Intel Xeon E-2400 vs AMD EPYC 4004

Which would you go for?

  • Intel Xeon E-2400

    Votes: 3 42.9%

  • AMD EPYC 4004

    Votes: 4 57.1%
  • Total voters
    7
robroy

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.

AttributeIntel (SYS-531R-I)AMD (AS-3015A-I)Winner
Speed1.00~1.88 (about 88% faster, depending on the benchmark)AMD
RAM limit128 GB192 GBAMD
NVMe slots12AMD
Price1.001.13 (13% higher)Intel
FreeBSD compatibilityUnknownUnknownUnknown
ESX HCLYes (the E-2488, at least)NoIntel
ESX nested virtualizationFull supportLimited supportIntel
PCI-e slots42Intel
SATA ports84Intel
Lowest CPU power draw during benchmarks19 W37 WIntel
 
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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
Unless you’re buying the very fastest cpu it never makes sense to buy the lastest cpu. Last years model is 1/3 the price (less used) so for the same price you can usually get a faster cpu with more cores. And you don’t have to worry about compatibility.
 
Based on the survey question, I assumed we were talking AMD 4004 or and Intel E-2400 CPU, not a prebuilt system with specific motherboards. When I read the chart about AMD/Intel wins, I was taken off guard by the AMD only supports two PCIe slots. Well that certainly is not the case. That specific motherboard is the limiting factor, not the CPU. the CPU has 28 lanes of Gen 5 PCIe lanes, that is a lot. Depending on the motherboard you can have quite a lot of PCIe slots. And when looking at those two slots on the AMD configured board, I'm certain those are a x16 and a x8 wired (or could be x4) slots.

The motherboard matters just as much as the CPU. So based on the survey, yes I like the AMD CPU. The survey should be changed to select which system is preferred.
 
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