[HN Gopher] AMD EPYC 97x4 "Bergamo" CPUs: 128 Zen 4c CPU Cores f...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AMD EPYC 97x4 "Bergamo" CPUs: 128 Zen 4c CPU Cores for Servers,
       Shipping Now
        
       Author : ksec
       Score  : 145 points
       Date   : 2023-06-24 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
        
       | xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
       | "Consistent x86 ISA" in that slide is clearly a dig at Intel.
       | AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores.
        
         | SloopJon wrote:
         | Last I checked, there aren't any Xeons with E-cores. However,
         | you're right: the most direct competitor to Bergamo seems to be
         | Sierra Forest, a chip that will have nothing but E-cores (and
         | no AVX-512).
        
           | api wrote:
           | A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may
           | be competitive with GPUs for AI.
        
             | pclmulqdq wrote:
             | Imagine if that chip also had HBM memory and fit into a
             | PCIe slot, or maybe had direct-attached high-bandwidth
             | networking.
             | 
             | Now imagine Intel had that product and canceled it in 2017,
             | and you will be living in reality:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
        
               | api wrote:
               | They're fools not to revive that or something like it.
               | 
               | Not only would something like 1024 cores with AVX512 be
               | competitive with GPUs it would have the added advantage
               | of being waaay more versatile and easier to program.
        
               | kimixa wrote:
               | That versatility comes at a cost though - nothing in
               | silicon is free. It clearly couldn't compete with GPUs in
               | their strengths, and couldn't find it's own niche, which
               | is why it was cancelled.
               | 
               | And I'm not sure it'll be that much easier to program -
               | "few large cores" and "GPU waves" are now pretty well
               | supported in the stack with mature tooling - trying to
               | insert a new stack between the two would likely be pretty
               | difficult as it doesn't really fit well with either
               | established paradigm so likely needs something new to
               | show it's benefits.
        
               | CyberDildonics wrote:
               | What you are talking about has literally came and went.
               | You can probably track one down, buy it and have it in
               | your computer in a few days.
        
               | rowanG077 wrote:
               | I actually don't think that would be easier to program.
               | The current thread abstraction won't be efficient with
               | 1024 cores. OpenCL is much better suited for that. But
               | then you might as well run it on a GPU.
        
               | moab wrote:
               | Work stealing makes it arguably much easier to program
               | than CUDA or OpenCL.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | rewmie wrote:
             | > A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512
             | may be competitive with GPUs for AI.
             | 
             | A chip with hundreds or thousands of E-cores should be
             | ideal for any cloud provider to offer vCPUs with a high
             | markup. For example, a company like Hetzner sells 1vCPU
             | services for around 4EUR/month. Even if they don't
             | overprovision and allocate 1 core per 1vCPU, a single chip
             | can potentially earn them 500EUR/month, which leads to a
             | break even point at around 2 years.
        
               | foota wrote:
               | Wait till you see the memory bandwidth that 1 thousandth
               | of a cpu gets you.
        
           | adrian_b wrote:
           | The Intel "Sierra Forest" Xeon CPUs with E-cores are
           | announced for 2024.
           | 
           | Even if they are not branded Xeon, but Atom, there already
           | are a lot of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, e.g. Denverton
           | Refresh, Snow Ridge, Parker Ridge and the recently launched
           | Arizona Beach.
        
         | cmrdporcupine wrote:
         | They don't have a lot to brag about there. I'm on an expensive
         | Thinkpad with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H, less than a year old...
         | no AVX512. Chip was released Apr 2022, with AVX&AVX2 but no
         | 512. (Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver &
         | firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another
         | story).
         | 
         | I've been messing with SIMD optimizations recently in a
         | datastructure library I wrote, and as tantalizing as the
         | AVX-512 is, it'll be years before it can be used in production
         | software on a real scale. Introduced in 2017, and still totally
         | unusable in the wild.
        
           | kolbe wrote:
           | If you're using an llvm-compiled language targeting a new
           | avx512-enabled architecture, you're already using avx512
           | instructions to vastly accelerate your programs via
           | autovectorization.
        
             | cmrdporcupine wrote:
             | My point is you can't really distribute a binary which
             | targets it or rely on its effects. It's not common enough
             | yet.
             | 
             | And autovectorization is nice, but explicit SIMD intrinsics
             | use usually wins if done right.
        
               | janwas wrote:
               | Why not distribute a binary that uses AVX-512 if present,
               | and falls back to AVX2 or SSE4 if not? It can be quite
               | easy, see the example earlier in this thread.
        
             | ComputerGuru wrote:
             | Hardly. Autovectorization is rarely performed as a
             | percentage of all the cases where it's theoretically
             | possible, not reliably done (no guarantees - even if it AVs
             | today, the same code may not AV tomorrow), and not
             | something you want your actual hot path to rely on. AV is
             | nice for "incidental" speedups to general code. No serious
             | library touting SIMD acceleration will consider AV
             | sufficient for the core hot loop.
        
               | kolbe wrote:
               | > Autovectorization is rarely performed as a percentage
               | of all the cases where it's theoretically possible,
               | 
               | This is not my experience. Do you have some justification
               | for this statement? I've found myself far more impressed
               | by autovectorization than disappointed by it. I've found
               | that code most people think is autovectorizable actually
               | violates scalar contracts. But if you write clear code
               | whose scalar implementation won't introduce UB if
               | autovectorized, the compiler is really good.
               | 
               | Here's my go-to example. Agner Fog's VCL is a well-
               | respected library. It has vectorized versions of all
               | sorts of useful mathematitical functions. For fun, I
               | rewrote his `exp(x)` function using his exact algorithm,
               | but in scalar code, and it autovectorized, and benchmarks
               | the same.
               | 
               | https://godbolt.org/z/TK637PTh7
        
             | IshKebab wrote:
             | Nobody distributes binaries compiled for AVX-512 for
             | obvious reasons. The only times you'll use it are for
             | source-based distros like Gentoo, and programs that do run
             | time feature detection, but they are relatively rare and
             | won't be using autovectorisation.
        
               | janwas wrote:
               | Runtime feature detection need not be rare nor hard, it's
               | a few dozen lines of boilerplate. You can even write your
               | code just once: see
               | https://github.com/google/highway#examples.
        
               | IshKebab wrote:
               | That's still hard, given the tiny benefit it would give
               | to 99% of code.
               | 
               | Maybe modern tooling (e.g. Cargo) will lower the barrier
               | so that it becomes less rare, but in C++ it's definitely
               | not worth the effort for the vast vast vast majority of
               | projects.
        
               | cmrdporcupine wrote:
               | Unfortunately Rust is way behind on getting SIMD
               | intrinsics out there. Anything AVX512 is nightly
               | (unstable) only still.
        
             | rat9988 wrote:
             | Yes but his point still stands.
        
               | kolbe wrote:
               | He said "Introduced in 2017, and still totally unusable
               | in the wild." I understand his frustrations with his own
               | hardware, but he's using lower end consumer hardware. We
               | could quibble about what it means to be "in the wild,"
               | but I operate in a compute heavy space where companies
               | buy good hardware, and they all make effective use of
               | AVX512 instruction.
        
           | leeoniya wrote:
           | > Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver &
           | firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another
           | story
           | 
           | as a counterpoint, i'm on a P14s Gen 2 Thinkpad (Ryzen 7 PRO
           | 5850u) and have zero issues on EndeavourOS (Arch,
           | KDE/Plasma). most of my time is in VSCode, SublimeMerge,
           | Chrome, MPV.
           | 
           | i did have to rip out the realtek (or mediatek?) M.2 wifi
           | card and swap in an intel one tho.
        
             | cmrdporcupine wrote:
             | Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support for
             | external displays (and other things) in the latest BIOS
             | update for my machine -- for both Windows and Linux -- and
             | there's no way to roll back and there's not a peep from
             | them on any kind of attempt to fix or even acknowledgement
             | of a problem.
             | 
             | Requires a hardware ("pinhole" not power cycle) reset every
             | time I want to switch between external monitor use and
             | laptop only. My bug report/forum post here:
             | https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-
             | Laptops/Exter... -- other people are effected.
             | 
             | Last year they pushed out a BIOS update which caused the
             | fan to run 100% of the time. Then a "fix" which caused it
             | to overheat. And in-between there somewhere something was
             | pushed that caused me to have to reformat the whole thing.
             | 
             | Lid-open-to-awake in Linux used to simply not work 75% of
             | the time, required a hard reset. Now it works, but there's
             | a 5-10 second pause before display turns on (Windows or
             | Linux) vs almost instant on the work issued laptops I've
             | had recently (MBP M1 and some HP Z series thing, running
             | Linux)
             | 
             | Waste of cash. Bought this thing to be my dev workstation
             | when I took a contract job last summer, wish I'd never done
             | that. Software quality / support at Lenovo is a real
             | problem.
        
               | Projectiboga wrote:
               | My Think Pad Tablet has had issues after a bad firmware
               | partial update. It won't stay on past 30 min. It is
               | really souring my former respect for them. I understand
               | it is part TPM issues, but now I have basically a semi-
               | brick. I was able to move the whole os to a VM. I'll try
               | linux and see if it was a Win-Bios interaction bug. And
               | if that doesn't fix it I'll wait six more months and see
               | if it gets a working update. By my former respect for
               | Lenovo is now gone.
        
               | rewmie wrote:
               | > Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support (...)
               | 
               | According to AMD, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H does not have
               | USB type-C support.
               | 
               | https://www.amd.com/en/product/11621
        
               | cmrdporcupine wrote:
               | What does that even mean? Clearly the laptop itself has
               | USB-C support (it has 2 USB-C 4 and 1 1 USB-C 3.2).
        
             | JonChesterfield wrote:
             | Couple of T14s (one debian, one windows) and a 4800U (both)
             | here, all solid. I haven't tried updating the bios.
        
           | znpy wrote:
           | I love thinkpads as much as the next person, but pulling in
           | mobile cpus when the topic is massively multicore chips is
           | extremely off topic at best.
        
             | cmrdporcupine wrote:
             | Parent comment is the one who brought consumer CPUs into
             | the discussion
        
         | PragmaticPulp wrote:
         | > AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores.
         | 
         | Why would they put a dig at Intel's consumer chips in a slide
         | deck for their server parts? The Intel Xeons don't have
         | E-cores. This doesn't make any sense unless I'm missing
         | something.
         | 
         | Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512,
         | right?
        
           | peppermint_gum wrote:
           | >The Intel Xeons don't have E-cores.
           | 
           | Xeons with E-cores are planned:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Forest
           | 
           | And even if they weren't, it would still be a cheap PR win.
           | 
           | >Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without
           | AVX-512, right?
           | 
           | All the current generation processors (Zen4) support AVX-512,
           | both mobile and desktop. It may be confusing because AMD's
           | numbering scheme is intentionally misleading and they sell
           | previous gen chips with new model numbers.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | adrian_b wrote:
           | There are many kinds of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, with
           | up to 24 E-cores, which are branded Atom, not Xeon, and which
           | are less known, because they are mainly intended to be
           | integrated in various telecommunication systems, e.g. in
           | mobile phone infrastructure.
           | 
           | Intel server CPUs with E-cores that will use the Xeon brand,
           | because they will have much more cores (6-times more, i.e.
           | 144 vs. 24) than the current models, are announced for 2024.
        
       | beebeepka wrote:
       | I wonder if Zen 4c is going to trickle down to the consumer
       | market. There are multiple possibilities for CPUs with mixed
       | chiplets but who knows if they really make sense outside the
       | server world. It's exciting
        
         | throw7890 wrote:
         | There was a very detailed post with die shots etc on semi
         | analysis a few weeks back
         | https://www.semianalysis.com/p/zen-4c-amds-response-to-hyper...
         | 
         | In the subscriber only section it was mentioned there will be
         | some Zen5 consumer parts using Zen5c as the equivalent of
         | current Intel E-cores.
        
           | dhruvdh wrote:
           | I think it is unfair to the semianalysis team to share
           | information from the subscriber only section.
        
             | InvaderFizz wrote:
             | Why? The article has a paywall about half way through.
        
               | dhruvdh wrote:
               | Because for them subscribers are low-volume. Subscriber
               | only section is generally pretty small and shares a
               | couple key tips or viewpoints.
               | 
               | If there was nothing wrong with it OP wouldn't feel the
               | need to use a throwaway account.
        
               | throw7890 wrote:
               | I made a throw as I can't remember my login and wanted to
               | highlight the semi article due to the amazing detail
               | there.
               | 
               | There is a lot more detail in the article on the possible
               | 4c/5c uses, it's been speculated in a lot of contexts for
               | the hybrid configurations (even by AMD directly) so don't
               | think it's surprising to mention this at all.
        
             | rat9988 wrote:
             | Nothing unfair honestly.
        
         | happycube wrote:
         | A 24-core Ryzen with an 8C zen4+3d sram and a 16C zen4c chip
         | might be quite interesting. There are probably already a few in
         | AMD's labs ;)
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | Yeah, that would destroy the 14900K.
        
             | mosquitobiten wrote:
             | Wow, do CPUs have that capability now? To actually destroy
             | other CPUs? How does that work? Do they get the
             | "Annihilate.Competition" instructions set in an update when
             | they detect a Intel machine in the network?/s
        
               | salawat wrote:
               | Have you never heard of the Intel C compiler's cripple
               | AMD function?
               | 
               | https://www.agner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6
        
       | WithinReason wrote:
       | 360W per CPU is less than 3W per core, not bad.
        
         | usrusr wrote:
         | Cores won't draw much while blocking on a memory access. If the
         | core count vs core utilization trade-off is a tie, the napkin
         | math expectation would be same throughput, same power draw of
         | cores, less power draw of cache for less cache.
        
       | giomasce wrote:
       | I wonder why AMD decided to name chips after Italian cities...
        
         | jerrygenser wrote:
         | Probably selected a concept that there were a bunch of names
         | from so that the series would be consistent but also which
         | would not result in any trademark issues. Same reason Intel
         | picks random words and "lake" after
        
         | szatkus wrote:
         | Geographical names aren't copyrighted, so it's a safe choice.
         | Before that they used names of various rivers around the world.
         | Intel does something similar, but they make up fictional names
         | based on real places. Nvidia uses names of famous scientists.
        
       | satvikpendem wrote:
       | Now when can we get the same through Threadripper? I'd love to
       | use my desktop as both my main gaming rig as well as my
       | productivity rig.
        
         | jquery wrote:
         | If you're okay with "only" 64 cores you can do this now. It's
         | my current rig, used for both work and play.
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | Zen 4c isn't good for desktop or workstation apps where you
         | occasionally need single-thread performance. Threadripper Pro
         | 7000 will be Genoa.
        
       | speed_spread wrote:
       | Something tells me that Teams still won't run properly using
       | this.
        
         | walrus01 wrote:
         | If you want to see something really amazing, look at the CPU
         | usage to display one high frame rate animated gif posted in a
         | slack channel on a modern quad core 11/12/13th gen Intel CPU
         | laptop. Chat clients were not meant to take 70% of available
         | CPU. You can literally hear the fans speed up.
         | 
         | Teams is bad, yeah, but does not have an entire monopoly on
         | being terribly inefficient.
        
           | dopa42365 wrote:
           | > modern
           | 
           | > quad core
           | 
           | pick one
        
             | gautamcgoel wrote:
             | Intel Core i3 processors are still quad-core, even in the
             | latest generation. Not everyone has an i7.
        
         | ComputerGuru wrote:
         | This doesn't add any more value to the conversation than
         | Reddit's "but will it run Crysis?" comments.
        
           | speed_spread wrote:
           | Ok then. Steering away from Redditisms, let's make this into
           | a deep reflection upon the state of modern application
           | software that's consuming hardware resources faster than
           | hardware can improve. We have these incredible CPUs yet our
           | machines offer barely the same experience they did twenty
           | years ago and even succeed in getting strictly worse as in
           | Teams case. The newer the software, the more wasteful
           | implementation we get, our performance budget spilled and
           | absorbed by layers upon layers of abstractions. Of all this
           | immense computing power, I can only feel the difference when
           | compiling stuff and other specialized activities.
        
           | Crystalin wrote:
           | it didn't but it made me smile :)
        
         | PragmaticPulp wrote:
         | Is everyone on HN running their computers in some parallel
         | universe where apps are running 10X slower than my computer?
        
           | uo21tp5hoyg wrote:
           | Not according to their own advertising:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7nnXej2K4
        
           | fbdab103 wrote:
           | No, but on the other hand, I do have some glimmer of hope
           | that eventually someone at Microsoft will see these kinds of
           | comments and do something to fix that abomination. I have no
           | doubt Microsoft employs many very talented people, but none
           | of them seem to be working on the user facing products which
           | make my corporate laptop run so poorly (Teams or OneDrive).
        
             | re-thc wrote:
             | To be fair, it has already improved a lot. They are doing
             | something whether they see your comment or not.
        
             | Clamchop wrote:
             | They've transitioned the consumer client from Electron to
             | Edge WebView, Angular to React, and the same for the
             | enterprise application appears to be in public preview and
             | slated for general availability later this year. Still web
             | tech but it's supposed to address some of the memory and
             | performance problems.
             | 
             | So I think they've known how unpleasant Teams is!
             | 
             | https://www.microsoft.com/en-
             | us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/2...
        
               | imperialdrive wrote:
               | T2 is much worse that version 1, I'm sorry to say because
               | I really really want to like Teams since I'm forced to
               | use it for work.
        
               | Clamchop wrote:
               | Don't tell me that, I want to believe in the dream. :/
        
               | fbdab103 wrote:
               | Highlighting the 9 second startup time does not bolster
               | confidence.
        
               | Klinky wrote:
               | Yes, appreciate the transparency, but it's kind of
               | embarrassing "22 second launch time" was considered
               | acceptable for so long, and "more than twice as fast" now
               | means "almost a 10 second launch time".
        
               | Clamchop wrote:
               | Yeah it is something but as an app that usually runs at
               | startup, I'd just be pleased if it can snap a little
               | faster and be less janky. Fingers crossed.
        
           | TOMDM wrote:
           | I think the problem is that using well optimised programs
           | (Sublime text for example) on modern computers feels
           | unbelievably fast.
           | 
           | Using something like Teams by comparison feels like mollases.
        
           | Klinky wrote:
           | Teams is hot garbage, it feels like it was designed to be
           | terrible at everything it does. Everything feels laggy in it
           | compared to Slack/Zoom.
        
             | cycomanic wrote:
             | Your kidding right, I mean teams is not great, but compared
             | to the UI rubbish of zoom and slack?
             | 
             | Take for example the whole business of screensharing, if
             | you share a single screen in zoom you get black blocks for
             | all the zoom windows. Yes it makes sense that I don't share
             | the window with participants, but at least let me freaking
             | close it. Similarly moving the controls from bottom to top
             | of the screen reliably confuses early (and even more
             | advanced users).
             | 
             | And don't get me started on quoting text or including math
             | in slack and what is the whole threads section?!
        
               | Klinky wrote:
               | It feels like a quarter of the time screenshare doesn't
               | even work in Teams and it's noticably choppier when it
               | does work.
               | 
               | Code blocks working in Teams is inconsistent, and it
               | seems to add additional spaces when copying.
               | 
               | Quoting & mentions also sucks. The channels, chats,
               | activity screens are always a mess, feel like UX bandaid.
               | 
               | Private channel limits are garbage.
               | 
               | Search and discovery sucks.
               | 
               | There's inconsistent options for the calendar between
               | Outlook & Teams. Don't you dare expect functional
               | compatibility between MS products. Scheduling assistant
               | sucks, sometimes confuses itself when people are busy.
               | 
               | The UX seems to rely on a myriad of nested menus & modals
               | that are XHR backed, so each one lags. Even just typing
               | text feels slow. It's as fluid as molasses.
        
       | loeg wrote:
       | We're going to be using a lot of these in a new hardware sku at
       | my employer sooner or later (it's in the works). We software
       | nerds get to figure out the scaling problems on these big CPUs
       | that don't manifest on the smaller 18 and 24 core CPUs we're
       | using today.
        
         | javajosh wrote:
         | We'll approach it like a network-on-a-chip: 128 servers with an
         | extremely fast network. Each server will be a process. One
         | process will be something like ingress, another like a message
         | queue and the rest will be workers. Chances are the chip
         | doesn't need or want to be saturated, so you rotate the cores
         | using Linux magic of some kind.
         | 
         | Put that on a napkin and give it to an unsuspecting intern.
        
           | foota wrote:
           | Re: speed, you'd likely get orders of magnitude better
           | bandwidth out of a real network of 128 servers instead,
           | though latency would be lower here.
        
           | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
           | Anyone have some napkin math on how many QPS something like
           | this can handle??
        
             | javajosh wrote:
             | Somewhere between 1 and 10e7
        
               | loeg wrote:
               | The theoretical floor is probably zero, not one. I agree
               | with the rest of the range :-).
        
           | loeg wrote:
           | Certainly the closer you can get to shared-nothing, the
           | better! Some of the difficulty is we have a legacy stack that
           | is not implemented that way. (You also need to account for
           | significant kernel CPU use, like hardware interrupt handlers
           | (e.g., NIC rx) running on some cores.)
        
             | toast0 wrote:
             | > You also need to account for significant kernel CPU use,
             | like hardware interrupt handlers (e.g., NIC rx) running on
             | some cores.
             | 
             | In a lot of loads, it doesn't matter that much, because the
             | application uses way more CPU than packet handling... But
             | if it does matter, you _really_ want to get things lined up
             | as much as possible. Each CPU core gets one NIC queue
             | pinned and one application thread pinned and the
             | connections correctly mapped so the fast path never
             | communicates to other cores. I 'm not tuned into current
             | NICs though, I don't know if you can get 128 queues on NICs
             | now. If you have two sockets, then you also have the fun of
             | Non-Uniform PCI-E Access...
             | 
             | When I was working on this (for a tcp mode HAProxy
             | install), the NICs did 16 queues, and I had dual 12 or
             | 14-core CPUs, so socket 0 got all its cores busy, and
             | socket 1 just got a couple work threads and was mostly
             | idle. Single socket, power of 2 cores is a lot better to
             | optimize, but I had existing hardware to reuse.
        
         | echion wrote:
         | Where can we buy?
        
       | reckless wrote:
       | It's fascinating how they managed to reclaim so much die area by
       | dropping the cache and optimising for low (~3GHz) frequency.
        
         | treesciencebot wrote:
         | I think we will be seeing this more and more (less cache on the
         | die OR stacked cache on top of the main chip instead of in it)
         | since SRAM scaling is now near a halting point [1] (no more
         | improvements) which means the fixed code of cache is going up
         | with every new node.
         | 
         | https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/tsmc-officially...
        
         | rektide wrote:
         | Semianalysis seems to indicate the core space itself is 35%
         | smaller. Maybe that's process tweaks related to clock rate? But
         | I don't think we know for absolute certain it really is the
         | same core with the same execution units & same everything. Even
         | though a ton of the listed stats are exactly the same.
        
         | loeg wrote:
         | It's mostly the cache area rather than the frequency, right?
         | Cache just takes a huge amount of space on the chip.
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | From what I've read, the L1/L2 cache per core is the same,
           | and the L3 cache per chiplet is the same, but the cores per
           | chiplet is doubled and the overall chiplet size is about the
           | same (it's a little bigger, I think)
           | 
           | So, L3 cache didn't get smaller (in area or bytes), there's
           | just less for each core. L1/L2 is relatively small, but they
           | did use techniqued to make it smaller at the expense of
           | performance.
           | 
           | I think the big difference really is the reductions in
           | buffers, etc, needed to get a design that scales to the moon.
           | This is likely a major factor for Apple's M series too. Apple
           | computers are never getting the thermal design needed to
           | clock to 5Ghz, so setting the design target much lower means
           | a smaller core, better power efficiency, lower heat, etc. The
           | same thing applies here: you're not running your dense
           | servers at 5Ghz, there's just not enough capability to
           | deliver power and remove heat; so a design with a more
           | realistic target speed can be smaller and more efficient.
        
       | ksec wrote:
       | With 2U, 4 Node, Dual Socket, and 128 Core CPU, you get up to
       | 1024 Core or 2048 vCPU per Server Machine. We can now all enjoy
       | our own _cloud_.
        
         | uguuo_o wrote:
         | The amount of scientific work that could be done with such a
         | machine would be staggering, specially if it can be local. I
         | use 2-10k cores on a daily basis, having a dedicated machine
         | with 1k would make debugging large scale problems much faster.
        
           | MuffinFlavored wrote:
           | > 2k-10k cores on a daily basis
           | 
           | could you tell more please? sorry, not in the loop on what a
           | typical "scientific workflow" is like
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | There are no 4P motherboards for AMD EPYC processors, they're
         | all 2P because the of the number of interconnects per server
         | CPU.
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | The OP was confusingly suggesting a 2U box with four distinct
           | computers inside (4 node), each with two sockets. These types
           | of systems do exist, and can help with volume density, but
           | then you have to work a lot harder with regards to power and
           | heat density.
           | 
           | I don't know what things look like now, but I recall hearing
           | many stories a decade ago about datacenters running out of
           | power and cooling when the volume was closer to 1/3rd full.
        
         | tryauuum wrote:
         | I understand your happiness, but using such a vague word as
         | "cloud" is doing a disservice to this setup
        
         | fbdab103 wrote:
         | While melting the wires in your walls. How much juice would
         | that pull when under full load?
        
           | rektide wrote:
           | 3kw
        
             | Groxx wrote:
             | ^ roughly how much a clothes dryer uses, for comparison.
             | 
             | A lot of power, but nothing really abnormal. Most rooms in
             | a house won't be wired for it but that's about all. You
             | probably wouldn't want this much thermal output in a normal
             | room anyway, not to mention fan noise.
        
               | fred123 wrote:
               | * * *
        
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