Intel's Skylake SP Xeons are out, Comparisons with AMD's EPYC

tj_1ca9500b

So Intel launced the Skylake SP Xeons yesterday.  Anandtech has been working with a pair of the new Xeons for about two weeks, and has had a pair of EPYCs for about a week.  They've posted a pretty thorough comparison (in typical Anandtech style), which gives us a nice initial picture of the strengths and weaknesses of each architecture.

Probably the most interesting thing to us Render types will the Raytracing performance.  For those using CPU based rendering packages, this will be more important; for those focusing on Iray, this may mean a bit less to you.  Here's the page in the article that deals with Floating Point/Raytracing performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/21

The rest of the article is a pretty good read as well.  Short form, it'll depend on your usage model as to whether Intel or AMD will be the better choice for you.  And these are 'first blushes', do doubt we are going to see numerous optimizations for both platforms over the coming months.

I still have questions as to how well EPYC will play with Nvidia GPUs.  I'm not seeing any reason why they couldn't, but until I see usage examples, it's hard to know how well these will mix.

I'll be watching for more of these comparisons, and will add them to this thread as I see them.

 

kyoto kid

...the one drawback, Epyc only supports Linux which means only a couple 3D programmes are useful (Maya and Blender come to mind). Daz, Carrara, Vue, C4D, 3DS Max, forget it. Would be nice if someone could do a hack for W8.1 which supports up to 512 GB of memory. That would be serious horsepower for CPU based rendering and animation.

tj_1ca9500b

kyoto kid said:

...the one drawback, Epyc only supports Linux which means only a couple 3D programmes are useful (Maya and Blender come to mind). Daz, Carrara, Vue, C4D, 3DS Max, forget it. Would be nice if someone could do a hack for W8.1 which supports up to 512 GB of memory. That would be serious horsepower for CPU based rendering and animation.

Who told you that?

EPYC runs fine with both Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2016...

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-supported-os-hypervisor-compatibility-matrix-launch/

Beyond this, we have started testing OSes. Thus far we have verified that Ubuntu 17.04, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016 work out-of-the-box with AMD EPYC.

kyoto kid

...are you sure?  The artricles I read mentioned it was only compatible with Liinux. 

Besides if that were the case, who here can afford Windows Server Edtion (and as Server 2012 is no longer available you are stuck with basically the W10 version)?

JamesJAB

kyoto kid said:

...are you sure?  The artricles I read mentioned it was only compatible with Liinux. 

Besides if that were the case, who here can afford Windows Server Edtion (and as Server 2012 is no longer available you are stuck with basically the W10 version)?

http://www.amd.com/system/files/2017-07/EPYC-Offers-x86-Compatibility.pdf

Yes quite sure about windows server compatibility.

"EPYC has been validated on all major server operating systems, including Microsoft Server and all of the leading commercial Linux distributions as well as the virtualized versions such as Hyper-V, Linux KVM, VMware, and Citrix XenServer. "

tj_1ca9500b

I haven't seen anything about Windows 10 compatability, mind you, and we already know that 8.1 has pretty much been abandoned by Microsoft.

Microsoft IS a launch partner for EPYC, and in fact now has a few EPYC servers in their own infrastructure.  While I suppose Microsoft COULD be running LInux servers in their own infrastructure, I seriously doubt that, except maybe as testbeds to scope out the competition so to speak.

prixat

kyoto kid said:

... who here can afford Windows Server Edtion?

That would be the same people who can afford eight GPUs to use up all those PCIe lanes!  

nonesuch00

tj_1ca9500b said:

I haven't seen anything about Windows 10 compatability, mind you, and we already know that 8.1 has pretty much been abandoned by Microsoft.

Microsoft IS a launch partner for EPYC, and in fact now has a few EPYC servers in their own infrastructure.  While I suppose Microsoft COULD be running LInux servers in their own infrastructure, I seriously doubt that, except maybe as testbeds to scope out the competition so to speak.

No, Microsoft does use Linux for infrastructure where Linux does a better job than a Microsoft product would do although I'm too lazy to search the source of those news article(s). They are practical, not this sort of Apple vs M$ vs Linux fanboy silliness you see sometimes.

kyoto kid

prixat said:

kyoto kid said:

... who here can afford Windows Server Edtion?

That would be the same people who can afford eight GPUs to use up all those PCIe lanes!  

....pretty much leaves most, if not all of us out.

In a sense comparison between Skylake X and Epyc is sort of moot as the latter does not run on an OS we can readily afford (Windows Server) or run our graphics programmes on (Linux).   So much for extreme high core count systems unless one goes to dual used Xeons of 10 cores and up. 

tj_1ca9500b

Well, according to Microsoft, Windows 8 64 bit will support up to 256 cores... and Windows 10 will support 2 physical CPUs (no word on the core count).

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10/windows-10-versions-cpu-limits/905c24ad-ad54-4122-b730-b9e7519c823f?auth=1

If this is the case, then there's no reason why EPYC shouldn't work with Windows 10.  I STILL haven't seen anything that says EPYC WON'T work with Windows 10, so if you have links, share them!

kyoto kid

...well if 8.1 can support up to 256 cores don't see why it can't be used with an Epyc CPU. BTW even W7 Pro 64 bit can support dual CPUs. I was originally considering the single socket Epyc 7105 as the price was projected at around 2,100$, only about 100$ more than the 18 core Skylake-X. Crikey, with 32 cores 64 processor threads, and 128 PCI lanes, who needs dual CPUs?