AMD recently released an Epyc CPU which fits into the AM5 socket. It does have the light weight iGPU and supports ECC memory, as well as lower power than some of the newer Epycs, (which seem to make great house heaters!).
Not as much is available for this CPU line yet. For example, I have some questions;
Is their a companion chip that has a break out for more PCIe lanes?
How many SATA ports are available?
What is the configuration of the USB3 ports? (Looks like USB4 is optional)
When I brought up a thread in the old forum for ideal, low end CPU, one thing was I thought was required, were about 40 PCIe lanes. The AM5 socket only supports 28 lanes, 4 of which appear dedicated to the companion chip. For a lower end desktop, which is what the AM5 is designed for, 24 PCIe lanes for the user is fine.
But, I would think a server needs more PCIe lanes, even if shared bandwidth. Especially if it is a low end storage server, (aka NAS). Perhaps having the option to turn PCIe lanes into SATA
What do you think?
Does Intel have a low end server CPU for storage? That is also cost effective?
10 years ago the Atom ASRock Rack board that was used in the FreeNAS Mini hit most of the features at that time. 12 SATA ports and a PCIe slot, along with multiple NICs.
Today, we need low end server boards that can support at least 2, 10Gbit/ps Ethernet. Not to mention 4 or more NVMe drives, with enough SATA ports, (6 to 10), for archival storage.
Remember, my “ideal low end server CPU” was not intended to the “ideal HIGH end server CPU”.
I agree about wanting 40 PCIe lanes. Especially when you may want to add a couple of 16x or 8x NVMe bifurcation cards, and maybe an 8x dGPU for transcoding or image analysis.
Ye Olde Xeon D 1500 was a good choice with 40 PCIe3 lanes and 128GB ECC and 10gbe on the soc
The good news is there’s now a successor which is the Xeon D 1700
It’s pretty high end for a low end server though.
Available in 4 to 10 cores. Lots of lanes. High speed networking built in saves lanes too.
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Existing boards use the B650(E) chipset. Supermicro, AsRock Rack and Gigabyte have added “EPYC 4004” to the specifications of thier existing server Ryzen boards. SATA and USB ports would then depend on the chipset (typically 6 SATA with B650, and I don’t see much use for the X chipset here); USB4 would require an additional Maple Ridge or ASM4242 controller.
The best option here remains Atom C3000. Xeon E or W#80 chipset for ECC-enabled Core CPUs both come with some hefty “Xeon tax”.
The very bad news is that many Supermicro X12SDV boards come with a passive heatsink that has its fins closed at the top, and is thus strictly designed for 1U chassis with little screaming fans.
The first batch of AsRock Rack motherboards are using a B650 chipset so it looks like we should expect similar capabilities to the mainstream consumer boards.
Supermicro has one motherboard with a proprietary format that doesn’t use any chipset beside the Epyc 4004 CPU.
Judging by their respective configurations, these motherboards are not
targetting NAS applications since there are no options with more than 4 SATA ports and 2 NVME ports.
…and does not even fit a usual naming scheme. H13SRA and H13SRH are Threadripper Pro 7000 WX boards, so I struggle to understand why a socket AM5 board ends up with the same letter as sTR5 boards.
If this is the “Linus” I suspect, this sounds like a challenge for him to break it and lose all of his data and configuration in the shortest possible time…
I find the new 4004’s appealing but I won’t consider them in a home server until I see confirmation that AMD has fully fixed the instability seen in their processors during low power states.
It’s difficult to prove a negative but I believe that Zen 4 CPUs were never affected by these issues.
Reports about having to disable C6 states and use high current idle BIOS options to prevent crashes died sometimes in late 2021. I assume something was fixed in a BIOS update or a kernel update but a quick search doesn’t bring confirmation of what exactly was made to address the issue.
The motherboards look fine and are more interesting than what we have seen from other manufacturers.
The track record of MSI for firmware updates and parts validation is not among the best compared to their peers. I would say they are pretty much unproven in this new server segment.
, and is thus strictly designed for 1U chassis with little screaming fans.
