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AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review
- pella 7y ago"AMD Pre-Announces 64-core Threadripper 3990X: Time To Open Your Wallet" https://www.anandtech.com/show/15151/amd-preannounces-64-core-threadripper-3990x https://www.anandtech.com/show/15151/amd-preannounces-64-cor...
- qaq 7y agoHow much would that run for 5K?
- brians 7y agoProbably. Or AMD pulls another rabbit out and calls it $2500 in mid 2021.
- bitL 7y agoI doubt it. This is new AMD with ridiculous prices when they face no competition. I'd say it's more likely to expect $6k than $2.5k.
- rubbingalcohol 7y agoI don't really see how the pricing is ridiculous though. They're still way cheaper than what Intel charged for the same cores a year ago, and they have more cores than Intel can even offer on their best workstation chips. If you compare against 28 core Xeons, the new Threadrippers are a downright bargain.
- bitL 7y agoI meant in comparison to what we were used to. Now a semi-decent TRX40 board is $700, entry-level TR3 is $1300. Top-end x399 board is $550, entry-level TR is $250. There was a huge jump in prices compared to previous generation of HEDT.
- barkingcat 7y agoThis comment doesn't make sense. You're getting more cores than previous generation of HEDT, and the equivalent Intel processors aren't cheaper at all. This is a new market segment. If you want a fast cpu, the Ryzen 7 and 9 series are completely fine if you want that price range! The exact same price range as you're used to still exist. On the other hand, people have been used to paying exorbitantly for Xeon processors, like 2000-5000 per cpu, so this is a breath of fresh air.
- bitL 7y agoYou are getting the same number of (better) cores for higher price. But backwards/forward compatibility is gone, so you either pay the full price upfront, or are stuck with outdated chips forever.
- pitaj 7y agoBoard cost is due to PCIe4 support mainly
- bitL 7y agoWhich is kinda unnecessary as there is no single GPU on the market capable of saturating PCIe3 and situations where one needs a sustained transfer between multiple M.2 SSDs that could saturate PCIe4 are very rare. Only 100Gbps+ LAN is probably practical for a few total pro users.
- dragontamer 7y agoActually, its pretty easy to get bandwidth-bottlenecked in GPU-compute. I know video games don't really get bandwidth bottlenecked, but all you gotta do is perform a "Scan" or "Reduce" on the GPU and bam, you're PCIe bottlenecked. (I recommend NVidia CUB or AMD ROCprim for these kinds of operations) CUB Device-reduce is extremely fast if the data is already on the GPU: https://nvlabs.github.io/cub/structcub_1_1_device_reduce.html https://nvlabs.github.io/cub/structcub_1_1_device_reduce.htm.... However, if the data is CPU / DDR4 RAM side, then the slow PCIe connection hampers you severely. I pushed 1GB of data to device-side reduce the other day (just playing with ROCprim), and it took ~100ms to hipMemcpy the 1GB of data to the GPU, but only 5ms to actually execute the reduce. That's a PCIe-bottleneck for sure. (Numbers from memory... I don't quite remember them exactly but that was roughly the magnitudes we're talking about). That was over PCIe 3.0 x16, which seems to only push 10GBps one-way in practice. (15Gbps in theory, but practice is always lower than the specs) Yeah, I know CPU / GPU have like 10us of latency, but you can easily write a "server" kind of CPU-master / GPU-slave scheduling algorithm to send these jobs down to the GPU. So you can write software to ignore the latency problem in many cases. Software can't solve the bandwidth problem however. You gotta just buy a bigger pipe.
- vbezhenar 7y agoThey increased pricing by $100/$200 for 24/32 core CPU since last year. May be it's not ridiculous, but they are not undercutting anymore.
- aoeusnth1 7y agoThey are undercutting - on perf/$. The difference in sticker price you pointed out is only there because there is no comparable intel part (under $3000 at least)
- lliamander 7y agoYup. What's crazy is that a $6k 3990X is still a better deal in terms of $/core than even a dual-cpu Xeon W-3175 system (which would cost about $6k for only 56 cores).
- chaosbutters 7y agoprobably closer to 3500-4000 USD. Maybe $5k if theyre feeling greedy. But I think they want to undercut intel so theyll keep their margins reasonable so they can crush the Xeon line
- pella 7y agoreview "AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 (Castle Leak) Review Roundup" https://videocardz.com/83333/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3000-castle-leak-review-roundup https://videocardz.com/83333/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3000-cas...
- stopads 7y agoGreat review, but the highlight for me is that windows task manager view of CPU utilization. It's like looking at a spreadsheet: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Task%20Manager%202_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Task%20Manag...
- gameswithgo 7y agoThe core explosion AMD has started has quickly made current cpu monitor UIs cease to even make sense, its great!
- bitL 7y agoCan't wait for a scrollbar in htop... [EDIT: 256 threads in htop on ARM] https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Cavium-ThunderX2-htop-100-percent.jpg https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Cavi...
- davnicwil 7y agoWell, it would be moreso if they laid out logical cores as columns and physical cores as rows - they missed a nice UI trick there!
- nolok 7y agoWorks with the current 1:1 assumptions, but then the early windows performance problems with ryzen's NUMA design shows what happens when those assumptions are wrong. Their design, while less cool, is capable of handling pretty much any configuration.
- jasomill 7y agoA nicer UI trick would be to change how Windows Task Manager reports CPU usage on the "Details" tab, because with, e.g., 64 virtual cores, single-threaded process CPU utilization can only ever be 00, 01, or (assuming the display rounds up) 02, because the displayed value is sum of core % utilization ------------------------- number of cores In a system with hundreds of cores, (predominantly) single-threaded processes' CPU utilization will therefore appear to be identically zero. The "Processes" tab improves on this slightly by adding a single decimal digit, but this display still becomes less and less useful as core count increases because its precision remains inversely proportional to the number of (virtual) cores in the system.
- bitL 7y agoAny official announcement for 8-channel 4TB LRDIMM TRX80/WRX80 chipset yet? TRX40 is underwhelming compared to high-end x399...
- Jonnax 7y agoWhat's missing?
- bitL 7y agoTRX40 can do only as much RAM as x399 (256GB) as there are only 32GB (ECC) UDIMMs available. With incoming 64-core TR that would be 4GB/core or 2GB/thread, which is way too little for a CPU that would cost ~$5k. TRX40 boards also for some reason have fewer PCIe slots (4) than x399 (6) or x299 (7) boards. I can't call them "Pro" because of that - fewer GPUs for Deep Learning is not a good idea in a workstation-level tech.
- IanCutress 7y agoNothing yet.
- greatjack613 7y agoRespectfully, intel looks like its hiding under a chair by refusing to release anything with similar core counts. I mean I would also be afraid that Amd has a > Manufacturing Process > Performance > Power Consumption = IPC
- lm28469 7y ago> by refusing to release anything with similar core counts. Are they refusing or are they not able to produce them ?
- wtallis 7y agoThey have server and workstation parts up to 28 cores, but their enthusiast-oriented product line is 10, 12, 14 or 18 cores while AMD offers 16, 24, 32 and soon 64.
- jessaustin 7y ago18 cores ought to be enough for anybody...
- genghizkhan 7y agoSomething something 640k RAM...
- dragontamer 7y ago> while AMD offers 16 Threadripper 3 doesn't offer any 16-core offering. The smallest Threadripper 3 is 24-cores (the 3960x).
- wtallis 7y agoSure, but AMD has a 16-core part on their mainstream socket that is in the same price range as Intel's 14-core HEDT part, and the AMD chip is performance competitive with the Intel HEDT parts despite being limited to two memory channels.
- misja 7y ago280W TDP?! That's more than what a large refrigerator uses ..
- gameswithgo 7y agoTDP does not reflect actual power draw. Actual power draw might be more, might be less. Either way, its like, eight normal computers.
- bitL 7y agoExpect max around 430W...
- bryanlarsen 7y agoAnandtech's testing showed full load power consumption of 279.82 W (3960X) and 286.72 W (3970X). OTOH the "255W" Xeon W-3175X full load power consumption was 381.08W...
- g4d 7y agoGoodness, I had no idea the power consumption of that Xeon was so high!
- bitL 7y ago2990WX with PBO enabled went over 400W.
- kllrnohj 7y agoOverclocking chips does tend to cause power usage to spike, yes. That's not exactly a new thing, nor is the increase that surprising. A slight bump to voltage will cause power consumption to skyrocket. Heck, i9-7980XE's at 4.9ghz are pushing 1kW in consumption. Hence why intel's 28 core @ 5ghz demo used a 1700W capable cooler.
- xbmcuser 7y ago
- bjoli 7y agoWhy no compilation benchmarks? Say, a Linux, chromium or GCC compile. All that cache must make it fantastic at compiling.
- gameswithgo 7y agoGamers Nexus did some GCC benchmarks with the regular Ryzens and indeed they were absolutely trouncing intel, and indeed it was due to the big l3 cache. The Threadrippers are the same cpu with just more of them so I'm sure they do well also.
- syshum 7y agoOn Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRgmq9f6VBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRgmq9f6VBY https://www.level1techs.com/article/threadripper-ragnarok https://www.level1techs.com/article/threadripper-ragnarok
- Trellmor 7y agoPhoronix posted some compilation benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linux-3960x-3970x&num=9 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linu... And golem.de (link in german, see table at the end of the page): https://www.golem.de/news/threadripper-3970x-3960x-im-test-amd-wird-uneinholbar-1911-144997-3.html https://www.golem.de/news/threadripper-3970x-3960x-im-test-a...
- travisglines 7y agoThe percentage increase in performance in those benchmarks is stunning. They're pushing hard on the multi-thread end and it's clearly working for a lot of modern applications that can take advantage of it. Pair one of these Threadrippers with a pair of the fastest NVMe SSD's out there, with plenty of high performance DDR4 memory and you've got a near supercomputer from recent past in terms of performance.
- Avamander 7y agoWe should also really update all tutorials out there to use things like `make -j12` and makefiles to link and compile using multiple threads.
- shantara 7y agoThe biggest indicator of the success of AMD Threadripper line to me is that Intel has been forced to cut the price of their newly released i9-10980XE CPU by $1000 compared to i9-9980XE while maintaining practically indistinguishable performance.
- bitL 7y agoThe only advantages are AVX512 and optimized Intel compiler/libraries now.
- a012 7y agoIntel has so many resources, so when their hardware isn't competitive enough they have software to the rescue.
- NullPrefix 7y agoRead: Software patches to hardware vulnerabilities.
- Someone1234 7y ago> optimized Intel compiler/libraries now And that's just cheating anyway. Intel's libraries refuse to use some instructions on AMD's CPU that the CPU supports, and instead downgrade to slower legacy versions. Cite[0]. [0] https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
- boris 7y ago6 pages of gaming benchmarks and not one compilation speed test. Baffling.
- MindTooth 7y agoHere are some of Linux stuff: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linux-3960x-3970x&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linu...
- disintegore 7y agoKernel 5.4 compiled under 24 seconds. Insane.
- thebruce87m 7y agoCompile on boot
- Someone1234 7y agoThat is insane. I'm surprised it can even go that low, I would have expected it to hit an IO bottleneck before then (large object files/linking/source reads, etc). Even with a fast SSD on my lowly i7, I often wind up sitting at IO or lock contention instead of actual CPU bottlenecks (although it could be argued faster CPU = faster lock release = faster compilation).
- somurzakov 7y agocan it run crysis, though?
- leadingthenet 7y agoIt might even run it in CPU-rendered mode...
- mastax 7y agoYep: https://youtu.be/HuLsrr79-Pw?t=705 https://youtu.be/HuLsrr79-Pw?t=705 (this is the previous generation)
- e12e 7y agoWell, if epyc could with 64 cores...? https://youtu.be/HuLsrr79-Pw?t=12m10s https://youtu.be/HuLsrr79-Pw?t=12m10s
- bob1029 7y agoI think this is the part where it gets interesting. Once you have enough parallel general-purpose compute horsepower available to run a physically-based renderer (e.g. what Pixar uses) at frame rates beyond 30/second, you can start to enter into a realm of arbitrarily-complex scenes within real-time applications. How far off are we from this possibility, assuming someone sat down and optimized existing solutions for this use case?
- FBISurveillance 7y agoAMD slaps Intel around a bit with a large trout.
- mstade 7y agoMan, that's a blast from the past – thanks for the chuckle!
- walkingolof 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78b67l_yxUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78b67l_yxUc
- jacquesm 7y agoRight series, wrong clip, I thought it was going to be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8XeDvKqI4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8XeDvKqI4E
- SahAssar 7y agoAs is tradition in certain parts of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHDbu4G3_oE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHDbu4G3_oE
- ravedave5 7y agoI love it how CPUs have more onboard memory than my whole first computer now.
- anentropic 7y agoI remember when a 20 megabyte hard drive was a wow item
- sumoboy 7y agoI just added a single seagate 16tb drive to my pc the other day, just an insane amount of storage in a little package.
- puranjay 7y agoI got a 1tb SSD. I remember a time when 250mb Zip Drives were the stuff of science fiction, or when I thought they'd never top the 128mb storage on my first digital camera. Incredible how cheap storage is now.
- Zardoz84 7y agoThis is happening since a long time.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's been like that for a while for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1
- bryanlarsen 7y agoIt's been a while since the L1 cache size (64KB) has exceeded that of my first computer. What I find crazy is that a single Ryzen core has more in registers than some of the computers I've used. AMD64 has 16 64 bit registers, but Ryzen actually has 168 behind the scenes so it can pipeline and reorder multiple instructions simultaneously. That's almost 1.5KBytes of memory, more than some microcontrollers have in ROM or RAM.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago> Last AMD generation was 250W, this one is 280W: if we’re not there already, then this should be a practical limit. A good point for people looking to use this in their home server like I am. It’s going to be really hot if you’re getting your money out of it. At some point there’s not an efficient way to cool these processors when the ambient room temperature rises too high. Anyone have suggestions for that? I’m in a weird position where power is cheap but I can’t AC my garage (where it’s located).
- wil421 7y agoI’ve seen people on YouTube build a wood box around a small rack, put a bathroom fan inside, and run a foil hose for a dryer to the outside. The racks I saw already had a glass door so it was easier to build the sides and foil tap the cracks.
- mgalgs 7y agoHow about some good old fans? I had a little NAS box in my garage for a few years that ran pretty hot and I was afraid of straining the hard disks. I ended up just using lm_sensors on the server to monitor temperature, and when it got it hot, kick off an SSH command to a raspberry pi sitting nearby to tell it to turn on an exterior fan (gpio -> mosfet -> relay) I had mounted to the side of the cabinet a few inches away from the server box (literally just an old PC fan). Super ghetto but actually pretty efficient at bringing the server's temperature down.
- smolder 7y agoThere are pre-made circuits which come with a temperature sensor and can control fan speed to accomplish the same kind of thing. e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SLWWXL/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SLWWXL/
- mastax 7y agoA few vendors make phase-change coolers which can activly cool below ambient. They're pretty expensive and niche and probably not reliable in the long term. Since it's going in the garage Id just get some really loud server fans.
- fulafel 7y agoI started wondering about the physics of removing 280W of heat from the tiny silicon die/dice. Is most of the heat conducted through the metal connections or through the package? What material is the package made of?
- rubbingalcohol 7y agoThey use a heatspreader (solid metal surface, the "top" of the chip) soldered to the actual cores. Then you slap a heatsink or water block on and tighten it down on the heatspreader with the help of a thermal interface material (metallic goo). The actual cooling done by the heatsink or water cooler is pretty basic and similar to what you'd find inside cars or home A/C units. With "280 watts" you can still use an off-the-shelf Noctua air cooler or any number of all-in-one water coolers.
- kllrnohj 7y agoIt's not actually that tiny and it's pretty spread out. The HEDT chips are physically very large. You can see how the dies themselves are laid out here: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15151/amd_rome-678_678x452_575px_678x452.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15151/amd_rome-678_678x452... And you can see how physically huge the package is here compared to desktop CPUs you may be more familiar with: https://images.app.goo.gl/T5kpz8WyjGHV8Vqm8 https://images.app.goo.gl/T5kpz8WyjGHV8Vqm8
- the8472 7y agohttps://images.anandtech.com/doci/13401/2018-10-08%2010.38.03.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13401/2018-10-08%2010.38.0... The lid is made of copper and as you see there are additional layers. Plus the interfaces between the materials are also limiting thermal conductance. As far as material science goes there's a lot of room, it's just not practical to throw liquid nitrogen cooling or diamond substrates at the problem when you're making a mass market product.
- gowld 7y agoWhat does "nm" mean, really? It's only barely useful to compare generations within one company's fab model. What's a better measure to use? transistors / m^2 ? Or at least to label properly as "7 AMD-nm" to avoid false comparison to "Intel-nm"?
- sachintendulkar 7y agoGet out with your technical nuances. This is hacker news where we discuss is frameworks and their naming and how Intel bad Oracle bad. Serious- i didn't downvote
- bryanlarsen 7y agoMillion transistors per mm^2 has been proposed as a comparison metric: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mtr-mm%C2%B2 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mtr-mm%C2%B2 There are lots of different transistor sizes on a chip, so it also specifies what kind of transistors to measure.
- vbezhenar 7y agoWhy does it matter anyway? Just compare benchmarks and power.
- naveen99 7y agoit'd be funny if amd came out with something like intel phi pcie cards, after intel discontinued them. But for my mostly unet / fcn, segmentation deep learning models, gpu's will continue to be the goto, until we get into a few hundred cores range...
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoI really want one of those, even though I have almost no use for one. Maybe?
- IOT_Apprentice 7y agoThe benchmarks on the Ryzen Threadripper and Zen 9 3rd gen cpus look great. I have been looking to find prebuilt gaming desktops that don't have issues with those chips. Newegg reviews show failures around their units and Amazon isn't much help either. Is this truly a build your own situation? Not necessarily issues with the CPUs but the overall quality of the build and bios issues/DOA status. Any recommendations for BYO or prebuilt options?
- fgonzag 7y agoHonestly, anyone with the know how to build their own PC should. The savings are not only substantial (usually, unless you find some crazy black friday discount), you can actually spec it to what you actually need. Pre-builts usually have an over-specced CPU and and under-specced GPU, a bad memory configuration, crappy hard drives, and horrible power supplies + motherboards.
- avgDev 7y agoBuild your own! Single components offer longer warranty(usually). You can research decent RAM, decent hard drives and so on. Building a PC these days is trivial, back in the day there was a lot more fiddling with bios, now things are simplified and its mostly plug and play. I actually might build a computer and make a detailed written guide, but I would love to help if you decide to go this route.
- adrianmonk 7y ago> Thread + Ripper was a clever play on words: anything that had plenty of threads, the hardware was designed to ‘rip’ through the workload. Tangent, but is this really a play on words? And if so, what is the other meaning here? I get the meaning where lots of cores are ripping through workload. But the other one I don't. The closest guess I have is that it's like a comic book hero (The Incredible Hulk) ripping through his clothes because he is so big and powerful. And I don't guess it refers to a seam ripper (the sewing tool).
- TylerE 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper But in general "Ripper" was 19th century slang for a murderer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zeroonetwothree 7y agoIt’s a metaphor, not a play on words.
- spectramax 7y agoAMD's (and Intel's) marketing teams are awfully enslaved to the gamer market - gamer aesthetics, big bold packaging, insane names that sound like something off of Tron, the whole RGB enchilada. AMD started it with Ryzen. That name sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings. And then we Threadripper - violent to say the least, and finally, EPYC - cheap play of the letters. What happened to marketing like the IBM System 360? Elliot Noyes is rolling in his grave. I don't think the marketing teams are to be blamed, its the consumers and the Taiwanese influence around what a computer product should be marketed as such.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoThey're marketing to the people who are affected by such marketing. I'd like to think the rest of us ignore any marketing and choose their CPU's for better reasons.
- jgalt212 7y ago32 cores at good price point. Now there's no reason to lease all those VM's and use kubernetes. Unless of course, we are all I/O bound due to the bulk of the work being telemetry and tracking. hmm....
- kd3 7y agoAll these products are great but I still can't get a Ryzen 9 3950x anywhere for fucks sake. I'm tired of waiting. Amd should work on their supplies.
- jiggawatts 7y agoHas anyone seen independent reviews for database performance on EPYC 2 / Threadripper 3? I'd love to recommend the AMD platform for customers with large databases, but there's is zero reputable information available on the Internet. The vendors can't be trusted, because they obviously cheat their ass off, such as Intel disabling security patches, using ludicrous hardware configurations, etc...
- kbenson 7y agoFor what databases? Many vendors specifically disallow publishing any benchmarks in their licensing, so if you're looking for benchmarks for a proprietary database, good luck.
- petronio 7y agoPhoronix has done a few DB benchmarks on EPYC 2. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=EPYC https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=EPYC Don't forget that if comparing to old benchmarks, there's a bug with Intel's TSX now and the mitigations once again seem to take a nice hit if your database engine makes use of it.
- posix_me_less 7y agoAn advice for the younger enthusiasts out there: don't buy this _yet_, it's an overpriced pseudo-workstation platform for now, even if you can afford it. It's nice to watch (and have) new CPUs pushing the available computing performance up, and bringing new features. With Ryzen 3000/EPYC Rome this finally happened in a meaningful way, and TR is(shortly will be) the most powerful CPU there is. _AND_ Intel is getting kicked in the ass, which is good. But objectively, even if AMD is better value than Intel now, it still is overpriced. The first problem is with the launch price. This kind of system maintains the top status for one year or so these days. Then it slips into mainstream level which can be got for 50%, 30% price. Look at what happened to 2950X, or EPYC Milan platforms. They were similarly expensive at launch and they are mainstream performance now, their prices have fallen dramatically as well. (If you want AMD, those are much better choice now.) The second problem is, the TRX40 motherboards available now are simply underwhelming and disappointing, take a look: https://www.pcmag.com/feature/372107/first-look-all-the-amd-trx40-motherboards-for-third-gen-thre/6 https://www.pcmag.com/feature/372107/first-look-all-the-amd-... You can get 16,24,32 cores for x $1000, but only 4 channels of memory and 3-4 PCIe slots and 2010-era networking? The Xeon workstation boards are so much better. Here is how you design a motherboard in this price range: https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11spa-t-motherboard-review-an-intel-xeon-w-3200-platform/ https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11spa-t-motherboard... It's like mobo manufacturers are thinking, the TR CPUs are cooler than Xeons, let's make a killing on expensive gamer-like motherboards. If you're after nice punch performance on the cheap, go here, sort by performance, then look for rows with highest value. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html The result for me is, if you're after performance but clever with money, go for 3900X or 3700X on an B450 board, anything else is kind of stupid for most people. If you're after solid workstation with ECC and 2020-level, connectivity, Intel Xeon W now or wait for better motherboards (unlikely to happen).