When GPUs became vastly more powerful over the last ~10 years, it made big neural nets practical. I wonder what an equivalent jump in CPU power will unlock.
More electron apps.
Only if people make more usage of worker threads.
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
11–20 of 290 posts
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#12This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power!
Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper?
Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#13Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#14When GPUs became vastly more powerful over the last ~10 years, it made big neural nets practical. I wonder what an equivalent jump in CPU power will unlock.
More electron apps.
Sadly, I'm afraid you're right.
I love my 1920X for making a modern desktop snappy. I hate Discord, chrome et. al for needing one.
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#15This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power! Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper? Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?
I would say it is the first 16-core "consumer chip", since every other 16-core chip has either been HEDT-class or server-grade, both requiring expensive motherboards. I would be happy to try plopping this into my B450 motherboard from my 2700X. I'm happy with my current NVMe storage, which is just about the only thing that takes advantage of the extra bandwidth. Graphics cards aren't there yet.
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#167nm is about 35 times the diameter of a silicon atom.
It sure is, but 7nm in cpu lithography doesn't mean anything, it's pure marketing. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process > The term "7 nm" is simply a commercial name for a generation of a certain size and its technology and does not represent any geometry of a transistor.
Yeah, since about 14nm the nanometer number has become kind of like CPU speed (mhz/ghz) became in the early-mid 1990s and for the same reason.
Long ago you could say e.g. a 600mhz CPU was faster than a 500mhz CPU. Then things like instruction level parallelism and other significant optimizations started and you had lower-core-speed CPUs that would in practice be quite a bit faster than higher-core-speed CPUs. Today a 1.6ghz mobile chip is far faster than a 2.4ghz earlier generation Pentium-4 for example, at least for most workloads.
My understanding is that chip fab processes have developed similar numbers of devils in details. It's not just about the smallest feature size but lots of other things like materials, transistor types, layout, power density, etc. I've heard that Intel's 14nm processes are comparable to other fabs' 10nm processes for instance.
Still this 7nm node is better than what Intel is currently shipping.
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#17This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power! Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper? Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?
I would say it is the first 16-core "consumer chip", since every other 16-core chip has either been HEDT-class or server-grade, both requiring expensive motherboards. I would be happy to try plopping this into my B450 motherboard from my 2700X. I'm happy with my current NVMe storage, which is just about the only thing that takes advantage of the extra bandwidth. Graphics cards aren't there yet.
I had 24 core workstation 5 years ago for price of this single chip. Refurbished server...
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#18This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power! Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper? Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?
I would say it is the first 16-core "consumer chip", since every other 16-core chip has either been HEDT-class or server-grade, both requiring expensive motherboards. I would be happy to try plopping this into my B450 motherboard from my 2700X. I'm happy with my current NVMe storage, which is just about the only thing that takes advantage of the extra bandwidth. Graphics cards aren't there yet.
That's fair - looks like you need LGA 2066 for the Intel chips with those core counts, which aren't terribly expensive ($150+) but it's hard to find exactly which motherboards support something like the i9-9960X.
Running a 2700X in an X470 but this is 3x the price of that chip, and personally, I won't get the necessary benefit. Still pleased to see exploding CPU power in the past few years!
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#19I find it interesting how desktop CPUs are essentially coming down to two enthusiast markets, developers/content creators/workstations and gaming.
While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths.
Intel really has their work cutout for them with performance to cost for consumer desktops.
Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review
#20This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power! Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper? Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?
I did some math for myself and realized that I can skip the 4 extra cores, and go with the Ryzen 9 3900X (530€ vs 820€).
That's 44.16 € / Core (3900X) vs 51.25 € / Core (3950X) where I live. Yes, the base clock is 200 Mhz lower, but for my use case (homeserver with gaming vm and minecraft server etc), I need cores that I can assign. Im not ready to pay 290€ für an extra 4 cores yet.