Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 202 posts

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#101

Post by orbital-decay »

ReverseCold wrote: post #70
sandworm101 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Folklore would have it that single-thread performance is the most important aspect of desktop performance There are a few places where it matters. We talk of "gaming" but that is too broad a term imho. Many AAA games do leverage AMD chips well. They know how to split loads across threads to maximize performance. But in recent years the hot games have come from indi developers. Pre-release titles from tiny develope…

KSP 1.1 finally added multithreading btw

Only for different spacecraft, so it only really matters for some planetary bases. A single spacecraft is still processed in a single thread.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#103

Post by somebodythere »

c2h5oh wrote: post #51
ekianjo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly faster yes. Cheaper? For now. Price is elastic. The i9 could be priced at any price point because there was no competition until now. Do you think Intel will keep it overpriced for long?

AMD has manufacturing cost advantage - CPUs are built from 4- core CCXes that can be binned separately. Intel on the other hand needs to manufacture a monolithic CPU that not only is fault free in enough cores, but performs well. That's harder and yields are way lower. 80% yield on a 4 core block is a 16.7% yield on a 32 core block - and that's before binning

If AMD's method scales so much easier, why didn't Intel just... do that? Honest question.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#104

Post by blattimwind »

mrkgnao wrote: post #89
Filligree wrote: post #13

The biggest benefit I've found to running a 1950X isn't something I would have expected, but which perhaps I should have. True, it's much faster than my old system for batch processing, but most of the time it's still idle. Even if it's running Chrome flat-out, as far as the 1950X is concerned, that's idle. Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full…

> Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full speed. I don't understand. From my (admittedly little better than layperson's) knowledge, I'm guessing the cores of most multicore processors have to compete for memory access...? Is there a good search term I can use to help me understand what's going on here?

NUMA means "(Explicitly) Non-Uniform Memory Access"; this means that some cores have easier (lower latency, higher bandwidth) access to some memory regions than others.

In practice this means that memory controllers are partitioned amongst groups of cores, with some slower and often otherwise busy interconnect between those groups.

The software implication is that if task X uses some bit of memory a lot, then that bit of memory better be node-local, i.e. easy to access for the core where task X is running.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#105

Post by Filligree »

adiusmus wrote: post #72
Filligree wrote: post #13

The biggest benefit I've found to running a 1950X isn't something I would have expected, but which perhaps I should have. True, it's much faster than my old system for batch processing, but most of the time it's still idle. Even if it's running Chrome flat-out, as far as the 1950X is concerned, that's idle. Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full…

I run 4 simultaneous factorio servers on my old 32gb laptop. How many servers is your 1950x capable of? How much ram do you have? The 1950x is looking like a viable upgrade right now as it’s becoming cheaper.

I have 32 GB of ram, but you could easily fit 128 GB if needed. Above that, I think sourcing the chips becomes difficult.

If you aren't concerned with getting absolute maximum speed from the servers, then I'd think you could run 16 of 'em with only moderate degradation; perhaps 20-30% slower (per server) than a single server. Feel free to imagine the Clusterio applications.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#107

Post by gsnedders »

compilerdev wrote: post #90
gok wrote: post #85

The Chromium compile being faster on 16 cores than 32 cores is pretty weird, given how embarrassingly parallelizable that should be. Wonder if it's out of memory, or if the bottleneck is actually linking.

The Chrome compilation looks really strange indeed, especially with having the results from Phoronix on Linux which show that it's the fastest compiling the Linux kernel. I wonder what kind of Chrome build it's doing - does it use Clang-cl or Visual C++? Does it have LTO (LTCG for VC++) enabled? If it's VC++ with LTCG, for example, the entire code generation and linking is limited to 4 cores by default.

It's Chromium 56 with the default Chromium build-chain.

At that point, Chromium required Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 or later. Anand use VS Community 2015.3. IIRC, by default it doesn't have LTCG enabled.

By default, release builds are almost entirely statically linked (with a few shared libraries, platform dependent), which makes linking time pretty significant. As a result, it ends up more as a linking benchmark than a compilation benchmark.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#108

Post by zaarn »

ekianjo wrote: post #29
zaarn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VMs, lots of them. Atm I'm running about 15 VMs on about 8 cores in a dedicated box somewhere and it's definitely noticable. I would love to shove some core services at home and have 32 cores to play with to give some more headroom

Why not use containers instead of VMs? You can run about 10x more Docker instances than VMs on the same hardware.

Not everything runs great on containers. My internal firewall is a pfSense, BSD based which doesn't run on a linux kernel.

Atleast 3 VMs need patched kernels or more recent kernels/regular kernel updates than the host provides.

Additionally VMs provide a bit more isolation than a simple container (atleast unless you do unpriv'd container).

I do have containers too, about 20 of them, half of them unpriv'd, all of them LXC. Docker is not suitable for my use case at all and frankly I don't think you should suggest someone should switch to Docker without knowing their use cases.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#109

Post by blattimwind »

sandworm101 wrote: post #56
Filligree wrote: post #13

The biggest benefit I've found to running a 1950X isn't something I would have expected, but which perhaps I should have. True, it's much faster than my old system for batch processing, but most of the time it's still idle. Even if it's running Chrome flat-out, as far as the 1950X is concerned, that's idle. Because the two NUMA nodes are ~entirely independent, it's capable of running two independent processes at full…

>> Folklore would have it that single-thread performance is the most important aspect of desktop performance There are a few places where it matters. We talk of "gaming" but that is too broad a term imho. Many AAA games do leverage AMD chips well. They know how to split loads across threads to maximize performance. But in recent years the hot games have come from indi developers. Pre-release titles from tiny develope…

Minecraft reigns king in that category. I don't know if it still does, but a couple years ago Minecraft actually managed to somehow still use the OpenGL immediate mode. Back then the larger Minecraft servers required ridiculous amounts of memory and dedicated a dozen cores just to Java's GC.

Re: AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review

#110

Post by Tuna-Fish »

bluescarni wrote: post #61
nv-vn wrote: post #10

It's funny to me how much range there is in these tests. Some of these are seemingly backwards with better CPUs ranking so much worse and some look completely random. But wow, the performance on these new TR chips is just insane. Never would've guessed that AMD would be this competitive a few years ago, especially not on the CPU front. Looking forward to the upcoming 7nm launch, can't wait to see what's in store.

The test results on Phoronix paint a rather different picture (i.e., the 2990WX being consistently and markedly faster than any other tested processor). My initial gut feeling reading the results on Anandtech is that Window's scheduler may not be able yet to exploit the processor's architecture effectively.

2990WX has a very complex NUMA architecture that costs it a lot of performance if the scheduler doesn't get things right. Linux has been running on and has been heavily optimized for even more complex NUMA systems.
Post reply on HN