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

[ryao]

This is just a plain 2D graphics port for nothing more than maintenance. If you want to use this mobo in a desktop/workstation you will have to buy a discrete graphics card anyway. And btw don't forget a sound card ...

When using sound over HDMI, a discrete sound card is not necessary.

[ryao]

When the power savings and performance increases are this significant it is hard it is hard to resist upgrades. The power savings may actually pay for the upgrade.

However i I do wonder about the long term potential for these 7nm chips. That is will the processors last as long. Further what happens if the processor starts making errors that don’t halt the machine. In other words will these processors fail faster.

Then again it might not make a difference the power savings alone likelywill pay for ill pay for more frequent updates.

The main thing that separates enterprise hardware from consumer hardware is the testing, validation and support. There are a few other things too like:

• higher efficiency DC to DC conversion circuitry on the motherboard (80% vs 90% according to Intel, although it would not surprise me if premium motherboards used these)
• capacitors to protect SSD data (although you can get this on most crucial drives and some Intel drives)
• eMLC flash for high endurance
• Support for TLER/CCTL/ERC on hard drives (some consumer drives have this)
• Support for changing low level formatting (rare on enterprise drives these days)
• ECC (you can get this with AMD or by using a Xeon motherboard with Intel on the Core i3 line)
• high efficiency PSUs (95% efficiency consumer models exist, although Matthew is rack mounting this, so he is using enterprise PSUs)
• IPMI (Matthew found a motherboard with it)
• rack mountable chassis’s (not specific to the electronics)

However, the main thing is really testing, validation and support. Given that Matthew develops an OS and has caught a bug in AMD hardware in the past that he got AMD to fix, he basically is able to do all of that himself (and get manufacturer help when he cannot). Not being marketed as enterprise hardware is not going to pose a problem. The act of compiling an OS on a machine is a way of validating hardware (in specific, the *BSD community is known to do testing by rebuilding world) and that is going to be these systems’ main function.

[ryao]

It's pretty cool that people are beginning to arbitrage on the power usage as well as the raw compute. Makes for some interesting build decisions.

I just set up a Ryzen 2700 and now I have stopped using my 12c/24t Xeon box. Power consumption is down, BTU (heat) release is way, way down as well.

That translates into $ saved in forced air cooling on top of the kWh saved.

Power usage has always played a role. The amount of power each rack in a data center has allocated to it is limited. You just never hear about people talk about it unless they are doing something like bitcoin mining, running high density storage servers, etcetera that raises power usage well beyond the traditional 1U/2U/3U/4U systems sold by companies like Dell, HP and Lenovo.

That said, the power is included in the cost of the rack space, so it usually only factors into cost calculations when you have empty rack space because all of the power was used by the other equipment and you want the option of putting something useful in that rack space. That is when renting an entire rack (or a half rack), rather than just the few units needed. It would not surprise me if Matthew is renting a full rack (or half rack) and likes the idea of freeing space in the power budget to give him the option of putting more equipment there in the future. In fact, I am not sure if he could rent say 4U with the power budget necessary to support his older build system (at a minimum, it would limit his options for data centers), so he is almost certainly renting at least half a rack.

[ryao]

Michael Why is this listed under "Latest Linux News" on the article page? This isn't about Linux. Perhaps you might want to change it to "Latest Open Source News".

[crystall]

Why a VGA and parallel port over HDMI though; makes it look like a 16 year old product.

That's not a parallel port, it's a serial one. Those are server motherboards, they're supposed to be in a rack where they will be mostly used headless, and when direct access is required it will be via a rack-mounted console like this one https://www.rackmountmart.com/rmLCD/sc1u17-01.htm That kind of console usually works over RS232 (i.e. serial) and has a VGA input so both make perfect sense for the target market.

[elatllat]

That's not a parallel port, it's a serial one. Those are server motherboards, they're supposed to be in a rack where they will be mostly used headless, and when direct access is required it will be via a rack-mounted console like this one https://www.rackmountmart.com/rmLCD/sc1u17-01.htm That kind of console usually works over RS232 (i.e. serial) and has a VGA input so both make perfect sense for the target market.

Or one could use a HDMI version

https://www.tripplite.com/n~B03000817IP

If a $5 pi-0 can do HDMI there is no need to make people go hunting for obsolete technology to fix a computer.

I'm sure both ports operate in parallel and serial, I understand how something like uart/jtag are useful for debuging but not as a user facing port.

[Ophidian]

Guessing you haven't worked in a lot of data centers. VGA rules the day. I am not even sure I can order a rackmount server with HDMI from any of my normal vendors, and there are certainly none in any of the data centers I deal with. Yes, for the home user or a home lab, HDMI is fine. Enterprise data centers want new gear that works with their existing gear though, including the existing VGA KVMs


Also the port above the VGA port is an RS232 serial port, which again in an enterprise data center, is the norm, not the exception (and quite useful for a console or for getting into some other gear's console)

Or one could use a HDMI version

https://www.tripplite.com/n~B03000817IP

If a $5 pi-0 can do HDMI there is no need to make people go hunting for obsolete technology to fix a computer.

I'm sure both ports operate in parallel and serial, I understand how something like uart/jtag are useful for debuging but not as a user facing port.

[crystall]

Or one could use a HDMI version

https://www.tripplite.com/n~B03000817IP

If a $5 pi-0 can do HDMI there is no need to make people go hunting for obsolete technology to fix a computer.

I'm sure both ports operate in parallel and serial, I understand how something like uart/jtag are useful for debuging but not as a user facing port.

As Ophidian mentioned you won't find any other rackmount servers with HDMI ports. They all use the same server management processors from ASMedia that don't support HDMI output. VGA+serial is in widespread use for server management and it does the job so no vendor feels the need to "upgrade" it to something more modern. Servers that don't come with a VGA+serial port couple usually have a completely headless network-based management infrastructure.

[kendall]

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

It looks like it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-r...1KAAKIHBR46NX/, but it also looks like Matt's not entirely thrilled with it. I wonder if he's made some progress with BIOS updates or workarounds since posting that review.

[chithanh]

I wonder if he's made some progress with BIOS updates

With BIOS updates certainly not, because the latest update is from May 2019: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/p...70D4U#Download

Anyway, the Ryzen 3000 are not even listed on the vendor's CPU QVL yet, so I would suggest caution before moving such a setup to production.