Quote from: octominer on July 07, 2018, 07:23:26 PM

Quote from: KaydenC on July 07, 2018, 05:07:18 AM

Quote from: octominer on July 07, 2018, 04:34:16 AM

Hey hey, Octominer here. We manufacture and sell specialised mining hardware for crypto miners.

We are currently working on developing our NEXT GEN riser free motherboard that will be more focused on AI and Rendering tasks also and not just mining for mining. Shocked

I would love to hear some feedback from you guys on which kind of motherboard would you think would be perfect for Vectordash or AI/Rendering rigs? Currently we are considering making a riser free motherboard with X16 slots based on either AMD Threadripper X399 platform or AMD EPYC server CPU platform. Advantage of the threadripper is that it is cheaper and the CPU clock speeds are much higher. Advantage of the AMD EPYC is that it has 128 PCIe lanes compare to the threadrippers 64 PCIe lanes and more cores. Which makes it possible to run 7x GPUs at full 16x speed on the EPYC motherboard, while the threadripper motherboard can support a maximum of 3x GPU running at 16x full speed or 7x GPUs running at 8x speed.

I would love to hear some real life feedback on the topic of 16x vs 8x PCIe speed when it comes to rendering and AI tasks. From what I understand for OTOYs OctaneRender 8x speed is optimal and there is only a 1-2% difference in performance when comparing 8x to 16x PCIe speed. Does anybody know how is the 8x vs 16x PCIe performance difference when it comes to AI tasks and Vectordash?

I'd definitely grab those boards if they were made. But I will prefer EPYC, you never know when a task may benefit from 16 rather than 8 lanes. Is it possible to estimate how much more will the EPYC mobo cost compared to threadripper? CPU wise it's about $100.

Here's a discussion on pcie lanes by OTOY users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOBvz454fU&t=3485s

Support for pcie burification, and using the remainder lanes for m2 pcie slots may also be important for people getting the acorn fpga accelerator.

Appreciate the feedback!
The Epyc mobo should be around 100USD more than the X399 version. We are leaning towards the Epyc based platform ourself too due to the 128x PCIe lanes it has. I am also talking with the people behind the upcoming Acorn FPGAs also to get their feedback and to make sure our new motherboard will play well with the Acorns. Smiley

Do you plan to release the boards in time fo the acorn release?