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Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).
by karangoeluw 8y ago
Honest 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.
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- 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.