Sane use-case for Kaveri?

[Abwx]

In fairness, Sapphire and AMD deliberately made the A320 expensive and hard to find so it wouldn't cannibalize low end FirePro sales but at the same time could introduce/test the concept of FirePro APUs in underdeveloped nations such as India and France.

Really..?

Theses chips were intended for emerging markets so the fact
that they are sold in Europe means that there are demand
even in theses develloped countries.

Edit :

i admit that the Firepro APU price is somewhat higher than what i expected although this include a very good motherboard that is obviously much better and up to date than the 150$ Xeon mobo presented in this thread, besides we re talking of Kaveri wich is significantly better than piledriver so if it also on the 540€ range it would be a good deal.

 

[mrmt]

Just a curiosity: Does the A3xx APU support ECC? IIRC it does*not* support ECC RAM, which makes the product an even worse value proposition.

 

[Abwx]

Sapphire say non ECC for the MB but that s not up to the MB
to support ECC but to the APU memory controler and in this respect
all AMD CPUs and APU do support ECC ram, even Kabini, since
they use the same dies for both consumers PCs and servers
dedicated chips.

http://www.sapphirepgs.com/productdetail.asp?IDno=3&tag=spec&lang=eng

ECC Unbuffered RAM seems to be working as well.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/sap...-firepro-a300-same-a-a10-5700-apu-cpu-1626570

 

[kevinsbane]

There s some moisture on your nail , the guy say no dual core
so you re stretching what he says but anyway if professionalism
is the way to go i would prefer a certified mobo + APU than an
addition of DT consumer items.

He said no Dual CPU - ie, no dual socket ie, no 2x Xeon cpus...

 

[Arkaign]

He said no Dual CPU - ie, no dual socket ie, no 2x Xeon cpus...

Lol reading comprehension is a problem with that one Yes, the recommendations are for fastest single socket ST performance possible, which is Intel CPUs. Nobody on SolidWorks recommends AMD CPUs, and it has nothing to do with brand, they happily recommended AMD GPUs on a case by case basis (Firepro).

The guy even ignored that a vastly superior P9D-WS and Haswell Xeon can be bought for cheaper than the crap A320 (with a much faster FirePro GPU as well!). Sapphire is not a company known for decent motherboards at all.

 

[Abwx]

A320 is here for the indicative price wich will be about the one
of the kaveri version that has 512 GCN SPs , as much as your
DDR3 firepro proposition....

And what about the wonderfull ATX xeon mobo :

http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/P8BX/

Seriously.????? No Audio.?.

The Sapphire :

 

[AtenRa]

Are you serious? Just read the SW forums, and you'll find a lot of people who have gone through consumer cards, found that they didn't work properly, and have lists list this for recommended cards :

https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/64436

https://forum.solidworks.com/message/388110

Same thing is a trend :

"results with non-certified cards was glitches, less-than-great performance, and memory issues. This was very different, and was a horrible solution for SolidWorks. I ended up buying an AMD FirePro v4900 for my home computer, just to get things to work correctly.

I cannot endorse the latest integrated consumer grade GPUs for SolidWorks. Not at all."

I was expecting a technical analysis and not a quote from a guy that used Intel's Integrated Graphics with Solidworks and had a revelation of how bad integrated consumer iGPUs are in professional applications.
Intels drivers are the worst in the industry for gaming, I dont believe you would expect them to perform ok in professional applications.

Rendering errors may occur with a professional card as well. If you need that high of a precision you better get ECC ram and a 64bit float capable GPU. But people and/or projects that need that high of a precision are very few, the vast majority of people using CAD applications are more than fine with 32bit Float.

The biggest difference using a professional GPU with SolidWorks is the added features you will get from the application. Using a commercial GPU will only allow you to use certain features and that may have negative impact in what you want to do. Also, professional drivers may even have higher performance than commercial since they are more optimized for OpenGL.

I have never implied to use a commercial card for that kind of work and i have never recommended one to any professional.
I have just linked Kaveris performance in SW to show you that your first post in this topic was wrong. A kaveri FirePro APU will be very capable for SolidWorks. And dont forget that it will also have lower power consumption with a smaller form factor.
Is it for everyone ?? no, but that doesnt change the fact that it has a lot of power to use SW.

 

[Arkaign]

Nope, no amount of paragraphs will change the fact that not one single serious person on the SolidWorks forums recommend using any AMD CPUs. The single-threaded performance is the #1 thing they recommend as a priority, and Kaveri won't change that (as it still vastly lags behind even Ivy on a per-clock basis, let alone Haswell and beyond).

Let's see SW testing :

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/shareyourscore.htm

HP? Nope, all Intel :

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/dassault-solidworks.html

Dell? Nope, all Intel :

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/...precn/topics/en/precn_vertical_mcad?c=us&l=en

Boxx? Who SPECIALIZES in SolidWorks boxes? Nope, all Intel :

http://config.boxxtech.com/solutions/solidworks_solution.asp

Dassault's Solidworks Certified Partners? HP, all Intel :

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/products/details.htm?productID=230

WorkStation Specialists for Solidworks? Again, all Intel :

http://www.workstationspecialist.com/workstations/

CADD Edge? They recommend Intel exclusively :

http://www.caddedge.com/blog/bid/183574/The-Best-SolidWorks-Workstation

SolidBox? Another exclusive SolidWorks workstation provider? All Intel :

http://mysolidbox.com/solidworks/

Or the HUNDREDS of threads on the SolidWorks site, all recommending the fastest ST performance you can get ahold of. You've already blundered massively with mixing up the difference between multi-core and multi-socket systems.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that AMD simply does not make a good solution for SolidWorks, even as a value proposition. For anyone buying a SW license and working with SW on a professional basis would have less than zero reason to choose a product that performs worse or less reliably for a mission-critical fundamental job function.

For a student to mess around with? Maybe. For a pirate to use with hacked software? Sure. For a professional? Not even close.

If the Kaveri FirePro APU does get released, and is released for an extremely competitive price, then it might, MIGHT earn a spot low on the totem pole. The A320 was an abject failure though. You know how I can tell? AMD's own marketing links on their own web page DON'T WORK. They offer no way to find a place to buy it. The partner for the mobo is SAPPHIRE. NOBODY takes Sapphire seriously. I also think it's stupidly hilarious how you link back to a server-class ASUS board and complain that it doesn't have audio, something utterly useless for SolidWorks, and something that can be solved by a $10 usb stick should you really give a crap.

Not to mention you COMPLETELY IGNORED THE FACT that you can build :

Xeon 4C8T Haswell
Asus P9D-WS
FirePro V4900/etc

for LESS or EQUAL money than the idiotic A320/Sapphire setup. At every possible level it gives you more performance, and a track record with SolidWorks that is infinitely superior to an APU that was such a failure that AMD themselves have basically buried.

 

[Abwx]

Dassault's Solidworks Certified Partners? HP, all Intel :

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/products/details.htm?productID=230

I took your Dassault link as exemple , they do an offering
for students and specify the system requirement for SW :

SolidWorks System Requirements

Processor :

Intel or AMD with SSE2 support. 64-bit operating system recommended

https://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html


Keep on with your advertisement selected pages that show
sponsored offerings and are irrelevant technicaly speaking...

As for the MB i linked this is the very same outdated MB you
proposed, i see that you got to a higher priced iteration,
the firepro you re proposing has 480SPs , less than Kaveri.