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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

#91

Post by floatboth »

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.

That option makes the PSP invisible to the running OS, but no one knows what is left running on the PSP.

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

#92

Post by floatboth »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #32
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?

Threadripper uses quad-channel DDR4-2666 memory. That gets you 80 GB/s memory bandwidth, which is possible because the processor sits in an enormous 4094-pin TR4 socket. Your Xeons were probably in 2011 pin sockets with DDR3-1866 resulting in 70 GB/s memory bandwidth. One Threadripper has more than double the pin count and slightly more total memory bandwidth than your dual Xeon machine. Also, your the Intel setup ha…

> enormous 4094-pin TR4 socket

A lot of these pins aren't used on TR, since you only get half the memory controllers you'd have with EPYC

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

#93

Post by floatboth »

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…

EPYC fixes the problem by having 8 channels. All cores have direct access to DDR.

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

#94

Post by harias »

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 ...

Threadripper was born out of side-projects too.

"They worked on it in their spare time and it was really a passion project for about a year before they sought the green light from management, which is quite unusual – it was something they really cared about."

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

#95

Post by floatboth »

paulmd wrote: post #80
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…

> They start at about $350 and go up from there

That's an excellent deal compared to the Talos POWER9 boards :)

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

#96

Post by floatboth »

gameswithgo wrote: post #68

Does anyone in here know if Zen2 is going to implement AVX properly? Threadripper2 will not, all AVX2 instructions will operate at ~SSE speeds, as on past AMD chips.

Zen 1 already implements AVX2 properly.

It doesn't have 256 bit wide units, so it's 2 clock cycles instead of 1… but that's actually good. Intel's 256 bit units cause horrible downclocking issues: https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...

What even is "SSE speeds"?!

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

#97

Post by brobinson »

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.

My MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard had an option to disable the PSP, but it was removed in the latest bios update. The latest one has an option to turn on SVM (Secure Virtual Machine, needed for virtualization). I can either run VMs _or_ have PSP disabled...

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

#98

Post by StudentStuff »

std_throwaway wrote: post #78
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.

The Platform Security Processor (and the code to make it work) is licensed from ARM, AMD did hire a 3rd party to audit the PSP after that thread on Reddit blew up. The results indicated the need for a rewrite, so in 5 to 6 years hopefully AMD will own the IP to their new PSP.

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

#99

Post by deaddodo »

opencl wrote: post #79
deaddodo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what I was hoping to hear. Thanks!

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

#100

Post by LeifCarrotson »

floatboth wrote: post #92
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threadripper uses quad-channel DDR4-2666 memory. That gets you 80 GB/s memory bandwidth, which is possible because the processor sits in an enormous 4094-pin TR4 socket. Your Xeons were probably in 2011 pin sockets with DDR3-1866 resulting in 70 GB/s memory bandwidth. One Threadripper has more than double the pin count and slightly more total memory bandwidth than your dual Xeon machine. Also, your the Intel setup ha…

> enormous 4094-pin TR4 socket A lot of these pins aren't used on TR, since you only get half the memory controllers you'd have with EPYC

That's true. A staggering number of them are power delivery to start with - you don't waste anywhere near half the socket by dropping 4 memory controllers (!) but yeah, it's not EPYC.
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