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The sort of person that buys the _high end_ prosumer boards DO use things in burst often enough for it to be a consideration. In the end, the devices chipset A

The sort of person that buys the _high end_ prosumer boards DO use things in burst often enough for it to be a consideration. In the end, the devices chipset AMD has sourced from 3rd parties is good as a general tool for manufacturers... My issue is that I'd _really_ like their high end chips to support more PCIe 5.0 x4 lanes, possibly used in aggregations. Imagine if they instead supported 5.0 x16 (or x8+x8) AND 5.0 x16 (2x8 || x8+x4+x4 || 4x4). That'd allow for either a second full x16 slot for future mass IO devices (be it a GPU or NVMe riser card) or the full sized ATX boards with a good number of x4 slots. Maybe that is what a lower core count, higher mhz, thread-ripper socket was really for.

paulmd 4y ago
> Maybe that is what a lower core count, higher mhz, thread-ripper socket was really for. It is. Historically the HEDT sockets have often overlapped with the consumer socket in terms of core count - this was true of X58, X79, and sTR4, and X99 was so cheap that de facto it did overlap anyway (5820K basically cost the same as a 4790K, and motherboard costs were in-line with what we saw from X570 boards until the B550 line settled prices down a bit). That’s fine because HEDT is not about core count, it’s about memory and PCIe lanes. The current offerings leave a void for "I want a big platform but I don't need >24 cores and I'm still somewhat price-sensitive", the classic "workstation/prosumer" tier that used to be serviced by things like the 5820K/3930K/1900X/1920X. Potentially you could get to a similar place with a bunch of PCIe 5.0 slots attached to PCIe switch chips - this style of board used to be called “supercarrier” by one brand. Unfortunately it pretty much died out in the wake of SLI and crossfire becoming niche and then extinct. And the current crop of Intel and AMD boards only offer PCIe 5 on the first slot anyway so that isn’t quite as possible as you’d think at first glance. It’s really a shame the way AMD hollowed out the HEDT segment and cranked prices. A 3960X is four 3600s on a HEDT package with a single bigger IO die instead of four little ones, it’s a very cheap chip to produce, it should really go for more in the $700-800 price range than $1600+. (And the HEDT boards are also quite expensive for what they are - the ROMED8-2T gets you 7x slots of PCIe 4.0x16 full-capacity, with power delivery for 280W TDP CPUs, dual 10gbe, and BMC, for $600. Look at what a $1000 sTRX40 board buys you and just laugh, "gamer" boards are ripping you off.) Again, the precedent is the 5820K and the TR1900 series where these savings were passed on to the consumer - it is historically abnormal for HEDT to be such a huge reach compared to desktop chips, but AMD isn’t interested in pursuing low-end (actually they aren’t even interested in releasing Zen3 HEDT chips at all outside WRX80) and Intel has abandoned the segment entirely for now. Maybe Alder Lake-X will change the situation and force AMD to pay a little more attention, just as it has forced some of the ridiculous 5000 series price increases to be backed down. Right now it is actually worth a strong look at Epyc server boards like ROMED8-2T and chips like the 7402P because if you don’t need the absolute clock rate of Threadripper the Epyc chips are often cheaper per-core while offering a better PCIe and memory capability. That’s completely opposite from how HEDT has always worked but AMD is pushing hard in the server segment and sandbagging in the HEDT segment and that flips the math in a lot of homelab or workstation situations.
- paulmd 4y ago
  (note: the "pcie5 only on the first slot for X670E, no PCIe 5 for X670" appears to have been a false rumor, per the computex presentation it's "X670E is PCIe 5 on everything, X670 is PCIe5 on the first slot, B650 is pcie5 only on storage".)

paulmd 4y ago

> Maybe that is what a lower core count, higher mhz, thread-ripper socket was really for. It is. Historically the HEDT sockets have often overlapped with the consumer socket in terms of core count - this was true of X58, X79, and sTR4, and X99 was so cheap that de facto it did overlap anyway (5820K basically cost the same as a 4790K, and motherboard costs were in-line with what we saw from X570 boards until the B550 line settled prices down a bit). That’s fine because HEDT is not about core count, it’s about memory and PCIe lanes. The current offerings leave a void for "I want a big platform but I don't need >24 cores and I'm still somewhat price-sensitive", the classic "workstation/prosumer" tier that used to be serviced by things like the 5820K/3930K/1900X/1920X. Potentially you could get to a similar place with a bunch of PCIe 5.0 slots attached to PCIe switch chips - this style of board used to be called “supercarrier” by one brand. Unfortunately it pretty much died out in the wake of SLI and crossfire becoming niche and then extinct. And the current crop of Intel and AMD boards only offer PCIe 5 on the first slot anyway so that isn’t quite as possible as you’d think at first glance. It’s really a shame the way AMD hollowed out the HEDT segment and cranked prices. A 3960X is four 3600s on a HEDT package with a single bigger IO die instead of four little ones, it’s a very cheap chip to produce, it should really go for more in the $700-800 price range than $1600+. (And the HEDT boards are also quite expensive for what they are - the ROMED8-2T gets you 7x slots of PCIe 4.0x16 full-capacity, with power delivery for 280W TDP CPUs, dual 10gbe, and BMC, for $600. Look at what a $1000 sTRX40 board buys you and just laugh, "gamer" boards are ripping you off.) Again, the precedent is the 5820K and the TR1900 series where these savings were passed on to the consumer - it is historically abnormal for HEDT to be such a huge reach compared to desktop chips, but AMD isn’t interested in pursuing low-end (actually they aren’t even interested in releasing Zen3 HEDT chips at all outside WRX80) and Intel has abandoned the segment entirely for now. Maybe Alder Lake-X will change the situation and force AMD to pay a little more attention, just as it has forced some of the ridiculous 5000 series price increases to be backed down. Right now it is actually worth a strong look at Epyc server boards like ROMED8-2T and chips like the 7402P because if you don’t need the absolute clock rate of Threadripper the Epyc chips are often cheaper per-core while offering a better PCIe and memory capability. That’s completely opposite from how HEDT has always worked but AMD is pushing hard in the server segment and sandbagging in the HEDT segment and that flips the math in a lot of homelab or workstation situations.

paulmd 4y ago
(note: the "pcie5 only on the first slot for X670E, no PCIe 5 for X670" appears to have been a false rumor, per the computex presentation it's "X670E is PCIe 5 on everything, X670 is PCIe5 on the first slot, B650 is pcie5 only on storage".)