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First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

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Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#61

Post by lmm »

hetman wrote: post #46
userbinator wrote: post #43

IMHO, increasingly inefficient software notwithstanding, CPU performance has been well beyond acceptable since a long time ago. Thus, the real question is how buggy these new CPUs will be. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37812556

I don't think someone doing video editing or 3D rendering is likely to agree with you here...

> I don't think someone doing video editing or 3D rendering is likely to agree with you here...

They're hopefully not using a CPU for that - that's all been on the GPU for years.

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#63

Post by Racing0461 »

CobaltFire wrote: post #52
Racing0461 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. it's great that it compiles code faster, but i would also like when i'm writing code and hit enter, a newline is added and all lines under it goes down by 1 without any "lag". That's why i decided to go with a 5950x + 3090 rtx + gamer ram for my current "workstation" instead of a 5995wx + rtx 6000 + ecc ram for my current machine. even tho its not workstation rated, it seemed like the better way to go for quality…

Having run a 3945WX machine side by side with same era intel and AMD desktops the Threadripper Pro was the more “responsive” machine, but it was minor enough you would have had to have them side by side to really notice. Once there were a lot of programs in flight it started making a larger and larger difference. Now half my family and friends have TR Pro systems bought refurbished (they watched eBay) because they lo…

The TR Pro cpus with the same cores as ryzen equilivalent should have similar performance as they have similar specs.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-p... vs https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-7900x

Its usually the ones with more cores than the max ryzen cpus that have to make tradeoffs and seeing how it affects day to day use. (the 32, 64, and in this case the 96 core ones).

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#65

Post by sp332 »

lmm wrote: post #61
hetman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think someone doing video editing or 3D rendering is likely to agree with you here...

> I don't think someone doing video editing or 3D rendering is likely to agree with you here... They're hopefully not using a CPU for that - that's all been on the GPU for years.

I know video cards have sepcialized hardware for video encoding, but those are tuned for realtime streaming and not meximum quality. If you want to use a different algorithm than the one baked into the hardware, can you use a GPU for that?

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#66

Post by coeneedell »

mrichman wrote: post #25

What use cases is this CPU ideal for? It's not a GPU, so gaming, ML model training, and crypto mining are out.

I’m looking at one for research purposes. Agent based simulation, non-GPU-implementable Ml modeling, large scale data processing. There are a lot of tasks in my work that are greatly sped up by having tons of threads.

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#68

Post by dathinab »

maccard wrote: post #56
hedora wrote: post #44

Has anyone done a perf / watt scatterplot of the current AMD and Apple offerings? I'd guess this wins in absolute performance (due to the TDP), but I've heard AMD is pretty competitive on energy efficiency too these days. I'm typing this on an M2, which is simultaneously cooler and faster than my old Intel laptop. Wondering if it's time to upgrade my decade-old Intel Linux desktop to an AMD yet.

I have an older threadripper - a 3970x. It's the most power hungry device in my house after my electric oven. In raw numbers it's hard to beat. But it is _not_ efficient

Zen 4 is known to be noticeable more efficient then Zen 3 and even much much more so then Zen 2 so I don't think this comparison is helpful.

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#69

Post by dathinab »

mumblemumble wrote: post #21
_joel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're testing CPU performance, not memory capacity. They need that much for the channels.

If the benchmark has any cache misses at all then you also want to make sure everything about the memory configuration is the same, too, for a fair CPU benchmark, right? Number of channels, latency, etc. No, the actual amount of RAM isn't directly relevant, but it seems like a possible brown m&m to me. ( https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ )

> for a fair CPU benchmark, right? Number of channels,

That's exactly where the differences comes from you want to max out the available memory channels on each device not have the same number. Same for latency etc.

I mean your also not fixing the clock speed to 2GHz no boost or when comparing cars limit things just to the first 3 gears or similar.

Because if you would add such artificial limits you won't compare fairly how fast the _max performance_ can be, it would be a very different comparison and wrt. evaluating max performance very unfair.

Now you still need to e.g. have a fair choice of RAM, so preferably if possible use the same RAM sticks (and also use RAM which works equally well with both Intel and AMD). But what that means is that you _have to_ give the AMD system more RAM because it has more channels. Now you also _have to_ make sure that you benchmarks don't have any RAM pressure wrt. capacity.

Also I'm not sure why you mention cache misses? Because number of cache misses is quite independent of RAM amount? Do you mean disk cache or swap misses instead, but I don't think the benchmark does disk I/O and shouldn't have swap either? But even if the benchmark only uses let's say 32GiB of memory for getting a proper GPU

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#70

Post by lmm »

sp332 wrote: post #65
lmm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think someone doing video editing or 3D rendering is likely to agree with you here... They're hopefully not using a CPU for that - that's all been on the GPU for years.

I know video cards have sepcialized hardware for video encoding, but those are tuned for realtime streaming and not meximum quality. If you want to use a different algorithm than the one baked into the hardware, can you use a GPU for that?

> I know video cards have sepcialized hardware for video encoding, but those are tuned for realtime streaming and not meximum quality. If you want to use a different algorithm than the one baked into the hardware, can you use a GPU for that?

If you're doing something that follows the same general design as most existing video codecs, absolutely; these days "hardware" encoding is less "fixed function chip" and more "the driver/firmware knows how to stitch together these components so as to comply with the xyz standard" - hence you see support for new encoding standards getting added in driver updates. If you're doing some completely radical out-of-left-field video compression algorithm, maybe not, although even then GPU hardware is pretty general these days and video encoding tends to be well suited to running on it.

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