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AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

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Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#41

Post by dragontamer »

rbanffy wrote: post #33
dragontamer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main selling point for Intel isn't speed anymore. Intel still has superior performance counters and debugging features. Mozilla's rr (Record and Replay framework) only works on Intel for example, and Intel vTune is a very good tool. AVX512 is also an advantage, as you've noted. There are other instruction set advantages: I think Intel has faster division / modulus operator, and also has single-clock pext / pdep (…

Even if you do, in most cases you won't use them on all your workloads. This means not all your boxes need to be Intel.

I would hope that your production hardware matches your developer / staging / testing hardware.

Lets say production is 50% slower than what's tested in staging / developer test cases. Is it the data in production that causes this performance loss? Or is it hardware differences?

If you are using Intel tools to debug performance problems on developer / testing stages, you probably want to keep using those Intel tools in staging / production. There are enough cache differences and instruction-level differences (speed of "division" instruction. PEXT vs PDEP. Cache differenches, branch predictor differences, TLB differences) between the chips.

Intel has interesting optimizations: an Intel Ethernet card drops the data off in L3 cache (bypassing DDR4 RAM entirely). These little differences in the driver / motherboard / CPU can have a huge difference in performance, and complicate performance testing / performance debugging.

If you are deploying to AMD hardware for production, you probably want to be running AMD hardware in testing / developer stages as well. You want all your hardware performing as similarly as possible.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#42

Post by lawn »

kraig911 wrote: post #38

Now if only programming multi-core work could catch up to this hardware. Honestly chips with more cores is starting to sound like cars with more wheels or I guess more valves lately. Doesn't matter the horsepower the speed limit is the same until we can make software better.

At work our homegrown programming language is still single threaded only. Feels bad man.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#43

Post by klodolph »

kraig911 wrote: post #38

Now if only programming multi-core work could catch up to this hardware. Honestly chips with more cores is starting to sound like cars with more wheels or I guess more valves lately. Doesn't matter the horsepower the speed limit is the same until we can make software better.

This is a very outdated complaint, we are using all cores these days, just not on all systems. Backend software is concurrent & distributed, and although utilization is lower than we’d like, the extra cores are not going to waste.

However, if you put this in a machine you use for playing games or checking Facebook then you might think that it’s a waste, and you’d be right. There is plenty of software out there which is still single-threaded, but it’s not dominating our utilization.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#44

Post by twotwotwo »

Worth noting AMD just announced that the first third-gen Threadripper will come out in Nov with 24 cores, and the planned 16-core mainstream chip (the 3950X) is delayed to November: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-delay-la...

A 32-core chip is still almost certain to show up, since benchmarks have leaked, and folks have also leaked some pics of 3950X's and packaging, but I guess supply/demand have kept everything from coming out yet.

As the Tom's post notes, server and client chips use the same chiplets, so it could be that most of the higher-binned ones are going to server parts; some are higher-margin (7742 is almost $100/core, vs. 3950X under $50/core) and plausible there're some enterprise orders (AWS etc.) getting priority. I wonder if they tightened the binning for the 3950X to respond to the fuss over turbo, too.

I had never really considered everything that goes into getting to that SKU/price list and launch date: you don't really know how much supply you'll have at various perf levels, or what demand there will be for what at what price, and if you don't exactly match them you might end up losing money by underpricing, by having to nerf good silicon to fill highly-demanded lower-end SKUs, or by having a shortage that makes customers go elsewhere. (Plus vendors don't just have the public SKU list, they're working out contracts with OEMs/other big customers. And who knows what the competition will do.) High stakes, and practically speaking no backsies; seeing how upset folks are about turbo clocks, imagine if AMD announced a price hike. Glad it's not my job.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#45

Post by mrguyorama »

klodolph wrote: post #43
kraig911 wrote: post #38

Now if only programming multi-core work could catch up to this hardware. Honestly chips with more cores is starting to sound like cars with more wheels or I guess more valves lately. Doesn't matter the horsepower the speed limit is the same until we can make software better.

This is a very outdated complaint, we are using all cores these days, just not on all systems. Backend software is concurrent & distributed, and although utilization is lower than we’d like, the extra cores are not going to waste. However, if you put this in a machine you use for playing games or checking Facebook then you might think that it’s a waste, and you’d be right. There is plenty of software out there which…

Honestly with the way chrome and firefox behave nowadays, even grandma looking at facebook benefits from multiple cores

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#46

Post by benj111 »

kraig911 wrote: post #38

Now if only programming multi-core work could catch up to this hardware. Honestly chips with more cores is starting to sound like cars with more wheels or I guess more valves lately. Doesn't matter the horsepower the speed limit is the same until we can make software better.

"or I guess more valves lately."

Extra valves can increase efficiency, which is probably why the valve count is increasing, can't say I've noticed though.

Extra wheels can improve aerodynamics also.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrrell_P34

I'll stop undermining your point now :)

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#47

Post by GiorgioG »

arcticbull wrote: post #18
GiorgioG wrote: post #14

I have the original Threadripper 1950X overclocked to 4.1ghz and I’ve been pretty happy with it. As a developer I can’t find much reason to upgrade 2 years after its release. Single core improvements (from AMD or Intel) aren’t game-changing. More cores won’t do anything for me (.NET Core, angular, etc) I’ve considered switching back to intel for their 5ghz processors but based on benchmarks, I wouldn’t see anything b…

They're doing both. AMD has ramped single-core performance, at least from an IPC perspective, massively. From Excavator (2015) to Ryzen we saw a 52% increase in IPC. From Ryzen 1000 to 2000 (Zen+) we saw a 3% increase in IPC. From Ryzen 2000 to 3000 (Zen2) we saw a 15% increase in IPC. From 2015 to 2019 we saw a total IPC boost on the AMD side of over 80%, and an increase in max core count in the desktop line of 433%…

The progress is ok, just incremental. AMD had been playing catch up, until Ryzen/Threadripper.

Just for comparison, here are the numbers from my GeekBench 4 run:

Single-Threaded: 4,746 Multi-Threaded: 34,586

According to a leaked benchmark, the Threadripper 3000's numbers are:

Single-Threaded: 5,519 Multi-Threaded: 68,279

The multithreaded benchmark is 2x, that's a no-brainer since it's likely to have 32 cores vs the 1950x's 16 cores. Now, I will say that TR3000 benchmark is not overclocked (3.6ghz.) But from what I've read, it seems like there's not much room for these latest chips to be overclocked. So, despite being the 3rd iteration, the TR3000 is only 16% faster in single-threaded benchmarks than my 1950X.

Intel's 9900K (overclocked) gets a single-threaded GB4 score of ~7,000. That (or its successor) may be my next machine.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#48

Post by gameswithgo »

vj44 wrote: post #24
ogrisel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BLAS & Lapack subset of the API of the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) is very well implemented in open source projects such as OpenBLAS and BLIS: https://github.com/flame/blis Both are well optimized for AMD CPUs.

I work in this space... and let's just say that MKL is definitely NOT well optimized for AMD's chips. You'll be lucky to get 10-20% efficiency. Nevermind openblas.

does this remain true on the zen2 cpus which finally do avx properly?

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#49

Post by gameswithgo »

dragontamer wrote: post #10
Jonnax wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a lot about AVX-512 being really good. Is there any software that's commonly used that has a measurable performance boost with it? Or is it more specialised stuff?

> I hear a lot about AVX-512 being really good. Its a great instruction set, Absolutely great, AVX512 supports gather/scatter, a whole slew of efficient processing instructions, etc. etc. However, AVX512 has poor implementations right now. Skylake-X is one of the only implementations, and running it drops the clock-rate in ways that are difficult to predict. (One core running AVX512 drops the clock of other cores, sl…

the clock rate has nothing to do with a bad implementation, all the computation just makes a lot of heat. the performance increase is still massive, often more than 2x avx, which also throttles btw

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#50

Post by spamizbad »

rbanffy wrote: post #32
astrodust wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever get into Docker/Kubernetes, being able to spin up a local cluster for testing is a pretty big deal. Having that running in the background and not impacting your usual workload is huge. I've been testing a Kubernetes cluster built on 32-core AMD servers and it's unreal the workloads you can throw at them. I'm used to 4 or 8-core Xeon chips and this is a whole different game.

That's true, but memory/IO is a much bigger issue in this scenario than processing power. While running a cluster in VMs, I'm frequently limited by IO (and if your VMs use more memory than it's physically available, you'll quickly descent into swap hell) well before my CPUs register a significant uptick in usage. And, mind you, my workstation is 4 year old Xeon with 64 gigs of memory and reasonably fast (but not amaz…

I really hope the 3000-series Threadripper is 8-channel like its server counterpart. 8 16GB DIMMs gets you 128GB, and a significant amount of memory bandwidth. You also have enough PCI-E lanes to either stripe or partition your I/O in such a way to work around any major bottlenecks.
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