I know this is a bit of a crystal ball question but I’m curious when others think ADSK might come out with new hardware recommendations/certifications for Linux boxes.
The Z8s have been around a while and are only Intel and PCI 3. The AMD Ryzen is pretty impressive and currently the only chip that supports PCI 4 and, thus, could take full advantage of the A6000.
Speaking of the A6000, it’d be interesting to know if/when they would certify that for use in a Z8 even if it can’t take full advantage of the bus speed…it does have twice the RAM of a RTX6000.
Like I said, I know it’s all “finger in the air” guessing but I’d imagine at best next year…
The ones who control the purse strings. They’re risk adverse so when dropping that kind of cash they want to know the machines will work as expected. That said I’d love to play guinea pig as I do love a good tinker but sadly that’s not possible.
The only issues I’ve heard of is that some of the newer ThreadRipper stuff needs a newer kernel than what ADSK ships in the DKUs. That fucking grey box problem again.
For us, we are sticking with HP Z for now, since you basically get the $650 RGS license for free. The problem with HP is they don’t make a good rack unit. A Z8X0 takes up 5U in a rack, 6U if you don’t pay attention. That is a lot of space. Dell R79X0 are hardware equivalent, take up 2U and come with out-of-band management. They are great machines. Just factor in the additional cost of purchasing an RGS license. Now with all of that, we are very cheap here. We tend to buy 1 generation back. So for us z840 is still considered current hardware. We just load it with a really good GPU and have a big burn farm. Since a lot of Flame is still single-threaded, some of these monster 64core CPUs don’t really benefit as much as just faster cores. It is the classic Flame dilemma.
Thanks for the insight as always Alan. Good point about the RGS license. We’re looking at two new Z8s and I toying with the idea of shoving a A6000 in there but unsure if it’s worth it. I suppose someone has to try, right?