19th of December

Farm status
CPU only
Running Rosetta

Intel GPUs
Four running Rosetta

Nvidia GPUs
Off

Raspberry Pis
Six running Einstein. Three running Einstein and Rosetta (50/50 split).


Other news
Its been a hot and humid week so everything except the Pis have been off. Today is a somewhat cooler 24 degrees C with drizzle on and off (ie 100% humidity). I've fired up a few of the Intel GPU machines and have them doing Rosetta.

I am still waiting for the 2nd Ryzen 5900X to be shipped. The supplier status is "We are expecting a small shipment this week. Once we have confirmed numbers, we will update with an expected new queue position. Queue is just shy of 50% filled since launch". I ordered the second 5900X on the 6th of November so its been six weeks so far. Maybe Santa will bring a new CPU for christmas.


Next year plans
I was thinking of rationalizing the farm a bit and bringing it up to 4 x Ryzen 5900X machines and get rid of the Intel GPU machines completely (6 x i7-8700). That reduces the physical machines while not losing too many CPU cores.

Another area that I would like to look at is an AMD GPU machine or two. Currently there are 4 x Ryzen 5600 with Nvidia GTX 1660Ti in the farm. I haven't used AMD GPUs before due to issues with their drivers under Linux.


Ampere Altra
They are now shipping. Some reviews have started to surface. Apparently the 80 core 3.3Ghz model is faster than an AMD Threadripper at compute performance. I made inquiries about getting one but never heard back from my server supplier. I will have to ask again.