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96 cores? Wild! Can the cores even stay busy and fed with work to do at some point?
by bfrog 3y ago
96 cores? Wild! Can the cores even stay busy and fed with work to do at some point?
- bhouston 3y agoI can feed those cores! PixInsight for astrophotography or CPU-based 3D rendering. And remember that with "hyper-threading" it appears at 192 cores - which is just insane.
- Arnavion 3y agoThat's why they also support all those PCIe lanes.
- undersuit 3y agoAnd 8 channels of DDR5! I wonder if any WRX90 Motherboards will have memory overclocking or if that's going to be limited to the quad channel TRX50 enthusiast boards. AMD seems to allow it, but will there be a market? If the platforms are anything like the desktop topology overclocking the memory increases the L3 cache and CCX<->CCX clock speeds as well. Feed the beast.
- undersuit 3y agoLooks like there are some DDR5 ECC Registered Overclockable(or at least with XMP profiles) DIMMs released already for Intel platforms.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoWaiting for Bruce Dawson aka randomascii's sequel to "24-core CPU and I can't move my mouse", with "96-core CPU and time has been stilled", with event tracing and flame graphs that show which of those cores are slowing down something basic in Windows. It's a bit weird (but cool!) that AMD seems to expect to use this chip on ordinary workstations rather than HPC clusters. Hopefully a few of those workstations are bought by the kernel and application developers (who have reasonably parallel workloads like compiling operating systems), otherwise you're likely to have more than an order of magnitude more cores than the average person designing your operating system. Usually, the problem is the opposite - the devs are on new flagship workstation-class devices, and the users on little edge devices (sometimes still with HDDs instead of SSDs!) have a poor experience, but this is kind of the opposite.
- smolder 3y ago> the devs are on new flagship workstation-class devices, and the users on little edge devices This will continue to be true, I think. The vast majority of people buying threadripper machines at threadripper prices are those with serious work to do on them, like compiling huge codebases, hosting piles of VMs, running simulations, or doing certain creative work. I doubt anyone developing 'serious' software that their customers buy 96 core machines to run wouldn't also run similarly powerful machines. There are some tech fetishists who will buy this premium hardware and underutilize it, but not too many.
- bick_nyers 3y agoDepends on how memory bandwidth constrained you are with eight channels of DDR5. Keep in mind also that the DDR5 on these can also clock higher than EPYC parts, so the gap between Threadripper's 8 channels and EPYC's 12 channels isn't as wide as one may initially think.
- Aurornis 3y agoDepending on the workload, absolutely. The 96 core part has 480MB of cache and 8 channels of DDR5. Compare that to a 7950X (not the X3D model) which has 16 cores, but only 80MB of cache and 2 channels of DDR5. The 96-core part has 6X as many cores, but 4X as much memory bandwidth and 6X as much cache. The interfaces have scaled similarly to the core count. Of course, if your workload isn't really very parallel then you won't see much benefit. Such is life with high core counts.
- MenhirMike 3y agoAlso, enough fast PCIe lanes to have GPUs, NVMe drives, and NICs feed that pipe from the outside.
- rewmie 3y ago> Can the cores even stay busy and fed with work to do at some point? There are still some embarrassingly parallel applications out there that could benefit from this sort of hardware. I'm not sure if it's absolutely necessary to have this number of cores under each desk though. To me this sounds like a luxury/vanity/status symbol.