AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review

https://www.anandtech.com/print/15044/the-amd-ryzen-threadripper-3960x-and-3970x-review-24-and-32-cores-on-7nm

by pella • 7 years ago

488 337 7 years ago

anandtech.com

pella2• 7 years ago

"AMD Pre-Announces 64-core Threadripper 3990X: Time To Open Your Wallet"

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15151/amd-preannounces-64-cor...

qaq• 7 years ago

How much would that run for 5K?

brians• 7 years ago

Probably. Or AMD pulls another rabbit out and calls it $2500 in mid 2021.

chaosbutters• 7 years ago

probably closer to 3500-4000 USD. Maybe $5k if theyre feeling greedy. But I think they want to undercut intel so theyll keep their margins reasonable so they can crush the Xeon line

pella2• 7 years ago

review "AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 (Castle Leak) Review Roundup"

https://videocardz.com/83333/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3000-cas...

stopads• 7 years ago

Great review, but the highlight for me is that windows task manager view of CPU utilization. It's like looking at a spreadsheet:

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Task%20Manag...

gameswithgo10• 7 years ago

The core explosion AMD has started has quickly made current cpu monitor UIs cease to even make sense, its great!

bitL23• 7 years ago

Can't wait for a scrollbar in htop...

[EDIT: 256 threads in htop on ARM] https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Cavi...

davnicwil• 7 years ago

Well, it would be moreso if they laid out logical cores as columns and physical cores as rows - they missed a nice UI trick there!

nolok• 7 years ago

Works with the current 1:1 assumptions, but then the early windows performance problems with ryzen's NUMA design shows what happens when those assumptions are wrong. Their design, while less cool, is capable of handling pretty much any configuration.

jasomill• 7 years ago

A nicer UI trick would be to change how Windows Task Manager reports CPU usage on the "Details" tab, because with, e.g., 64 virtual cores, single-threaded process CPU utilization can only ever be 00, 01, or (assuming the display rounds up) 02, because the displayed value is

  sum of core % utilization
  -------------------------
       number of cores

In a system with hundreds of cores, (predominantly) single-threaded processes' CPU utilization will therefore appear to be identically zero.

The "Processes" tab improves on this slightly by adding a single decimal digit, but this display still becomes less and less useful as core count increases because its precision remains inversely proportional to the number of (virtual) cores in the system.

theandrewbailey• 7 years ago

I remember Linus playing around with a Xeon Phi CPU with a few hundred threads. The task manager was all percent signs.

https://youtu.be/fBxtS9BpVWs?t=200

Looks like Microsoft has already got 1000+ cores on Windows: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Intern...

Can we get Bruce Dawson[0] one of those? I wonder how many more bugs he'll run into.

[0] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

Macha3• 7 years ago

I'm really curious about the machine it's running on. 896 physical cores is an odd number - 32 x 28, 16 x 56 or 8 x 112 are the likely combinations. The picture identifies it as a Xeon Platinum 8180 which is a 28C/56T CPU. Are there systems that support 32 Intel CPUs in one host? I thought quad socket was the practical limit these days.

masklinn2• 7 years ago

I remember Linus playing around with a Xeon Phi CPU with a few hundred threads. The task manager was all percent signs.

The last Sun chips (Niagara / Ultrasparc Tx) also had pretty high count, IIRC they had 64 threads / socket, and were of course multi-socket systems. At 1.6GHz they were clocked pretty low for 2007 though.

Dylan168079• 7 years ago

Can we get Bruce Dawson[0] one of those? I wonder how many more bugs he'll run into.

Oh yeah, especially because core affinities in Windows get all wonky once you go above 64 threads.

brucedawson2• 7 years ago

If somebody gives me a ThreadRipper I promised to do some performance investigations. I keep meaning to update my fractal program (Fractal eXtreme) to support more than 64 threads and that would give me a good excuse (processor group support is needed).

Anyone? Got a spare one lying around?

akhilcacharya2• 7 years ago

This is honestly my favorite part of my new 3700x!

hyperbovine• 7 years ago

What a nice visual summary of why most people do not need this many cores.

kunai• 7 years ago

These are not mainstream CPUs; people who do rendering and run server farms for a living will find this level of parallel computing a godsend.

dragontamer8• 7 years ago

If you think that's crazy, then remember the CM-5 machines in Jurrasic park? A real 90s supercomputer.

Anyway, each of those lights was "on" when a core was utilized, and "off" when a core was off.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Frostbur...

detritus2• 7 years ago

For anyone else interested who, unlike me, doesn't want to spend a few seconds swearing at how useless Google's become, OP meant 'CM-5'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

Although this particular bout of verbalised obscenity did just make me change my default browser search engine to duck duck go as Google crossed out 'supercomputer' as missing from its query, which was annoying as it was 50% of my sodding query and, technically, the only correct bit. Google search is totally crap these days.

masklinn2• 7 years ago

That was the case of the original CMs (1/2/200), but the CM5 switched from the original single-bit processors to a lower number of RISC SPARC cores.

While it retained the LEDs, I don't think they had the same 1:1 correspondance to cores of the previous model: the CM1 and CM2 up to 65536 cores (the CM2 also had an FP coprocessor for 32 cores, for an additional 2048 special-purpose cores) whereas the CM5 had "only" 1056 processors.

wherehouse• 7 years ago

The CM-5 LEDs had different settings options: on, disabled, and also a “random and pleasing” setting. So in one respect, modern RGB LED motherboards utilize trickle-down supercomputer technology in the form of... blinkenlights.

landr0id• 7 years ago

Check out winocm's view of a 112-core server: https://twitter.com/winocm/status/1183533208605990913

bitL23• 7 years ago

Any official announcement for 8-channel 4TB LRDIMM TRX80/WRX80 chipset yet? TRX40 is underwhelming compared to high-end x399...

Jonnax• 7 years ago

What's missing?

bitL23• 7 years ago

TRX40 can do only as much RAM as x399 (256GB) as there are only 32GB (ECC) UDIMMs available. With incoming 64-core TR that would be 4GB/core or 2GB/thread, which is way too little for a CPU that would cost ~$5k. TRX40 boards also for some reason have fewer PCIe slots (4) than x399 (6) or x299 (7) boards. I can't call them "Pro" because of that - fewer GPUs for Deep Learning is not a good idea in a workstation-level tech.

IanCutress2• 7 years ago

Nothing yet.

greatjack613• 7 years ago

Respectfully, intel looks like its hiding under a chair by refusing to release anything with similar core counts.

I mean I would also be afraid that Amd has a

Manufacturing Process
Performance
Power Consumption

= IPC

lm28469• 7 years ago

by refusing to release anything with similar core counts.

Are they refusing or are they not able to produce them ?

wtallis6• 7 years ago

They have server and workstation parts up to 28 cores, but their enthusiast-oriented product line is 10, 12, 14 or 18 cores while AMD offers 16, 24, 32 and soon 64.

colinchartier• 7 years ago

Intel even refused to give i9 9900Ks to Linus Tech Tips because LTT had a Ryzen 3950X and Intel didn't want them benchmarked.

HeWhoLurksLate4• 7 years ago

They still got one, though, through Origin PC.

zionic• 7 years ago

9900KS still wins in games though, per the recent anandtech review

JaRail2• 7 years ago

I don't think their 10980XE and Threadripper videos from this morning are going to win them any favor with Intel. Absolutely savage rants though.

Intel 10980XE: https://youtu.be/vuaiqcjf0bs

AMD 3970X/3960X: https://youtu.be/a8apEJ5Zt2s

misja• 7 years ago

280W TDP?! That's more than what a large refrigerator uses ..

gameswithgo10• 7 years ago

TDP does not reflect actual power draw. Actual power draw might be more, might be less. Either way, its like, eight normal computers.

bitL23• 7 years ago

Expect max around 430W...

geogra4• 7 years ago

reminds me of how things were back in the days of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition!

EDIT: Wow, the TDP of that was only 115 watts[0]. I remember thinking it was just a monstrous power-sucker of a CPU.

0: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27492/p...

gruez• 7 years ago

That's more than what a large refrigerator uses ..

That's partially due to good insulation in modern fridges. After all, if the insulation is perfect, you could run a fridge on 0W (assuming you don't open the doors).

all_blue_chucks• 7 years ago

How's that? By powering them with Maxwell's Demon?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

adtac• 7 years ago

Then it's clear what must be done in the CPU world -- we need to insulate our CPUs better and eliminate all heat transfer.

bjoli• 7 years ago

Why no compilation benchmarks? Say, a Linux, chromium or GCC compile. All that cache must make it fantastic at compiling.

gameswithgo10• 7 years ago

Gamers Nexus did some GCC benchmarks with the regular Ryzens and indeed they were absolutely trouncing intel, and indeed it was due to the big l3 cache.

The Threadrippers are the same cpu with just more of them so I'm sure they do well also.

syshum• 7 years ago

On Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRgmq9f6VBY

https://www.level1techs.com/article/threadripper-ragnarok

Trellmor• 7 years ago

Phoronix posted some compilation benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linu...

And golem.de (link in german, see table at the end of the page): https://www.golem.de/news/threadripper-3970x-3960x-im-test-a...

travisglines• 7 years ago

The percentage increase in performance in those benchmarks is stunning. They're pushing hard on the multi-thread end and it's clearly working for a lot of modern applications that can take advantage of it.

Pair one of these Threadrippers with a pair of the fastest NVMe SSD's out there, with plenty of high performance DDR4 memory and you've got a near supercomputer from recent past in terms of performance.

SlowRobotAhead• 7 years ago

Really interesting and effective way to lay out the results of so many tests here.

https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=1911248-HU-THREADRI...

IanCutress2• 7 years ago

Ever since moving to Win 1909, our compile benchmarks have been a bit off. I was at Supercomputing last week, literally got back Saturday to start writing the review, and I need to get some time to debug why it's not working as it should. I've got Qualcomm's Tech Summit next week and IEDM the week after that, so you'll have to wait a bit. Ian (the editor of the review)

Someone12343• 7 years ago

Quick question: How are you handling Intel's security patches vis-a-vis benchmarks/consistency? In particular as there are like three(?) performance impacting fixes now that were released over a two or more year period.

For example in articles like this where you include older chips are you just listing the numbers from previous benchmarks, or are all running on the same patch level/OS?

keldaris2• 7 years ago

I can't resist asking something that's been bugging me for a long time. The issue of insane travel schedules has openly plagued AnandTech for a long time now, both delaying reviews and severely impacting their quality when they do come out. Every tech website out there covers the big events in roughly the same way, very few do proper deep dive technical reviews like you've done in the past. Is it really the best use of your time to (partially) squander the comparative advantage you have in favor of rushing from one event to the next, reporting the same things everyone else does?

old-gregg• 7 years ago

Ian,

Consider adding Linux as the underlying platform for some of your tests. Not only it's usually easier to script repeatable developer-oriented workloads, but your reviews will be more comprehensive as well. The Linux scheduler is quite different and more advanced (as illustrated by vastly different Gen 2 Threadripper performance on Windows vs Linux), and your articles have not been capturing this.

I can see why Linux is not yet the mainstream for gamers, but this OS should be more popular among the HEDT crowd.

bogwog• 7 years ago

It's 2019; I just want to press F5 to refresh my Linux kernel. Is that too much to ask for?

gremlinsinc3• 7 years ago

I just want vscode to work, because it's awesome when it does... but I tend to have 5-10 editors open at a time and so far only sublime_text works w/ my workflow without crashing...though it sometimes needs rebooted when the plugin manager is having race conditions or other errors. Plus other electron apps. Current system is about 8-10 years old though, upgrading after christmas sometime to 3700x amd line and ddr4 3200 ram 32gb (upgrading from 8gb)...mobo should be quite upgradeable though to last another decade.

szatkus2• 7 years ago

Note that every core has access to "only" 16MB of cache (well, counting L2 you could say it's 16.5MB). This will change with Zen3 ("32MB+").

shantara• 7 years ago

The biggest indicator of the success of AMD Threadripper line to me is that Intel has been forced to cut the price of their newly released i9-10980XE CPU by $1000 compared to i9-9980XE while maintaining practically indistinguishable performance.

bitL23• 7 years ago

The only advantages are AVX512 and optimized Intel compiler/libraries now.

a012• 7 years ago

Intel has so many resources, so when their hardware isn't competitive enough they have software to the rescue.

Someone12343• 7 years ago

optimized Intel compiler/libraries now

And that's just cheating anyway. Intel's libraries refuse to use some instructions on AMD's CPU that the CPU supports, and instead downgrade to slower legacy versions. Cite[0].

[0] https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49

nextos• 7 years ago

And better Linux compatibility, plus less heat on low end CPUs. But hopefully those 2 will change soon too.

dnautics2• 7 years ago

Is avx512 an advantage really? Iirc the machine has to go into another mode where processing across the board becomes slower except for the avx instructions, which to me seems only useful for niche hpc "measuring contest" applications.

boris• 7 years ago

6 pages of gaming benchmarks and not one compilation speed test. Baffling.

MindTooth• 7 years ago

Here are some of Linux stuff: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linu...

disintegore2• 7 years ago

Kernel 5.4 compiled under 24 seconds. Insane.

xbmcuser2• 7 years ago

Here you can see some compiling benchmarks by linus tech tips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8apEJ5Zt2s

dumpsterkid• 7 years ago

LinusTechTips has compile time for Mozilla Firefox as a comparative benchmark in their review video

ATsch3• 7 years ago

This is my frustration with almost all tech sites. The AMD press deck included compilation benchmarks, but the only others to reliably provide them are Phoronix.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

There's a void to film then.

close04• 7 years ago

Most reviewers don't bother doing compile benchmarks because they're not as familiar with them and perhaps they don't come in the same "canned" form as every other gaming benchmark. It may also be that each site caters to a particular audience.

On the other hand bench results have to be comparable and relevant (in time). Which is easy when you run the same still widely played GTA V year after year on every new CPU. But comparing compilation time for kernel version 3.11 (released at the same time as GTA V) seems a lot less relevant today.

gowld5• 7 years ago

Anandtech is a site for benchmark fanbois, not shopping for compute value.

undersuit• 7 years ago

"Also, our compile test seems to have broken itself when we used Windows 10 1909, and due to travel we have not had time to debug why it is no longer working. We hope to get this test up and running in the new year, along with an updated test suite."

So there's that. I'd give them a break with the fact they also had to produce the review for Intel's launch on the same day: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15039/the-intel-core-i9-10980...

somurzakov• 7 years ago

can it run crysis, though?

leadingthenet• 7 years ago

It might even run it in CPU-rendered mode...

mastax5• 7 years ago

Yep: https://youtu.be/HuLsrr79-Pw?t=705 (this is the previous generation)

e12e• 7 years ago

Well, if epyc could with 64 cores...?

https://youtu.be/HuLsrr79-Pw?t=12m10s

bob1029• 7 years ago

I think this is the part where it gets interesting. Once you have enough parallel general-purpose compute horsepower available to run a physically-based renderer (e.g. what Pixar uses) at frame rates beyond 30/second, you can start to enter into a realm of arbitrarily-complex scenes within real-time applications.

How far off are we from this possibility, assuming someone sat down and optimized existing solutions for this use case?

FBISurveillance• 7 years ago

AMD slaps Intel around a bit with a large trout.

mstade• 7 years ago

Man, that's a blast from the past – thanks for the chuckle!

_lbaq• 7 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78b67l_yxUc

SahAssar• 7 years ago

As is tradition in certain parts of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHDbu4G3_oE

ravedave5• 7 years ago

I love it how CPUs have more onboard memory than my whole first computer now.

anentropic• 7 years ago

I remember when a 20 megabyte hard drive was a wow item

sumoboy• 7 years ago

I just added a single seagate 16tb drive to my pc the other day, just an insane amount of storage in a little package.

Zardoz84• 7 years ago

This is happening since a long time.

jacquesm3• 7 years ago

It's been like that for a while for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

bryanlarsen4• 7 years ago

It's been a while since the L1 cache size (64KB) has exceeded that of my first computer. What I find crazy is that a single Ryzen core has more in registers than some of the computers I've used.

AMD64 has 16 64 bit registers, but Ryzen actually has 168 behind the scenes so it can pipeline and reorder multiple instructions simultaneously. That's almost 1.5KBytes of memory, more than some microcontrollers have in ROM or RAM.

chapplap• 7 years ago

It's actually a lot larger if you look at vector registers - AVX registers are 32 bytes each and there are also ~168 of them in modern AMD and Intel CPUs, resulting in 5KB of registers. With AVX-512 the number is 10KB!

3fe9a03ccd14ca52• 7 years ago

Last AMD generation was 250W, this one is 280W: if we’re not there already, then this should be a practical limit.

A good point for people looking to use this in their home server like I am. It’s going to be really hot if you’re getting your money out of it.

At some point there’s not an efficient way to cool these processors when the ambient room temperature rises too high. Anyone have suggestions for that? I’m in a weird position where power is cheap but I can’t AC my garage (where it’s located).

wil421• 7 years ago

I’ve seen people on YouTube build a wood box around a small rack, put a bathroom fan inside, and run a foil hose for a dryer to the outside. The racks I saw already had a glass door so it was easier to build the sides and foil tap the cracks.

mgalgs• 7 years ago

How about some good old fans? I had a little NAS box in my garage for a few years that ran pretty hot and I was afraid of straining the hard disks. I ended up just using lm_sensors on the server to monitor temperature, and when it got it hot, kick off an SSH command to a raspberry pi sitting nearby to tell it to turn on an exterior fan (gpio -> mosfet -> relay) I had mounted to the side of the cabinet a few inches away from the server box (literally just an old PC fan).

Super ghetto but actually pretty efficient at bringing the server's temperature down.

smolder• 7 years ago

There are pre-made circuits which come with a temperature sensor and can control fan speed to accomplish the same kind of thing. e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SLWWXL/

mastax5• 7 years ago

A few vendors make phase-change coolers which can activly cool below ambient. They're pretty expensive and niche and probably not reliable in the long term. Since it's going in the garage Id just get some really loud server fans.

mcv• 7 years ago

Water cool it, maybe? Moving that kind of heat out of a regular heatsink is going to be extremely noisy and you'll be blowing a lot of hot air through your machine.

Personally I'm not that interested in extreme power at the cost of extreme heat. I'm more interested in enough power with as little heat as possible. I find it hard to figure out which processor is the best fit for that these days, but I guess this one isn't it.

CoolGuySteve2• 7 years ago

The new 16 core Ryzen part already recommends a 280mm closed loop water cooler and so it doesn't come with a fan like the 12 core Ryzen does.

Finding an AIO with a waterblock that will cover a Threadripper is very difficult though. It's one of the reasons why I'm sticking with an overclocked 12 core Ryzen.

gameswithgo10• 7 years ago

there are dozens of threadripper coolers on the market, air and water

hrgiger• 7 years ago

What temps you are getting? Are you looking tdie? Did you update bios? I am having 40~ tdie on 1950x with noctua air. (Even I clocked, disabled dynticks, have lot of pcie device and using quad channel). i think noctua is still competitive with water cooling on TR. I would recommend renew thermal paste, have a room inside of case, check negative/positive pressure and go through again your bios settings i.e. prevent clocking on load

swebs• 7 years ago

Water cool it and pipe it to a large enough radiator outside your garage.

newnewpdro• 7 years ago

Bury a loop of copper pipe out behind the garage, 6+ feet underground. Circulate the water cooler through said pipe.

TL;DR: a short "geothermal" ground loop.

3fe9a03ccd14ca52• 7 years ago

Also, 280w comes out to be about $58 a month in electricity for Bay Area pricing (29c/kWh). Collocation will probably be cheaper for some folks.

m0zg2• 7 years ago

That's only if you use all cores 24x7 and all ALUs within those cores (vectorized workloads), which is very unlikely unless you're doing straight up linear algebra on the CPU.

In CA there's also the issue of not having electricity in the first place sometimes though. So power _consumption_ seems kind of secondary.

Dylan168079• 7 years ago

But to be clear, California is a strong outlier. The average price in the US is 12 cents.

hajile• 7 years ago

AMD is getting almost 30% better performance at 287 watts than Intel at 380 watts (Intel W-3175X in the review). If you're actually using all 32 cores all the time, you're saving TONS of money overall. Not only are you doing 30% more work, but at 25% less power.

Even if you left it on 24/7, it would take you a year and a half to make up the difference in price between the $2000 AMD and the $3000 Intel. If we assume both chips have identical performance, the Intel would cost $4350 to run over 5 years vs $3480 for the AMD (assuming 24/7 at all cores). The total cost of ownership for that Intel chip over 5 years seems to be around 2x that of the AMD chip.

I'd note we've been talking about 32 cores 24/7. If you're using 4 cores and 8 threads, you will be using half the power (about 140 watts). If your system is idling, it's using a bit less than 50 watts.

Let's say you leave your system on 24/7. You work 8 hours, play 4 hours (4 cores, 8 threads constantly running), and it idles the other 12 hours. We'll assume that you somehow max all cores for your entire workday and max 4 cores during play. You'd be well under half that price per month.

Change all-out time to a more reasonable, but still strenuous 4 hours with 8 moderate hours and shutting off your computer at night will get you down to less than $20 per month.

TD-Linux• 7 years ago

I run a previous-generation 2990WX (320W TDP) and the largest Noctua air cooler is easily sufficient at a low fan speed. If it's in your garage and you don't care about fan speed, you should be able just to blast the fans faster and have a well-ventilated case before resorting to water cooling.

The cores start to throttle at 70C, which is far hotter than even the hottest garage.

dragontamer8• 7 years ago

The cores start to throttle at 70C, which is far hotter than even the hottest garage.

Thermal dissipation however is proportional to delta-T (change in temperature).

A 25C ambient will provide delta-T of 45C, but a 35C ambient will provide a delta-T of 35C: so your 35C ambient garage will reduce performance by at least 22% compared to 25C.

----

Note that Intel chips can go all the way to 95C or 100C, making cooling a far easier problem. So you're already dealing with a lower Delta-T when you use these AMD chips that throttle at 70C. (To be fair: AMD and Intel's measurement systems are a bit different, so we can't compare them directly. But IIRC, most people have a slightly easier time cooling Intel chips).

snuxoll• 7 years ago

You may not be able to AC your entire garage, but you could cool an entire rack with a rackmount AC unit (tripp-lite sells them). It costs more since you are constantly having to cool hot air as it comes in, so it's not an ideal solution from a performance or affordability perspective. You can buy ducts to push the heat out, but garages typically have poor insulation so ugh.

I live in Idaho and keep my 24U rack in my office, total idle draw on it is now around 4A@110V and considering power tops out at $0.11/KWh during the summer there's no real reason to colo it somewhere else.

velosol• 7 years ago

If you want an all-in-one there are climate cabinets that keep separate cool air and hot air loops e.g. [1].

The downside is of course the price at >$5k for a 24U.

[1] https://www.blackbox.com/en-us/store/Detail.aspx/ClimateCab-...

szatkus2• 7 years ago

You can downclock and/or undervolt the CPU if you need these many threads, but could bite relatively small single core performance reduction.

ComputerGuru2• 7 years ago

Look into and get a split-unit ac. You can run the pipes quite a long distance, more than the advertising material and stock images would have you think! If power is cheap, you’ll regret not doing ten years ago.

Pioneer had the best bang-for-the-buck the last time I checked.

fulafel• 7 years ago

I started wondering about the physics of removing 280W of heat from the tiny silicon die/dice. Is most of the heat conducted through the metal connections or through the package? What material is the package made of?

rubbingalcohol2• 7 years ago

They use a heatspreader (solid metal surface, the "top" of the chip) soldered to the actual cores. Then you slap a heatsink or water block on and tighten it down on the heatspreader with the help of a thermal interface material (metallic goo). The actual cooling done by the heatsink or water cooler is pretty basic and similar to what you'd find inside cars or home A/C units.

With "280 watts" you can still use an off-the-shelf Noctua air cooler or any number of all-in-one water coolers.

kllrnohj6• 7 years ago

It's not actually that tiny and it's pretty spread out. The HEDT chips are physically very large.

You can see how the dies themselves are laid out here: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15151/amd_rome-678_678x452...

And you can see how physically huge the package is here compared to desktop CPUs you may be more familiar with: https://images.app.goo.gl/T5kpz8WyjGHV8Vqm8

the8472• 7 years ago

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13401/2018-10-08%2010.38.0...

The lid is made of copper and as you see there are additional layers. Plus the interfaces between the materials are also limiting thermal conductance. As far as material science goes there's a lot of room, it's just not practical to throw liquid nitrogen cooling or diamond substrates at the problem when you're making a mass market product.

gowld5• 7 years ago

What does "nm" mean, really?

It's only barely useful to compare generations within one company's fab model.

What's a better measure to use? transistors / m^2 ?

Or at least to label properly as "7 AMD-nm" to avoid false comparison to "Intel-nm"?

bryanlarsen4• 7 years ago

Million transistors per mm^2 has been proposed as a comparison metric:

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mtr-mm%C2%B2

There are lots of different transistor sizes on a chip, so it also specifies what kind of transistors to measure.

vbezhenar2• 7 years ago

Why does it matter anyway? Just compare benchmarks and power.

naveen99• 7 years ago

it'd be funny if amd came out with something like intel phi pcie cards, after intel discontinued them. But for my mostly unet / fcn, segmentation deep learning models, gpu's will continue to be the goto, until we get into a few hundred cores range...

HeWhoLurksLate4• 7 years ago

I really want one of those, even though I have almost no use for one. Maybe?

IOT_Apprentice• 7 years ago

The benchmarks on the Ryzen Threadripper and Zen 9 3rd gen cpus look great. I have been looking to find prebuilt gaming desktops that don't have issues with those chips. Newegg reviews show failures around their units and Amazon isn't much help either. Is this truly a build your own situation? Not necessarily issues with the CPUs but the overall quality of the build and bios issues/DOA status. Any recommendations for BYO or prebuilt options?

fgonzag• 7 years ago

Honestly, anyone with the know how to build their own PC should. The savings are not only substantial (usually, unless you find some crazy black friday discount), you can actually spec it to what you actually need.

Pre-builts usually have an over-specced CPU and and under-specced GPU, a bad memory configuration, crappy hard drives, and horrible power supplies + motherboards.

avgDev• 7 years ago

Build your own! Single components offer longer warranty(usually). You can research decent RAM, decent hard drives and so on.

Building a PC these days is trivial, back in the day there was a lot more fiddling with bios, now things are simplified and its mostly plug and play.

I actually might build a computer and make a detailed written guide, but I would love to help if you decide to go this route.

adrianmonk2• 7 years ago

Thread + Ripper was a clever play on words: anything that had plenty of threads, the hardware was designed to ‘rip’ through the workload.

Tangent, but is this really a play on words? And if so, what is the other meaning here?

I get the meaning where lots of cores are ripping through workload. But the other one I don't. The closest guess I have is that it's like a comic book hero (The Incredible Hulk) ripping through his clothes because he is so big and powerful. And I don't guess it refers to a seam ripper (the sewing tool).

TylerE• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper

But in general "Ripper" was 19th century slang for a murderer.

zeroonetwothree• 7 years ago

It’s a metaphor, not a play on words.

spectramax• 7 years ago

AMD's (and Intel's) marketing teams are awfully enslaved to the gamer market - gamer aesthetics, big bold packaging, insane names that sound like something off of Tron, the whole RGB enchilada.

AMD started it with Ryzen. That name sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings. And then we Threadripper - violent to say the least, and finally, EPYC - cheap play of the letters.

What happened to marketing like the IBM System 360? Elliot Noyes is rolling in his grave. I don't think the marketing teams are to be blamed, its the consumers and the Taiwanese influence around what a computer product should be marketed as such.

bryanlarsen4• 7 years ago

They're marketing to the people who are affected by such marketing. I'd like to think the rest of us ignore any marketing and choose their CPU's for better reasons.

Macha3• 7 years ago

Ryzen is hardly any worse than Itanium, Solaris, EPIC, all names of products marketed at businesses in the past.

Personally, I appreciate the optimism (correctly as it turned out) that it would be the line to turn AMD's fortunes around.

I think you've let your perception of the names be affected by the marketing. e.g. the X Box 360 could be the name for a boring server (maybe someone's tenth gen), but instead it's a game console. PS5 and Core are pretty descriptive name compared to the business product names previous.

bitL23• 7 years ago

EPYC is like FU to Intel as AMD64 killed its EPIC-based Itaniums and they obviously intended the same to Xeons now. Just silly marketing having fun.

adrianmonk2• 7 years ago

I guess I never thought of it in a gaming-oriented way, although it totally makes sense.

Ryzen also sounds like "rising", and even like "horizon", which are both pretty positive and non-gamer-y.

Ripping has other meanings too. It can mean going really fast or energetically, like "the driver ripped right past the race leader on that corner" or "let her rip" when you launch something at full speed. And a sawmill or woodworker uses a circular saw, band saw, etc. to rip wood, which means dividing it along the grain, the natural direction it wants to split. Which I suppose makes a good analogy for embarrassingly parallel compute problems.

basscomm• 7 years ago

> Thread + Ripper was a clever play on words: anything that had plenty of threads, the hardware was designed to ‘rip’ through the workload.
Tangent, but is this really a play on words? And if so, what is the other meaning here?

Perhaps the OP was thinking of a seam ripper? Which, to be fair, does rip threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_ripper

skyyler• 7 years ago

is this really a play on words?

Yes.

There is a tool that your grandmother probably used a lot called a seam ripper. You stick the end of it into a seam and pull down and it cuts all the threads that make the seam.

It's a clever play on words, in my opinion.

bitL23• 7 years ago

But the drop of backward/forward compatibility turned previous gens to "Dreadrippers" making their owners not very happy...

jgalt212• 7 years ago

32 cores at good price point. Now there's no reason to lease all those VM's and use kubernetes. Unless of course, we are all I/O bound due to the bulk of the work being telemetry and tracking. hmm....

kd3• 7 years ago

All these products are great but I still can't get a Ryzen 9 3950x anywhere for fucks sake. I'm tired of waiting. Amd should work on their supplies.

jiggawatts• 7 years ago

Has anyone seen independent reviews for database performance on EPYC 2 / Threadripper 3?

I'd love to recommend the AMD platform for customers with large databases, but there's is zero reputable information available on the Internet. The vendors can't be trusted, because they obviously cheat their ass off, such as Intel disabling security patches, using ludicrous hardware configurations, etc...

kbenson• 7 years ago

For what databases? Many vendors specifically disallow publishing any benchmarks in their licensing, so if you're looking for benchmarks for a proprietary database, good luck.

petronio• 7 years ago

Phoronix has done a few DB benchmarks on EPYC 2. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=EPYC

Don't forget that if comparing to old benchmarks, there's a bug with Intel's TSX now and the mitigations once again seem to take a nice hit if your database engine makes use of it.

posix_me_less• 7 years ago

An advice for the younger enthusiasts out there: don't buy this _yet_, it's an overpriced pseudo-workstation platform for now, even if you can afford it.

It's nice to watch (and have) new CPUs pushing the available computing performance up, and bringing new features. With Ryzen 3000/EPYC Rome this finally happened in a meaningful way, and TR is(shortly will be) the most powerful CPU there is. _AND_ Intel is getting kicked in the ass, which is good.

But objectively, even if AMD is better value than Intel now, it still is overpriced.

The first problem is with the launch price. This kind of system maintains the top status for one year or so these days. Then it slips into mainstream level which can be got for 50%, 30% price. Look at what happened to 2950X, or EPYC Milan platforms. They were similarly expensive at launch and they are mainstream performance now, their prices have fallen dramatically as well. (If you want AMD, those are much better choice now.)

The second problem is, the TRX40 motherboards available now are simply underwhelming and disappointing, take a look:

https://www.pcmag.com/feature/372107/first-look-all-the-amd-...

You can get 16,24,32 cores for x $1000, but only 4 channels of memory and 3-4 PCIe slots and 2010-era networking? The Xeon workstation boards are so much better. Here is how you design a motherboard in this price range:

https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11spa-t-motherboard...

It's like mobo manufacturers are thinking, the TR CPUs are cooler than Xeons, let's make a killing on expensive gamer-like motherboards.

If you're after nice punch performance on the cheap, go here, sort by performance, then look for rows with highest value.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html

The result for me is, if you're after performance but clever with money, go for 3900X or 3700X on an B450 board, anything else is kind of stupid for most people.

If you're after solid workstation with ECC and 2020-level, connectivity, Intel Xeon W now or wait for better motherboards (unlikely to happen).

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review

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