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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

#161

Post by pedrocr »

paulmd wrote: post #150
philwelch wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One instance of this might be "running a performance-intensive game fullscreen on one virtual desktop while having a browser open to read strategy guides on another virtual desktop". This is a common use case for me that also seems to be the first place where performance starts to diminish.

Having a browser open uses approximately 0% CPU though. Streaming would be a better example.

>Having a browser open uses approximately 0% CPU though.

Not on the modern web it doesn't. A lot of pages are continuously running background tasks and refreshing over time.

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

#162

Post by 131012 »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #110
bluescarni wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2990WX has a very complex NUMA architecture that costs it a lot of performance if the scheduler doesn't get things right. Linux has been running on and has been heavily optimized for even more complex NUMA systems.

I'm eager to see the AIDA64-fpu or any other scientific calculation benchmark on linux, as it is the area where the i9 seems to dominate the TR. Sadly, the few benchmarks I've found were on win10.

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

#163

Post by glandium »

compilerdev wrote: post #90
gok wrote: post #85

The Chromium compile being faster on 16 cores than 32 cores is pretty weird, given how embarrassingly parallelizable that should be. Wonder if it's out of memory, or if the bottleneck is actually linking.

The Chrome compilation looks really strange indeed, especially with having the results from Phoronix on Linux which show that it's the fastest compiling the Linux kernel. I wonder what kind of Chrome build it's doing - does it use Clang-cl or Visual C++? Does it have LTO (LTCG for VC++) enabled? If it's VC++ with LTCG, for example, the entire code generation and linking is limited to 4 cores by default.

There's a significant workload difference between compiling the Linux kernel (C code base) and Chromium (C++ code base). I'd very much like to see a Chromium build benchmark performed under Linux.

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

#164

Post by philwelch »

paulmd wrote: post #150
philwelch wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One instance of this might be "running a performance-intensive game fullscreen on one virtual desktop while having a browser open to read strategy guides on another virtual desktop". This is a common use case for me that also seems to be the first place where performance starts to diminish.

Having a browser open uses approximately 0% CPU though. Streaming would be a better example.

If you have "a browser" open, sure, if by "a browser" you mean a single browser tab on a not-resource-intensive page or with Javascript disabled. If by "a browser" you mean the dozens of tabs and half-dozen browser plugins the typical user is actually running, though...well, there's a reason Chrome comes with its own process monitor.

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

#165

Post by arithma »

How many cores must a CPU have until it's competitive with GPUs? Those beasts could pretty well open the hell-gates to fully interactive raytracing soon, or not so much? Of course am not expecting THIS processor to be competitive, but with the interest in raytracing, things might get interesting if this trend of more CPU cores keep on piling up.

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

#166

Post by dragontamer »

omnimus wrote: post #154
dragontamer wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes roughly 20-minutes to make a SINGLE good frame using Cycles on Blender. Cycles is a raytracer for 3d modeling. If you are making a 30-second animation at 24-frames-per-second, that would be 720 frames, or roughly 240 hours (10 days) of rendering. 30-seconds would be roughly the length of a standard commercial. If you have a computer that is 2x or 4x faster, that cuts the time down to 5 days or 2.5 days. Whic…

Or you buy good graphics card and you blow CPU out of the water. But it is true for render engines like Arnold or Corona CPU is main thing. For cycles get gpu.

You might be surprised.

http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snaps...

The Threadripper 1950x (16-core) is faster than the 1080 Ti in several tests. Fishy Cat for instance is faster on Threadripper, as well as the difficult "Barbershop Interior".

With all the updates to Zen2, higher clocks, and now 32-cores, I bet that the 2990wx will be incredible and give GPUs a run for their money.

Besides, you'll need a good CPU to handle physics (cloth, fluid, etc. etc.). Not everything can be done on the GPU yet.

CPUs also have the benefit that RAM is super-cheap. You can get 64GB of DDR4, but its basically impossible to get that amount of RAM on a GPU. This allows you to run multiple blender instances to handle multiple frames quite easily. A portion of rendering is still single-thread bound, so an animation can be rendered slightly faster if you allocate a blender-instance per NUMA node.

If you do have a GPU, you can still have CPU+GPU rendering by simply running Blender twice, once with GPU rendering and a 2nd time for CPU Rendering. With the proper settings, you'll generate .png files for each animation independently, which allows for nearly perfect scaling.

Every x399 board I've seen supports quad-GPUs. So you can totally build a beast rig with 4x GPUs + 32 CPU Cores for the best rendering speed possible.

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

#167

Post by vbezhenar »

Osiris wrote: post #93
mrkgnao wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full speed. I don't understand. From my (admittedly little better than layperson's) knowledge, I'm guessing the cores of most multicore processors have to compete for memory access...? Is there a good search term I can use to help me understand what's going on here?

There are 2 dies in the 1950X, each one has 2 memory channels. Thus, it's possible to run a process on one (8-core) die that maxes out the memory bandwidth to it's two local DDR4 channels while the other die still has full bandwidth access to it's own DDR4 channels. Threadripper is able to switch between NUMA (non-uniform memory access) mode and "regular" mode. In NUMA, the OS knows that 2 channels are attached to 1…

Does it really work this way (with automatic memory and core pinning)? Both Windows and Linux can do that?

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

#168

Post by ashleyn »

gok wrote: post #85

The Chromium compile being faster on 16 cores than 32 cores is pretty weird, given how embarrassingly parallelizable that should be. Wonder if it's out of memory, or if the bottleneck is actually linking.

Personally, I'm more astounded someone outside Google was actually able to build a Google project.

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

CarVac wrote: post #53
srcmap wrote: post #40

Two additional benchmarks I like to see from Anandtech: 1) some VM base tests for these kind of CPU - 32, 64, 128 VM all running some kind of web/db/redis benchmarks inside. 2) Some compilation testing - time the clean build of AOSP, BSD, some very complex linux app - use max jobs setting for parallel compile and time how long it take to finish the jobs. ( measure the over CPU usages at the same time. )

Phoronix had it compiling the Linux kernel in 32 seconds, compared to 37.5 for the 7980XE.

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by compilerdev »

glandium wrote: post #163
compilerdev wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chrome compilation looks really strange indeed, especially with having the results from Phoronix on Linux which show that it's the fastest compiling the Linux kernel. I wonder what kind of Chrome build it's doing - does it use Clang-cl or Visual C++? Does it have LTO (LTCG for VC++) enabled? If it's VC++ with LTCG, for example, the entire code generation and linking is limited to 4 cores by default.

There's a significant workload difference between compiling the Linux kernel (C code base) and Chromium (C++ code base). I'd very much like to see a Chromium build benchmark performed under Linux.

See my answer above, it's because the build was LTCG and in the best case at most 4 cores were used during optimization/code geneation/linking.
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