AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-Core beats dual Xeon Platinum 8280 in benchmark leak

https://hothardware.com/news/amd-threadripper-3990x-crushing-xeon-platinum-8280-cpus

by signa11 • 6 years ago

277 220 6 years ago

cbg0• 6 years ago

Hats off to AMD for giving Intel a run for their money in recent years, this competition is amazing for the consumers.

bjoli• 6 years ago

Even in the consumer range, the Ryzen 5-9 parts are crazy value as well when building a reasonably future-proof computer. I am building a 3900x computer now, and with screen and peripherals it will end up sub 3k (this is Swedish prices, so it is quite a bit more expensive than in the US).

chupasaurus• 6 years ago

An advice: get a decent cooling for 3900X, stock Wraith Prism can't hold it.

vbezhenar3• 6 years ago

How is the stability of the system? I always afraid of AMD because of their low investments into software that AMD systems won't be rock stable. Especially with Linux, where Intel commits a lot of code into kernel.

But AMD value is tremendeous, especially comparing with Intel CPU supporting ECC. I'm thinking about buying Xeon W-2265 workstation and it's just 12 cores for $1200, AMD is much cheaper and for that price I can get Threadripper monster.

jhoechtl• 6 years ago

Maybe we will see that Moores law still holds (somewhat) true and it was Intels de-facto monopoly and their inability for progress to declare the end of Moore?

qubex2• 6 years ago

Very perceptive. Moore’s Law has been holding strong in the mobile/embedded market (ARM), on GPUs, and on neural processing units (TPP & cetera). The death di Moore’s Law was premature fratricide courtesy of it’s brother Intel (both being offspring of Moore himself).

ansible• 6 years ago

My understanding of conventional wisdom from maybe 15 years ago was that we'd run out of memory bandwidth for high core-count processors.

Is this now a factor? I know memory has gotten faster, and multi-channel of course helps, but is that all really enough for typical workloads?

cma2• 6 years ago

It has a separate dedicated IO die, allowing memory access/latency to all cores. I think threadripper does have less bandwidth than the 64 core Epyc part though.

amarshall3• 6 years ago

Indeed as TR is 4-channel and Epyc is 8-channel. If one needs ECC, TR is a bit more limited still due to unbuffered ECC memory having lower max speeds presently.

greglindahl• 6 years ago

CPUs keep on getting more memory channels per socket. That trend was already visible 15 years ago, when AMD moved the northbridge onto the CPU. Scaling it depends on scaling pin counts, which are now amazing.

wtallis• 6 years ago

To put some numbers to this:

In 2005, Opterons used a 940-pin socket and had dual-channel DDR, for 6.4GB/s total bandwidth to feed two cores. In 2009, Xeons the LGA1366 socket to provide triple-channel DDR3, 32GB/s for four (later six) cores.

Now, we're up to 4094 pin sockets providing 8 channels of DDR4 for a total of 204.8GB/s of memory bandwidth for 64 cores, which is exactly the same per-core bandwidth we had in 2005.

(And for comparison, a $200 graphics card will also have around 200GB/s of memory bandwidth.)

codeflo• 6 years ago

I’m interested in this as well. As opposed to CPUs from 15 years ago, the 3990X has 256 MB L3 cache and around 100 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which should help a bit. What kinds of workloads can we expect to be bandwidth-botllenecked still?

BubRoss6• 6 years ago

If a program is structured in a particular way to run through large spans of contiguous memory but only do trivial operations, then memory bandwidth can be maxed out by the prefetcher and the cache wouldn't be used.

Things like adding two huge images with SIMD and writing out a new image could be like this. It would be much better of course if the image is tiled and more operations are done per tile, which would use the cache.

Good use of the prefetcher but poor use of the cache could still run through memory bandwdith.

imtringued2• 6 years ago

The rule of thumb is 25GB/s per channel. At 8 channels you have 200GB/s. Unless you are working with SIMD it is unlikely that you actually hit these numbers.

blattimwind5• 6 years ago

Actually it's super easy, barely an inconvenience, since the raw memory bandwidth you get per core is around 1 byte per cycle and half that per thread. A 3900X with 12 cores / 24 threads getting a total memory bandwidth of 57.6 GB/s (using DDR4-3600) has just 0.6 bytes / cycle and thread. Meanwhile the CPU can actually achieve ALU throughputs that are 20 times greater than that. Even encryption algorithms are much faster than that.

The saving grace is not that there is a lot of memory bandwidth to go around; there isn't; the saving grace is that a lot of processing either doesn't use too much data (making caches effective) or is complex enough to not be limited by memory bandwidth. Rarely using all cores and threads at the same time helps a lot as well.

mschuetz• 6 years ago

It definitely gets harder to code in a way that is not memory bandwidth bound.

hoistbypetard• 6 years ago

As a happy first gen Threadripper user (read: someone who wants this) my big question here is what boards will be available. Last time I looked, most of the motherboards available did not inspire confidence when it came to moving away from Xeons.

jdc• 6 years ago

How so? Which features are you looking for?

amarshall3• 6 years ago

Presumably they’re referring to how the current crop of TRX40 motherboards are all very “gaming” oriented, rather than workstation or server.

vetinari• 6 years ago

Well, reliability.

I have one computer with Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme and it is an utter crap, especially the firmware. It randomly resets its settings, even after you just saved them. Sometimes it takes few reboots to get it to acknowledge, that yes, I did enable AMD SVM and want to use it.

rwmj4• 6 years ago

We have a few of these AMD Daytona X systems (2 socket, 64 cores per socket). They're beasts. It's nice doing -j256 builds.

fmajid• 6 years ago

How much effective parallelism do you get out of them?

rwmj4• 6 years ago

I didn't specifically measure that, but most builds are limited by Amdahl's law (./configure kills you) and there will rarely be 256 compiles that can happen in parallel at any one time.

2zcon• 6 years ago

That must take a lot of memory, Clang @ -j16 gets OOMed on my machine.

rwmj4• 6 years ago

The machine I tested has 256 GB of RAM (and amusingly exactly the same amount of disk space).

glandium• 6 years ago

There has been some speculation that the Threadripper 3990X could arrive at $2,999

Come on, AMD announced it would be $3990 at CES!

vorticalbox• 6 years ago

could this not be simply down to the fact it was tested against a dual sock system? is the benchmark used NUMA aware?

amarshall3• 6 years ago

I believe some or all of SiSoftware test are NUMA-aware. Regardless, 128/112 threads = 1.143 and 1786/1516 score = 1.178. Really not far off thread-scaling.

tmaly• 6 years ago

This is great news. I just started planning to build a video editing machine over the next few months. Are prices likely to come down more?

The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core was what I was looking at. This new 3990X looks amazing, but its probably overkill for what I need.

puranjay• 6 years ago

I have a 3700X that I use primarily for music production and it runs flawlessly. Prices, at least on NewEgg India, haven't budget even a cent in 4 months though.

I would recommend getting a different cooler though. The stock cooler, while adequate, runs noisy and doesn't feel all that sturdy.

eklavya• 6 years ago

Thanks, I didn't even know newegg came to India !

blattimwind5• 6 years ago

Depending on what you use for video editing the CPU really isn't much of a factor.

BubRoss6• 6 years ago

Video encoding is still very CPU intensive, especially newer codecs like HEVC VP9 and AV1

nsporillo• 6 years ago

I have the AMD Ryzen 9 3900x (paid $499 at launch). Last I checked it is now $469, so prices will likely inch down as time goes on. I would probably wait until the next AMD launch sometime this year if you want to get a sweet deal on a great chip.

rubyn00bie• 6 years ago

While I am incredibly stoked for AMD pushing the envelope, this should be a gigantic sign to Intel that their entire market is about to be commoditized by physics unless they put every single dollar they have into pushing the envelope (AND get extremely lucky in the breakthrough).

Without the advent of Quantum computers, solving P=NP for our computational benefit, and/or some other unworldly mathematics, the PC industry is pretty fucked in ~10-15 years save those who transition into services.

swarnie_2• 6 years ago

Can anyone vouch for how well consumer CPUs have come along in the last 5-10 years?

I'm still running a i7 2700k and haven't even felt the need to upgrade. I guess i didn't want to when Intel only released $600-$800 scam CPUs, now were seeing reasonable competition is it worth another look?

onli7• 6 years ago

I run a meta benchmark[0] that is set up to answer exactly questions this this. The answer: Processors made a big jump since then! There was not that much movement after the 2600K, but only until Ryzen got released. The 2600K is now on rank 86 of my benchmark, way below $120 cpus like the Ryzen 5 2600 [1]. That comparison just shows games, but in in other application workloads the difference is even bigger, because of the better multithreaded performance of Ryzen and Threadripper processors. The 3970X just completely dominates outside of games, but with the Ryzen 9s there are two cheaper and still extremely strong processor for consumer AM4 systems available. And Intel has way stronger processors than the 2600K now as well, the complete 9000 series staring with the i5-9400F ($140). Stronger cores and more of them, i5s have six now, the i7-9700K 8 and the i9-9900K adds hyperthreading.

[0] https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark

[1] https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...

Brave-Steak3• 6 years ago

This is great, thanks. One of my biggest issues in PC hardware has been comparing older parts with modern ones. Most sites don't retest old hardware with new tests that they use on new hardware, so you end up with wildly different numbers that don't tell you anything.

dingdingdang2• 6 years ago

The comparison (https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...) shows that the Ryzen 5 2600 (late 2018) barely manages to outdo the i7-2600K (early 2013) since the compound score difference is 7.54 - 6.16 = 1.38. Plus the gaming benchmarks that the Ryzen dominate are mildly misleading since all the games run above 60fps so average gamer will be fine, i.e. Witcher 3 comes in at 133fps on the i7-2600K and clocks 200fps on the Ryzen. Of course processors HAVE become massively faster but the question remains whether one has a workload that's sufficiently parallelizable to warrant the upgrade. Individual core speed improvements are still lacking.

Cu3PO424• 6 years ago

As entirely anecdotal evidence, I upgraded from a 2500k (that I'd been running at 4.5GHz) to a 3600 and the perceived difference in speed is phenomenal. At ~€400 for CPU+Motherboard+RAM it's also great value.

Every day work just feels more snappy and compile times are down by a lot. Single thread is a lot faster and of course having 12 threads instead of 4 makes a huge difference (of course that effect might be less for you since you already have SMT).

Paired with a 1060 I even notice quite a difference in gaming. Even though I didn't necessarily have 100% usage on the CPU, I was 10-20FPS below benchmarks for my GPU. This didn't really make sense to me, but after I upgraded I indeed got those extra frames.

I haven't done any scientific on the performance improvement, but according to PassMark, I am getting roughly a 120% performance increase on parallelizable workloads, even when taking my OC into account.

onli7• 6 years ago

Even though I didn't necessarily have 100% usage on the CPU, I was 10-20FPS below benchmarks for my GPU. This didn't really make sense to me, but after I upgraded I indeed got those extra frames.

That can happen when the game performance relies on the workload of one thread (or at least less then cores/thread count) that couldn't be properly offloaded to the idle cores. The 3600 has not only more but also stronger cores than the 2500K, and thus even without reaching 100% processor usage before the game can run faster now, because the critical thread runs faster.

Brave-Steak3• 6 years ago

Out of curiosity, what was your last GPU?

swarnie_2• 6 years ago

Funnily enough i have a 1060 right now, this entire comment is scarily on point for my exact situation!

rasz9• 6 years ago

non OC 2700K difference to modern CPUs is huge, OC to >=4.5GHz and it quickly diminishes unless doing crazy threaded jobs.

0xWTF• 6 years ago

Is this uncooled AMD vs Intel comparison still relevant?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDLjVwxH-Fk

oliwarner2• 6 years ago

The 20 years since this video is a long time... But I still remember my P2s and P3s that melted themselves. In the case of the slot-mount P2, it literally melted.

So relevant? Probably just as important now as then, but a few P3 designs not melting two decades ago shouldn't give you confidence to do this with a 9900KS.

rasz9• 6 years ago

P3 designs not melting two decades ago

P3s melted, Throttling was a brand new P4 feature, probably a must considering how hot they ran

davidcme• 6 years ago

no - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU9yjwMlbRI

bitxbit2• 6 years ago

This is great but why is it so difficult for AMD to break into the enterprise/server side of the market? Seems Intel is very entrenched in that space despite their clear exercise of market power for over a decade.

pixl97• 6 years ago

Between Intel manipulating the server OEMs, and relatively poor lights out management, who could guess?

wilhil3• 6 years ago

I said before - it's more than just this. AMD's ecosystem just sucks... Intel may be doing things that are questionable, but, as a OEM on the much smaller size, Intel have a great partner program.

With Intel, I get advanced warranties, presales support, next day parts, details marketing and product information alongside access to privileged information and roadmaps.

With AMD, I was waiting the best part of 3 months for a call back, and their "partner" site which is open to the world is severely out of date and doesn't even have all products listed.

Intel is frictionless when it comes to doing business, AMD put up roadblocks.

posix_me_less2• 6 years ago

For big companies, migration to AMD is a risky move. Old applications work well on Intel and Intel has been reliable for years. Big corps love boring tech. Now that Intel offering sucks, they do notice but they are not jumping all the the same time. Will the old applications work well on the new AMD tech? What if there is an incompatibility/HW bug on AMD platform which makes critical applications fail?

It takes years for the big companies to get interested in such a big of a platform switch. For now, they've been sticking with Intel and observing how the situation develops. If Intel keeps screwing up, which they do, eventually the big migration will happen.

Angostura• 6 years ago

I wonder how long until Apple starts looking at AMD.

ckastner• 6 years ago

I think it's sensible to assume that Apple is already looking, even if only to renegotiate their deal with Intel. But 8 cores at 15W is really enticing.

Apple is already using AMD graphics, so they already have a business relationship.

eyegor• 6 years ago

Don't forget that Apple already has best in class low power performance/watt on their in house designs. One day they'll probably move all the Mac airs and such to A13 or newer.

agloeregrets• 6 years ago

Well, it’s kinda assumed that Apple wants to go ARM based for the Mac with their own internal CPUs. Much of AMD’s comeback magic is enabled by them building on TSMC’s 7nm process, this same process is what Apple’s Ax SOCs are built on, so I bet Apple could come close in the consumer market.

jagger273• 6 years ago

I think that ship sailed when they they shipped the new Mac Pro. That would have been the place to start.

tachion3• 6 years ago

Mac Pro was in the making long before AMD released a complete line of products that can compete with Intel on all fronts (not only price, but single core and multi core performance, clock speeds and so on) so quite possibly they'd have to delay Mac Pro even further, if they'd decide to stop and redesign it for AMD platform. Given how willing they been to switch GPU chips between Nvidia and AMD/ATI in past for their laptops, I still have a little hope for something like iMac or iMac Pro with a nice high cpu count AMD CPU in future. I don't hold my breath though.

tachion3• 6 years ago

Probably not before AMD can beat Intel on the mobile chips single core performance and power consumption, as I assume they sell much more laptops than desktops, and in addition to that not before AMD erodes the vague notion of 'Intel being best you can get' in consumers minds.

ksec4• 6 years ago

I assume they sell much more laptops than desktops,

The figure from 2017 /2018 were 80% Laptop and 20% Desktop. And since Apple is kind of stuck with AMD for Graphics, it sort of make sense if Apple unify their GPU stack on Laptop as well. Assuming they get the Thunderbolt issue sorted.

ProZsolt2• 6 years ago

not before AMD erodes the vague notion of 'Intel being best you can get' in consumers minds.

They don't have to. Most of the Mac users don't care. They know that the latest Mac is the best Mac they can get.

tyingq• 6 years ago

I think the server CPU area will be more immediately interesting. What's interesting this time, vs Opteron, is that AMD doesn't need to convince a bunch of conservative data center managers.

A few key wins with the three cloud giants, and Intel will feel it. And the cloud giants can start with things like managed messaging, databases, etc, where it's not directly exposed to end users. Similar for the various high end AARCH64 CPUs. Intel is in for a ride.

jerven• 6 years ago

Also this time Intel has been pissing of conservative data center managers with all the security issues and performance loss due to them.

earenndil2• 6 years ago

Conservative data center managers aren't particularly pissed off. Source: know one.

ksec4• 6 years ago

Except this hasn't happened. If anything Intel is still selling as many as they could produce as shown in the latest quarterly report [1]. So while AMD managed to grow double digit over a very small number, it still felt they were picking up the scraps from Intel.

And Amazon is full steam ahead with their own ARM CPU. I wonder if Google and Microsoft paused and think they will need to act now if they haven't already.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15433/intel-q4-fy-2019-result...

Shorel2• 6 years ago

I agree, Intel sells everything they make, and it has been like that for years.

The difference is that AMD is starting to do the same, and it seems the process and architecture lets them make more chips than Intel.

And this forces Intel to lower prices on the more powerful chips, something that had not happened in about a decade.

Right now the winners are the customers, having such great chips at good prices.

wyldfire• 6 years ago

Similar for the various high end AARCH64 CPUs.

I think Graviton has really big potential. Maybe the biggest challenge is for AWS to market it well.

wilhil3• 6 years ago

The only annoying thing here is the thread count!!

Intel do servers at all levels including low core count/high core frequency, where as AMD have a very decent core count, but, performance between the models is largely just an increase in core count (there is very little difference in frequency - e.g. NO high frequency/low core)

So many jobs still require Windows licenses unfortunately and since the shift to core count, it's ludicrously expensive to license a lot of the new AMD machines on SPLA licensing.

Not that I'm not trying though...

3fe9a03ccd14ca53• 6 years ago

The high-performance, low core count CPU market is not well served by AMD, but I don’t think that’s a large segment of the CPU purchasing share. AMD is aiming for top dog not boutique.

zrm2• 6 years ago

The trouble is you can't actually scale that way. You might be able to make a 5GHz dual core that can match a 2.5GHz quad core, but nobody can make the 80GHz dual core that would be needed to match a 2.5GHz 64-core. Good luck even making a 5GHz 32-core unless you want to measure power consumption in kilowatts.

Meanwhile if all you need is single thread performance for lower core counts, that's Ryzen rather than Epyc, but it's not like they don't make that.

wilhil3• 6 years ago

Agreed, but, not really for servers/enterprise usage which the parent thread was about...

For example, I7/I9 is much cheaper and more powerful than entry level Xeons, but, you VERY rarely see them in a rackmount chassis/server.

Same goes for Epyc and Ryzen.

lisk1• 6 years ago

Just heard that VMware is changing the license for vSphere up to 32 cores and you have to pay more expensive license if your using more than 32 cores per CPU. In my opinion VMware products are overated there are good enough free to use products similar to vShpere without the per CPU/socket licenses with payed support if you need one.

whalesalad• 6 years ago

Overrated? If I had to pick a level 1 hypervisor for a production environment id probably choose VMware without hesitation.

tasubotadas• 6 years ago

What makes it so good?

Shorel2• 6 years ago

VMWare developed the first useful virtualization software and had a monopoly for years because of this.

They still have some performance advantages over all competitors.

But if you are not enterprise, I see no point in paying their prices.

As you say, free products have caught up and are just good enough.

fulafel2• 6 years ago

Nitpick: IBM beat VMware by some decades at "first useful virtualization software".

The VMware thing was that they figured out how to make virtualization on i386 compatible hardware hobble along despite the hardware architecture being technically unvirtualizable, using clever binary translation style tricks. Virtualization support came to x86 hardware many years later.

faebi• 6 years ago

How do you see the future of AMD in the next 1-3 years? Will they get anywhere close to Intel in terms of sales?

leshenka• 6 years ago

With news like this (https://wccftech.com/amd-dominates-retail-cpu-sales-outselli...) yea I believe they can do that.

bitL7• 6 years ago

3990X is limited to 256GB RAM, so not really a competitor to dual Xeons anyway...

p_l2• 6 years ago

Official numbers say 1TB, which is probably what was "validated" and the real numbers are "how many JEDEC-compatible ranks can you fit before the signal degrades too much", as was the norm with AMD. They don't put artificial limits on CPUs

bitL7• 6 years ago

There are no 128GB UDIMM modules and I doubt they will ever be for DDR4.

AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-Core beats dual Xeon Platinum 8280 in benchmark leak

Related Stories