My rack is finished for now (because I'm out of money).
Last time I posted I had some jank cables going through the rack and now we're using patch panels with color coordinated cables!
But as is tradition, I'm thinking about upgrades and I'm looking at that 1U filler panel. A mini PC with a 5060ti 16gb or maybe a 5070 12gb would be pretty sick to move my AI slop generating into my tiny rack.
I'm also thinking about the PI cluster at the top. Currently that's running a Kubernetes cluster that I'm trying to learn on. They're all PI4 4GB, so I was going to start replacing them with PI5 8/16GB. Would those be better price/performance for mostly coding tasks? Or maybe a discord bot for shitposting.
Thoughts? MiniPC recs? Wanna bully me for using AI? Please do!
I think the mainboard from the Framework Desktop meets your requirements: https://frame.work/au/en/products/framework-desktop-mainboard-amd-ryzen-ai-max-300-series?v=FRAFMK0002
Pretty sure that's a x4 PCIe slot (admittedly PCIe 5x4, but not many video cards speak PCIe5), would totally trade a usb4 for a x8, but these laptop chips are pretty constrained lanes wise.
It's PCIe 4.0 :(
Indeed. I read Strix Halo only has 16 4.0 PCIe lanes in addition to its USB4, which is resonable given this isn't supposed to be paired with discrete graphics. But I'd happily trade an NVMe slot (still leaving one) for x8.
One of the links to a CCD could theoretically be wired to a GPU, right? Kinda like how EPYC can switch its IO between infinity fabric for 2P servers, and extra PCIe in 1P configurations. But I doubt we'll ever see such a product.
Boo! Silly me thinking DDR5 implied PCIe5, what a shame.
Feels like they're testing the waters with Halo, hopefully a loud 'waters great, dive in' signal gets through and we get something a bit fitter for desktop use, maybe with more memory (and bandwidth) next gen. Still, gotta love the power usage, makes for one hell of a NAS / AI inference server (and inference isn't that fussy about PCIe bandwidth, hell eGPU works fine as long as the model / expert fits in VRAM.
Rumor is it’s successor is 384 bit, and after that their designs are even more modular:
https://www.techpowerup.com/340372/amds-next-gen-udna-four-die-sizes-one-potential-96-cu-flagship
Hybrid inference prompt processing actually is pretty sensitive to PCIe bandwidth, unfortunately, but again I don’t think many people intend on hanging an AMD GPU off these Strix Halo boards, lol.