30 ms·

AMD Reveals Threadripper 2: Up to 32 Cores, 250W, X399 Refresh

340 points by gnufied 8y ago

TylerE 8y ago
Nice I guess, but I wish we could get back to working on getting FASTER cores rather than more of them. Some tasks just don't multi-thread.
- taspeotis 8y ago
  There is some movement in the clock-speed arena [1]. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12893/intels-28core-5-ghz-cpu-coming-in-q4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/12893/intels-28core-5-ghz-cpu...
  - gnufied 8y ago
    That is water chilled phase change cooling, no consumer is going to run a desktop with that kind of cooling. It is as pointless as liquid nitrogen based benchmarks IMO. But I think threadripper 2 should have faster clock speeds regardless. The zen+ 12nm cores that it uses are known to have higher clock speeds.
    - loeg 8y ago
      We've only seen early 32- and 24- core numbers. Hopefully the 16-core part gets a refresh with interesting improvements.
  - fibonacci112358 8y ago
    That is just Intel grabbing some attention from the Threadripper 32 core announcement. It doesn't run at 5Ghz, that was heavily overclocked using a custom cooling system hidden under the table.
    - sliken 8y ago
      I was amused that the heroic efforts by Intel to make AMD looks bad included a 1 horse power (735 watts) pump in the cooler. So sure Intel can make 32 cores go fast, by taking a $10,000 chip (literally, it's a relabel of the Intel Xeon 8180), a giant power supply, impressive cooling, and a 735 watt pump. Still only has 75% of the memory bandwidth/memory channels of the AMD epyc. My main hope with threadripper is that they hit the lower price points that the HEDT intel chips do (I.e. $300-$500).
      - loeg 8y ago
        > My main hope with threadripper is that they hit the lower price points that the HEDT intel chips do (I.e. $300-$500). 1900x sells for ~$450. It's just the 8 core part, though — might as well grab the Ryzen 8 core for way less cost instead unless you need the memory b/w or PCIe lanes.
        sliken 8y ago
        Yeah, that's the one I have my eye on. Was hoping for something more competitive with the i7-7800x or so (6 core, 12 threads, 4 memory channels, 4 GHz, and $390 list).
        loeg 8y ago
        They're pretty similar, but I think 1900x is slightly higher end. (And arguably, better value if you can utilize all the cores.) i7-7800x (Skylake-X) is a sort-of last gen part (Kabylake-X briefly existed in the form of i7-7740X, although only in a 4-core SKU); 4 GHz is its maximum turbo clock (may be only single core); base clock is 3.5. 1900x is current gen, although about to become last-gen; its base clock is 3.8, 4.0 turbo (single core). Same number of memory channels. 33% more cores. AMD's IPC lags Intel a little bit, but not by 25%. Is it worth the $60 (15%) premium? Maybe. When TR2's version of 1900x comes out, TR1 1900x may experience a nice price drop, making it (even) more competitive/affordable.
    - aarongolliver 8y ago
- deepnotderp 8y ago
  > Nice I guess, but I wish we could get back to working on getting FASTER cores rather than more of them. Absolutely. I can double the speed* for a ~10-15X increase in power. But then you won't buy my core ;) *In theory a massive ROB could do this, frontend bottlenecks notwithstanding.
  - DSingularity 8y ago
    Yeah, but good luck renaming registers fast enough. The breakthrough has to come from software. Might need to reimagine our programming/system model altogether.
- kbenson 8y ago
  I was under the impression there was still some advances here, even given the lack of movement in clock speeds. That is, basically being able to pipeline better and service specific operations in fewer cycles or with less latency. I just did a little googling, and came across the Intel Optimation Reference Manual[1], and in Appendix C you can see how latency and throughput changed for architectures over time (e.g. table C-4). Being able to assess all the implications of these is beyond me currently, but if an operation goes from 5 clock cycles to 4 (or it ties up certain transisters less for other ops at the same time, my understanding is this stuff is super complex), that could be a huge boost for specific actions. 1: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
- dahart 8y ago
  > I wish we could get back to working on getting FASTER cores rather than more of them. Some tasks just don't multi-thread. Out of curiosity, are you working on tasks that don't parallelize? There are some for sure, but maybe more that do parallelize, just not trivially or easily? It seems like some people have wanted faster CPUs rather than more parallelism for as long as I can remember... decades. I'm wondering out loud if your wish has ever not been true. I suspect we're stuck with getting more cores until there's a new fundamental breakthrough in physics. We're hitting the wall with CPU speeds, which is why GPUs have been seeing all the growth recently. So I just went looking and found a CS term for hard to parallelize I hadn't heard before: P-complete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-complete Are you working on stuff related to or dependent on any of these examples?
  - deepnotderp 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure OoO execution (which is how single threaded execution is improved in modern CPU cores) won't help with P- complete problems.
    - DSingularity 8y ago
      No not really. One of the biggest attractions of OoO is that it helps you find parallelism at the instruction level. So OoO as an architectural technique is one of the most helpful to problems hard to parallelize. The problem is there is a limited window of instructions where it can be applied. Trying to make one massive processor to find huge amounts of instruction level parallelism is just too hard.
      - kingosticks 8y ago
        Recently on here[0], Arm claimed for every 7% extra resources they put towards increasing the RoB they got 1% performance. Past a certain point it's not worth it. That was their justification for having half the window of rival Samsung chips. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu-unveiled-7nm-powerhouse https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu-unve...
- sosborn 8y ago
  What makes you think people aren’t working on it?
  - deepnotderp 8y ago
    Look at paper topics at major computer architecture conferences like ISCA. There's been a clear shift from single thread architecture research to parallel and low power single thread core research. Not a complete shift of course, but the trend is clear.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Sure they do. My computer has 130 processes on average, even if they are single threaded, they get all nicely distributed across all cores. We are not in MS-DOS where a single application owns the hardware while it runs.
  - loeg 8y ago
    And 129 of them are sleeping 99.95%+ of the time and wouldn't have any noticeable impact on a same-clock single core system anyway.
  - megablast 8y ago
    Ok, but almost every single one of those processes uses a tiny bit of processor time.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  SO many comments missing the entire point in reply to this! It's like none have noticed all processors, even gaming centric ones, come with a bunch of cores these days. Athlon dual core is not exactly a recent innovation, it's archaeology. So all the trivia and "yeah but..." + Gaming and a few other tasks mostly do not benefit from more cores and tend to be extremely GHz dependent. Thanks to massive GPU parallelisation we're left mainly CPU bound. + Even gaming pitched "Extreme" SKUs are disappointing from a GHz PoV + We haven't been in MS-DOS mode or had problems serving 120 OS background processes for a very, very long time indeed. + Power and heat have still gone wildly up despite the switch to cores not GHz So, processor manufacturers hopped off the GHz race for well known reasons. We're now a decade on from that and GHz is about the same like they have stopped thinking about GHz entirely. It's not unreasonable to have hoped to have hit 5GHz without wildly unrepresentative cheats hidden under the desk, or that they would have kept at least a few percent of their research chasing some more Hz as well as cores.
  - Piezoid 8y ago
    I will keep my dual X5690 machine for few more years I guess. The increase IPC of modern CPU is only 33% compared to theses old Xeons. Although, power consumption is another factor to consider...
  - sliken 8y ago
    Sure, we can all wish that physics were to bend to our 'reasonable' expectations. The reality of it is: 1) increasing the clock rate is hard past 3 GHz or so. The memory wall doesn't get any easier, so IPC drops as clock rate increases. Also heat becomes more of an issue. 2) increasing pipeline length (to make it easier to hit higher clocks) has increasing penalties for each branch misprediction. So IPC drops significantly and you end up back where we are today (high IPC, but low clock). 3) shrinking chips to increase the clock rate no longer works. Generally the insulation layer is so thin that making it thinner results in more leaking. 4) Ever increasingly smart cores (to get higher IPC), makes it ever harder to increase the clock. It's actually pretty amazing what happens in 1/3rd of a ns. Voltage changes in silicon actually move quite slowly (relatively to the speed of light) in silicon. Things like looking at a queue of 80 instructions, figuring out which ones have no pending dependencies, and issuing them to the right unit is pretty impressive for 0.33 ns. Moving to 0.2ns makes it worse. So could AMD, Intel, or anyone with a decent CPU team design a 5 GHz cpu... sure, no problem. Would it be any faster for general purpose code running on today's 3 GHz CPUs, unlikely. Personally for my desktop use I don't care about best case performance (0% cache misses), or even average case performance (which is generally way more than I need). I care about worst case performance. Stutters, hangs, lagginess, etc. Linux, enough ram (32GB in my case), GTX 1070, and a M2 for /home. So I welcome the additional cores. Plex transcoding, compressing family videos, making new icons for 10,000 photos, large parallel compiles, etc. Hell sometimes I game while the kids are watching plex streaming and neither of us notice. Thank god for M.2 which killed off the rather serious bottlenecks with SATA.
- sliken 8y ago
  The laws of physics are intruding. Clock rate doubling without prohibitive cost, power, and heat have gone. At 3 GHz electrons don't go very far in 1/3rd of a NS. Chips are getting physically bigger (look at the Epyc). Easy increases in IPC are gone. There's an embarrassing number of transistors available, but few uses for them actually increase performance on things consumers care about. Even GPUs are starting to peter out with lengthening product cycles, smaller improvements, and the increasing tendency to just rename the previous generation with a new name, as if it was actually significantly improved. So CPUs have peaked, most of the low hanging fruit has already been taken. Most easily shown by pretty much all the popular CPUs from the previous generation maxed out at 95 watts or so (desktop or server), but are at 180 watts in the current generation. This happened years ago for desktops, but is hitting laptops (last year), and smart phones (this year or so). GPUs are about half way there, improvements are harder. No more annual updates with 2x the performance on most common use cases. Feature improvements are getting more obscure, gaming sites are using 16x zoom to show the improvements. GTX1170 is rumored to be 50% faster than the GTX1070... from 2 years ago. Specific use ASICs for mining, AI, and similarly narrow use cases are still early in their development. Multiple vendors are showing 2x improvements with each generation, even crazy things like including said chips in consumer devices with tiny power budgets. So basically a core twice as fast isn't happening, it's not because anyone is lazy. There's tons of room for improvement in specific use cases where today's silicon is crazy inefficient. Things like machine learning, software device radios, vision specific processing, and related are seeing rapid improvements.
  - merinowool 8y ago
    I think it is not happening because it doesn't have to. Current CPUs are more than fine for home user and HEDT market is too small to excuse huge spending for research. I think once electron apps will become more popular home users will get power hungry again and that will kick off another cpu revolution.
    - muxr 8y ago
      It's not happening because it's hard to do. Extracting instruction level parallelism is difficult(which is how CPUs gain IPC) and then also the cores have to be wider with exponential complexity. ie. At the point you have to sacrifice 50% of CPU's power efficiency for 5% IPC gain, it's no longer worth it.
- tutanchamun 8y ago
  I remember reading a article here on hn about inverse hyper threading (I don't remember the correct term) where multiple cores would work together to increase single threaded performance (if some cores are idle). I believe some company (not a major player like AMD, Intel or Samsung etc.) claimed they would have solved major problems with previous implementations of this idea or something along those lines. Sounds interesting but is that even possible? Seems like it would have been the perfect fit for AMDs Bulldozer back then due to the chips worse single threaded performance and it's unused multi threaded performance in mainstream software.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Or we could just write more efficient software?
- jcranmer 8y ago
  How? We can't make cores higher frequency, because the power consumption (and heat dissipation) is prohibitive. Doing more per cycle? It's hard to see how more work could be squeezed out of most operations (maybe fdiv or div could be shrunk a few cycles), so you're left with introducing niche instructions or wider, more complex SIMD instructions. Spending more of your time being productive? This requires more accurate branch prediction and other speculative execution, but everyone's freaking out and trying to rip out speculative execution because of a bug that lets you read memory you already have access to. You might be able to squeeze out more performance, but you're looking at 10% gains, not 2× gains.
baybal2 8y ago
I wish I can get threadripper on an mini-ITX motherboard
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  The socket size and accompanying cooler makes that impossible without using laptop-sized (and lower-performing) RAM. There are mATX boards and very small mATX chassis out though.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Have you seen a Threadripper socket? They're freakishly huge (78mm X 105mm). That's a huge chunk of a mini-ITX board (170mm X 170mm) all by itself. There's no way.
  - loeg 8y ago
    And even with an ordinary socket, mITX boards have anemic amounts of PCIe lanes. One of the top selling points of TR is the huge number of PCIe lanes for a non-server part. All ATX boards around launch were required to support the full complement of physical lanes. A mITX configuration would have both anemic PCIe and anemic memory.
    - baybal2 8y ago
      On the other hand, I think TR can work without chipset. Am I right? Would 4 DIMM slots should be enough to saturate all controllers?
      - loeg 8y ago
        Yeah, 4 DIMMs should be sufficient[0], and I guess some mini-ITX boards have 4 slots (e.g., ASRock X299E-ITX/ac). I don't know about TR working without a chipset. This picture[1] suggests the X399 part isn't absolutely essential, but I don't know if there are other considerations that make it essential. Anandtech says[2]: > Unlike Ryzen, the base processor is not a true SoC as the term has evolved over the years. In order to get the compliment of SATA and USB ports, each Threadripper CPU needs to be paired with an X399 chipset. So aside from the CPU PCIe lanes, the 'new' X399 chipset also gets some IO to play with. So, maybe? If you are willing to forgo all the chipset-attached IO, and most PCIe lanes. That could be useful for a niche workflow or maybe a small form-factor desktop workstation that just needs CPU compute. [0]: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x [1]: https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/6/61/x399_platform.png https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/6/61/x399_platform.png [2]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11685/amd-threadripper-x399-motherboards https://www.anandtech.com/show/11685/amd-threadripper-x399-m...
gnufied 8y ago
Kinda excited and can't wait for more details. Key detail from anandtech article: "Threadripper this is still the case: the two now ‘active’ parts of the chip do not have direct memory access. This technically adds latency to the platform, however AMD is of the impression that for all but the most memory bound tasks, this should not be an issue"
- sliken 8y ago
  Sounds pretty much exactly like an Epyc, but with half the memory channels disabled. Seems kinda silly unless it's pretty cheap. After all the 7351P is $750, guarantees ECC, and has twice the memory bandwidth of the threadripper.
  - loeg 8y ago
    7351P is the 16-core Epyc part. The comparable Epyc part is the 32-core 7551P, at $2317 (Newegg). There is definitely differentiation between the server line of chips and the TR "HEDT" chips, other than the crippled memory channels. The TR4 socket sacrifices half of the SP3 memory channels to use for more power. As a result, TR models come with (much) higher stock clocks: 3.0 GHz base -> 3.4 GHz all-core turbo vs Epyc 7551P 2.0 GHz base -> 2.55 GHz all core. So all in all, TR may be better for your workflow than Epyc even at the same core count and price (if clock matters more to you than memory bandwidth). And keep in mind, server boards aren't free.
    - sliken 8y ago
      Not sure I get the value. Unless you like motherboards with LEDs hot glued everywhere. To compare: Epyc 7351P, 2.9GHz, 16 core, 32 threads, 8 memory channels = $799 TR 1920X, 3.5GHz, 12 core, 24 threads, 4 memory channel = $761 TR 1950X, 3.4GHz, 16 core, 32 threads, 4 memory channel = $959 Sure the 1950X is 17% faster clocked, but with half the mem bandwidth and half the mem channels (half the performance for random lookups). So generally the 1950X will be 17% faster with no cache misses, and 50% as fast with all cache misses. Motherboard prices are pretty close, the Epyc, Dual GigE, 3x PCI-e x16, etc = $369. I found some TR boards cheaper, but not with ECC or 3x PCI-e x16. Sure the future thread ripper 2 will be faster... but so will the Epyc 2. Not sure I see the point in the TR.
mastazi 8y ago
Could an admin please fix the title?
megaman22 8y ago
What does this mean compared to say a 2011 i7? I'm frankly amazed my first post-college desktop is soldiering on as a high-end gaming system with gpu, ssd and dram updates
- JoeCoder_ 8y ago
  I first read this as "a soldered-on GPU" :O
- lev99 8y ago
  Generally speaking gaming is single thread intensive on the CPU side, and all parallel task are offloaded to the GPU. This is really more of a workstation or server cpu than a gaming cpu. Edit: Tons of comments are pointing out exceptions. I was hoping to cover that with "generally speaking".
  - p1necone 8y ago
    This is changing (very slowly), more and more games are scaling to higher thread counts (and having more capabilities as a result). Ashes of the Singularity is a good example of a recent game that actually benefits from higher end high core count CPUs. I imagine many genres will never be heavy CPU users though, like low player count competitive FPS and MOBA.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Game studios are already taking advantage of all the cores they can get. This guys go all the way up to 6 hardware ones, depending on availability. https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU
    - loeg 8y ago
      AAA studios, within the last couple years, yeah. But it was certainly the general trend until quite recently, and lower budget games may still be very single threaded on the CPU. Also, many games that do utilize multiple CPU cores do not scale well beyond about 4-6 cores (which makes a lot of sense given the CPUs most gamers have and the priorities of the studios).
dis-sys 8y ago
AMD will have a kill on the market if they can price this 32 core chip around $1999.
- strmpnk 8y ago
  Given that their 1-socket 32c EPYC part (7551P) for $2300, I'd guess it'll be cheaper than 2k unless they can show the two nodes (half the chip) lacking direct memory channel access won't have a problem being fed data.
- daveguy 8y ago
  The top end Threadripper 1 16c/32t was priced at $1k. I don't think this is going to be much more than that. $1499 max is my guess. (Disclaimer: I own AMD stock so I am optimistic)
  - dis-sys 8y ago
    $1499? too good to be true. ;)
  - hoistbypetard 8y ago
    That sounds right to me. At the beginning of the year I found a TR 9150 + a nice motherboard bundled together at a local shop out the door for around $900 before rebates. I'd be a little surprised if this part came in at more than $1500, and not at all surprised to see it available for around $1200 within a couple months.
cmsimike 8y ago
I was just telling myself today that I wasn't going to build a new desktop for a while. Now I'm thinking current desktop might become the new VM server and I get a new gaming/dev box!
- loeg 8y ago
  I got 1st gen TR w/ 16 cores, coming from 2013 4-core Haswell Xeon, and I don't regret it at all.
- onli 8y ago
  I would not count on this being great for gaming. Already the current threadripper is slower in games than a regular Ryzen processor or Intel i5/i7, slower base and turbo clock and added memory latency won't help with that.
  - rubber_duck 8y ago
    It would still be great - just not as good as some alternatives. But if you're doing development spinning up 32 cores is a very realistic proposition (compilers are good at parallelizing work, especially on big projects, spinning up dev cluster locally, etc.) - so you're getting a top productivity machine that can game - if you can afford it and are not interested in chasing gaming benchmarks then I don't see how it wouldn't be great.
    - chrisper 8y ago
      Also virtualmachines!
  - UK-Al05 8y ago
    It doesn't have to be great. It just has to be good enough.
  - josefx 8y ago
    Is it actually slower or is it just the good old Intel compiler at work again? Binaries compiled with it have great performance on Intel chips, but perform a vendor id check and slow down on non Intel chips. As long as Intel CPUs remain dominant game developers will continue to use it.
loser777 8y ago
Just put together a first gen Threadripper build for work a few months ago where out-of-the-box ECC support was too good to pass up for a box with >= 64GiB DRAM. If it’s possible to do a drop-in upgrade (cooling solution not withstanding) then this will be a big deal as we have basically not seen backwards compatibility, especially with such a compelling upgrade, in this part of the market in over a decade from Intel. But 16 to 32 cores is a leap (250W TDP!!!!!), so I wonder what cooling solutions will remain viable (e.g., what about the TR4 edition Noctua cooler made just for TR?)
- dabockster 8y ago
  Cooling Threadripper has been my issue with adopting it as well. The only pre-assembled cooler I've seen is an Enermax AIO block. Otherwise, you have to loop it on your own.
  - loser777 8y ago
    Do you mean for liquid-cooled solutions only? We've been using this Noctua U14S TR4-SP3 (https://noctua.at/en/nh-u14s-tr4-sp3 https://noctua.at/en/nh-u14s-tr4-sp3) on a 1950X (no overclock though) without issues.
    - reilly3000 8y ago
      Oh man, I love that fan. But I misread the height specs on it and I couldn’t fit everything into my case any longer, but my old fan had died. I Ordered a replacement on amazon and the sent out the wrong item twice, so for about 3 weeks I just ran it open and yelled at the cats if they came in my office. Amazon finally gave up on trying to send the right case, and just told me to by it somewhere else, and eventually gave me a refund. I wanted to not take any chances, and the cats were getting terrified of me, so I ordered a ThermalTake core X9. The thing is insane. You could reasonably fit two motherboards and 8 hard drives in it. Don’t try to fit it on a desk. It could almost be a desk. But it is all worth it because I love that fan so much.
    - dabockster 8y ago
qwerty456127 8y ago
Are individual cores in this thing something nearly as powerful as in conventional quad-core desktop/server CPUs? Also can it sleep/downclock individual cores to cool down when its full power is not needed?
- JoshuaJB 8y ago
  Yes. Threadripper is essentially just four well-binned Ryzen 7s tied together with a creative interconnect. The memory bandwidth doesn't increase as proportionally as the core count, but each individual core should operate just as fast as in a typical desktop part. Edit: To answer the second part of the parent question, since the dies are the same, it should have all the same power-saving features available in AMD's laptop and desktop processors.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    Wow. Now I am amazed. Thanks!
    - muxr 8y ago
      Particularly in case of Threadripper, they use cherry picked binned cores so they can actually hit even [slightly] higher clocks than their mainstream cousins. We don't know the Threadripper 2's clocks yet, but last gen TR 1950x could hit 4.2Ghz with Turbo, while the best mainstream Ryzen the 1800x could do 4.1Ghz with Turbo. The Ryzen 2 top dog right now can do 4.25Ghz with Turbo.. so we could perhaps expect TR2 to hit 4.3Ghz+ on Turbo.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Epyc is 4 ryzen 7's. The threadripper (at least the ones shipping today) are two Ryzen 7s. The memory bandwidth does increase proportionally (it's 2x ryzen for threadripper and 4x ryzen for eypc). Individual cores do tend to be lower on the threadripper and epyc because of power/heat limitations, so they tend to be lower clocked and tend to have less cache per core.
    - 8y ago
SubiculumCode 8y ago
Oh lovely competition. How I adore you.
valarauca1 8y ago
2/4 CCX’s lack direct memory access. This is kind of a deal breaker. Threadripper is already memory bound, so the 2 new packages will just be waiting on RAM most the time. Cite: http://en.community.dell.com/cfs-file/__key/telligent-evolution-components-attachments/13-4491-00-00-20-44-47-63/Direct-from-Development-_2D00_-PowerEdge-NUMA-Configs-with-AMD-EPYC-Processors.pdf?forcedownload=true http://en.community.dell.com/cfs-file/__key/telligent-evolut... It would be nice if L3 wasn’t an eviction cache :/
- loeg 8y ago
  > Threadripper is already memory bound This depends heavily on your workflow. If you find TR memory bound, then you want a server part. TR has 4 memory controllers that will each do DDR4-3200 in TR2 per TFA. That should be able to push ~95 GiB/s. What do you compare that against? Intel's highest end HEDT part, i9 7980XE with 18 cores, only supports DDR4-2666 and has the same number of controllers, so it should hit ~80 GiB/s. It retails for $2000. If you want more memory bandwidth you're either buying an even more expensive Xeon, or an AMD Epyc part.
  - valarauca1 8y ago
    >This depends heavily on your workflow. If you find TR memory bound, then you want a server part. TR has 4 memory controllers that will each do DDR4-3200 in TR2 per TFA. That should be able to push ~95 GiB/s. Wrong. You neither read the OP or my citation. Eypc can push 95GiB/s with its 8 channels. TR2 isn't increasing the number of channels, so 2 CCX's (8 cores, 16hyper threads) don't have direct memory access. They have to work with in the inter-chip CCX bus to get memory access. This is going to carry a lot of performance penalties.
    - loeg 8y ago
      > Wrong. What? Are you seriously claiming that a workflow that only uses 4 GiB/s of memory throughput is somehow memory bound on a controller that can push 95 GiB/s? Workflow matters and affects reasonable CPU choice. > You neither read the OP or my citation. Eypc can push 95GiB/s with its 8 channels. Um, also not true. Your link does not include any memory throughput figures supporting your contention that TR is "memory bound." I believe you are totally mistaken about the 95 GiB/s figure for Epyc; see below: TR, quad channel: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x#Memory_controller https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x#Me... Epyc, octa channel: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/epyc/7551p#Memory_controller https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/epyc/7551p#Memory_controlle... Epyc can push 159 GiB/s with DDR4-2666. Per socket: > In a dual-socket configuration, the maximum supported memory doubles to 4 TiB along with the maximum theoretical bandwidth of 317.9 GiB/s. You said: > TR2 isn't increasing the number of channels, so 2 CCX's (8 cores, 16hyper threads) don't have direct memory access. Understood. I have never said otherwise. > This is going to carry a lot of performance penalties. The extra cores will have higher NUMA latency than the memory-local cores, yes. But it does not somehow decrease the total memory bandwidth available across the CPU.
xamarinthrw 8y ago
Somebody told me that cpu prices are like flight prices and your best bet is to buy a bit old. What is the best time to buy a CPU? After how many months does the biggest drop occur?
- viraptor 8y ago
  Check on https://camelcamelcamel.com/ https://camelcamelcamel.com/ There are big dips, buy not related to time since release. I guess it's more about when a new version comes out. Anyway - you can verify whether that happened or not from the chart.
- a_f 8y ago
  If you are shopping for a bit of a CPU than newer models, make sure that the motherboard that fits your requirements is also available. Motherboards tend to get more expensive 2nd hand once they stop being manufactured, as opposed to CPUs.
  - xamarinthrw 8y ago
    I will keep this in mind, good info, thanks
alfalfasprout 8y ago
Problem is windows support for this many cores is still a problem. On a Linux server, sure we've been using multi-socket motherboards w/ high core count CPUs for years. But many applications (eg; Microsoft Edge) still crash w/ 16 cores.
- merinowool 8y ago
  I have Intel's 20 core CPU and never had problems.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    My guess is it's a timing bug that likely exists with any number of cores, but becomes more likely the higher the parallelism.
    - tjoff 8y ago
      My guess is it's something else entirely specific to that system. Really weird to just single out many cores as the cause. It is also just one application that barely has anything to do with windows anyway. There has never been a lack of multiple-cpus nor many-cores (and 16 isn't even many) on windows as the post implies either.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- glenneroo 8y ago
  So all those 1/2 CPU Xeon servers with 16+ cores running Windows and which don't crash are just an anomaly? I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I would guess that your case is the anomaly. Anecdotally speaking, as admin to several 12 and 24 core dual CPU systems running Windows 7/10, my first guess would be that you have some other issue e.g. faulty stick of RAM (have you run memtest86?), a bad driver or the most common cause of crashes: a bug in the code, which only happens in certain specific cases such as "while Skype is running in the background".
- JoshuaJB 8y ago
nottorp 8y ago
Sexy, but for home use I don't need a space heater, on the contrary. What's the fastest (multiple core) you can get these days inside 65 W and who wins there, AMD or Intel?
- Zekio 8y ago
  Pretty sure it is AMD with Ryzen 7 1700 or Ryzen 7 2700 both rated at 65W TDP
  - krylon 8y ago
    I have a Ryzen 1700 at home, and I am very happy with it. The fan that came with it runs very quietly even under heavy load. On workloads that utilize all cores, frequency will drop to 2-2.5 GHz after a while, but for those, the number of cores/threads tends to have a bigger impact on throughput than clock frequency / performance per core.
    - nottorp 8y ago
      Aww thanks - for some reason I had forgotten there are Ryzen 7s at 65 W and was only looking at the 5s...
      - krylon 8y ago
        I was very happy to discover the 1700 back then, because I wanted an 8-core machine really badly (not that I really need one, but hey, I only upgrade my desktop every ~5 years), but I did not want an electric radiator. ;-)
  - fibonacci112358 8y ago
    The Ryzen 2700 is a very nice improvement over 1700, reaches higher frequencies and turbos better. The cooler that comes with the 2700x at least is very nice too and silent.
- muxr 8y ago
  It's only a space heater when it's being used. These CPUs consume very little power when idle. So if you have a task that can leverage 32 cores.. that task should in theory complete that much faster than on your 65W CPU. So the difference in total heat generated shouldn't be too bad.
mpreda 8y ago
Intel leads in AVX/AVX2/AVX512 perf by a large factor over Ryzen CPUs. (A software that makes that manifest is Prime95 (Mersenne primality tester)). Looks like AMD did have to cut something after all.
- bitL 8y ago
  Yeah, it was known Ryzen cut AVX performance in order to lower power consumption. That's how we ended up with 65W 8-core at 14nm.
- sliken 8y ago
  Indeed, but the problem is that often AVX intensive code triggers intel to significantly throttle, or run out of bandwidth from cache or main memory. A surprisingly number of codes don't seem to benefit from the AVX performance. Most notably even on the most FP intensive code don't seem to benefit much from the higher end xeons (with two AVX512 units) over the lower models with a single AVX512 unit. So sure if you compute mercenne primes all day go for it. If you are actually doing some real world work that's vector intensive you are often better off with AMD (per $.) Keep in mind that today's chips have more performance per memory bandwidth then previous generations. So generally memory is a bigger bottleneck and AMD's 1.33x advantage in bandwidth/memory channels is an advantage on a wider variety of codes than the previous generation.
  - paulmd 8y ago
    > Indeed, but the problem is that often AVX intensive code triggers intel to significantly throttle Xeon-W, HEDT, and consumer processors suffer this to a much smaller extent than Skylake-SP does, and this slowdown is already baked into the benchmarks (the deviation from benchmarks only really exists for mixed workloads). In most cases, AVX is still a huge speedup. Also, on consumer+HEDT you can manually configure the AVX offset anyway. Want zero offset, and can handle the power/heat? Go hog wild... > Most notably even on the most FP intensive code don't seem to benefit much from the higher end xeons (with two AVX512 units) over the lower models with a single AVX512 unit. Intel's documentation on some of the HEDT chips was incorrect, the i7s actually have dual AVX512 as well as the i9s. If you were referring to HEDT as "Xeons" that would be why. Otherwise, it might be another documentation issue. The difference should be very clear in something like x265 encoding.
phkahler 8y ago
I was hoping they would put a GPU and HBM2 in place of those non-functional die. Like their old EHP concept that never saw the light of day. With enough HBM you wouldn't even need regular RAM modules and could fit a monster system on an ITX board.
- IronBacon 8y ago
  Well, I would be really happy if they would add a couple of GBs HBM RAM in their next APU. After the Linux 4.17 kernel release I finally ordered a Ryzen 5 2400G to cram it in a tiny mini ITX desktop.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    I just got a 2400G too. I'm in the process of designing a custom 3d printed case - aiming for a very small design. It's a great APU for everyday stuff, but the EHP concept could be a monster in a similar package. Running Fedora Rawhide on it and I still get lockups after a few minutes of BZflag - but it's starting more reliably after the last update.
    - IronBacon 8y ago
      Yeah, not following the HW releases I was surprised the other day to find out the Intel NUC Hades Canyon and how well the integrated GPU+HBM work. I already bought a Streacom F1CWS but I'm already regretting it as, without mods, there's no way that this case can have a decent airflow even if it's allegedly designed to support CPU with 65W TDP. ^__^; I liked the form factor too much tho.
- paulmd 8y ago
  (1) the TR4 socket is too big for mITX, even the "hold my beer" team over at Asrock only could stuff it into mATX. (2) TR4 mobile don't have video outputs, so a GPU would only be useful for compute. If you can't fit a discrete GPU the Hades Canyon NUC is still the best you can do, although AMD is readying their own competitor called "Fenghuang" with a bigger+newer GPU - 28 CU Vega vs the 24 CU Polaris on the Intel (yes, despite Vega branding it's actually based on Polaris).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ksec 8y ago
Are there any reason, why you don't want to use Threadripper for Server? Quad Memory Channel + 32 Core + NVMe Sounds perfect to me for Sever. And it should be priced similar to the Xeon-D 16 Core.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sliken 8y ago
  No guarantee on ECC, half the cores and half the memory bandwidth of epyc.
  - ksec 8y ago
    TR Supports ECC, and many has it running. Of coz if you need the memory bandwidth EPYC is best fit.
MR4D 8y ago
This looks like a fun CPU for running Redis on. At one instance per core, this ..... ok, I'm getting carried away, aren't I ?

340 points by gnufied 8y ago

Nice I guess, but I wish we could get back to working on getting FASTER cores rather than more of them. Some tasks just don't multi-thread.

taspeotis 8y ago
There is some movement in the clock-speed arena [1]. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12893/intels-28core-5-ghz-cpu-coming-in-q4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/12893/intels-28core-5-ghz-cpu...
- gnufied 8y ago
  That is water chilled phase change cooling, no consumer is going to run a desktop with that kind of cooling. It is as pointless as liquid nitrogen based benchmarks IMO. But I think threadripper 2 should have faster clock speeds regardless. The zen+ 12nm cores that it uses are known to have higher clock speeds.
  - loeg 8y ago
    We've only seen early 32- and 24- core numbers. Hopefully the 16-core part gets a refresh with interesting improvements.
- fibonacci112358 8y ago
  That is just Intel grabbing some attention from the Threadripper 32 core announcement. It doesn't run at 5Ghz, that was heavily overclocked using a custom cooling system hidden under the table.
  - sliken 8y ago
    I was amused that the heroic efforts by Intel to make AMD looks bad included a 1 horse power (735 watts) pump in the cooler. So sure Intel can make 32 cores go fast, by taking a $10,000 chip (literally, it's a relabel of the Intel Xeon 8180), a giant power supply, impressive cooling, and a 735 watt pump. Still only has 75% of the memory bandwidth/memory channels of the AMD epyc. My main hope with threadripper is that they hit the lower price points that the HEDT intel chips do (I.e. $300-$500).
    - loeg 8y ago
      > My main hope with threadripper is that they hit the lower price points that the HEDT intel chips do (I.e. $300-$500). 1900x sells for ~$450. It's just the 8 core part, though — might as well grab the Ryzen 8 core for way less cost instead unless you need the memory b/w or PCIe lanes.
      - sliken 8y ago
        Yeah, that's the one I have my eye on. Was hoping for something more competitive with the i7-7800x or so (6 core, 12 threads, 4 memory channels, 4 GHz, and $390 list).
        loeg 8y ago
        They're pretty similar, but I think 1900x is slightly higher end. (And arguably, better value if you can utilize all the cores.) i7-7800x (Skylake-X) is a sort-of last gen part (Kabylake-X briefly existed in the form of i7-7740X, although only in a 4-core SKU); 4 GHz is its maximum turbo clock (may be only single core); base clock is 3.5. 1900x is current gen, although about to become last-gen; its base clock is 3.8, 4.0 turbo (single core). Same number of memory channels. 33% more cores. AMD's IPC lags Intel a little bit, but not by 25%. Is it worth the $60 (15%) premium? Maybe. When TR2's version of 1900x comes out, TR1 1900x may experience a nice price drop, making it (even) more competitive/affordable.
  - aarongolliver 8y ago
deepnotderp 8y ago
> Nice I guess, but I wish we could get back to working on getting FASTER cores rather than more of them. Absolutely. I can double the speed* for a ~10-15X increase in power. But then you won't buy my core ;) *In theory a massive ROB could do this, frontend bottlenecks notwithstanding.
- DSingularity 8y ago
  Yeah, but good luck renaming registers fast enough. The breakthrough has to come from software. Might need to reimagine our programming/system model altogether.
kbenson 8y ago
I was under the impression there was still some advances here, even given the lack of movement in clock speeds. That is, basically being able to pipeline better and service specific operations in fewer cycles or with less latency. I just did a little googling, and came across the Intel Optimation Reference Manual[1], and in Appendix C you can see how latency and throughput changed for architectures over time (e.g. table C-4). Being able to assess all the implications of these is beyond me currently, but if an operation goes from 5 clock cycles to 4 (or it ties up certain transisters less for other ops at the same time, my understanding is this stuff is super complex), that could be a huge boost for specific actions. 1: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
dahart 8y ago
> I wish we could get back to working on getting FASTER cores rather than more of them. Some tasks just don't multi-thread. Out of curiosity, are you working on tasks that don't parallelize? There are some for sure, but maybe more that do parallelize, just not trivially or easily? It seems like some people have wanted faster CPUs rather than more parallelism for as long as I can remember... decades. I'm wondering out loud if your wish has ever not been true. I suspect we're stuck with getting more cores until there's a new fundamental breakthrough in physics. We're hitting the wall with CPU speeds, which is why GPUs have been seeing all the growth recently. So I just went looking and found a CS term for hard to parallelize I hadn't heard before: P-complete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-complete Are you working on stuff related to or dependent on any of these examples?
- deepnotderp 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure OoO execution (which is how single threaded execution is improved in modern CPU cores) won't help with P- complete problems.
  - DSingularity 8y ago
    No not really. One of the biggest attractions of OoO is that it helps you find parallelism at the instruction level. So OoO as an architectural technique is one of the most helpful to problems hard to parallelize. The problem is there is a limited window of instructions where it can be applied. Trying to make one massive processor to find huge amounts of instruction level parallelism is just too hard.
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      Recently on here[0], Arm claimed for every 7% extra resources they put towards increasing the RoB they got 1% performance. Past a certain point it's not worth it. That was their justification for having half the window of rival Samsung chips. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu-unveiled-7nm-powerhouse https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu-unve...
sosborn 8y ago
What makes you think people aren’t working on it?
- deepnotderp 8y ago
  Look at paper topics at major computer architecture conferences like ISCA. There's been a clear shift from single thread architecture research to parallel and low power single thread core research. Not a complete shift of course, but the trend is clear.
pjmlp 8y ago
Sure they do. My computer has 130 processes on average, even if they are single threaded, they get all nicely distributed across all cores. We are not in MS-DOS where a single application owns the hardware while it runs.
- loeg 8y ago
  And 129 of them are sleeping 99.95%+ of the time and wouldn't have any noticeable impact on a same-clock single core system anyway.
- megablast 8y ago
  Ok, but almost every single one of those processes uses a tiny bit of processor time.
oldcynic 8y ago
SO many comments missing the entire point in reply to this! It's like none have noticed all processors, even gaming centric ones, come with a bunch of cores these days. Athlon dual core is not exactly a recent innovation, it's archaeology. So all the trivia and "yeah but..." + Gaming and a few other tasks mostly do not benefit from more cores and tend to be extremely GHz dependent. Thanks to massive GPU parallelisation we're left mainly CPU bound. + Even gaming pitched "Extreme" SKUs are disappointing from a GHz PoV + We haven't been in MS-DOS mode or had problems serving 120 OS background processes for a very, very long time indeed. + Power and heat have still gone wildly up despite the switch to cores not GHz So, processor manufacturers hopped off the GHz race for well known reasons. We're now a decade on from that and GHz is about the same like they have stopped thinking about GHz entirely. It's not unreasonable to have hoped to have hit 5GHz without wildly unrepresentative cheats hidden under the desk, or that they would have kept at least a few percent of their research chasing some more Hz as well as cores.
- Piezoid 8y ago
  I will keep my dual X5690 machine for few more years I guess. The increase IPC of modern CPU is only 33% compared to theses old Xeons. Although, power consumption is another factor to consider...
- sliken 8y ago
  Sure, we can all wish that physics were to bend to our 'reasonable' expectations. The reality of it is: 1) increasing the clock rate is hard past 3 GHz or so. The memory wall doesn't get any easier, so IPC drops as clock rate increases. Also heat becomes more of an issue. 2) increasing pipeline length (to make it easier to hit higher clocks) has increasing penalties for each branch misprediction. So IPC drops significantly and you end up back where we are today (high IPC, but low clock). 3) shrinking chips to increase the clock rate no longer works. Generally the insulation layer is so thin that making it thinner results in more leaking. 4) Ever increasingly smart cores (to get higher IPC), makes it ever harder to increase the clock. It's actually pretty amazing what happens in 1/3rd of a ns. Voltage changes in silicon actually move quite slowly (relatively to the speed of light) in silicon. Things like looking at a queue of 80 instructions, figuring out which ones have no pending dependencies, and issuing them to the right unit is pretty impressive for 0.33 ns. Moving to 0.2ns makes it worse. So could AMD, Intel, or anyone with a decent CPU team design a 5 GHz cpu... sure, no problem. Would it be any faster for general purpose code running on today's 3 GHz CPUs, unlikely. Personally for my desktop use I don't care about best case performance (0% cache misses), or even average case performance (which is generally way more than I need). I care about worst case performance. Stutters, hangs, lagginess, etc. Linux, enough ram (32GB in my case), GTX 1070, and a M2 for /home. So I welcome the additional cores. Plex transcoding, compressing family videos, making new icons for 10,000 photos, large parallel compiles, etc. Hell sometimes I game while the kids are watching plex streaming and neither of us notice. Thank god for M.2 which killed off the rather serious bottlenecks with SATA.
sliken 8y ago
The laws of physics are intruding. Clock rate doubling without prohibitive cost, power, and heat have gone. At 3 GHz electrons don't go very far in 1/3rd of a NS. Chips are getting physically bigger (look at the Epyc). Easy increases in IPC are gone. There's an embarrassing number of transistors available, but few uses for them actually increase performance on things consumers care about. Even GPUs are starting to peter out with lengthening product cycles, smaller improvements, and the increasing tendency to just rename the previous generation with a new name, as if it was actually significantly improved. So CPUs have peaked, most of the low hanging fruit has already been taken. Most easily shown by pretty much all the popular CPUs from the previous generation maxed out at 95 watts or so (desktop or server), but are at 180 watts in the current generation. This happened years ago for desktops, but is hitting laptops (last year), and smart phones (this year or so). GPUs are about half way there, improvements are harder. No more annual updates with 2x the performance on most common use cases. Feature improvements are getting more obscure, gaming sites are using 16x zoom to show the improvements. GTX1170 is rumored to be 50% faster than the GTX1070... from 2 years ago. Specific use ASICs for mining, AI, and similarly narrow use cases are still early in their development. Multiple vendors are showing 2x improvements with each generation, even crazy things like including said chips in consumer devices with tiny power budgets. So basically a core twice as fast isn't happening, it's not because anyone is lazy. There's tons of room for improvement in specific use cases where today's silicon is crazy inefficient. Things like machine learning, software device radios, vision specific processing, and related are seeing rapid improvements.
- merinowool 8y ago
  I think it is not happening because it doesn't have to. Current CPUs are more than fine for home user and HEDT market is too small to excuse huge spending for research. I think once electron apps will become more popular home users will get power hungry again and that will kick off another cpu revolution.
  - muxr 8y ago
    It's not happening because it's hard to do. Extracting instruction level parallelism is difficult(which is how CPUs gain IPC) and then also the cores have to be wider with exponential complexity. ie. At the point you have to sacrifice 50% of CPU's power efficiency for 5% IPC gain, it's no longer worth it.
tutanchamun 8y ago
I remember reading a article here on hn about inverse hyper threading (I don't remember the correct term) where multiple cores would work together to increase single threaded performance (if some cores are idle). I believe some company (not a major player like AMD, Intel or Samsung etc.) claimed they would have solved major problems with previous implementations of this idea or something along those lines. Sounds interesting but is that even possible? Seems like it would have been the perfect fit for AMDs Bulldozer back then due to the chips worse single threaded performance and it's unused multi threaded performance in mainstream software.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Or we could just write more efficient software?
jcranmer 8y ago
How? We can't make cores higher frequency, because the power consumption (and heat dissipation) is prohibitive. Doing more per cycle? It's hard to see how more work could be squeezed out of most operations (maybe fdiv or div could be shrunk a few cycles), so you're left with introducing niche instructions or wider, more complex SIMD instructions. Spending more of your time being productive? This requires more accurate branch prediction and other speculative execution, but everyone's freaking out and trying to rip out speculative execution because of a bug that lets you read memory you already have access to. You might be able to squeeze out more performance, but you're looking at 10% gains, not 2× gains.

baybal2 8y ago

I wish I can get threadripper on an mini-ITX motherboard

PascLeRasc 8y ago
The socket size and accompanying cooler makes that impossible without using laptop-sized (and lower-performing) RAM. There are mATX boards and very small mATX chassis out though.
Analemma_ 8y ago
Have you seen a Threadripper socket? They're freakishly huge (78mm X 105mm). That's a huge chunk of a mini-ITX board (170mm X 170mm) all by itself. There's no way.
- loeg 8y ago
  And even with an ordinary socket, mITX boards have anemic amounts of PCIe lanes. One of the top selling points of TR is the huge number of PCIe lanes for a non-server part. All ATX boards around launch were required to support the full complement of physical lanes. A mITX configuration would have both anemic PCIe and anemic memory.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    On the other hand, I think TR can work without chipset. Am I right? Would 4 DIMM slots should be enough to saturate all controllers?
    - loeg 8y ago
      Yeah, 4 DIMMs should be sufficient[0], and I guess some mini-ITX boards have 4 slots (e.g., ASRock X299E-ITX/ac). I don't know about TR working without a chipset. This picture[1] suggests the X399 part isn't absolutely essential, but I don't know if there are other considerations that make it essential. Anandtech says[2]: > Unlike Ryzen, the base processor is not a true SoC as the term has evolved over the years. In order to get the compliment of SATA and USB ports, each Threadripper CPU needs to be paired with an X399 chipset. So aside from the CPU PCIe lanes, the 'new' X399 chipset also gets some IO to play with. So, maybe? If you are willing to forgo all the chipset-attached IO, and most PCIe lanes. That could be useful for a niche workflow or maybe a small form-factor desktop workstation that just needs CPU compute. [0]: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x [1]: https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/6/61/x399_platform.png https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/6/61/x399_platform.png [2]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11685/amd-threadripper-x399-motherboards https://www.anandtech.com/show/11685/amd-threadripper-x399-m...

gnufied 8y ago

Kinda excited and can't wait for more details. Key detail from anandtech article: "Threadripper this is still the case: the two now ‘active’ parts of the chip do not have direct memory access. This technically adds latency to the platform, however AMD is of the impression that for all but the most memory bound tasks, this should not be an issue"

sliken 8y ago
Sounds pretty much exactly like an Epyc, but with half the memory channels disabled. Seems kinda silly unless it's pretty cheap. After all the 7351P is $750, guarantees ECC, and has twice the memory bandwidth of the threadripper.
- loeg 8y ago
  7351P is the 16-core Epyc part. The comparable Epyc part is the 32-core 7551P, at $2317 (Newegg). There is definitely differentiation between the server line of chips and the TR "HEDT" chips, other than the crippled memory channels. The TR4 socket sacrifices half of the SP3 memory channels to use for more power. As a result, TR models come with (much) higher stock clocks: 3.0 GHz base -> 3.4 GHz all-core turbo vs Epyc 7551P 2.0 GHz base -> 2.55 GHz all core. So all in all, TR may be better for your workflow than Epyc even at the same core count and price (if clock matters more to you than memory bandwidth). And keep in mind, server boards aren't free.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Not sure I get the value. Unless you like motherboards with LEDs hot glued everywhere. To compare: Epyc 7351P, 2.9GHz, 16 core, 32 threads, 8 memory channels = $799 TR 1920X, 3.5GHz, 12 core, 24 threads, 4 memory channel = $761 TR 1950X, 3.4GHz, 16 core, 32 threads, 4 memory channel = $959 Sure the 1950X is 17% faster clocked, but with half the mem bandwidth and half the mem channels (half the performance for random lookups). So generally the 1950X will be 17% faster with no cache misses, and 50% as fast with all cache misses. Motherboard prices are pretty close, the Epyc, Dual GigE, 3x PCI-e x16, etc = $369. I found some TR boards cheaper, but not with ECC or 3x PCI-e x16. Sure the future thread ripper 2 will be faster... but so will the Epyc 2. Not sure I see the point in the TR.

mastazi 8y ago

Could an admin please fix the title?

megaman22 8y ago

What does this mean compared to say a 2011 i7? I'm frankly amazed my first post-college desktop is soldiering on as a high-end gaming system with gpu, ssd and dram updates

JoeCoder_ 8y ago
I first read this as "a soldered-on GPU" :O
lev99 8y ago
Generally speaking gaming is single thread intensive on the CPU side, and all parallel task are offloaded to the GPU. This is really more of a workstation or server cpu than a gaming cpu. Edit: Tons of comments are pointing out exceptions. I was hoping to cover that with "generally speaking".
- p1necone 8y ago
  This is changing (very slowly), more and more games are scaling to higher thread counts (and having more capabilities as a result). Ashes of the Singularity is a good example of a recent game that actually benefits from higher end high core count CPUs. I imagine many genres will never be heavy CPU users though, like low player count competitive FPS and MOBA.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Game studios are already taking advantage of all the cores they can get. This guys go all the way up to 6 hardware ones, depending on availability. https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU
  - loeg 8y ago
    AAA studios, within the last couple years, yeah. But it was certainly the general trend until quite recently, and lower budget games may still be very single threaded on the CPU. Also, many games that do utilize multiple CPU cores do not scale well beyond about 4-6 cores (which makes a lot of sense given the CPUs most gamers have and the priorities of the studios).

dis-sys 8y ago

AMD will have a kill on the market if they can price this 32 core chip around $1999.

strmpnk 8y ago
Given that their 1-socket 32c EPYC part (7551P) for $2300, I'd guess it'll be cheaper than 2k unless they can show the two nodes (half the chip) lacking direct memory channel access won't have a problem being fed data.
daveguy 8y ago
The top end Threadripper 1 16c/32t was priced at $1k. I don't think this is going to be much more than that. $1499 max is my guess. (Disclaimer: I own AMD stock so I am optimistic)
- dis-sys 8y ago
  $1499? too good to be true. ;)
- hoistbypetard 8y ago
  That sounds right to me. At the beginning of the year I found a TR 9150 + a nice motherboard bundled together at a local shop out the door for around $900 before rebates. I'd be a little surprised if this part came in at more than $1500, and not at all surprised to see it available for around $1200 within a couple months.

cmsimike 8y ago

I was just telling myself today that I wasn't going to build a new desktop for a while. Now I'm thinking current desktop might become the new VM server and I get a new gaming/dev box!

loeg 8y ago
I got 1st gen TR w/ 16 cores, coming from 2013 4-core Haswell Xeon, and I don't regret it at all.
onli 8y ago
I would not count on this being great for gaming. Already the current threadripper is slower in games than a regular Ryzen processor or Intel i5/i7, slower base and turbo clock and added memory latency won't help with that.
- rubber_duck 8y ago
  It would still be great - just not as good as some alternatives. But if you're doing development spinning up 32 cores is a very realistic proposition (compilers are good at parallelizing work, especially on big projects, spinning up dev cluster locally, etc.) - so you're getting a top productivity machine that can game - if you can afford it and are not interested in chasing gaming benchmarks then I don't see how it wouldn't be great.
  - chrisper 8y ago
    Also virtualmachines!
- UK-Al05 8y ago
  It doesn't have to be great. It just has to be good enough.
- josefx 8y ago
  Is it actually slower or is it just the good old Intel compiler at work again? Binaries compiled with it have great performance on Intel chips, but perform a vendor id check and slow down on non Intel chips. As long as Intel CPUs remain dominant game developers will continue to use it.

loser777 8y ago

Just put together a first gen Threadripper build for work a few months ago where out-of-the-box ECC support was too good to pass up for a box with >= 64GiB DRAM. If it’s possible to do a drop-in upgrade (cooling solution not withstanding) then this will be a big deal as we have basically not seen backwards compatibility, especially with such a compelling upgrade, in this part of the market in over a decade from Intel. But 16 to 32 cores is a leap (250W TDP!!!!!), so I wonder what cooling solutions will remain viable (e.g., what about the TR4 edition Noctua cooler made just for TR?)

dabockster 8y ago
Cooling Threadripper has been my issue with adopting it as well. The only pre-assembled cooler I've seen is an Enermax AIO block. Otherwise, you have to loop it on your own.
- loser777 8y ago
  Do you mean for liquid-cooled solutions only? We've been using this Noctua U14S TR4-SP3 (https://noctua.at/en/nh-u14s-tr4-sp3 https://noctua.at/en/nh-u14s-tr4-sp3) on a 1950X (no overclock though) without issues.
  - reilly3000 8y ago
    Oh man, I love that fan. But I misread the height specs on it and I couldn’t fit everything into my case any longer, but my old fan had died. I Ordered a replacement on amazon and the sent out the wrong item twice, so for about 3 weeks I just ran it open and yelled at the cats if they came in my office. Amazon finally gave up on trying to send the right case, and just told me to by it somewhere else, and eventually gave me a refund. I wanted to not take any chances, and the cats were getting terrified of me, so I ordered a ThermalTake core X9. The thing is insane. You could reasonably fit two motherboards and 8 hard drives in it. Don’t try to fit it on a desk. It could almost be a desk. But it is all worth it because I love that fan so much.
  - dabockster 8y ago

qwerty456127 8y ago

Are individual cores in this thing something nearly as powerful as in conventional quad-core desktop/server CPUs? Also can it sleep/downclock individual cores to cool down when its full power is not needed?

JoshuaJB 8y ago
Yes. Threadripper is essentially just four well-binned Ryzen 7s tied together with a creative interconnect. The memory bandwidth doesn't increase as proportionally as the core count, but each individual core should operate just as fast as in a typical desktop part. Edit: To answer the second part of the parent question, since the dies are the same, it should have all the same power-saving features available in AMD's laptop and desktop processors.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Wow. Now I am amazed. Thanks!
  - muxr 8y ago
    Particularly in case of Threadripper, they use cherry picked binned cores so they can actually hit even [slightly] higher clocks than their mainstream cousins. We don't know the Threadripper 2's clocks yet, but last gen TR 1950x could hit 4.2Ghz with Turbo, while the best mainstream Ryzen the 1800x could do 4.1Ghz with Turbo. The Ryzen 2 top dog right now can do 4.25Ghz with Turbo.. so we could perhaps expect TR2 to hit 4.3Ghz+ on Turbo.
- sliken 8y ago
  Epyc is 4 ryzen 7's. The threadripper (at least the ones shipping today) are two Ryzen 7s. The memory bandwidth does increase proportionally (it's 2x ryzen for threadripper and 4x ryzen for eypc). Individual cores do tend to be lower on the threadripper and epyc because of power/heat limitations, so they tend to be lower clocked and tend to have less cache per core.
  - 8y ago

SubiculumCode 8y ago

Oh lovely competition. How I adore you.

valarauca1 8y ago

2/4 CCX’s lack direct memory access. This is kind of a deal breaker. Threadripper is already memory bound, so the 2 new packages will just be waiting on RAM most the time. Cite: http://en.community.dell.com/cfs-file/__key/telligent-evolution-components-attachments/13-4491-00-00-20-44-47-63/Direct-from-Development-_2D00_-PowerEdge-NUMA-Configs-with-AMD-EPYC-Processors.pdf?forcedownload=true http://en.community.dell.com/cfs-file/__key/telligent-evolut... It would be nice if L3 wasn’t an eviction cache :/

loeg 8y ago
> Threadripper is already memory bound This depends heavily on your workflow. If you find TR memory bound, then you want a server part. TR has 4 memory controllers that will each do DDR4-3200 in TR2 per TFA. That should be able to push ~95 GiB/s. What do you compare that against? Intel's highest end HEDT part, i9 7980XE with 18 cores, only supports DDR4-2666 and has the same number of controllers, so it should hit ~80 GiB/s. It retails for $2000. If you want more memory bandwidth you're either buying an even more expensive Xeon, or an AMD Epyc part.
- valarauca1 8y ago
  >This depends heavily on your workflow. If you find TR memory bound, then you want a server part. TR has 4 memory controllers that will each do DDR4-3200 in TR2 per TFA. That should be able to push ~95 GiB/s. Wrong. You neither read the OP or my citation. Eypc can push 95GiB/s with its 8 channels. TR2 isn't increasing the number of channels, so 2 CCX's (8 cores, 16hyper threads) don't have direct memory access. They have to work with in the inter-chip CCX bus to get memory access. This is going to carry a lot of performance penalties.
  - loeg 8y ago
    > Wrong. What? Are you seriously claiming that a workflow that only uses 4 GiB/s of memory throughput is somehow memory bound on a controller that can push 95 GiB/s? Workflow matters and affects reasonable CPU choice. > You neither read the OP or my citation. Eypc can push 95GiB/s with its 8 channels. Um, also not true. Your link does not include any memory throughput figures supporting your contention that TR is "memory bound." I believe you are totally mistaken about the 95 GiB/s figure for Epyc; see below: TR, quad channel: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x#Memory_controller https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/1950x#Me... Epyc, octa channel: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/epyc/7551p#Memory_controller https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/epyc/7551p#Memory_controlle... Epyc can push 159 GiB/s with DDR4-2666. Per socket: > In a dual-socket configuration, the maximum supported memory doubles to 4 TiB along with the maximum theoretical bandwidth of 317.9 GiB/s. You said: > TR2 isn't increasing the number of channels, so 2 CCX's (8 cores, 16hyper threads) don't have direct memory access. Understood. I have never said otherwise. > This is going to carry a lot of performance penalties. The extra cores will have higher NUMA latency than the memory-local cores, yes. But it does not somehow decrease the total memory bandwidth available across the CPU.

xamarinthrw 8y ago

Somebody told me that cpu prices are like flight prices and your best bet is to buy a bit old. What is the best time to buy a CPU? After how many months does the biggest drop occur?

viraptor 8y ago
Check on https://camelcamelcamel.com/ https://camelcamelcamel.com/ There are big dips, buy not related to time since release. I guess it's more about when a new version comes out. Anyway - you can verify whether that happened or not from the chart.
a_f 8y ago
If you are shopping for a bit of a CPU than newer models, make sure that the motherboard that fits your requirements is also available. Motherboards tend to get more expensive 2nd hand once they stop being manufactured, as opposed to CPUs.
- xamarinthrw 8y ago
  I will keep this in mind, good info, thanks

alfalfasprout 8y ago

Problem is windows support for this many cores is still a problem. On a Linux server, sure we've been using multi-socket motherboards w/ high core count CPUs for years. But many applications (eg; Microsoft Edge) still crash w/ 16 cores.

merinowool 8y ago
I have Intel's 20 core CPU and never had problems.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  My guess is it's a timing bug that likely exists with any number of cores, but becomes more likely the higher the parallelism.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    My guess is it's something else entirely specific to that system. Really weird to just single out many cores as the cause. It is also just one application that barely has anything to do with windows anyway. There has never been a lack of multiple-cpus nor many-cores (and 16 isn't even many) on windows as the post implies either.
deleted 8y ago
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glenneroo 8y ago
So all those 1/2 CPU Xeon servers with 16+ cores running Windows and which don't crash are just an anomaly? I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I would guess that your case is the anomaly. Anecdotally speaking, as admin to several 12 and 24 core dual CPU systems running Windows 7/10, my first guess would be that you have some other issue e.g. faulty stick of RAM (have you run memtest86?), a bad driver or the most common cause of crashes: a bug in the code, which only happens in certain specific cases such as "while Skype is running in the background".
JoshuaJB 8y ago

nottorp 8y ago

Sexy, but for home use I don't need a space heater, on the contrary. What's the fastest (multiple core) you can get these days inside 65 W and who wins there, AMD or Intel?

Zekio 8y ago
Pretty sure it is AMD with Ryzen 7 1700 or Ryzen 7 2700 both rated at 65W TDP
- krylon 8y ago
  I have a Ryzen 1700 at home, and I am very happy with it. The fan that came with it runs very quietly even under heavy load. On workloads that utilize all cores, frequency will drop to 2-2.5 GHz after a while, but for those, the number of cores/threads tends to have a bigger impact on throughput than clock frequency / performance per core.
  - nottorp 8y ago
    Aww thanks - for some reason I had forgotten there are Ryzen 7s at 65 W and was only looking at the 5s...
    - krylon 8y ago
      I was very happy to discover the 1700 back then, because I wanted an 8-core machine really badly (not that I really need one, but hey, I only upgrade my desktop every ~5 years), but I did not want an electric radiator. ;-)
- fibonacci112358 8y ago
  The Ryzen 2700 is a very nice improvement over 1700, reaches higher frequencies and turbos better. The cooler that comes with the 2700x at least is very nice too and silent.
muxr 8y ago
It's only a space heater when it's being used. These CPUs consume very little power when idle. So if you have a task that can leverage 32 cores.. that task should in theory complete that much faster than on your 65W CPU. So the difference in total heat generated shouldn't be too bad.

mpreda 8y ago

Intel leads in AVX/AVX2/AVX512 perf by a large factor over Ryzen CPUs. (A software that makes that manifest is Prime95 (Mersenne primality tester)). Looks like AMD did have to cut something after all.

bitL 8y ago
Yeah, it was known Ryzen cut AVX performance in order to lower power consumption. That's how we ended up with 65W 8-core at 14nm.
sliken 8y ago
Indeed, but the problem is that often AVX intensive code triggers intel to significantly throttle, or run out of bandwidth from cache or main memory. A surprisingly number of codes don't seem to benefit from the AVX performance. Most notably even on the most FP intensive code don't seem to benefit much from the higher end xeons (with two AVX512 units) over the lower models with a single AVX512 unit. So sure if you compute mercenne primes all day go for it. If you are actually doing some real world work that's vector intensive you are often better off with AMD (per $.) Keep in mind that today's chips have more performance per memory bandwidth then previous generations. So generally memory is a bigger bottleneck and AMD's 1.33x advantage in bandwidth/memory channels is an advantage on a wider variety of codes than the previous generation.
- paulmd 8y ago
  > Indeed, but the problem is that often AVX intensive code triggers intel to significantly throttle Xeon-W, HEDT, and consumer processors suffer this to a much smaller extent than Skylake-SP does, and this slowdown is already baked into the benchmarks (the deviation from benchmarks only really exists for mixed workloads). In most cases, AVX is still a huge speedup. Also, on consumer+HEDT you can manually configure the AVX offset anyway. Want zero offset, and can handle the power/heat? Go hog wild... > Most notably even on the most FP intensive code don't seem to benefit much from the higher end xeons (with two AVX512 units) over the lower models with a single AVX512 unit. Intel's documentation on some of the HEDT chips was incorrect, the i7s actually have dual AVX512 as well as the i9s. If you were referring to HEDT as "Xeons" that would be why. Otherwise, it might be another documentation issue. The difference should be very clear in something like x265 encoding.

phkahler 8y ago

I was hoping they would put a GPU and HBM2 in place of those non-functional die. Like their old EHP concept that never saw the light of day. With enough HBM you wouldn't even need regular RAM modules and could fit a monster system on an ITX board.

IronBacon 8y ago
Well, I would be really happy if they would add a couple of GBs HBM RAM in their next APU. After the Linux 4.17 kernel release I finally ordered a Ryzen 5 2400G to cram it in a tiny mini ITX desktop.
- phkahler 8y ago
  I just got a 2400G too. I'm in the process of designing a custom 3d printed case - aiming for a very small design. It's a great APU for everyday stuff, but the EHP concept could be a monster in a similar package. Running Fedora Rawhide on it and I still get lockups after a few minutes of BZflag - but it's starting more reliably after the last update.
  - IronBacon 8y ago
    Yeah, not following the HW releases I was surprised the other day to find out the Intel NUC Hades Canyon and how well the integrated GPU+HBM work. I already bought a Streacom F1CWS but I'm already regretting it as, without mods, there's no way that this case can have a decent airflow even if it's allegedly designed to support CPU with 65W TDP. ^__^; I liked the form factor too much tho.
paulmd 8y ago
(1) the TR4 socket is too big for mITX, even the "hold my beer" team over at Asrock only could stuff it into mATX. (2) TR4 mobile don't have video outputs, so a GPU would only be useful for compute. If you can't fit a discrete GPU the Hades Canyon NUC is still the best you can do, although AMD is readying their own competitor called "Fenghuang" with a bigger+newer GPU - 28 CU Vega vs the 24 CU Polaris on the Intel (yes, despite Vega branding it's actually based on Polaris).

deleted 8y ago

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ksec 8y ago

Are there any reason, why you don't want to use Threadripper for Server? Quad Memory Channel + 32 Core + NVMe Sounds perfect to me for Sever. And it should be priced similar to the Xeon-D 16 Core.

deleted 8y ago
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sliken 8y ago
No guarantee on ECC, half the cores and half the memory bandwidth of epyc.
- ksec 8y ago
  TR Supports ECC, and many has it running. Of coz if you need the memory bandwidth EPYC is best fit.

MR4D 8y ago

This looks like a fun CPU for running Redis on. At one instance per core, this ..... ok, I'm getting carried away, aren't I ?