One thing hosts of fast-moving multiplayer games don’t want is jitter.
Jitter is the game industry’s term for an inconsistent user experience. It occurs when what’s known as the tick rate base workload—the frequency with which gamers are updated—differs from one game-player to another.
Keeping this tick rate consistent across gamers isn’t easy. Some games get updated hundreds of times a second.
That explains why global game hosting provider i3D.net recently refreshed its infrastructure stack. The company chose Supermicro MicroBlade servers powered by AMD EPYC 4004 Series processors.
Single-Core Rules
To understand i3D’s choice, it helps to understand how the demands of game hosting differs from those of conventional cloud hosting.
Cloud hyperscalers generally try to pack as many compute cores as possible into the smallest possible space. That’s because they want to support many virtual machines on a single node. To get this result, they buy large servers with lots of cores and plenty of memory.
By contrast, for game hosting providers, it’s single-core performance that rules. These companies want to provide the best possible performance for their users. For this purpose, core count per CPU is relatively unimportant.
One thing that really matters for game hosting is single-core performance. And to control costs, gaming providers typically scale with lots of smaller machines rather than a single big one.
All that’s important for i3D. The company, founded in the Netherlands in 2002, initially rented consumer game servers. In 2018, i3D was acquired by Paris-based Ubisoft, and today it offers not only game online services, but also cloud and compute resources, connectivity services, and colocation via its private data center.
Big Games, Big Systems
i3D planned its rollout in large part to support a new game, “Dune: Awakening.” It’s a massively multiplayer online game.
To provide the needed scale, i3D acquired Supermicro MicroCloud servers powered by AMD EPYC 4464P processors. This CPU, part of AMD’s 4th generation EPYC 4004 series, packs 12 cores, 24 threads and 64MB of cache. Yet its power consumption is just 65 watts, a level that fits most data centers.
Now that the rollout is complete, i3D has found that single-core performance with the new setup on a bare-metal is 52% higher than the previous solution.
As Paul Louvet, i3D’s senior product manager of bare metal, puts it: “AMD has the best performance out there for a very attractive cost.”
Double the Nodes
These AMD processors power i3D’s choice of Supermicro 3U MicroCloud servers with eight nodes (Supermicro model AS -3015MR-H8TNR). Each node has a single AMD CPU. This means i3D can fit 96 nodes in one rack, more than double what they could do before.
The Supermicro chassis also includes dual power supplies, bolstering reliability.
Though the upgrade involved a transition from older servers based on a competitor’s processors, i3D says the shift to AMD was seamless. I3D now has about 1,800 nodes powered by AMD EPYC processors, and it will add even more soon.
Looking ahead, i3D plans to upgrade the Supermicro servers to AMD EPYC 4545P processors. This CPU is a member of AMD’s 5th generation EPYC 4005 series, which offers ‘Zen 5’ data-center processors designed for small businesses and hosted services.
Importantly, these processors offer 16 cores to the prior generation’s 12. That will allow i3D to employ four additional cores for the same power usage.
“That’s incredible,” says Louvet of i3D. “This CPU will allow us to have much better TCO per core.”
Do More:
- Read the AMD case study: i3D.net Boosts Game Hosting with AMD EPYC 4000 Series CPUs
- Learn more about i3D.net
- Explore AMD data-center processors for small business and hosted services: EPYC 4004 Series and EPYC 4005 Series
- Check out Supermicro’s 3U MicroCloud servers