New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

What are the implications? Higher perf and/or lower price?

Basically. This is the best server processor.

Big claim there. On what basis?

You can pick almost any basis you like, it's still winning.

Most performance, most performance per watt, most performance per cost. Also, more performance per thread than high-threadcount intel chips. (Although, some of their low-threadcount Xeons do have an edge on that one.)

Oh, and best memory interface and best IO, too.

Raw single-thread perf still matters for many workloads. Epyc doesn't come in especially high clock / fewer core configurations that are beneficial to some workloads. (Additionally: cloud vendors don't buy that end of configuration; they buy the high core count, high perf per watt configurations. E.g. GCE's N2D is the 2.25 GHz base clock, 64 core Epyc 7742 in a 2P configuration, but you can get EPYC 7302 with 16 cores at a 3 GHz base clock.)

For my business' workloads, Threadripper 3 (same gen 2 Zen, same IO chiplet, etc) would likely be a much better fit (and competitive with Intel) if AMD sold it with the same kind of enterprisey guarantees they do for Epyc (ECC, etc). Threadripper 3970x, for example, comes with 32 cores and a base clock of 3.7 GHz. That's a much better fit for us than Epyc 7742 or 7302.

> For my business' workloads, Threadripper 3 (same gen 2 Zen, same IO chiplet, etc) would likely be a much better fit (and competitive with Intel) if AMD sold it with the same kind of enterprisey guarantees they do for Epyc (ECC, etc).

Threadripper has official support for ECC. Well, "optional" based off of the motherboard's support: https://www.amd.com/en/chipsets/str40

And just picking a random board: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/TRX40-AORUS-XTREME-rev-... you'll see it listed:

"Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules"

That it must be un-buffered is an annoying market segmentation thing that limits your max RAM in practice, BUT you can at least get ECC up to 256GB with official support and RAM modules that actually exist.

Yep, I'm familiar with all that.

Yeah, it's that "optional" part that is problematic for ECC in particular. But don't let that be a distraction; there are plenty of other enterprisey features in Epyc that are not present in TR, including registered memory support.

Re: 256GB ECC UDIMM on an 8-socket TR board, that's 32GB a DIMM. I guess you can find 32 GB ECC UDIMMs now, but that's pretty recent and expensive.