How do the thermals work out? The compute dies are already one heck of a hotplate, putting an entire layer of insulating silicon on top isn't going to improve things?
There's additional silicon stiffeners which should help with thermal transfer, granted at lower thermal efficiency than a single element.
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Cooling? Well, I'm using a 5900X right now, air cooled, with a high airflow case loaded with slow spinning 140mm case fans.
In games at 1440p120 (maxed settings, with RTX) I'm hotspotting at -- wait for it -- about 68C. With most of the CPU at 60C. In CPU intensive applications, more like 74C hotspot, with most of the chip at 65-67C. That's a setup that's still inaudible to me at 1m distance.
I feel this is going to be a 5900XT and 5950XT. Fills a price gap between the higher end X desktop CPUs and Threadripper for the HEDT market. Great for reasonably priced dev desktops (without falling down the workstation rabbit hole), as compilers love cache.
... though next year with 64-core EPYCs at 5nm with 768MB of L3? Oh. Dear. What's in the Xeon pipeline that can attempt to compete with A CPU that dominates on PPW and will be neither cache-starved nor core-starved? I guess it'll fuel a lot of Optane 5800-series sales, as driving down IO latency to sub-10μs will matter more.
Copper 400 W / m K Aluminium 230 W / m K Silicon 150 W / m K Iron/Steel 50 W / m K
[1] Though Intel thinned their dies recently to improve thermal performance (CPUs are flip-chip, so the metal layers and active circuitry are facing the interposer). Some were concerned about stability/cracking of the thinner dies. Perhaps AMD is doing the same here, thinning the compute die, then stacking the memory die on top to end up with a stack that's exactly the same thickness as before. Since they're bonded together, the structural integrity should be similar. That additionally has the advantage that you can keep using the exact same IHS as before.
> - The processor with V-Cache is the same z-height as current Zen 3 products - both the core chiplet and the V-Cache are thinned to have an equal z-height as the IOD die for seamless integration
> - As the V-Cache is built over the L3 cache on the main CCX, it doesn't sit over any of the hotspots created by the cores and so thermal considerations are less of an issue. The support silicon above the cores is designed to be thermally efficient.
A quick googling brings up this article, which I think may be the same thing: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24571219
Both litography and the desperate search for infinite growth is going to hurt in the long run!
I'm stacking up on 14nm Atom that I can passively cool at 42 degrees celcius full blast on 8 cores and 50nm (100.000 writes per bit) X25-E SSDs!
[1] https://www.newegg.com/supermicro-mbd-a1sri-2758f-o-intel-at...
I think these boards are the first and last to be able to run 100 years! Earlier models consume too much energy and subsequent will be too fragile/complex!
Don't be so sure. If it was going to be the case, we'd be changing CPUs like early Seagate disks at our datacenter. There's no measurable longevity loss in the CPUs that we observed in our data center.
We use every system for ~7 years at full load.
Since you haven't tried the 7nm CPUs yet I guess we'll have to see?
7 years sounds really short to me, I'm planning on running my machines for 100 years!
That CPU's reported temperatures are 81 for high, 91 for critical (in degrees Celsius).
We get new systems almost every year, so we have a rolling set consisting many systems. So, we have a cross section of systems to observe.
Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage!
Atom is the perfect design, no crap and low power!
From my experience, that doesn't happen like that in enterprise hardware. Either wrong voltage (inside the system) or defective design causes premature death. If the server BMC says it's fine, it's fine.
> Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage!
High Performance Computing doesn't work like that, unfortunately :)
> Atom is the perfect design, no crap and low power!
I'm sure it has its own uses and can accomplish a lot, but in HPC, it won't cut it. I use small SBCs at home to do and try a lot of fun and useful stuff, but it has limits.
The best way to keep your CPU intact for a long time is keep it powered off. But then you have probably no use for this CPU…
> it's too hot and it's going to break very soon!
“very soon” on your scale from now to 100 years, probably. But most people prefer having a CPU working at full capacity for a few years than having a useless brick of silicon sitting around for a hundred year.
Nonetheless, there is a continuous aging of the metal traces (electromigration) and especially of the insulating layers, e.g. the MOS transistor gates, due to the difusion of atoms.
This continuous aging is accelerated by steady-state high temperatures and it eventually results in either open circuits or short circuits somewhere, destroying the device.
Good MOS integrated circuits are designed for a lifetime at their maximum specified temperature of at least 10 years or even 20 years or more for the better of them.
Nevertheless, this is puny in comparison with the lifetime of many semiconductor components produced 40-50 years ago, before the continuous shrinking of the active device sizes, which could have lifetimes of hundreds of years, when free from fabrication defects.
I even think like you that my 45nm D510MO probably will outlive these! But it's so underpowered (like 1/10 of the perf. at 15W) compared to these that I'm willing to take the risk!
The risk of new boards being so much better that I'll have to throw these away ever is zero at this point, memory being the bottleneck!
That's only like ~45 °C or so.
Are you talking about junction temperature, package temp, or heatsink temp? The only CPU I own with a package temp that's cold enough to touch is inside my phone.
Meanwhile some of my data center machines are a decade old and run at 75C all day. I've never had a CPU fail before the machine became obsolete
The biggest offender in my experience is OrangePi Zero, but I need a thermal probe to verify it.
That's 50C (bit less)... which is quite low operating temperature and very far from anything that damages silicon. Temperature fluctuations are far worse due to thermal expansion/contraction.
There are plenty of things that damage chips, especially those at 7nm and beyond but this too-hot-to-touch "rule" is rubbish.
So, per die sensors are probably reading somewhat lower numbers, but the core's cooking at 70 degrees C internally. Nevertheless, bigger die surface inevitably allows better heat conduction and reduces internal stresses considerably, when compared to a desktop part.
Nevertheless the numbers you mention are neither unrealistic, nor impossible in stock cooling and/or sustained load scenarios.
I really want to buy a proper serious workstation and I can afford it in a few months but I keep wondering: is now the best time for it?
There's never a good time to buy a new computer. It's always going to be obsolete before you open the box. Though in this case, one might wait for the Zen 3 Threadrippers.
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As for the Zen 3 TRs, well, to be fair, I am not looking to blow $50k on a workstation. :) I am more interested how -- and if -- they will drive down the prices of the TR 3900 SKUs...
You won't spend $50,000 on a workstation just by using current-generation parts. I think when you see a workstation that costs that much, it's because it has multiple GPUs in them. Pro GPUs are always artificially overpriced, and given the GPU shortage, they're now even more overpriced.
I did a quick pcpartpicker expedition and found that using last-gen parts saves you about $1000 on a $6000 32 core Threadripper workstation. I compared last-gen SSDs, consumer GPUs, processor, and motherboard, and picked relatively high-end parts. You will save more money by dropping to 24 (or heaven forbid, 16) cores, not getting an extreme motherboard, getting 64G of RAM instead of 128, etc.
This could all be invalid in a few months. It is hard to separate "market is always crazy" from "this whole COVID thing is going on". Building a workstation during the pandemic was a pain -- I bought a used GPU, and didn't get ECC memory because nobody would sell me any. If you wait a year, that is likely to improve, and there will be newer hardware. But, if you need to do some computing between now and then, you don't have much choice but to buy what's available now, and it certainly makes for a very good computer.
I realized I was looking at several custom-made TR Pro workstations and they of course have a hefty markup on top -- custom cases, custom cooling, pre-added several PCIe NVMe riser cards, plus style price tag I suppose, etc. Should have looked in PC Part Picker indeed.
And yeah, last-gen tech very rarely gets discounted even by normal people who just post ads in local Craigslist-like websites (like OLX). Stuff that's 2 or more generations ago is discounted, but not last gen. Puzzling indeed, especially having in mind that this last gen tech is very soon going to be "two gens ago". Oh well.
As for ECC RAM, I hear you. I was unable to find such anywhere officially but lucked out that one guy in the local OLX was having loads of it but just didn't post the ads due to being very busy (we communicated because of other ads) and then I just bought 64GB ECC DDR3 RAM from him for a home NAS that I am gradually expanding.
I'm definitely very interested in having a TR Pro workstation; started getting sick of Macs and their artificial slowness. I got the iMac Pro and granted, I have it connected to my TV where it plays Twitch streams all day but hell, a lot of stuff on the terminal (that's not Python) just works slower than it does on a meager i3 Linux machine that I have lying around.
So I do want a TR Pro machine but I am very curious about TR 5000. A release is expected in August which isn't that far away. On the other hand, the TR Pro 5000 might take several more months on top. Hmmm. Decisions, decisions. :)
There is something to be said for the prebuilt workstations from reputable vendors. It shows up in a box, and starts working. I have strongly considered that angle; being a system integrator is tough. If something doesn't work, it's a week cycle time where you find a new part, organize the RMA of the faulty part, etc. and there is a potentially unbounded amount of time spent tweaking. Meanwhile, HP or Lenovo just ships you a computer; they tested it and it works. You pay several thousand dollars for the privilege, but it might be worth it. (And if you want a TR Pro, you have no choice. AMD doesn't sell them to consumers.)
If so, why? I can't imagine a workload that is so unchangeable in its nature, especially considering the world we live in and how often storage media changes that I'd want to plan ahead for 100 years.
My drives are from 2011, peak SSD at 50nm (100.000 writes per bit).
My CPU/motherboards are from 2017, I think 2Gflops/watt is about where peak CPU is at.
Time will tell... but there is no point waiting for improvements now, time to go all in!
Heh, that's an interesting thought that i've also sometimes had.
For doing something like that, the hardware would need to be way more resilient and have failover for various components - for example RAID for the HDDs/SSDs and some mechanism for clustering and failover for apps and other stuff you'd want to run on them. But even with those in place, i'm not sure that the hardware that's available to us wouldn't just die long before the 100 year mark.
Anyone have any idea what are the oldest computers presently in continuous use? Best i could find was this, but it was just turned on for once, instead of being continuously working: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-the-worlds-o... Apart from that, all i can think of are mainframes and such.
I really doubt that any piece of currently modern hardware could last 100 years without becoming some hard to understand mess that's incredibly out of touch with the OSes and paradigms of the future. What would you even run on it? Debian? FreeBSD? Haiku? Would there be anyone to debug Python 2 or Python 3 in 100 years? What about Java, .NET, PHP, Golang, Rust, C++ or even C? Considering that many of those ecosystems are more and more migrating to integration with the Internet, especially for the dependencies, what are the chances that any of the software will survive that long?
Voyager 1 and 2 are good candidates. In the end, they'll probably shut off because their generators won't provide enough power to operate their computers after 50 years or so.
Instead I made my own async. distributed database: http://root.rupy.se
That way I can just fix the drives as they fail.
As for OS/languages I'm 100% sure linux + Java is the final server platform for eternity.
Nothing has improved for 5+ years since NIO got epoll!
The io_uring and potentially user network/disk stuff to work around the kernel waste (in my case ~30% of the CPU) might happen but also might not...
Nevertheless, their expected lifetime is not much greater than that.
I normally replace CPUs because they become obsolete much earlier than they should show age problems.
Nevertheless, I had a pair of Opterons that were used continuously for about 10 years.
At the end, they developed a very high leakage current, leading to an idle power consumption several times higher than in the beginning.
Increased leakage current is one of the most frequent signs of aging in semiconductor integrated circuits.
Querying and recording these as time series provides very nice insights over time.