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AMD Hardware

AMD Unveils the World's Most Powerful Desktop CPUs (zdnet.com) 187

ZDNet reports: In the never ending war between the chip giants, AMD has released a salvo by unveiling what are the world's most powerful desktop processors -- the new 24-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X... These 3rd-generation Ryzen Threadripper Processors are built using AMD's 7-nanometer "Zen 2" core architecture, and both chips feature 88 PCIe 4.0 lanes with extraordinary power efficiency.

On the performanced front, AMD claims that the new 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 3970X offers up to 90 percent faster performance over the competition... This performance doesn't mean the chips are power-hungry either, with AMD claiming they deliver up to 66 percent better power efficiency compared to previous generation processors. The new chips do, however, need a new socket. The new socket is called sTRX4, which offers expansion for serious multi-GPU and NVMe arrays, quad channel DDR4, ECC support, and unlocked overclocking.... [T]hey both will be available starting Tuesday, November 19.

Engadget reports: After getting some wins against Intel in the desktop enthusiast processor race, AMD is trying to run up the score with its latest model, the Ryzen 9 3950X. It has 16 cores/32 threads, a 3.5 Ghz base clock with up to 4.7 GHz boost (on two cores) and 105 watt power consumption (TDP), and costs $749, compared to $1,199 for Intel's 12-core i9-9920X. At the same time, AMD claims it outperforms the i9-9920X in gaming and even more so for content creation, where those extra cores can be best exploited.

According to the company, it'll do some Adobe Premiere tasks up to 26 percent quicker than an i9-9920X, and 42 percent faster than an 8-core i9-9900K. Better still, the Ryzen 9 3950X delivers 2.34 times more performance per watt than its Intel counterpart, and consumes 173W of absolute wall power compared to 304W for the i9-9920X. The power figures alone could be decisive for creators who run multiple workstations for 3D animation and rendering...

If $749 is $700 too much, AMD has another option -- the Athlon 3000G. The dual-core processor runs at 3.5Ghz, but AMD said it's "the only unlocked option in its segment," meaning you can push it to around 3.9Ghz. That'll boost its performance ahead of Intel's $73 Pentium G5400, AMD said. The Athlon 3000G will arrive November 19th for $49.

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AMD Unveils the World's Most Powerful Desktop CPUs

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  • Longevity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:05AM (#59399146) Homepage Journal

    Ryzen looks like a great option for use today, but it's a bit thin on PCIe lanes. You get basically 16x for a GPU and 4x for everything else, which could be entirely taken up by a single NVMe SSD. Then all your additional lanes are on the chipset and share a 4x link to the CPU/RAM.

    That might be a bit limiting in the long term. We already have USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt that will saturate the chipset's bandwidth. You can split the 16x link into to 8x slots with minimal performance loss but still... Expect motherboards to have a bunch of 1x slots and a compromised second NVMe slot that splits lanes from the first one.

    That may not matter, it might be better to save money now over Threadripper and just upgrade in a few years when it becomes an issue. Also Threadripper tends not to perform so well in games so if you game it might not be an option.

    • Re:Longevity (Score:5, Informative)

      by spth ( 5126797 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:32AM (#59399174)

      The news is about the new generation of Threadripper; with the currently available TRX40 chipset advertized by AMD as "72 available PCIe 4.0 lanes" [heise.de]

      You get 56 lanes directly from the processor. And 16 from the chipset. The connection between processor and chipset is 8 lanes, which would only be a bottle neck if you really use PCIe 4.0 speed on the 16 lanes from the chipset.

      If you need more than 72 lanes, you'll have to wait for boards with the TRX80 or WRX80 chipset.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Threadripper is more than enough for almost any workstation type scenario. Since I don't play modern games much (well, maybe FS 2020 when it comes out) it's tempting to go for that and future proof the system in the expectation that I'd keep it for many years.

        My current system has parts dating back to 2007, with the CPU and mobo from 2012. It's the lack of PCIe lanes that is pushing me to upgrade it, nothing else.

    • Re:Longevity (Score:5, Informative)

      by Pravetz-82 ( 1259458 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:45AM (#59399186)
      Ryzen has PCI-E 4.0 which has twice the bandwidth of PCI-E 3.0/3.1 (where Intel's at currently).
      In the example given in TFS, they are comparing it to i9-9920X which has 44 lanes, but they are PCI-E 3.0.
      AMD is only at slight disadvantage while the GPU, Storage etc. manufacturers catch up and switch over to PCI-E 4.0. If you use 3.0/3.1 devices in 4.0 slots you will be essentially wasting half of the bandwidth of those slots. Kinda like plugging USB2 devices in USB3 slots.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Thing is many cards are only PCIe 3.0 and since Intel is not going to support 4.0 at all (they are going straight to 5.0 apparently) maybe there won't be that many.

        At this point it's really hard to know if PCIe 4.0 is helpful or not.

        • by ReneR ( 1057034 )
          if Intel is going straight to PCIe 5.0 then only because they were so lazy and overslept PCIe 4. Obviously most vendors will first go to PCIe4 given the complexity and frequencies involved. Certainly AMD will ship PCIe 5 in time peripherals like their own GPUs are available, too.
          • if Intel is going straight to PCIe 5.0 then only because they were so lazy and overslept PCIe 4.

            Or they were preoccupied with their yield issues, the latter seeming more probable.

        • At this point it's really hard to know if PCIe 4.0 is helpful or not.

          It's helpful for the chipset and the NVMe which is where you're likely to see a limitation if you have some strange use case that actually is able to push the PCIe lanes to their limit. Currently GPUs don't even make full utilization of the PCIe 3.0 lanes they have.

    • Re:Longevity (Score:4, Informative)

      by ebrandsberg ( 75344 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @11:19AM (#59399716)

      the new Ryzen desktop chips have 16x for GPU, 4x dedicated for an m.2, and then another 4xx dedicated for other stuff. These are also PCIE4 lanes, so this is equivelent to an Intel chip having 32x for GPU, 8x dedicated for m.2, and 8x dedicated for other stuff. It is only the rare case where you are going to overflow this with a desktop system, and in that case, you are now in HEDT territory, which is what Threadripper is for.

    • by jon3k ( 691256 )

      4x for everything else, which could be entirely taken up by a single NVMe SSD

      The new X570 chipset includes PCIe 4.0 support which means x4 would be almost 8GB/s (64Gb/s) throughput. I don't think there's any concerns of saturating that with a single NVMe SSD.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Corsair Force MP600 has read speeds just shy of 5GB/sec, so if you had two they would be constrained by lack of PCIe lanes. People make RAID0 stripes out of them now with 9GB/sec+ performance, and of course they will continue to get faster over time.

        Maybe 9GB/sec isn't something you need... But I'm expecting there to be some interesting applications in future. This is as fast as DDR3 RAM so although there is additional latency compared to RAM I think it's hard to predict where this will go in future.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • but it's a bit thin on PCIe lanes

      Ryzen 3 provides 16x PCIe 4.0 lanes to the GPU, 4x PCIe 4.0 lanes to the NVMe slot, and 4x PCIe 4.0 lanes to the chipset.

      Nothing on the consumer market saturates those links. This will become relevant if you're running a highspeed renderbox, or throwing multiple GPUs in for an AI calculation farm.

      It's not a case of a few years either. We're in a realm where GPUs don't even saturate the 16x PCIe 3.0 lanes, and they have double the bandwidth to play with now. NVMe storage is already blazingly fast to the poin

    • by etash ( 1907284 )
      intel troll is obvious. this is about threadripper.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Intel has ever fewer PCIe lanes on their consumer models and their Xeon stuff is way over-priced compared to AMD.

  • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:05AM (#59399148) Journal

    I saw "Optimized for liquid cooling" on the marketing blurb. That's an entertainingly optimistic way of saying "too hot for air cooling".

    • by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <mashiki@gmail.cBALDWINom minus author> on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:48AM (#59399188) Homepage

      No what it means is that the form factor design for an air cooler would be prohibitive to the current design of minimalist cases. And minimialist designs have been the big thing in the enthusist market for the last 7-8 years. Look at say the cooler master hyper 212 and variations, they're still rated as one of the best aftermarket coolers to have ever been made. They're quiet, have good air flow, but they're big, heavy, and have serious installation issues. Everything from causing motherboards to break to absolute pain in the ass installation.

      Liquid cooling on the other hand, especially closed loop designs have come so far down in price that they're on par with the cost of the 212 and other quiet but beefy designs.

    • Modern high end air coolers can dissipate 300w or more while being quieter than liquid cooling and cheaper. See the entirety of the Noctua lineup.

      • by raynet ( 51803 )

        Only thing watercooling has over high end air coolers is thermal mass, thus it can handle sudden heat spikes better, but those are quite rare, usually the CPU is mostly idle or doing something for several minutes before going back to idle.

        • Actually no. Watercooling has thermal transfer over aircooling. Aircooled systems have thermal mass to boot, and most sudden heat spikes take a long time to actually saturate an air cooler.

          As for heatspikes being quite rare, that is also the exact opposite of true. Most modern CPUs clock down massively when idle pushing only a few degrees above ambient. Doing practically anything causes heatspikes, which is why it's so bloody frustrating that we're still doing primitive cooling design such as regulating fan

      • Modern high end air coolers can dissipate 300w or more while being quieter than liquid cooling and cheaper.

        Generalizations like that will get you into trouble.
        There's probably a grain of truth to it, but from a thermodynamic perspective, shipping heat via a coolant to a radiator that is larger than you could conceivable fix on the processor will absolutely yield superior cooling at lower sound volume, and the same amount of airflow can be achieved by a lower RPM fan.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          >that is larger than you could conceivable fix on the processor

          This is the part of the equation that you're not understanding. Modern tower coolers have a tremendous amount of surface for forced convection. It's why they can run into three digits USD today, the sheer amount of thin but wide fins interlinked by heat pipes is quite amazing. While you can hypothetically have a greater surface on the exhaust part of a water cooler, most modern water cooler "heat dump" parts are designed to be mounted on one

          • Surface area hasn't been a limiting factor for air coolers since the Pentium 4 days. There's a reason why heatpipes are common place now, there's a reason why higher thermal loads require vapour chambers, and there's a reason why both of the above are outperformed by AIOs hitting the market (though I'm waiting for an AIO with built in vapour chamber as the ultimate in current cooling tech.

            High tower coolers are great at dissipating heat, but suck at transferring it away from the CPU.

      • Modern high end air coolers can dissipate 300w or more while being quieter than liquid cooling and cheaper. See the entirety of the Noctua lineup.

        Okay a few things you're missing with your oversimplified comment. The first being the comment about "quiet". No, there's no air cooler on the market that can match the cooling capability of a passive radiator. The ability to cool a computer without spinning fans tops out at very low power CPUs.

        Secondly. 300W? What is this, amateur hour? 300W is the amount of cooling provided by small crap 240mm radiators. A normal watercooling system typically provides 500W, with most enthusiasts typically doing dual 360 r

    • by etash ( 1907284 )
      another intel butthurt found. trying to find problem, when the obvious metric is performance and intel gets stomped to death by amd since the last ryzen let alone threadripper. intel doesn't make a good job of paying you.
  • The other Ryzen 3...G processors are architecturally Ryzen 2... processors with graphics so I wonder what the Athlon 3000G is.
    As for me, my previous PC pretty much went belly up after the original Ryzen line was released but before it became widely available. I'd like to buy one but can't justify it to myself at present - in particular because the system I bought back then is not *that* much slower.

    • 2 non-hyperthreaded Ryzen 2 cores with a Vega 3 unit and 8 PCIe lanes available (8 used onboard by Vega).

  • With a processor like that, Factorio could probably run a huge factory!
  • by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Sunday November 10, 2019 @09:04AM (#59399488)
    In other news: Programmers consume 500% of processor power before the chip is ready for market with unwanted features and bloatware.
  • So, obviously, I want one of these. Oddly, I had been trying to hold on to my antique 2600k for as long as I could, hoping that CPU prices would come down.

    Currently, it's no fun exporting youtube video that takes hours. I spent over a month re-rendering my Rhino3D resume in Cycles, which mostly ran on the video card, but for those projects too large to run on the GPU, so the machine would run for 36 hours at a time n the CPU.

    I did some Paraview visualizations for an optical experiment. The results are one y

  • So what is a "Desktop" CPU anyway? It sounds like a category carefully designed to exclude processors faster than AMD's latest offering. There are low-power processors used for laptops and tablets, and I can see that AMD's latest chip outperforms all of those. But why exclude chips such as the lower end of Intel's Xeon line? You can easily run them in desktop PCs and they are sold for that purpose. Indeed, they don't necessarily cost any more than the latest "enthusiast" parts.

    Surely the hardware compa

    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      The design parameters for high volume high performance server CPUs are different to those for single CPU multifunction desktop CPUs.

      If you're doing one thing you can focus on doing it really really well. If you're trying to do everything well you don't have the luxury of sacrificing various things in order to focus.

      So yeah, desktop vs other CPUs is a reasonable comparison to make.

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