AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#21

Post by cptskippy » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

davidmr wrote: post #14

karangoeluw wrote: post #2

Honest 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. Anan…

> 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.

It really depends on what else you're doing. If you're just playing a game then Disk and GPU tend to be the biggest bottlenecks in video gaming. Even a reasonably fast modern CPU is sufficient for most games.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#22

Post by zaarn » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #8

crypt0ninja wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd use it for home labs or servers.

Home servers? In what situation would you ever need 32 cores for home usage? I'm genuinely curious.

VMs, lots of them.

Atm I'm running about 15 VMs on about 8 cores in a dedicated box somewhere and it's definitely noticable. I would love to shove some core services at home and have 32 cores to play with to give some more headroom

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#23

Post by chaosbutters314 » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

karangoeluw wrote: post #2

Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).

with 32 cores, I can run 32 small simulations (e.g. CFD, FEA, etc) in parallel for optimization problems or run 1 medium sized simulation. And anything in between.

My ideal workstation likely actually uses ~128 cores but that isn't practical for home use yet. A board with 4 2990wx would be heaven.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#24

Post by drewg123 » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

It is interested that the review is not yet finished. The author writes in the comments section:

Hey everyone, sorry for leaving a few pages blank right now. Jet lag hit me hard over the weekend from Flash Memory Summit. Will be filling in the blanks and the analysis throughout today.

I am disappointed in that, as I was looking forward to reading the test setup and power draw sections, as I have a 2990WX on order, and I'm dithering over what motherboard to get (I'd prefer an older one, which matches the features that I want better... eg, clear support for ECC and no bling) but there is some concern that older motherboards will be too close to the edge in terms of the power draw of the 2990WX.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#25

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

karangoeluw wrote: post #2

Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).

[deleted]

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#26

Post by jdietrich » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

karangoeluw wrote: post #2

Honest q: What home-use workstation would use 32 cores? (Excluding home labs or servers).

Digital audio workstation workloads are massively multithreaded, with hundreds or thousands of DSP processes. Performance scales almost linearly with core count.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#27

Post by Kranar » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #7

Symmetry wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

What metric are you considering? The rendering tests show the 2990WX to be both faster and cheaper than the i9.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#28

Post by PuffinBlue » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

afroboy wrote: post #18

ekianjo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home servers? In what situation would you ever need 32 cores for home usage? I'm genuinely curious.

VMs

And just to expand on that, I'd like to (for instance) run multiple remote desktops (including a photo editing station), probably a decent plex/emby VM, probably something to do transcoding etc etc. Not to mention dev VMs etc.

You can do a lot with one thing and administer that one thing without having lots of individual boxes doing stuff, and for me it'd be way faster and a single cost, so it'd work out as a big improvement.

In a 'money is no object have all the time in the world' it would probably be better to have something dedicated to do each task, but that's not that flexible on top of the other drawbacks (cost in money/time).

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#29

Post by ekianjo » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #22

ekianjo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home servers? In what situation would you ever need 32 cores for home usage? I'm genuinely curious.

VMs, lots of them. Atm I'm running about 15 VMs on about 8 cores in a dedicated box somewhere and it's definitely noticable. I would love to shove some core services at home and have 32 cores to play with to give some more headroom

Why not use containers instead of VMs? You can run about 10x more Docker instances than VMs on the same hardware.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#30

Post by iClaudiusX » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

nv-vn wrote: post #10

It's funny to me how much range there is in these tests. Some of these are seemingly backwards with better CPUs ranking so much worse and some look completely random. But wow, the performance on these new TR chips is just insane. Never would've guessed that AMD would be this competitive a few years ago, especially not on the CPU front. Looking forward to the upcoming 7nm launch, can't wait to see what's in store.

Indeed, as noted in the conclusion there is very little middle ground as performance with this particular NUMA structure is bimodal depending on memory access patterns and power consumption of all the supporting hardware.

I suppose it makes the most sense to frame this as an iteration of the original Threadripper with all the design compromises that entails to provide backward compatibility with existing motherboards. I'm definitely more excited for the next generation HEDT chips that hopefully have a more balanced layout like Epyc.

AMD have certainly come out of the Bulldozer era swinging, and we all benefit from their aggressive pricing.