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Question about Ryzen
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Question about Ryzen

LittleCreekLittleCreek Member, Patron Provider

It seems to me that AMD Ryzen is primarily for a desktop system not servers. It seems that Epyc would be the AMD server class processor. So could somebody provide a little clarification?

Comments

  • Ryzens are more cost-effective especially for low-end providers which is why you see them a lot around here.

    Take a look at a recent discussion:

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/170182/amd-ryzen-7-5800x-ecc-support#latest

  • What clarification are you looking for ?
    Ryzen is a desktop CPU but its also good for servers ( very stable ) And ( very cheap ) you get less cores but high GHZ speed.
    Epyc is a server CPU with more cores + lower GHZ and its very expensive .

    So its really depend on your requirements e.g if you are looking for many cores and enterprise hardware including IPMI and your wallet is open go for EPYC otherwise go for RYZEN is a beast !

  • oplinkoplink Member, Patron Provider

    The AMD Ryzens are just a great bang for buck right now. Plus they support up to 128G of memory. In addition they also out bench pretty much most of Intels xeon cpu line up. Pair that with NVME storage and you have a great vps node. You really only become limited by the 128G ram.

  • ViridWebViridWeb Member, Host Rep

    If lowend your primary target then use Ryzen

    If not then go for Epyc.. it's very stable and overall great performance

  • IPMI is available on all AsrockRack Ryzen boards and barebone servers

    Ryzen is the single tread rating champion ...

  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker
    edited April 2021

    In the hosting business, el. power plays a very major role in terms of cost. It also plays a very significant role in (not low end) processors because one can pump only so much power through a processor without special and very expensive cooling.

    Second rule: one has to fit some mix of single thread and multi-threading performance, frequency, caches, etc into a given power envelope whose realistic max is about 250 W per socket.

    Third rule: one must decide for a position on the few cores, high performance - many cores, lower performance (per core) axis.

    Fourth rule: The power consumption vs frequency ratio is not linear (but tends towards exponential). That's for example why intel offers "low power" variants at considerably lower frequency.

    For desktops almost always fewer cores with high performance and higher clock rate is desired. For servers usually performance per Watt and many cores is desired (plus some features like ECC memory).

    With Ryzen the lines got somewhat blurred because "server class" features like ECC became available plus with Ryzens one could have as many or even more cores than (at least many) intel server processors, especially with Threadripper.

    Ryzen and Epyc actually are (IMO) rather different processors. While Ryzen is optimized for mid-range in terms of number of cores with a lower end class (2 - 6 cores) that indeed are desktop centric (mainly the APUs, e.g. 3400G) it also offers many features that were considered "server class" before Ryzen and Epyc.
    Epyc on the other hand is clearly optimized for server use where many cores within a reasonable power envelope is far more important than single thread performance and where an abundance of PCIe lanes allow for things one could hardly dream of with Xeons, like e.g. 10 (or even more) NVMEs.
    But again, for hosters the point is "really good (but not top) performance at (relatively) low power consumption" - which Epyc delivers.

    Both, Ryzen and Epyc are attractive in terms of power consumption but Epyc is optimized for many cores. However even relatively cheap Ryzens offer 8 cores which actually is too many for most dedicated servers, but attractive for VPS hosting on a small to mid scale in particular as their performance is excellent.

    Finally there also is the human factor. Seing Ryzen benchmark results vs. Epyc results many, probably most users half blindly choose the Ryzen because Epyc (or Xeon) based VPSs seem to be lame when compared to Ryzen. BUT: Look at the power consumption! With a smart Epyc choice one can have 48 cores at ca. 5W per core and ca. 3/4 of Ryzen performance while Ryzens gobble about double the power per core.

    TL;DR You can forget much of how the game and its rules were pre Ryzen. Today the whole field is much more in flux and a "desktop" CPU can be a better server CPU than Xeon once was while at the same time a "server" CPU may be an excellent basis for a high end workstation (with e.g. 4 PCIe-16 graphics cards, multiple NVMes, plus 25 Gb/s. ethernet).

  • LittleCreekLittleCreek Member, Patron Provider

    I was thinking of using dual AMD MD EPYC 16C Model 7282 SP3 120W 3200MHZ with the Supermicro H11DSI-O Dual SP3 sockets AMD Motherboard for my next server. The board can have up to 2 TB of memory.

  • spectraipspectraip Member, Patron Provider

    @LittleCreek said:
    It seems to me that AMD Ryzen is primarily for a desktop system not servers. It seems that Epyc would be the AMD server class processor. So could somebody provide a little clarification?

    AMD Ryzen servers have a high clock speed and have a good price-performance rate.
    There are server motherboards available designed for AMD Ryzen CPUs. They have BMC/IPMI and ECC support, for instance.

    We use the ASRock Rack X470D4U and X570D4U motherboards for our AMD Ryzen servers :smile:

  • HxxxHxxx Member
    edited April 2021

    @LittleCreek In general and without any offense to the Ryzen champions such as BuyVM @Francisco and NexusBytes @seriesn since they seem to be doing the Ryzen scene properly... Most providers that use Ryzen are just cutting corners, being cheap. The justification is that single thread is faster, but in general most servers purpose are to serve web content, that's something that clearly benefits from multi-cores /multi-thread. So it might actually not make sense to use Ryzen over EPYC

    I rather buy a VPS with lots of cores/threads fair share than buy one VPS with one single thread dedicated, the latter is only good for static content and really won't hold much dynamic content traffic.

    In the end it greatly varies from customer to customer. I've only trusted @Francisco Ryzen VPS because I know he is a mad genius. But honestly I prefer any E3, E5 and the beautiful AMD EPYC over Ryzen, that's preference.

    Also you might want to make sure that when you are buying Ryzen for serious use, that it is using ECC memory. Most Ryzen builds are Frankesteins, kind of forced.

    Thanked by 1seriesn
  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker
    edited April 2021

    @Hxxx said:
    in general most servers purpose are to serve web content, that's something that clearly benefits from multi-cores /multi-thread.

    ... or not. Actually most modern http servers are either async based or at least offer that as an option. That said, fun fact: async based servers are actually not (anymore) significantly faster than multi-threaded ones.

    I agree though that E5 26xx v4 (and newer generations) are fine server processors.

    Fun fact 2: IMO one very major revenue source for VPS providers is the fact that the vast majority of customers are blinded by numbers and have an utterly unrealistic idea of their real needs. Many for example "think" that an Epyc or a Xeon 26xx can't be good enough while actually even an 8 years old processor would be more than they really need.

    Fun question: Which one actually offers better performance: 1/4th of a Ryzen hw thread or a full Xeon 26xx v4 thread? Most don't ask (and if they do they don't get an anwser or a vague one) and go for the Ryzen box.

    Fun fact 4: LET, at least sometimes, seems to run on a 32 vCore machine. That's either ridiculous or the software is really, really sh_tty. A site like this should run easily on e.g. a 4 (or max 6) vCore Ryzen VPS from @seriesn.

    Thanked by 3Hxxx bulbasaur seriesn
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