AMD is Ryzen to the SMB occasion with a bundle of baby Epycs AMD on Tuesday revealed its latest chips to get a Zen 5 refresh with the launch of its itty bitty Epyc 4005-series CPUs. The House of Zen is betting on the parts it thinks will help it win over small-to-midsize businesses, branch offices, and dedicated hosting providers that don't necessarily need or want to pay for all the …
Where is the variant with 3D Cache on both chiplets? They skipped that for the 9950x3d, for "probably not enough market" reasons. And do the same for epyc.
But I am not a big market enough alone, sadly... Where are the Zen5 Threadrippers? They are late! There I may find the 16 core with 192 MB cache (or more?)...
The desktop variant can ECC, and there are such 64 GB ECC UDIMM. ECC is, for me, a selling point. I have ECC since Ryzen 2700x was released (and upgraded two times on that mainboard). Much easier when doing RAM overclocking: You get an event in your system log that you overdid RAM OC, but the machine keeps on going. Albeit much slower with my desktop CPU, but you can shut down normal.
Yes - AMD are trying to create market fragmentation!
By deliberately putting in more, arbitrary, limitations. Which, being arbitrary, are kinda baffling.
So if you want the full RAM, in a server, you buy the 'real' EPYC and give AMD the extra money.
Why wouldn't you buy the desktop part instead? Because the sale literature makes it clear that those are not 'server rated' or some such wording, whatever that means (no matter your Ryzen box at home runs 24/7/52 without any problems). Classic FUD.
Unfortunately, my belief in this idea of any company, especially AMD, being brazen enough to try and get more money by cynically manipulating CPU specs has proven unpopular so far, but until there is a better explanation I'm gonna stick with it.
Isn't that what I just said?
Nobody's claiming creating fragmentation is a new idea (go back to IBM changing the position of a rubber band to increase the speed of your tabulator - for a price).
Ditto the "server runs 24/7/52" - pay more and they'll give you the support. (Even though people have managed to use the Ryzen part 24/7/52 quite happily & they are going to be fine for you, that isn't 'supported'.).
AMD should have come up with some 3rd model name... falling in-between EPYC and Ryzen. This is just diluting the EPYC brand and bringing it down a notch. Data centers can SAY they've got EPYC CPUs, while they really have cheaper Ryzens. That doesn't help anybody.
I don't really see the appeal. It's just a desktop chip with an EPYC label slapped on it. Maybe the supported motherboards for these chips will be more reliable and ALL have ECC support as mandatory, instead of a guessing-game on desktop mobo models? Other than that, a cheap cash-in on the EPYC name seems to tbe the only reason for it.
Article mention Built-in RAID, fully supported. In the end it will be as usual: The BIOS/UEFI has just enough RAID logic to make the OS boot with the driver, the RAID is in the driver. But then another typical server part comes in: Monitoring. Yes, can be done in another way too, but here being closer to the usual server monitoring things of the bigger manufacturers.
And it is not like Intel doesn't do the same for its Xeons.
You arent the droid they are selling to.
Enterprises rate reliablity far higher than benchmark scores. Benchmarks rarely drive enterprise sales - reliablity stats and warrantee's do. EPYC means lower failure rates and better post-sales support and thats all that matters.
To misquote General Brady.
Amateurs study spec sheets.
Professionals study reliability & return stats.
Or to put in software terms - if you arent prioritising your NFR's you're probably doing it wrong.
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