AMD's Computex 2018 Press Conference Showed Off Many Products, Including 32 Core/64 Thread Threadripper

[Guest_Jim_*]

Last night AMD held its Computex 2018 press conference where several products were announced and shown off. Many of these products were new systems coming from various OEM partners, such as Acer and the Predator Helios 500 gaming laptop announced last week and products from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Huawei. Also shown off was the PowerColor RX Vega 56 Nano and the adoption of FreeSync in Samsung QLED TVs, when playing on a Radeon RX graphics card, or the Xbox One S or X. Several server partners were also discovered and announced too, along with the reveal that the Zen2, 7 nm EPYC processors, codenamed Rome, are in AMD labs, will be sampling to customers in 2H 2018, and launching in 2019. The world's first 7 nm GPU though, the Vega-based Radeon Instinct was also shown off to the crowd and it was announced it will be launched to server and workstation form factors 2H 2018.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the press conference though, and the part I teased in the title, was not only the announcement but demonstration of the second-generation Threadripper HEDT CPU with 32 cores/64 threads. The current top-end Threadripper, the 1950X, features 16 cores/32 threads between its two Zeppelin dies, which have 8 cores/16 threads each. It looks like the next top-end Threadripper will utilize four Zeppelin dies, much like the EPYC processors, with Infinity Fabric connecting them. As Anandtech discusses in its article, two of these dies have their PCIe lanes and memory controllers disabled. This means there will likely be a latency penalty for these two dies, as they will need to reach across other dies to access system RAM. However, not all processes are sensitive to these latencies and AMD has improved Infinity Fabric in the Zen+ design, so perhaps the hit will not be as significant as one might think. There will also be a 24 core/48 thread Threadripper as well.

Anandtech also discovered some specifications for the engineering samples AMD had running in systems to show off Blender render performance. Both the 24 core and 32 core samples had a base frequency of 3.0 GHz and a Turbo frequency of 3.4 GHz, but these Turbo speeds are work-in progress. These CPUs will be available in 2H 2018, with some speculation pointing to August, so there is time for these to be pushed higher. The TDP is up to 250 W, which is a sizeable increase from the 180 W of the 1950X, but apparently this is an over-estimation and AMD was cooling these CPUs with an air cooler called the Wraith Ripper Air Cooler. To top all of that off, these second-generation Threadripper parts can be dropped into current X399 motherboards after a BIOS update. I am very happy with my 1950X and so I should not need to upgrade… I wonder what the price will be?

AMD has the video of the conference on its YouTube channel, which is embedded below.

 

 

Source: AMD and Anandtech

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[Braegnok]

It's only been a few days since Intel announced its own 28-core chip,.. https://hothardware.com/news/intel-demos-28-core-56-thread-5ghz-core-x-cpu-available-q4-2018  and now AMD tossing its hat in the ring with a 32-core chip, going to be some interesting benchmarks,.. just how much these two chips interact will depend a great deal on pricing as well as overall market positioning. With a 14% core count advantage for AMD (32 cores versus 28) is enough to be outmatched by clock frequencies, while finding tests that scale up to 28-32 cores in the first place will be increasingly difficult.

 

Hopefully price and availability information should follow soon, with rumors of an August launch.   

Edited June 7, 2018 by Braegnok

[Guest_Jim_*]

Just posted an item on the Intel 28 core processor using a couple Tom's Hardware pieces on it. Turns out that chip was almost certainly overclocked, based on the massive amounts of power the motherboard was configured to supply (1000 W) and the one-horsepower water chiller used to cool it (and it also draws over 1000 W when operating). AMD used air coolers for its demonstration, so while Intel was pushing its part to an impressive limit, AMD was showing what is more realistically possible, sort of. (One test with unconfirmed clock speeds, though the Anandtech link indicates a 3.4 GHz boost currently, and we do not know power draw or what that cooler is rated for.)

Until we know at minimum the stock base and turbo clock speeds of these CPUs, no comparison is at all possible, and then there is pricing of the chips and the platform. On the platform front, AMD likely wins since they are supposed to work in current X399 boards, following a BIOS update, but also some may not be up to overclocking, depending on the board's power configuration. AMD may also win at pricing the chip, thanks to the MCM design compared to Intel's monolithic approach, but Intel might be able to hit higher clock speeds (it's chips often do). Also there will be some latency penalty for AMD's MCM design, especially for the dies without direct RAM access (having to go through the memory controller of another die). We are stuck having to wait for specifics. Until then, enjoy knowing this is a very interesting time for computing. (The Core i7-2700K launched in Q4 2011, a 4-core/8-thread part, and the Core i7-7700K launched Q1 2017 and was still a 4 core/8 thread part. Now we are talking about 28 and 32 core CPUs being sold to consumers, with 16 core and 18 core chips available today.)

 

Oh, and for finding a test that scales up to that many cores, I'd personally go to video encoding, especially with x264 (and maybe x265, though I rarely use it). It's what I'm comfortable with and it does like threads. At least, if we want to try pushing all the threads with the same process and not just trying multiple processes.

[Braegnok]

Intel's Platinum 8180 28-core chip sells for $10,000 that's insane,.. 

 

AMD EPYC 7501 32-core chip sells for under $3,700, more cores, more memory channels, more than twice the PCIe lanes.  https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7501-benchmarks-and-review-32-cores-per-socket/

 

Gee if I'm a consumer trying to decide which platform to buy for my new server or workstation build, it would be a no brainier which platform I'm buying. 

Edited June 8, 2018 by Braegnok