The technology and potential in Intels "10nm" and TSMCs "7nm" are similar. What matters is that Intel hasn't managed to successfully deploy a new process node in 4 years and thus competitors like TSMC, Samsung, and GF have had time to catch up and surpass Intels fab tech in various ways.
Sys Admin here. People are starting to notice and raise eyebrows. It is certainly an option, especially for new stacks. The power/price/performance ratios on AMD are truly amazing.
It certainly helps that Amazon, Microsoft, Cray, and Baidu have all already started to use Epyc servers.
If these next gens have similar pricing, they look very competitive for the future of on-premise (and cloud) HPC stacks.
1, you are right, you can build your own machines for way less than dell
2, you are now the support team. So when you get a call months, years later about hardware quirks, missing pieces or odd incompatibilities, expect it.
3, Buy extras and keep the machines largely the same. The fleet will be its own spare parts as it ages out. You will need extras for differential testing.
4, Keep a log and copy of all the bioses supplied by the motherboard manufacturer. Baseline and benchmark each server before it is put into production, retest as it is cycled out for other duties.
5, If you don't max out the memory when built, do track ram prices and there is a sweet spot of a dip just as the ram tech ages out. If you miss it, ram prices go back up again. An older machine with lots of ram will useful for a very long time.
If one plans it right, 100 node HPC cluster decays into a 75 node render farm into a 25 node distributed system test cluster, I think they could get 10 years of service out of the purchase.
* I have (hopefully) one semester left. After that, I’m gone.
* A good portion of our experienced team will be gone within the next two years, including the few grad students who helped build our cluster. Introducing “non-supported” hardware would likely introduce problems for the next group.
* The prices above were from Dell, not self assembly shopping. University policies mandate any university funded tech/infrastructure equipment (especially desktops/servers) be done through specific partners. For us, that’s Dell, GovConnection, and CDW. I host my own 6 node Supermicro Microblade setup (render farm) from CDW that took almost a full year to purchase because nobody in the Purchasing Dept. for clubs was aware of that rule. Until my hopping from Boxx to Thinkmate to “haha, funny story...” uncovered it.
That is amazing. With those kind of prices folks might upgrade before their old hardware has properly aged out. At what point does AMD institute a buyback program for Intel hardware? (joking)
Who's making chips to compete with Intel? AMD, IBM, and nobody else (ARM isn't high-performance yet). IBM's lock-in with POWER is scary to businesses. AMD wasn't competitive for most server needs. That left Intel to charge whatever they wanted (and they did).
With EPYC, there was finally a competitive offering at a great price (not to mention a better track record with meltdown and the constant stream of spectre variants). All the same software runs on the AMD chips too.
Maybe not those exact words, but people will say "We are adding a server to our VMWare ESXi cluster, so if want it to be compatible with our existing hardware we better stick with Intel."
VMWare's high availability feature (a highly desired feature for any data center) won't work across different CPU architectures, so unless you are replacing your entire stack and not just adding server(s) then you have to stick with the architecture you already have in place.
https://communities.vmware.com/thread/305792 https://www.v-front.de/2013/04/how-to-vmotion-from-intel-to-...
EVC does not allow for migration with vMotion between Intel and AMD processors.[1]
This isn't really that surprising. x86-64 is standard, but extensions aren't. Eg, here's some of the new extrnsion in Zen vs Steamroller: Compared to the AMD Opteron™ "Steamroller" EVC mode, this EVC mode exposes additional CPU features including RDRAND, SMEP, AVX2, BMI2, MOVBE, ADX, RDSEED, SMAP, CLFLUSHOPT, XSAVES, XSAVEC, SHA, and CLZERO [1]
I don’t consider that an unusual constraint.
Actually, that is the case, it will take about 1-2 hardware generations of customers _asking_ for AMD before it's featured prominently by any vendor (except the extreme ones like SuperMicro)
If nobody is actually calling their HP/Dell reps asking for it then it will never happen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924192 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Se... https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/RyzenMachineL...
Not implying that Intel chips are flawless (still bitter about Haswell TSM), but as you said, market perception matters.
Moving to the next intel generation is usually simple, incremental change. Moving between vendors means a lot of re-evaluating if you're crunching numbers.
If your workload needs a lot of PCIe lanes for IO or you need cheap systems with ECC ram then the story changes quite a bit.