There has always been a certain amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IT vendors sow as they try to protect their positions in markets that they participate in. But there is also a lot of straight-up misunderstanding among those vendors as well as the people who work at the companies that acquire IT hardware, software, and services.
And thus, these persistent myths need to be debunked from time to time. And it doesn’t take explosives to do the debunking, although we admit that would make it fun. We will leave that to special effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who hosted the canonical MythBusters show from 2003 through 2017 and who debunked 1,050 myths in 248 episodes with 900 explosions.
The Next Platform sat down with Lynn Comp, vice president in AMD’s server business unit, to talk about datacenter compute myths and debunk them. Here are the first five:
- Myth 1: Epyc processors from AMD can’t run all X86 workloads.
- Myth 2: Thermal design point, or TDP, is the be-all, end-all of measuring power for comparing CPUs.
- Myth 3: The ARM architecture is the best way to get low power and energy efficient compute.
- Myth 4: You have to choose between performance and efficiency – you can’t have both.
- Myth 5: Simultaneous Multi-Threading, or SMT, is “legacy X86 baggage” left over from the days before multi-core CPUs. The benefits of SMT are not worth it given the security risks or the unpredictable per core performance inherent in sharing threads on a core.
You undoubtedly have your own opinions, so don’t be shy about commenting after watching the conversation.
This content was sponsored by AMD.