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The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

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Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#71

Post by paulmd »

jchw wrote: post #2

I'm very excited for AMD and their market successes lately. I never wanted a world controlled by Intel, and even if all my computers are Intel at the moment I feel the world benefits from this competition. That being said... Processor pre-orders? I had No idea that was a thing. Hope you get a QA discount. It doesn't talk about sockets but for sake of preorderers I hope it's compatible with original threadripper board…

It's "compatible" in the sense that it plugs in and runs, but the 32-core processors are going to push the VRMs on all existing boards right to the limit, even at base clocks. After all, it's at least 70% more power than the first gen, and probably higher (most 2000-series Ryzens bust through their official TDP pretty readily).

Turbos are going to be pretty iffy under sustained load, let alone Precision Boost and XFR, which are (iirc) enabled by default.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE

AMD is shipping all the review kits with an unspecified "add-on VRM cooling kit" to try and help that, and there are second-gen X399 boards coming out with 16 phases (up from 6-8 in the first gen).

Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#72

Post by deaddodo »

valarauca1 wrote: post #24
whatever1 wrote: post #17

Bloody hell, this processor has more cores than the dual socket Xeon HPCs that my lab bought 2 years ago. Amazing. Honest question: Isn't the memory throughput an issue when you try to feed 32 hungry processors?

For TR kind of. In the newer models only half the cores have direct access to a DDR channel. This shows in memory bounded benchmarks, but Epyc (server line) elevates this problem by have 8 (!!) memory channels, instead of the consumer TR’s 4. Ultimately it depends on how cache friendly your workload is. The 32c/64t is kind of a marketting gimmick selling binned Eypcs. If your doing memory bound HPC consider the 16c/3…

Do we know if the 16c TR (2950x) will be full bandwidth or not? I'm assuming it'll still be halved due to die count/arrangement?

Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#73

Post by jaxtellerSoA »

geezerjay wrote: post #50
dbatten wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This alone is a great reason to run AMD...

2020 is currently just 18 months ahead. In the consumer's pov that means close to nothing. Heck, I assume they would not be able to change within that time frame even if they wanted to.

The commitment was made over a year ago when Ryzen was first released. Basically it was a guarantee if you were going to upgrade you processor in the next 3 years you wouldn't have to get a new motherboard. A moderate upgrader would get 1 upgrade out of this deal, an aggressive upgrader (gets ever new chip), would get 3 upgrades. Someone who is conservative and only plans to upgrade ever 5 years or so would see no benefit. However, Intel seems to change the socket every. damn. time.

Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#76

Post by paulmd »

dev_dull wrote: post #45
vbezhenar wrote: post #36

While I can see Intel's leadership in single-core performance with 6 cores (overclocked 8700K can have 5+ GHz and future flagships probably will be even faster with 8 cores), at high-core workstation AMD is a winner, hands down. Competition is good.

AMD has always had great OC performance but my impression is that they have been power hogs. Is that incorrect or has it changed?

Zen (both Ryzen 2000 and 1000) is on a fairly low-power node, optimized for efficiency rather than clocks. Zen is pretty much comparable to Intel these days, if not slightly better, but runs into a voltage wall much quicker. If you force your way into that wall they do pull a fair bit of power.

The Ryzen 2000 chips have a smarter SpeedStep-type functionality than Intel does, it pretty much squeezes out all the OC performance from the chip while maintaining normal power management, while Intel (and Ryzen 1000) needs to manage voltages on a processor-wide basis, which eats more power.

Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#77

Post by [deleted] »

mbell wrote: post #27
florakel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is time to give AMD a chance. Intel is plagued by problems with the 10nm process technology resulting in no significant innovation on their CPUs' performance or power consumption for over two years now. And just recently they pushed their 10nm products even further back to the second half of 2019. AMD might have the first 7nm CPUs out by then. Of course process technologies are not easily comparable between fabs b…

> It is time to give AMD a chance. Intel is plagued by problems with the 10nm process technology resulting in no significant innovation on their CPUs' performance or power consumption for over two years now. The difference between 14nm and 14nm+++ is pretty close to a full node step... > And just recently they pushed their 10nm products even further back to the second half of 2019. AMD might have the first 7nm CPUs o…

[deleted]

Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#78

Post by std_throwaway »

zanny wrote: post #41

At the end of the day we still have the third party me_cleaner to disable the proprietary secret coprocessor on Intel chips while AMD chips still have their equivalent PSP With no first or third party means to disable it. Until such a time I can get the equivalent tool to stop the hardware spyware built into the CPU I can have no enthusiasm or motivation to buy AMD chips. Not to say I want to buy Intel parts - they h…

Lisa Su sounded like she'd be in the boat to open the PSP source when she was on Reddit. It seems that she only learned later that she can't do that.

Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#79

Post by opencl »

deaddodo wrote: post #72
valarauca1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For TR kind of. In the newer models only half the cores have direct access to a DDR channel. This shows in memory bounded benchmarks, but Epyc (server line) elevates this problem by have 8 (!!) memory channels, instead of the consumer TR’s 4. Ultimately it depends on how cache friendly your workload is. The 32c/64t is kind of a marketting gimmick selling binned Eypcs. If your doing memory bound HPC consider the 16c/3…

Do we know if the 16c TR (2950x) will be full bandwidth or not? I'm assuming it'll still be halved due to die count/arrangement?

2950X is using two dies with 2 memory channels each, basically an update of the original Threadripper with Zen+ dies.

Re: The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores

#80

Post by paulmd »

swarnie_ wrote: post #13

That TR 1900X SKU looks like an Intel killer for its target audience.

Not really, it's kind of a weird entry in the lineup. Due to the dual-NUMA layout of TR it's essentially a pair of 4-cores smushed together, which is essentially the worst of all worlds. Desktop users will be better off using the 2700X (same number of cores but on a single NUMA node, and higher clocks), high-core-count users will be better off with the 1920X/1950X or the 2920X/2950X.

The sole advantage is that it's a lot of PCIe lanes for the money, so it can make sense for storage builds that want to address a lot of NVMe, or GPU compute builds that need very little CPU horsepower.

Also, like all TR boards, the motherboards are extortionate. They start at about $350 and go up from there. And that doesn't even buy you a futureproof system - the higher core counts on the TR 2000 series mean that first-gen boards likely won't be able to turbo the new processors, you're running base-clocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE

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