Senior IT Manager with EPYC & Intel Experience - Telegrams for Guests

Hello Tom and John! I have a question for you both: What was your first PROPER gaming PC, built with the intention of gaming? For myself, it was a system with an FX 8320, 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 950. My father’s first computer was a beast with two Voodoos in SLI (the old style of SLI with the cables coming out the back of the cards and linking them together) some AMD chip (he can’t remember which), and a mighty 4MB of RAM. He was able to max out absolutely everything in every game, plus he had access to exclusive graphic libraries that you can’t even use on modern hardware.

Jake_ Dude_23

"Never let your skills stagnate" - excellent advice.

Moore's Law Is Dead

Oops i was late, I’ll bring it to the next talk.

Brahm

Hi Tom and guest. I’ve been a fan for some time and have been meaning to ask this for awhile: My question has to do with the future of hardware...I’ve posited for awhile now that chiplet technology would allow for more customizable products to the demands of consumers by making it cheaper for the producer to essentially make all the blocks and decide how to build the building at the end. For example: if a every component in an soc was a chiplet one could choose how many cores, how many work group processors and any additional asic desired allowing for much more efficient use of silicon and perhaps alleviating some level of supply constraint while achieving higher performance and variability. This could likely change how the pc platform is handled and perhaps change the entire industry. Do you think that this is the direction that amd is moving towards or do you think they mean to make the parts cheaper for themselves and maintain status quo in how a pc is designed overall ie: cpu, discrete gpu and motherboard? How long do you think it might take them to achieve this if they are attempting to change the industry? Is this perhaps why intel and nvidia appear to be attempting to improve gpu capability and acquire arm respectively? My question comes on the heels of amd’s cpu chiplet success, their mcm patent and the fpga controller patent that allows for different instruction sets to be read. Thanks and hope you’re doing well.

Brahm

Sadly all too often you need to move organisations to further your career, working on open source projects may give you networking opportunities. Finally never let your skills stagnate, especially if you work in house.

Ian Clifford

Will the launch of Ice Lake SP be dead on arrival, secondly will Sapphire Rapids give Epyc new opportunities as vendors and enterprises will have to requalify their solutions, thus could it be an inflection point?

Ian Clifford

Finally do Richardson serve as as a reference site for other organisations considering Epyc, if so, has there been a marked increase in interest from other Enterprise customers? Not Hyperscalers but Enterprise customers, as that is an area where Epyc is still poorly represented?

Ian Clifford

My question regards how has their infrastructure evolved in terms of Rome and in the future Milan? How has the transition been, especially with NVME since NVME over Fabric is still in its infancy.

Ian Clifford

If Intel became competitive enough in the coming years, would it be just as difficult to switch back to Xeon, as it was switching to EPYC?

Laz

First of all I want to ask you what is the best way to progress in my career of a programmer .What is that one thing that is most commonly neglected .Here is my personal example : At my job I have two tasks ,the first one is to code a small piece of software every day, the other one is to develop a product that will replace оne 3rd party service that is very unreliable .With the first task I am well ahead of the quota and with the second one , my product is better in some areas and equivalent in the rest.And beside that I am improving my skills and knowledge in the field of ML because our company works with a lot of data and I am hoping that I can progress in that path .I don't know what I can do more in order to progress in my career.What advice you will give me beside improving my social skill (I am working on those).And one gaming question.When we will see a really good and big in terms of popularity RTS like SC blood war and C&C .I really miss those.

Valko Milev

Hello Tom and John! As someone who is in school for Networking and will be entering the IT field fairly soon, what would you say, as an IT manager, is more desirable set of skills/certificate - Cisco CCNA or CompTia Cloud+? I plan on getting both at some point, but what cert should I plan to get first?

Christopher Foster

Having just switched to a new CPU vendor, how long in terms of years and hardware generations are you certain to be with AMD? How long would it take or what would need to happen before you would consider making such a move again, be it to a different ISA or back to Intel?

Deepest Learners

since Ice lake xeon and sapphire rapids are all coming out this year, which one do you think enterprises are going to choose?

I know for large scale projects, switching from even Intel to AMD on the same ISA can be a challenge. Apple has proven that the ARM ISA can be made very performant; if Ampere or Nuvia/Qualcomm end up making high quality and high performance ARM server chips, what would it take for the switch to be worth it? I know many companies end up relying on shared libraries/DLLs having ABI stability, would it even be possible for some companies to switch?

Mia

Maybe a couple words on Magny Cours Opterons, which were: a) almost a prototype for Naples MCM b) named incredibly cheekily ("Magny Cours" -> "Many Cores") ?

KarbinCry

Will System Z / Z System / IBM Z ever die?

KarbinCry

how parallel can we make software, also how many cores is too many(the point you cant use that many threads meaningfully)? 64 cant be the final destination right?

Will 2021 be the year of waiting in DC? Next year promises great new products, especially Sapphire Rapids, and generally, the introduction of DDR5, PCIe 5, and CXL 1.1 make for a big jump. And especially with 2020 being so crazy and cloud becoming more and more appealing (OPEX being more attractive in these uncertain times than CAPEX), I just don't see a lot of traditional datacenter purchases this year.

KarbinCry

How much downwards pressure on the complexity of games, is the console controller imposing?

Woolly

What is the cost, not in dollars, of changing platform, legacy software/hardware support etc.

Woolly

Obvious question but: how do you feel the adoption for Zen 3 and 4 will be on the server side? Will we see major adoption or difficulties in changing from an Intel platform to an AMD one will curb that transition? Thanks!

Manuel Nascimento