AMD EPYC 97x4 “Bergamo” CPUs: 128 Zen 4c CPU Cores for Servers, Shipping Now

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18913/amd-intros-epyc-97x4-bergamo-cpus-128-zen-4c-cpu-cores-shipping-now

by ksec • 3 years ago

159 123 3 years ago

360W per CPU is less than 3W per core, not bad.

usrusr• 3 years ago

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.

reckless• 3 years ago

It's fascinating how they managed to reclaim so much die area by dropping the cache and optimising for low (~3GHz) frequency.

treesciencebot• 3 years ago

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...

loeg4• 3 years ago

It's mostly the cache area rather than the frequency, right? Cache just takes a huge amount of space on the chip.

toast03• 3 years ago

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.

rektide2• 3 years ago

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.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu• 3 years ago

"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• 3 years ago

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).

adrian_b2• 3 years ago

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.

api2• 3 years ago

A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may be competitive with GPUs for AI.

cmrdporcupine10• 3 years ago

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.

leeoniya• 3 years ago

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.

kolbe8• 3 years ago

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.

znpy• 3 years ago

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.

PragmaticPulp2• 3 years ago

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?

adrian_b2• 3 years ago

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.

peppermint_gum• 3 years ago

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.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

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

happycube• 3 years ago

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 ;)

wmf2• 3 years ago

Yeah, that would destroy the 14900K.

throw78902• 3 years ago

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.

dhruvdh2• 3 years ago

I think it is unfair to the semianalysis team to share information from the subscriber only section.

speed_spread2• 3 years ago

Something tells me that Teams still won't run properly using this.

ComputerGuru2• 3 years ago

This doesn’t add any more value to the conversation than Reddit’s “but will it run Crysis?” comments.

Crystalin• 3 years ago

it didn't but it made me smile :)

speed_spread2• 3 years ago

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.

COGlory• 3 years ago

I'm extremely curious if this could run Crysis in with software rendering, actually...

PragmaticPulp2• 3 years ago

Is everyone on HN running their computers in some parallel universe where apps are running 10X slower than my computer?

fbdab1033• 3 years ago

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).

TOMDM• 3 years ago

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.

Klinky3• 3 years ago

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.

uo21tp5hoyg• 3 years ago

Not according to their own advertising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7nnXej2K4

walrus01• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

modern
quad core

pick one

loeg4• 3 years ago

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.

javajosh2• 3 years ago

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.

loeg4• 3 years ago

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.)

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 years ago

Anyone have some napkin math on how many QPS something like this can handle??

foota2• 3 years ago

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.

echion• 3 years ago

Where can we buy?

ksec• 3 years ago

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.

fbdab1033• 3 years ago

While melting the wires in your walls. How much juice would that pull when under full load?

rektide2• 3 years ago

3kw

uguuo_o3• 3 years ago

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.

MuffinFlavored2• 3 years ago

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

tryauuum• 3 years ago

I understand your happiness, but using such a vague word as "cloud" is doing a disservice to this setup

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

There are no 4P motherboards for AMD EPYC processors, they're all 2P because the of the number of interconnects per server CPU.

toast03• 3 years ago

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.

satvikpendem• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

If you're okay with "only" 64 cores you can do this now. It's my current rig, used for both work and play.

wmf2• 3 years ago

Zen 4c isn't good for desktop or workstation apps where you occasionally need single-thread performance. Threadripper Pro 7000 will be Genoa.

giomasce• 3 years ago

I wonder why AMD decided to name chips after Italian cities...

jerrygenser• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

AMD EPYC 97x4 “Bergamo” CPUs: 128 Zen 4c CPU Cores for Servers, Shipping Now

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