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

anandtech.com

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

#61

Post by bluescarni »

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.

The test results on Phoronix paint a rather different picture (i.e., the 2990WX being consistently and markedly faster than any other tested processor).

My initial gut feeling reading the results on Anandtech is that Window's scheduler may not be able yet to exploit the processor's architecture effectively.

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

#62

Post by mrb »

ekianjo wrote: post #32
nv-vn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2990wx blew everything out of the water in rendering. It's like 37% faster than the 7980xe in the Blender benchmark.

Faster with 2x more cores and twice more power consumption. Hardly a win in my book - it means each core is way weaker and power hungry. Intel will easily match that sometimes soon without sweating.

Check your numbers. In that Blender benchmark, AMD is actually 58% faster (152/96), has 78% more cores (32/18), and its TDP is 52% higher (250/165).¹ https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...

This means AMD manages to execute more work per watt (more energy efficient), and each AMD core uses less power than Intel.

¹ Anantech wrongly lists the TDP as 140W. It's in fact 165W: https://ark.intel.com/products/126699/Intel-Core-i9-7980XE-E...

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

#65

Post by mileycyrusXOXO »

deadbunny wrote: post #39
ekianjo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because contrary to the hype, containers aren't the right solution to everything.

While you are correct that they are not a one size fits all solution, would you care to elaborate to the specifics of this instance?

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

#66

Post by kilo_bravo_3 »

ekianjo wrote: post #32
nv-vn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2990wx blew everything out of the water in rendering. It's like 37% faster than the 7980xe in the Blender benchmark.

Faster with 2x more cores and twice more power consumption. Hardly a win in my book - it means each core is way weaker and power hungry. Intel will easily match that sometimes soon without sweating.

A Corona 1.3 benchmark between the i9-7980XE and the 2990WX saw, in that workload, the 2990WX 28% faster than the i9.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI9sMfWmCsk&feature=youtu.be...

Its power consumption was 19% higher than the i9-7980XE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI9sMfWmCsk&feature=youtu.be...

Tom's Hardware saw a stock 2990WX at a lower power consumption than a stock i9-7980XE during a Prime95 "torture loop". Overclocked, the AMD part was higher than the Intel one, but only slightly.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-threadripper-...

Where have you seen that it has double the power consumption? Under what workloads?

Personally, I don't care about "weaker cores". If a system has 2048 cores clocked at 7 THz and it is 20% faster at my workload than a single-core CPU at 700 MHz, it is faster.

The fact that the "weaker cored" system is cheaper than the "burly muscly" single core system is a bonus.

Power consumption doesn't even matter that much either. It is the equivalent to a single 60W light bulb (or several of those new-fangled LED bulbs). Big whoop.

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

#67

Post by deng »

Hasknewbie wrote: post #41
MrUnderhill wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Chr…

"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" The article mentions that, due to the die packaging, only 16 of the cores have direct access to RAM. So for the 32-core version, half the cores are memory-starved and have to go through the 'connected' cores (also impacting these…

I would think that compilation is faster on the 32Core, but linking is much slower.

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

#68

Post by Symmetry »

ekianjo wrote: post #32
nv-vn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2990wx blew everything out of the water in rendering. It's like 37% faster than the 7980xe in the Blender benchmark.

Faster with 2x more cores and twice more power consumption. Hardly a win in my book - it means each core is way weaker and power hungry. Intel will easily match that sometimes soon without sweating.

If I were Pixar and was running one of these 24/7 then, well, it's theoretically possible that the extra you pay in electricity would make up for the lower capital price. But for a hobbyist running this at most 10 hours a week I really doubt that that's a consideration.

But more importantly, The Tech Report looked at task energy for the Threadripper in rendering tasks and found that it took less energy to finish a render than competitorys. It's power was higher but the time was shorter to an even greater extent.

https://techreport.com/review/33977/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2...

So if you're so serious about rendering that you're willing to spend thousands on a good rig for it there really isn't any reason not to use this boy.

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

#69

Post by deng »

jdietrich wrote: post #26
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.

Not my experience. I've had stutters with Ableton Live on a 4 core machine with 2 cores still idling around. Ableton cannot multi-thread a single track (at least in Version 9), and if you're using a single-threaded VST that does not matter anyway.

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

#70

Post by ReverseCold »

sandworm101 wrote: post #56
Filligree wrote: post #13

The 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…

>> Folklore would have it that single-thread performance is the most important aspect of desktop performance There are a few places where it matters. We talk of "gaming" but that is too broad a term imho. Many AAA games do leverage AMD chips well. They know how to split loads across threads to maximize performance. But in recent years the hot games have come from indi developers. Pre-release titles from tiny develope…

KSP 1.1 finally added multithreading btw
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