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First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel
- Racing0461 3y agoSingle core performance? All i'm seeing is the confirmation that independently parallalizable tasks finish twice as fast on a cpu with twice the cores. cool, amdahl's law is proven. The handbrake one, all the times seems similar indicating similar single core perf. This matters for me since single core perf is pretty important for visual studio/other software with alot going on feeling "snappy" even tho the actual compiling/rendering might be faster and scale with moree cores.
- wmf 3y agoSingle core should be not much worse than Ryzen.
- Racing0461 3y agoYep seems about the same single thread wise which is a bit weird since 7950x3d base clock is 4.2 whereas the 7995wx is 2.5. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5726vs5234vs3862/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-PRO-7995WX-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X3D-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X#:~:text=CPU%20Single%20Thread%20Rating https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5726vs5234vs3862/AMD-Ry...
- coder543 3y agoSingle threaded tasks should never run at the base clock. The base clock can pretty much be thought of as the minimum clock speed you should see when all cores are maxed out and the thermal solution is only just meeting the spec.
- tedunangst 3y agoI still want my computer to remain responsive even when I'm rendering in the background.
- dralley 3y agoI doubt 2.5ghz vs 4.2ghz is going to make any real difference to "responsiveness". The more pressing concern would be making sure the kernel actually schedules foreground workloads promptly.
- jacquesm 3y agoTypical desktop OS's don't have proper prioritization and terrible schedulers. It's definitely not the hardware.
- Racing0461 3y agoMaybe i'm missing why it doesn't matter. Ryzen runs at 4.5 base clock, TR Pro runs at 2.5 base clock, upon booting up nothing is happening so each cpu runs at their base clock. I open something like visual studio that isn't too intensive so each cpu doesn't realize it needs to boost. Won't the ryzen with 4.5 base clock feel snappier than the 2.5 one when vs loads? When a pretty big task (compiling, rendering) activates the scheduler and causes the cpu to boost to their respective 5 ghz or w/e, then yeah the numbers would be the same, but they don't be at the beginning when i'm dragging windows around and right clicking on stuff in visual studio. I don't believe this feeling is reflected in the scores.
- coder543 3y agoNo. None of what you're writing is accurate. No processor made in the last decade will ever idle at the base clock. Any modern processor idles far, far lower than that, approximately 1Ghz, maybe even lower. Idling at multiple gigahertz would be a huge waste of energy. The minimum clock speed is not correlated to the "base clock" at all. It takes tens of milliseconds to reach the boost clock: https://stackoverflow.com/a/64254459 https://stackoverflow.com/a/64254459 The base clock is entirely irrelevant to everything you are talking about. Please reference my earlier comment for the meaning of "base clock": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37980293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37980293
- dathinab 3y agosince a few generations ago boosts have become so good that for many use-cases base clock don't matter that much AFIK it's basically tweaked AMD EPYC™ 9654 with much higher boost and some other changes, so that's probably where the base clock comes from some situations where the base clock might still matter: - you perfectly max out CPU utilization (no I/O, hardly cache misses, etc.) and at the same time have exactly only the thermal headroom from the spec and run it for a "long" time - you want to max optimize for watter/perf the best power efficiency is likely around the base clock (for this one because of my assumption of it being more or less a tweaked server processor, on a typical consumer desktop PC I would say likely quite a bit below the base clock)
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- FullyFunctional 3y agoThreadripper is as the name implies, purely MT focused. I run simulations that are inherently completely single-threaded and I lean on Geekbench which tend to be a good predictor for me. As far as I can tell, Intel still holds the crown in absolute ST perf, granted at horrific efficiencies: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks/ https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks/ (be sure to ignore the "Top Single-Core Results" which AFAICT is full of BS numbers). Intel's latest 14900K isn't there yet, but should be a smidgen faster: https://www.techspot.com/news/100034-intel-core-i9-14900k-tops-geekbench-record-breaking.html https://www.techspot.com/news/100034-intel-core-i9-14900k-to...
- elromulous 3y ago> All i'm seeing is the confirmation that independently parallalizable tasks finish twice as fast on a cpu with twice the cores. cool, amdahl's law is proven. Yes, but if you can squeeze more cores in the same space (and/or power) envelope, and not suffer a performance per core penalty, you're winning.
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- wingmanjd 3y ago"One big disparity between the three machines was the Zen 4 machine was outfitted with 512GB of memory, while its competition had just 128GB each" This feels like cheating to me.
- RecycledEle 3y agoThey had to give the Eypc 4 more RAM to populate all its RAM channels. I've read it has 12 channels of DDR5.
- pyuser583 3y agoWhy? Extra RAM has no effect on most types of performance.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoThese chips have 8 channel ram, so you need at least 8 sticks to get full ram bandwidth.
- kijin 3y agoAren't there 16GB DDR5 sticks? With smaller sticks, they could populate all the channels while keeping total memory capacity the same as other setups. I don't see why they had to splurge all the way up to 512GB.
- sva_ 3y agoPlaying around with 96x avx512 sounds fun
- MaxikCZ 3y agoPardon my ignorance, I hear about "fun with avx512" so often yet still have 0 intuition about why its fun? What do people do with that instruction that's so different to all the other stuff?
- fancy_pantser 3y agoProfessor Lemire has some fun ideas: https://lemire.me/blog/?s=Avx https://lemire.me/blog/?s=Avx
- 112233 3y agohttps://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/10/14/vectorized_emulation.html https://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/10/14/vectorized_e...
- mrichman 3y agoWhat use cases is this CPU ideal for? It's not a GPU, so gaming, ML model training, and crypto mining are out.
- KiranRao0 3y agoShoving somewhere in a datacenter and virtualizing so that 96 different clients can use it at once.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoBut ThreadRipper is a workstation-targeted product, not server, isn't it?
- stn8188 3y agoI use my Threadripper for massive electromagnetic simulations for printed circuit boards and packages - I love it!
- Philpax 3y agoCompiling.
- serf 3y agoI like to use my lots-of-cores Xeons for media conversion and 3d rendering, it's nice to see that many cores spin up for SMP workloads.
- pshirshov 3y agoIt's ideal for building big things, like Chromium or AOSP. > not a GPU Well, 3970x is able to soft-render DotA in 4k with 8-11 fps...
- stingraycharles 3y agoI’m using it to still feel productive while working on our massive, TMP-heavy C++ codebase.
- xcv123 3y agoProduction 3D rendering is still done on CPU at VFX studios.
- DrReachAround 3y agoThis will be perfect for my Plex server.
- preisschild 3y agoWhy do you need so much compute in your Plex server? Wouldn't a cheap GPU be better for transcoding tasks?
- fortyseven 3y agoWoosh.
- mdhen 3y agoI'm pretty sure that was a joke
- userbinator 3y agoIMHO, increasingly inefficient software notwithstanding, CPU performance has been well beyond acceptable since a long time ago. Thus, the real question is how buggy these new CPUs will be. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37812556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37812556
- hetman 3y agoI don't think someone doing video editing or 3D rendering is likely to agree with you here...
- lmm 3y ago> I don't think someone doing video editing or 3D rendering is likely to agree with you here... They're hopefully not using a CPU for that - that's all been on the GPU for years.
- sp332 3y agoI know video cards have sepcialized hardware for video encoding, but those are tuned for realtime streaming and not meximum quality. If you want to use a different algorithm than the one baked into the hardware, can you use a GPU for that?
- lmm 3y ago> I know video cards have sepcialized hardware for video encoding, but those are tuned for realtime streaming and not meximum quality. If you want to use a different algorithm than the one baked into the hardware, can you use a GPU for that? If you're doing something that follows the same general design as most existing video codecs, absolutely; these days "hardware" encoding is less "fixed function chip" and more "the driver/firmware knows how to stitch together these components so as to comply with the xyz standard" - hence you see support for new encoding standards getting added in driver updates. If you're doing some completely radical out-of-left-field video compression algorithm, maybe not, although even then GPU hardware is pretty general these days and video encoding tends to be well suited to running on it.
- hedora 3y agoHas anyone done a perf / watt scatterplot of the current AMD and Apple offerings? I'd guess this wins in absolute performance (due to the TDP), but I've heard AMD is pretty competitive on energy efficiency too these days. I'm typing this on an M2, which is simultaneously cooler and faster than my old Intel laptop. Wondering if it's time to upgrade my decade-old Intel Linux desktop to an AMD yet.
- maccard 3y agoI have an older threadripper - a 3970x. It's the most power hungry device in my house after my electric oven. In raw numbers it's hard to beat. But it is _not_ efficient
- hamandcheese 3y agoThat is now a two generation old CPU at this point - I don't think we started seeing AMD get competitive on power efficiency until Zen 3.
- jrockway 3y agoI have the same chip and it's amazing to see it idle at 75W after growing up on Intel chips that use like 5W at idle. Of note is that Zen 2 (the 3970x's microarchitecture) is 7nm. The new Threadrippers are on a 5nm process. I would expect slightly lower power consumption, but note that the 7000 series of Threadrippers quote a TDP of 350W while the 3000 series quote 280W. So I'm guessing they're using the efficiency for more speed instead of more power savings. To me, it's fine. I'd always prefer paying more for electricity than to wait longer for something to complete. (But I do respect the desktop chips that can blink my cursor with an efficiency core that uses a few tens of milliwatts.)
- dathinab 3y agoZen 4 is known to be noticeable more efficient then Zen 3 and even much much more so then Zen 2 so I don't think this comparison is helpful.
- pleoxy 3y agoAll of the AMD chiplet based designs do poorly at idle power. These monsters will do better than the 39xx because of the 6mm IO die. But it's still going to have high idle power compared to a monolithic Intel design. The monolithic AMD dies (laptop/mobile) are competitive in the idle power space.
- spandextwins 3y agoCan't wait for Linus Tech Tips to do some great benchmarks on this thing!
- Tostino 3y agoIs this a joke? Isn't their whole thing pretty much lacking rigor in everything they do? Why would you want benchmarks from them?
- extragood 3y agoActually, no - their thing for the past few years has been to build out the most comprehensive test bench across all PC hardware components. "LTT Labs." They are aiming to become the authority on hardware performance and reliability, and have invested heavily in the tools and industry experts required to do that. Linus doesn't do any testing himself; he is just bankrolling it with the proceeds from his main channel and other media properties. I find this whole thing super fascinating, coming from the perspective of Silicon Valley startups.
- MaxikCZ 3y agoI don't know when/if that change you talk about happened, as I banned LTT from my feeds years ago for their (subjectively) annoying style of presentation, but latest drama isn't even year old and highlighted so many technical issues with LTT I have no intention of trying them again: [0]: The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc
- Citizen_Lame 3y agoLol, Steve is ok, but I remember when he attacked wrong company for making claims against his videos. He never apologised or acknowledged he was wrong. So, please.
- extragood 3y agoFair enough. I have a few gripes with the channel, particularly how they title videos and the thumbnails are usually cheesy. The content can be hit or miss, but the smart house series is especially relevant to me as I'm going through something similar a smaller scale. The thing that I find so interesting is that they - for better or worse - essentially live stream their business decisions, challenges, and aspirations. Whether their endeavors are successful or not, I agree with their decision to try and move beyond Youtube and create their own video platform via Floatplane. They've also found success in alternative revenue streams via sponsorships from reputable brands and merchandising and are very open about their metrics. Lastly, I really respect that they are 100% bootstrapped. I've only ever worked for companies that rely on investor funding for growth, and their influence often feels intrusive and counterproductive.
- dathinab 3y agoHonestly that thing is a monster. It's basically a AMD EPYC™ 9654 but with more clock boost speed and some differences wrt. IO (e.g. less but faster memory channels) and I think some differences wrt. enterprise features.
- galaxyLogic 3y agoFor me as a developer it does not bother so much that some tasks like compilation or rendering or AI-training can take a long time. What bothers me is that I am doing multiple things at the same time like say committing to git or rebasing and trying to read my code at the same time, taking backups simultaneously. So this would seem like an ideal, if not overkill processor for me.
- ksec 3y agoI am just wondering if it would be better and cheaper to buy an Threadripper 7980X 64 Core for Server than EPYC. You get higher single core performance. Specifically for those workload where bandwidth isn't an issue. Something like StackExchange [1] could fit all their 9 server into 1 ( or 2 with one for redundancy ) without any degraded performance. [1] https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance
- jiggawatts 3y agoI keep trying to make the point that one or two servers could now put out the traffic of many top 100 websites, assuming they apps are written reasonably efficiently (e.g.: with C# or Rust, not Ruby). Nobody believes me, which says a lot about both the hardware and software industries.
- ksec 3y agoYes. And we will have 128Core / 256 Thread Zen 4c Server soon. I would be happy if Ruby Rails could do it in 2x the rendering time i.e slower with 2x Resources / Server. That is combined 4x difference. Unfortunately even with JIT we are not there yet.
- throwaway81523 3y agoIt had 192 threads, drew 57 amps of current, had a heat sink the size of a Cadillac... they called it a macroprocessor. That never gets old.