Sane use-case for Kaveri?

[Arkaign]

This isn't even an AMD vs Nvidia or AMD vs. Intel thing. It's a matter of matching the pro vs. consumer items to their proper usage.

For a student or someone using pro apps without getting paid for it, there might be a case for modding/hacking (discussion not really allowed here for good reason), or just using a cheap consumer product.

However, for actual engineering work when you're paying and making huge money for the software, the employees, buying pro hardware to get the job done right the first time is a no brainer.

 

[Abwx]

not a very constructive post, this has been a thread about theoreticals and budget, not top-spec. why would an engineer use kaveri when there are faster options? stick to the topic and cut out the flame baiting. Could kaveri be used for a budget workstation? or is "budget" workstation a contradiction in any scenario? mobile, students, top engineers etc?

That s typical reactions from clulessness and certainly a ton of bias, i do routinely simulations using a pro soft and i can tell you that it takes me much more time to set the conditions than running the simulations, actualy an averagely experimented engineer would use way more time and even giving him the earth simulator as WS would not improve his productivity by a iota.

 

[mrmt]

not a very constructive post, this has been a thread about theoreticals and budget, not top-spec. why would an engineer use kaveri when there are faster options? stick to the topic and cut out the flame baiting. Could kaveri be used for a budget workstation? or is "budget" workstation a contradiction in any scenario? mobile, students, top engineers etc?

That question was thoroughly answered before: It doesn't make sense in most cases.

When you have the expense with a Junior engineer, that's over $100.000 to bring him on board, to add some $200 bucks per month isn't anything. Every minute this engineer is waiting for something to render is wasted money, so you'll spend as much money as necessary in order to keep the engineer working, and not waiting. So you'll align this performance threshold with your budget and not the other way around, for example it makes sense to spend more $2000 in a top of line Quadro card if this card will reduce the processing time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes, but it doesn't make sense if you are reducing the processing time from 20 seconds to 8. So for heavy lifting you can write Kaveri off, because every penny you are saving by buying Kaveri you'll lose in idle hours of the engineer/designer/whatever.

Also you must factor that not every workloads burden the dGPU. There are workloads that are heavily CPU ST, some heavily CPU MT, some heavily GPU compute dependent, some heavily shader dependent. AMD APU in general are very unbalanced in the first place. It's an anemic CPU coupled with a relatively strong GPU, with the catch that it's heavily bandwidth choked. On almost every ST CPU-bound workloads AMD APU will lose to anything Intel, and on MT workloads AMD is only barely competitive against 2C low clocked Intel processors, so if your workload is somehow CPU dependent, write Kaveri off.

(One parenthesis here about AMD resellers marketing tactics. They are using the same consumer marketing approach in the professional market and in every slide you see in their website or in their promotional material shows top quad core Intel processors coupled with anemic Nvidia GPU (a very unbalanced system) and testing GPU-dependent workloads. Next step they show how great value they provide, same performance for cheaper, without mentioning these very inconvenient facts. As if the guys buying workstations wouldn't make proper research before asking for bids).

That leaves us with just light professional workloads or students with very short budgets. If the workload is light enough to run on Kaveri *and* is not CPU bound, then Kaveri might make some sense if AMD prices the thing a step below they did with the Trinity Firepro. Currently, as Arkaign has showed, it's cheaper to buy i7 Intel + Nvidia K2000 than to buy a Firepro APU.

 

[Abwx]

A K2000 is 400-500€ in France , i dont know how adding a i7
will still keep its cost below....500€ , because the price given
by Arkaign for the A320 is not sourced , other says that it cost
about 400$ wich would negate all thoses erratic speculations...

And while some insist on being professional why not
use ECC RAM, wich the A320 can manage while the i7,
well , what is the opinion of the experts of this thread..???..

 

[Essence_of_War]

well , what is the opinion of the experts of this thread..???..

The i7 does not support ECC RAM. There are often equally clocked Xeon's which do, though. And usually of comparable price.

 

[Abwx]

It seems that Sapphire exclusivity for the Firepro line extend
to the dedicated APUs, that s why they are not sold through
the channel and are not even available if not bought from
this manufacturer....

The thing with its MB cost 540€ in France , 21% VAT included :

http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00139502.html

So about the price of a K2000 , so much for the useless
long posts....

The i7 does not support ECC RAM. There are often equally clocked Xeon's which do, though. And usually of comparable price.

Surely but the plateform is significantly more expensive...

Edit : worthwile to point the Sapphire MB caracteristics :

Micro ATX
APU AMD FirePro A320 (Quad-Core 3.8 GHz / 4.2 GHz - Cache 4 Mo)
GPU 800 MHz 384 sps
4 slots DIMM DDR3 32 GB
8 ports SATA 6 Gb/s RAID 0,1,5 et 10
PCI-Express 2.0 16x
DisplayPort + DVI-D Dual-Link et analogique VGA
2 ports USB 3.0 + 4 ports USB 2.0


Windows 8 (32 bits et 64 bits) / Windows 7 (32 bits et 64 bits) / Windows Vista (32 bits et 64 bits) / Windows XP (32 bits) / SUSE Entreprise desktop (SLED) 11.4 et 11.5 (32 bits et 64 bits) / Ubuntu 11.04 et 11.10 (32 bits et 64 bits

 

[Enigmoid]

This isn't even an AMD vs Nvidia or AMD vs. Intel thing. It's a matter of matching the pro vs. consumer items to their proper usage.

For a student or someone using pro apps without getting paid for it, there might be a case for modding/hacking (discussion not really allowed here for good reason), or just using a cheap consumer product.

However, for actual engineering work when you're paying and making huge money for the software, the employees, buying pro hardware to get the job done right the first time is a no brainer.

I agree completely. For real work there is no point. For a student it may make sense but when you don't care about errors there is no point not to go the intel + dgpu route.

 

[Arkaign]

The K2000 + Xeon is quite a bit faster though, so the comparison is bizarre.

As for the platform being more expensive, that's totally laughable :

Xeon E3-1220 v2 Quad-Core Ivy Bridge 3.1Ghz/3.5Ghz Turbo
Asus P8B-X Motherboard (Supports DDR3 32GB ECC and PCI-Express 3.0)
FirePro V3900 Workstation GPU (more GPU cores and better performance than A320 IGP)
120GB Samsung Evo SSD
16GB Crucial ECC Workstation Memory

Total @ Newegg $655

OR STILL LESS THAN THE A320, Despite having an SSD, 16GB DDR3 ECC, and a FASTER PROFESSIONAL GPU

The A320 is a horrible deal. That's why AMD has basically buried it. Even as a value workstation proposition it's terrible.

 

[NTMBK]

You can be error sensitive without being especially performance sensitive, in which case why spend more on top end hardware? Low end workstations do exist, and they fill a market niche. Look at some of these: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-t1700-workstation/fs The Quadro K600 in some of those workstations is based on the same GPU as a GT640, and comes with 1GB DDR3 VRAM. Not to mention the model which uses Intel integrated graphics- surely AMD Firepro drivers would be more reliable than Intel in such a box? And again, some of those models ship with Core i3 processors.

 

[Abwx]

The K2000 + Xeon is quite a bit faster though, so the comparison is bizarre.

As for the platform being more expensive, that's totally laughable :

Xeon E3-1220 v2 Quad-Core Ivy Bridge 3.1Ghz/3.5Ghz Turbo
Asus P8B-X Motherboard (Supports DDR3 32GB ECC and PCI-Express 3.0)
FirePro V3900 Workstation GPU (more GPU cores and better performance than A320 IGP)
120GB Samsung Evo SSD
16GB Crucial ECC Workstation Memory

Total @ Newegg $655

OR STILL LESS THAN THE A320, Despite having an SSD, 16GB DDR3 ECC, and a FASTER PROFESSIONAL GPU

The A320 is a horrible deal. That's why AMD has basically buried it. Even as a value workstation proposition it's terrible.

Hard digging indeed , no more a quadro but a 125$ card instead,
and one using DDR3 of course , along with an outdated MB
that seems short of USB3, well a PCIe USB card is not expensive
but what about the 6 sata 3gb , quite poor feature for professionals,
as for the IB dont overstimate thoses chips , we re not talking
of Cinebench or other ICC compiled toybenches but of professional
applications where results are often quite different from the
amateurish scene benchmania, all in all the A320 was a more
balanced plateform , i say was because the Kaveri version is the
one that should be adressed in the present times.

 

[lagokc]

Yes, because the best way to improve the ROI of a project is to buy AMD for peanuts and make your $100.000 engineer wait by the coffee machine while his Kaveri workstation finishes the rendering.:awe::awe::awe::awe::awe::awe:

I've worked for companies where the upper management actually thought like that D:

 

[Arkaign]

Hard digging indeed , no more a quadro but a 125$ card instead,
and one using DDR3 of course , along with an outdated MB
that seems short of USB3, well a PCIe USB card is not expensive
but what about the 6 sata 3gb , quite poor feature for professionals,
as for the IB dont overstimate thoses chips , we re not talking
of Cinebench or other ICC compiled toybenches but of professional
applications where results are often quite different from the
amateurish scene benchmania, all in all the A320 was a more
balanced plateform , i say was because the Kaveri version is the
one that should be adressed in the present times.

If the A320 was a good deal there would have been demand for it. It wasn't, so it got buried.

USB3 and Sata 6Gbps don't really enter in the equation much for these kinds of apps, the rendering waits involve what the CPU/GPU are capable of. Which the A320 kind of sucks at.

 

[lagokc]

If the A320 was a good deal there would have been demand for it. It wasn't, so it got buried.

USB3 and Sata 6Gbps don't really enter in the equation much for these kinds of apps, the rendering waits involve what the CPU/GPU are capable of. Which the A320 kind of sucks at.

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.

No one seems to know what the price/availability will be like for the Kaveri FirePro APUs or if the situation will change from the A320.

 

[Abwx]

If the A320 was a good deal there would have been demand for it. It wasn't, so it got buried.

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.

USB3 and Sata 6Gbps don't really enter in the equation much for these kinds of apps, the rendering waits involve what the CPU/GPU are capable of. Which the A320 kind of sucks at.

Of course getting huge files faster doesnt matter, all the work
is to stay in the WS as testimony that it was performed...seriously.??.

When it come to what is sucking, well , why not look at what
Anand used to test the integer single thread of IB and PD when
it comes to professional hardware..?..

 

[mrmt]

I've worked for companies where the upper management actually thought like that D:

From my experience this happens when you have accounting systems built around cost centers. In this case the IT manager will try to reduce CAPEX/OPEX on the dGPU card, because that's one of the main KPI he will be evaluated for. He won't give a damn about lost productivity times of engineers, because this is not his PKI.

When the company moves to an accounting structure built around projects, this becomes less of an issue because the functional managers have less power, and the hours lost because of shoddy equipment suddenly becomes issues impacting ROI of projects and upper managements becomes aware of it. In this case, the risk is to have IT managers overspending in order to keep project managers happy.

 

[Arkaign]

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.

Of course getting huge files faster doesnt matter, all the work
is to stay in the WS as testimony that it was performed...seriously.??.

When it come to what is sucking, well , why not look at what
Anand used to test the integer single thread of IB and PD when
it comes to professional hardware..?..

Are you hard headed? The images you show are graphs where higher is better.

All that can be seen is the Intel procs dominating the results. Oops?

Fwiw, if you swap out to a P9D-WS and Xeon 1245V3 Haswell (with even higher IPC) you still come in at cheaper than it would cost to build out of an A320 box (where the CPU/MOBO come in at ~$680 alone)

Those changes bring it to $840.66 WITH 16GB DDR3 ECC If you change it to apples/apples and take the RAM out, it's cheaper to buy the P9D-WS and Xeon anyway.

Still is all ludicrous though, because nobody spending $4000-$7000 (or more) for the Software is going to want to cut corners on the hardware so much as to sweat it.

 

[Abwx]

Are you hard headed? The images you show are graphs where higher is better.

All that can be seen is the Intel procs dominating the results. Oops?

Of course but the A320 is way higher clocked than your xeon
by roughly 20% , conclude what you want...

As for the rest of the discussion there are people who quietly and randomly assume or rather imply that one can be forced to bankruptcy if he buys some AMD gear, i guess that it s the entertainement side of the thread, quite authoritarive in its presentation but totaly void in its meaning if ever
there was one at the first place...

 

[Arkaign]

The final point of this is not meant to be Intel v. AMD

You can try to fight city hall all day long with distractions, but the fact of the matter is that NOBODY recommends AMD CPUs for Solidworks. They're just not a good match. However, AMD FirePro Professional GPUs get a TON of respect there, and for good reason.

A good Solidworks system is a high-clocked Xeon, High Quality ECC Memory (a lot of it), and a high quality professional GPU from either AMD or Nvidia. It will be expensive no matter how you look at it (students/etc are best off looking for a great deal on a used professional workstation really), but that's just the way it is. It's still affordable compared to the personnel and software costs involved.

 

[Essence_of_War]

As for the rest of the discussion there are people who quietly and randomly assume or rather imply that one can be forced to bankruptcy if he buys some AMD gear, i guess that it s the entertainement side of the thread, quite authoritarive in its presentation but totaly void in its meaning if ever
there was one at the first place...

That is not at all what anyone has been saying to you.

 

[Enigmoid]

As far as professional vs. consumer GPU go here are my tests with a student version of maya 2013.

Simple objects- Very doable.

About 2K edges in that model. Works fine. More edges are fine too.

Works very well.

Much harder scenes.

Utter pain. Stuff doesn't load well, movements are extremely jerky in the scene below.

Of course that is a very complicated model.

Render looks fine though (about 3 minutes on laptop though this guy really likes RAM- more and 8 GB required).

That set of trees is annoying and an utter pain to deal with. Its still doable but not optimal.

Even more complex scenes are so frustrating that they are impossible.

Moves at about 1 frame about every two seconds when panning around. Only about 300 MB vram though.

If you are just doing simple things a consumer GPU is fine. As a student you probably wouldn't have any problem with a consumer GPU. For more complex models, forget it (though 100 million vertices is probably going to lag on anything). Again there is the problem with accuracy though I haven't noticed problems on a 660m.

It looks like the 2014 version added DX 11 support.

Edit: The complex tree scenes are not my work. They are sample scenes from gnomon workshop. It also looks like ST CPU performance is the reason for the lag.

 

[Arkaign]

Good post Enigmoid, and to put the final nail in this coffin, from the SolidWorks forums :

https://forum.solidworks.com/message/414005

"Summary

As I say in every post like this: CPU is King. Always has been, and it will be for a while. Don't get dual CPU setups for SolidWorks modeling; that is a horrible mistake. Get the highest frequency Intel CPU you can, then an SSD second, and a better video card third. Make sure you have enough RAM for whatever your models require by doing a test and looking at your task manager."

 

[mrmt]

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.

That was a move I could not understand. AMD drivers, DevRel and customer support are inferior to Nvidia's. They *must* compete on price no matter what they think. With Firepro APU they had the chance of building a niche for themselves. Students workstations or very cheap machine for emerging markets. Sure, it might cannibalize some of their own market share, but who cares, it's a very small share anyway. But with the current Firepro prices they ensured that the product was DOA.

 

[mrmt]

Thanks for the posts, Enigmoid. Very enlightening.

 

[Enigmoid]

On the weekend I will try (if I can get the student version) to check on autodesk maya 2014 and see if the DX 11 viewport changes anything.

Note that maya is much more friendly to consumer GPU's than Solidworks.

The first requirement as Arkaigan said is a solid CPU. Singlethread performance is king. This is true for almost every professional app (except rendering and such) due to the branched nature of the feature set.

Edit:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Update-HP-ZBook-15-DreamColor-Workstation.112327.0.html

Some notebook GPU benchmarks.

In SPEC 12 it looks like consumer GPUs are doing better and at least in maya bring no benefit over professional.

Iris Pro does surprising well.

Of course I have no idea about the caveats of performance. It may stutter, crash, or return errors and that will not be reflected on the score.

 

[Abwx]

Good post Enigmoid, and to put the final nail in this coffin, from the SolidWorks forums :

https://forum.solidworks.com/message/414005

"Summary

As I say in every post like this: CPU is King. Always has been, and it will be for a while. Don't get dual CPU setups for SolidWorks modeling; that is a horrible mistake. Get the highest frequency Intel CPU you can, then an SSD second, and a better video card third. Make sure you have enough RAM for whatever your models require by doing a test and looking at your task manager."

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.