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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

#81

Post by wmf »

AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #30
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…

What is strange about pre-ordering hardware that might initially be in short supply? Pre-orders don't make sense in the case of downloadable games, where there is no scarcity.

Pre-ordering a product that hasn't been reviewed and benchmarked means you could get something much worse than you expect. For example, there may be apps that can't take advantage of 32 cores so you could spend $1,800 to get no benefit.

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

#82

Post by wbl »

nimish wrote: post #47
stingraycharles wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know whether Threadripper is affected by NUMA issues? Otherwise this could be an additional selling point for applications that need a lot of memory (e.g. databases, where you do not want the memory latency to be unpredictable depending upon which socket you are running on)

It is. Only 1/2 of the dies are connected directly to memory controllers. For actual production workloads you want EPYC which has a memory controller for each die, meaning it's 8 channel.

Depends on the arithmetic intensity. Higher intensity means less memory bandwidth needed to keep the cores happily crunching.

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

#83

Post by Laaas »

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…

You can disable PSP on some motherboards AFAIK. My motherboard has an option that at least seems like it disables PSP.

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

#84

Post by iforgotpassword »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #66
iforgotpassword wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had their ups and downs. The athlon 64 was a masterpiece in both performance and power consumption, in part because they made power management an integral part of the platform not just for laptops. At the time it was released Intel was busy pushing the pentium 4 to its limits, making it a great replacement for central heating during winter. Then Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture and w…

> Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture Funny thing is that Core, AFAIK, came from a separate laptop chip branch. For 64 bits Intel was betting on Itanium, which crashed and burned like iAPX-432 did before. And so Intel once again was forced to stay on the 8080 treadmill ...

Yup. If was a little "side project" by their team in Haifa that turned out much better than expected. So the Israelis saved Intel. (Dramatization mine)

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

#85

Post by snovv_crash »

geezerjay wrote: post #55
montalbano wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the modularity of the manufacturing process helps too.

Modularity helps cutting production costs, but that's just a lower bound. Prices are set based on marketing strategies and on how much the company is able to get for a product.

With a monolithic die that lower bound is not linear though: the bigger the die, the higher a chance of defects and the rarer the parts that don't need to have sections fused off.

With a modular design the lower bound is, indeed, linear, allowing AMD to severely undercut Intel.

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

#88

Post by josteink »

harias wrote: post #86

An image says x series is for gamers. Are modern games that CPU intensive? Don't most major game engines depend almost entirely upon the GPU?

IME gamers are those who most likely are willing to shell out noticeably more money for something which they perceive may potentially improve their game performance.

Statistically I’m pretty sure most of them aren’t too scientific about their assumptions.

Hence the huge market for lots of HW which no normal person would buy, explicitly targeted at gamers.

TLDR: reality doesn’t matter as long as the x CPUs are faster :)

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

#89

Post by merinowool »

Laaas wrote: post #83
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…

You can disable PSP on some motherboards AFAIK. My motherboard has an option that at least seems like it disables PSP.

What is the model?
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