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All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

anandtech.com

21–30 of 144 posts

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#21

The huge number of PCIe lanes is pretty exciting to me. For consumers, the limiting factor in PCs these days tends to be I/O. With this, you could have 4 PCIe M2 SSDs (that's a bit under 16Gbps bandwidth, assuming RAID0), and still have 44 lanes (the number in the top-end Intel CPU) to spare for GPUs and other peripherals.

I don't fully understand. So 1 SSD need 1 lane. How many lanes need something like NVisia 1080Ti? What use of the remaining lanes? If I want to build something like 1 CPU/1 GPU/1 SSD configuration without additional peripherals, 62 lanes will be effectively wasted?

This is for high-end workstations after all. Many people are suffering with video production. New cameras this year output 8K video raw (or slightly compressed). Even the guys in RED couldn't produce hardware to properly feed the stream into a computer realtime or at least without having to wait.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enthusiasts tend to be gamers, and once you have a high end machine, most games tend to be limited on disk bandwidth, which affects load times. By consumers, I meant enthusiasts, since that's who the Threadripper (X399) and Intel's Extreme Edition (X299) platforms are aimed at.

That sounds frivolous versus a single high-end PCIe SSD. Wouldn't be surprised if the improvement in real-world game load times wasn't even perceptible.

>That sounds frivolous

Maybe, but that's what being an enthusiast is all about :) also assets (models & textures) need to be loaded from disk during game-play which can result in stutter when gaming. Faster IO would help here.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt we'll be seeing desktop ARM systems any time soon, especially high end workstation or enthusiast systems. The problem is that the ARM64 architecture is completely different from x86-64, which almost every desktop application is compiled for exclusively . Remember when Microsoft launched an ARM Surface? It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as very few applications are compil…

My Raspberry Pi does almost all things that I would like to do with a computer. I could definitely imagine buying an ARM based computer.

Because we have the sources for most of the software, it can be recompiled.

Not true for Windows, especially old closed source software.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#24
post #6

I was of the opinion that Intel will only face real competition when arm reaches parity with desktop class cpu. Nice to see AMD rise back up again. Hope Intel is not able to strong arm the oems like last time when AMD had design wins but Intel using anti competitive practice stalled its growth till it was able to catch-up and later go ahead.

I doubt we'll be seeing desktop ARM systems any time soon, especially high end workstation or enthusiast systems. The problem is that the ARM64 architecture is completely different from x86-64, which almost every desktop application is compiled for exclusively . Remember when Microsoft launched an ARM Surface? It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as very few applications are compil…

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#25

We all benefit when AMD is a player. And this player is fighting HARD right now. Me gusta.

I've long been thinking that it would make sense for e.g. US+EU to fund AMD just in order to get some actual competition going.

As already said, funding a company is not fair competition. If governments (us, eu, etc) cared for competition in this market (or any other tbh) they could have simply enforced the fair market regulations. Instead they chose to ignore the unfair practices of Intel during the opteron days. In a similar way, if they cared about fair competition and protecting consumers they would n't have let microsoft enforce their windows tax on everybody.

Apparently they do not care.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long been thinking that it would make sense for e.g. US+EU to fund AMD just in order to get some actual competition going.

> US+EU to fund AMD IANAL, but I don't think this would be legal under WTO rules. It would be seen as an unfair advantage to AMD, and Intel could complain to the WTO about it. Something similar happened recently when Brazil accused the Province of Quebec of funding Bomardier (who competes with Embraer). [0] [0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-canada-wto-idUSKBN1...

If that's a violation of WTO rules it seems like these rules would need to get overhauled.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#27

64 lanes would be good for something like 4-6 GPUs @ 8 lanes per, and some high speed storage/networking? Anxiously awaiting Intel's "I am not left handed either" response.

Yeah, depending on the configuration it would maybe even be enough for 7 GPU's with 8x PCIe 3.0 (60 of the 64 are feeding PCIe and M.2 slots, 4 go to the chipset). Seems like it will be a nice CPU to use for machine learning.

Other sites also report that it will support 2 TByte of RAM like the single socket Naples/Epyc, but LRDIMM and official/validated ECC support was not mentioned in the stream.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#28
post #6

I was of the opinion that Intel will only face real competition when arm reaches parity with desktop class cpu. Nice to see AMD rise back up again. Hope Intel is not able to strong arm the oems like last time when AMD had design wins but Intel using anti competitive practice stalled its growth till it was able to catch-up and later go ahead.

I doubt we'll be seeing desktop ARM systems any time soon, especially high end workstation or enthusiast systems. The problem is that the ARM64 architecture is completely different from x86-64, which almost every desktop application is compiled for exclusively . Remember when Microsoft launched an ARM Surface? It had a special version of Windows, and almost nothing would run on it, as very few applications are compil…

I wonder if it's possible to use some kind of translator, like Apple did with Rosetta to run PowerPC code on x86. This is of course not interesting for the Surface but it might be a nice solution for a desktop transition to ARM.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#29

We all benefit when AMD is a player. And this player is fighting HARD right now. Me gusta.

I've long been thinking that it would make sense for e.g. US+EU to fund AMD just in order to get some actual competition going.

Some years ago I read a moderately well fleshed out proposal to create a European semiconductor consortium as a sort of an Airbus for CPUs. My recollection is that, while it was somewhat flawed, it was an idea with significant merit.

Re: All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US+EU to fund AMD IANAL, but I don't think this would be legal under WTO rules. It would be seen as an unfair advantage to AMD, and Intel could complain to the WTO about it. Something similar happened recently when Brazil accused the Province of Quebec of funding Bomardier (who competes with Embraer). [0] [0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-canada-wto-idUSKBN1...

If that's a violation of WTO rules it seems like these rules would need to get overhauled.

WTO rules are very biased in general, allowing for some kinds of protectionism, which are more popular in the US, and banning other kinds entirely.

It’s complete bullshit, as who they are applied to is entirely subjective.

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