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AMD Q4:16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, Threadripper Up To 32-Core 3970X

264 points by pella 7y ago

maerek 7y ago
This is fantastic. I'm most interested in the eventual arrival of Zen 2-based APUs for upgrading my tiny home server. Getting a (hopefully) 8 core, 16 thread part with integrated graphics at the end of 2020 would be a fantastic value if prices stay similar to the current announcement (sub $200). Seeing AMD continue to make incredible progress on their chips makes me very excited!
- Tepix 7y ago
  AMD added the Athlon 3000G today, but it's Zen+ based. Personally I'm looking forward to their Mobile Zen 2 based APUs. I believe they are expected in early 2020.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Ditto.. running a mid-2014 rmbp with nvidia 750 graphics that is showing its' age. Hoping to make a jump to a nice linux environment on next year hardware.
  - tutanchamun 7y ago
    Yeah, and finally with LPDDR4x support which should, in addition to 7nm and the improvements Zen 2 has, further help increase battery life. Not to mention that the better bandwidth (if they use a 128 bit interface like the MacBooks) should help increase their iGPU advantage.
- wil421 7y ago
  What are your use cases for the tiny home server and the APU? I built a smallish FreeNas with an i3 earlier this year. It was before this year’s AMD announcements. I like the i3 because it has ECC memory and can fit into some supermicro server boards. IPMI makes it easy to setup over LAN and I don’t have to ever plug in a monitor or keyboard. It would be nice to see more AMD boards with it beside the AsRock X470D4U. My desktop/plex server is due for an upgrade next year. Maybe the threadripper price will go down.
  - flatiron 7y ago
    I still have a haswell i5 quad core as my plex/pi hole/openvpn box. It’s never cpu pegged. I do have hardware transcoding enabled which looks like crap but teaches people to not have such low birtates on their gigabit connections. Silly plex defaults. The most cpu used is deluge/openvpn combo out to PIA as it uhhh acquires new content. That and rclone as it pulls off google drive. But I see no need to upgrade. What do you use yours for that it’s cpu needs refreshing?
    - wil421 7y ago
      Intel QSV does degrade quality. The i7-7700k can’t handle a 4K HVEC transcode to 1080p very well on the fly with Plex. Plex optimizing a 4K video takes about as long as the movie to get a 1080p version. I’d like something that’s not dependent on QSV. My Asus motherboard also has a Bluetooth issue from time to time that requires unplugging the motherboard power connection. Not sure I want to spend the money on a 10gb backbone or wait and upgrade the desktop. My UniFi switches and supermicro board can do link aggregation but my Asus mobo only has one port.
      - windexh8er 7y ago
        If your UniFi switch has SFP+ you can get 10Gb copper SFPs these days for under $60 and then a dual 10Gb PCIe is another $180-200. Probably not worth the upgrade just for Plex - but most people don't realize how cheap copper 10Gb PHY has gotten. And if you have SFP+ on both ends and just need something to fill in-between you can get fused 10Gb DAC cables for under $20 which is a drop in the bucket for those SFP+ ports that are sitting there collecting dust.
        wil421 7y ago
        The SFP+ ports on my 150w PoE switch are only 1Gb. The MikroTik CRS305 switch is the most cost effective one I’ve found at ~$130. UniFi has an option but it’s $599. DAC is the most sensible option considering I need to go from my basement, up 2 more stories to my attic, and drop into my office.
- rohan1024 7y ago
  If you don't mind me asking what do you use your home server for?
  - maerek 7y ago
    A couple uses, but the primary purpose is as a VM host and file server. Hyper-V for the VMs, and Storage Spaces with ReFS for the storage. My current build uses a core i5-4570s, but I'd love to have more cores & threads for running additional VMs. My use cases don't require _real_ server hardware (IPMI is overkill), just the ability to run a good amount of test and lab environments.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    I'm not the op, but running a TOR node, some Minecraft servers, and some web apps will occasionally bog down my old FX-6300 server. Having a low power part that can do the same work is appealing.
- BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
  I like that idea and I'd like a chip like that too, though compared to say a current 3400G I'd rather have more memory bandwidth, much more cache and a couple of extra Vega cores. Don't care much about doubling the core count, four cores with SMT is enough for what I do with it (mostly gaming from the couch). It depends on the use case I guess. Maybe AMD will surprise us with further segmentation to server APUs and gaming APUs.
- ridiculous_fish 7y ago
  Some interest in tiny home servers on this thread so I thought I'd share mine, and why I went Intel. I used the InWin Chopin case, which is too small for a video card. Here it is next to a NUC: https://imgur.com/l7dFKCl https://imgur.com/l7dFKCl This server is used for development and has an i7-8700. Unfortunately AMD does not offer a similarly fast chip with integrated graphics. There are rumors of AMD building a NUC competitor, which means we may have more options soon.
b1gtuna 7y ago
I wonder how fast I can compile my code base with this. On my hexa-core i7-8850h, it often takes more than 4 hours to build everything in full throttle. And I do this quite often, so pain is definitely present. Given the network and disk i/o aren't the bottleneck, having more than 5 times the cores should theoretically reduce the build time at least by 3 folds, conservatively?
- jchw 7y ago
  I’ve experienced very substantial improvements in compilation times jumping from the 2700X to the 3900X. I suspect the 3950X should be even better, as long as there are not frequency issues.
- Tepix 7y ago
  Just curious, why do you have to "build everything" quite often? Normally it's enough to just build the parts that changed. Perhaps you can improve your build process instead of investing in new hardware?
  - ownagefool 7y ago
    Not the OP, but nightly build to prove it all still works is a pretty common thing. Reasons for mysterious breakage: - Compiler Updates - Dependencies getting lost - Code changes (you break things into parts, doesn't mean they work together now).
    - b1gtuna 7y ago
      Yes. I don't do nightly, but weekly. Some changes still trigger long builds that last multiple hours.
  - ajuc 7y ago
    binary stability in c++ is hard, especially with dynamic plugins. You need to make daily or at least weekly build from scratch to confirm everything works. Otherwise for example things might seem to work because you are changing a field in class named x through api with a different name for it, and it won't work when you use new version on both sides. These kinds of bugs are the worst.
andy_ppp 7y ago
I would bite AMDs hand off for a Mac mini equivalent with a reasonable graphics card and AMDs latest chips in. Everything in JavaScript/Docker land on projects of scale takes an absolute age to run all the tests on a laptop. Fans are constantly on and throttling. It’s crazy that JS dev is this hardware inefficient...
- ianai 7y ago
  Uh maybe use better webdev stacks? I know I’m arguing against 20+ years of software practice, but Moores law is over.
  - andy_ppp 7y ago
    I'm tempted to be very very sarcastic here but instead I'll just say clearly I'm not able to move the whole of 3000 person organisation onto a better stack because convincing people they would get no features for 3-6 months would be impossible.
    - ianai 7y ago
      Corporate America, am I right? But this is a safe place for us devs.
    - FpUser 7y ago
      Cant vouch for every situation but I think in general it actually pretty much achievable using slow attrition. From what I've observer while consulting corporate systems are collections of hundreds components. Start with one with clearly defined functionality and slowly chip away. Does not prevent from delivering new features. The only thing here is that it will introduce certain overhead and has to be carefully managed. Also one has to make sure if it has measurable ROI.
      - ianai 7y ago
        That’s possibly a trend from the places I’ve worked. The larger he organization the better the odds there are little niches of few users using specific software and website services. From around. 2x-5x GP’s size.
a012 7y ago
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a AMD-based NUC size PC with Ryzen 2 core and more powerful Radeon iGPU.
- tecleandor 7y ago
  It's not a NUC, but the ASRock DESKMINI A300 is quite small and might cover some of your needs...
  - michielr 7y ago
    The A300 is wonderful, but there aren't any Zen 2 APU's available. When the next gen APU's with Zen 2 cores come out I'm hoping to build an A300 with a Ryzen 5 APU and 32GB RAM. Seems like a dream dev machine for me.
- BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
  As an alternative for the Asrock A300 but again a bit bigger there's also the beautiful but expensive Cirrus 7 incus A300, which is completely fanless[0]. [0] https://www1.cirrus7.com/en/produkte/cirrus7-incus/ https://www1.cirrus7.com/en/produkte/cirrus7-incus/
- thijsvandien 7y ago
  Throw in passive cooling please! Still waiting for the iBOX-R1000 to become available. Meanwhile more options are very welcome.
- twotwotwo 7y ago
  Using the ASRock A300 today and already pretty happy with it (small, quiet, reasonable cost, gets the work done), though of course agree the next APUs should be a noticeable step up. It'd've been nice if ASRock's micro-STX formfactor had taken off and gotten an AM4 variation (http://www.asrock.com/nettop/Intel/DeskMini%20GTXRX/index.asp http://www.asrock.com/nettop/Intel/DeskMini%20GTXRX/index.as... ). It's a mini-tower bigger than NUC or the A300 but smaller than mini-ITX. Compared to mini-ITX, it takes an MXM GPU instead of having a full-sized PCI slot and uses an external brick PSU. The extra benefit on the AM4 side would've been that even a weak dGPU allows using non-APU chips, at least up to the supported TDP.
growlist 7y ago
Sadly my FX 8350 is still cranking away just fine for my needs - really looking forward to upgrading to Ryzen when the time comes.
- account42 7y ago
  The FX processors got a lot of flak over the core count vs number of floating point units, but for compiling my FX 8350 has been doing just fine. Still looking to upgrade to a TR 3970X though when the become available.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Yeah that's my point, I almost wish the thing would become obsolete more quickly but it stubbornly refuses to :)
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Whenever I read "threadripper" I think of one of these and get confused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_ripper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_ripper
karpodiem 7y ago
Does this require liquid cooling?
- Filligree 7y ago
  Not at all. I've got an air-cooled 1920X, which works just fine. Noctua makes good fans. The downside is, a fan capable of cooling a 200W CPU is going to be huge; mine only has a few millimeters of clearance, and that's in an EATX case. AIO water-cooling is easier to fit.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Can motherboard break from the fan weight? Those huge coolers have solid weight.
    - vel0city 7y ago
      These days there's usually a back bracket which helps distribute the weight of the cooler over a large part of the board as opposed to earlier coolers which would only mount to a few screw holes. Extra large aftermarket coolers usually come with extra large mounting brackets. I wouldn't be too worried about any name brand cooler causing damage to the board. Follow the directions from the kit and it will probably be fine.
    - WiseWeasel 7y ago
      Maybe at sufficient g-forces.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      I might unmount the cooler before shipping the box somewhere, but if it's just sitting there you will generally be alright.
    - Macha 7y ago
      If you get a giant cooler it's usually recommended to uninstall it before transporting the computer (which means having rubbing alcohol and new thermal paste to reinstall it after transport), but stationary it's perfectly fine. They also have to hold up high end gaming GPUs which weigh equally much (and also recommended to be removed for transport).
crb002 7y ago
Who are the best PC builders to get a Ryzen 9 through with a fair amount of RAM for a dev box?
- kaibee 7y ago
  Is there some reason you're not interested in building it yourself? Though to answer your question, I don't think you can go wrong with https://system76.com/desktops https://system76.com/desktops
  - chapium 7y ago
    The answer to why not diy is usually predominantly available time.
    - overcast 7y ago
      Start to finish build time(including OS install) is maybe two hours if you're a complete newbie. Everything is color coded and keyed to fit into only one spot.
      - beart 7y ago
        Putting the computer together is typically the fastest step in the process. However, you have to factor in trouble-shooting time if some component doesn't work. More wait time if you need to ship it back and get a new component. Then there's all the time up front to research desired parts and find the best prices. Filling out rebates and then having to think about getting the rebate check back for the next 4 to 8 weeks. There's a lot more to time and cognitive load to account for than just plugging in RAM sticks.
        overcast 7y ago
        What you described is not a normal experience. Sure problems crop up, but it also can and definitely does happen with a prebuilt machine. If you're already working on existing machine, wait time doesn't exactly factor into any of it.
Damogran6 7y ago
Modern processor design is mindboggling in it's capacity. Coworker has a modern Alenware...it was able to host a VR session, play a 1440p game and transcode video, all at once.
- MattyMc 7y ago
  Goodness. That really is incredible.
nickjj 7y ago
The first computer I ever built had a Cyrix 133mhz CPU, and over time I tried out Celeron and Pentium CPUs up until current day which is an i5 3.2ghz from ~6 years ago. I still don't feel the need to upgrade but when I do this might be the first time where I really consider an AMD CPU. Things are looking really really solid for them lately. I could totally see using one for an all purpose development, video editing / recording and gaming box to replace this i5 eventually.
- shrewduser 7y ago
  If you do lots of compiling, and run the typical suite of things a developer might (IDE, terminal apps, compilers, your backend, emulators, web browser) these kinds of cpu's can be a large benefit. for the average user, not as much.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    >> for the average user, not as much Actually there are workloads on which they will heavily benefit the average user as well. Image processing and video editing come to mind especially. You may argue that few users do this on a PC nowadays, but that's mostly oversight by OS developers. MS should revive Movie Maker. I used it a lot 10 years ago when my kid was little. Apple already ships iPhotos and iMovie with every new mac, and both of them are pretty great for what they were designed for. Then there's also more and more 4K content on youtube by the day. My 5 year old iMac does spin up its fans quite a lot nowadays. I think it's also a good time to start moving some of the AI workloads to the edge as well. It's ridiculous that we have near instantaneous on-device speech recognition on phones now, but PCs still have to dial back home and incur perceptible latency. I want local speech recognition out of the box in Windows and MacOS (and ideally Linux as well), with automatic punctuation and robust to background noise.
    - anonymfus 7y ago
      Microsoft's video editor today is Photos app. But it's a very unconventional one: it has motion tracking but no layers.
bitL 7y ago
Abandoning x399 is silly; AMD effectively cut-off entry level HEDT folks (24 core is minimum now; 8-12c is a plenty for e.g. Deep Learning researchers) and upset previous enthusiasts that invested a lot of $ for the possibility of a future upgrade (boards in the range of $350-$650). Given that EPYC Rome up to 32 cores can run in 1st gen EPYC boards with just BIOS update, it's difficult to understand the decision (unless they cut the corners for TR1/TR2 boards). I don't see any reason not to release backwards-compatible TR3 even if they had to limit frequency/TDP on older boards... I had plans buying 64c TR3, but I'll be skipping this and next gen and buy TR5 with DDR5 in 2021 instead.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  I somewhat agree. I don't need 24 cores and 12 would be more than enough for me, but proper ECC support, workstation-grade motherboard, 4 memory channels, big L3 cache are nice to have.
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    fwiw ECC support and workstation-grade motherboards are both features you'll find on AM4 platform. "workstation-grade motherboards" being a standard feature across the entire X570 lineup, even, as PCI-E 4.0 signaling requirements basically forced it. TR3 does have larger L3, but the 3900X isn't a slouch either with 64MB of it.
    - account42 7y ago
      > TR3 does have larger L3, but the 3900X isn't a slouch either with 64MB of it. And L3 scales with the number of chiplets, which rooughly scales with core count, so a 16 core TR would "only" have 64MB L3 too unless they used garbage chiplets with half of the cores disabled.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  They changed the interface between the CPU & the chipset, that appears to be the main breakage. Specifically they doubled the width of it, not just bumped from PCI-E 3.0 to 4.0. Instead of an x4 connection it's now an x8 connection. It does suck, but since they also seem to have dropped any of the lower-cost SKUs it's probably not a motherboard upgrade that's going to stop you from dropping $1400 on a CPU. And if you really were considering a 64C one, it's hard to believe a price difference of ~$400 will matter on what's going to likely be a ~$4000 CPU. It's a ~10% price difference.
josteink 7y ago
> AMD today has lifted the covers on its next generation Threadripper platform, which includes Zen 2-based chiplets, a new socket Hopefully this new socket-change is for Threadripper CPUS only. AFAIK They already had their own one distinct from the “regular” AM4-socket.
- sp332 7y ago
  AMD has confirmed that AM4 will be supported at least through next year. https://hothardware.com/news/amd-confirms-am4-socket-support-future-ryzen-processors-2020 https://hothardware.com/news/amd-confirms-am4-socket-support... They didn't make any such promises about TR sockets.
kd3 7y ago
Can't wait for the 3950x. Hope launch supplies are adequate.
gigatexal 7y ago
Drool. I want one! Make -j64 ;)
NicoJuicy 7y ago
AMD appears in a trending section almost every other day. How can OEM's still ignore AMD, I mean. It's obviously very popular. They have the best offering and no one can match their price. How long till Intel's monopoly will fall, because of consumer demand and seemingly (almost) perfect long-term execution of AMD: - 2016 - 8,1% market share - 2019 - 18 % market share According to Intel, they have free game untill 2021. My guess is that they will have free game long after 2023 ( when 3nm architecture will be released by TSMC) I think the market share now is mostly because of DIY builders. Am I wrong? The only serious AMD OEM offering i have seen was from Microsoft's Surface. Side-note: AMD is mostly interesting for desktops for now ( -> battery life), until next Q. But how come OEM desktops lack an AMD alternative? Any articles/information on OEM's partnerships with Intel? PS. Please upvote a more ontopic comment concerning the product itselve. I didn't want this to be the top comment.
- nknealk 7y ago
  They’re also making headway in the server market. AWS has quite a few AMD powered offerings that have hourly costs lower than intel equivalents https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/
  - NicoJuicy 7y ago
    Yes I know. Azure also and Netflix is considering to change their CPU portfolio :). One of the latest super computers was AMD only. But that is not the OEM market.
- bitcoinmoney 7y ago
  I have HP elite book with AMd?
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  My exact question - Lenovo or HP should come out with small business desktop - you cannot buy anything current from either now. Dell never will in their optiplex line I don't think. Rumor has it that Lenovo will do a M75Q machine with AMD. Seeing is believing.
- 7y ago
pen2l 7y ago
Here's a bad question from someone who doesn't really understand the differences of CPU architectures and is therefore apprehensive about making related decisions: Will I be hurting myself if I buy a computer with an AMD chip, in that I might end up in a situation where certain programs won't work for me? E.g., if I do fancy 3d modeling (Cinema4d, fancy renderers), if I do multi-threaded programming (in matlab), if I do physical simulations ( in COSMOL), etc.?
- eyegor 7y ago
  Nope, with 1 possible caveat. Amd doesn't have support for avx512 instructions in any of their cpus as far as I know, but avx512 is very uncommon. Most of the Intel chips don't even support avx512. This won't be a "it won't work" scenario, but in case the developer has written code which uses avx512, any cpu that supports it will run the operations substantially faster.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  As someone who has just tried to run tensorflow and found out that for my specific CPU I can't use prebuilt docker images and have to build my own from scratch, yes, it's certainly a headache.
  - cmcd 7y ago
    The only time I could imagine this being the case is if there was code already compiled for a specific architecture. In these cases you would have compatibility issues between different intel CPUs as well so I do not think it is a reason to avoid AMD.
- cmcd 7y ago
  No, programs do not interact with the CPU directly so there is no difference from that perspective. Rendering and anything multithreaded will definitely favor Ryzen as you will have more cores/threads at the same price point.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
c0ffe 7y ago
I would like to know if somebody has good experiences to share about AMD video cards on Linux (with the latest driver AMDGPU). I bought a Ryzen (Zen 2) for workstation, where I need to run a few VMs, a local k8s cluster, run builds, some browsers tabs, and Slack. I have everything running smoothly on top of a Linux 5 kernel, and so far, Im pleased with the results. But I kept an older NVIDIA card, and the drivers always had a bit of trouble with desktop Linux support (like Wayland, plymouth bootsplash, etc).
- tadfisher 7y ago
  I ran a Radeon 380 between 2015 and this year, it worked flawlessly. I bought a 5700 XT in July; it was not usable out of the box, but all the pieces are at least upstreamed now. Desktop stability is great, gaming performance is great, and all the basic stuff (Wayland, Plymouth) is solid.
- disintegore 7y ago
  On Linux, AMD has a MAJOR advantage over Nvidia simply due to the fact that the driver is FLOSS and built into the kernel itself. This means you get full GPU support out of the box and fixes/improvements are delivered through the same update channel as the kernel. The userland tools aren't ported to Linux however, so you don't get access to the fancy social-media-augmented gamer stuff. If you want to overclock/etc you have to rely either on a /sys filesystem interface (which wasn't stabilized when I tried it but could very well be now) or third party tools of varying quality. As for the actual experience itself, I've owned GPUs from multiple architectures (Polaris, Raven Ridge, Vega) and I've noticed a common pattern. When the hardware is new, it's unstable. A few kernel updates later (typically over a month) they run flawlessly. To be fair a lot of the crashes/freezes I've experienced could be traced down to Mesa and LLVM. I still would give new AMD hardware time to mature though. Performance is on par with the Windows driver package (probably because they share a lot of code). You get your money's worth. Some of the games I run on DXVK offer near-native performance. tl;dr there's never been better a GPU driver on Linux but it's not quite ready for your grandma yet
- scns 7y ago
  Bought a RX570, worked great. Undervolted for more performance, would recommend it.
tutanchamun 7y ago
Back when Ultima 9 was released around 2000 my PC had 128 MB of RAM. Now Threadripper has the same amount of L3 cache in total (Epyc twice as much).
rafaelvasco 7y ago
I've been away from AMD since Athlon times. Now finally I felt secure getting an AMD processor with the Ryzen family; Ended up getting a Ryzen 5 3600X since it was on sale. If not I would've got a normal 3600. Ended up paying less on my new build;

264 points by pella 7y ago

This is fantastic. I'm most interested in the eventual arrival of Zen 2-based APUs for upgrading my tiny home server. Getting a (hopefully) 8 core, 16 thread part with integrated graphics at the end of 2020 would be a fantastic value if prices stay similar to the current announcement (sub $200). Seeing AMD continue to make incredible progress on their chips makes me very excited!

Tepix 7y ago
AMD added the Athlon 3000G today, but it's Zen+ based. Personally I'm looking forward to their Mobile Zen 2 based APUs. I believe they are expected in early 2020.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Ditto.. running a mid-2014 rmbp with nvidia 750 graphics that is showing its' age. Hoping to make a jump to a nice linux environment on next year hardware.
- tutanchamun 7y ago
  Yeah, and finally with LPDDR4x support which should, in addition to 7nm and the improvements Zen 2 has, further help increase battery life. Not to mention that the better bandwidth (if they use a 128 bit interface like the MacBooks) should help increase their iGPU advantage.
wil421 7y ago
What are your use cases for the tiny home server and the APU? I built a smallish FreeNas with an i3 earlier this year. It was before this year’s AMD announcements. I like the i3 because it has ECC memory and can fit into some supermicro server boards. IPMI makes it easy to setup over LAN and I don’t have to ever plug in a monitor or keyboard. It would be nice to see more AMD boards with it beside the AsRock X470D4U. My desktop/plex server is due for an upgrade next year. Maybe the threadripper price will go down.
- flatiron 7y ago
  I still have a haswell i5 quad core as my plex/pi hole/openvpn box. It’s never cpu pegged. I do have hardware transcoding enabled which looks like crap but teaches people to not have such low birtates on their gigabit connections. Silly plex defaults. The most cpu used is deluge/openvpn combo out to PIA as it uhhh acquires new content. That and rclone as it pulls off google drive. But I see no need to upgrade. What do you use yours for that it’s cpu needs refreshing?
  - wil421 7y ago
    Intel QSV does degrade quality. The i7-7700k can’t handle a 4K HVEC transcode to 1080p very well on the fly with Plex. Plex optimizing a 4K video takes about as long as the movie to get a 1080p version. I’d like something that’s not dependent on QSV. My Asus motherboard also has a Bluetooth issue from time to time that requires unplugging the motherboard power connection. Not sure I want to spend the money on a 10gb backbone or wait and upgrade the desktop. My UniFi switches and supermicro board can do link aggregation but my Asus mobo only has one port.
    - windexh8er 7y ago
      If your UniFi switch has SFP+ you can get 10Gb copper SFPs these days for under $60 and then a dual 10Gb PCIe is another $180-200. Probably not worth the upgrade just for Plex - but most people don't realize how cheap copper 10Gb PHY has gotten. And if you have SFP+ on both ends and just need something to fill in-between you can get fused 10Gb DAC cables for under $20 which is a drop in the bucket for those SFP+ ports that are sitting there collecting dust.
      - wil421 7y ago
        The SFP+ ports on my 150w PoE switch are only 1Gb. The MikroTik CRS305 switch is the most cost effective one I’ve found at ~$130. UniFi has an option but it’s $599. DAC is the most sensible option considering I need to go from my basement, up 2 more stories to my attic, and drop into my office.
rohan1024 7y ago
If you don't mind me asking what do you use your home server for?
- maerek 7y ago
  A couple uses, but the primary purpose is as a VM host and file server. Hyper-V for the VMs, and Storage Spaces with ReFS for the storage. My current build uses a core i5-4570s, but I'd love to have more cores & threads for running additional VMs. My use cases don't require _real_ server hardware (IPMI is overkill), just the ability to run a good amount of test and lab environments.
- jandrese 7y ago
  I'm not the op, but running a TOR node, some Minecraft servers, and some web apps will occasionally bog down my old FX-6300 server. Having a low power part that can do the same work is appealing.
BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
I like that idea and I'd like a chip like that too, though compared to say a current 3400G I'd rather have more memory bandwidth, much more cache and a couple of extra Vega cores. Don't care much about doubling the core count, four cores with SMT is enough for what I do with it (mostly gaming from the couch). It depends on the use case I guess. Maybe AMD will surprise us with further segmentation to server APUs and gaming APUs.
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Some interest in tiny home servers on this thread so I thought I'd share mine, and why I went Intel. I used the InWin Chopin case, which is too small for a video card. Here it is next to a NUC: https://imgur.com/l7dFKCl https://imgur.com/l7dFKCl This server is used for development and has an i7-8700. Unfortunately AMD does not offer a similarly fast chip with integrated graphics. There are rumors of AMD building a NUC competitor, which means we may have more options soon.

b1gtuna 7y ago

I wonder how fast I can compile my code base with this. On my hexa-core i7-8850h, it often takes more than 4 hours to build everything in full throttle. And I do this quite often, so pain is definitely present. Given the network and disk i/o aren't the bottleneck, having more than 5 times the cores should theoretically reduce the build time at least by 3 folds, conservatively?

jchw 7y ago
I’ve experienced very substantial improvements in compilation times jumping from the 2700X to the 3900X. I suspect the 3950X should be even better, as long as there are not frequency issues.
Tepix 7y ago
Just curious, why do you have to "build everything" quite often? Normally it's enough to just build the parts that changed. Perhaps you can improve your build process instead of investing in new hardware?
- ownagefool 7y ago
  Not the OP, but nightly build to prove it all still works is a pretty common thing. Reasons for mysterious breakage: - Compiler Updates - Dependencies getting lost - Code changes (you break things into parts, doesn't mean they work together now).
  - b1gtuna 7y ago
    Yes. I don't do nightly, but weekly. Some changes still trigger long builds that last multiple hours.
- ajuc 7y ago
  binary stability in c++ is hard, especially with dynamic plugins. You need to make daily or at least weekly build from scratch to confirm everything works. Otherwise for example things might seem to work because you are changing a field in class named x through api with a different name for it, and it won't work when you use new version on both sides. These kinds of bugs are the worst.

andy_ppp 7y ago

I would bite AMDs hand off for a Mac mini equivalent with a reasonable graphics card and AMDs latest chips in. Everything in JavaScript/Docker land on projects of scale takes an absolute age to run all the tests on a laptop. Fans are constantly on and throttling. It’s crazy that JS dev is this hardware inefficient...

ianai 7y ago
Uh maybe use better webdev stacks? I know I’m arguing against 20+ years of software practice, but Moores law is over.
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  I'm tempted to be very very sarcastic here but instead I'll just say clearly I'm not able to move the whole of 3000 person organisation onto a better stack because convincing people they would get no features for 3-6 months would be impossible.
  - ianai 7y ago
    Corporate America, am I right? But this is a safe place for us devs.
  - FpUser 7y ago
    Cant vouch for every situation but I think in general it actually pretty much achievable using slow attrition. From what I've observer while consulting corporate systems are collections of hundreds components. Start with one with clearly defined functionality and slowly chip away. Does not prevent from delivering new features. The only thing here is that it will introduce certain overhead and has to be carefully managed. Also one has to make sure if it has measurable ROI.
    - ianai 7y ago
      That’s possibly a trend from the places I’ve worked. The larger he organization the better the odds there are little niches of few users using specific software and website services. From around. 2x-5x GP’s size.

a012 7y ago

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a AMD-based NUC size PC with Ryzen 2 core and more powerful Radeon iGPU.

tecleandor 7y ago
It's not a NUC, but the ASRock DESKMINI A300 is quite small and might cover some of your needs...
- michielr 7y ago
  The A300 is wonderful, but there aren't any Zen 2 APU's available. When the next gen APU's with Zen 2 cores come out I'm hoping to build an A300 with a Ryzen 5 APU and 32GB RAM. Seems like a dream dev machine for me.
BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
As an alternative for the Asrock A300 but again a bit bigger there's also the beautiful but expensive Cirrus 7 incus A300, which is completely fanless[0]. [0] https://www1.cirrus7.com/en/produkte/cirrus7-incus/ https://www1.cirrus7.com/en/produkte/cirrus7-incus/
thijsvandien 7y ago
Throw in passive cooling please! Still waiting for the iBOX-R1000 to become available. Meanwhile more options are very welcome.
twotwotwo 7y ago
Using the ASRock A300 today and already pretty happy with it (small, quiet, reasonable cost, gets the work done), though of course agree the next APUs should be a noticeable step up. It'd've been nice if ASRock's micro-STX formfactor had taken off and gotten an AM4 variation (http://www.asrock.com/nettop/Intel/DeskMini%20GTXRX/index.asp http://www.asrock.com/nettop/Intel/DeskMini%20GTXRX/index.as... ). It's a mini-tower bigger than NUC or the A300 but smaller than mini-ITX. Compared to mini-ITX, it takes an MXM GPU instead of having a full-sized PCI slot and uses an external brick PSU. The extra benefit on the AM4 side would've been that even a weak dGPU allows using non-APU chips, at least up to the supported TDP.

growlist 7y ago

Sadly my FX 8350 is still cranking away just fine for my needs - really looking forward to upgrading to Ryzen when the time comes.

account42 7y ago
The FX processors got a lot of flak over the core count vs number of floating point units, but for compiling my FX 8350 has been doing just fine. Still looking to upgrade to a TR 3970X though when the become available.
- growlist 7y ago
  Yeah that's my point, I almost wish the thing would become obsolete more quickly but it stubbornly refuses to :)

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

Whenever I read "threadripper" I think of one of these and get confused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_ripper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_ripper

karpodiem 7y ago

Does this require liquid cooling?

Filligree 7y ago
Not at all. I've got an air-cooled 1920X, which works just fine. Noctua makes good fans. The downside is, a fan capable of cooling a 200W CPU is going to be huge; mine only has a few millimeters of clearance, and that's in an EATX case. AIO water-cooling is easier to fit.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Can motherboard break from the fan weight? Those huge coolers have solid weight.
  - vel0city 7y ago
    These days there's usually a back bracket which helps distribute the weight of the cooler over a large part of the board as opposed to earlier coolers which would only mount to a few screw holes. Extra large aftermarket coolers usually come with extra large mounting brackets. I wouldn't be too worried about any name brand cooler causing damage to the board. Follow the directions from the kit and it will probably be fine.
  - WiseWeasel 7y ago
    Maybe at sufficient g-forces.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    I might unmount the cooler before shipping the box somewhere, but if it's just sitting there you will generally be alright.
  - Macha 7y ago
    If you get a giant cooler it's usually recommended to uninstall it before transporting the computer (which means having rubbing alcohol and new thermal paste to reinstall it after transport), but stationary it's perfectly fine. They also have to hold up high end gaming GPUs which weigh equally much (and also recommended to be removed for transport).

crb002 7y ago

Who are the best PC builders to get a Ryzen 9 through with a fair amount of RAM for a dev box?

kaibee 7y ago
Is there some reason you're not interested in building it yourself? Though to answer your question, I don't think you can go wrong with https://system76.com/desktops https://system76.com/desktops
- chapium 7y ago
  The answer to why not diy is usually predominantly available time.
  - overcast 7y ago
    Start to finish build time(including OS install) is maybe two hours if you're a complete newbie. Everything is color coded and keyed to fit into only one spot.
    - beart 7y ago
      Putting the computer together is typically the fastest step in the process. However, you have to factor in trouble-shooting time if some component doesn't work. More wait time if you need to ship it back and get a new component. Then there's all the time up front to research desired parts and find the best prices. Filling out rebates and then having to think about getting the rebate check back for the next 4 to 8 weeks. There's a lot more to time and cognitive load to account for than just plugging in RAM sticks.
      - overcast 7y ago
        What you described is not a normal experience. Sure problems crop up, but it also can and definitely does happen with a prebuilt machine. If you're already working on existing machine, wait time doesn't exactly factor into any of it.

Damogran6 7y ago

Modern processor design is mindboggling in it's capacity. Coworker has a modern Alenware...it was able to host a VR session, play a 1440p game and transcode video, all at once.

MattyMc 7y ago
Goodness. That really is incredible.

nickjj 7y ago

The first computer I ever built had a Cyrix 133mhz CPU, and over time I tried out Celeron and Pentium CPUs up until current day which is an i5 3.2ghz from ~6 years ago. I still don't feel the need to upgrade but when I do this might be the first time where I really consider an AMD CPU. Things are looking really really solid for them lately. I could totally see using one for an all purpose development, video editing / recording and gaming box to replace this i5 eventually.

shrewduser 7y ago
If you do lots of compiling, and run the typical suite of things a developer might (IDE, terminal apps, compilers, your backend, emulators, web browser) these kinds of cpu's can be a large benefit. for the average user, not as much.
- m0zg 7y ago
  >> for the average user, not as much Actually there are workloads on which they will heavily benefit the average user as well. Image processing and video editing come to mind especially. You may argue that few users do this on a PC nowadays, but that's mostly oversight by OS developers. MS should revive Movie Maker. I used it a lot 10 years ago when my kid was little. Apple already ships iPhotos and iMovie with every new mac, and both of them are pretty great for what they were designed for. Then there's also more and more 4K content on youtube by the day. My 5 year old iMac does spin up its fans quite a lot nowadays. I think it's also a good time to start moving some of the AI workloads to the edge as well. It's ridiculous that we have near instantaneous on-device speech recognition on phones now, but PCs still have to dial back home and incur perceptible latency. I want local speech recognition out of the box in Windows and MacOS (and ideally Linux as well), with automatic punctuation and robust to background noise.
  - anonymfus 7y ago
    Microsoft's video editor today is Photos app. But it's a very unconventional one: it has motion tracking but no layers.

bitL 7y ago

Abandoning x399 is silly; AMD effectively cut-off entry level HEDT folks (24 core is minimum now; 8-12c is a plenty for e.g. Deep Learning researchers) and upset previous enthusiasts that invested a lot of $ for the possibility of a future upgrade (boards in the range of $350-$650). Given that EPYC Rome up to 32 cores can run in 1st gen EPYC boards with just BIOS update, it's difficult to understand the decision (unless they cut the corners for TR1/TR2 boards). I don't see any reason not to release backwards-compatible TR3 even if they had to limit frequency/TDP on older boards... I had plans buying 64c TR3, but I'll be skipping this and next gen and buy TR5 with DDR5 in 2021 instead.

vbezhenar 7y ago
I somewhat agree. I don't need 24 cores and 12 would be more than enough for me, but proper ECC support, workstation-grade motherboard, 4 memory channels, big L3 cache are nice to have.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  fwiw ECC support and workstation-grade motherboards are both features you'll find on AM4 platform. "workstation-grade motherboards" being a standard feature across the entire X570 lineup, even, as PCI-E 4.0 signaling requirements basically forced it. TR3 does have larger L3, but the 3900X isn't a slouch either with 64MB of it.
  - account42 7y ago
    > TR3 does have larger L3, but the 3900X isn't a slouch either with 64MB of it. And L3 scales with the number of chiplets, which rooughly scales with core count, so a 16 core TR would "only" have 64MB L3 too unless they used garbage chiplets with half of the cores disabled.
kllrnohj 7y ago
They changed the interface between the CPU & the chipset, that appears to be the main breakage. Specifically they doubled the width of it, not just bumped from PCI-E 3.0 to 4.0. Instead of an x4 connection it's now an x8 connection. It does suck, but since they also seem to have dropped any of the lower-cost SKUs it's probably not a motherboard upgrade that's going to stop you from dropping $1400 on a CPU. And if you really were considering a 64C one, it's hard to believe a price difference of ~$400 will matter on what's going to likely be a ~$4000 CPU. It's a ~10% price difference.

josteink 7y ago

> AMD today has lifted the covers on its next generation Threadripper platform, which includes Zen 2-based chiplets, a new socket Hopefully this new socket-change is for Threadripper CPUS only. AFAIK They already had their own one distinct from the “regular” AM4-socket.

sp332 7y ago
AMD has confirmed that AM4 will be supported at least through next year. https://hothardware.com/news/amd-confirms-am4-socket-support-future-ryzen-processors-2020 https://hothardware.com/news/amd-confirms-am4-socket-support... They didn't make any such promises about TR sockets.

kd3 7y ago

Can't wait for the 3950x. Hope launch supplies are adequate.

gigatexal 7y ago

Drool. I want one! Make -j64 ;)

NicoJuicy 7y ago

AMD appears in a trending section almost every other day. How can OEM's still ignore AMD, I mean. It's obviously very popular. They have the best offering and no one can match their price. How long till Intel's monopoly will fall, because of consumer demand and seemingly (almost) perfect long-term execution of AMD: - 2016 - 8,1% market share - 2019 - 18 % market share According to Intel, they have free game untill 2021. My guess is that they will have free game long after 2023 ( when 3nm architecture will be released by TSMC) I think the market share now is mostly because of DIY builders. Am I wrong? The only serious AMD OEM offering i have seen was from Microsoft's Surface. Side-note: AMD is mostly interesting for desktops for now ( -> battery life), until next Q. But how come OEM desktops lack an AMD alternative? Any articles/information on OEM's partnerships with Intel? PS. Please upvote a more ontopic comment concerning the product itselve. I didn't want this to be the top comment.

nknealk 7y ago
They’re also making headway in the server market. AWS has quite a few AMD powered offerings that have hourly costs lower than intel equivalents https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  Yes I know. Azure also and Netflix is considering to change their CPU portfolio :). One of the latest super computers was AMD only. But that is not the OEM market.
bitcoinmoney 7y ago
I have HP elite book with AMd?
privateSFacct 7y ago
My exact question - Lenovo or HP should come out with small business desktop - you cannot buy anything current from either now. Dell never will in their optiplex line I don't think. Rumor has it that Lenovo will do a M75Q machine with AMD. Seeing is believing.
7y ago

pen2l 7y ago

Here's a bad question from someone who doesn't really understand the differences of CPU architectures and is therefore apprehensive about making related decisions: Will I be hurting myself if I buy a computer with an AMD chip, in that I might end up in a situation where certain programs won't work for me? E.g., if I do fancy 3d modeling (Cinema4d, fancy renderers), if I do multi-threaded programming (in matlab), if I do physical simulations ( in COSMOL), etc.?

eyegor 7y ago
Nope, with 1 possible caveat. Amd doesn't have support for avx512 instructions in any of their cpus as far as I know, but avx512 is very uncommon. Most of the Intel chips don't even support avx512. This won't be a "it won't work" scenario, but in case the developer has written code which uses avx512, any cpu that supports it will run the operations substantially faster.
londons_explore 7y ago
As someone who has just tried to run tensorflow and found out that for my specific CPU I can't use prebuilt docker images and have to build my own from scratch, yes, it's certainly a headache.
- cmcd 7y ago
  The only time I could imagine this being the case is if there was code already compiled for a specific architecture. In these cases you would have compatibility issues between different intel CPUs as well so I do not think it is a reason to avoid AMD.
cmcd 7y ago
No, programs do not interact with the CPU directly so there is no difference from that perspective. Rendering and anything multithreaded will definitely favor Ryzen as you will have more cores/threads at the same price point.
deleted 7y ago
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c0ffe 7y ago

I would like to know if somebody has good experiences to share about AMD video cards on Linux (with the latest driver AMDGPU). I bought a Ryzen (Zen 2) for workstation, where I need to run a few VMs, a local k8s cluster, run builds, some browsers tabs, and Slack. I have everything running smoothly on top of a Linux 5 kernel, and so far, Im pleased with the results. But I kept an older NVIDIA card, and the drivers always had a bit of trouble with desktop Linux support (like Wayland, plymouth bootsplash, etc).

tadfisher 7y ago
I ran a Radeon 380 between 2015 and this year, it worked flawlessly. I bought a 5700 XT in July; it was not usable out of the box, but all the pieces are at least upstreamed now. Desktop stability is great, gaming performance is great, and all the basic stuff (Wayland, Plymouth) is solid.
disintegore 7y ago
On Linux, AMD has a MAJOR advantage over Nvidia simply due to the fact that the driver is FLOSS and built into the kernel itself. This means you get full GPU support out of the box and fixes/improvements are delivered through the same update channel as the kernel. The userland tools aren't ported to Linux however, so you don't get access to the fancy social-media-augmented gamer stuff. If you want to overclock/etc you have to rely either on a /sys filesystem interface (which wasn't stabilized when I tried it but could very well be now) or third party tools of varying quality. As for the actual experience itself, I've owned GPUs from multiple architectures (Polaris, Raven Ridge, Vega) and I've noticed a common pattern. When the hardware is new, it's unstable. A few kernel updates later (typically over a month) they run flawlessly. To be fair a lot of the crashes/freezes I've experienced could be traced down to Mesa and LLVM. I still would give new AMD hardware time to mature though. Performance is on par with the Windows driver package (probably because they share a lot of code). You get your money's worth. Some of the games I run on DXVK offer near-native performance. tl;dr there's never been better a GPU driver on Linux but it's not quite ready for your grandma yet
scns 7y ago
Bought a RX570, worked great. Undervolted for more performance, would recommend it.

tutanchamun 7y ago

Back when Ultima 9 was released around 2000 my PC had 128 MB of RAM. Now Threadripper has the same amount of L3 cache in total (Epyc twice as much).

rafaelvasco 7y ago

I've been away from AMD since Athlon times. Now finally I felt secure getting an AMD processor with the Ryzen family; Ended up getting a Ryzen 5 3600X since it was on sale. If not I would've got a normal 3600. Ended up paying less on my new build;