7 ms·

While listening to the podcast "Moore's law is dead", I heard repeatedly that AMD has no interest in launching new Threadrippers, ever again.

pdimitar 5y ago
...What? But why! Sigh, less and less choice every day. EDIT: What about this potential leak? https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-to-release-ryzen-threadripper-pro-5000-processor-march-2022/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-to-release-ryzen...
- lillecarl 5y ago
  Probably because they're server cpus that can be sold for more, it's too bad if this is true, I really want more PCIe lanes, though the threadripper 128 lanes are overkill, I'd be fine with 40. Other than that, performance is plenty on a 5950x for all my imaginable use cases.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Sure but I'd be paranoid about not having ECC RAM whereas Threadrippers support it officially. But I am sure there's a curated list of Ryzen motherboards that do in fact support ECC...
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Pretty much. https://hardwarecanucks.com/cpu-motherboard/ecc-memory-amds-ryzen-deep-dive/5/ https://hardwarecanucks.com/cpu-motherboard/ecc-memory-amds-...
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        Much appreciated and I bookmarked it. Thanks.
    - ptx 5y ago
      The Gigabyte B550 VISION motherboards claim to support ECC both on box and on the "key features" page[1]: Reliability ECC Memory To protect against data corruption Error Correction Code (ECC) memory corrects errors in your data as it passes in and out of memory to ensure reliability for critical applications. [1] https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B550-VISION-D-rev-10#kf https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B550-VISION-D-rev-10#kf
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        Thank you. Any observations on whether the CPU performs worse? It's a widely circulated meme that AMD CPUs hugely benefit from as fast a RAM as you can put in, whereas ECC is a bit slower.
        dfox 5y ago
        ECC is not inherently slower. Registered modules are slower (by the added latency of the register). ECC-or-not and registered-or-not are two orthogonal features of the DIMM and in theory all four combinations are possible. On the other hand non-registered ECC is somewhat rare (and for some reason often ridiculously expensive) and registered non-ECC probably is not manufactured at all (it does not make much sense).
        pdimitar 5y ago
        I see. So I should chase the fastest unregistered ECC modules I can find then? I'll do that when the time comes.
      - mindslight 5y ago
        I just tried out a Vision D-P (B550) and the IOMMU groups were terrible. All PCIe cards were in one big group, so good luck passing through specific hardware to a VM. It might not matter in a workstation or it might be fixed by a BIOS update, but shrug. I went with an Asus instead. The Asus manual says "ECC memory support varies by CPU" which is questionable for the 5700G APU I went with, and I didn't feel like digging to find out if harder to obtain ECC UDIMMs would be beneficial. (This was for a router / personal server. My workstation is ECC on a libreboot/KGPE)
    - lillecarl 5y ago
      I honestly don't care if my machine miscalculates, I don't run any important workloads. All content is in some cloud, all code is on github, all configuration is on github and by definition everything is hashed and stored in multiple locations. EDIT: miscalculates as rarely as a computer normally does
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        Well, that's a solid point. I will still consider ECC RAM for my home servers but you are right that for a workstation it is a bit too paranoid.
        lillecarl 5y ago
        Cheers, though I would say that I don't like that ECC isn't the standard, there's nothing but segmentation stopping ECC from being mainstreamed other than that it would make a lot of server gear redundant for a lot of applications, but as I said, it really doesn't matter for my application. Something that should be online for extended periods of time though, go ECC
  - wronglebowski 5y ago
    Silicon supply and engineering resources are a major issue for HEDT platforms. Thread Threadripper uses a massive amount of high quality silicon, Epyc has much better margins. Supporting HEDT is living hell for Intel/AMD. You're often using all kinds of consumer hardware with otherwise enterprise grade gear. Addressing every little PCIe device issue and catering to a very very small market has very little ROI.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      Not really, that's not how Threadripper works thanks to the chiplet design. It's not necessarily "high quality silicon" since it has a higher TDP budget. But regardless remember that in this case the 5800X and 5950X are also competing with Epyc for that same 8c chiplet silicon. For something like Intel's HEDT then yes, you're absolutely correct. That involves HEDT-specific binning and it eats into Xeon-W profits very directly. But for Threadripper it's not nearly as clear cut. In fact it seems more like it's silicon that failed to validate for Epyc since it's half the IO die of Epyc (for the non-Pro Threadripper anyway). Otherwise you're talking about AMD just taking Ryzen-quality chiplets, putting more of them on a substrate, and selling them at a huge markup. Take the Threadripper 3970X as just a simple example here. It's 4x 8c zen2 chiplets that can hit a peak of 4.5ghz at 280W TDP. Meanwhile the Ryzen 3950x is a 2x 8c zen2 chiplet that hits a peak of 4.7ghz at 105W TDP. So 3970x is 2x the silicon of the 3950x, but lower quality silicon, and AMD charged more than 2x for the 3970X. That's the brilliance of chiplets and Threadripper. It's Ryzen-class chiplets with half of an Epyc IO die (the IO die being 12nm GloFlo means it's not really competing for high-end prices anyway). It's binning they're already doing for they're primary product lines, not a specialized HEDT-specific process.
kllrnohj 5y ago
That is almost certainly wrong. Threadripper is what AMD is also using for its workstation line of products (eg, https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkstation-p620/ https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkstation-p620/ ). So unless AMD just doesn't want a piece of that pie anymore despite only just entering the market, there's absolutely more Threadrippers coming. No doubt about that at all. AMD isn't going to leave the Xeon-W just entirely unchallenged when AMD is otherwise firing on all cylinders. What they probably won't do is continue to have different sockets for the "Pro" and "non-Pro" threadrippers, though. But that'd be different from them just not having anymore Threadrippers at all. It'll probably just end up in the same category as Ryzen & Ryzen Pro where it's the same socket, just one is sold to consumers and one is sold to OEMs.
- jagger27 5y ago
  I don't think MLID has said anything besides that there won't be a Zen 3 Threadripper, because Intel still doesn't have anything that comes close to Zen 2 TR. Now, a Zen 4 Threadripper is extremely compelling because of DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    To be fair I'd be completely okay with them basically making TR and TR Pro with even more L3 cache and leave it at that. I'd still buy.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      That's definitely not happening. The L3 is part of the chiplet, so they aren't going to take Zen 2 and rev it to have more L3. Rather they'd just swap it out with a Zen 3 chiptlet instead, which is far less work for AMD to do. Especially since TR & TR Pro already have way more L3 than anything else (128-256MB L3) I highly doubt we'll see a vcache version of TR/TR Pro prior to the jump to Zen 4, especially since so far AMD has only officially announced a 3d vcache 5800X which is a single-chiplet product ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/17152/amd-cpus-in-2022-ces https://www.anandtech.com/show/17152/amd-cpus-in-2022-ces )
zucker42 5y ago
I occasionally watch the same YouTube channel, and I have not gotten this same impression. Just a month ago, he said that at least Zen 3 Threadripper Pro and Zen 4 Threadripper were still planned[1]. Can you point to the piece of content where he suggests this? [1] https://youtu.be/TX6bREO3Nd4?t=380 https://youtu.be/TX6bREO3Nd4?t=380
- andreime 5y ago
  I'm very sorry but I can't. I listen to podcasts while I do chores so ... yeah. edit: So, I'm sure there's some other older thoughts/info presented on his podcasts, but it's the latest thing I heard from him talking about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s (12 minute section )
ollien 5y ago
My understanding (I got this from listening to The WAN Show, but I don't have a timestamp off hand) is that they want to stop selling them to consumers directly (rather than to OEMs), presumably because volume was too low to support it.
andreime 5y ago
Sorry if this came across as me saying he is leaking there's no desire to launch Threadripper. To my knowledge he did not leak such a thing, but he was talking about Threadripper not making sense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s in a new podcast episode. I have not conveyed this well enough in my original comment.

pdimitar 5y ago

...What? But why! Sigh, less and less choice every day. EDIT: What about this potential leak? https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-to-release-ryzen-threadripper-pro-5000-processor-march-2022/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-to-release-ryzen...

lillecarl 5y ago
Probably because they're server cpus that can be sold for more, it's too bad if this is true, I really want more PCIe lanes, though the threadripper 128 lanes are overkill, I'd be fine with 40. Other than that, performance is plenty on a 5950x for all my imaginable use cases.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Sure but I'd be paranoid about not having ECC RAM whereas Threadrippers support it officially. But I am sure there's a curated list of Ryzen motherboards that do in fact support ECC...
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Pretty much. https://hardwarecanucks.com/cpu-motherboard/ecc-memory-amds-ryzen-deep-dive/5/ https://hardwarecanucks.com/cpu-motherboard/ecc-memory-amds-...
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Much appreciated and I bookmarked it. Thanks.
  - ptx 5y ago
    The Gigabyte B550 VISION motherboards claim to support ECC both on box and on the "key features" page[1]: Reliability ECC Memory To protect against data corruption Error Correction Code (ECC) memory corrects errors in your data as it passes in and out of memory to ensure reliability for critical applications. [1] https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B550-VISION-D-rev-10#kf https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B550-VISION-D-rev-10#kf
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Thank you. Any observations on whether the CPU performs worse? It's a widely circulated meme that AMD CPUs hugely benefit from as fast a RAM as you can put in, whereas ECC is a bit slower.
      - dfox 5y ago
        ECC is not inherently slower. Registered modules are slower (by the added latency of the register). ECC-or-not and registered-or-not are two orthogonal features of the DIMM and in theory all four combinations are possible. On the other hand non-registered ECC is somewhat rare (and for some reason often ridiculously expensive) and registered non-ECC probably is not manufactured at all (it does not make much sense).
        pdimitar 5y ago
        I see. So I should chase the fastest unregistered ECC modules I can find then? I'll do that when the time comes.
    - mindslight 5y ago
      I just tried out a Vision D-P (B550) and the IOMMU groups were terrible. All PCIe cards were in one big group, so good luck passing through specific hardware to a VM. It might not matter in a workstation or it might be fixed by a BIOS update, but shrug. I went with an Asus instead. The Asus manual says "ECC memory support varies by CPU" which is questionable for the 5700G APU I went with, and I didn't feel like digging to find out if harder to obtain ECC UDIMMs would be beneficial. (This was for a router / personal server. My workstation is ECC on a libreboot/KGPE)
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    I honestly don't care if my machine miscalculates, I don't run any important workloads. All content is in some cloud, all code is on github, all configuration is on github and by definition everything is hashed and stored in multiple locations. EDIT: miscalculates as rarely as a computer normally does
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Well, that's a solid point. I will still consider ECC RAM for my home servers but you are right that for a workstation it is a bit too paranoid.
      - lillecarl 5y ago
        Cheers, though I would say that I don't like that ECC isn't the standard, there's nothing but segmentation stopping ECC from being mainstreamed other than that it would make a lot of server gear redundant for a lot of applications, but as I said, it really doesn't matter for my application. Something that should be online for extended periods of time though, go ECC
- wronglebowski 5y ago
  Silicon supply and engineering resources are a major issue for HEDT platforms. Thread Threadripper uses a massive amount of high quality silicon, Epyc has much better margins. Supporting HEDT is living hell for Intel/AMD. You're often using all kinds of consumer hardware with otherwise enterprise grade gear. Addressing every little PCIe device issue and catering to a very very small market has very little ROI.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    Not really, that's not how Threadripper works thanks to the chiplet design. It's not necessarily "high quality silicon" since it has a higher TDP budget. But regardless remember that in this case the 5800X and 5950X are also competing with Epyc for that same 8c chiplet silicon. For something like Intel's HEDT then yes, you're absolutely correct. That involves HEDT-specific binning and it eats into Xeon-W profits very directly. But for Threadripper it's not nearly as clear cut. In fact it seems more like it's silicon that failed to validate for Epyc since it's half the IO die of Epyc (for the non-Pro Threadripper anyway). Otherwise you're talking about AMD just taking Ryzen-quality chiplets, putting more of them on a substrate, and selling them at a huge markup. Take the Threadripper 3970X as just a simple example here. It's 4x 8c zen2 chiplets that can hit a peak of 4.5ghz at 280W TDP. Meanwhile the Ryzen 3950x is a 2x 8c zen2 chiplet that hits a peak of 4.7ghz at 105W TDP. So 3970x is 2x the silicon of the 3950x, but lower quality silicon, and AMD charged more than 2x for the 3970X. That's the brilliance of chiplets and Threadripper. It's Ryzen-class chiplets with half of an Epyc IO die (the IO die being 12nm GloFlo means it's not really competing for high-end prices anyway). It's binning they're already doing for they're primary product lines, not a specialized HEDT-specific process.

kllrnohj 5y ago

That is almost certainly wrong. Threadripper is what AMD is also using for its workstation line of products (eg, https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkstation-p620/ https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkstation-p620/ ). So unless AMD just doesn't want a piece of that pie anymore despite only just entering the market, there's absolutely more Threadrippers coming. No doubt about that at all. AMD isn't going to leave the Xeon-W just entirely unchallenged when AMD is otherwise firing on all cylinders. What they probably won't do is continue to have different sockets for the "Pro" and "non-Pro" threadrippers, though. But that'd be different from them just not having anymore Threadrippers at all. It'll probably just end up in the same category as Ryzen & Ryzen Pro where it's the same socket, just one is sold to consumers and one is sold to OEMs.

jagger27 5y ago
I don't think MLID has said anything besides that there won't be a Zen 3 Threadripper, because Intel still doesn't have anything that comes close to Zen 2 TR. Now, a Zen 4 Threadripper is extremely compelling because of DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  To be fair I'd be completely okay with them basically making TR and TR Pro with even more L3 cache and leave it at that. I'd still buy.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    That's definitely not happening. The L3 is part of the chiplet, so they aren't going to take Zen 2 and rev it to have more L3. Rather they'd just swap it out with a Zen 3 chiptlet instead, which is far less work for AMD to do. Especially since TR & TR Pro already have way more L3 than anything else (128-256MB L3) I highly doubt we'll see a vcache version of TR/TR Pro prior to the jump to Zen 4, especially since so far AMD has only officially announced a 3d vcache 5800X which is a single-chiplet product ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/17152/amd-cpus-in-2022-ces https://www.anandtech.com/show/17152/amd-cpus-in-2022-ces )

zucker42 5y ago

I occasionally watch the same YouTube channel, and I have not gotten this same impression. Just a month ago, he said that at least Zen 3 Threadripper Pro and Zen 4 Threadripper were still planned[1]. Can you point to the piece of content where he suggests this? [1] https://youtu.be/TX6bREO3Nd4?t=380 https://youtu.be/TX6bREO3Nd4?t=380

andreime 5y ago
I'm very sorry but I can't. I listen to podcasts while I do chores so ... yeah. edit: So, I'm sure there's some other older thoughts/info presented on his podcasts, but it's the latest thing I heard from him talking about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s (12 minute section )

ollien 5y ago

My understanding (I got this from listening to The WAN Show, but I don't have a timestamp off hand) is that they want to stop selling them to consumers directly (rather than to OEMs), presumably because volume was too low to support it.

andreime 5y ago

Sorry if this came across as me saying he is leaking there's no desire to launch Threadripper. To my knowledge he did not leak such a thing, but he was talking about Threadripper not making sense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8gVyjvSZkg&t=5713s in a new podcast episode. I have not conveyed this well enough in my original comment.