7 ms·

Great 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/d

Great 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 ago
The core explosion AMD has started has quickly made current cpu monitor UIs cease to even make sense, its great!
- bitL 7y ago
  Can'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 ago
Well, 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 ago
  Works 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 ago
  A 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.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    macOS's Activity Monitor, and the task manager on Ubuntu (forgot its name, something like System Monitor maybe?) when in “Solaris mode” do sum of core % utilisation without dividing by number of cores. So a single core at 100% shows up as 100%, four cores at 100% shows up as 400%.
  - miffe 7y ago
    For a weird trick, change the decimal symbol and the digit grouping symbol to the same value in the Region settings in the old Control Panel. Then everything always uses 0% CPU :)
  - brucedawson 7y ago
    Chrome changed their task manager to make the CPU percentages be relative to a single core instead of relative to the total CPU power available. This makes the numbers more comparable (100% on one machine is roughly the same as 100% on another, regardless of core count) and it avoids the problem of increasingly tiny numbers. Microsoft should follow that lead. This change means that Chrome's task manager can show CPU usage percentages that are higher than 100%, but that is fine. The percentage is simply the percentage of a logical processor that is being used and 200% means that two logical processors are being used. Simple, easy to understand and explain.
theandrewbailey 7y ago
I remember Linus playing around with a Xeon Phi CPU with a few hundred threads. The task manager was all percent signs. https://youtu.be/fBxtS9BpVWs?t=200 https://youtu.be/fBxtS9BpVWs?t=200 Looks like Microsoft has already got 1000+ cores on Windows: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Internals/One-Windows-Kernel/ba-p/267142 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Intern... Can we get Bruce Dawson[0] one of those? I wonder how many more bugs he'll run into. [0] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/
- Macha 7y ago
  I'm really curious about the machine it's running on. 896 physical cores is an odd number - 32 x 28, 16 x 56 or 8 x 112 are the likely combinations. The picture identifies it as a Xeon Platinum 8180 which is a 28C/56T CPU. Are there systems that support 32 Intel CPUs in one host? I thought quad socket was the practical limit these days.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Here's one, "HPE Superdome" https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/V2/getpdf.aspx/A00036491ENW.pdf https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/V2/getpdf.aspx/A00036491ENW.pdf See the diagram on page 6, they have a custom routing chip to link up 8 boards over UPI.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    It says right there, Xeon Phi 7210. Knight's Landing supports 4-wide threading per core so you get 256 threads, which is exactly what it shows in task manager under "logical processors".
    - Macha 7y ago
      I was talking about the Microsoft article, not the LTT video, which are using different CPUs. The HP 32 socket chassis (8x4 socket boards) seems to be the answer.
- masklinn 7y ago
akhilcacharya 7y ago
This is honestly my favorite part of my new 3700x!
hyperbovine 7y ago
What a nice visual summary of why most people do not need this many cores.
- kunai 7y ago
  These are not mainstream CPUs; people who do rendering and run server farms for a living will find this level of parallel computing a godsend.
  - gowld 7y ago
    And yet anandtech writes articles as though "home usees" and "gamers" have a user for these cores, despite benchmarks being the most demanding workloads those users will ever run on these machines. In the "HEDT" space, the media coverage and forum chitchat is mostly for users who by these cards for decorative purposes, not work purposes. People buying for real work need realistic test measurements on realistic workloads.
    - fwip 7y ago
      Yeah, benchmarking the games is a little embarrassing. Outside of Twitch streamers who do software encoding on-device (which is a minority of a minority), almost everyone interested in game performance would be better served by a different market segment. I guess it's driven by the types of hardware they normally review - their audience is interested in game benchmarks, so they might as well report them.
      - jl6 7y ago
        It’s not so unreasonable. I imagine there are plenty of users with HEDT workloads who also want to play games on the side, and want some assurance that their HEDT box can do both.
      - noir_lord 7y ago
        I mean nvenc has made a huge difference to streamers using nvidia cards already, you don't really need more than a 'consumer' 6C/12T or 8C/16T even with games gradually moving to supporting more cores if you have an nvidia card.
dragontamer 7y ago
If you think that's crazy, then remember the CM-5 machines in Jurrasic park? A real 90s supercomputer. Anyway, each of those lights was "on" when a core was utilized, and "off" when a core was off. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Frostburg.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Frostbur...
- detritus 7y ago
  For anyone else interested who, unlike me, doesn't want to spend a few seconds swearing at how useless Google's become, OP meant 'CM-5'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine Although this particular bout of verbalised obscenity did just make me change my default browser search engine to duck duck go as Google crossed out 'supercomputer' as missing from its query, which was annoying as it was 50% of my sodding query and, technically, the only correct bit. Google search is totally crap these days.
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    > For anyone else interested who, unlike me, doesn't want to spend a few seconds swearing at how useless Google's become, OP meant 'CM-5'. Oh, sorry for the typo. I just fixed it. It used to say "CX-5", I must have been thinking about Mazda cars or something when I wrote the post...
    - detritus 7y ago
      Oh, absolutely no worries! In older, smarter days (less smart, or at least less presumptive, perhaps?), I'd like to think that Google would've been clever enough to correct the incorrect aspect of my search term. As I say, this was the final nudge to move my standard search over to something else :)
- masklinn 7y ago
  That was the case of the original CMs (1/2/200), but the CM5 switched from the original single-bit processors to a lower number of RISC SPARC cores. While it retained the LEDs, I don't think they had the same 1:1 correspondance to cores of the previous model: the CM1 and CM2 up to 65536 cores (the CM2 also had an FP coprocessor for 32 cores, for an additional 2048 special-purpose cores) whereas the CM5 had "only" 1056 processors.
landr0id 7y ago
Check out winocm's view of a 112-core server: https://twitter.com/winocm/status/1183533208605990913 https://twitter.com/winocm/status/1183533208605990913

gameswithgo 7y ago

The core explosion AMD has started has quickly made current cpu monitor UIs cease to even make sense, its great!

bitL 7y ago
Can'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 ago

Well, 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 ago
Works 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 ago
A 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  macOS's Activity Monitor, and the task manager on Ubuntu (forgot its name, something like System Monitor maybe?) when in “Solaris mode” do sum of core % utilisation without dividing by number of cores. So a single core at 100% shows up as 100%, four cores at 100% shows up as 400%.
- miffe 7y ago
  For a weird trick, change the decimal symbol and the digit grouping symbol to the same value in the Region settings in the old Control Panel. Then everything always uses 0% CPU :)
- brucedawson 7y ago
  Chrome changed their task manager to make the CPU percentages be relative to a single core instead of relative to the total CPU power available. This makes the numbers more comparable (100% on one machine is roughly the same as 100% on another, regardless of core count) and it avoids the problem of increasingly tiny numbers. Microsoft should follow that lead. This change means that Chrome's task manager can show CPU usage percentages that are higher than 100%, but that is fine. The percentage is simply the percentage of a logical processor that is being used and 200% means that two logical processors are being used. Simple, easy to understand and explain.

theandrewbailey 7y ago

I remember Linus playing around with a Xeon Phi CPU with a few hundred threads. The task manager was all percent signs. https://youtu.be/fBxtS9BpVWs?t=200 https://youtu.be/fBxtS9BpVWs?t=200 Looks like Microsoft has already got 1000+ cores on Windows: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Internals/One-Windows-Kernel/ba-p/267142 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Intern... Can we get Bruce Dawson[0] one of those? I wonder how many more bugs he'll run into. [0] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

Macha 7y ago
I'm really curious about the machine it's running on. 896 physical cores is an odd number - 32 x 28, 16 x 56 or 8 x 112 are the likely combinations. The picture identifies it as a Xeon Platinum 8180 which is a 28C/56T CPU. Are there systems that support 32 Intel CPUs in one host? I thought quad socket was the practical limit these days.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Here's one, "HPE Superdome" https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/V2/getpdf.aspx/A00036491ENW.pdf https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/V2/getpdf.aspx/A00036491ENW.pdf See the diagram on page 6, they have a custom routing chip to link up 8 boards over UPI.
- paulmd 7y ago
  It says right there, Xeon Phi 7210. Knight's Landing supports 4-wide threading per core so you get 256 threads, which is exactly what it shows in task manager under "logical processors".
  - Macha 7y ago
    I was talking about the Microsoft article, not the LTT video, which are using different CPUs. The HP 32 socket chassis (8x4 socket boards) seems to be the answer.
masklinn 7y ago

akhilcacharya 7y ago

This is honestly my favorite part of my new 3700x!

hyperbovine 7y ago

What a nice visual summary of why most people do not need this many cores.

kunai 7y ago
These are not mainstream CPUs; people who do rendering and run server farms for a living will find this level of parallel computing a godsend.
- gowld 7y ago
  And yet anandtech writes articles as though "home usees" and "gamers" have a user for these cores, despite benchmarks being the most demanding workloads those users will ever run on these machines. In the "HEDT" space, the media coverage and forum chitchat is mostly for users who by these cards for decorative purposes, not work purposes. People buying for real work need realistic test measurements on realistic workloads.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Yeah, benchmarking the games is a little embarrassing. Outside of Twitch streamers who do software encoding on-device (which is a minority of a minority), almost everyone interested in game performance would be better served by a different market segment. I guess it's driven by the types of hardware they normally review - their audience is interested in game benchmarks, so they might as well report them.
    - jl6 7y ago
      It’s not so unreasonable. I imagine there are plenty of users with HEDT workloads who also want to play games on the side, and want some assurance that their HEDT box can do both.
    - noir_lord 7y ago
      I mean nvenc has made a huge difference to streamers using nvidia cards already, you don't really need more than a 'consumer' 6C/12T or 8C/16T even with games gradually moving to supporting more cores if you have an nvidia card.

dragontamer 7y ago

If you think that's crazy, then remember the CM-5 machines in Jurrasic park? A real 90s supercomputer. Anyway, each of those lights was "on" when a core was utilized, and "off" when a core was off. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Frostburg.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Frostbur...

detritus 7y ago
For anyone else interested who, unlike me, doesn't want to spend a few seconds swearing at how useless Google's become, OP meant 'CM-5'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine Although this particular bout of verbalised obscenity did just make me change my default browser search engine to duck duck go as Google crossed out 'supercomputer' as missing from its query, which was annoying as it was 50% of my sodding query and, technically, the only correct bit. Google search is totally crap these days.
- dragontamer 7y ago
  > For anyone else interested who, unlike me, doesn't want to spend a few seconds swearing at how useless Google's become, OP meant 'CM-5'. Oh, sorry for the typo. I just fixed it. It used to say "CX-5", I must have been thinking about Mazda cars or something when I wrote the post...
  - detritus 7y ago
    Oh, absolutely no worries! In older, smarter days (less smart, or at least less presumptive, perhaps?), I'd like to think that Google would've been clever enough to correct the incorrect aspect of my search term. As I say, this was the final nudge to move my standard search over to something else :)
masklinn 7y ago
That was the case of the original CMs (1/2/200), but the CM5 switched from the original single-bit processors to a lower number of RISC SPARC cores. While it retained the LEDs, I don't think they had the same 1:1 correspondance to cores of the previous model: the CM1 and CM2 up to 65536 cores (the CM2 also had an FP coprocessor for 32 cores, for an additional 2048 special-purpose cores) whereas the CM5 had "only" 1056 processors.

landr0id 7y ago

Check out winocm's view of a 112-core server: https://twitter.com/winocm/status/1183533208605990913 https://twitter.com/winocm/status/1183533208605990913