Comments on: Microsoft Is First To Get HBM-Juiced AMD CPUs https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/11/22/microsoft-is-first-to-get-hbm-juiced-amd-cpus/ In-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds. Fri, 14 Feb 2025 19:56:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 By: emerth https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/11/22/microsoft-is-first-to-get-hbm-juiced-amd-cpus/#comment-240570 Mon, 25 Nov 2024 16:48:30 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=145042#comment-240570 Gotta think there is a market for this in the normal world. High volume high speed databases, anyone? I think your point about getting the bandwidth benefits of HBM without having to port code to GPU is very well made.

]]> By: Slim Albert https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/11/22/microsoft-is-first-to-get-hbm-juiced-amd-cpus/#comment-240502 Sun, 24 Nov 2024 16:40:34 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=145042#comment-240502 An interesting chip to be sure! If I understand, it has HBM, no DDR5, and possibly CXL 2.0 off of PCIe 5.0 for extra RAM. Comparing this to a non-HBM Granite Rapids (or other) may be like the reverse comparison of Sapphire Rapids with Genoa that we saw earlier, where Streams and HPCG benefited most — but then, Granite Rapids’ MRDIMM also does quite a number on HPCG ( https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/06/12/intel-pits-its-sapphire-rapids-xeon-sp-against-amd-genoa-epycs/ ).

With the CPU Max’s ability to boot into either HBM-only, Flat, or Cache modes, those chips provided a nice opportunity for TACC to evaluate the resulting performance, and it seemed that WRF and AWP-ODC benefited most from HBM-only mode (nearly 2x), and no workload was negatively impacted ( https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/12/putting-taccs-stampede3-through-the-hbm-paces/ ). This tends to support this here 9V64H’s HBM-only hypothesis (or bet!).

So I guess these Azure HBv5 4-packs of Epyc 9V64H should be ok for the target HPC jobs … though CXL 3.0 on PCIe 6.0 would be a nice upgrade, and the ability to fully tier memory, between HBM, DDR, and CXL, could be a real bonus IMHO ( https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/01/24/building-the-perfect-memory-bandwidth-beast/ )!

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