Intel Xeon E-2400 vs AMD EPYC 4004

[robroy]

FreeBSD Fans,

As you all know, AMD released the EPYC 4004 series this week. This caught my eye since I've been looking to buy a little server for mixed FreeBSD and ESX use. 'til now I'd only been looking at the Xeon E-2400 family.

I've put a poll in this thread to see which you all like more.

My thoughts:

I'm partial to Supermicro. And I'm also partial to RAM made by Micron, Hynix or Samsung--none of which make 48 GB ECC UDIMMs (wiping out AMD's RAM limit advantage).

So, has anybody noticed that Supermicro only offers a workstation motherboard for the EPYC 4004 family (H13SAE-MF)?

Since the EPYC 4004 family includes a GPU this doesn't surprise me too much.

But as far as using this motherboard in a server goes, beyond the wasted USB and video outputs, its slot configuration isn't ideal; it does actually have an x4 slot, but Supermicro's own integrated offering (AS-3015A-I) obviates its use due to CPU cooler interference. This struck me as bizarre so I confirmed it with their support department--it's for-real; you're left with but two x8 slots.

Attribute	Intel (SYS-531R-I)	AMD (AS-3015A-I)	Winner
Speed	1.00	~1.88 (about 88% faster, depending on the benchmark)	AMD
RAM limit	128 GB	192 GB	AMD
NVMe slots	1	2	AMD
Price	1.00	1.13 (13% higher)	Intel
FreeBSD compatibility	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown
ESX HCL	Yes (the E-2488, at least)	No	Intel
ESX nested virtualization	Full support	Limited support	Intel
PCI-e slots	4	2	Intel
SATA ports	8	4	Intel
Lowest CPU power draw during benchmarks	19 W	37 W	Intel

 

[cracauer@]

What flavor of FreeBSD do you want to run? If it is -current, -stable or if you want to build ports like Chrome or anything electron-based you definitely want those 16 cores in the EPYC.

What is HCL?

 

[Jose]

What is HCL?

Hardware Compatibility List? ESX is a Vmware thing, no?

 

[robroy]

Thanks for replying cracauer@ and Jose.

I'll be running RELEASE and using packages. I do run a custom kernel with QLogic FC HBA target mode enabled, but the kernel compile times are already okay on my 2015-era hardware.

HCL is indeed a VMware thing (as is ESX); it's their Hardware Compatibility List. I know that's off topic for this forum but I figured I'd mention it since I'll be flip-flopping between FreeBSD and ESX.

 

[diizzy]

You'll need at least 14.1-RELEASE and it's basically a Ryzen CPU with a few more instructions (ISA) and faster IOD. I would guess that it performs pretty much the same in most cases compared to its counterpart. To take advantage of the CPU you likely want to recompile packages to match your CPU arch (multimedia related at least and likely scientific too) there are however a few potential optimization bugs in LLVM/Clang that may reduce performance (they're being worked on upstream) using zen* targets.