Ryzen vs Xeon

rbentley100

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Hi,

I have been digging for a while now and feel like I am being blind here. I am planning a home server build in 2023, this will boot proxmox with a VM for TrueNAS, the high level requirements are:
  • TrueNAS - ~100tB available data for media storage (anything up to and including 4k blu ray rips uncompressed)
  • Plex Media Server (will add a GPU to the build for hardware encoding)
  • Pi hole/Graphana etc. (other relatively lightweight tasks)
  • Home assistant
  • a Linux VM playground machine
  • ability to scale to add more machines as and when I think of something useful or want to have a play
(I am here as Truenas is my most important part here for reliability and longevity)

My issue is there appear to be 2 routes I can go, Xeon E v2388g or Ryzen 7900. (there are some other options too i.e. AMD 5900X or something)
The former appears to be more expensive and comes in at half the cores
The latter is a consumer chip with more nuanced support for things like ECC memory

At this stage I cant seem to find any AM5 server motherboards, gigabyte appears to announce one, but I cant see it ever making it to sale
and other boards are unclear on their ECC support let alone on board management etc.

So, in summary, should I wait for AM5 server boards to be released? If I do is there any other strong benefits to the 2388g I am missing?

It seems most people go the Xeon route for their builds today, so I guess I am just hoping for a summary as to why (of they go completely consumer parts, no ECC etc.)

Thanks in advance.
 

LarsR

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Before you take a closer look at buying the 7900 i would take a look if it's even supported in the current Kernel scale uses. If its not supported, like the 13th gen intel cpu's, the question is pretty much obsolete.
 

jgreco

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My issue is there appear to be 2 routes I can go, Xeon E v2388g or Ryzen 7900. (there are some other options too i.e. AMD 5900X or something)

I picked up an E-2388G last year with the intention of turning it into a Plex-optimized transcoding host. I haven't actually gotten around to that just yet though.

TrueNAS - ~100tB available data for media storage (anything up to and including 4k blu ray rips uncompressed)

So be aware that you probably need 48-64GB RAM in your VM just to deal with that. The E-2388G is capable of 128GB. I run a large pool on 32GB RAM but I am also painfully aware that if there are pool import issues, I might need to allocate "more" -- this isn't a problem in my case since the filer in question has 256GB or maybe 512GB and a different host. But if you are intending to do other VM's on this, plan to go 128GB RAM for the host, and that you may need to be able to allocate half of that to ZFS.

Plex Media Server (will add a GPU to the build for hardware encoding)

You're presumably aware that the E-2388G is a rare unicorn Xeon; it has the Intel QuickSync stuff for graphics and can theoretically do transcoding. Otherwise I'm not sure why you picked this CPU. You shouldn't need to add a GPU. However, I haven't yet tried to get this working.

The former appears to be more expensive and comes in at half the cores

Incorrect; the E-2388G is 8c/16t at 3.2GHz-5.1GHz selling for $590 wholesale. It takes DDR4-3200 which is readily available. 95W TDP. The part is not available in the retail channel AFAIK, though I'm sure someone somewhere is selling tray parts.

The Ryzen 7900 is 12c/24t at 3.7GHz-5.4GHz selling for $420 retail. It takes unobtainium DDR5 with a 65W TDP. It is effectively one CPU generation newer than the Intel part we're discussing, which may be bad for out-of-the-box support from hypervisors. I'm not familiar enough with the Ryzen to say much more.

So, in summary, should I wait for AM5 server boards to be released?

Calls for speculation. There is not a strong history of high quality Ryzen server boards.

If I do is there any other strong benefits to the 2388g I am missing?

It's Intel. It is a year older than your Ryzen and ESXi 7 runs just fine on it. You may need to wait around awhile for both your mainboard and for CPU support under Proxmox. Not claiming this to be the case, just something for you to research. The Ryzen appears to have some sort of integrated GPU support. Is it supported by Plex? The Intel QuickSync of the 2388G supposedly is supported.

i would take a look if it's even supported in the current Kernel scale uses. If its not supported, like the 13th gen intel cpu's, the question is pretty much obsolete.

That shouldn't be a problem since the user is planning to run Proxmox. Whether or not Proxmox will run on it is a separate issue. However, Proxmox should be providing a usable virtual CPU abstraction to any guest VM's. That's all that TrueNAS should see.
 

Etorix

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(I am here as Truenas is my most important part here for reliability and longevity)
If so you should consider running TrueNAS baremetal and host the secondary functions as VMs on TrueNAS itself, CORE or SCALE.
At least read this through:
ESXi is the recommended solution, but you're welcome to be a guinea pig with Proxmox.

A NAS does not need the latest hardware, so AM4 is certainly a better choice than AM5 right now and older Intel CPU than the Xeon E-2300 are also worth looking into—including second-hand refurbished servers.
 

rbentley100

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Thank you - some great replies here.

@LarsR that is a good point, something definitely I need to triple check if I swap to baremetal

@jgreco yes I was planning 128gb of memory as I believe a good rule of thumb is ~1gb per tb of disk
yes on the quick sync encoding that will definitely get me though the 1st season - however I am curious where AV1 encoding is going and if that starts getting utilised a card that supports it will be required. (but have to admit this is a problem to work out another day :) ) - I also stated the graphics card as I have also looked at other non 'g' chips in that generation which dont have graphics.

I stand corrected on the double the cores :)
yes Ryzen server boards seem a lot rarer, this has pretty much lead to me wondering why though, is it Ryzen is inherently more unstable therefore all enterprise sites just want intel?

All in all it seems intel is more widely supported and viewed to be more stable, but is currently a 'generation' behind - this has advantages as to being supported and also using slightly more accessible ddr4

@Etorix thank you for the article I will need to read through running baremetal instead but balancing that around potential future uses for the system I haven't thought of yet. (I have gone back and forth on having a dedicated TrueNAS box and a separate machine for virtualisation)

Proxmox just seems to be the wider used platform at the moment in the home space, but I will definately look into ESXi more.

AM4 is also a big thing on my mind, cheaper etc. but mainly been trying to think long term, 10+ years, and there seems quite a jump in performance between the 2. This thought is more around what else I would want to do with the system, I am not worried about AM4s ability to drive TrueNAS itself.

All in all it sounds like the advise is to run TrueNAS on Intel Xeon (intel E-2388g looks good for this) using DDR4 - lose out on some power but gain more software support, more accessible memory and also viewed as more stable, with better motherboard options.

Thank you all
 

Etorix

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If you want 128 GB RAM you may as well look into "real" Xeons, i.e. those which use RDIMM rather than UDIMM: More RAM capacity for a lower price—which will offset the higher price of the platform.
Second-hand/refurbished Xeon Scalable, or Xeon W-2000 if you can find a Supermicro X11SRL-F or X11SRM-F.
Or EPYC on the AMD side of things.
 

jgreco

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yes Ryzen server boards seem a lot rarer, this has pretty much lead to me wondering why though, is it Ryzen is inherently more unstable therefore all enterprise sites just want intel?

Ok I'll give this a shot. This is a HUGE topic and I cannot do it 100%-accurate justice in less than a hundred pages, so all of those of you who would pick nits, nuts to you. This is just to show a bigger picture which is not immediately obvious to many people. If I miss a major point, you are of course welcome to comment.

Throughout the '90's, Intel and AMD were in a battle for the hearts of users, and you could toss either an Intel, AMD K6, or Cyrix "Pentium-class" processor, all of which were socket-compatible. These were mostly all desktop-targeted systems but could also be used for small servers if you had a server-oriented board.

Intel's Xeon and and its predecessor the Pentium Pro designs were targeted at servers and workstations; these were never socket-compatible with anything else. As we entered the 2000's, dual and then quad core CPU's became a thing, as did different designs for memory controllers (MCH, northbridge, etc) where it quickly became clear that the next evolutionary target was going to be integrating the memory controller into the CPU itself, and designing a quick interconnect between cores on the CPU or even between CPU's.

AMD evolved its systems in a somewhat different way, with the Athlon, Duron, and Opteron lines; the latter being AMD's server-oriented Xeon-like offering. You could get server-y dual Athlon boards such as the Tyan S2882, but in reality it was more a nod towards the workstation users, and while it did offer a BMC and onboard SCSI and other server-y like things, it was also poorly designed and gave some of us endless problems. I had units where the PCI bus had to be clocked down in order to be stable, for example.

The Opteron represented a very popular platform towards the end of the aughties and it WAS aimed squarely at servers. Some people thought that AMD was going to become dominant in the server world, but it was not to be. Instead, what happened was Intel made a bunch of advances that resulted in the Core and Xeon lines we know from the early 2010's, and one of the genius things they did was they leveraged their designs so that some i3 could be used as a low end server processor in some E3 Xeon boards. This killed AMD for some of us, because there was really little consistency in AMD platforms; you were always getting crappy Broadcom or other alternative ethernet chipsets, random SATA/SCSI/SAS controllers, etc. Intel plowed their roads clear with reference designs that offered a large degree of consistency, and during almost the entirety of the 201X's, Intel was a clear winner, both for desktop and server.

Meanwhile, AMD was licking its wounds, but they have some really smart people over there, so they re-evaluated where they were going, and aimed Ryzen at desktop/gaming, and EPYC at servers. There is no doubt that some of these are killer products, but they are targeted at certain market segments. There is relatively little call for a low-core-count "server" platform for Ryzen; Ryzen core counts are mostly driven by gaming and desktop demands, so it remains focused on lower core counts and relatively little I/O (even if the threadrippers offer 64 cores and a hundred PCIe lanes for six thousand dollars).

Most server needs these days involve virtualization, large I/O loads, and heavy consolidation ratios, so AMD has focused on making EPYC competitive there. They're in a battle for their life, though, and actually, so is Intel. ARM has made minor inroads into markets once exclusively the realm of Intel/AMD, and that trend is likely to continue. AMD is unlikely to put out reference designs for Ryzen-based servers because it would undercut EPYC, and because they're too busy trying to evolve their existing platforms to maybe recapture more of the intended market share in each segment. There's not a whole lot of demand for Ryzen based servers, which would be "smaller" servers.

is it Ryzen is inherently more unstable therefore all enterprise sites just want intel?

In short, it's because Ryzen is a desktop targeted platform.
 

Arwen

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I have to agree, AMD simply does not have a low end socketed server CPU. The embedded Ryzen & Epyc have the problem of being soldered onto the system board. That is fine for medium and larger deployments of miniature all in one servers. But, for our purposes, less suitable.

It would be nice if AMD released an AM5 server style CPU & chipset, without the desktop fluff, like excessive USB port. But, more SATA ports & PCIe lanes, (even if they are from the chipset, not CPU).
 

Davvo

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I see no mentions of Threadrippers, though they are kinda dead.
 
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Ericloewe

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Doesn't really change the picture. OG Threadripper was high-end HEDT (yes, that's high-end high-end desktop, and yes, HEDT is a weird abbreviation) akin to a theoretical Xeon E5 v6, but has effectively been relegated to "Epyc with different branding", which drives up everything, especially cost.
 

Arwen

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The one nice thing of Threadripper is that it had 4 memory channels. Ryzen AM4 has 2 memory channels and Epyc 7001-7003 has 8. So Threadripper was a nice in-between.

Of course, Epyc NG, (Next Generation), decided that 8 was not enough, now it has 12 memory channels. (But that makes sense, because they upped the maximum core count from 64 to 96 if I remember correctly.)
 
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Etorix

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I see no mentions of Threadrippers, though they are kinda dead.
There is one, in a passage which, uncharacteristically, is not perfectly accurate [6th paragraph, my emphasis]:
Ryzen core counts are mostly driven by gaming and desktop demands, so it remains focused on lower core counts and relatively little I/O (even if the threadrippers offer 64 cores and a hundred PCIe lanes for six thousand dollars).
Ryzen actually went up to 16 cores on the desktop at a time where Intel topped at 8, with a brief stint at 10 (Comet Lake), and I/O is not worse than that from Intel Core CPU. This amount of cores on AM4 probably contributed to the demise of Threadripper.
But this is largely irrelevant here because AMD's offer is quite strictly divided between desktops/workstations and servers and Threadripper is not designed to power a NAS.
 

Davvo

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There is one, in a passage which, uncharacteristically, is not perfectly accurate [6th paragraph, my emphasis]:
I can't read and can't write because before posting I searched the page for threadripper and got no results; I'm officially illiterate.
 

jgreco

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There is one, in a passage which, uncharacteristically, is not perfectly accurate [6th paragraph, my emphasis]:

Eugh, you two troublemakers. I did say,

all of those of you who would pick nits, nuts to you.

The Threadrippers were something of an aberration, trying to manufacture a new class, the HEDT marketplace, in a desperate bid to catch up with Intel.

Unfortunately, Apple and Intel had already conspired to release the E5-2697 v2 in 2013, positioning it as a high end workstation CPU for the Mac Pro, for a 12 core (single socket!) 2.7GHz monster, and by the time your 16-core Threadrippers rolled around in 2017, AMD was basically in a bad position; the E5-2699 v4 (22c/44t) 2.2GHz had already launched at the start of 2016. The AMD parts had a faster base clock and a lower price, but were also struggling to manufacture a mid tier that Intel had more or less just ignored, and let companies like Apple and other workstation manufacturers fill in from the high end server CPU offerings. I never noticed any significant uptake in the "HEDT" Threadrippers but never invested much thought in why that might be; I think it was probably a CPU in search of a userbase that didn't really exist.

Intel continues to suffer from their inability to present large numbers of high base clock cores, and of course, the prices, wow.
 

Ericloewe

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Prices are just insane for anything similar to Xeon E5, but newer. Does this world have nothing to offer to those of us who like to have desktops full of PCIe devices without going to the craziness that are modern servers?
 

Davvo

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Prices are just insane for anything similar to Xeon E5, but newer. Does this world have nothing to offer to those of us who like to have desktops full of PCIe devices without going to the craziness that are modern servers?
Yeah, the new Nvidia cards: special deal, only a single kidney required. "You don't need more than a few PCIe, you can't afford it." - an Intel manager, probably.
 
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Ericloewe

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I'm not paying an arm and a leg to upgrade my GPU, which is fine because I'm not paying an arm and a leg to upgrade my CPU and motherboard, which is fine because I'm not paying an arm and a leg to upgrade my GPU, which is - holy crap, I'd never had a computer last this long, much less without feeling slow and miserable.
 

jgreco

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I'd never had a computer last this long

Our company laptops are just shy of 10 years old and they're still fantastic. Don't think Toshiba even makes laptops anymore. This is probably helped because I don't do any substantial computing on the laptop, they're more like smart terminals (web browser, SSH, VNC, RDP, etc).
 

Arwen

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Many CPU & GPU combinations from 5 or more years ago are quite suitable for continued use in environments that are not graphic or CPU intensive.

For example, my 3.5 year old all in one miniature PC that I am using right now does web browsing, remote desktop access for work and my writing just fine. Even the Gentoo updates, (which build the updates from source), are fine. While a CPU & integrated GPU upgrade is possible, (it is currently a Ryzen 5 2400G), there is no "need".

On the other hand, before the Ryzen & Epyc evolution, my old miniature PC used as a media server, (and a few other light weight tasks), is a bit slow for updates. it is using an AMD A10 Micro-6700T APU+AMD Radeon R6 Graphics and was bought in mid 2015. It does serve up media great and performs it's other tasks just fine.

In someways, we have reached a place where many people just don't need faster CPUs or GPUs. Lower power and perhaps updates for new video encode & decode algorithms, and such, but not much more.
 

jgreco

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we have reached a place where many people just don't need faster CPUs or GPUs.

This strikes me in much the same way where we reached the gigabit network plateau 20 years ago. Sufficiency for typical use cases.
 
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