AMD - PCI-E Lanes going forward

[smogsy]

Hi all,

I currently have a 2950X (£800) after getting this i went all in on NVME storage & now have 6 NVME drives & looking to get more.
Which is great for performance of my workflow

However looking at future AMD products it seems Threadripper is pretty much DEAD in terms of
High End PC enthusiasts & much more a "firePro" product & now aimed at true professionals. (£1700 for my direct upgrade)

Looking at the 5900s Series - they lack the PCI-Lanes to really support Fast Direct Storage
It "apparently have 40 lanes"

20 appears to be used for the chipset (USB,ethernet etc)
20 for users GPU - 1 NVME drive

so it appears Fast Storage support is not going to be with us for a long time?
Have i missed anything?
I cannot upgrade my CPU unless i either ditch NVME or Go Threadripper just for PCI-E

 

[Journey]

Run your GPU at 8x PCI-E 4.0, assuming you have a GPU that supports 4.0, then you can run an additional two drives in the second 16x slot (8x wired). Add that to the dedicated single CPU 4x M.2 slot, and up to two 3.0 speed slots coming from the chipset and you can have five drives connected.

 

[smilingcrow]

You can upgrade your current system to 24 or 32 cores anyway.

 

[Journey]

You can upgrade your current system to 24 or 32 cores anyway.

Some workflow isn't about just more cores, but faster cores. This is why very fast 16 core EPYC parts exist with massive RAM and I/O capabilities.

 

[smogsy]

Some workflow isn't about just more cores, but faster cores. This is why very fast 16 core EPYC parts exist with massive RAM and I/O capabilities.

indeed,

your first post kind of works, but chipset will be slower. really need a mainstream to have more lanes or a board to drop SATA entirely i don't use sata at all

waiting on my GPu (3090)

 

[smilingcrow]

Some workflow isn't about just more cores, but faster cores..

The OP doesn’t want to pay the price for that which leaves them with the option to upgrade their current platform.

3960X is ~£1,200 so not that much more considering it has more and faster cores.
Wait for Zen 3 and see if pricing on the current TR platform drops!

 

[Journey]

indeed,

your first post kind of works, but chipset will be slower. really need a mainstream to have more lanes or a board to drop SATA entirely i don't use sata at all

waiting on my GPu (3090)

You don't currently have PCI-E 4.0, so not sure how it will be slower? The chipset lanes support 4x 4.0 lanes which is 8x 3.0 of bandwidth so you can make full use of those at the same time, the single 4.0 M.2 connect to the CPU can be run at full speed, as can the two drives (up to 4.0 speed) in the secondary 16x PCI-E slot.

Are you saying you want to go will all new drives at 4.0 speeds? What drives are your running at the moment, and capacities etc?

 

[smogsy]

You don't currently have PCI-E 4.0, so not sure how it will be slower? The chipset lanes support 4x 4.0 lanes which is 8x 3.0 of bandwidth so you can make full use of those at the same time, the single 4.0 M.2 connect to the CPU can be run at full speed, as can the two drives (up to 4.0 speed) in the secondary 16x PCI-E slot.

Are you saying you want to go will all new drives at 4.0 speeds? What drives are your running at the moment, and capacities etc?

chip-set is generally slower even if the bandwidth is their, latency drops.
Currently using
5x Samsung Pro 970's (2TB)
1x Samsung Evo 970 250GB (OS)

although i won't instantly upgrade to 4.0 speeds, will be nice to have support in the future.
this thread was more for general discussion that getting fast storage on a decent platform is not really progressing unless you spend a lot of money just for pci-e lanes

Threadripper 2000s & 1000s was wewll priced 3000/ possibly 5000s are going the way of Xeon.

 

[Journey]

We've had a thread like this before, and the general feeling was that edge cases for non-professional uses exist but are just that edge cases. If you are willing to drop what would have been £2k+ on 5x 2TB storage drives then investing in a platform that supports them isn't a big deal really. It is annoying that AMD haven't made a 16-core part for the new TRx40 boards at the $999 price point, but given the aforementioned EPYC parts becoming popular it would not surprise me if they did offer a 16-core part with a higher clock speed at a premium price, but it would likely be $1249+, $450 more than the AM4 part. Lets not forget AM4 is going to be a 4 years old platform in a few months, so whose to say its replacement won't offer more.

I think you also have to consider your bandwidth and I/O improvements with PCI-E 4.0, you are now seeing drives that are almost 2x faster than the fastest 3.0 drives, so if 3.0 was fast enough, then you can halve the number of drives, unless you need the capacity, in which case you can look at U.2 drives to achieve the speed and capacity now. If you need faster drives for latency then really the use case should be Intel based 3DXPoint drives like the 905P, or the new Alder Stream drives when they finally launch.

 

[smogsy]

very true good breakdown.
my case is very double sided, i am a professional, I don't necessary use this Workstation as my Main Work computer for profit, But i do like to work from Home too & learn on my own time.
So whilst its not directly link to the "PC Earns me Money So its worth it" its closely linked as learning would be lot slower.
Also game too

cheers for the convo.