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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

#101

Post by justinclift »

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…

For a desktop - if you're running Linux (or maybe FreeBSD?) - then the POWER9 based Talos workstations seem like a reasonable alternative:

https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

Pricy, but they don't have the ME/PSP problem.

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

#102

Post by benchaney »

StudentStuff wrote: post #98
std_throwaway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Are the audit results or an announcement about them public?

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

#103

Post by fgonzag »

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.

At least AMD has consistent AVX performance over prolonged periods of time. Intel starts throttling and downclocking so hard because of heat output that if you are doing any type of mixed workload, its better to skip the AVX instructions since the rest of the workload will suffer due to the extreme performance degradation.

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

#104

Post by dragontamer »

sounds wrote: post #67
gt_ wrote: post #56

It may be of no concern to many, but 3D artists constantly express problems with filling DIMM slots when using Threadrippers. Supposedly, 128 GB RAM is only reliable on a couple of motherboards. I just constantly read these stories on forums. (And to be sure, these aren’t situations where users were mixing RAM sets)

I've seen that as well. I believe it boils down to a few AMD motherboard integrators that have rushed out products that are marginal - they work ok for simple use cases, but maxing them out reveals some edge cases they didn't work out. The solution, of course, is to name them. Can you share which motherboards you've seen people complaining about?

AMD's memory controller has worse compatibility compared to Intel's. AMD's 1st Gen Ryzen was known to have issues with Hynix dies.

Remember: DDR4 goes straight to the CPU these days. I'm fairly certain that motherboard makers can make a simple wire connection between the DDR4 pins and the CPU itself without much issue.

https://community.amd.com/thread/217871

The AMD Community knows to avoid Hynix and to buy Samsung. Hynix did improve with some BIOS updates (in particular: increasing V_soc voltage to 1.1 and other tricks). Update your BIOS if you have any issues.

Zen+ dies have better DDR4 compatibility.

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

#105

Post by dragontamer »

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…

> 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.

That's what I was thinking. The 1900x looks useful for quad-GPU Redshift rendering setups.

Its certainly not "mainstream". The 1920x / 2920x is far better bang for your buck. But the price from AMD scales very well. If you're willing to spend bigger bucks on cooling, the 2990WX is great. But 250W TDP is going to be a tough-one to design around.

Custom-cooling is probably the answer. Enermax's TR4 AIO turned out to be all sorts of awful, unfortunately. And Noctua's Air coolers cap out at 180W TDP designs.

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

#106

Post by stuckinarut »

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.

you get bonuses and you get to annoy gamers.

that's 1 good reason to preorder, plus some bonuses that tend to be lame.

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

#107

Post by kllrnohj »

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?

A non-trivial amount of the game is still on the CPU. All game logic is on the CPU. AI, physics, networking, audio, etc... are all CPU as well (GPU physics never really happened beyond particle effects).

Even for rendering it's still the CPU preparing the commands and doing a first-pass curation to minimize rendering load.

That said, in this case it's not so much running the games better, as yes the GPU is usually the bottleneck. It's more for gamers that also stream or similar, which is an increasingly popular thing. You can GPU offload it, but that hurts your game performance and GPU encoding quality tends to be relatively fixed and relatively poor. CPU encoding is more flexible and higher quality, and if you've got an extra 8 cores sitting around idle anyway might as well use those instead of eating into the GPU power budget.

Also you've got the PCI-E lanes to run things like SLI or multi-GPU along with RAID NVME drives. Threadripper has 60 lanes. Something like an i7-8700k only has 16 PCI-E lanes - you can't even run a single GPU and an NVME drive without multiplexing your PCI-E lanes.

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

#108

Post by elihu »

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…

For what it's worth, Broadwell E5v4 Xeons (which have been out a little over 2 years) use a 2011-3 socket and support DDR4-2400.

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

#109

Post by daeken »

brobinson wrote: post #97
Laaas wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Enabling virtualization is pretty simple, someone could probably write a little EFI app to do it and chainload from there.

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

#110

Post by walrus01 »

Iwan-Zotow wrote: post #6
h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #4

That pricing is actually more reasonable than I was expecting. I might get myself a 32 core quad GPU workstation. Unthinkable even just a year ago.

Good god! Why on earth you need 32 core quad GPU workstation?

for my purposes? editing and recompressing 110Mbps H264 3840x2160 30fps video into lower bitrate H265 formats.

It can take a very long time just to process a 5 minute video.

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