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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

#51

Post by c2h5oh »

ekianjo wrote: post #35
Kranar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What metric are you considering? The rendering tests show the 2990WX to be both faster and cheaper than the i9.

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

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

#52

Post by barkingcat »

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.

If you want to run multiple different OS's (or even different distributions of the same OS) containers don't work.

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

#53

Post by CarVac »

srcmap wrote: post #40

Two additional benchmarks I like to see from Anandtech: 1) some VM base tests for these kind of CPU - 32, 64, 128 VM all running some kind of web/db/redis benchmarks inside. 2) Some compilation testing - time the clean build of AOSP, BSD, some very complex linux app - use max jobs setting for parallel compile and time how long it take to finish the jobs. ( measure the over CPU usages at the same time. )

Phoronix had it compiling the Linux kernel in 32 seconds, compared to 37.5 for the 7980XE.

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

#54

Post by deng »

This is the perfect chip for continuous, low-memory number crunching. For everything else... not so much. I mean, this chip consumes 74W when idle, of which almost 90% are spend on the interconnect. That's insane. Most important bit in the review for me:

"After core counts, the next battle will be on the interconnect. Low power, scalable, and high performance: process node scaling will mean nothing if the interconnect becomes 90% of the total chip power."

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

#55

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

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.

I have many use-cases where containers are simply unsuitable.

I'm using FreeBSD, but these apply just as well to Linux. I wanted to run ZoneMinder, which is not available for FreeBSD, so I simply spun up a CentOS VM and installed it.

On the flip side, I wanted to run Home Assistant, Node-RED, and some related utility programs. All of these are happy to run on FreeBSD, so they can live happily in a Jail (FreeBSD's equivalent to a container).

Some people virtualize their router by dedicating a NIC to the appropriate VM. I don't know if this would even be possible in a container.

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

#56

Post by sandworm101 »

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 developers aren't properly optimized. If you want to play kerbal space program, single-thread performance is vital (KSP's physics is still single-threaded iirc). If you want to surf the web while running a factorio server, AMD will work fine. But if you want to maximize the performance of that factorio server, the faster single-thread performance of Intel chips would be better.

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

#57

Post by close04 »

deng wrote: post #54

This is the perfect chip for continuous, low-memory number crunching. For everything else... not so much. I mean, this chip consumes 74W when idle, of which almost 90% are spend on the interconnect. That's insane. Most important bit in the review for me: "After core counts, the next battle will be on the interconnect. Low power, scalable, and high performance: process node scaling will mean nothing if the interconnec…

Most people used TR for day to day desktop use. This really pushes it into the workstation segment. While efficiency is important, results are even more so.

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

#58

Post by moondev »

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.

I run proxmox on my 16 thread ryzen and would love more cores.

I currently run 4 linux vms for my kubernetes cluster and a 4 core macOS vm with passthrough for my gtx 1080i. I have 64 gb of memory so the only thing stopping me from running my windows 10 and arch desktop vms at the same time is more cores.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

barkingcat wrote: post #45
drewg123 wrote: post #24

It is interested that the review is not yet finished. The author writes in the comments section: Hey everyone, sorry for leaving a few pages blank right now. Jet lag hit me hard over the weekend from Flash Memory Summit. Will be filling in the blanks and the analysis throughout today. I am disappointed in that, as I was looking forward to reading the test setup and power draw sections, as I have a 2990WX on order, an…

Shouldn't they not publish until the review is done? This is really unprofessional - even bloggers have the concept of "only publish finished drafts" or use the scheduled publishing feature that all blogging platforms have nowadays.

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by gsnedders »

deng wrote: post #44
srcmap wrote: post #40

Two additional benchmarks I like to see from Anandtech: 1) some VM base tests for these kind of CPU - 32, 64, 128 VM all running some kind of web/db/redis benchmarks inside. 2) Some compilation testing - time the clean build of AOSP, BSD, some very complex linux app - use max jobs setting for parallel compile and time how long it take to finish the jobs. ( measure the over CPU usages at the same time. )

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.
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