DragonFlyBSD Replacing Their 48-Core Opteron Infrastructure With Ryzen 9 3900X CPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DragonFlyBSD Replacing Their 48-Core Opteron Infrastructure With Ryzen 9 3900X CPUs

DragonFlyBSD is replacing their 48-core Opteron server named "Monster" with two of the new AMD Ryzen 9 3900X "Zen 2" processors as well as a spare Xeon server. DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon continues to be mighty impressed by AMD's latest processor offerings...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...New-Colo-3900X

[Sonadow]

A Threadripper 2990wx would rip the 3900X and the upcoming 3950X apart.

[ryao]

Matthew Dillon is not the only developer considering a switch to Ryzen. I am thinking of replacing my Intel Xeons with a Ryzen 3000 system. My equipment is more modest than his. I have a single socket Xeon E5-2687W v2 and a Xeon E3-1276 v3. At this point, it is mostly a matter of me making time to go to the local store to get the motherboard and CPU. Also, I intend to use ECC RAM with it too.

[ryao]

A Threadripper 2990wx would rip the 3900X and the upcoming 3950X apart.

The upcoming 3990wx would run circles around a 2990wx. It would be better to get benchmarks of software compilation, but the 3900x is not doing that badly against the 2990wx in the multithreaded benchmarks here:

https://techgage.com/article/amd-ryz...performance/3/

Given that Matthew wants to reduce power consumption while increasing performance, the 3900X is not a bad choice.

[polarathene]

A Threadripper 2990wx would rip the 3900X and the upcoming 3950X apart.

Do note the drawback of latencies not only from CCX(and now chiplets in Zen2?), but also separate NUMA nodes within that TR model(no idea if any Zen2 Ryzen models at higher core counts are using more than one NUMA node or not like TRs can). I recall the 2990wx wasn't as great as it seemed for VFIO use due to architecture stuff like that making it less impressive in actual practice(not that it's a bad CPU by any means).

Zen2 got some nice reduced latency wins too, really depends what you're planning to do. If anything is single thread restrained, then TR usually isn't going to be a better performer.

[smitty3268]

The upcoming 3990wx would run circles around a 2990wx. It would be better to get benchmarks of software compilation, but the 3900x is not doing that badly against the 2990wx in the multithreaded benchmarks here:

https://techgage.com/article/amd-ryz...performance/3/

Given that Matthew wants to reduce power consumption while increasing performance, the 3900X is not a bad choice.

Same site has a couple linux compilation tests here: https://techgage.com/article/amd-ryz...ance-in-linux/

It gives the 2990wx a 43% advantage compiling the linux kernel, but the 3900x actually leads by 6% when compiling ImageMagick. I'm guessing it's not able to take advantage of all the cores in that case.

[betam4x]

A Threadripper 2990wx would rip the 3900X and the upcoming 3950X apart.

Not necessarily. I've seen more than a few workloads where the better memory subsystem makes the 3900X much faster, to say nothing of the 3950X. 32 cores helps, but the odd memory layout does not. The 2990wx may appear to scream on Linux, but in reality it isn't reaching it's full potential. It just happens to be better under Linux than Windows. One really interesting scenario that happens sometimes is where all the IF interconnects between dies are saturated, and then a core on 1 die needs to access information from the memory tied to the memory controller on the other die. Suddenly the entire machine is grinding to a halt.

[rene]

I'm impressed, too – just waiting for the 3950x or so 16 core / 32 thread SKU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WwE-crXP-Y

[GreenReaper]

I'm impressed, too – just waiting for the 3950x or so 16 core / 32 thread SKU

To my eye you get most of the benefit with the 3900X, from the extra L3 cache and channels to I/O, as well as improved thermal performance due to two separate chiplets, though if it fits into L1/L2 cache it will still do well.

If the CPU is running flat out at 105W, cores will already be forced to a lower voltage in the 3900X, let alone the 3950X. Admittedly the quality of the chiplets may be higher, allowing higher speeds at lower voltages.

[George99]

I think Matt is refering to the ASRock Rack X470D4U / X470D4U2-2T mobos?

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/p...Specifications
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/p...Specifications