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This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still,

This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power! Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper? Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?

snagglegaggle 7y ago
The step from Ryzen to Threadripper is quite a big one. I'd benefit from a Threadripper system, but budget only allows a (top tier) Ryzen for now. I suppose spare money could go towards a Threadripper right now and I wouldn't consider it wasted per se.
- Tepix 7y ago
  Even if you can get a good price for the CPU, the mainboards are very pricey compared to the consumer CPU boards.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    Last time I checked, motherboard's for thread ripper cpus were around 200~300$, is that still the case? The motherboard cost really erases the budget for entry, as that's the price of a decent ryzen cpu.
    - snagglegaggle 7y ago
      Exactly, and there's not a lot of used DDR4 (w/ or w/o ECC) on the market.
jagger27 7y ago
I would say it is the first 16-core "consumer chip", since every other 16-core chip has either been HEDT-class or server-grade, both requiring expensive motherboards. I would be happy to try plopping this into my B450 motherboard from my 2700X. I'm happy with my current NVMe storage, which is just about the only thing that takes advantage of the extra bandwidth. Graphics cards aren't there yet.
- jankotek 7y ago
  I had 24 core workstation 5 years ago for price of this single chip. Refurbished server...
  - velox_io 7y ago
    The problem with this strategy is that they often have much lower clock speeds/ IPC, plus they are often quite power-hungry and lose the ability to overclock (that one's subjective). So you do often get bitten by Amdahl's law. However, if it is purely a rendering machine and single-threaded performance isn't an issue, you can get a lot of processing power for the money.
    - jankotek 7y ago
      It was good complement for light laptop.
    - Damogran6 7y ago
      And potentially REALLY NOISY...
      - paulmd 7y ago
        GamersNexus had a fun video playing with a new Epyc server with Wendell from L1Techs... the delta fans on that pull up to 7A. Not 0.7A, 7A. More wattage than your CPU. https://youtu.be/la0_2Kmrr1E?t=164 https://youtu.be/la0_2Kmrr1E?t=164 Not an epyc thing, servers are hilariously loud and I've seen so many posts on selfhosted and homelab about "the wife made me get rid of my R710 because you can hear it in the closet/basement/etc all the time"....
- neogodless 7y ago
  That's fair - looks like you need LGA 2066 for the Intel chips with those core counts, which aren't terribly expensive ($150+) but it's hard to find exactly which motherboards support something like the i9-9960X. Running a 2700X in an X470 but this is 3x the price of that chip, and personally, I won't get the necessary benefit. Still pleased to see exploding CPU power in the past few years!
MrGilbert 7y ago
I did some math for myself and realized that I can skip the 4 extra cores, and go with the Ryzen 9 3900X (530€ vs 820€). That's 44.16 € / Core (3900X) vs 51.25 € / Core (3950X) where I live. Yes, the base clock is 200 Mhz lower, but for my use case (homeserver with gaming vm and minecraft server etc), I need cores that I can assign. Im not ready to pay 290€ für an extra 4 cores yet.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  the 3900x base clock is actually higher.
chaosbutters 7y ago
I'm waiting for 64 core CPU. 32 is nice but still not enough.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Are you on 48 cores currently?
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  I feel your comment is just pointlessly snarky without mentioning for what workloads it's not enough. Nothing is ever enough but we'll always be limited by the economics of scale and in case you're in the exclusive demographic where this doesn't apply to you than you'd have resources for workarounds to performance limitations without complaining (server grade chips, FPGAs, supercomputers, dedicated ASICs, clusters, etc.).
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Try running kubernetes dev environment with all the crap your team has hoarded on it, elastic, Prometheus, 5 different database engines and dashboard, etc. Then watch the system chug.
- qzw 7y ago
  64 cores ought to be enough for anybody...
  - neogodless 7y ago
    Yeah, that's what... 10kb of RAM per core?
    - dragontamer 7y ago
      Funny story. The Vega64 has 8GB of RAM and 4MB of L2 cache (last-level cache) across 4096 SIMD-cores. That's 1kB of L2 cache and 2MB RAM per core. It gets worse: although there are 4096 cores, the Vega64 isn't fully loaded until you stick 4-threads-per-core (Or more precisely, 16-wavefronts per Compute Unit (256-SIMD-cores)). That means you will actually need to run 16384 SIMD-threads before the Vega64 is fully utilized. That's less than 512kB main-RAM per core, and less than 256 bytes of L2 cache per core. Better hope your threads are sharing a lot of memory... -------- AMD addresses this problem with NAVI / RDNA: NAVI is fully utilized at 1-thread per core. So you only need 2816 threads on the 5700 XT to fully utilize the system.
velox_io 7y ago
I'm looking forward to a 3950X, this is the first time you can get a lot of cores without the expense of low clockspeeds. I was interested in the new ThreadRippers however, I do beleive this gen is overpriced. I realise this is how supply and demand works, but I don't think the expense is worth it personally. In addition, from what I've seen so far. AMD/ OEMs are chrging a large premium for TRX40 mother boards. You're talking ~$550 & up. Bare in mind that for a similar price you can get i an Epyc board with double the memory channels (8), AND add an addional CPU, AND duel 10gbe! (you would think a single port would be default on most workstations late 2019) It's a lot of money for 2 addional memory chennels & and PCIe lanes (PCIe is a serial interface so it only needs one wire per lane, per direction).
solotronics 7y ago
If you look at performance per watt AND performance per dollar it is a record breaker. Also, it is the highest base clock speeds of any of the AMD chips.
bob1029 7y ago
I am waiting for the 3990X announcement before pulling the trigger on 3rd gen TR. I am already running a 2950X in my main workstation, and it's currently really hard to make an argument for even more performance... That said, I am targeting the 3970X as my next upgrade option, but AMD might be able to upsell me on the 3990X. Once the trigger has been pulled on 3rd gen, I will look at repurposing the 2950X workstation as a Jenkins build agent. We currently only have 2 vCPUs in AWS for Jenkins, so this could make a huge difference for our build process and give the old machine a really good 2nd life. In terms of the 3990X specifically, I am most interested to see if they are going to provide additional platform capabilities. There were rumors regarding a TRX80/WRX80 platform, which seemed to imply to some tech journalists that there would be an octal channel variant of TR available early next year. It would be very hard to turn this down if it were an option.

snagglegaggle 7y ago

The step from Ryzen to Threadripper is quite a big one. I'd benefit from a Threadripper system, but budget only allows a (top tier) Ryzen for now. I suppose spare money could go towards a Threadripper right now and I wouldn't consider it wasted per se.

Tepix 7y ago
Even if you can get a good price for the CPU, the mainboards are very pricey compared to the consumer CPU boards.
- penagwin 7y ago
  Last time I checked, motherboard's for thread ripper cpus were around 200~300$, is that still the case? The motherboard cost really erases the budget for entry, as that's the price of a decent ryzen cpu.
  - snagglegaggle 7y ago
    Exactly, and there's not a lot of used DDR4 (w/ or w/o ECC) on the market.

jagger27 7y ago

I would say it is the first 16-core "consumer chip", since every other 16-core chip has either been HEDT-class or server-grade, both requiring expensive motherboards. I would be happy to try plopping this into my B450 motherboard from my 2700X. I'm happy with my current NVMe storage, which is just about the only thing that takes advantage of the extra bandwidth. Graphics cards aren't there yet.

jankotek 7y ago
I had 24 core workstation 5 years ago for price of this single chip. Refurbished server...
- velox_io 7y ago
  The problem with this strategy is that they often have much lower clock speeds/ IPC, plus they are often quite power-hungry and lose the ability to overclock (that one's subjective). So you do often get bitten by Amdahl's law. However, if it is purely a rendering machine and single-threaded performance isn't an issue, you can get a lot of processing power for the money.
  - jankotek 7y ago
    It was good complement for light laptop.
  - Damogran6 7y ago
    And potentially REALLY NOISY...
    - paulmd 7y ago
      GamersNexus had a fun video playing with a new Epyc server with Wendell from L1Techs... the delta fans on that pull up to 7A. Not 0.7A, 7A. More wattage than your CPU. https://youtu.be/la0_2Kmrr1E?t=164 https://youtu.be/la0_2Kmrr1E?t=164 Not an epyc thing, servers are hilariously loud and I've seen so many posts on selfhosted and homelab about "the wife made me get rid of my R710 because you can hear it in the closet/basement/etc all the time"....
neogodless 7y ago
That's fair - looks like you need LGA 2066 for the Intel chips with those core counts, which aren't terribly expensive ($150+) but it's hard to find exactly which motherboards support something like the i9-9960X. Running a 2700X in an X470 but this is 3x the price of that chip, and personally, I won't get the necessary benefit. Still pleased to see exploding CPU power in the past few years!

MrGilbert 7y ago

I did some math for myself and realized that I can skip the 4 extra cores, and go with the Ryzen 9 3900X (530€ vs 820€). That's 44.16 € / Core (3900X) vs 51.25 € / Core (3950X) where I live. Yes, the base clock is 200 Mhz lower, but for my use case (homeserver with gaming vm and minecraft server etc), I need cores that I can assign. Im not ready to pay 290€ für an extra 4 cores yet.

gameswithgo 7y ago
the 3900x base clock is actually higher.

chaosbutters 7y ago

I'm waiting for 64 core CPU. 32 is nice but still not enough.

Koshkin 7y ago
Are you on 48 cores currently?
ChuckNorris89 7y ago
I feel your comment is just pointlessly snarky without mentioning for what workloads it's not enough. Nothing is ever enough but we'll always be limited by the economics of scale and in case you're in the exclusive demographic where this doesn't apply to you than you'd have resources for workarounds to performance limitations without complaining (server grade chips, FPGAs, supercomputers, dedicated ASICs, clusters, etc.).
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
Try running kubernetes dev environment with all the crap your team has hoarded on it, elastic, Prometheus, 5 different database engines and dashboard, etc. Then watch the system chug.
qzw 7y ago
64 cores ought to be enough for anybody...
- neogodless 7y ago
  Yeah, that's what... 10kb of RAM per core?
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    Funny story. The Vega64 has 8GB of RAM and 4MB of L2 cache (last-level cache) across 4096 SIMD-cores. That's 1kB of L2 cache and 2MB RAM per core. It gets worse: although there are 4096 cores, the Vega64 isn't fully loaded until you stick 4-threads-per-core (Or more precisely, 16-wavefronts per Compute Unit (256-SIMD-cores)). That means you will actually need to run 16384 SIMD-threads before the Vega64 is fully utilized. That's less than 512kB main-RAM per core, and less than 256 bytes of L2 cache per core. Better hope your threads are sharing a lot of memory... -------- AMD addresses this problem with NAVI / RDNA: NAVI is fully utilized at 1-thread per core. So you only need 2816 threads on the 5700 XT to fully utilize the system.

velox_io 7y ago

I'm looking forward to a 3950X, this is the first time you can get a lot of cores without the expense of low clockspeeds. I was interested in the new ThreadRippers however, I do beleive this gen is overpriced. I realise this is how supply and demand works, but I don't think the expense is worth it personally. In addition, from what I've seen so far. AMD/ OEMs are chrging a large premium for TRX40 mother boards. You're talking ~$550 & up. Bare in mind that for a similar price you can get i an Epyc board with double the memory channels (8), AND add an addional CPU, AND duel 10gbe! (you would think a single port would be default on most workstations late 2019) It's a lot of money for 2 addional memory chennels & and PCIe lanes (PCIe is a serial interface so it only needs one wire per lane, per direction).

solotronics 7y ago

If you look at performance per watt AND performance per dollar it is a record breaker. Also, it is the highest base clock speeds of any of the AMD chips.

bob1029 7y ago

I am waiting for the 3990X announcement before pulling the trigger on 3rd gen TR. I am already running a 2950X in my main workstation, and it's currently really hard to make an argument for even more performance... That said, I am targeting the 3970X as my next upgrade option, but AMD might be able to upsell me on the 3990X. Once the trigger has been pulled on 3rd gen, I will look at repurposing the 2950X workstation as a Jenkins build agent. We currently only have 2 vCPUs in AWS for Jenkins, so this could make a huge difference for our build process and give the old machine a really good 2nd life. In terms of the 3990X specifically, I am most interested to see if they are going to provide additional platform capabilities. There were rumors regarding a TRX80/WRX80 platform, which seemed to imply to some tech journalists that there would be an octal channel variant of TR available early next year. It would be very hard to turn this down if it were an option.