I wondered when I can buy a AMD workstation with official ECC support, looks like that will finally be possible in September. Hope the price will be OK.
There are higher base frequencies but lower turbo on the new TR Pro vs Ryzen 9:
> I wondered when I can buy a AMD workstation with official ECC support, looks like that will finally be possible in September. Hope the price will be OK.
You don't have to wait. The current Ryzen 3000 series processors support ECC.
> You don't have to wait. The current Ryzen 3000 series processors support ECC.
The post you were responding to asked when they would get official ECC support. ECC is not officially supported on Ryzen. If it works on your particular board/BIOS, great, but it's not officially validated or tested, so nobody besides you will actually be testing whether it works, and if it doesn't work in some edge case (or at all) then sucks to be you. If ECC doesn't work right on some future BIOS revision that fixes a security issue or some other critical bug, and there is never an updated version that does support ECC, sucks to be you.
That is specifically the problem that people are looking to avoid by asking for official support.
As it stands, you can probably count the number of boards that anyone would bother to validate ECC on on a single hand - Asrock Rack has two server boards, Asus has some "WS" series that might, maybe some of the high-end Asrock consumer boards. And it will never be officially supported by AMD, if there is a critical bug then welp.
As such I think "ECC is supported on AM4" is a bit of an exaggeration or a clever bit of terminology spin from some fans. If you call up AMD and ask, they will tell you they don't go out of their way to disable it (except in APUs) but it's not supported. I think "functional" or "enabled" is a better term.
(Intel validates support on their consumer processors, by the way... i3s and Pentiums officially support ECC. Supermicro/Asrock Rack/etc test those configurations and if they don't work then you can complain and they will fix them.)
Yes, but only a limited UDIMM variant which makes it much harder to source memory for. It's gotten a little easier over the last year, but these new Pro variants will have support for RDIMM, LRDIMM, etc. DIMMs which will make it much easier to find memory at a reasonable price.
I firmly believe that TR (with their higher base freq) + ECC would be the ultimate SERVER.
The TR 3970x in particular is amazing for a server. It's 32 core, all running at a base freq of 3.7Ghz. It's amazing to have that kind of high clock with so many cores.
People typically run EPYC's at 4 sockets per U of rack space (2p-2u4n: 4 dual processor nodes in 2U). With these, you'd be lucky to get 1/4 of the density, more likely 1/8. Any savings on chips would be more than eaten up by rack fees.
This is probably part of the reason why it's OEM-only. That way AMD can control where it's used, avoiding it competing with it's own EPYC server chips.
"However, it should be noted that these processors will only be available as part of pre-built systems, and no corresponding consumer motherboards will be made available."
I'm pretty disappointed in this, but I suppose the market for such workstations leans more towards "large enterprise that needs reliability" than "hobbyist that needs low cost/likes to customize their rig."
These are absolutely just low-bin EPYC chips. EPYC has never had "consumer-available" motherboards (read: you can buy them, just have to know where to look), nor have some of the chips been officially validated for Windows 10 (read: it works fine). But the 2TB of 8-channel memory and 128 PCI-E lanes screams EPYC.
Unclear what the price differential will be, but consumers can buy EPYC chips just fine, so if you want something home-built, that's a path. The main issue is finding a good motherboard; going Xeon-at-home is pretty straightforward, but EPYC boards tend to be really basic server-grade stuff designed for a datacenter.
It doesn't really look bad to me... market segmentation isn't all about the silicon but the support and quality assurance. It seems like they want maximum control over quality for the big-spending money-making customers, which makes a lot of sense.
What I'm surprised about is that they're branding this "Threadripper Pro" instead of branding it as a high end Epyc workstation chip. Threadripper is a watered down Epyc chip to start with, and all they've done here is raise base clocks, lower boost, and turn on the additional IO that Epyc already had which was disabled in TR.
I really don't want to buy an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000/6000/8000. I want a very high-end non-GPU-focused workstation where I can pick any videocard since I'll also do some occasional gaming on it and I'd like that to be fast -- so an RTX 2080 Ti would be enough (although both NVIDIA and AMD promised better consumer cards than the 2080 Ti until the end of the year so that is interesting to keep an eye on as well).
I'm quite OK with the limit of 1TB of RAM but the forced buy of a Quadro card is an absolute nope from me.
I hope that when other vendors are allowed to build TR Pro machines that some of them will actually give you a bit more choice.
These workstations are aimed at business customers, and so the customizations offered by Lenovo are going to be limited.
If you wanted a TR Pro workstation with a consumer graphics card instead of a Quadro, you could work with a third-party reseller. You and the reseller would have to verify compatibility yourselves (e.g. will the card fit in the chassis, will it have the necessary airflow, will it have the needed power connectors and will they reach, etc.), but it's doable.
I really hope some resellers proactively test the "I want this to be my workstation and a gaming machine" setup and have people ready to put an RTX 2080 Ti in. So I hope you're right.
Ive previously (aftermarket) added consumer GPUs to an hpe proliant server in a non-dc environment (using pcie riser card). Main issue was lack of appropriate supplemental power cabling, so I had to run a separate (consumer) power supply for supplemental power connection (but still from same ups/ground).
I guess it would be possible to add a graphics card of your choice to this workstation as well.
That would be a nice workaround. How do you know though? Is there an online configurator already?
But won't opening the box to add your own GPU void warranty? This workstation kind of gives off that vibe of a professional machine that's pre-built for you and you're not supposed to open it.
At that sort of power level one could theoretically capture the heat and cycle it back into the board as electricity. How long before we see a little stirling engine spinning away atop AMD chips?
Those sort of high wattage configurations are only really useful for seeing your system at the top of the benchmarking charts. Nearly everything that scales to 64 cores will scale to multiple machines, at which point you're getting much better performance per watt by adding a machine which doubles performance at double the power than by unlimiting clock speed which gives you a small percentage improvement in performance in exchange for quadruple the power consumption.
The smaller the temperature difference, the worse the efficiency. The linked article said it got up to 85C, if you assume the cold end gets down to 25C, you could only recover 16.753% of the thermal power as useful work, theoretical maximum Carnot cycle.
> There is also a small difference in DRAM support – TR Pro supports up to 2 TB, but EPYC supports 4 TB. All of the Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors are single socket only.
This is probably a small misprint; EPYC only supports 2TB per socket, or 4TB on multi-socket boards.
In that regard, TRPro looks like its just a re-branded EPYC chip.
I'm still mad that I cant buy the Ryzen 3600E processor (45W TDP) as it's reserved to OEMs. I know i'm sacrificing performances, but I want an energy-efficient processor.
You can set the TDP manually for the regular Ryzens, that does give you a significant reduction in power usage, at the cost of some performance. The difference in power usage is much larger than the drop in performance.
I haven't followed the Ryzen versions like the 3600E you mentioned, so I'm not sure how much binning is done there to get power consumption even lower, but I'd guess that you can get most of the effect with a regular Ryzen and manually setting the TDP to 45W.
it's still good enough for many games, for me it's fine even with The Witcher 3, sure, not the top tier, but I also looked for energy efficient PC. As low energy Ryzens are hard to get, I took 5 3600 and compromised on GPU, storage and mobo.
As others have mentioned, you can manually adjust the TDP lower by reducing the max wattage for various power envelopes. This has all the same benefits that lower clocked mobile chips have in terms of power savings. The desktop chips are less efficient because they run at higher clocks where the returns have diminished as far as clock/power ratio.
Ryzen supports an Eco mode which will configure the power management functionality to assume a lower TDP. A Ryzen 3600 running in Eco mode will be functionally equivalent to a Ryzen 3600E.
It's weird how this is clearly not just slightly different SKUs of Threadripper like Ryzen Pro was to consumer Ryzen. Instead Ryzen Threadripper Pro seems to be EPYC in all but name?
I'm not sure why they don't market it as an Epyc. (I suspect the TDP requirements exceed the limits of Epyc's SP3 socket.) Otherwise, it's essentially a single-socket Epyc with higher clock speeds and a higher TDP.
This is very saddening, I was looking forward to build a 16 core system on this platform to give me an insane amount of room for upgrade in the years to come.
The CPU market is going to go through some pretty dramatic changes in the net year, especially with things like ARM possibly becoming the dominant architecture. I wouldn't try and future proof your system too much yet.
Readit News
There are higher base frequencies but lower turbo on the new TR Pro vs Ryzen 9:
Edit: the new, much higher TDP is not welcome news.You don't have to wait. The current Ryzen 3000 series processors support ECC.
ASUS, ASRock, and Gigabyte have several Ryzen 3000 motherboard options that support ECC RAM. Example: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Pro-WS-X570-ACE/
The post you were responding to asked when they would get official ECC support. ECC is not officially supported on Ryzen. If it works on your particular board/BIOS, great, but it's not officially validated or tested, so nobody besides you will actually be testing whether it works, and if it doesn't work in some edge case (or at all) then sucks to be you. If ECC doesn't work right on some future BIOS revision that fixes a security issue or some other critical bug, and there is never an updated version that does support ECC, sucks to be you.
That is specifically the problem that people are looking to avoid by asking for official support.
As it stands, you can probably count the number of boards that anyone would bother to validate ECC on on a single hand - Asrock Rack has two server boards, Asus has some "WS" series that might, maybe some of the high-end Asrock consumer boards. And it will never be officially supported by AMD, if there is a critical bug then welp.
As such I think "ECC is supported on AM4" is a bit of an exaggeration or a clever bit of terminology spin from some fans. If you call up AMD and ask, they will tell you they don't go out of their way to disable it (except in APUs) but it's not supported. I think "functional" or "enabled" is a better term.
(Intel validates support on their consumer processors, by the way... i3s and Pentiums officially support ECC. Supermicro/Asrock Rack/etc test those configurations and if they don't work then you can complain and they will fix them.)
It was impossible to find an OEM workstation with those specs so I ended up building it and it's been working with no hassles.
The usual distinction is that Threadripper regular takes unbuffered ECC, whereas Threadripper Pro and Epyc take buffered ECC. But they're both ECC.
The TR 3970x in particular is amazing for a server. It's 32 core, all running at a base freq of 3.7Ghz. It's amazing to have that kind of high clock with so many cores.
The TDP is (in part) because the Epyc IO die consumes roughly 100W by itself. You can still cool a Threadripper on air though.
I'm pretty disappointed in this, but I suppose the market for such workstations leans more towards "large enterprise that needs reliability" than "hobbyist that needs low cost/likes to customize their rig."
Unclear what the price differential will be, but consumers can buy EPYC chips just fine, so if you want something home-built, that's a path. The main issue is finding a good motherboard; going Xeon-at-home is pretty straightforward, but EPYC boards tend to be really basic server-grade stuff designed for a datacenter.
What I'm surprised about is that they're branding this "Threadripper Pro" instead of branding it as a high end Epyc workstation chip. Threadripper is a watered down Epyc chip to start with, and all they've done here is raise base clocks, lower boost, and turn on the additional IO that Epyc already had which was disabled in TR.
I'm quite OK with the limit of 1TB of RAM but the forced buy of a Quadro card is an absolute nope from me.
I hope that when other vendors are allowed to build TR Pro machines that some of them will actually give you a bit more choice.
If you wanted a TR Pro workstation with a consumer graphics card instead of a Quadro, you could work with a third-party reseller. You and the reseller would have to verify compatibility yourselves (e.g. will the card fit in the chassis, will it have the necessary airflow, will it have the needed power connectors and will they reach, etc.), but it's doable.
I guess it would be possible to add a graphics card of your choice to this workstation as well.
I think the main thing here with the list of choices in the need to provide ISV certification.
But won't opening the box to add your own GPU void warranty? This workstation kind of gives off that vibe of a professional machine that's pre-built for you and you're not supposed to open it.
Hope I'm wrong.
I imagine it would be nice to have a mini-AWS at home. Not sure how it would feel like to have a 1K Watt space heater permanently running though.
[1] https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x...
This is probably a small misprint; EPYC only supports 2TB per socket, or 4TB on multi-socket boards.
In that regard, TRPro looks like its just a re-branded EPYC chip.
I haven't followed the Ryzen versions like the 3600E you mentioned, so I'm not sure how much binning is done there to get power consumption even lower, but I'd guess that you can get most of the effect with a regular Ryzen and manually setting the TDP to 45W.
Take GPU like this one RX 570 https://www.newegg.com/sapphire-radeon-rx-570-100412p4gitxl/...
it's still good enough for many games, for me it's fine even with The Witcher 3, sure, not the top tier, but I also looked for energy efficient PC. As low energy Ryzens are hard to get, I took 5 3600 and compromised on GPU, storage and mobo.
any particular reason why? power costs? cooling?
Threadripper 3960x will have to do then :(