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I have an "old" 32c/64t threadripper 2990-WX as my primary dev machine. I'm really looking forward to a consumer grade Zen5 with 32c/64t as an upgrade, as thre

I have an "old" 32c/64t threadripper 2990-WX as my primary dev machine. I'm really looking forward to a consumer grade Zen5 with 32c/64t as an upgrade, as threadripper is now locked to high costs OEMs.. In fact, I wonder how much market there will be for threadripper once we have 32c/64t consumer grade desktop CPUS.

colejohnson66 3y ago
Wasn’t Threadripper more of a “because we can” product, not a mainstream one? The price jump from the highest end Zens to the lowest end Threadrippers seems to indicate that.
- drewg123 3y ago
  Yes, it is basically a prosumer version of the Epyc server CPUS, limit to a single socket, and with higher clocks. What frustrates me is that in the last 2 or so generations, you cannot simply buy a CPU. One has to buy an entire system from a vendor like Lenovo or HP. When I built my box in 2018, the 2990-WX was available for ~$1900. Which is a lot, but doesn't match the $5k->10k prices for the entire systems. There just aren't that many affordable, reasonably efficient ways to get >= 32c these days. (and by efficient, I'm excluding used server-class boxes from older generations that are power hungry).
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    You can still just buy the pieces e.g. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-boards https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-b... or https://www.serversupply.com/PROCESSORS/AMD%20EPYC%2064-Core/2.45GHz/AMD/100-000000799_368308.htm https://www.serversupply.com/PROCESSORS/AMD%20EPYC%2064-Core... or https://servers4less.com/cd8070604480301-intel-xeon-platinum-8380h-28-core-2-90ghz-6-00gt-s-upi-38-5mb-l3-cache-socket-fclga4189-processor/ https://servers4less.com/cd8070604480301-intel-xeon-platinum..., the same is true for the current Threadripper. Most searching for this stuff are expecting to buy a full system with support from the vendor though, so that's what shows up most of the time. The ratio of those trying to build an individual workstation has been decreasing, making piecemeal part builds the less prominent way to order. It's still around though. Price... now that's definitely a story :). The current 32 core Threadripper is around $3,000 itself now. It does have some advantages like the 8 memory channels but even just trying to build a low core count box with a lot of PCIe lanes is an extremely expensive endeavour. I think part of it has to do with the gap between the consumer and server markets widening over time, it becomes harder to justify doesn't something special for the HEDT market.
    - tornato7 3y ago
      Indeed, I built a 3U Threadripper Pro server last year using the supermicro board. Works great!
  - stn8188 3y ago
    Similar to what the sibling comment says, I was able to find a motherboard/CPU combo from Newegg 2 years ago when I built mine around a 3955WX. I'm not incredibly happy with the Supermicro board though and sort of wish I went with the Asus.
    - ciupicri 3y ago
      What's wrong with the Supermicro motherboard?
      - stn8188 3y ago
        The boot time is long, the BMS programs are awkward (but maybe I'm not familiar with server-style BMS programs), and I can't get the DDR4 clock as high as it should be for my DRAM. There's a chance my UDIMM doesn't support the speed I want to run, but it hasn't been a big enough deal for me to look into.
        zamadatix 3y ago
        How much total memory are we talking and what speed were you able to run it at?
        stn8188 3y ago
        I have 4x16GB of 3200MT/s DDR4, but can't get the clock above 1055 MHz (which would be 2110MT/s). There's a chance that the cheaper/consumer grade G.skill memory isn't compatible with those speeds, but it hasn't been a blocker lately. I built the machine to be more basic for now but be able to upgrade over time into a powerful computer to run electromagnetic simulations.
        pixl97 3y ago
        Yea, SuperMicro are not boot time optimized boards at all. In the style of systems I've always built them in we were talking systems that might only be rebooted once or twice a year. Though with CPU/firmware exploits commonly getting patched it does seem like there are a lot of reasons to reboot server style systems these days.
  - derefr 3y ago
    > Yes, it is basically a prosumer version of the Epyc server CPUS Threadripper was, yes. Threadripper Pro wasn't. It was a workstation CPU. Threadripper was discontinued while Threadripper Pro wasn't, because workstation CPUs are profitable, while HEDT CPUs aren't. (AFAICT the HEDT "class" of CPUs only existed for a short time when CPU production was such that all the individual cores could perform really well, but the die as a whole could still fail validation as a server/workstation-grade CPU. I think, with chiplets, this just doesn't happen any more.)
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    I'm disappointed in the lack of I/O in consumer chips these days. I've had 3930k 4930k and now 1680v2 Xeon and I have memory channels and PCIe lanes coming out of my ears. Current consumer chips give you maybe 20 lanes.
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      Things actually end up not that different in the I/O department. Yeah, there are only 20 lanes going direct to the CPU but the northbridge has the bandwidth to hang another true 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes off it (before running into contention). At this point you are still an honest 4 lanes short but half the lanes are 4x faster so things like your GPU or high speed NIC don't need to eat 16 lanes each in the first place. The story repeats on memory where, yeah, you don't have 4 memory channels anymore... but the actual memory bandwidth is significantly higher and the total capacity is about the same. I've got a 13900k NAS build with 14 NVMe drives in it and 25G network connectivity. If you do W680 for the motherboard instead of the typical boards you get to keep the ECC too. Saved me thousands compared to getting equivalent I/O and total CPU performance with a server board. Reminded me a lot of when I got a 1650v3 prior really, "oh, it's kind of just consumer stuff but fully loaded", but ran a lot faster (of course). The hardest part is finding a board which breaks out the things out into ports instead of trying to figure out how to cram 2 extra cheap "gaming" nics, wi-fi, 50 USB ports, or other useless things in statically instead.
      - ciupicri 3y ago
        What motherboard are you using and were you able to install 128+ GB of RAM running at full speed, e.g. 5600 MT/s?
        zamadatix 3y ago
        Never said full speed because I'm running 192 GB at 5200 MT/s :p. Just the ASUS Z790 creator, like I said though I'd look into W680 and some ECC instead had I not had a steal of a deal on the memory at the time. 5600 MT/s booted but wouldn't pass memory tests. I've heard others with the same setup needed to go to 4800. That just happens to still be faster than the max memory bandwidth of the quad channel platform that was referenced anyways. Part of it might be that the early 48 GB kits (mine included) were themselves only rated for 5600. I'd be willing to bet mine would work at 5600 with one of these new better rated ~6800 kits helping things a little. I will say my experience with the memory controllers on modern Intel systems has been SIGNIFICANTLY better than my experience with them memory controllers on modern AMD systems. I could barely get my 7950X to do 64 GB at 6000, and that was one of the better experiences have had with the Zen memory controllers, but the Intel builds easily blow past that.
satvikpendem 3y ago
I'm looking forward to the 96 core Threadripper, personally. It helps for compilation to have as many cores as possible. Not sure how the single threaded performance will be however as it's slower than the Ryzen series, generally, and I still want to game.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  What are you compiling, if you don’t mind me asking?
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Rust and Dart/Flutter programs, mainly.
ciupicri 3y ago
Right now the problem with consumer grade CPUs from AMD is that you can't have 128 GB of memory running at full speed. You need to use 4 memory modules which means a lower speed. From https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-7950x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-7950x Max Memory Speed 2x1R DDR5-5200 2x2R DDR5-5200 4x1R DDR5-3600 4x2R DDR5-3600 There's also the issue of ECC.
- sapiogram 3y ago
  I assume you're also still limited to dual-channel in both scenarios?
  - ciupicri 3y ago
    From the same page: Memory Channels: 2 On the other hand the specifications for Threadripper™ PRO 5945WX [1] say: Memory Channels: 8 [1]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-pro-5945wx https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-p...
    - sapiogram 3y ago
      Oof
- vluft 3y ago
  you can at least get 96GB now, with 48GB dimms
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Scramblejams 3y ago
    But not with ECC, unfortunately. At least not yet, but I haven’t heard of any in the pipeline.
- wmf 3y ago
wmf 3y ago
I don't think consumer grade Zen5 with 32c/64t will be released because the frequency of Zen 5c will be pretty low leading to poor single-thread performance.
ksec 3y ago
I am much more looking forward to potential 256 Core EPYC with PCIe 6.0 Server for Netflix CDN.... Waiting for the "Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 3200Gb/s and Beyond" Talk :) That is assuming 1600Gb/s is already possible with ConnectX-7 XD.

colejohnson66 3y ago

Wasn’t Threadripper more of a “because we can” product, not a mainstream one? The price jump from the highest end Zens to the lowest end Threadrippers seems to indicate that.

drewg123 3y ago
Yes, it is basically a prosumer version of the Epyc server CPUS, limit to a single socket, and with higher clocks. What frustrates me is that in the last 2 or so generations, you cannot simply buy a CPU. One has to buy an entire system from a vendor like Lenovo or HP. When I built my box in 2018, the 2990-WX was available for ~$1900. Which is a lot, but doesn't match the $5k->10k prices for the entire systems. There just aren't that many affordable, reasonably efficient ways to get >= 32c these days. (and by efficient, I'm excluding used server-class boxes from older generations that are power hungry).
- zamadatix 3y ago
  You can still just buy the pieces e.g. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-boards https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-b... or https://www.serversupply.com/PROCESSORS/AMD%20EPYC%2064-Core/2.45GHz/AMD/100-000000799_368308.htm https://www.serversupply.com/PROCESSORS/AMD%20EPYC%2064-Core... or https://servers4less.com/cd8070604480301-intel-xeon-platinum-8380h-28-core-2-90ghz-6-00gt-s-upi-38-5mb-l3-cache-socket-fclga4189-processor/ https://servers4less.com/cd8070604480301-intel-xeon-platinum..., the same is true for the current Threadripper. Most searching for this stuff are expecting to buy a full system with support from the vendor though, so that's what shows up most of the time. The ratio of those trying to build an individual workstation has been decreasing, making piecemeal part builds the less prominent way to order. It's still around though. Price... now that's definitely a story :). The current 32 core Threadripper is around $3,000 itself now. It does have some advantages like the 8 memory channels but even just trying to build a low core count box with a lot of PCIe lanes is an extremely expensive endeavour. I think part of it has to do with the gap between the consumer and server markets widening over time, it becomes harder to justify doesn't something special for the HEDT market.
  - tornato7 3y ago
    Indeed, I built a 3U Threadripper Pro server last year using the supermicro board. Works great!
- stn8188 3y ago
  Similar to what the sibling comment says, I was able to find a motherboard/CPU combo from Newegg 2 years ago when I built mine around a 3955WX. I'm not incredibly happy with the Supermicro board though and sort of wish I went with the Asus.
  - ciupicri 3y ago
    What's wrong with the Supermicro motherboard?
    - stn8188 3y ago
      The boot time is long, the BMS programs are awkward (but maybe I'm not familiar with server-style BMS programs), and I can't get the DDR4 clock as high as it should be for my DRAM. There's a chance my UDIMM doesn't support the speed I want to run, but it hasn't been a big enough deal for me to look into.
      - zamadatix 3y ago
        How much total memory are we talking and what speed were you able to run it at?
        stn8188 3y ago
        I have 4x16GB of 3200MT/s DDR4, but can't get the clock above 1055 MHz (which would be 2110MT/s). There's a chance that the cheaper/consumer grade G.skill memory isn't compatible with those speeds, but it hasn't been a blocker lately. I built the machine to be more basic for now but be able to upgrade over time into a powerful computer to run electromagnetic simulations.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        Yea, SuperMicro are not boot time optimized boards at all. In the style of systems I've always built them in we were talking systems that might only be rebooted once or twice a year. Though with CPU/firmware exploits commonly getting patched it does seem like there are a lot of reasons to reboot server style systems these days.
- derefr 3y ago
  > Yes, it is basically a prosumer version of the Epyc server CPUS Threadripper was, yes. Threadripper Pro wasn't. It was a workstation CPU. Threadripper was discontinued while Threadripper Pro wasn't, because workstation CPUs are profitable, while HEDT CPUs aren't. (AFAICT the HEDT "class" of CPUs only existed for a short time when CPU production was such that all the individual cores could perform really well, but the die as a whole could still fail validation as a server/workstation-grade CPU. I think, with chiplets, this just doesn't happen any more.)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I'm disappointed in the lack of I/O in consumer chips these days. I've had 3930k 4930k and now 1680v2 Xeon and I have memory channels and PCIe lanes coming out of my ears. Current consumer chips give you maybe 20 lanes.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Things actually end up not that different in the I/O department. Yeah, there are only 20 lanes going direct to the CPU but the northbridge has the bandwidth to hang another true 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes off it (before running into contention). At this point you are still an honest 4 lanes short but half the lanes are 4x faster so things like your GPU or high speed NIC don't need to eat 16 lanes each in the first place. The story repeats on memory where, yeah, you don't have 4 memory channels anymore... but the actual memory bandwidth is significantly higher and the total capacity is about the same. I've got a 13900k NAS build with 14 NVMe drives in it and 25G network connectivity. If you do W680 for the motherboard instead of the typical boards you get to keep the ECC too. Saved me thousands compared to getting equivalent I/O and total CPU performance with a server board. Reminded me a lot of when I got a 1650v3 prior really, "oh, it's kind of just consumer stuff but fully loaded", but ran a lot faster (of course). The hardest part is finding a board which breaks out the things out into ports instead of trying to figure out how to cram 2 extra cheap "gaming" nics, wi-fi, 50 USB ports, or other useless things in statically instead.
    - ciupicri 3y ago
      What motherboard are you using and were you able to install 128+ GB of RAM running at full speed, e.g. 5600 MT/s?
      - zamadatix 3y ago
        Never said full speed because I'm running 192 GB at 5200 MT/s :p. Just the ASUS Z790 creator, like I said though I'd look into W680 and some ECC instead had I not had a steal of a deal on the memory at the time. 5600 MT/s booted but wouldn't pass memory tests. I've heard others with the same setup needed to go to 4800. That just happens to still be faster than the max memory bandwidth of the quad channel platform that was referenced anyways. Part of it might be that the early 48 GB kits (mine included) were themselves only rated for 5600. I'd be willing to bet mine would work at 5600 with one of these new better rated ~6800 kits helping things a little. I will say my experience with the memory controllers on modern Intel systems has been SIGNIFICANTLY better than my experience with them memory controllers on modern AMD systems. I could barely get my 7950X to do 64 GB at 6000, and that was one of the better experiences have had with the Zen memory controllers, but the Intel builds easily blow past that.

satvikpendem 3y ago

I'm looking forward to the 96 core Threadripper, personally. It helps for compilation to have as many cores as possible. Not sure how the single threaded performance will be however as it's slower than the Ryzen series, generally, and I still want to game.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
What are you compiling, if you don’t mind me asking?
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Rust and Dart/Flutter programs, mainly.

ciupicri 3y ago

Right now the problem with consumer grade CPUs from AMD is that you can't have 128 GB of memory running at full speed. You need to use 4 memory modules which means a lower speed. From https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-7950x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-7950x Max Memory Speed 2x1R DDR5-5200 2x2R DDR5-5200 4x1R DDR5-3600 4x2R DDR5-3600 There's also the issue of ECC.

sapiogram 3y ago
I assume you're also still limited to dual-channel in both scenarios?
- ciupicri 3y ago
  From the same page: Memory Channels: 2 On the other hand the specifications for Threadripper™ PRO 5945WX [1] say: Memory Channels: 8 [1]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-pro-5945wx https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-p...
  - sapiogram 3y ago
    Oof
vluft 3y ago
you can at least get 96GB now, with 48GB dimms
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Scramblejams 3y ago
  But not with ECC, unfortunately. At least not yet, but I haven’t heard of any in the pipeline.
wmf 3y ago

wmf 3y ago

I don't think consumer grade Zen5 with 32c/64t will be released because the frequency of Zen 5c will be pretty low leading to poor single-thread performance.

ksec 3y ago

I am much more looking forward to potential 256 Core EPYC with PCIe 6.0 Server for Netflix CDN.... Waiting for the "Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 3200Gb/s and Beyond" Talk :) That is assuming 1600Gb/s is already possible with ConnectX-7 XD.