It's extremely frustrating that none of the vendors are taking advantage of the built-in 10Gbe functionality of the new AMD chips. I've seen the same with the embedded options that compete with the Xeon-D. If anyone happens to work in that specific portion of the industry and can comment - I'd be curious if there's a reason other than motherboard mfgs just don't want to invest the time and effort so they slap a 1Gbe intel NIC on the mobo and call it a day.
Little stuff like that makes the AMD option (which SHOULD be cheaper) not cheaper for a lot of applications because now you've got server + NIC vs. just the server from intel.
I recently researched EPYC 7002 boards available via retail channels and found four options: Supermicro, Asrock, Tyan, and Gigabyte. Of these, Asrock and Tyan both offer 10Gbe options. I ended up buying the Asrock board with 10Gbe from Newegg, but haven't hooked it up yet.
Though now that I look at it, the ASRock board is advertising "10G base-T by Intel® X550" -- is this different from the "built-in" functionality you mention?
Yup. AMD has an on-die 10gbe controller that would show up as AMD. Anything that says Intel/Broadcom/realtek/etc are off chip and something the MFG put on the motherboard which adds cost.
Hmm. I'm speculating, but I'd guess that tossing on the same external controller that they've put on a million other motherboards in the past probably actually saves cost, vs. designing something unique to expose the on-die controller.
I wonder what the performance impact is, though. I'd guess (very naively) that an on-die controller would perform better.
My guess is that the Intel Ethernet drivers are seen by the customers as very tried-and-true, and how to tune them is well-documented. AMD's Ethernet drivers are relatively unknown and unproven, and it's easy to imagine that they could perform worse. That could easily make up the difference in cost between an external PHY vs an external MAC+PHY.
I suspect that AMD disabled the 10GbE for EPYC, only enabled for EPYC Embedded. I heard somewhere that AMD want to avoid IP fee for mostly unused feature.
Little stuff like that makes the AMD option (which SHOULD be cheaper) not cheaper for a lot of applications because now you've got server + NIC vs. just the server from intel.