AMD Hopes to Break Intel Server Dominance with New 32-Core Naples Chip

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

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Infoworld has a story up today about AMD's server chief Forrest Norrod, and how he believes he can take the fight to Intel on the server front. Naples has a massive 32 cores, more PCIe lanes and greater memory capacity than Intel's counterparts, and will likely also sell at a lower cost. On the other hand, only having AVX-128 instructions as opposed to Intel's AVX-512, may hamper its abilities in some vectorized applications.

Damn, why cant I have 128 PCIe lanes on the desktop? If they can go up to 128 on the server chip, you'd think they could at least give us 40 lanes with Ryzen.

"The Naples server chips are based on the x86 architecture, but they don’t have an official name yet. AMD was once a legitimate threat to Intel, but a series of missteps killed its server business. The decline started with the heavily criticized Bulldozer architecture, and the company later bet its server future on ARM chips, but slow demand knocked the company out of servers."
 
Damn, why cant I have 128 PCIe lanes on the desktop? If they can go up to 128 on the server chip, you'd think they could at least give us 40 lanes with Ryzen.
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There are always compromises. Power usage and motherboard cost would go up if you added more lanes.
 
Naples... wafer... mmm...

drooling_homer.gif~c200
 
I may get to play with these at work provided Dell produces servers based on these. At home I will have to see pricing.
 
If nothing else this should be monumentally disruptive. Density and power are everything in that world, and a 1/3 increase in core is certainly a shot across the bow.
 
drescherjm said:
Depends on the price. I mean I expect the 32C / 64T CPU to be > $5000 US for the CPU alone.
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Intel have nothing to combat Naples, considering Intel's ES-2599 is only 22 cores at around $5K. AMD is expecting to undercut them while providing 45 per cent more cores, 60 per cent more output and 122 per cent more memory bandwidth.
 
thesmokingman said:
Intel have nothing to combat Naples, considering Intel's ES-2599 is only 22 cores at around $5K. AMD is expecting to undercut them while providing 45 per cent more cores, 60 per cent more output and 122 per cent more memory bandwidth.
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Try going out with a new platform... again ?
Good Luck intel.

I have to say that the power usage for the 1700 when undervolted is just under 60W it seems unless I measure it completely incorrectly.
30W for 2ghz 8 core 16t.
120W for 32 core 2ghz naples.
Add in 20 W for 8 channel memory and PCI-E Lanes.

Good Luck intel, you will have to ditch your valued fab process node
Amd's current Gives amd's bad overclock but superior efficiency performance in lower clocks.
 
drescherjm said:
Depends on the price. I mean I expect the 32C / 64T CPU to be > $5000 US for the CPU alone.
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AMD cannot roll out everything at once, and when Naples is out it's bound to trickle down to HEDT, and a new chipset, even a 12core CPU, the success of Ryzen or lack of, will dictate most of it.

i doubt intel will just sit there watching, as much as desktop performance represents the image of the brand for common folks, servers is really where the money is at, and intel would hire a real Hitman to keep their piggy bank intact.
 
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What they going to call it?
The Carrier class CPU?
Code name Fortress?
The killer whale?
Skyscraper?
 
ole-m said:
Try going out with a new platform... again ?
Good Luck intel.

I have to say that the power usage for the 1700 when undervolted is just under 60W it seems unless I measure it completely incorrectly.
30W for 2ghz 8 core 16t.
120W for 32 core 2ghz naples.
Add in 20 W for 8 channel memory and PCI-E Lanes.

Good Luck intel, you will have to ditch your valued fab process node
Amd's current Gives amd's bad overclock but superior efficiency performance in lower clocks.
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True, I am sure we will see what Intel can do, however doesn't mean they can do miracles either.
 
SolidBladez said:
So does this mean that HardOCP will move its servers from from dual-cores to 32-core CPU configs?

I kid, I kid.. please don't ban me
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LOL, I don't have the details about what server hardware Kyle has in the colocation facility, but I'm pretty sure it's not bad stuff.

The site does get slow from time to time, but that seems more to blame on the frequent DDOS attacks this site is a victim of, presumably from some hardware fanboi du-jour who feels slighted by the H's no BS messaging style, and throwing some bitcoin at the "dark net", or persuading their fanboi friends on 4chan, or 8chan or whatever the latest one is to download LOIC.

It feels like it has been better recently since the server moves though.
 
Just don't co lo it where Blizzard does it's wow servers. Then you will wind up having security methods shut down your sites because of a DDOS sniffer that is too aggressive.

Not that I know anything about that mind you.
 
Price, and core clocks, and actual benchmarks make me leery. Until I have those I'm holding out on investing in this. A single one of these would make for a good workstation chip if the clocks are good and it benches well.
 
I'll take a ton of cores and RAM bandwidth for Hyper V and that sweet PCIe bandwidth for hyper converged NVMe. Now to convince work of buying new servers in a year.
 
yeah gl w/that. especially with the traditional server industry shrinking rapidly.
 
Uvaman2 said:
True, I am sure we will see what Intel can do, however doesn't mean they can do miracles either.
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In current status AMD wins server, looses gaming, tie in production, looses in very heavy workstation - Based on chipset\platform, core architecture and process node.
 
4saken said:
yeah gl w/that. especially with the traditional server industry shrinking rapidly.
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Yea because the massive virtual server hosting farms that pay for licenses by socket won't be ALL OVER 32 core CPU's they can pay one license slot for and get 33% more sellable CPU cores out of for end users. Nope not in the least.

when a single slot license costs around 5k. Getting 22/44 or 32//64 is a big deal. As long as performance is within an acceptable margin this will be a big win for those companies as well.

Yes traditional server use is becoming less and less. But when you consider someone can build out a 64/128 core 2 socket server with a TB of ram and turn that into more profit based hosting than they could with intel cores... well you get the idea.

No they are not going to go out and re buy everything. But you can bet new servers will tilt this direction. And when it comes time to do a refresh if AMD still has the core/socket lead with Hyperthreading or SMT solutions they will get a lot of the sales.

If intel takes the lead again that's who those core count hounds will lean towards. And this is all thanks to licensing models.
 
Grimlaking said:
Yea because the massive virtual server hosting farms that pay for licenses by socket won't be ALL OVER 32 core CPU's they can pay one license slot for and get 33% more sellable CPU cores out of for end users. Nope not in the least.

when a single slot license costs around 5k. Getting 22/44 or 32//64 is a big deal. As long as performance is within an acceptable margin this will be a big win for those companies as well.

Yes traditional server use is becoming less and less. But when you consider someone can build out a 64/128 core 2 socket server with a TB of ram and turn that into more profit based hosting than they could with intel cores... well you get the idea.

No they are not going to go out and re buy everything. But you can bet new servers will tilt this direction. And when it comes time to do a refresh if AMD still has the core/socket lead with Hyperthreading or SMT solutions they will get a lot of the sales.

If intel takes the lead again that's who those core count hounds will lean towards. And this is all thanks to licensing models.
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Thats what I was thinking as well servers arent going away they are expanding but fewer companies own them
 
Presbytier said:
Thats what I was thinking as well servers arent going away they are expanding but fewer companies own them
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All this is going to take is one major hack of a cloud service. We all know it is a when not if. Once that happens private in house clouds will become all the rage.

So keep your ears to the ground for when this happens. Get your savings account ready. Because when these hosting services start returning leased servers by the rack to vendors.. we will be able to pick them up cheap if we can get them before the corporations do! ;)
 
Grimlaking said:
when a single slot license costs around 5k. Getting 22/44 or 32//64 is a big deal. As long as performance is within an acceptable margin this will be a big win for those companies as well.
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I hadn't thought of that, and it is a very good point.

I have an old Westmere-EP bases dual socket Xeon (L5640 hexacores) in my basement. It always irked me that I am paying double for my license compared to if I had a newer single CPU with 12 cores.

The whole "per socket" model never made any sense to me. It seems like such an arbitrary pricing model.
 
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Grimlaking said:
Yea because the massive virtual server hosting farms that pay for licenses by socket won't be ALL OVER 32 core CPU's they can pay one license slot for and get 33% more sellable CPU cores out of for end users. Nope not in the least.

when a single slot license costs around 5k. Getting 22/44 or 32//64 is a big deal. As long as performance is within an acceptable margin this will be a big win for those companies as well.
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That's great until the licensing pendulum swings back to core count.
 
DPI said:
Until the licensing pendulum swings back to core count ofcourse..
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Too true, but many have swung away from core count.. unless your Intel and think you have a lock on the Database Market and it's too expensive or still MORE expensive to switch to another top tier DB vendor and would require major rewrites of your code to switch to it. Not that I know anything about that mind you. Grrrr.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Awesome. I hope they make quad CPU motherboards. I'd love to see that. 128C/256T. Fuuuuuuuck, that'd be sweet.

I could play the shit out of chess!

Either that, or global thermonuclear war.

Nah, I'd rather play a nice game of chess.
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Somehow I doubt either were properly multithreaded.
 
Holy shit please let it be unlocked. I need a sr-x replacement. And I wounded how these cups would do with water going over the die :p
 
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JosiahBradley said:
I'll take a ton of cores and RAM bandwidth for Hyper V and that sweet PCIe bandwidth for hyper converged NVMe. Now to convince work of buying new servers in a year.
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Tons of cores are fine, unless the software you are using is licensed by the core.
With something like SQL, it can make more sense to pay more for more Ghz and less cores, due to the high software licensing costs.
 
even if this CPU kick ass intel xeon ass so much i don't think AMD can easily gain market share from intel. professional client usually did not change their preferred solution overnight like us do. remember what happen to AMD S9150?
 
Please no less than 2.8ghz base clock.....and tdp no higher than 130w.
 
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