Intel i7 980x or wait for Socket 34 opterons?

[olly]

We're looking in to building some new machines and wanted your thoughts on these new cpu's.

On paper the i7 980x looks incredible, but can a single socket machine really hold it's own with demanding workflows?

From what I've seen so far, the price of the 6 core Xeon's is going to be nearly double that of the i7 making a dual socket machine ridiculously expensive.

Now with AMD nearly there with an 8 core offering and the anticipation surrounding Vray RT & OpenCL, I'm confused.

Will we even need dual socket workstations any more or are multiple GPUs the way forward?

All thoughts welcome...

Cheers,
Olly

[Donald2B]

I would like to hear some thoughts on this as well. We are due for system upgrades within the next 4-6 months and we are waiting to see what hardware options are going to present themselves. Our projects seem to be getting larger and more complicated and can really push our hardware/software to the extreme limits. Compositing has been a huge help, but requires a lot more labor to get everything rendered out properly.

Anyways, would love to hear the thoughts of others to see what their thoughts are.

[YoyoBoy]

There is never a good time to buy technology. The price for speed is constantly plummeting and there's always something more powerful coming out next week. You just have to set a price that you want to pay and a date by which you want to pay it, find the best deal for that price that you can, and then just shut yourself off from the outside world for two years convinced that you did a wise thing.

[olly]

Wise words, I'm sure we've all felt a tinge of buyer's remorse with our workstations....

Perhaps mid-range is the way forward with a 12 month upgrade cycle....

[Donald2B]

I agree with there never being a good time to buy technology. This timeline is our own internal, "Let's see if we can make until then" kind of thing and then buy the best that we can at that point.

Well, we are hoping to get another 3 years out of our next gen workstations. Our current workstations are no slouches, but they are getting a little long in the tooth. I am just wondering whether there is going to be a huge benefit to getting an $8k workstation vs $4k single proc machine? With the economy the way it is and with all of the newer software coming out...it will make for a interesting strategic meeting regarding my upgrade recommendations.

[trick]

...Our projects seem to be getting larger and more complicated...

With such projects I wouldn't bet on GPU solutions for final output, since the whole project needs to fit within the GPU RAM of a single card. Currently this maxes out at 4GB for the QuadroFX 5800. If I'm not mistaken: in the case of Arion this would put you back on the CPU resulting in Fryrender speeds ! The best bet would be to wait for the 6-core X5677 (which has about 3.5 GHz clockspeed) which gives you 24 hyperthreaded cores in a dual socket config and is also one of the fastest (un-overclocked) processors on single threaded apps. You can wait untill the end of the year for the 8-core variant, but then it's just some more cores and not completely new technology !

[Donald2B]

I am leaning towards the 6-Core Xeon, but I really would like to refrain from having to use a Server OS. I have also read that most applications fail to even launch when HT is turned on giving the benefit of the 24core situation. In a way, this would be the smartest buy if future OS and software were to support up to 24cores reliably. While waiting for that situation, you could run the machine with HT turned off and then when software/OS support more, you can essentially gain 20%-30% performance gain with no additional cost. That would almost future proof you for hopefully the full 3 year period...if not a little while longer.

[ajroane]

The 12-core (Magny-Cours) Opterons are claiming to be better than the Xeons, obviously they would say that. AMD claims that Hyper-Threading only gives 10-20% performance improvements vs the same proc with HT disabled, and even that some intensive programs actually run slower. With 12 cores you don't have to worry about HT. The price on the AMD 12-core procs is supposed to be better as well. So should you just wait for these? I don't know, it's like YoyoBoy said, the best time to buy a new computer is in the future.

Back on topic, I just upgraded last week to a single, 4-core Xeon with HT (Xeon w3520) workstation, 12-gig ram, QuadroFX3800, and it is great for what I do. The IT guy said that my new Xeon proc is the pro version of the consumer i7, I don't know which i7 he was referring to. I don't get in to the real heavy stuff, mostly just still renderings. My scenes are almost always less than a million polys, that's not counting the furniture and plants that are usually proxied, and I have had no problems. My old machine was a dual, 2-core Xeon machine. Old and new were both 64-bit, and my new machine is much faster. I haven't benchmarked them against each other, but it is a lot faster.

If I could change anything about my new machine I would add another processor, It would be nice to have at least 8-cores. That extra cost may seem like a lot now (I think it would have added about $400 or $500 to the total cost), but spread that added cost over the next 3+ years and it's definitely worth it. Not to mention that you will be able to work faster, so your bosses should know that they will actually be losing money if they skimp now. Hopefully my boss won't be mad if he sees that I wrote that, because I really like my new computer.

Good luck with your decision.

[beestee]

We had our IT guys build some render nodes recently. We were pushing for i7 920s, but for the price of two of the i7 machines that we spec'd we were able to get four PhenomII X4s with Intel SSDs within the same budget. They perform remarkably better than the now seemingly ancient Athalon X2s that they replaced. They actually perform significantly better than even our Intel Core2 Quad workstations that are only ~2 yrs old. Not sure how the PhenomII X4 it stacks up against the Core i7 series, but we were pleasantly suprised by the big bump in performance that the cheaper Phenoms gave us.

Of course for workstations, the i7 offers much more than brute power it takes to make your render speeds fast. There are many advancements in that chip and it's corresponding chipset that can make a difference if it is to be used as a workstation. The additional cores that the new i7 980X offers are not quite as important as the GHz in a workstation configuration in my opinion, and if you can get close using a much cheaper i7 chip then you really wouldn't notice a big difference in anything but the heaviest CPU tasks, such as rendering and encoding.

The big question is "what is the purpose for these computers." If it is to be a jack-of-all-trades, workstation and render node, then the i7 980X makes perfect sense. However, if it's usage will be more specific you can probably save some money by building something that fit's the purpose more and still get a good 3+ years of service out of them.

[judderman]

The i7 980x does look amazing, I want, but they are from my perspective at least, prohibitively expensive. Four times the price of the i7 930 but of course don't deliver four times the performance. I think I'll be opting for the 930 processors when I build my new machine.

[^Lele^]

I recently upgraded an old x2-4200 with a black box x4 running at 3.2 ghz stock (per core).
Mobo, cpu and 4gb of ddr3 1600 ram costed me around 300 euros.
While i used i7s at work, and can't say they're slow, for this price tag i think the AMDs are unbeatable.
Throw in the mix the good OCs abilities (even with a meagre stock coller i get to nearly 4ghz), and the fact the cpu can OC one core while UC the others when a single core task is processing, and you see why 300 euros there are pretty well spent.
It's all down to the price/performance ratio, imho.