Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).
At the very least I guess it would be useful for running multiple VMs
AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
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Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#12> After core counts, the next battle will be on the interconnect. Low power, scalable, and high performance: process node scaling will mean nothing if the interconnect becomes 90% of the total chip power.
I think this means that scaling processors to more cores (nodes) in a lightweight-NUMA scheme just isn't going to work.
My guess going forward is that the core counts will stay at the current level for quite a while, and that both AMD and Intel will optimize the heck out of their interconnects, using most power budget gains to bolster the actual cores.
Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#13The biggest benefit I've found to running a 1950X isn't something I would have expected, but which perhaps I should have. True, it's much faster than my old system for batch processing, but most of the time it's still idle. Even if it's running Chrome flat-out, as far as the 1950X is concerned, that's idle.
Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full speed. In practice, that means lower latencies and less jitter, and it's been noticeable. Folklore would have it that single-thread performance is the most important aspect of desktop performance, but that isn't what I've observed.
...it's also useful when I, e.g, decide to run a Factorio server on my desktop.
Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#14Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).
I wondered that as well. I guess my imagination for uses isn't particularly good, but all the uses i bought my 16 core workstation for (mostly research computing development) would really suffer with the memory performance of the 32 core chip.
I don't know enough about video games, but I would naively think that the memory latency would be a big deal there as well.
At any rate, I learned a lot from this article. Anandtech's reviews always seem well-written and well-researched.
Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rendering is something I could see people doing at home if that's their hobby.
Then the tests in this article are hardly convincing.
How is the $1800 2990WX outperforming the $1980 i9-7980XE in every rendering test they performed not convincing?
There are clearly workloads where the 32 core TR chip does not perform well (probably due to the memory configuration) but it seems pretty good at rendering.
Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rendering is something I could see people doing at home if that's their hobby.
Then the tests in this article are hardly convincing.
The 2990wx blew everything out of the water in rendering. It's like 37% faster than the 7980xe in the Blender benchmark.
Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#17Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).
I'd use it for home labs or servers.
I would use it to mine bitcoin and heat my house in winter, I already have a slogan :
"Don't be a patsy who pay for heating your place, be paid for it. Order our heating device for just $2999!"
Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#18Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd use it for home labs or servers.
I would use it to mine bitcoin and heat my house in winter, I already have a slogan : "Don't be a patsy who pay for heating your place, be paid for it. Order our heating device for just $2999!"
You jest but this is a thing https://www.networkworld.com/article/2929810/data-center/hom...
Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
#20Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).
For compiling, having many cores is fantastic. Granted, on a workstation, compilation normally just involves a few files (the ones that have changed since the previous build and their dependencies), but when you have to do a full rebuild, it is fantastic to be able to do `make -j16` and watch it chug through 16 files simultaneously. Interestingly, the benchmark in this review shows that the 16-core 2950X compiles Chromium faster than the 32-core 2990WX, presumably this means something other than the thread count becomes a bottleneck after 16 threads or so.