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All AMD ThreadRipper CPU's will have 64 PCIe Lanes

anandtech.com

41–50 of 144 posts

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

#42
Competition is supposed to bring prices down, yet Intel released i9 processor for an insane prize (nearly 2000$).

If AMD manages to ship similar performance (not necessarily higher) at a lower price... Sooner or later Intel will have to slash its prices.

Looking forward to such times.

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

#43
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers tend to be limited by not having many PCIe SSDs in RAID0? Who are these people and what do they need galactic disk bandwidth for?

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.

A lot of processing happens when games load. Once you have sufficient storage bandwidth and latency, load times flatten out. It seems that "sufficient" is SATA; above that, there is little difference in game load times:

https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ss...

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

#44
post #42

Competition is supposed to bring prices down, yet Intel released i9 processor for an insane prize (nearly 2000$). If AMD manages to ship similar performance (not necessarily higher) at a lower price... Sooner or later Intel will have to slash its prices. Looking forward to such times.

These aren't your average consumer/gamer/enthusiast CPUs though. For what it is, the price doesn't look insane at all. And I'm concerned that AMD is not going to be much of a winner here because most people looking at these top-of-the-line workhorse CPUs are probably going to pick the better performer over the cheaper part -- they aren't exactly doing budget shopping.

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

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A GPU can use 16x 3.0 lanes, theoretically. In practice 8 lanes is enough, people have measured performance between 16x and 8x, it's almost the same. SSDs use 4x, if you do buy an NVMe drive that is. (In my country, these things are TWICE as expensive as SATA SSDs lol)

Maybe for games, but for cuda this is certainly not the case. Double the lanes is double the host to device bandwidth.

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

#46
post #10

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.

Consumers tend to be limited by not having many PCIe SSDs in RAID0? Who are these people and what do they need galactic disk bandwidth for?

I've been shopping for a future proof workstation (10Gbps Ethernet 8x + 2 16x video cards) that couldn't quite fit on a Xeon E3.

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

#47
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers tend to be limited by not having many PCIe SSDs in RAID0? Who are these people and what do they need galactic disk bandwidth for?

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.

Enthusiast here - can confirm, an array of nvme's makes a huge difference over single standard SSD. I set this up last year, check the benchmark results, it's night and day.

http://imgur.com/a/N4FpD

note: be sure to note the scaling at the bottom. 4-500MB/s old vs 3000+ MB/s new

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

#48
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we have the sources for most of the software, it can be recompiled. Not true for Windows, especially old closed source software.

Apple switched processors several times. They provided an emulator for old programs, so they could run without the user noticing anything (except worse performance). You could probably do the same for ARM.

It's worth understanding the Mac software ecosystem is mostly made up of people who love the platform and OS.

Windows just isn't the same, lots of devs making software the same way the made it 15+ years ago and not wanting or even caring enough to change no matter what the benefits.

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

#49

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.

A lot of processing happens when games load. Once you have sufficient storage bandwidth and latency, load times flatten out. It seems that "sufficient" is SATA; above that, there is little difference in game load times: https://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ss...

I wonder if game developers are actually disincentivized from qualitatively improving load times past a certain acceptable threshold, lest their AAA game be perceived as lightweight.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A GPU can use 16x 3.0 lanes, theoretically. In practice 8 lanes is enough, people have measured performance between 16x and 8x, it's almost the same. SSDs use 4x, if you do buy an NVMe drive that is. (In my country, these things are TWICE as expensive as SATA SSDs lol)

Maybe for games, but for cuda this is certainly not the case. Double the lanes is double the host to device bandwidth.

And even for games, the only reason it's not a difference is because game developers target less bandwidth between CPU and GPU so they don't use it all.

If we move to a future where every GPU has a lot more bandwidth then games would most likely start taking advantage of it.

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