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Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

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31–40 of 58 posts

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#31
post #25
post #24

Imho if cpu manufacturers figure out how to slap a large cache on the same die (something like amd 3D V-Cache but much more) we may actually see graphic cards become obsolete in favor of software rendering.

Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon. It is true that a chip like this probably could render pretty decent 3d in software though. I wonder if combining this with the GPU in a clever way could allow more people to experience real time raytracing?

> Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon.

The whole history of PCs is repeatedly proving otherwise. The NES had hardware sprites. Then Carmack & Romero showed up and proved you can have smooth side scrolling in software, on an underpowered CPU. The whole concept of a PPU was thus rendered obsolete. Repeat for discrete FPUs, discrete sound cards, RAID cards (ZFS), and so on.

Specialised silicon will beat general purpose silicon at the given task, until general purpose silicon + software catches up. You need to keep pouring in proportional R&D effort for the specialised silicon to stay ahead.

What keeps GPUs relevant is that they're in fact much more general than what the "G" originally stood for.

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#32
post #16

Anyone is using 64 cores besides Linus :) I'm much more excited for 7900x on 12 cores rather than 64 cores. But I understand the limited amount of people that needs this power on desktop can also be excited.

You might want to wait for 7900X3D based on what we see with 5800X3D vs the latest Zen4...

I'm actually considering upgrading to 5800x or 5800x3d as a cheap temporary upgrade since the newest generation (which I initially planned on) just seems too expensive given the need for new DDR5, and new very expensive motherboards which will likely need at least another year to mature. So far I've been leaning towards the pretty cheap 5800x (280e vs 450e for 5800x3d) since the difference actually doesn't look that big for real workloads (and since it's an upgrade for a shorter than usual timeframe). Is the 5800x3d actually 60% better in non-gaming to be worth it? If not (as it seems to me) I'm not sure why waiting for the next 3d specifically makes sense.

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? My 5950x (measured) flops are ~2 TFLOPS in single-precision, ~1TFLOPS in double precision (obviously, due to half the SIMD vector size). This is a desktop-class 16-core machine.

You might be a bit overoptimistic: https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9uswbz/how_much_gflops...

Go and measure it yourself, if you have one :)

https://github.com/Mysticial/Flops/

You can also get a theoretical computation of the Flops, which matches nicely with the experimental measurement. You have to take into account:

- the clock frequency (~3.9 GHz on multithreaded workloads on my machine)

- the number of cores (16)

- the reciprocal throughput of the FMA instruction (~.5, that is, 2 instructions per clock cycle)

- the number of flops per instruction (2 for the FMA instruction, that is, 1 multiply + 1 add)

- the SIMD vector width (4 for double, 8 for float).

Putting it together:

3.9e9 * 16 * 2 * 2 * 4 = 998.4 GFlops (double)

3.9e9 * 16 * 2 * 2 * 8 = 1996.8 GFlops (single)

The measured values on my machine are a bit different, but close (1070 and 2151 respectively).

References:

https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf

https://www.agner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=56

https://gadgetversus.com/processor/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-gflops-...

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#34
post #31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon. It is true that a chip like this probably could render pretty decent 3d in software though. I wonder if combining this with the GPU in a clever way could allow more people to experience real time raytracing?

> Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon. The whole history of PCs is repeatedly proving otherwise. The NES had hardware sprites. Then Carmack & Romero showed up and proved you can have smooth side scrolling in software, on an underpowered CPU. The whole concept of a PPU was thus rendered obsolete. Repeat for discrete FPUs, discrete sound cards, RAID cards (ZFS), and so on. Specialised silicon w…

CPU’s have integrated a lot of specialized silicon as transistor budgets increased. x86 treats integer and floating point arithmetic as separate things because the math coprocessor used to be a separate and optional chip. Now days it’s GPU cores making the migration, but that’s hardly going to be the end of it.

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#35
post #23

I'm reminded of ... that ... Was it power cpu or risc? The one with the 1024 cpu cores. I did a search but can't find it. Essentially 1024 cores soc server, affordable. Compared to that 64 cores sounds rather unimpressive. IMHO.

Parallela?

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#36
post #15

I recently ran some machine learning benchmarks on CPU versus GPU. The gap for a multicore CPU was much smaller than I expected. I, for one, am excited by a 64-core CPU in a way I wouldn't have been a year ago. Between Hugging Face, Stable Diffusion, and Whisper, I'm using ML workloads a lot more. Being able to do so: * with a standard instruction set * with open-source software * with my full system RAM * without ha…

Inference or training? I think with full training you are out of luck with CPUs, the gap is much bigger. 64c TR could only get to roughly 1TFlops.

Zen4 will do 16bit BFloat FP, so one would expect it to do a lot better than threadripper on ML training applications?

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#37
post #23

I'm reminded of ... that ... Was it power cpu or risc? The one with the 1024 cpu cores. I did a search but can't find it. Essentially 1024 cores soc server, affordable. Compared to that 64 cores sounds rather unimpressive. IMHO.

Parallela?

That was the platform; the company was Adapteva. Cavium and Tilera also had more cores than this approximately a decade ago. "Manycore" would be the generic term to search for.

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#38
post #13
post #10

Can I use it in a base of my kettle to boil water?

the cpu is certified by AMD to be running up to 105 celsius, but it thermal throttles automatically at 95 celsius, so out of the box probably not enough to boil water, but just barely :P. the fun fact, is that if you manually reduce the power limit to 65W the initial single thread results so virtually no loss in ST performance vs 170W, and it appears that the original AMD slides stating 75% more efficient cores at th…

The previous generation of Intel and AMD CPUs could not consume more than 20 to 30 W with a single active core (non-overclocked).

So with the power limit set to 65 W or more the single-thread performance was always limited by the maximum turbo frequency (which may depend on the temperature of the CPU) and never by the power limit.

I have not seen yet any published value about the single core power consumption of Zen 4, but it is likely that the single core power is not higher. It is certainly much less than 65 W even at 5.85 GHz.

So the expected behavior is that the single-thread performance does not depend on whether you set in BIOS the steady-state power limit to 170 W, 105 W or 65 W. Only the multi-threaded performance is modified by the power limit, because when the power limit is reached, the clock frequency is decreased until the power consumption matches the limit.

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be a bit overoptimistic: https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9uswbz/how_much_gflops...

Go and measure it yourself, if you have one :) https://github.com/Mysticial/Flops/ You can also get a theoretical computation of the Flops, which matches nicely with the experimental measurement. You have to take into account: - the clock frequency (~3.9 GHz on multithreaded workloads on my machine) - the number of cores (16) - the reciprocal throughput of the FMA instruction (~.5, that is, 2 instructions per clock c…

2 TFlops or 5 TFlops does not matter much. 3090Ti does 160 TFlops, e.g. at least 30x (!) times faster.

Re: Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

#40
post #36
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inference or training? I think with full training you are out of luck with CPUs, the gap is much bigger. 64c TR could only get to roughly 1TFlops.

Zen4 will do 16bit BFloat FP, so one would expect it to do a lot better than threadripper on ML training applications?

This Threadripper is Zen 4.
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