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The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores
- jchw 8y agoI'm very excited for AMD and their market successes lately. I never wanted a world controlled by Intel, and even if all my computers are Intel at the moment I feel the world benefits from this competition. That being said... Processor pre-orders? I had No idea that was a thing. Hope you get a QA discount. It doesn't talk about sockets but for sake of preorderers I hope it's compatible with original threadripper boards. edit: Actually it does, and they mention it's compatible with existing main boards too. I missed that this was multiple pages.
- jaxtellerSoA 8y ago> It doesn't talk about sockets but for sake of preorderers I hope it's compatible with original threadripper boards. AMD has already committed to using the same socket until 2020.
- dbatten 8y agoThis alone is a great reason to run AMD...
- geezerjay 8y ago2020 is currently just 18 months ahead. In the consumer's pov that means close to nothing. Heck, I assume they would not be able to change within that time frame even if they wanted to.
- jaxtellerSoA 8y agoThe commitment was made over a year ago when Ryzen was first released. Basically it was a guarantee if you were going to upgrade you processor in the next 3 years you wouldn't have to get a new motherboard. A moderate upgrader would get 1 upgrade out of this deal, an aggressive upgrader (gets ever new chip), would get 3 upgrades. Someone who is conservative and only plans to upgrade ever 5 years or so would see no benefit. However, Intel seems to change the socket every. damn. time.
- skgoa 8y ago> Someone who is conservative and only plans to upgrade ever 5 years or so would see no benefit. I disagree based on my personal experience. The CPU upgrade path for my current desktop computer ended roughly a year after I bought it, even though that CPU generation had been introduced very recently by Intel. I got a relatively high-end CPU, so upgrading to anything but the highest-end CPUs of that generation doesn't really make sense from a performance point of view. Yet those still cost a surprising amount of money today and offer worse performance than the midrange options of newer generations. Simply put, extending the lifetime and thus upgrade path out by at least 150% means that the options available 5 years down the line will be 150% "better", even though no CPUs for that socket might even be in production anymore at that time. For me that seems like a significant advantage.
- AboutTheWhisles 8y agoWhat is strange about pre-ordering hardware that might initially be in short supply? Pre-orders don't make sense in the case of downloadable games, where there is no scarcity.
- wmf 8y agoPre-ordering a product that hasn't been reviewed and benchmarked means you could get something much worse than you expect. For example, there may be apps that can't take advantage of 32 cores so you could spend $1,800 to get no benefit.
- some_account 8y agoNot to mention that with so many cores, if they want to read and write to disk, the disk is going to be a huge bottleneck.
- llampx 8y agoRight, they could just pay the same money to get a 10-core processor from Intel.
- stuckinarut 8y agoyou get bonuses and you get to annoy gamers. that's 1 good reason to preorder, plus some bonuses that tend to be lame.
- AboutTheWhisles 8y agoAre you implying you make poor financial decisions because you feel that it annoys other people?
- paulmd 8y agoIt's "compatible" in the sense that it plugs in and runs, but the 32-core processors are going to push the VRMs on all existing boards right to the limit, even at base clocks. After all, it's at least 70% more power than the first gen, and probably higher (most 2000-series Ryzens bust through their official TDP pretty readily). Turbos are going to be pretty iffy under sustained load, let alone Precision Boost and XFR, which are (iirc) enabled by default. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE AMD is shipping all the review kits with an unspecified "add-on VRM cooling kit" to try and help that, and there are second-gen X399 boards coming out with 16 phases (up from 6-8 in the first gen).
- InTheArena 8y agoGiven Intel's struggles around their process shrink, AMD may have come up with the perfect product at the perfect time. You can already see their effect with Intel finally adding more cores to their chips to try and stay competitive. I do think that Intel will manage to get silicon out a bit earlier then their current end of CY19, but if they don't, TR and Ryzen may be the default go-to for manufacturers.
- agumonkey 8y agoThere's also Samsung hurting intel image a lot. They became the most profitable silicon~ company (due to loads of memory) and they are head to head with intel in transistor process (near EUV ready).
- florakel 8y agoIt is time to give AMD a chance. Intel is plagued by problems with the 10nm process technology resulting in no significant innovation on their CPUs' performance or power consumption for over two years now. And just recently they pushed their 10nm products even further back to the second half of 2019. AMD might have the first 7nm CPUs out by then. Of course process technologies are not easily comparable between fabs but it is still crazy to see Intel starting to fall behind in process technology - a game they dominated for decades.
- mbell 8y ago> It is time to give AMD a chance. Intel is plagued by problems with the 10nm process technology resulting in no significant innovation on their CPUs' performance or power consumption for over two years now. The difference between 14nm and 14nm+++ is pretty close to a full node step... > And just recently they pushed their 10nm products even further back to the second half of 2019. AMD might have the first 7nm CPUs out by then. Of course process technologies are not easily comparable between fabs but it is still crazy to see Intel starting to fall behind in process technology - a game they dominated for decades. The numbers used for process 'sizes' don't really hold any meaning anymore and can't be directly compared. Intel's 14nm is 'better' in almost every metric than other fabs 10nm process. Intel's 10nm process is expected to be similarly comparable to other fabs 7nm. Intel isn't really behind on process tech, but the competition has closed the gap considerably.
- h4b4n3r0 8y agoThat pricing is actually more reasonable than I was expecting. I might get myself a 32 core quad GPU workstation. Unthinkable even just a year ago.
- Iwan-Zotow 8y agoGood god! Why on earth you need 32 core quad GPU workstation?
- nickthemagicman 8y agoBecause it's awesome.
- distantsounds 8y agoCinema4D and Blender are both very CPU intensive as well as taxing on the GPU.
- jadbox 8y agoBlender 2.8 Eevee is reducing rendering by factor of 100, with a modest reduction of quality. It's basically using game rendering techniques, but instead of catering to realtime, it'll take a couple seconds to produce a frame. It's almost entirely GPU driven, so in the future there may not be a need to really go full Threadripper unless you use Cycles daily.
- dragontamer 8y agoIf you want to use Cycles for animations, you'll probably need the full Threadripper. Cycles is easily 5+ minutes a frame, maybe 20+ minutes on a threadripper if you have an interior scene or something hard to light. Even with Cycle's denoiser, you need a lot of rays to get a decent animation. Even a short 10-second animation through Cycles will take multiple days to render on a Threadripper.
- dostres 8y agoDeep Learning, once you’ve got enough GPUs you end up bottlenecking on the CPU.
- throwaway42342 8y agoImagine what'd happen what'll happen once AMD starts competing with Nvidia (for AI stuff).
- swarnie_ 8y agoThat TR 1900X SKU looks like an Intel killer for its target audience.
- 013a 8y agoAnd you can already buy it today (AMD 1xxx chips are Zen 1, already on the market).
- paulmd 8y agoNot really, it's kind of a weird entry in the lineup. Due to the dual-NUMA layout of TR it's essentially a pair of 4-cores smushed together, which is essentially the worst of all worlds. Desktop users will be better off using the 2700X (same number of cores but on a single NUMA node, and higher clocks), high-core-count users will be better off with the 1920X/1950X or the 2920X/2950X. The sole advantage is that it's a lot of PCIe lanes for the money, so it can make sense for storage builds that want to address a lot of NVMe, or GPU compute builds that need very little CPU horsepower. Also, like all TR boards, the motherboards are extortionate. They start at about $350 and go up from there. And that doesn't even buy you a futureproof system - the higher core counts on the TR 2000 series mean that first-gen boards likely won't be able to turbo the new processors, you're running base-clocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE
- floatboth 8y ago> They start at about $350 and go up from there That's an excellent deal compared to the Talos POWER9 boards :)
- dragontamer 8y ago> The sole advantage is that it's a lot of PCIe lanes for the money, so it can make sense for storage builds that want to address a lot of NVMe, or GPU compute builds that need very little CPU horsepower. That's what I was thinking. The 1900x looks useful for quad-GPU Redshift rendering setups. Its certainly not "mainstream". The 1920x / 2920x is far better bang for your buck. But the price from AMD scales very well. If you're willing to spend bigger bucks on cooling, the 2990WX is great. But 250W TDP is going to be a tough-one to design around. Custom-cooling is probably the answer. Enermax's TR4 AIO turned out to be all sorts of awful, unfortunately. And Noctua's Air coolers cap out at 180W TDP designs.
- whatever1 8y agoBloody hell, this processor has more cores than the dual socket Xeon HPCs that my lab bought 2 years ago. Amazing. Honest question: Isn't the memory throughput an issue when you try to feed 32 hungry processors?
- adreamingsoul 8y agoYes, hopefully the motherboard manufactures take that seriously.
- Symmetry 8y agoWell, it's got four fairly fast memory channels but yes, you'll probably tend to be more memory limited with this guy - though the 64 MB of L3 should help in many cases.
- valarauca1 8y agoFor TR kind of. In the newer models only half the cores have direct access to a DDR channel. This shows in memory bounded benchmarks, but Epyc (server line) elevates this problem by have 8 (!!) memory channels, instead of the consumer TR’s 4. Ultimately it depends on how cache friendly your workload is. The 32c/64t is kind of a marketting gimmick selling binned Eypcs. If your doing memory bound HPC consider the 16c/32t model for roughly equal performance at a lower price.
- ramshanker 8y agoGo AMD Go. Ryzen is default choice now for me and my brother. This pushes even more people toward DEFAULT RED.
- mizzack 8y agoRoughly linear pricing per core? What is this wizardry?
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago> Roughly linear pricing per core? What is this wizardry? It's called "marketing", and it's definitely not limited by the laws of physics as we know them. You too can learn the ways of marketing, but it comes at a very steep price: your eternal soul. (JK, that's sales.)
- montalbano 8y agoI think the modularity of the manufacturing process helps too.
- geezerjay 8y agoModularity helps cutting production costs, but that's just a lower bound. Prices are set based on marketing strategies and on how much the company is able to get for a product.
- snovv_crash 8y agoWith a monolithic die that lower bound is not linear though: the bigger the die, the higher a chance of defects and the rarer the parts that don't need to have sections fused off. With a modular design the lower bound is, indeed, linear, allowing AMD to severely undercut Intel.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoCurious that there's quad-channel DDR4. AMD's similar Epyc processors that have four chips on the module are octal-channel (because there's a dual-channel controller on each chip). Won't these therefore perform worse than they should?
- Symmetry 8y agoUltimately they're limited by the number of pins that the socket they use has, even if the silicon could support more channels. They want to be able to maintain socket compatibility and they want to have some SKUs with just 2 working dies so 4 channels it remains.
- Proven 8y agoThe coolest model uses up to 105W. I'll give them a call when I need a heater. For now I think I'll stick with my power saving Intel CPU.
- vbezhenar 8y agoWhile I can see Intel's leadership in single-core performance with 6 cores (overclocked 8700K can have 5+ GHz and future flagships probably will be even faster with 8 cores), at high-core workstation AMD is a winner, hands down. Competition is good.
- dev_dull 8y agoAMD has always had great OC performance but my impression is that they have been power hogs. Is that incorrect or has it changed?
- sigi45 8y agoCPU wise they are holy shit close. GPU wise not that much.
- iforgotpassword 8y agoThey had their ups and downs. The athlon 64 was a masterpiece in both performance and power consumption, in part because they made power management an integral part of the platform not just for laptops. At the time it was released Intel was busy pushing the pentium 4 to its limits, making it a great replacement for central heating during winter. Then Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture and while bulldozer (iirc) improved in that regard again Intel was still ahead, especially as bulldozer sucked pretty much in every other regard. Ryzen seems to be about on par with current Intel CPUs (performance per watt), depending on benchmark.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago> Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture Funny thing is that Core, AFAIK, came from a separate laptop chip branch. For 64 bits Intel was betting on Itanium, which crashed and burned like iAPX-432 did before. And so Intel once again was forced to stay on the 8080 treadmill ...
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
- gt_ 8y agoIt may be of no concern to many, but 3D artists constantly express problems with filling DIMM slots when using Threadrippers. Supposedly, 128 GB RAM is only reliable on a couple of motherboards. I just constantly read these stories on forums. (And to be sure, these aren’t situations where users were mixing RAM sets)
- sounds 8y agoI've seen that as well. I believe it boils down to a few AMD motherboard integrators that have rushed out products that are marginal - they work ok for simple use cases, but maxing them out reveals some edge cases they didn't work out. The solution, of course, is to name them. Can you share which motherboards you've seen people complaining about?
- dragontamer 8y agoAMD's memory controller has worse compatibility compared to Intel's. AMD's 1st Gen Ryzen was known to have issues with Hynix dies. Remember: DDR4 goes straight to the CPU these days. I'm fairly certain that motherboard makers can make a simple wire connection between the DDR4 pins and the CPU itself without much issue. https://community.amd.com/thread/217871 https://community.amd.com/thread/217871 The AMD Community knows to avoid Hynix and to buy Samsung. Hynix did improve with some BIOS updates (in particular: increasing V_soc voltage to 1.1 and other tricks). Update your BIOS if you have any issues. Zen+ dies have better DDR4 compatibility.
- ksec 8y agoHasn't the latest BIOS fix most of the issues? AMD's memory controller is actually from Rambus. The good thing is as more EPYC moves inside DC, there will be lots more memory testing done for AMD.
- zanny 8y agoAt the end of the day we still have the third party me_cleaner to disable the proprietary secret coprocessor on Intel chips while AMD chips still have their equivalent PSP With no first or third party means to disable it. Until such a time I can get the equivalent tool to stop the hardware spyware built into the CPU I can have no enthusiasm or motivation to buy AMD chips. Not to say I want to buy Intel parts - they have nothing to do with third party efforts to nullify their backdoor - but if I were buying a chip tomorrow it would be a begrudging Intel purchase just for me_cleaner.
- dev_dull 8y agoWhat percentage of Intel owners have run the ME-cleaner software? Probably infinitesimally small. If AMD wants to dominate they don’t need to care about your particular use-case at all in fact. They just need to produce the fastest x86 chips at the cheapest price.
- Drdrdrq 8y agoI think the problem is that me-cleaner is a 3rd party solution, I'm not sure I would trust it not to brick my CPU. If AMD solved this, it would be a huge differentiator in my eyes, and I think it would further boost their sales. That said, I suspect there is some deal with 3 letter agencies that doesn't allow them to do that. It doesn't make sense to go against their customers like that otherwise.
- m-p-3 8y agoYou're relying on a third-party community effort to disable their coproprietary processor, which neither company seems to have the will to so by themselves. The best outcome would be to have AMD provide a first-party, auditable option to disable it, otherwise the community will have to do it themselves, which will probably take longer if there's less people using them. Until then, the main focus would be the buy the best performing product, because that's the only real differentiator.
- std_throwaway 8y agoLisa Su sounded like she'd be in the boat to open the PSP source when she was on Reddit. It seems that she only learned later that she can't do that.
- gameswithgo 8y agoDoes anyone in here know if Zen2 is going to implement AVX properly? Threadripper2 will not, all AVX2 instructions will operate at ~SSE speeds, as on past AMD chips.
- ksec 8y agowhere did you get this idea from?
- floatboth 8y agoZen 1 already implements AVX2 properly. It doesn't have 256 bit wide units, so it's 2 clock cycles instead of 1… but that's actually good. Intel's 256 bit units cause horrible downclocking issues: https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequency-scaling/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen... What even is "SSE speeds"?!
- fgonzag 8y agoAt least AMD has consistent AVX performance over prolonged periods of time. Intel starts throttling and downclocking so hard because of heat output that if you are doing any type of mixed workload, its better to skip the AVX instructions since the rest of the workload will suffer due to the extreme performance degradation.
- faragon 8y agoI hope AMD hits hard the low end, too.
- llampx 8y agoMost chips sold these days are server chips or mobile (cellphone or notebook). I hope these gains filter down to the mobile SKUs.
- hsivonen 8y agoDoes this generation still lack the kind of performance counters that are needed for rr?
- harias 8y agoAn image says x series is for gamers. Are modern games that CPU intensive? Don't most major game engines depend almost entirely upon the GPU?
- josteink 8y agoIME gamers are those who most likely are willing to shell out noticeably more money for something which they perceive may potentially improve their game performance. Statistically I’m pretty sure most of them aren’t too scientific about their assumptions. Hence the huge market for lots of HW which no normal person would buy, explicitly targeted at gamers. TLDR: reality doesn’t matter as long as the x CPUs are faster :)
- ionised 8y agoGamers don't buy new CPUs hoping they might be faster, that's ridiculous. They check benchmarks and see what kind of gains they can expect over what they currently have.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kllrnohj 8y agoA non-trivial amount of the game is still on the CPU. All game logic is on the CPU. AI, physics, networking, audio, etc... are all CPU as well (GPU physics never really happened beyond particle effects). Even for rendering it's still the CPU preparing the commands and doing a first-pass curation to minimize rendering load. That said, in this case it's not so much running the games better, as yes the GPU is usually the bottleneck. It's more for gamers that also stream or similar, which is an increasingly popular thing. You can GPU offload it, but that hurts your game performance and GPU encoding quality tends to be relatively fixed and relatively poor. CPU encoding is more flexible and higher quality, and if you've got an extra 8 cores sitting around idle anyway might as well use those instead of eating into the GPU power budget. Also you've got the PCI-E lanes to run things like SLI or multi-GPU along with RAID NVME drives. Threadripper has 60 lanes. Something like an i7-8700k only has 16 PCI-E lanes - you can't even run a single GPU and an NVME drive without multiplexing your PCI-E lanes.
- bhouston 8y agoThis is great. Paying twice as much for a processor with twice as many cores makes a lot of sense in this case. I'm glad it wasn't more. I've got my costs down for a TR machine and it comes in at around $4K CAD.