Do you have a "relevant" chunk of customers that are really looking for the high-density PCI-Express connectivity?
Are the 128 lanes per system a feature that actually draws in users with real world demands or is this the wrong thing to focus on?
To me this wasn't very surprising.
It's well understood in the more technically inclined enthusiast community that underclocking Ryzen yields tremendous efficiency improvements.
Famous overclocker "The Stilt" did a great analysis on Ryzen's launch day in 2017: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technica...
One of his benchmarks showed an almost 80% efficiency improvement when underclocking an R7 1800X to 3.3GHz, which is just above Epyc's maximum boost frequency.
Since Epyc is almost the same silicon as Ryzen 1st Gen (B2 stepping instead of B1), the chips should have almost identical characteristics.
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any similar detailed analyses on recent Intel Core processors to compare.
Samsung's low-power manufacturing node used by AMD has often been cited as the specific reason for the steep efficiency curve (and the realtively low upper end compared to Intel), but the general trend is the same for almost all chips.
On the other end of the spectrum, overclocker der8auer measured about 500W draw in Cinebench when overclocking the Epyc 7601 to around 4GHz: https://redd.it/92u6db
> Are the 128 lanes per system a feature that actually draws in users with real world demands or is this the wrong thing to focus on?
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest (based on my own experience[1]) that most users are too ignorant to know that this might be something that they want or would benefit from.
Some of us have always demanded more I/O bandwidth (even if it meant 4S servers), but typically with a price limit.
I do, however, suspect that additional demand could materialize in the form of NVMe slot count.
[1] particularly with so many potential employers being categorically cloud-only, they don't even want to know about the underlying hardware or what it's capable of.
Do you have a "relevant" chunk of customers that are really looking for the high-density PCI-Express connectivity? Are the 128 lanes per system a feature that actually draws in users with real world demands or is this the wrong thing to focus on?
> There was also a neat blog posted somewhere
You must be talking about the DragonflyBSD mailing list: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2018-September... (as linked by others by now).
To me this wasn't very surprising. It's well understood in the more technically inclined enthusiast community that underclocking Ryzen yields tremendous efficiency improvements. Famous overclocker "The Stilt" did a great analysis on Ryzen's launch day in 2017: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technica... One of his benchmarks showed an almost 80% efficiency improvement when underclocking an R7 1800X to 3.3GHz, which is just above Epyc's maximum boost frequency. Since Epyc is almost the same silicon as Ryzen 1st Gen (B2 stepping instead of B1), the chips should have almost identical characteristics.
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any similar detailed analyses on recent Intel Core processors to compare. Samsung's low-power manufacturing node used by AMD has often been cited as the specific reason for the steep efficiency curve (and the realtively low upper end compared to Intel), but the general trend is the same for almost all chips.
On the other end of the spectrum, overclocker der8auer measured about 500W draw in Cinebench when overclocking the Epyc 7601 to around 4GHz: https://redd.it/92u6db