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Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

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Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#31

Post by aden1ne »

Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

Such workloads are typical in bioinformatics, as the majority of tools do not support running on GPUs. Data parallelization (e.g. run the same tool on every chromosome independently) is a common strategy used in that field.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#32

Post by fock »

Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

like all of the legacy quantum chemical and FEM codes or anything else you run in HPC (which are a lot of codes, which are not ported from one day to the other by an army of self-declared ML-pros). Part of them can be GPU-accelerated, but then you can easily eat TBs of memory with the right system and GPUs still have a way to go there.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#33

Post by zumachase »

Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

Surprised databases haven’t been mentioned. Anything stateful is still far easier to scale vertically. Otherwise you have to go multi master and start sharding across smaller instances. A massive chip like this can let you keep a pretty simple master/follower architecture for HA without having to share.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#34

Post by lmilcin »

Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

Cuda and x86 are different things.

I do not personally, but I work with another team that uses tens of thousands of cores for calculations. Just day to day business.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#35

Post by bobjordan »

Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

I'm using a 22 core / 44 thread xeon workstation for development and my primary joy using it is being able to run my pytest test suites in parallel. I went from ~45 minutes to run the test suite to about a minute. It is also pretty sweet to be able replicate our three physical servers for bomquote.com, locally.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#36

Post by flywheel »

Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

I mainly write nodejs code, and now that it supports threads I've been hammering my CPU with all kinds of parallel tasks. One common thing I do is crunch a few thousand 16MB+ JSON files in parallel. Multiple cores saves quite a bit of time parsing huge JSON payloads. Sure, people may crap on me for using Javascript, whatever... It's what I prefer to use, and 64 cores would only help do all sorts of things in parallel, saving me time.

There's all kinds of other things I do that utilize multiple cores.

I also run a lot of VMs.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#37

Post by soygul »

A lot of people question the usefulness of 64+ cores on a workstation CPU. It is true that audio/visual tools like Adobe After Effects stop benefiting from extra cores at around 32 cores. [1]

But if you want to simulate production workloads on your machine say with Apache Spark or Flink, you are in the prime. You couple that CPU with 256+ GB memory, and you can start exploring the bottlenecks in your batch algorithms using as many cores as you want.

[1] https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/After-Effects-CPU...

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#38

Post by swiley »

pengaru wrote: post #28
Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

Compiling large projects like the linux kernel is an obvious one.

Yes. Even the cheaper zen processors make this so much more convenient.

Gentoo is actually a usable distro again and most of the packages (even things like mono) install decently fast.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#39

Post by dTal »

Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

CPUs are much more general! Unscientifically, on my 2950X/1070Ti workstation, Cycles takes approximately the same amount of time to raytrace a scene on the CPU vs the GPU. I think this is a great example of a highly parallel workload that is challenging for GPUs due to lack of coherence - extreme props to the Cycles team for making it work on GPU at all.

Also, year-on-year performance increases for nVidia GPUs are relatively boring, while Threadrippers routinely double in performance. I have just built a 3970X/RX5700XT workstation, and while I have not benchmarked it yet I expect the CPU to smash the GPU for Cycles raytracing.

Also worth noting that CUDA is a proprietary architecture from a single company - targeting it locks you in, and you need to run proprietary blobs to make it work.

All in all, CUDA works well now but I think it's ultimately a dead-end architecture - hugely parallel CPU architectures will eclipse it.

Re: Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX Spotted

#40

Post by vosper »

staticfloat wrote: post #14
Uehreka wrote: post #12

I feel like 64 cores is getting rather close to a tipping point: What workloads are so massively parallel that they can use 64 cores of x86 but can’t use the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card? I’m sure right now there are workloads that just need particular x86 instructions, but that feels like a temporary problem. Am I wrong about that being a temporary problem (that would feel frustrating)? Are these cores j…

One big difference is memory availability; the amount of RAM directly accessible from a 64-core CPU is much larger than that of the thousands of CUDA cores on a Quadro card. Perhaps for many workloads intelligent use of the PCIE bus can make up for that, streaming datasets in/out of the card, but for others, having random access to hundreds of GBs of data may be non-negotiable. I'd be interested to know what workload…

I’m not sure about “require”, but we use multi-hundred-gigabytes or RAM instances for our Elasticsearch coordinator nodes, which seems to work well.
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