Thoughts on the AMD Threadripper?

[ir_cow]

Looks like more information has come out about AMD new chip. So far the official name is Threadripper and is not a codename. A good marketing strategy for AMD because Intel has always (last 10+ years) been known for crushing it when it came it heavy tasks like video encoding or data crunching.

 

Reading more about it and seeing the X399 4094-pin socket, I can only guess so much. So far it seems two Summit Ridge dies are being slapped together to produce the Threadripper. Summit Ridge from what I can tell is just a revised Zen microarchitecture found in the Ryzen. Just think of two 1800X put together and you have a Threadripper. The big concern I have (besides heat) is generally when it comes to multiple CPUs (dual sockets) a small amount of latency is introduced. This is not traditionally a problem when it comes to servers that are constantly crunching big numbers. In fact the trade off is nonexistent in many circumstances but when it comes to games I think we will see a dip in performance compared to a 1800X because of extra latency.

 

What are peoples thoughts on this?

[Guest_Jim_*]

I have no problem admitting I am pretty hyped about seeing what Threadripper will be capable of. Might not end up getting one, but the prospect of an 'affordable' 16 core/32 thread CPU is very enticing, especially if the clock speed is reasonably high. (Some people are using the Blender demo from yesterday to guess all 16 cores were at about 3.5 GHz.) I don't need a super-gaming rig, but processing video quickly, and generating graphs for making overlays (like what I did in the Serious Statistics article) faster would be awesome.

Personally I am not too worried about the heat much, or at least I will not be until much closer to release. (It isn't like I wouldn't get a good cooler for it, if I built around one of these.) I can see how latency could be an issue, but some of that can be addressed by software, and it will be the Infinity Fabric handling that communication between the two dies. AMD has likely been refining it since Ryzen 7 first released, with both EPYC and Threadripper in mind. (Plus few games are highly multi-threaded currently, so that should afford AMD even more time to reduce any latency issues.) Wish I could remember where it was that someone argued the point that Infinity Fabric is of a lot more importance than some realize, in part because it will allow multiple Zen dies to be combined to make EPYC and Threadripper, but there were other points being made too.

All in all, I think we're close enough to be interested and somewhat excited (I might be more excited than is appropriate) but still far enough away for the only appropriate caution being to moderate how we ingest rumors, and not if will 'succeed' or 'fail.' EPYC's release on June 20 may provide some answers about Threadripper, but it may still be a while before the key questions are addressed.

[ir_cow]

I agree and AMD is finally worth talking about again. If the 1998X (16/32) is $1,000 or below I will buy it over the Intel i9 7960X that is going to price at least around $1500. I do not game much on the PC anymore and not enough to care about a few FPS drop. However, I think all these (Intel and AMD) CPUs are slightly overkill. GPU Acceleration has been growing slowly. I recently put a GTX 1060 is a video editing workstation and the CUDA rendering is night and day compared to a Xeon E5-2680v3 in Adobe Premiere. Especially when it comes to 4k HEVC exports. I know a lot of applications do not not use CUDA or OpenCL but I think companies should focus on this. Now that Intel and AMD are moving to affordable 8core desktop setups, I do believe games and a lot application will be optimized. I Just think unless you are already doing big project exports, the average person is going to see more likely a drop in performance (game wise) over the AMD Ryzen 1800 or Intel I7 7700K just because those are clock for clock the fastest per core.

 

Only time will tell I guess.

[Waco]

It'll be an R7 1800X times two, essentially. The only latency increase you'd see would be from lower clocks (possible) or if your application spans across both dies (in which case, you're using more cores, so it might still be a net benefit).

 

I'm hoping the Naples 32C/64T chips drop in and AMD will surprise us that the boards actually have wiring for 8 memory channels.

[wildman2]

I'm way more excited about EPYC and THREADRIPPER than I prolly should be.If I could afford it I'd by one Specially EPYC.

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[Guest_Jim_*]

It'll be an R7 1800X times two, essentially. The only latency increase you'd see would be from lower clocks (possible) or if your application spans across both dies (in which case, you're using more cores, so it might still be a net benefit).

 

I'm hoping the Naples 32C/64T chips drop in and AMD will surprise us that the boards actually have wiring for 8 memory channels.

It will be interesting to see what the final clocks end up being, that is for sure (and what can be achieved with better cooling...)

 

It does seem like the SP3 socket of Naples/EPYC and the SP3r2/TR4 (some documentation is using the TR4 name instead, which is an appropriate change) might be physically identical, but there could be other things in place that may prevent putting an EPYC into X399. I think there was one rumor that had the power delivery capabilities different and possibly something else I cannot recall just now. That was only a rumor though and I think also from around the time the since-proven fake layout for the X399 chipset was put out there.

Oh, one other thing I want to say is I would love to see something done with the X300 chipset, including one with Threadripper support. Since Ryzen is actually an SOC, the chipsets can be very small and that is what the X300 is, allowing AIB manufacturers to basically do whatever they want with what the CPUs offer.

[Guest_Jim_*]

So apparently Bits And Chips has reason to tweet that the "entry-level" 16 core/32 thread (quotes because one of those can be entry-level today) will be $849.... That would be half the price of the i9-7960X, Intel's 16 core/32 thread part.

Source tweet

 

Definitely and without question a rumor, but I could believe it, if only because I want dreams to be true. Also the whole two-die/Infinity Fabric thing, instead of a single die, reducing costs.

Of course X399 motherboards may be rather expensive, but then so could X299 boards. (I don't recall having seen prices for either of these yet.)

[wildman2]

Hmmm got to looking at the delidded EPYC and thought, they have a lot of wasted space on it .So I manipulated the image to see if they could put two more cpu's in it and wala they can.Not sure how much space the need between them but it is physically possible.So that would make it a 48 core 96 thread processor.Hmmm

 

Edited July 30, 2020 by wildman2

[Waco]

Hmmm got to looking at the delidded EPYC and thought, they have a lot of wasted space on it .So I manipulated the image to see if they could put two more cpu's in it and wala they can.Not sure how much space the need between them but it is physically possible.So that would make it a 48 core 96 thread processor.Hmmm

Not gonna happen without a revamp to the memory hierarchy. There are only 8 channels worth of memory attached to various pins in the socket, they couldn't easily add on 2 more dies without making it pretty unbalanced.

[ir_cow]

Even so, I kinda want it just so intel prices go down haha.

[Burasutsu]

Not at all worried about latency or clock speeds tbh. Ryzen and it's Infinity Fabric were created from the ground up to be incredibly scale-able with little to no loss in efficiency. It's the main point of the architecture.

 

Just look at how there's no difference in clock speeds in the range of R5 vs R7 processors. It means that the platform just gets better with more cores. But the low core count models might suffer some.

 

In terms of temps even the largest model (16C/32T) is rumored to be 155W, which is great for such a high core count

 

Not something I'll be looking into right now, but I'll be keeping a close eye on it. I'll maybe look into the future equivalents in Zen 2 or Zen 3

[xenkw0n]

AMD likes to stretch the truth on their TDP numbers so be careful.