Third Party Hardware > GPU Compute / Accelerators
Radeon Pro vs regular Radeon cards - worth the price premium for POWER users?
q66:
half height of course, they are rarely full height
and there is still a gap between the NIC and the GPU either way
shawnanastasio:
I originally purchased an RX 580 for my Talos but it never behaved properly. Frequent EEH errors, kernel panics, and black screens. After switching to a WX5100, I haven't encountered any issues.
I've heard people theorize that the consumer cards have less mature firmware that ends up tripping the PCIe DMA protections on POWER9 that don't exist on x86. At least anecdotally this seems accurate, since that same RX 580 works just fine in an x86 machine.
Of course, this probably doesn't hold true for all consumer cards, though for me the investment in a guaranteed-working WX-series card was well worth it.
pocock:
--- Quote from: shawnanastasio on June 11, 2020, 12:37:45 pm ---I originally purchased an RX 580 for my Talos but it never behaved properly. Frequent EEH errors, kernel panics, and black screens. After switching to a WX5100, I haven't encountered any issues.
I've heard people theorize that the consumer cards have less mature firmware that ends up tripping the PCIe DMA protections on POWER9 that don't exist on x86. At least anecdotally this seems accurate, since that same RX 580 works just fine in an x86 machine.
--- End quote ---
Do you have the option to exchange the RX 580, did you try a replacement?
Many retailers will exchange or refund any product within the first 2 - 4 weeks, especially in Europe. Is this enough time for somebody to detect a problem like that?
--- Quote from: shawnanastasio on June 11, 2020, 12:37:45 pm ---Of course, this probably doesn't hold true for all consumer cards, though for me the investment in a guaranteed-working WX-series card was well worth it.
--- End quote ---
I understand that in various ways the WX series (now the W series) cards are more tested by AMD but has either AMD or Raptor given any guarantee about them on POWER9 in general or on the Raptor hardware specifically?
If that is written somewhere then it provides an extra reason to prefer those cards for those who can buy them.
Thanks for taking the time to share your observations.
shawnanastasio:
--- Quote from: pocock on June 11, 2020, 12:52:54 pm ---
Do you have the option to exchange the RX 580, did you try a replacement?
Many retailers will exchange or refund any product within the first 2 - 4 weeks, especially in Europe. Is this enough time for somebody to detect a problem like that?
--- End quote ---
While the card was definitely intermittent from the start, it was still usable, and the issues I encountered towards the beginning could just as well have been unrelated driver bugs.
It started getting really bad after about a year of use, which is well outside the return window. I didn't bother requesting an RMA, since I needed a working card as soon as possible and just decided to buy a WX.
--- Quote from: pocock on June 11, 2020, 12:52:54 pm ---I understand that in various ways the WX series (now the W series) cards are more tested by AMD but has either AMD or Raptor given any guarantee about them on POWER9 in general or on the Raptor hardware specifically?
If that is written somewhere then it provides an extra reason to prefer those cards for those who can buy them..
--- End quote ---
Of course neither AMD nor Raptor provide official guarantees about hardware compatibility - AMD doesn't care about POWER9 and Raptor couldn't audit the firmware/drivers to ensure complete compatibility even if they wanted to. That said, the fact that Raptor's prebuilt machines all ship with WX cards is a pretty strong vote of confidence I'd say.
pocock:
--- Quote from: shawnanastasio on June 11, 2020, 03:34:59 pm ---AMD doesn't care about POWER9
--- End quote ---
they have a wealth of knowledge about POWER9 in AMD.
Whether they will apply it or support it is another thing. NVIDIA provides POWER9 binary only drivers for a couple of their cards.
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