Any CPU upgrades on the horizon?

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K6-2
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Any CPU upgrades on the horizon?

Post by K6-2 »

Are you guys planning to upgrade CPUs on machines hosting VDSs any time soon? Those 2.60GHz Xeon E5-2697v3 CPUs from 2014 are begging to be replaced. Also, have you considered using AMD's EPYC based machines?
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Spray
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Re: Any CPU upgrades on the horizon?

Post by Spray »

We're constantly upgrading our hardware for both our VDS and game server hosting machines, as well as introducing new hardware for full machine rentals. New hardware is rotated into existing stock, with the oldest hardware rotated out as new machines are brought online. The latest VDS hosting machines we've been shipping over the past 9 months have all used the Intel Xeon Gold 6154 processor (https://ark.intel.com/products/120495/). When Intel introduces the next generation of their Xeon Scalable processor line, we'll begin to ship machines with those processors as well.

As for AMD's EPYC line, it's good to see AMD competing again with Intel with both their desktop and server platforms. The first release of AMD's new EPYC line, based on their Zen architecture, wasn't a good a fit for our hosting. For our VDS hosting in particular, we try to strike a good balance between the number of cores available and performance of each individual core, as many of our customers run game servers and software which rely heavily on single threaded performance. Single threaded performance for the processor would have been a downgrade under most circumstances, dipping down below that of an Intel Xeon E5-2690, a server processor based on the 6 year old Sandy Bridge architecture. There were also some initial reports of stability issues with the new CPU, although those may have been ironed out over time.

We always want to use the best, top of the line server hardware for our hosting. If AMD's next iteration of their EPYC series of server processors increases performance and reliability, we'd be open to trying it out.
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Edge100x
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Re: Any CPU upgrades on the horizon?

Post by Edge100x »

The AMD EPYC processors that I've wanted to test on the server side also just haven't been available for purchase. I'm not sure why, but I suspect supply shortages and contracts with large companies have meant that the stock made available through standard reseller channels has been extremely limited.

On the Intel side, recent processor generations haven't made very big leaps. Each generation has added perhaps 5% per-core performance. Further, with its Xeon chips, Intel's main focus over the last 5-10 years has been adding processor cores, and Intel has chosen to trade-off single-core performance in order to fit more cores onto each physical chip. That has been good news for multithreaded applications, and for the per-core pricing that we can offer on VDSes (since we can put more customers onto each machine, reducing our management costs), but not good news for intensive single-threaded applications such as game servers. (With each generation of processor, we carefully choose chips that have comparatively high single-core performance.)

Consequently, the E5-2697v3 is actually still a very capable processor, and it's not all that much slower than the Gold 6154s that we use now, from a customer perspective. A 4-core VDS on an E5-2697v3 will benchmark very similarly to a 4-core VDS on a Gold 6154.
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