8 ms·

AMD unveils world's most powerful desktop CPUs

116 points by kmod 7y ago

jotm 7y ago
280 Watts TDP! Wow, I think that's a new record for desktop CPUs, although GPUs had reached that a while ago. I wonder how well air coolers work on them, or do they need water cooling for maximum performance? Impressive nonetheless.
- pizza234 7y ago
  Yes, they need water cooling. The marketing communication is amusing: "Optimized for water cooling": https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop%20Announcement%20Briefing%20Deck-page-008_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop... Threadrippers are at least HEDT; I think this TDP is not unusual. Paradoxically, AMD's marketing is likely more reliable when they specify that the i9-9920X wall power consumption is up to ~300W (https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop%20Announcement%20Briefing%20Deck-page-007_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop...), rather than Intel's own spec (https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/products/processors/core/x-series/i9-9920x.html https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/products/processo...).
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    > Yes, they need water cooling. That's inaccurate. Air cooling solutions are readily available for Threadripper. Water cooling systems simply move heat to a more convenient place to air cool it away (thus the radiators and fans at the destination). The only limiter on air cooling (and not water) is weight/size on the CPU socket (or amount of air moving over the fins of the heatsinks). Some examples of retail air coolers that can cool it out of the box already: https://www.amd.com/en/thermal-solutions-threadripper https://www.amd.com/en/thermal-solutions-threadripper https://noctua.at/en/amd_ryzen_threadripper_tdp_guidelines https://noctua.at/en/amd_ryzen_threadripper_tdp_guidelines https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/coolers/cpu-air-coolers/wraith-ripper/ https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/coolers/cpu-air-coolers... Now the hypothetical ceiling on water cooling is of undeniably higher. You could literally use a jet engine as a fan to cool the water, or send it through liquid nitrogen. But we aren't there yet with 280 Watts. At the current wattage air cooling remains viable, with some trade-offs (e.g. huge air coolers, requiring huge cases, plus strong in-case airflow). You definitely don't "need water cooling," yet. At least not for threadripper.
    - Angostura 7y ago
      That's like saying that heat sinks 'don't make sense' Water cooling systems allow heat to be moved away from the chip's surface more efficiently than pointing at can at it can. Once moved away, a larger radiating surface can be air-coooled
    - the8472 7y ago
      > That's inaccurate and doesn't actually make sense. You want a steep temperature gradient at the limited chip surface to maximize heat flux. Pumping a liquid with high heat capacity to it steepens the gradient where you need it. Cooling the liquid on the other hand can happen over a much larger surface area with shallower gradients and thus lower heat flux. Note that while the heat pipes in air coolers do use convection they do so passively, liquid cooling solutions are active.
      - Someone1234 7y ago
        You've not really added anything to the discussion here, but seem to be using verbose language in an attempt to convey expertise. For example this: > You want a steep temperature gradient at the limited chip surface to maximize heat flux. Is true with both and is really just a convoluted way of saying "if you don't convect heat fast enough, it won't work." Yeah, undeniably true... > Pumping a liquid with high heat capacity to it steepens the gradient where you need it. Where you need it is at the surface of the CPU package. Both solutions provide adequate heat capacities at that location, that's why they fundamentally work. One uses heat pipes and fins directly above with fans/air carrying the heat away, the other moves the heat, and does the same elsewhere. > Cooling the liquid on the other hand can happen over a much larger surface area with shallower gradients and thus lower heat flux. Note that while the heat pipes in air coolers do use convection they do so passively, liquid cooling solutions are active. This is a basic explanation of how water cooling works, it doesn't really add any specific insight into the problem scope.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        7y ago
  - jotm 7y ago
    "Recommended". So at least they're being honest, unlike Intel and their stated TDP. Laptop manufacturers have always used the cheapest possible cooling, but since Sandy Bridge, it has become painfully obvious the TDP is severely understated. Thermal throttling has become acceptable, and while it's impressive that Intel CPUs last years at ~90 degC, I'd rather they be honest with their actual requirements to get the full performance out of a given chip. Many laptops go over 90 degrees even at the guaranteed base speeds (no TurboBoost), in everyday use, not even multihour rendering or anything.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  I think TDP is becoming less and less of a comparable figure. All designs could use far more power in specific worst case corner cases (eg. a very specific instruction stream that causes every functional unit to be in use every cycle, and all data paths to toggle logic state every cycle). Yet in the typical use case (desktop PC, most cores idle most of the time), power consumption will be far lower. What really matters is the graph of "how much computation can I get out of this thing in 10ms bursts, 1 second bursts, and 10 minute bursts?", with a specific cooling setup.
  - x3ro 7y ago
    I'm not sure whether people use $2k CPUs in "most of the time all cores are idle" scenarios a lot.
    - concerned_user 7y ago
      Even if they don't, 10-15% performance gain for double the price seems questionable. If you include the specialized motherboard, chillers, high speed ram even more so. Maybe in some very specific scenarios it would work like some VR prototype or flight sim, but for majority of users it doesn't make economic sense.
  - pizza234 7y ago
    It's correct that TDP is getting more relative¹, but it's not correct that we're talking of corner cases. Anandtech locked an i9-9900k to 95W, and the loss was considerable (between 8 and 28%)². ¹: it needs to be noted that in the last years, Intel's TDP is getting "much more relative" than AMD's ²: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13591/the-intel-core-i9-9900k-at-95w-fixing-the-power-for-sff/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13591/the-intel-core-i9-9900k...
    - pingyong 7y ago
      Intel TDP always had the same meaning: "If your cooler can dissipate TDP, the CPU will run all-core loads at base clock speed, or a single-core loads at boost-clock speed." - Pretty sure that statement has always been true, within +- 100 MHz depending on the specific workload. The distance between base and boost clocks has just increased over the years.
cromwellian 7y ago
It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt, and I find myself worrying about Intel now. Why do they seem to be failing on so many projects? Itanium, Larabee, XScale, the Modem Division? Why is one of the world's largest and most successful CPU companies noncompetitive now on pretty much everything, except their mainstay x86 processor, where they seem to be stalling. Is there something wrong with Intel management/culture that's allowing other firms to run rings around them?
- vkazanov 7y ago
  I don't think a work "failing" is relevant here. The reality is that AMD is still well behind Intel in many, many things. Projects fail. It's expected. The only way to have no failing projects is not to create experimental projects. But AMD is definitely catching up and that's a good thing.
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  > It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt That's how competition works. You are constantly making decisions, each of which could bury you, even if you was a total winner only yesterday. Intel put its bet on own fab and single die design. AMD outsourced the fab and focused on chiplet design. And AMD gain a benefit. Though Intel still has some advantage, and would move to chiplet design soon most likely, so we would yet see a very tight competition.
- beetwenty 7y ago
  With respect to their core CPU business, they were executing on a monopoly playbook since the start of the decade - 4 core desktops and 5% generational improvements on the same architecture, every generation - which made them organizationally unfit to stay competitive. When the Ryzen chips first launched they quickly moved to punch up the core counts to keep pace, but were still waiting on their 10nm process to come through, so they ran out of breathing room really quickly. For the past year it's just been "run hotter and engage in FUD", and now that AMD has got onto 7nm process there's really no comparison to be made. Could they have seen it coming? Absolutely, and they could have had a new architecture ready earlier or adjusted their process plans to de-risk, but again, multiple years of uncontested dominance in their main business tends to make things that aren't next quarter top-line a lower priority. And I think that really is at the heart of the issue with their projects failing so frequently. Intel's pursued anti-competitive practices for decades, and when it works, they coast along without urgency, letting marketing call the shots, and when it doesn't they use their economic moat to rush a solution. But this time, with everything running late, Intel is going to face several quarters ahead without having a real response on the CPU front. They are not going anywhere, though. Their foundry channel is needed to meet global demand for new chips - a good deal will still find buyers. They still have plenty of existing agreements to work with, and can negotiate their way through a lean patch. And they have their new GPU stuff coming soon which should hopefully give them a piece of a different market. There will be plenty of stress to re-org along the way, though, so Intel could come out of this looking very different.
loser777 7y ago
It seems they have left the xx90X model number unused for now but the 32-core has been accounted for...
- alecmg 7y ago
  Not a huge secret that they have a 64-core Threadripper 3990x ready to go. But also no hurry to release it, as even the 24 core wipes the floor with anything Intel has to offer.
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    > wipes the floor with anything Intel has to offer * in synthetic benchmarks that uses down to the last core edit: my bad I mistook this for a technical audience
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      Single-core CPU performance is at a peak. There aren't any revolutionary increases expected there anytime soon. Milticore performance gets more and more important with time.
      - LoSboccacc 7y ago
        > Milticore performance gets more and more important with time. no? above 2-4 core it's just marketing hype like it was ten years ago already and today if you need parallel processing you have vastly powerful resources to tap. sure this amd cpu might be faster in 3d rendering or video encoding or other task that use 4+ cores and that might be useful if you truly can't move them onto a gpu but truth is at the top end many-cores architectures are getting squeezed out by streaming processors and the workloads that have a hard dependency on many core single node general processor are rarer by the day.
        pdimitar 7y ago
        Threadripper is proven to do extremely well in parallel compilation benchmarks -- the Linux kernel build process being the chief example. I've seen the numbers on at least 4 sites (Phoronix included). It's not only about 3D. We're talking everyday programmer productivity, partially achieved by less waiting around when compiling your projects.
kogepathic 7y ago
> AMD has released a salvo by unveiled what are the world's most powerful desktop processors Is it too much to ask that tech journalists proof read their articles before hitting publish? > AMD unveils world's most powerful desktop CPUs This article contains zero benchmarks or anything other than the core count and TDP to substantiate the claim that these are the "world's most powerful desktop CPUs" Can we please stop giving ZDNet impressions for this tripe? The Anandtech article from 4 days ago on the Threadripper announcement at least included AMD's slide deck. [1] [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15062/amds-2019-fall-update https://www.anandtech.com/show/15062/amds-2019-fall-update
- mkl 7y ago
  Discussion of the Anandtech article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21473235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21473235
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- drcongo 7y ago
  The article reads like it's been back and forth between several languages in Google Translate.
- greyfade 7y ago
  > Is it too much to ask that tech journalists proof read their articles before hitting publish? Yes.
tomtomtom777 7y ago
Please promote the guy who came up with the name "threadripper".
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  Sounds like something a true-blue Aussie bloke would come up with.
  - HNLurker2 7y ago
    I only give negative feedback
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Sounds like something a romance novelist would come up with.
- pingyong 7y ago
  It's a shame they didn't call the line EPYC THREADRIPPER though.
Beltiras 7y ago
It's finally happened. I don't foresee a time where I need more CPU power in my desktop. I could use more memory, faster (and larger) SSDs, faster GPUs with more TCs (althou I'm actually good for that too mostly), more bulk data storage on platter disks but honestly I'm good for CPU for all my needs. Here's why: Most of the cores on my Ryzen 7 are idle most of the time. There are intense periods where I need to compile stuff where they max out but these are relatively short. Cup-of-coffee short. Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max. Should I ever need more CPU I don't need an order of magnitude more, I need orders of magnitude more. Those are easily procured through AWS or Azure or some other cloud provider. Same with GPUs. I might make a training run for a NN on my desktop to hypothesis test something that I would then run for longer hours on cloud hardware. It's never going to be cost-efficient for me to scale up with any sort of ownership of the hardware. Of course I'm going to buy the new monster at some point but it will be due to hardware failure, not due to me needing the new shiny.
- flohofwoe 7y ago
  > Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max. The main reason for this is most likely that all current-gen game consoles are using 8 CPU cores, so this is basically the "baseline" for games right now. If the next generation of game consoles increases CPU core count, the core usage for games running on PC will most likely also go up accordingly.
- ebg13 7y ago
  > Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max Large numbers of cores have never been useful for gaming, but overall thread performance has. Right now the major bottleneck for high end gaming is GPUs because display pixel counts have gone through the roof with high frame rate VR and 5k monitors, but keep in mind that the current most powerful graphics card for games (Nvidia 2080 Ti) is over a year old, still costs over $1000, and is not about to be replaced yet because, just like Intel, NVidia hasn't had competition at the top in a long time. If AMD can bring this success to the graphics space, maybe that will change too.
  - pmjordan 7y ago
uuioperter 7y ago
I’ve been reading that many of the Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs support ECC ram, but motherboards support is shaky at best. Worst is that some motherboards will boot with ECC but don’t actually use it. Does anyone have any concrete experience? I wad hoping to build a workstation with ECC memory, but it appears only the EYPC cpus have certified support for ECC. The Xeon W appears to be the most cost effective for guaranteed ECC memory.
- kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
  I have an ASRock X399 Professional and a TR-1950X. 64GB DDR4-2666 ECC UDIMM runs perfectly on it, and the kernel reports ECC support. Day-one memory support was very, pathetically, bad with Threadripper, but it has gotten better. It improved even more with Threadripper 2000. If Ryzen 3000 is any guide, the gaping memory compatibility gulf between Intel and AMD will probably be closed to a slight gap by the time TR 3000 releases. As far as I'm aware, every X399 motherboard vendor supports and warranties ECC support on the platform, but only if you use memory on their QVL at its rated speeds. sTRX4 will likely be no different. As far as cost-effectiveness, a W-3175X ($2,978.80) and Dominus Extreme ($1,868.74) is indeed $552.45 less expensive than a Supermicro MBD-H11SSL-NC with EPYC 7702P ($5399.99), but the the 7702P is about 37% faster multi-threaded, and about 13% faster single-threaded.

116 points by kmod 7y ago

jotm 7y ago

280 Watts TDP! Wow, I think that's a new record for desktop CPUs, although GPUs had reached that a while ago. I wonder how well air coolers work on them, or do they need water cooling for maximum performance? Impressive nonetheless.

pizza234 7y ago
Yes, they need water cooling. The marketing communication is amusing: "Optimized for water cooling": https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop%20Announcement%20Briefing%20Deck-page-008_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop... Threadrippers are at least HEDT; I think this TDP is not unusual. Paradoxically, AMD's marketing is likely more reliable when they specify that the i9-9920X wall power consumption is up to ~300W (https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop%20Announcement%20Briefing%20Deck-page-007_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15062/AMD%20Fall%20Desktop...), rather than Intel's own spec (https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/products/processors/core/x-series/i9-9920x.html https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/products/processo...).
- Someone1234 7y ago
  > Yes, they need water cooling. That's inaccurate. Air cooling solutions are readily available for Threadripper. Water cooling systems simply move heat to a more convenient place to air cool it away (thus the radiators and fans at the destination). The only limiter on air cooling (and not water) is weight/size on the CPU socket (or amount of air moving over the fins of the heatsinks). Some examples of retail air coolers that can cool it out of the box already: https://www.amd.com/en/thermal-solutions-threadripper https://www.amd.com/en/thermal-solutions-threadripper https://noctua.at/en/amd_ryzen_threadripper_tdp_guidelines https://noctua.at/en/amd_ryzen_threadripper_tdp_guidelines https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/coolers/cpu-air-coolers/wraith-ripper/ https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/coolers/cpu-air-coolers... Now the hypothetical ceiling on water cooling is of undeniably higher. You could literally use a jet engine as a fan to cool the water, or send it through liquid nitrogen. But we aren't there yet with 280 Watts. At the current wattage air cooling remains viable, with some trade-offs (e.g. huge air coolers, requiring huge cases, plus strong in-case airflow). You definitely don't "need water cooling," yet. At least not for threadripper.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    That's like saying that heat sinks 'don't make sense' Water cooling systems allow heat to be moved away from the chip's surface more efficiently than pointing at can at it can. Once moved away, a larger radiating surface can be air-coooled
  - the8472 7y ago
    > That's inaccurate and doesn't actually make sense. You want a steep temperature gradient at the limited chip surface to maximize heat flux. Pumping a liquid with high heat capacity to it steepens the gradient where you need it. Cooling the liquid on the other hand can happen over a much larger surface area with shallower gradients and thus lower heat flux. Note that while the heat pipes in air coolers do use convection they do so passively, liquid cooling solutions are active.
    - Someone1234 7y ago
      You've not really added anything to the discussion here, but seem to be using verbose language in an attempt to convey expertise. For example this: > You want a steep temperature gradient at the limited chip surface to maximize heat flux. Is true with both and is really just a convoluted way of saying "if you don't convect heat fast enough, it won't work." Yeah, undeniably true... > Pumping a liquid with high heat capacity to it steepens the gradient where you need it. Where you need it is at the surface of the CPU package. Both solutions provide adequate heat capacities at that location, that's why they fundamentally work. One uses heat pipes and fins directly above with fans/air carrying the heat away, the other moves the heat, and does the same elsewhere. > Cooling the liquid on the other hand can happen over a much larger surface area with shallower gradients and thus lower heat flux. Note that while the heat pipes in air coolers do use convection they do so passively, liquid cooling solutions are active. This is a basic explanation of how water cooling works, it doesn't really add any specific insight into the problem scope.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - 7y ago
- jotm 7y ago
  "Recommended". So at least they're being honest, unlike Intel and their stated TDP. Laptop manufacturers have always used the cheapest possible cooling, but since Sandy Bridge, it has become painfully obvious the TDP is severely understated. Thermal throttling has become acceptable, and while it's impressive that Intel CPUs last years at ~90 degC, I'd rather they be honest with their actual requirements to get the full performance out of a given chip. Many laptops go over 90 degrees even at the guaranteed base speeds (no TurboBoost), in everyday use, not even multihour rendering or anything.
londons_explore 7y ago
I think TDP is becoming less and less of a comparable figure. All designs could use far more power in specific worst case corner cases (eg. a very specific instruction stream that causes every functional unit to be in use every cycle, and all data paths to toggle logic state every cycle). Yet in the typical use case (desktop PC, most cores idle most of the time), power consumption will be far lower. What really matters is the graph of "how much computation can I get out of this thing in 10ms bursts, 1 second bursts, and 10 minute bursts?", with a specific cooling setup.
- x3ro 7y ago
  I'm not sure whether people use $2k CPUs in "most of the time all cores are idle" scenarios a lot.
  - concerned_user 7y ago
    Even if they don't, 10-15% performance gain for double the price seems questionable. If you include the specialized motherboard, chillers, high speed ram even more so. Maybe in some very specific scenarios it would work like some VR prototype or flight sim, but for majority of users it doesn't make economic sense.
- pizza234 7y ago
  It's correct that TDP is getting more relative¹, but it's not correct that we're talking of corner cases. Anandtech locked an i9-9900k to 95W, and the loss was considerable (between 8 and 28%)². ¹: it needs to be noted that in the last years, Intel's TDP is getting "much more relative" than AMD's ²: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13591/the-intel-core-i9-9900k-at-95w-fixing-the-power-for-sff/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13591/the-intel-core-i9-9900k...
  - pingyong 7y ago
    Intel TDP always had the same meaning: "If your cooler can dissipate TDP, the CPU will run all-core loads at base clock speed, or a single-core loads at boost-clock speed." - Pretty sure that statement has always been true, within +- 100 MHz depending on the specific workload. The distance between base and boost clocks has just increased over the years.

cromwellian 7y ago

It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt, and I find myself worrying about Intel now. Why do they seem to be failing on so many projects? Itanium, Larabee, XScale, the Modem Division? Why is one of the world's largest and most successful CPU companies noncompetitive now on pretty much everything, except their mainstay x86 processor, where they seem to be stalling. Is there something wrong with Intel management/culture that's allowing other firms to run rings around them?

vkazanov 7y ago
I don't think a work "failing" is relevant here. The reality is that AMD is still well behind Intel in many, many things. Projects fail. It's expected. The only way to have no failing projects is not to create experimental projects. But AMD is definitely catching up and that's a good thing.
ernst_klim 7y ago
> It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt That's how competition works. You are constantly making decisions, each of which could bury you, even if you was a total winner only yesterday. Intel put its bet on own fab and single die design. AMD outsourced the fab and focused on chiplet design. And AMD gain a benefit. Though Intel still has some advantage, and would move to chiplet design soon most likely, so we would yet see a very tight competition.
beetwenty 7y ago
With respect to their core CPU business, they were executing on a monopoly playbook since the start of the decade - 4 core desktops and 5% generational improvements on the same architecture, every generation - which made them organizationally unfit to stay competitive. When the Ryzen chips first launched they quickly moved to punch up the core counts to keep pace, but were still waiting on their 10nm process to come through, so they ran out of breathing room really quickly. For the past year it's just been "run hotter and engage in FUD", and now that AMD has got onto 7nm process there's really no comparison to be made. Could they have seen it coming? Absolutely, and they could have had a new architecture ready earlier or adjusted their process plans to de-risk, but again, multiple years of uncontested dominance in their main business tends to make things that aren't next quarter top-line a lower priority. And I think that really is at the heart of the issue with their projects failing so frequently. Intel's pursued anti-competitive practices for decades, and when it works, they coast along without urgency, letting marketing call the shots, and when it doesn't they use their economic moat to rush a solution. But this time, with everything running late, Intel is going to face several quarters ahead without having a real response on the CPU front. They are not going anywhere, though. Their foundry channel is needed to meet global demand for new chips - a good deal will still find buyers. They still have plenty of existing agreements to work with, and can negotiate their way through a lean patch. And they have their new GPU stuff coming soon which should hopefully give them a piece of a different market. There will be plenty of stress to re-org along the way, though, so Intel could come out of this looking very different.

loser777 7y ago

It seems they have left the xx90X model number unused for now but the 32-core has been accounted for...

alecmg 7y ago
Not a huge secret that they have a 64-core Threadripper 3990x ready to go. But also no hurry to release it, as even the 24 core wipes the floor with anything Intel has to offer.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  > wipes the floor with anything Intel has to offer * in synthetic benchmarks that uses down to the last core edit: my bad I mistook this for a technical audience
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    Single-core CPU performance is at a peak. There aren't any revolutionary increases expected there anytime soon. Milticore performance gets more and more important with time.
    - LoSboccacc 7y ago
      > Milticore performance gets more and more important with time. no? above 2-4 core it's just marketing hype like it was ten years ago already and today if you need parallel processing you have vastly powerful resources to tap. sure this amd cpu might be faster in 3d rendering or video encoding or other task that use 4+ cores and that might be useful if you truly can't move them onto a gpu but truth is at the top end many-cores architectures are getting squeezed out by streaming processors and the workloads that have a hard dependency on many core single node general processor are rarer by the day.
      - pdimitar 7y ago
        Threadripper is proven to do extremely well in parallel compilation benchmarks -- the Linux kernel build process being the chief example. I've seen the numbers on at least 4 sites (Phoronix included). It's not only about 3D. We're talking everyday programmer productivity, partially achieved by less waiting around when compiling your projects.

kogepathic 7y ago

> AMD has released a salvo by unveiled what are the world's most powerful desktop processors Is it too much to ask that tech journalists proof read their articles before hitting publish? > AMD unveils world's most powerful desktop CPUs This article contains zero benchmarks or anything other than the core count and TDP to substantiate the claim that these are the "world's most powerful desktop CPUs" Can we please stop giving ZDNet impressions for this tripe? The Anandtech article from 4 days ago on the Threadripper announcement at least included AMD's slide deck. [1] [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15062/amds-2019-fall-update https://www.anandtech.com/show/15062/amds-2019-fall-update

mkl 7y ago
Discussion of the Anandtech article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21473235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21473235
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
drcongo 7y ago
The article reads like it's been back and forth between several languages in Google Translate.
greyfade 7y ago
> Is it too much to ask that tech journalists proof read their articles before hitting publish? Yes.

tomtomtom777 7y ago

Please promote the guy who came up with the name "threadripper".

jiggawatts 7y ago
Sounds like something a true-blue Aussie bloke would come up with.
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  I only give negative feedback
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Sounds like something a romance novelist would come up with.
pingyong 7y ago
It's a shame they didn't call the line EPYC THREADRIPPER though.

Beltiras 7y ago

It's finally happened. I don't foresee a time where I need more CPU power in my desktop. I could use more memory, faster (and larger) SSDs, faster GPUs with more TCs (althou I'm actually good for that too mostly), more bulk data storage on platter disks but honestly I'm good for CPU for all my needs. Here's why: Most of the cores on my Ryzen 7 are idle most of the time. There are intense periods where I need to compile stuff where they max out but these are relatively short. Cup-of-coffee short. Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max. Should I ever need more CPU I don't need an order of magnitude more, I need orders of magnitude more. Those are easily procured through AWS or Azure or some other cloud provider. Same with GPUs. I might make a training run for a NN on my desktop to hypothesis test something that I would then run for longer hours on cloud hardware. It's never going to be cost-efficient for me to scale up with any sort of ownership of the hardware. Of course I'm going to buy the new monster at some point but it will be due to hardware failure, not due to me needing the new shiny.

flohofwoe 7y ago
> Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max. The main reason for this is most likely that all current-gen game consoles are using 8 CPU cores, so this is basically the "baseline" for games right now. If the next generation of game consoles increases CPU core count, the core usage for games running on PC will most likely also go up accordingly.
ebg13 7y ago
> Any gaming activity seems to use no more than 8 cores max Large numbers of cores have never been useful for gaming, but overall thread performance has. Right now the major bottleneck for high end gaming is GPUs because display pixel counts have gone through the roof with high frame rate VR and 5k monitors, but keep in mind that the current most powerful graphics card for games (Nvidia 2080 Ti) is over a year old, still costs over $1000, and is not about to be replaced yet because, just like Intel, NVidia hasn't had competition at the top in a long time. If AMD can bring this success to the graphics space, maybe that will change too.
- pmjordan 7y ago

uuioperter 7y ago

I’ve been reading that many of the Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs support ECC ram, but motherboards support is shaky at best. Worst is that some motherboards will boot with ECC but don’t actually use it. Does anyone have any concrete experience? I wad hoping to build a workstation with ECC memory, but it appears only the EYPC cpus have certified support for ECC. The Xeon W appears to be the most cost effective for guaranteed ECC memory.

kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
I have an ASRock X399 Professional and a TR-1950X. 64GB DDR4-2666 ECC UDIMM runs perfectly on it, and the kernel reports ECC support. Day-one memory support was very, pathetically, bad with Threadripper, but it has gotten better. It improved even more with Threadripper 2000. If Ryzen 3000 is any guide, the gaping memory compatibility gulf between Intel and AMD will probably be closed to a slight gap by the time TR 3000 releases. As far as I'm aware, every X399 motherboard vendor supports and warranties ECC support on the platform, but only if you use memory on their QVL at its rated speeds. sTRX4 will likely be no different. As far as cost-effectiveness, a W-3175X ($2,978.80) and Dominus Extreme ($1,868.74) is indeed $552.45 less expensive than a Supermicro MBD-H11SSL-NC with EPYC 7702P ($5399.99), but the the 7702P is about 37% faster multi-threaded, and about 13% faster single-threaded.