>>21638>>21639Now I understand why would you think in such way, and I also remember when the first ryzens came out and everyone was shitting themselves, but this is a very special case and I am going to explain it down to the last details why I would still go platinum ES.
First things first, the platinum was always the top of the line, multisocket, most-core variant of the lineup, so yeah, it does have AVX2.
"Crap single core performance" is a bit misleading, isn't it. We are talking about Skylake, not some gunked up Core2duo. So the performance of a core would be pretty much equal if it wasn't a manycore server processor. I don't need to explain this means it's thermally constrained, but keep it in mind, because it will matter.
I don't game. It's not a thing. But if it needs to, these beasts can turbo up to 3.80 Ghz (again, thermals). Summarizing all the cpu specs, Xeon has around 24-28 slower cores compared to the top of the line ryzen 3950x, which has 16 cores, albeit faster and cooler since 7nm lol.
However, moving onto memory, things become a little more interesting and we have to start comparing them as platforms as well. Little known (I didn't know it) that common Ryzens support ECC. Now, if I need that, is an other question, we will go into that in the workloads section, but for now, it's clear that it's a feature both cpus support.
Memory channels. Xeon has 6, SIX, while Ryzen has 2. Then again, the benefits here do really depend on the usecase, and, of course you need to populate the six memory SLUTS to make use of this strong point. The Xeon also supports tons of more memory, a single socket can take on 768GB, although we bump into the very real financial limit posed in the opening post of the thread. I hope these two last features show just how much of a different ballpark the two platforms are and platinum xeons are no joke.
Now, the case for Ryzen, PCIe 4.0. This little thing had my attention earlier in the month while I madly scoured the net for PCIe 4.0 peripherials, but there is not much right now. What already benefits from this is NVME storage, there are some really good offerings at the market right now like the Aorus m.2 drive that has double speed compared to your average samsung evo schtick stick. The only other part worthy mentioning is the 5700 XT. But, and that's a big but here is that I heard using a 5700xt occupies all PCIe 4.0 lanes on available ryzen CPUs. Bummer. It's too early for this technology. And it also has one more thing that is a must to mention (you most likely know about this) and that is the motherboard chipset, which sanctions that only x570 motherboards can actually provide pcie 4.0 lanes and this brings us to the final frontier: platform costs
The Xeon being LGA3647 based, (le rare enterprise socket face) has very few boards going for it. They are all marked with the C621 marker (as this is the motherboard interfacing chipset for this generation) and have a consistent price, they are about the same. Asus, Gigabyte has some boards, but they don't differ too much. Same price, dual sockets, 12 memory SLUTS. Now, X570 boards are also, not cheap, they are pretty pricey for being consumershit, with the top of the line Asus ROG (Return Of Gay niggers) and Gigabyte Aorus boards actually costing 150% compared to the aforementioned LGA3647 2S boards, while the cheaper X570s costing at least half of the dual socket xeon boards, but that's really the bottom line.
Processor price. The compared prices here are the price of a new 3950X and an engineering sample xeon platinum 8176. I don't know where you live, but here, a new 3950X costs twice as an ebay engineering sample 8176. Twice. And that's a lot. I can buy a fancy cooler and invest lots of money populating my mem sluts to exploit my 6 channels and 28 cores, however, this price difference is so big, it actually has provisions towards other parts of the system.
The xeon is big, alright, and it needs power. I found a benchmark where a 8180 (8180 has a higher base clock than a 8176 but the turbo clock is the same) pulled 640 watts under full load. That's huge, but here is the catch. The price difference between a 3950X plus cooling versus ES 8176 plus cooling is so big, that if we add the difference between these two to the price of a normal, good quality PSU, we are in the price area where the real monster 1500 watt power supplies dwell. So, even if we just buy one ES Xeon, we will already have more cores, more memory supply, although more power consumption BUT a straightforward upgrade path too. This is already 28 cores versus 16. Want more? Buy one more CPU and it will become a 56 core unreal monster.
Keep in mind, the 640 watt power figure is only true for full load, how often do you peg a 28 core? Never, but the capabilities are there.
The LGA3647 motherboards are also packed with features, tons of them. 7 full sized PCIe slots (although only three are wired to 16x). Tons of storage options. m.2 interface, u.2 and 10 fricking SATA ports (this is the Asus SAGE)
Top of the line X570 boards are gamer oriented. No ECC, 4-5 PCIe sluts at best. Why is this important brings us to the usecase