Hetzner’s New AX102 Dedicated Server with AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D

https://www.hetzner.com/press-release/new-amd-ryzen-7950-server/

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

72 41 3 years ago

rektide2• 3 years ago

$141 for 128GB ram + 2x 2TB NVMe SSD, and a very fine 16 core chip with gobs of cache. This is a pretty solid offering. If you get a 1 year up front price reserve instance (lot of caveats there), a aws m5ad.2xlarge is $176/mo. 32GiB, 8vCPU, and a 300GB NVMe ssd on a 2019 era Epyc. That's the best offer I could find from AWS for something near that price point. Having 4x the RAM, way more SSD space, and 2x the cores, on a dedicated machine sounds great. And it makes sense as an offering, is a reasonable offer, attainable.

Hopefully these come to more than the 1 data-center! :) Hopefully we see more competitors offering great stuff like this. Wild that this easily a sub $2000 box, $700 cpu, $200 ram, couple hundred for ssd and mobo and case.

Scaevolus• 3 years ago

The 7950X is probably close to 40 vCPUs in terms of total compute power (32 threads, big cache, higher frequency than datacenter chips).

alberth2• 3 years ago

Love the price. Arguably unbeatable.

Still shocked after more than a decade, Economics 101 hasn’t kicked in and put more downward pricing pressure on the major cloud providers.

hknmtt• 3 years ago

self-imposed vendor lock-in

wmf6• 3 years ago

This processor is terrible for servers because of the asymmetric design.

Arrath• 3 years ago

It seems poorly suited to a lot of workloads absent some scheduler improvements. Take the work-around for gaming: park the CCD without the 3d cache. Well at that point why not just use a 7800x3d?

dragontamer5• 3 years ago

Park the processes that need the cache on the cache cores.

Park the processes that don't need it on the smaller-cores.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/taskset.1.html

These commands exist in both Linux and Windows for a reason.

dragontamer5• 3 years ago

Surely this is a problem that can be fixed with a bit of Thread Affinity?

wmf6• 3 years ago

Many servers only run one type of workload. Do you want to just use half the cores? That's not cost effective.

sudosysgen3• 3 years ago

Not really. If you're going for performance, you're going to be using NUMA aware code, and your compute is going to stay on a single CCD (if you set up your NUMA domain correctly). Then it's up to you to decide if you benefit more from cache or frequency.

EDIT: AMD CPUs with nonuniform cache (such as this one), with the right motherboard, support L3 as NUMA, which means that each CCX is exposed as a NUMA domain.

dragontamer5• 3 years ago

I don't think the 7950x is NUMA?

But I don't have such a system, nor have I played with the BIOS settings of that chip. But it only has one memory controller, so I doubt there's a NUMA setting. Correct me if I'm wrong of course.

tedunangst2• 3 years ago

I don't think this inevitably follows. It means, for a web server, some requests will be faster than others, but some faster is probably still better than none faster. If you have a very specific need for consistency, then slower is better, but that's rather niche.

Do companies like google and Facebook replace 100% of their servers all at once? Or do they upgrade in stages, allowing some requests to be processed faster than others?

wmf6• 3 years ago

For most workloads the 7950X3D is slower and costs more than the 7950X. The performance variability is just icing on the cake. It's really a gaming processor.

karussell• 3 years ago

IMO the predictability, that a certain request for a single server should have the same response time, is very important to find performance regressions. I'm still unsure how others that use Hetzner deal with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35165764

justinclift• 3 years ago

Hmmm, we tend to use LXC (similar to Docker) to partition dedicated servers into smaller pieces. eg database server, app servers, etc.

It's fairly likely the high cache cores would be good for PostgreSQL, while the standard cores would be good for general application servers.

I'd be trying these out if we needed new dedicated servers atm. And might do so depending on how things go over time. :)

alberth2• 3 years ago

Can you link to a better performing server for the same price.

piperswe• 3 years ago

Wow, that's a fantastic price if you have a workload that can take advantage of the processor's architecture

mfiguiere• 3 years ago

Phoronix has a nice set of Linux benchmarks with this CPU. https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen9-7950x3d-linux

throwme_123• 3 years ago

I would love to have a dedicated server to run custom LLM models like llama, alpaca, but with dedicated context and memory (like knowning my codebase :).

I'm not an ai expert yet but:

1. Is this processor suitable for that?

2. Is it feasible to customize one of the LLM models directly on that machine or retraining the model requires more power?

mkl• 3 years ago

For machine learning stuff like that you would be much better off with something that has a GPU.

adastra22• 3 years ago

No. You absolutely need a powerful, preferably NVIDIA GPU for that use case.

leobg• 3 years ago

For fine tuning I can recommend vast.ai. Easy and cheap.

2h• 3 years ago

I tried to sign up for a basic VPS on Hetzner, they said my information was suspect, even after already purchasing VPS with these companies:

Amazon Lightsail

Atlantic.Net

DigitalOcean

Google Compute Engine

Linode Shared

Vultr

kamatera

lunanode

upcloud

I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but once they asked for a photo of my drivers license, I gave up. no thanks, I will just stick with Digital Ocean.

kouteiheika• 3 years ago

Due to their really low prices and the fact that they don't force you to prepay for your VMs they get a lot of spammers/scammers, so while this is unfortunate it is somewhat understandable.

I've been using them for a few years already and only have good things to say.

aeaa3• 3 years ago

Not sure why you defend this practice. No other hosting provider requires copies of their user's passports.

I am also unable use Hetzner, due to their overreaching security process.

jhoelzel• 3 years ago

I Love hetzner, especially with the fact that you can have private networks between dedicated and (dedicated) VPC servers, you can have endless scaling kubernetes clusters for a fraction of the price you pay elsewhere.

Provisioning is relatively fast and everything has an API. If you are brave enough you can just build your own server and have them co-locate it for you too, making advanced machine learning clusters possible aswell (albeit of course with more upfront investment).

I have seen startups go through their 250k cloud bonuses in 3 month because of unattended scaling, I recon on hetzner, you would have a couple of years playroom =)

Nextgrid• 3 years ago

I have seen startups go through their 250k cloud bonuses in 3 month because of unattended scaling, I recon on hetzner, you would have a couple of years playroom =)

But then how will you get invited to the next AWS conference to talk about your (self-inflicted) problems and then write about it on your company’s “engineering” blog?

sourcecodeplz• 3 years ago

For me, the best value prop from Hetzner are their managed servers.

yagop• 3 years ago

I really would like to use Hetzner but their ToS [1] forbids any cryptocurrency related usage. I only want to archive block transaction data (think a block explorer). I don't know why they are so aggressive with that, I would understand PoW and PoS ban but not a hole industry.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/wucxs4/comment/ilf...

2bluesc• 3 years ago

Wish they'd offer dedicated servers in their Ashburn, VA (or Hillsboro, OR) datacenter but those seem focused on their cloud offering.

Hetzner’s New AX102 Dedicated Server with AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D

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