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

anandtech.com

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

#181

Post by Dylan16807 »

philwelch wrote: post #164
paulmd wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a browser open uses approximately 0% CPU though. Streaming would be a better example.

If you have "a browser" open, sure, if by "a browser" you mean a single browser tab on a not-resource-intensive page or with Javascript disabled. If by "a browser" you mean the dozens of tabs and half-dozen browser plugins the typical user is actually running, though...well, there's a reason Chrome comes with its own process monitor.

But "strategy guides" are in the former category, aren't they?

And for reference all my background tabs in chrome are using plenty of memory but Edit: it's even more aggressive than I thought https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/chrom...

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

#182

Post by jandrese »

hyperpallium wrote: post #179
jandrese wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows version has way better performance, but it doesn't support mods so nobody cares about it.

Was the "Windows version" the one released 1-2 years ago that looks really pretty, with god rays etc? I wondered if it would be a hit, since 8 bit graphics is part of the charm and concept of minecraft, but I didn't consider the mod ecosystem.

Yeah, the one based on the mobile version.

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

#183

Post by philwelch »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #181
philwelch wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have "a browser" open, sure, if by "a browser" you mean a single browser tab on a not-resource-intensive page or with Javascript disabled. If by "a browser" you mean the dozens of tabs and half-dozen browser plugins the typical user is actually running, though...well, there's a reason Chrome comes with its own process monitor.

But "strategy guides" are in the former category, aren't they? And for reference all my background tabs in chrome are using plenty of memory but Edit: it's even more aggressive than I thought https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/chrom...

I dunno what to say, man. It's a real problem that I've run into.

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

#184

Post by compilerdev »

gsnedders wrote: post #60
deng wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do a compilation of Chrome in the "Office Tests" section. The 32Core takes about an hour per compile, but the 16Core is actually a bit faster (my guess would be that linking takes longer on the 32 core machine as it's very memory intensive).

FWIW, I believe the version they use relies on a version of MSVC where the linker is predominently single-threaded, and linking the final binary ends up as a significant proportion of the time.

Yes, the issue is the LTCG build, which by default uses 4 threads and with Chromium the compiler hits some pathological issues with such a huge program and it ends up using mostly 1 core and swapping lots of memory.

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

#185

Post by greglindahl »

hajile wrote: post #177
greglindahl wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has done that in the past, actually, their first "dual core" chip (2005) was actually two chips in a package. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_D

There was a major difference though. Intel's chips communicated over the front-side-bus (not a great solution considering how FSB was already far inferior to HyperTransport).

Sure, that's why the startup I was one of the founders of in that era built a HyperTransport-attached InfiniBand adapter. Intel wasn't very competitive in the supercomputing space back then.

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

#186

Post by nodesocket »

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 just upgraded from a 13" MacBook Pro with 2 cores to a 15" 2018 MacBook Pro with 6 cores (Intel cough, cough), the difference in performance is substantial and very noticeable. The folklore that increasing cores does not translate, feels outdated now that operating systems and applications are designed to utilize multiple cores.

I do wonder if there is a point of diminishing returns though. 24, 32 cores, is it really worth the extra money?

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

#187

Post by gok »

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.

That Phoronix says the opposite makes me think Anandtech is right....

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

#188

Post by Dylan16807 »

philwelch wrote: post #183
Dylan16807 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "strategy guides" are in the former category, aren't they? And for reference all my background tabs in chrome are using plenty of memory but Edit: it's even more aggressive than I thought https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/chrom...

I dunno what to say, man. It's a real problem that I've run into.

I believe you had performance issues caused by chrome. What I'm wondering is whether all three of the following apply:

1. The problem was caused by Chrome actively spending CPU and memory cycles, not just having so much memory allocated you run low, because NUMA itself can't change memory consumption.

Caveat: It's possible the NUMA setting would also cause Chrome's ram use to be capped. If that's causes an improvement, then you could do the same capping on a non-NUMA machine.

2. The foreground page in chrome was something like a strategy guide, not something more intense like video streaming. Are there pages that are both strategy guides and intensive to calculate?

3. This happened in the last year or so since version 57 came out.

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

#189

Post by adiusmus »

Filligree wrote: post #105
adiusmus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We’re running 43 clusterio-like connected worlds here. Worlds allocated 8gb ram each. Less if we can get away with it by deleting unused chunks.

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

#190

Post by Dylan16807 »

mjevans wrote: post #147
blattimwind wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's still pretty much the case today. Though the underlying java GL library the desktop client uses has been updated a bit and the newer versions have migrated to higher versions of OpenGL; breaking a lot of mods pretty hard with the changes to the rendering engine. I hear the (Windows/console only?) version is faster for all the reasons you'd expect, but I'll probably end up never playing it.

Minecraft has made some very, uh, interesting performance decisions.

For example they decided to forcibly split everything into server thread(s) and play thread(s), even when you're doing single player. This made things more consistent, and sometimes helped performance, even though it broke a huge amount of mods.

While making this clean break it would have been easy to put world generation into its own thread, or even let it use multiple threads. Minecraft's world generation is inherently very parallel, and it bogs down servers all the time. Responsiveness could be improved by a huge amount by cutting it out of the simulation loop.

They didn't.

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