Live data from Hacker News

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

anandtech.com

31–40 of 290 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#31

I 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…

>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.

It's not really that cut and dried, plenty of dev workloads are better served by high top single core, while plenty of gaming workloads are better served by multi core.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#32

I noticed yesterday's articles about Intel's upcoming unusually large release of security mitigations. Under serious competitive threat for the first time in a while, I'm curious if Intel may have slowed the release of some mitigations to land after this round of comparison benchmarks.

That's an interesting idea I didn't consider. edit: Below is wrong, see author of article's reply below for why. Preserving for record. They have been holding back review samples of their latest i9s so reviewers wouldn't do head-to-heads with this new 3950X (but people have anyway, and the 3950X crushes the i9). See Linus Tech Tip's review of the 3950X this morning for citation.

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1123580-intel-could-tak...

For those of you without really good search engines :) (Contains link to YouTube video review.)

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#34

I 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…

I agree with your overall synopsis of the status quo. We might however see gaming shift more to multi-core workloads as the next gen of consoles are highly likely to contain 8 core (16T) AMD CPUs based on Zen2 (and a lot of games are made for the lowest common denominator).

This shouldn't be confused with the 8 core APUs found in current gen. Next gen will have an 8 core CPU and a NAVI 12+ GPU.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#35

7nm is about 35 times the diameter of a silicon atom.

7mm is so called 'commercial name' nothing physical.

Million transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm²) is better comparison metric than the commercial name for the process. Here is handy chart I copied from https://www.techcenturion.com/7nm-10nm-14nm-fabrication:

    Tech Node name  (MTr/mm²)

    Intel 7nm       (2??) 
    TSMC 5nm EUV    171.3
    TSMC 7nm+ EUV   115.8
    Intel 10nm      100.8
    TSMC 7nm Mobile 96.5
    Samsung 7nm EUV 95.3
    TSMC 7nm HPC    66.7
    Samsung 8nm     61.2
    TSMC 10nm       60.3
    Samsung 10nm    51.8
    Intel 14nm      43.5
    GF 12nm         36.7
    TSMC 12nm       33.8
    Samsung/GF 14nm 32.5
    TSMC 16nm       28.2

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#37

I noticed yesterday's articles about Intel's upcoming unusually large release of security mitigations. Under serious competitive threat for the first time in a while, I'm curious if Intel may have slowed the release of some mitigations to land after this round of comparison benchmarks.

That's an interesting idea I didn't consider. edit: Below is wrong, see author of article's reply below for why. Preserving for record. They have been holding back review samples of their latest i9s so reviewers wouldn't do head-to-heads with this new 3950X (but people have anyway, and the 3950X crushes the i9). See Linus Tech Tip's review of the 3950X this morning for citation.

The new 18-core i9-10980XE isn't out yet, and review embargoes haven't been lifted. We know it's a slightly clock bumped version of the i9-9980XE, which was included in the AnandTech review and not the Linus review.

Linus tested the 8-core i9-9900KS, which came out a few weeks ago, and those results are also in the link which is the title to this thread.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#39

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.

At this stage, generic computing is unlikely to get any more significant boost (under the assumption that generic computing is something not necessarily [highly] parallelizable); instead, we'll likely see specialized processors. Therefore, ultimately, the market/industry will decide what to accelerate - and the technology to support the acceleration.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#40

7nm is about 35 times the diameter of a silicon atom.

7mm is so called 'commercial name' nothing physical. Million transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm²) is better comparison metric than the commercial name for the process. Here is handy chart I copied from https://www.techcenturion.com/7nm-10nm-14nm-fabrication : Tech Node name (MTr/mm²) Intel 7nm (2??) TSMC 5nm EUV 171.3 TSMC 7nm+ EUV 115.8 Intel 10nm 100.8 TSMC 7nm Mobile 96.5 Samsung 7nm EUV 95.3 TSMC 7nm HPC 6…

It's worth pointing out that the value for Intel's 10nm is on its high-density libraries, not its high-performance libraries, which are less dense.
Post reply on HN