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AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
- karangoeluw 8y agoHonest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).
- crypt0ninja 8y agoI'd use it for home labs or servers.
- ekianjo 8y agoHome servers? In what situation would you ever need 32 cores for home usage? I'm genuinely curious.
- rhencke 8y agoBuild servers, video conversion/streaming, and hosting game servers are use cases that would certainly benefit from this in a hobbyist/home environment.
- afroboy 8y agoVMs
- PuffinBlue 8y agoAnd just to expand on that, I'd like to (for instance) run multiple remote desktops (including a photo editing station), probably a decent plex/emby VM, probably something to do transcoding etc etc. Not to mention dev VMs etc. You can do a lot with one thing and administer that one thing without having lots of individual boxes doing stuff, and for me it'd be way faster and a single cost, so it'd work out as a big improvement. In a 'money is no object have all the time in the world' it would probably be better to have something dedicated to do each task, but that's not that flexible on top of the other drawbacks (cost in money/time).
- zaarn 8y agoVMs, lots of them. Atm I'm running about 15 VMs on about 8 cores in a dedicated box somewhere and it's definitely noticable. I would love to shove some core services at home and have 32 cores to play with to give some more headroom
- ekianjo 8y agoWhy not use containers instead of VMs? You can run about 10x more Docker instances than VMs on the same hardware.
- deadbunny 8y agoBecause contrary to the hype, containers aren't the right solution to everything.
- mileycyrusXOXO 8y agoWhile you are correct that they are not a one size fits all solution, would you care to elaborate to the specifics of this instance?
- deadbunny 8y agoBecause not everything I want to run in best suited (or even available) to linux.
- CorpOverreach 8y agoBecause all of the containers may not be of the same operating system? Networking on containers is also a bit different. There are also reasons for having some more isolation between guest OSes. On my ESXi box at home I have: * A VM that hosts my NAS shares. This does nothing other than host the NAS shares, as I want to be sure no silly experiment of mine interferes with that. * A general-purpose VM, where I do run some containers out of (UniFi controller, Plex, etc) * A VM running Windows Server for my Domain Controller * A secondary vSwtich with isolated no uplink to the rest of the network. This is my mini malware testing lab. * A VM running pfSense that I'll sometimes use to allow selective access out of the isolated vSwtich out to the internet, but not to the rest of the network. Can't do all that with containers.
- bad_login 8y agoI would use it to mine bitcoin and heat my house in winter, I already have a slogan : "Don't be a patsy who pay for heating your place, be paid for it. Order our heating device for just $2999!"
- gaius 8y agoYou jest but this is a thing https://www.networkworld.com/article/2929810/data-center/home-heating-provided-by-cloud-servers-is-now-a-reality.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2929810/data-center/hom...
- Symmetry 8y agoRendering is something I could see people doing at home if that's their hobby.
- ekianjo 8y agoThen the tests in this article are hardly convincing.
- opencl 8y agoHow is the $1800 2990WX outperforming the $1980 i9-7980XE in every rendering test they performed not convincing? There are clearly workloads where the 32 core TR chip does not perform well (probably due to the memory configuration) but it seems pretty good at rendering.
- nv-vn 8y agoThe 2990wx blew everything out of the water in rendering. It's like 37% faster than the 7980xe in the Blender benchmark.
- ekianjo 8y agoFaster with 2x more cores and twice more power consumption. Hardly a win in my book - it means each core is way weaker and power hungry. Intel will easily match that sometimes soon without sweating.
- snovv_crash 8y agoHow much power would an Intel based system need to get that 40% performance boost?
- CarVac 8y agoIf you check Phoronix, they found it doesn't actually take much more power than the 7980XE.
- mrb 8y ago
- jghjg 8y agosome home labs or servers
- carbocation 8y agoI think that most of us who are interested in high core counts are at least hobbyists. For example, I use Monte Carlo simulation to compute the pagerank vector for all of the biomedical literature on PubMed. 32 cores is either 32x faster than 1 core, or lets me improve the precision of my results. Sure, this isn't browsing the web, but it's also not a real research project or a business.
- mywacaday 8y agoAt the very least I guess it would be useful for running multiple VMs
- davidmr 8y agoI wondered that as well. I guess my imagination for uses isn't particularly good, but all the uses i bought my 16 core workstation for (mostly research computing development) would really suffer with the memory performance of the 32 core chip. I don't know enough about video games, but I would naively think that the memory latency would be a big deal there as well. At any rate, I learned a lot from this article. Anandtech's reviews always seem well-written and well-researched.
- cptskippy 8y ago> I don't know enough about video games, but I would naively think that the memory latency would be a big deal there as well. It really depends on what else you're doing. If you're just playing a game then Disk and GPU tend to be the biggest bottlenecks in video gaming. Even a reasonably fast modern CPU is sufficient for most games.
- MrUnderhill 8y agoFor compiling, having many cores is fantastic. Granted, on a workstation, compilation normally just involves a few files (the ones that have changed since the previous build and their dependencies), but when you have to do a full rebuild, it is fantastic to be able to do `make -j16` and watch it chug through 16 files simultaneously. Interestingly, the benchmark in this review shows that the 16-core 2950X compiles Chromium faster than the 32-core 2990WX, presumably this means something other than the thread count becomes a bottleneck after 16 threads or so.
- Hasknewbie 8y ago"this review shows that the 16-core 2950X compiles Chromium faster than the 32-core 2990WX, presumably this means something other than the thread count becomes a bottleneck after 16 threads" The article mentions that, due to the die packaging, only 16 of the cores have direct access to RAM. So for the 32-core version, half the cores are memory-starved and have to go through the 'connected' cores (also impacting these), while the 16-core version doesn't have that problem and can be at 100% for all process loads.
- deng 8y agoI would think that compilation is faster on the 32Core, but linking is much slower.
- znpy 8y agoMight memory access model (UMA vs NUMA) play a role here? AFAIK the TR2950wx has configurable model (can be configured to work in either uma or numa mode) whereas the 2950x only has one mode (can't recall which one at the moment)
- snuxoll 8y agoIt's the opposite, the 2950X can be configured in (fake-)UMA ("distributed" mode in AMD's terms) or NUMA mode but the WX chips are NUMA only.
- compilerdev 8y ago
- chaosbutters314 8y agowith 32 cores, I can run 32 small simulations (e.g. CFD, FEA, etc) in parallel for optimization problems or run 1 medium sized simulation. And anything in between. My ideal workstation likely actually uses ~128 cores but that isn't practical for home use yet. A board with 4 2990wx would be heaven.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jdietrich 8y agoDigital audio workstation workloads are massively multithreaded, with hundreds or thousands of DSP processes. Performance scales almost linearly with core count.
- xzel 8y agoThese recentish AMD core improvements alone have made me considering rebuilding my VST collection for Windows and moving off mac for production. I'm not looking forward to tracking down windows VST versions of tiny apps. I can't imagine spending 3k for another Macbook when I can get way more interesting performance in Windows these days. I'd love to have a desktop for very heavy synth and processing work, freeze those tracks, and then be able to take it on the go with a similarly set up laptop (set up DAW that is, not 32 cores).
- derekdahmer 8y agoI was in a similar position, really tied to all my tools on OS X but didn't want to spent 3k on their desktop line. Instead I built an awesome Hackintosh with 16gb ram, 8 cores, nvme drive and 1080 for like $1600 that runs High Sierra. It's definitely more work to set up initially but pretty low hassle afterwards. No regrets.
- xzel 8y agoYes I'm at the crossroads but I want to be able to have a laptop to take as well and the new mac line up is just not for me. Thats great info that the Hackintosh computers are still kicking because I had mostly ruled that out after not hearing much about them over the past few years. Mind sharing your build? :D
- derekdahmer 8y agoMy build: - Intel 7700k - Geforce 1080 - Asus ROG Strix Z270E - Samsung Evo 960 NVMe The process is much easier than it was years ago - especially if you can find a few people that got it working with the same motherboard. 1) Make a standard install USB 2) Run Clover Configurator on the USB with standard settings + tweaks based on your GPU and motherboard (you can find suggestions on /r/hackintosh and the TonyMac forums) 3) Install and boot 4) Tweak the Clover configuration on the EFI partition to fix any random remaining issues you find like USB or audio.
- mort96 8y agoI'm literally sitting here waiting for glibc to compile, because I need a version with debug symbols, which the version from Arch Linux' repos lacks. Right before that, I compiled valgrind from the git head, because the current release (3.13) doesn't support glibc 2.28. I have compiled Chromium a couple of times for work. It's very apparent that my 2-core 4-thread i5 5200U is a bit too weak; I'd love to be using a 16- or 32-core machine.
- floatboth 8y ago8-core Ryzen is a huge upgrade from an Intel U and doesn't cost nearly as much as 16- and 32-core machines
- zzzcpan 8y agoYou are right, uncovering potential of a system like that is almost impossible for home use. With most software unable to use efficiently even a couple of cores, 32 is certainly something for the future. Personally I'm looking forward to something based on 2200GE for home use.
- elorant 8y agoI'm thinking of buying one to run multiple instances of Selenium with headless Firefox for crawling reasons. Pair it with 128GB RAM and I could easily run 40-50 instances simultaneously.
- Mankaninen 8y agoI think more CPU performance is attractive if you edit photos or movies - something that is typical for a home computer. The reason AMD provides CPU performance through a high core count is because it is power efficient, otherwise a single-core is easier to program.
- bluedino 8y agoVideo editing or 3D rendering.
- florabuzzword 8y agoDoes video editing or After Effects work could as home use yet? Video editing, in terms of cutting and splicing clips, is not going to benefit much from this chip, but a lot of effects rendering will benefit, and basic video editing uses a lot of effects these days. That’s all I’ve got.
- bitL 8y agoMost plugins/filters/effects are single-threaded :-(
- florabuzzword 8y agoYeah don’t get me wrong. They pretty much all are. But, a few key ones aren’t, depending on the host app, and aftermarket plugins have a lot of multi threading support.
- dragontamer 8y agoYes for roughly 8-threads or so. 16-thread Threadripper is mostly idle in my video-editing tests. I mean, its a great processor. But video editing isn't "heavy enough" for me to recommend a 16-core or bigger processor.
- florabuzzword 8y agoAh, not surprised. I have the Intel 8-core. The best upgrade I’ve made for my video editing workstation has been going to 4x GPUs for DaVinci Resolve.
- Coding_Cat 8y agoAny (well written) data analysis code could benefit from the increased core count and high number of memory channels. Any kind of process that's batchable too.
- andrewbinstock 8y agoOne niche application is music composition. When you're writing a score for full orchestra, you need lots of RAM and lots of cores for accurate playback.
- dragontamer 8y agoIt takes roughly 20-minutes to make a SINGLE good frame using Cycles on Blender. Cycles is a raytracer for 3d modeling. If you are making a 30-second animation at 24-frames-per-second, that would be 720 frames, or roughly 240 hours (10 days) of rendering. 30-seconds would be roughly the length of a standard commercial. If you have a computer that is 2x or 4x faster, that cuts the time down to 5 days or 2.5 days. Which is dramatically different. Its mostly a CPU-intensive problem with relatively low RAM bandwidth. (Its RAM-heavy, especially with HDR skymaps. So you need lots of RAM but not necessarily fast RAM).
- omnimus 8y agoOr you buy good graphics card and you blow CPU out of the water. But it is true for render engines like Arnold or Corona CPU is main thing. For cycles get gpu.
- dragontamer 8y agoYou might be surprised. http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snapshot.html http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snaps... The Threadripper 1950x (16-core) is faster than the 1080 Ti in several tests. Fishy Cat for instance is faster on Threadripper, as well as the difficult "Barbershop Interior". With all the updates to Zen2, higher clocks, and now 32-cores, I bet that the 2990wx will be incredible and give GPUs a run for their money. Besides, you'll need a good CPU to handle physics (cloth, fluid, etc. etc.). Not everything can be done on the GPU yet. CPUs also have the benefit that RAM is super-cheap. You can get 64GB of DDR4, but its basically impossible to get that amount of RAM on a GPU. This allows you to run multiple blender instances to handle multiple frames quite easily. A portion of rendering is still single-thread bound, so an animation can be rendered slightly faster if you allocate a blender-instance per NUMA node. If you do have a GPU, you can still have CPU+GPU rendering by simply running Blender twice, once with GPU rendering and a 2nd time for CPU Rendering. With the proper settings, you'll generate .png files for each animation independently, which allows for nearly perfect scaling. Every x399 board I've seen supports quad-GPUs. So you can totally build a beast rig with 4x GPUs + 32 CPU Cores for the best rendering speed possible.
- nv-vn 8y agoIt's funny to me how much range there is in these tests. Some of these are seemingly backwards with better CPUs ranking so much worse and some look completely random. But wow, the performance on these new TR chips is just insane. Never would've guessed that AMD would be this competitive a few years ago, especially not on the CPU front. Looking forward to the upcoming 7nm launch, can't wait to see what's in store.
- iClaudiusX 8y agoIndeed, as noted in the conclusion there is very little middle ground as performance with this particular NUMA structure is bimodal depending on memory access patterns and power consumption of all the supporting hardware. I suppose it makes the most sense to frame this as an iteration of the original Threadripper with all the design compromises that entails to provide backward compatibility with existing motherboards. I'm definitely more excited for the next generation HEDT chips that hopefully have a more balanced layout like Epyc. AMD have certainly come out of the Bulldozer era swinging, and we all benefit from their aggressive pricing.
- bluescarni 8y agoThe test results on Phoronix paint a rather different picture (i.e., the 2990WX being consistently and markedly faster than any other tested processor). My initial gut feeling reading the results on Anandtech is that Window's scheduler may not be able yet to exploit the processor's architecture effectively.
- fooker 8y agoYeah, I remember AMD's bulldozer architecture coming out much worse on Windows based benchmarks.
- Tuna-Fish 8y ago2990WX has a very complex NUMA architecture that costs it a lot of performance if the scheduler doesn't get things right. Linux has been running on and has been heavily optimized for even more complex NUMA systems.
- blattimwind 8y ago> After core counts, the next battle will be on the interconnect. Low power, scalable, and high performance: process node scaling will mean nothing if the interconnect becomes 90% of the total chip power. I think this means that scaling processors to more cores (nodes) in a lightweight-NUMA scheme just isn't going to work. My guess going forward is that the core counts will stay at the current level for quite a while, and that both AMD and Intel will optimize the heck out of their interconnects, using most power budget gains to bolster the actual cores.
- Eochei5h 8y agoAny wins they make in interconnect efficiency could either be used to boost the power budget of existing cores or add even more cores.
- ksec 8y agoIt will also means many consumer software can now optimise from low core count to a 64 Core / 128 Thread scenario. And this is likely be a decade worth of work.
- mastax 8y agoI was amazed at how much power the interconnect was taking on these parts. Even with all the other downsides I was convinced it was the right move, but those power requirements are giving me second (third?) thoughts. The 7nm parts (incl. Ryzen on up) are rumored to use 16-core CCXes, so we should see 64-core EPYC and possibly Threadripper with no worse IC power use. Hopefully they'll make the IC better as well. 7nm EPYC being fabbed on TSMC does give some chance for a big monolithic die. TSMC has a long history making large dies and their 7nm process should be mature enough for decent yields at that point. I am speculating out of my depth, though.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoThe larger the die the worse the yields, and 7nm will have worse yields than previous generations. AMD will go even harder on MCMs because it makes 7nm cost-effective.
- 8y ago
- Filligree 8y agoThe biggest benefit I've found to running a 1950X isn't something I would have expected, but which perhaps I should have. True, it's much faster than my old system for batch processing, but most of the time it's still idle. Even if it's running Chrome flat-out, as far as the 1950X is concerned, that's idle. Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full speed. In practice, that means lower latencies and less jitter, and it's been noticeable. Folklore would have it that single-thread performance is the most important aspect of desktop performance, but that isn't what I've observed. ...it's also useful when I, e.g, decide to run a Factorio server on my desktop.
- mrkgnao 8y ago> Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full speed. I don't understand. From my (admittedly little better than layperson's) knowledge, I'm guessing the cores of most multicore processors have to compete for memory access...? Is there a good search term I can use to help me understand what's going on here?
- Osiris 8y agoThere are 2 dies in the 1950X, each one has 2 memory channels. Thus, it's possible to run a process on one (8-core) die that maxes out the memory bandwidth to it's two local DDR4 channels while the other die still has full bandwidth access to it's own DDR4 channels. Threadripper is able to switch between NUMA (non-uniform memory access) mode and "regular" mode. In NUMA, the OS knows that 2 channels are attached to 1 die and 2 channels on the other, thus allowing lower latencies because the OS knows what RAM to allocate based on which core the process is running on.
- gascan 8y agoAs a bonus, if you are explicitly NUMA & the OS/code does a good job, there's little line contention or resource sharing (e.g., caches) between die.
- drewg123 8y agoIt is interested that the review is not yet finished. The author writes in the comments section: Hey everyone, sorry for leaving a few pages blank right now. Jet lag hit me hard over the weekend from Flash Memory Summit. Will be filling in the blanks and the analysis throughout today. I am disappointed in that, as I was looking forward to reading the test setup and power draw sections, as I have a 2990WX on order, and I'm dithering over what motherboard to get (I'd prefer an older one, which matches the features that I want better... eg, clear support for ECC and no bling) but there is some concern that older motherboards will be too close to the edge in terms of the power draw of the 2990WX.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- barkingcat 8y agoShouldn't they not publish until the review is done? This is really unprofessional - even bloggers have the concept of "only publish finished drafts" or use the scheduled publishing feature that all blogging platforms have nowadays.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hyperbovine 8y agoPresumably the embargo lifted and they were afraid of getting scooped. I agree it's unprofessional but hey probably 90% of their readers are hobbyists.
- mastax 8y agoIn the PC hardware space there is a big push to have something out by the embargo since that's when 80% of the traffic is. It's unfortunate, but I'd rather have an incomplete article than an inaccurate or shallow one. I'd rather have a review posted too soon than no more Anandtech.
- qaq 8y agoThis looks like a nice part for a server
- srcmap 8y agoTwo additional benchmarks I like to see from Anandtech: 1) some VM base tests for these kind of CPU - 32, 64, 128 VM all running some kind of web/db/redis benchmarks inside. 2) Some compilation testing - time the clean build of AOSP, BSD, some very complex linux app - use max jobs setting for parallel compile and time how long it take to finish the jobs. ( measure the over CPU usages at the same time. )
- deng 8y agoThey do a compilation of Chrome in the "Office Tests" section. The 32Core takes about an hour per compile, but the 16Core is actually a bit faster (my guess would be that linking takes longer on the 32 core machine as it's very memory intensive).
- gsnedders 8y agoFWIW, I believe the version they use relies on a version of MSVC where the linker is predominently single-threaded, and linking the final binary ends up as a significant proportion of the time.
- twoodfin 8y agoDoes anyone do multithreaded LTO yet?
- glandium 8y agoGCC and clang do. As a matter of fact, MSVC does too, to some extent (CGTHREADS option, iirc).
- compilerdev 8y agoYes, the issue is the LTCG build, which by default uses 4 threads and with Chromium the compiler hits some pathological issues with such a huge program and it ends up using mostly 1 core and swapping lots of memory.
- MikusR 8y ago
- deng 8y agoThis is the perfect chip for continuous, low-memory number crunching. For everything else... not so much. I mean, this chip consumes 74W when idle, of which almost 90% are spend on the interconnect. That's insane. Most important bit in the review for me: "After core counts, the next battle will be on the interconnect. Low power, scalable, and high performance: process node scaling will mean nothing if the interconnect becomes 90% of the total chip power."
- close04 8y agoMost people used TR for day to day desktop use. This really pushes it into the workstation segment. While efficiency is important, results are even more so.
- Symmetry 8y agoThat's what it consumes when one core is active. Idle should be much lower, though you're right that to the extent you're doing anything on most desktops it's going to be just a few threads.
- Coding_Cat 8y agoWhy do you say low-memory? I got the opposite feeling. I've been drooling over EPYC and TR2 ever since they released the specs for my memory bandwidth limited projects.
- snuxoll 8y agoThe NUMA configuration on TR2 results in two 8-core CCX's without direct memory access, so you still "only" have four memory channels and half the cores have to hop over the infinity fabric to access any of them.
- celrod 8y agoIf that number crunching is highly vectorizable, avx-512 of skylake-x will likely still be faster. Eg, an Intel 7900x is over twice as fast at multiplying big matrices (multithreaded) as an AMD 1950x. Of course, a similarly priced GPU would stomp both whenever CPU-GPU latency isn't much of an issue. Meaning "highly vectorizable number crunching that you can't practically run on a GPU for some reason" is probably fairly niche. In LINPACK the even the 1950x beat the 7980XE on phoronix: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linux-2990wx&num=4 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linu... and I'd have thought LINPACK would really reward AVX... Maybe it isn't optimized to take advantage of it? I love wasting time playing with number crunchinng microbenchmarks, and when you do that avx-512 seems so unassailably impressive, it's surprising to see this not bourne out in larger benchmarks. (Also worth pointing out you need to tell gcc -mprefer-vector-width=512 on top of march=skylake-avx512, otherwise it'll prefer 256 bit vectors). Anyway, those benchmarks definitely support compiling and number crunching. Pretty ideal for stuff like monte carlo.
- faragon 8y agoI would love AMD commercials using Judas Priest's "The Ripper" [1] as music for selling those beasts! :-D [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lriWlHZAy8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lriWlHZAy8A
- unit_circle 8y agoThis article is very dumbed down
- jjuhl 8y agoIt seems performance under Linux is significantly better: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linux-2990wx&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linu...
- MrRadar 8y agoI wonder if this comes down to Linux being more adept at handling "exotic" NUMA configurations compared to (desktop) Windows. Even if the "server" editions of Windows could handle them Microsoft may have left that functionality out of the "desktop" kernels for product segmentation purposes.
- jjuhl 8y agoThere are now Windows server benchmarks available as well (it's just as bad) : https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-server-2990wx&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-...
- std_throwaway 8y agoMaybe Michael Larabel removed the plastic cover first.
- pantalaimon 8y agoThere is also a direct comparison with Windows: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2990wx-linux-windows https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2990wx-l...
- mindviews 8y agoFor those wondering like I was after reading this comment, both the anandtech and phoronix test setups are patched for Spectre.
- celrod 8y agoPhoronix now has Windows 10 vs Linux tests: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2990wx-linux-windows&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2990wx-l... Sure enough, many of the benchmarks feature dramatically better performance on Linux. Michael also writes: "The Windows 10 vs. Linux tests were done out of opportunity with having that Windows installation around without giving it too much thought, but on this 2990WX launch-day it's been surprising to see some of the performance results from some of the Windows publications. Had I known how poorly Windows 10 works on current high core count NUMA environments under some workloads, I would have certainly ran more benchmarks. But that will come in another article then as well as possibly looking at the Windows Server 2016 vs. Linux performance on the 2990WX to see if Windows behaves better there for this NUMA box. So treat this as the introductory article and more Windows vs. Linux benchmarks will be on the way as time allows."
- gok 8y agoThe Chromium compile being faster on 16 cores than 32 cores is pretty weird, given how embarrassingly parallelizable that should be. Wonder if it's out of memory, or if the bottleneck is actually linking.
- compilerdev 8y agoThe Chrome compilation looks really strange indeed, especially with having the results from Phoronix on Linux which show that it's the fastest compiling the Linux kernel. I wonder what kind of Chrome build it's doing - does it use Clang-cl or Visual C++? Does it have LTO (LTCG for VC++) enabled? If it's VC++ with LTCG, for example, the entire code generation and linking is limited to 4 cores by default.
- gsnedders 8y agoIt's Chromium 56 with the default Chromium build-chain. At that point, Chromium required Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 or later. Anand use VS Community 2015.3. IIRC, by default it doesn't have LTCG enabled. By default, release builds are almost entirely statically linked (with a few shared libraries, platform dependent), which makes linking time pretty significant. As a result, it ends up more as a linking benchmark than a compilation benchmark.
- compilerdev 8y agoIan Cutress replied on the article comments that LTCG is indeed used. With LTCG those strange results make sense - it's spending a lot of time on just 4 threads by default - actually majority of the time is on one thread for the Chromium case, it hits some current limitations of the VC++ compiler regarding CPU/memory usage that makes scaling worse for Chromium (but not for smaller programs or with non-LTCG builds). Increasing the number of threads from the default of 4 is possible, but will not help here. The frontend (parsing) work is well parallelized by Ninja, it's probably the reason why the Threadrippers do end up ahead of the faster single-core Intel CPUs.
- glandium 8y ago
- xvf22 8y agoIt seems that they left the plastic cover for at least some of the benchmarks [1]. I can imagine that would limit performance since the CPU would be throttling itself down to keep cool. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/comments/13124/the-amd-threadripper-2990wx-and-2950x-review/611648 https://www.anandtech.com/comments/13124/the-amd-threadrippe...
- vesrah 8y agoYou think they'd either pull the review or place a disclaimer at the start about this, but I agree with what you're thinking (throttling).
- wtallis 8y agoIan re-ran all of the affected tests after discovering the mistake, but he also kept the data for later analysis. Those results aren't in the review yet.
- xvf22 8y agoFair enough, mistakes happen but the comment didn't make it very clear which benchmarks were included. "Me being an idiot and leaving the plastic cover on my cooler, but it completed a set of benchmarks. I pick through the data to see if it was as bad as I expected"
- wtallis 8y ago> but the comment didn't make it very clear which benchmarks were included It made it perfectly clear. You were reading from a list of what wasn't in the review yet: "But here's what there is to look forward to:"
- bitL 8y agoIs there any board that allows 256GB ECC RAM for Threadripper 2? So far for TR I've seen only 128GB; for more EPYC was necessary.
- gavanwoolery 8y agoI wonder how many of these tests (if any) are limited by bad multithreading patterns (see: https://www.arangodb.com/2015/02/comparing-atomic-mutex-rwlocks/ https://www.arangodb.com/2015/02/comparing-atomic-mutex-rwlo...).
- SubiculumCode 8y agoWill there be motherboards to fit two of these chips like in my current dual 6-core Xeon? 64 cores / 128 thread in a single workstation would be insane, and fit in very nicely with my lab :)
- arithma 8y agoHow many cores must a CPU have until it's competitive with GPUs? Those beasts could pretty well open the hell-gates to fully interactive raytracing soon, or not so much? Of course am not expecting THIS processor to be competitive, but with the interest in raytracing, things might get interesting if this trend of more CPU cores keep on piling up.
- Baal 8y agoNot a chance. By the time you get there, GPUs would do it (much) faster. Not to mention that GPUs are likely going to get specialized cores for raytracing (see RTX).
- Arbalest 8y agoCores without memory channels being useless: Unsuprising. Interconnect power, that was a big suprise. Would we be able to get some kind of comparison between this on die interconnect approach and multi-socket power consumption? Two things seem apparent: Multi socket would have fewer thermal issues, but also lower inter-socket performance. For raw performance though, I would guess we will see some rather extreme cooling actually becoming more mainstream in future in the workstation space.
- ece 8y agoAs a long time Gentoo user, switching to even a Ryzen 7 1700 was a big difference, @world recompiles in ~8 hrs instead of 24+ hrs on 4C/8T CPUs.