Seeking Linux server (dedicated or not) w/ graphics

hzr

ts001 said: Unfortunately we couldn't find a host offering anything but AMD APUs. We found some hosts in Europe offering discrete Nvidia GPUs but we are in the USA.

They won't be cheap. Especially considering they need to comply with nvidia's licencing (you can't use nvidia consumer GPUs in a DC for anything non-mining, strictly legally speaking).

If you want to go the hobby route, buy a cheap GPU and colo a box somewhere with breadracks or something. But you can't sell access to this or run a business off it or whatever without legal risk.

As far as I can tell my GPUs use more power than the entire rest of the machine combined.

ts001

Thanks for the advice! This was our first dip into 3d servers. A lot of lessons learned.

ts001

Got an integrated headless AMD APU "KABINI" HD 8400 3d accelerating. I have a way back for this and I'll be sharing my findings for anyone who wants to do the same.

ts001

@willie said:
If you want a dirt cheap dedi with a GPU, try primcast.com, $7/m with $14 setup, or $80/y (iirc) with no setup. It's a low powered AMD processor with an on-chip older-generation Radeon GPU (2 CU's, or in marketing speak 128 "GPU cores"). To put that in perspective, the current high-end discrete Radeon cards have 56 or 64 CU's and I think the new Ryzen APU's have 10 or 12 on-chip. But the cheap thing is intriguing and I have thought of getting one to play with GPU code.

I put together a guide here on how to get the APU to accelerate: https://github.com/shamilovtim/3D-Accelerate-internal-GPU-or-APU-on-Linux.

The CPU on this server turned out to not have enough juice for us so we're moving to a different box with higher single threaded performance.

willie

Thanks for posting that! I'm glad you got it working even if it wasn't fast enough. The Ryzen APU graphics should be a lot faster and I hope someone offers those chips in servers:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-the-amd-ryzen-5-2400g-review