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AMD’s Zen Family Moves into the Long-Life Embedded Market (eejournal.com)
14 points by tfmkevin 3002 days ago
2 comments

If someone from AMD is reading this, why are there no decent GPU workstation motherboards for EPYC? The CPU is basically tailor made for this. There’s a lot of demand. Why not satisfy the demand?
Well it's not really up to AMD which motherboards get manufactured. Besides the fact the EPYC processor is better suited to database and storage solutions with high core counts and support for massive amounts of RAM.

The high core counts, high ram, and lots of PCIe lanes make EPYC CPUs perfect for flash based storage arrays and databases.

The large amount of IO to the GPU has some great potential too.

AMD should make some reference boards if the OEMs won't.

And large number of cores comes in handy as well for the more efficient neural network architectures with complex data augmentation. I have several such networks where 16-core Threadripper is a bit of a bottleneck on a 4-GPU machine. We do the usual stuff: random scaling, cropping, rotation, noise, etc. Super easy, parallelizable stuff. That bottleneck will get worse once Volta consumer cards start showing up.
They could make a reference motherboard (as Intel does for some of its chips).
Wow! Key takeaway for me was built in ram encryption transparent to the os/software. That’s cool!