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Cores of Rendering Madness: The AMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX Review
- jeffbee 6y agoIf they hadn't Osborned themselves with Zen3, I probably would have ordered a P620 by now. But the weird punchline of this article seems to be it still takes a whole minute to launch GIMP. Software matters.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoReally your buying Threadripper Pro's and your running GIMP on it, I find that hard to believe.
- dragontamer 6y agoI mean... Gimp works. And if your first job is CAD, Programming, or something non-artistic, Gimp is what I'm willing to pay for. I'm willing to pay $4000+ for my profession's tools. But when it comes to a hobby, cheap or free is better.
- c0nsumer 6y agoAffinity Photo is SO much better and currently only $24.99. May be worth taking a look: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
- dharmab 6y agoAffinity doesn't run on Linux, so it's not a replacement for GIMP as a Unix hacker's art tool. I like Krita (https://krita.org https://krita.org) as a painting tool. Darktable (https://www.darktable.org https://www.darktable.org) does photo editing, although I haven't used it myself.
- dbspin 6y agoNot sure why this is being downvoted. Gimp has a high learning curve and is primitive compared to contemporary commercial tools. I completely understand a disdain for Adobe's subscription model, but there are fantastic relatively low cost commercial options now. Open source is still a wasteland for actually usable video / audio and even photo editing applications. Lots of apps that are functional on paper, but have major workflow, file support or UX limitations that make them limited in practice. Edit: Guarantee not a single person downvoting this is an audio video or photography professional. This attitude of OSS above all, damn the users is likely part of the reason there aren't more viable creative apps for Linux, and more viable OSS creative apps overall.
- q3k 6y agoNot everyone who does light image editing as part of their professional setting needs professional tools straight away. The mental overhead of having to manage software installation, licensing, etc. is just not worth it, even if you're willing to spend the extra $300 per year for it. And as mentioned, Affinity/Adobe software is not available on Linux, which immediately disqualifies it for me personally, even though I'd like to upgrade past GIMP and I'm very much used to Photoshop after years of using it.
- katbyte 6y agoI would prefer to have photoshop but cost, however if the only alternative was gimp i'd throw all the money at them for my sanity. I use pixelmator pro instead and am quite happy with it.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoEspecially in the context of workstation class systems where your looking at $5k per CPU and your quite possibly looking at 10g connections for your horizontal cable runs. At a certain point the old HP (before they where shit) Joke if you have to ask the price you cant afford it still applies.
- dragontamer 6y agoI think this fundamentally misunderstands how computer users work. Lets say I'm a programmer who needs to spin up multiple VMs / Docker / etc. etc. to properly emulate some server setup. Multiple cores and tons of RAM (more than 256GB) needed on a regular basis, with a few NVMe drives in RAID0 so that those VMs can be snapshot in blazing fast speeds. Paying $100 to $4000 for VMWare workstation, Visual Studio subscriptions, SQLServer non-express, Red Hat Virtual Machine License, Visio, and other such top-class tools would be 100% reasonable, along with the $10,000+ Threadripper pro computer with 512GB RAM or whatever. But image editing wouldn't be part of that user's workflow. Suddenly, the professional developer is asked to make a web-banner on the top of his Github document with the logo of the company on it. Guess what? Said developer probably is downloading GIMP. The hassle of going to corporate to be compensated for lol $25 on another image editor is just not worth the time.
- dagmx 6y agoHighly recommend Krita over Gimp. its a much better product and has much better tooling and color handling
- throw8932894 6y agoI tried to load 30GB image to Krita, it crashes. Gimp handles it pretty well.
- justinclift 6y agoDid you mean MB rather than GB? Kind of wondering what kind of image would be 30GB... :)
- Solid_Applaud 6y agoAperio SVS
- justinclift 6y agoThanks. Found info on that file format: * https://openslide.org/formats/aperio/ https://openslide.org/formats/aperio/ * https://web.archive.org/web/20120420105738/http://www.aperio.com/documents/api/Aperio_Digital_Slides_and_Third-party_data_interchange.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120420105738/http://www.aperio... Pages 14 onward give the info. Seems like it's a variation of TIFF, in tiled format. Main tile (image) size is 120k x 80k. That's huge! 29GB when saved uncompressed. I'd hope most applications would use the optional compression features. :)
- throw8932894 6y agoThis was 360 degree mosaic, about 100kX100k
- justinclift 6y agoHmmmm, how much ram did the PC have that his happened on?
- 6y ago
- account42 6y agoGIMP can use a lot of ram, you need those 8 ram slots to run it properly.
- jeffbee 6y agoI also find this preposterous, but it's what the article measured. For me it would be a replacement for my HP z-series workstation I use mostly to build C++ software.
- kjhughes 6y agoFor any not familiar with Osborned, the Osborn Effect refers to how prematurely announcing a next generation product can cannibalize sales of the existing product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
- PartiallyTyped 6y agoI wouldn't say so. The TR series have many more bus lanes than the desktop variants, and support >= 128GB ram, iirc official EEC support, and iirc quad channel memory.
- greggyb 6y agoTR has quad-channel and unofficial ECC support. TR Pro has 8-channel memory and official ECC support, along with support for RDIMMs. The max RAM for a TR is 256GB right now, with 8x32GB - only unbuffered DIMMs are supported. TR Pro can take up to 2TB RAM.
- ip26 6y agoThere's always a faster machine coming. Zen3 Threadripper probably won't be in a ThinkStation for, what, another year? So if you need a computer like that, P620 is the machine of the hour. It also seems likely you will be able to drop a Zen3 Threadripper into the P620's sTRX4 socket.
- junar 6y agoI agree that they should not wait, but wanted to point out that P620s use Threadripper Pro, which has a different socket (sWRX8) and came out several months after the sTRX4 Threadrippers.
- wmil 6y agoHas Gimp done any work to parallelize plugin / font loading? I recall that was the bottleneck at startup. If they haven't then more cores won't ever help.
- jeffbee 6y agoAccording to the article it’s the opposite: it gets slower as you add cores. I wonder if it’s better to launch it with `taskset -c 0-3` or similar.
- pdpi 6y agoI think that's consistent with it being singlethreaded. AIUI, unless you pin the process to a single core, scheduling can make it bounce around between cores, and the probability you'll land on a different core (and, thus, incur more cache sync issues) goes up with the number of cores.
- IanCutress 6y agoGIMP decides to optimize the plugins for each individual core in the system, so the complexity of startup increases with the number of cores present. It's a single threaded process, so more cores = takes longer. At least for the first startup when that happens anyway.
- StillBored 6y agoAs someone who submitted a patch a few years back to fix a gimp startup problem, I don't think they really care. The visual purity of seeing all those plugins loading, and having it take a long time seems to be part of the mystique they are looking for. If it just started right up, it wouldn't send the same message.
- PrototypeNM1 6y agoThey added lazy loading of fonts a couple years back, which took a chunk out of startup time.
- fanatic2pope 6y agoIt takes ~2.5 seconds to launch gimp on my janky old core i7 box.
- mpol 6y agoHere 7 seconds on my AMD A8-7600 from 2015 with an SSD from 2012 :) But the test is with a very big XCF file, loading lots of high quality layers. I would assume that takes all the time. Unless it is the MS Windows filesystem that is terribly slow, that might also be an option :)
- __turbobrew__ 6y agoIt takes about 0.5 seconds on my 7 year old i5 + Samsung 960 SSD
- burnte 6y agoI have a 3600X, water cooled so it runs at top speed reliably, 64GB RAM, and a gen 4 PCIe SSD. Photoshop takes a solid 30+ seconds to launch, and another 30+ seconds to load even a few dozen KB JPEG. Feels like an app from 1988.
- kumarvvr 6y agoSeems like an os or driver issue.
- tauntz 6y agoAnother anecdote: 2018 MBP i9 (8950HK) and 32GB RAM. warm-start (that is, launching after having previously killed the process but stuff's probably in a cache somewhere) Photoshop: 4s GIMP: 3s
- kyriakos 6y agoSomething is wrong with your setup. I have the same cpu with 32gb ram and ssd and everything Inc photoshop is fast
- Turing_Machine 6y agoAt least at one point, most of the delay in starting GIMP seemed to be it groveling through the HD looking for fonts, and getting them into a format it could use (e.g., showing the font properly in the font selection dialog). I don't know if that's still the case.
- antome 6y agoI do enjoy how reviewers are now using software rendering of Crysis as a benchmark, even if it's just a joke. It would be pretty interesting to see what kind of game engine you could make if it was hyper-optimized around software rendering for modern, massively parallel CPUs.
- mottosso 6y agoZBrush has entered the chat. Not a game engine, but it's being doing that since the first version many years ago and always surprises me how it outperforms most GPUs. Rendering (and interactively manipulating!) billions of polygons.
- leetcrew 6y agoprobably not a very useful one. amd's high core count parts are certainly impressive, but it's hard to beat >3000 dumb cores that are all doing more or less the same thing anyway.
- ATsch 6y ago"CUDA Core" is a misleading marketing term. It merely counts the number of FP32 ALUs. If you measured CPUs this way, you'd have up to 16 "cores" per core. If you count it that way, that makes this CPU is roughly as powerful as the GTX 400 series with it's "512 cores". A brief look at benchmarks seems to confirm that. Conversely if you counted a GPUs independent parallel threads of execution like on CPUs, you'd max out at a very comparable 64 "cores".
- jjoonathan 6y agoSIMT is a much more convenient programming model than SIMD for wide compute, though. So much so that I think the marketing around CUDA cores isn't merely reasonable but for many applications actually strikes closer to the truth than counting ALUs or independent threads. If you count ALUs, you see that the CPU has many of them, but you don't see how difficult it is to chunk up data to keep those fed. If you count independent threads, you see that the GPU has few of them, but you don't see how it conceptually has many threads, which simplifies the programming of each thread while gracefully degrading only in proportion to how much branching you actually use.
- unwind 6y agoMeta: the leading "64" is missing from the title, making it kind of hard to interpret. Thanks mods, as always.
- Jonnax 6y agoAMD's 64 core 2995WX processor pulls 279.96W peak power in their tests whilst Intel's W-3175X 28 core CPU pulls 290.41 peak. I'm amazed how Intel has lost their crown. They don't have the best servers, HEDT and consumer desktop cpus. And if they are competitive they consume significantly more electricity Plus on laptops AMD has more cores and consumes less power whilst Intel touts how their CPUs beats AMD on AI photo upscaling. Not to mention how Apple is in the process of ditching them
- throw8932894 6y agoWorse of all, Intel lost most of their good engineers. By the time they catch up with AMD, ARM desktop CPUs will eat market.
- Chris2048 6y agoIntel decided to cut costs by not being competitive on salary. Engineers just work there to get Intel on the resume, then move on for better pay. I wonder if the exec/upper management levels still pay themselves well? (of course they do)
- mhh__ 6y agoI don't really buy that. Intel are in deep shit but the sheer amount of market share they have at the moment makes me slightly pessimistic about a true changing of the guard in the long term. Its hard to stress just how useless AMD have been for most of the last decade barring the Zens.
- croutonwagon 6y agoThey also have a status on vendor lock on a few fronts. Companies like VMware moved to per core licensing. And most have established infra in intel. Cycling that out is much easier said than done. Especially with the capex squeezes coming.
- mhh__ 6y ago
- bluecalm 6y agoSo now I am regretting not waiting for that one and getting 3970x. 8 memory channels make a huge difference for me to the extent that 3970x at 4Ghz is barely faster than 32core Epyc at 2.6 GHz. I never thought the bandwidth with 4 channels could be a limitation for my CPU heavy (or so I thought) workloads but AMD managed to deliver so many fast cores that it actually started becoming a bottleneck. Now I want to upgrade already. Well done AMD!
- KingOfCoders 6y ago"most machine learning today is still done on CPUs." Sounds strange.
- phkahler 6y agoI'd like a thread ripper with a small GPU to build a small form factor PC targeting CPU-heavy workloads.
- toast0 6y agoHere's a small GPU you may consider: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=M2_VGA#Specifications https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=M... (can't find it for sale yet; hopefully the price is as low as the performance)
- scns 6y agoThis might one might match your requirements: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=asus-50-gpu&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=asus-50-...
- StillBored 6y agoWorkstations aren't just load every core up at 100% and see how it runs. That would be a server like workload. Yet nearly every benchmark in this article is for the most part just a core count test. People use their workstations for office/web browsing/etc tasks, so a large part of the workload continues to be single threaded. Which is why the Threadripper exists at all (its a epyc with faster single threaded perf). So a good workstation is one that does well with both single threaded as well as multhreaded workloads. So to ignore the other half of the desktop workload performance doesn't give a complete picture.
- greggyb 6y agoThe framing in the introduction discusses VFX workloads, and this is recurring theme in throughout the article. The conclusion of the article is that if you need high core counts and clock speed with large working sets in RAM, then this is the right choice. VFX and rendering represent one sort of workload that benefits from this type of hardware. Simulations and CAD workloads can also benefit. There's no indication or suggestion that this is a good choice for a generic desktop system (note that desktop and workstation are different segments). The type of workload that you'd be buying a $1K+ CPU (this includes Threadripper and excludes desktop Ryzen) is the sort of thing that needs some form of specialized hardware. Maybe that's lots of IO (via 64+ PCIe gen4 lanes), or maybe lots of cores, or maybe lots of RAM (via 4-8 channels and support for registered DIMMs). If you have one of those needs, then it's probably worth a tradeoff of a few hundred MHz of low-utilization peak clock frequency. That said, with low core counts, the highlighted CPU clocks >4GHz. That's on Zen2 cores, so it is largely similar to what you'd see at similar clocks in Ryzen desktop CPUs. If you want lots of general purpose workloads, go check out benchmarks for Ryzen 3000-series. There is ample coverage of these processors.
- StillBored 6y agoYes, workstations have a lot of varying workloads, but they are fundamentally high end desktops because people sit in front of monitors attached to them. The high clock rates advantage the single threaded parts of the workload, otherwise one is better off with more lower clocked/efficient cores. Many of the vfx, engineering, etc workloads can (and are) also run as batch jobs on server farms. So, frequently what your looking for is a desktop that can do quick single user trial runs, and then the whole thing is farmed out to the cluster for the final product. But there are also segments (like building code) where the workload actually may have long sections of single threaded work. AKA, the machine burns through a bunch of cores in parallel, then it sits around with a single core linking/packaging/etc (yes I know some build systems can parallelize that too). So again my point is that if all you need are a pile of cores your not looking for a workstation, your looking for a server which is tuned for max throughput across a lot of cores. Frequently this means running more cores in a more energy efficient configuration (lower clocks/etc).
- hyperion2010 6y agoWell now I know what CPU to get for my Dwarf Fortress machine! (5950X)
- robinhoodexe 6y agoRegarding Dwarf Fortress, it should run pretty good on Apples new M1 processors, even under rosetta2.