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64 cores with 128 threads. Hope that comes to threadripper. I love and for bringing back competition to the CPU market. We've bought a ton of amd machines in

64 cores with 128 threads. Hope that comes to threadripper. I love and for bringing back competition to the CPU market. We've bought a ton of amd machines in the last year, great bargains in our space.

ianai 8y ago
I really think this is necessary for exascale computing. The core floodgate would have never opened without Intel getting several kicks in the pants.
- tanderson92 8y ago
  You can do the math but my estimates are that the energy costs would still be too high for exascale with pure-CPU compute. Accelerators are the way anyone actually planning to build an exascale machine is getting there.
  - ianai 8y ago
    I think it’s doable with tightly integrated compute nodes, ie specially engineered.
s3cur3 8y ago
Benchmarks on the 32-core TR are... disappointing, to say the least.[1] If you’re purely compute bound, it can be a win over the 16-core version, but if memory access is a factor, it’s a wash due to the extra hops to memory. And to my mind, there are very few pure-compute applications that wouldn’t benefit more from AVX2 and the like... in which case a cheaper Intel CPU would still wipe the floor with the 32-core chip. I’m a huge fan of the Threadripper concept, just wish they hadn’t neutered the 32-core chip compared to its Epyc counterpart. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-2990wx-and-2950x-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...
- snuxoll 8y ago
  Threadripper’s 4 die variant had to be “neutered” to remain compatible with the TR4 socket without splitting memory bandwidth. The new I/O chiplet would solve that issue entirely, assuming it comes to Threadripper 3.
  - bpye 8y ago
    I was just thinking this. Yes it'll have half the lanes of EPYC still, okay, but now the lanes will be connected to all the dies equally rather than to just 1/2 the dies. This hopefully means Threadripper 3 can perform almost as well as EPYC with just 1/2 the memory bandwidth - that isn't insignificant but it's a big improvement on Threadripper 2.
    - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
      An interesting point is that TR owners are much more likely to run their RAM at higher, out of JEDEC spec speeds, so the difference can be a lot smaller than 1/2.
- 5436436347 8y ago
  Those (Anandtech) benchmarks were performed on Windows. All threadripper benchmarks on Linux show that it is nowhere near as awful a performer as on Windows and most compute workloads do scale okay. Seen multiple ideas thrown around like Windows not being NUMA aware with this processor or just plain bad core scheduling
  - s3cur3 8y ago
    They did a follow up changing the scheduling policy for thread 0 (again, still on Windows) and it didn’t make a difference for almost all their workloads: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13446/the-quiz-on-cpu-0-playing-scheduler-wars-with-amds-threadripper-2990wx https://www.anandtech.com/show/13446/the-quiz-on-cpu-0-playi...
    - 8y ago

ianai 8y ago

I really think this is necessary for exascale computing. The core floodgate would have never opened without Intel getting several kicks in the pants.

tanderson92 8y ago
You can do the math but my estimates are that the energy costs would still be too high for exascale with pure-CPU compute. Accelerators are the way anyone actually planning to build an exascale machine is getting there.
- ianai 8y ago
  I think it’s doable with tightly integrated compute nodes, ie specially engineered.

s3cur3 8y ago

Benchmarks on the 32-core TR are... disappointing, to say the least.[1] If you’re purely compute bound, it can be a win over the 16-core version, but if memory access is a factor, it’s a wash due to the extra hops to memory. And to my mind, there are very few pure-compute applications that wouldn’t benefit more from AVX2 and the like... in which case a cheaper Intel CPU would still wipe the floor with the 32-core chip. I’m a huge fan of the Threadripper concept, just wish they hadn’t neutered the 32-core chip compared to its Epyc counterpart. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-2990wx-and-2950x-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...

snuxoll 8y ago
Threadripper’s 4 die variant had to be “neutered” to remain compatible with the TR4 socket without splitting memory bandwidth. The new I/O chiplet would solve that issue entirely, assuming it comes to Threadripper 3.
- bpye 8y ago
  I was just thinking this. Yes it'll have half the lanes of EPYC still, okay, but now the lanes will be connected to all the dies equally rather than to just 1/2 the dies. This hopefully means Threadripper 3 can perform almost as well as EPYC with just 1/2 the memory bandwidth - that isn't insignificant but it's a big improvement on Threadripper 2.
  - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
    An interesting point is that TR owners are much more likely to run their RAM at higher, out of JEDEC spec speeds, so the difference can be a lot smaller than 1/2.
5436436347 8y ago
Those (Anandtech) benchmarks were performed on Windows. All threadripper benchmarks on Linux show that it is nowhere near as awful a performer as on Windows and most compute workloads do scale okay. Seen multiple ideas thrown around like Windows not being NUMA aware with this processor or just plain bad core scheduling
- s3cur3 8y ago
  They did a follow up changing the scheduling policy for thread 0 (again, still on Windows) and it didn’t make a difference for almost all their workloads: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13446/the-quiz-on-cpu-0-playing-scheduler-wars-with-amds-threadripper-2990wx https://www.anandtech.com/show/13446/the-quiz-on-cpu-0-playi...
  - 8y ago