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AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

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Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#51
post #32
post #23

AMD was sooo close to having a perfect 4096 socket. SO CLOSE! But, alas, it was not meant to be.

Missing corner pins means you won't accidentally insert it the wrong way.

They could've added the extra pins, and kept the square pin count, but then molded the ceramic such that one corner is clipped, then had a socket to match that would only allow full insertion if the chip body is rotated to match.

Of course, doing all of that would have drove the cost up considerably - for not much practical purposes. No company that wants to stay in business is going to do that, and I wouldn't expect them to.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#52
Well damn this looks like it might be in the right spot for what I'm after. It'll depend on price-point to be exact but I've got a semi-server semi-gaming setup that I want to upgrade from an older i5 and have been waiting to see Naples and early adopter stuff get hammered out. 16 cores is a great spot for me to give a few to a gaming VM, while still being able to have plenty left over for running build/smoke VMs and other random projects like testing syzkaller to check that I'm not doing something inherently stupid with a sandbox I work on. Can't wait to see more about this.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#53
post #30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of the i7 5820k? It was released Q3'14. 6 cores. 12 threads. i7 name. Around $400. [1] AMD's great revolution was getting the TDP on that core count below 100W, and getting them onto a consumer chipset/socket instead of the enthusiast/server platform. That's it. We keep saying they forced some revolution in price/performance that Intel has had to respond to. Its 80% hype, 20% truth. Intel was complacent on…

Intel did a really shitty job marketing these (maybe the i9 name will help). They are hardly known even amount enthusiasts but they are really good processors for the exact same reasons that people like Ryzen. A moderate tradeoff in gaming for a big gain in productivity tasks. They are even priced essentially the same as the 4C8T i7s. I basically had Ryzen performance at Ryzen prices a year ago when I built my 5820K…

The 5820K was an amazing processor. I have one as well. Its coming up on two years old, yet for $390 (at release) its only ~10-20% slower than a brand new $490 Ryzen 1800x, and much of that drop can be attributed to two fewer cores.

You're right on all counts. Ryzen was vastly overhyped. Its highly likely Cannonlake and KabyLake-X will destroy it when they are released in a couple months.

The world needed Ryzen to push Intel to lower prices on their high end chips. But, like most of the times when AMD "pushes ahead", Intel will beat them within a year, and hold that position for another 4 years. And then the cycle repeats.

I don't know how much longer AMD can keep this up. It seems like they're being propped up by their dominance in console tech.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#54

I break out in cold sweat when I think about routing a 4094 pin socket. How does anyone layout a motherboard for this in a reasonable time frame?

My guess is that the socket side of this is done during development by AMD and then given to the manufacturers directly so that they don't have to do that part. The only other way I could think of is if the tools have a way to lay out as many of the traces in parallel (i.e. tell it, all of these traces are going to the same place just offset a little) and then do most of that automatically for say the RAM and power. I think most of the length and impedance matching is already automate-able in Altium and other high end software.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#55
post #30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of the i7 5820k? It was released Q3'14. 6 cores. 12 threads. i7 name. Around $400. [1] AMD's great revolution was getting the TDP on that core count below 100W, and getting them onto a consumer chipset/socket instead of the enthusiast/server platform. That's it. We keep saying they forced some revolution in price/performance that Intel has had to respond to. Its 80% hype, 20% truth. Intel was complacent on…

Intel did a really shitty job marketing these (maybe the i9 name will help). They are hardly known even amount enthusiasts but they are really good processors for the exact same reasons that people like Ryzen. A moderate tradeoff in gaming for a big gain in productivity tasks. They are even priced essentially the same as the 4C8T i7s. I basically had Ryzen performance at Ryzen prices a year ago when I built my 5820K…

Without the so called incremental improvement offered by Ryzen 7, there is no motivation for Intel to drop its prices on 8 cores chips. Intel now has to answer the challenges both on the 8c16t category and 16c32t as well.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#56
post #22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The i9 isn't new. Its a rebranded Skylake-X/KabyLake-X chip. This has been on their roadmap for over a year [1]; they just changed the name to trick consumers into thinking its something new. The hype between here and reddit about i9 is astounding to me. You've been able to get an i7 in a 10 core variant for a year now [2]. Need 6 cores? Take a time machine back to Q3'11 and pick up an i7 3930k [3]. And if you needed…

The problem is of course the fact that 6+ i7 chips don't actually fit the consumer motherboards, but you need to go to the server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines.

>server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive

False-ish

Single socket server boards are on par with home motherboards. They only become expensive when you start wanting 2+ NIC's and A LOT of sockets. But then yes your feature thing is mostly true.

> and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines.

False-ish

Intel's server socket (for non E7's) is 2011v3 which is also their enthusiast socket. I dropped a XEON E5v4 2030 into a 2011v3 ""ethusiast board"" and it worked without a problem.

Sure my enthusiast board doesn't support ECC RAM, and I can't over clock a XEON. But a 2011v3 board in and of itself is only ~50-60 more then an EXTREME low end You get what you pay for if you want a dirt cheap board to drop a server class CPU into you can find it.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably there must be a lot of computer assistance?

Not really, autorouting is generally extremely bad. Especially for applications with such high performance criteria. On the plus side the work only has to be done once since later motherboards are mostly just iterations on a previous design.

The latest high-end PCB tools actually provide useful autorouting features, because they have figured out that if you combine human ability to solve the difficult pattern-recognition and planning problems, you can have a computer solve the details.

For example, Xpedition's sketch routing feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIi13gI9xEA

Routing 4094 signals sounds daunting, but it is a bit less daunting when you realize that a good fraction of them are power/ground (and route directly to planes), and the rest of them are mostly logically organized into buses/groups that can be routed together.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#59
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top-end Ryzen chips have a TDP of 95W. (Edit: AM4 socket is rated at >140W TDP.) The new sockets are designed for 180W and up, so they will probably run at the same clock frequencies. That means no hit for single-thread performance.

180W!? That thing is a monster.

Cores come at a power cost. This is why Intel has been hesitant to move to consumer 8 or 16 core CPUs. There's a lot of pushback on using this much power and serious environmental concerns. Intel's engineering has been focused on power savings, so they've actually been going the opposite way for years now on the consumer end.

This is also why you won't been seeing these 16c chips on non-specialist Dells and HPs. They'll be high-end workstations and servers only. Joe Consumer or Joe Officeworker doesn't need 16 cores.

6-8c comes in at a more modest power profile, so we'll probably see the industry standardize on 6-8c for a while. I think Intel is now forced to move toward 6-8c now, which may be questionable move for most consumer loads, but if everyone stays under 100w for consumer CPUs I think it'll be okay. I don't want the performance race to be driven by AMD's ideas that burning 200+w for a CPU is reasonable. Outside of specialist applications, its not.

Re: AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket

#60
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is of course the fact that 6+ i7 chips don't actually fit the consumer motherboards, but you need to go to the server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines.

>server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive False-ish Single socket server boards are on par with home motherboards. They only become expensive when you start wanting 2+ NIC's and A LOT of sockets. But then yes your feature thing is mostly true. > and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines. False-ish Intel's server socket (for non E7's) is 2011v3 which is also their enthusia…

Motherboard price is square to the number of sockets. (This is actually accurate, look it up; and for somewhat good reason).
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