Zen based Athlons

[berserkre]

I've been looking all over for info on the integrated gpus of the Athlons that are based on the Ryzen cores. Can't find anything. I'm looking at building a dedicated F@H rig, and wondered how many PPD, heat, etc. I have a Core i3 6100 system I could use, but based on the motherboard and case I can't really fit 2 good gpus into it. Was thinking of the Athlon 240 GE plus 2 gpus. (The 240GE is 4 threads)

[bruce]

A large percentage of the time spent doing FAH calculations is spent doing Single Precision floating point arithmetic. Of course there always is a mixture of other types of operations but since the're less frequent, their speed doesn't matter as much.

FAH software is also designed to make use of instruction parallelism, so the number of cores matter if you're planning on folding with the CPU. In any case, Zen will do a reasonable job of supporting your GPUs, though.

Compared to other software, these are rather unusual characteristics.

The Zen goals of the design process has been focused on accelerating the more common types of software and enhancing SPFP throughput was not one of their top goals. Whiile FAH will use any calculation resources that are provided to it, I wouldn't expect Zen to produce spectacular FAH performance if that's your primary goal. A better measure of FAH performance will depend on your choice of GPUs.

[JimboPalmer]

Two Comments:

Packing the GPU and CPU in one package, will make heat management crucial. You may do better only using one or the other. Since both External GPUs will reserve a thread and the internal GPU will as well, 3 CPU threads will be used just to support GPUs. So only one CPU thread could be used in any case.

The Athalons are based on a generation back CPU so a second generation Athlon is using the first generation Zen CPU.

(Unasked for advice: I would get a third Gen Zen, and just use the external GPUs. the Third gen is much faster at F@H, it better implements AVX256)

[berserkre]

Sorry, I meant I was going to ONLY use the integrated GPU on the Athlon because I would assume it's going to be more efficient and productive than a couple Gen 1 Ryzen cores. Just wanted to make the most efficient use of space and power. (I've got an 80+ Gold 650 watt psu I'll be using)
My main rig is a Ryzen 9, and I fold with 8 threads on it and my 1080 Ti off and on. I was just going to build a rig dedicated to nothing but Folding@home, and that's what this post was about. I was just trying to see if anyone had performance numbers on the Athlon integrated GPU. If it isn't that great I'll just stick with the Core i3 6100 rig I have sitting here and find a 2nd gpu for it. (I've also been hunting for info on whether or not AMD is going to release an Athlon chip based on 2nd gen Ryzen, but can't find any info on that either)

[bruce]

The 240GE is designed for a laptop. As a general rule, the performance of chips of that nature are really intentionally performance-limited so they don't deplete the battery rapidly as opposed to producing floating point performance. You won't be happy with this chip.

The GPU has only 192 shaders that can work in parallel. It's an entry-level device (Vega 3) with a GFLOPS rating of 384 whereas the ones with the Ryzen brand name (RX Vega 8 or 11) have several times as many shaders and produce several times that performance for virtually the same power draw. I'm not sure which discrete GPU you're considering but compare the shader-count and the GFLOPS rating for a rough guess of relative performance.

[Frontiers]

AM4 200-240GE Athlons have only 4 PCIe lanes to 1st x16 PCIe slot, some Asus boards had bioses with unlocked 8 PCIe lanes for Ahlons (but they may be closed now, should check), but again all lanes routed only to 1st x16 PCIe slot without bifurcation to 2nd x16 slot.
All onchip iGPUs are weaker in compute than even 1050/1050ti thus no bothering with iGPUs - too little flops for desktops and too much noise, heat and thermal past drying for laptops for 24/7 operations.
i3 6100 have all 16 PCIe lanes and should be enough for driving 2 GPUs, but case should be big and good vented else open stand with support frame for GPUs.

[berserkre]

I ran across this on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/foldingathome/ ... sing_only/
My point with thinking about this processor was that I wanted to just use a single tower, and I'd only have enough space for 2 dedicated gpus, and this would add a 3rd. (the cpu cores would be dedicated to the gpus)
As it stands, I just bought a 2060 on Ebay and will use the Core i3 6100 system for my dedicated rig. (Also will have a GTX 950 in it, but that will be getting replaced as well)