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AMD Intel Hardware Technology

AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-Core Beast Spotted Outscoring Dual Intel Xeon Platinum (hothardware.com) 98

Posted by BeauHD from the numbers-don't-lie dept.
MojoKid writes: When AMD unveiled its forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core processor at CES 2020 this year, the company made no bones about comparing its performance to a many-core competitive platform from Intel. Under the hood of the yet formally released high-end workstation AMD chip are 64 physical cores capable of processing 128 threads in SMT, with a 2.9GHz base clock, 4.3GHz boost clock, and 256MB of L3 cache. All that horsepower resides in a single TRX40 socket with a 280 Watt TDP for a suggested retail price of $3990. Conversely, a dual socket Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum 8280 setup will sport 56 cores across two sockets with over a 400 Watt TDP that costs around $20,000. At CES, AMD showed its new 64-core Threadripper beating the dual Xeon Platinum setup in a 3D rendering application called VRAY, and today additional benchmark numbers have surfaced in SiSoft SANDRA, showing Threadripper 3990X out-scoring the Intel setup by around 18 percent. No doubt, AMD's Threadripper 3900X isn't a CPU for the average mainstream desktop user, but when the chips arrive to market in the near future, workstation and content creation professionals will likely be all over AMD's new 64-core beast chip.
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AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-Core Beast Spotted Outscoring Dual Intel Xeon Platinum More

AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-Core Beast Spotted Outscoring Dual Intel Xeon Platinum

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  • Intel Price Gouging (Score:3)

    by pefisher ( 774697 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @06:33PM (#59687158)
    Am I the only one who thinks Intel's Xeon prices are too high? I mean, way too high? I am asking because I am truly curious. Are my perceptions skewed? Or is it Intel?

    • No. You're not the only one.

    • Re:Intel Price Gouging (Score:5, Informative)

      by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @06:50PM (#59687218)

      Xeons are for morons.
      You can get more for about half the price by going with AMD.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

        Not always the dual Xeon can handle a lot more ram so if you are using it for VMs it can be an advantage. However, Eypc is the real competition in that space.

        • Not always the dual Xeon can handle a lot more ram so if you are using it for VMs it can be an advantage. However, Eypc is the real competition in that space.

          If you're talking more than a terabyte then yeah. Threadripper was never meant to be a server part. Then again for a 64 core non-server part it still supports plenty of ram for vm's. A terabyte of ram is nothing to sneeze at. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/a... [wikichip.org]

      • yep....just as long as you don't need a lot of memory of course. then the AMD's are pretty bad.

        • Where did you get that from?

          • Spec sheets are a good start. Of the two chips being compared here the Xeon has a 500% higher memory capacity.

            • Hate replying to myself but since you're probably going to miss this fact: Look at the RAM requirements for TR parts and what is available on the market. You literally cannot buy components with any amount of money to reach the advertised capacity given AMD's on chip memory controller's limited support for memory channels.

            • Of the two chips being compared

              What "two chips"? It literally said "going with AMD". AMD currently supports 4 TB of memory on their equivalent of Xeons. Do Xeons support 24 TB of memory?

            • Didn't ask you.

        • What exactly is "a lot of memory" to you?

        • yep....just as long as you don't need a lot of memory of course. then the AMD's are pretty bad.

          The 3990X supports up to a Terabyte of memory. If you need more than a terabyte then an enterprise server running EPYC is the way to go instead as they are still cheaper than Intel. Check the numbers: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/a... [wikichip.org]

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • In this case it's 18% more for 1/5th the price, and that is not even considering the additional cost of the second socket and thermonuclear power supply.

      • Meanwhile, AMD seems to have gone with "cute" pricing:

        "Ryzen Threadripper 3990X .. for a suggested retail price of $3990."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Especially now, yeah. I mean, sometimes you just need to throw a lot of local processing at a problem and traditionally Xeons have been the only way to accomplish that. But dropping five digits on a processor always feels a little weird to me. I really want to try a Threadripper for my video processing applications but don't really have the budget for a new machine at the moment.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Am I the only one who thinks Intel's Xeon prices are too high? I mean, way too high? I am asking because I am truly curious. Are my perceptions skewed? Or is it Intel?

      Intel knows that enterprise customers are quite conservative and won't rush to go AMD, they very much know how to run a business and extract maximum profit. As a gear head you feel it's too high, as a bean counter they probably think it's just right. You're probably both right depending on what measuring stick you use. They'll drop the price when they have to and not a moment sooner, was the same with 1st gen Ryzen/TR/Epyc too. Intel was twice the price until there was competition, then they shamelessly dum

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by oic0 ( 1864384 )
        At work, I would love to switch to AMD... but we use VMware and vmotion doesn't work between AMD and Intel machines. We would have to either segregate things or replace all the hosts at once. That's pretty much all that's stopping us.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rklrkl ( 554527 )

          I'm not familiar with VMware, but I know Proxmox can specify a "machine type" for VMs to use. Apparently, the Ivy Bridge profile is the one to use if Reddit [reddit.com] is to be believed. No idea if VMware can specify the CPU/machine type in a similar manner though.

        • Sounds like an argument for getting rid of all the Intels, not just some of them. Anyway, VMware isn't the company it once was technically. Should be looking at getting off that lock-in train.

      • Yah, no. The additional socket costs bags of money as does the power and HVAC. You are talking about increasing the cost of a data center by %40% while decreasing the aggregate throughput. Any bean counter who thinks that makes sense needs to be rooted out and disposed of ASAP, or the company is going down in flames.

    • Nope. But for my group, it has become moot. Out newest servers are AMD.

    • They definitely were in the the past. The 10980XE is a full $1k cheaper than it's predecessor. It's probably true for their server models as well.

      • They are still like that today. I was looking for a 6900K for ages, to replace my 6800K (X99 platform).
        Came to the conclusion this kind of upgrade would be stupid. 6900K selles for insane amounts, despite being an old generation, and for that money I can buy a Threadripper 1st gen together with a motherboard.

    • Well people are paying them so the answer would be no.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      Well, you can buy a rack server with two Xeon chips inside for around $900 so really it's pretty pointless looking at the CPU price.

      Work with a vendor to determine the server capacity you require and get a quote for that. That's where it'll be interesting to see the difference between Intel and AMD.

    • it's definitely Intel , it's always been like that, im not sure if the other bit has changed : the fact that an AMD cpu saves you a lot on heating in the winter as it doubles for a stove might or not have changed yet either. I don't have the money anymore to follow up and this internet fad seems to have taken to 99% out of 10.000 reviews say its always the best no matter what you look for on top .. so i tend to be more confused than i already naturally am which leaves a lot of chaos around

  • I imagine that RAM is going to be the bottle-neck for a 64-core processor. It would be interesting to see some benchmarks that explore the returns of using more cores for different tasks. My guess is that that last core doesn't add much performance at all.

    (I'm trying to convince myself that I will never need a 64-core processor.)

    • I'm trying to convince myself that I will never need a 64-core processor

      I'm a little more realistic. I'm trying to convince myself that I won't need a 64-core processor this year.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • This TR generation is much less numa than the previous due to the symmetric memory controller/IO hub. Anyway, it's more cores than you need, not that the article mentions "workstation and content creation professionals". I would add to that, developers who do a lot of compiling. Do you do a lot of compiling? If you, how much is your time worth?

      • I don't need this. I want it.

    • There are plenty of parallel applications that aren't bottlenecked by RAM.
      But many of those applications are better run on a GPU, which is cheaper and has even more cores.

      • And many of those applications branch too much to run well on a GPU, or the instruction cache footprint is too big, hence the benefit of a bigass CPU.

    • amd has more PCI-E lanes as well.

    • The new xTR40 also boost the RAM speed in addition to supporting quad channel memory (current boards are dual channel) with up to 32GB per slot. RAM shouldn’t be a problem.

    • I imagine that RAM is going to be the bottle-neck for a 64-core processor.

      Ya think. That's why it's big news that this Threadripper gen does 4 channels. That and improved hypertransport and it does pretty well, obviously.

  • No.

    The 3990X maxes out at 256GB RAM. Dual Xeon goes into the terabytes of RAM. RAM wins out over cycles for crunching large amounts of data any day.

    • Get an Epyc 7702P for $4800 on newegg for max 2TB of RAM if that's what you need.

    • The older 2990WX supports up to 2 TB or RAM. I am uncertain of the 3990X but it will be safe to assume it supports >= 2TB. It will probably be limited by motherboard design and the maximum capacity of available DIMMs.
      • Are you sure? For that amount of memory you'd need RDIMMs or LRDIMMs, while the Threadripper 2990WX only supports UDIMMs [servethehome.com], making for a max of 256G (with 8*32G UDIMMs, and 32G UDIMMs are not terribly easy to find).

        • Quick answer, no. Information was found from this [wikichip.org] link. But larger, 64GB UDIMMs are readily available from NewEgg. And if you look under server memory you see that 128 GB UDIMMs are also available - but way too expensive for most people.

          So while Threadripper might theoretically support 2 TB of RAM, it could easily be a relic before the required DIMMs are available.

          • Link? I don't see any 64G UDIMMs on NewEgg. This [newegg.com] is the only one that says UDIMM in the title, but then in the description it say LRDIMM, which I'm apt to believe over the title.

            Certainly larger DIMMs are broadly available, but only in RDIMM and LRDIMM formats, and those don't work with Threadripper.

            • I admit defeat... They are indeed all LRDIMMs. That being said, the only reason why UDIMMs are not available is a lack of market demand. The argument that Intel chips are better due to greater available memory will hopefully be short lived. If the Threadripper processors generate a demand then it will not take long for that demand to get filled. And this would be great because I like the idea of an ITX motherboard based system with a large amount of RAM - and such system only support 2 DIMMs.

        • 32GB EUDIMMs are now widely available in retail channels (last year and in prior years they were mostly only available in commercial channels). You can buy them on Amazon.

          64GB and 128GB EUDIMMs are only available in commercial channels insofar as I can tell. And expensive as hell... and have to be run at 2133 due to the line load. Not really the best fit for a threadripper, honestly. If you need that sort of capacity you would be buying an EPYC and not a TR.

          -Matt

          • 32GB EUDIMMs are now widely available in retail channels (last year and in prior years they were mostly only available in commercial channels). You can buy them on Amazon.

            64GB and 128GB EUDIMMs are only available in commercial channels insofar as I can tell. And expensive as hell... and have to be run at 2133 due to the line load. Not really the best fit for a threadripper, honestly. If you need that sort of capacity you would be buying an EPYC and not a TR.

            -Matt

            They are also on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/OLOy-Me... [amazon.com]

    • Re:No (Score:5, Informative)

      by bblb ( 5508872 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @07:46PM (#59687430)

      The 3990X is a desktop processor, not a server processor, with zero need or intent to address more than 256GB of RAM. You're comparing totally disparate processors in an attempt to defend Intel's lineup.

      If you want to compare equivalent chips, the Epyc 7742 can address 4TB of RAM compared to 4.5TB for the Xeon Platinum 9282... and the 7742 has nearly twice the cache negating any advantage to be had from that extra 12.5% RAM compared to the Intel chip.

      The fact is, AMD's chips are superior to Intel's offerings in nearly every way at this point... and they'll likely continue to be for the foreseeable future. Intel is behind and by a large margin, with a lot of catching up to do.

      • Where's the data? You can't make a claim like that without the data to back it up unless you simply want to come across as an internet fanboy. If you want to try to influence the people making or influencing purchasing decisions you have to have hard data to backup a claim like that. I think it is reasonable to say that Slashdot has a fair number of readers who are influencers and decision makers in the enterprise.

        If you want to influence enterprise decision makers you need consistent results from a range o

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bblb ( 5508872 )

          Both Amazon and Google began using AMD chips more than a year ago and have steadily escalated their acquisitions of AMD vs Intel since then... In August, Twitter began using their chips in their datacenter as well.

          They're well past your "quarter or two" of staying ahead and the only people that doubt that are Intel fanboys who don't know what they're talking about. Intel isn't a dying company by any measure but their days of uncontested dominance in datacenter environments and position as the top dog in wor

          • I'm not attached to a particular opinion. I'm more than willing to change my mind when presented with new facts. Indeed it looks like Google acknowledged this a few months ago. Notably, nothing there says that they are abandoning Intel:
            https://cloud.google.com/blog/... [google.com]

            That being said Amazon and Google have long built their own hardware including things like network switches:
            https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]

            Those certainly haven't trickled down to the general enterprise data center. That being said I think G

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bblb ( 5508872 )

          ...and just for the record, I'm an unrepentant Intel fanboy and have never owned an AMD chip personally and also refused to purchase them professionally in nearly 20 years of managing server and datacenter infrastructure.

          But that's always been based on the facts, and those facts now say AMD has taken a considerable leap forward while Intel has little progress comparatively.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @10:22PM (#59687734)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      The 3990X supports 1 TB of RAM, with AMD saying it can theoretically handle 2 TB. The problem is that there don't appear to currently be any motherboards that support more than 256 GB. That will presumably change, we're talking about a CPU that isn't even out yet.

    • Let's correct a few misconceptions:
      1.) sTRX4 boards currently available only support 256GB of RAM
      2.) The 3990X by itself can support up to 1Tb at it's max.
      https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/a... [wikichip.org]

  • Error in the Summary (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nichogenius ( 3606787 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @07:52PM (#59687438)

    No doubt, AMD's Threadripper 3900X isn't a CPU for the average mainstream desktop user

    The 3900x is not a threadripper part... it's a 12 core high end consumer grade part. This is a slight oversight by the person writing the article summary and should be corrected.

  • So when do we start rooting (Score:4, Funny)

    by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @11:15PM (#59687812)

    for the Intel underdog?

  • You feel like you've been Raped, even if it's only being peed on.

    You're getting an advantage, even if the other people are getting the same stuff for less money, no rape, and no humiliation.

    Yes, the single thread performance is ahead by a fraction, but that's just Intel's "I already came" in Silicon.

  • More on the ram (Score:4, Interesting)

    by m.dillon ( 147925 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @03:48AM (#59688260) Homepage

    Ram capacity for the retail AMD chips like the 3900X or 3950X (really any Zen 2 AM4 chip), and both Zen+ and Zen 2 threadripper chips, is limited by the fact that there is only support for unbuffered DIMMs.

    People trying to compare Xeons against TRs based on wanting to stuff a terrabyte or more of ram wouldn't be buying a TR for that, they would be buying EPYCs, so its a stupid comparison. Its also stupid because Intel charges thousands of dollars more for Xeons with large physical address spaces (even with recent price cuts, Intel gouges buyers just for wanting more addressable ram even if they don't need the cores).

    I have personally stuffed 128GB into a 3900X (AM4 socket) using 4 x 32GB ECC UDIMMs, and 256GB into a 2990WX (threadripper socket) using 8x of the same type of memory. I can run the memory at up to around 2666.

    Insofar as I know, one can use 64GB DIMMs in both situations (256GB on AM4 and 512GB on TR), and I think 128GB DIMMs can be used on the TR. But since they are unbuffered, they would have to at low frequencies (1066 MHz for a 2133 MHz data rate). But the biggest DIMMs I personally own are 32GB each so I can't test higher capacities.

    AM4 and TR Motherboard vendors do not generally validate for high-capacity memory, which is why they list lower capacities, but I they all support high-capacity memory just fine.

    Very few people need that much memory even on a threadripper. We need it for bulk compiles... around 2GB per cpu thread, so we need around 128GB of ram with a 32-core/64-thread threadripper and 256GB of ram with a 64-core/128-thread threadripper (the 3990X releases on February 7th). Most other (likely) workloads do not need that amount of memory though, particularly when one can get NVMe storage devices with 5GByte/sec bandwidths.

    The EPYC chips support 2TB per cpu socket (4TB total for dual-socket EPYCs), using registered DIMMs.

    --

    The bigger deal with the threadrippers is the massive PCIe bandwidth. Not only do you get 128 PCIe lanes (actually more when you include the chipset), but the Zen 2 I/O hub built into the cpu chip has over 400 GBytes/sec of peer-to-peer bandwidth. Intel chips clock in at more around 100 GBytes/sec (or less).

    DRAM bandwidth is roughly the same for both vendors, but AMD cleans Intel's clock out on peer-to-peer PCIe bandwidth and this is quickly going to become important in the commercial space.

    -Matt

    • This irks me. AMD advertises 2TB as the max memory support for their TR chips, but their memory controller only provides for 4x dual channels meaning that to get 2TB you will need 8x 256GB LR-DIMM modules which don't exist on the market yet. TR doesn't support standard RDIMMs, and LR-DIMMs have only just been released with 128GB capacity.

      It's deceptive marketing. I mean not as deceptive as the shit Intel normally pulls, but still no one should get a free pass for this.

      • This irks me. AMD advertises 2TB as the max memory support for their TR chips, but their memory controller only provides for 4x dual channels meaning that to get 2TB you will need 8x 256GB LR-DIMM modules which don't exist on the market yet. TR doesn't support standard RDIMMs, and LR-DIMMs have only just been released with 128GB capacity.

        It's deceptive marketing. I mean not as deceptive as the shit Intel normally pulls, but still no one should get a free pass for this.

        Not really. TR4 motherboards only support up to 256GB as far as I know which AMD has very little control over. If anything this allows vendors to push for higher capacities hence the reason we are just now seeing more supported ram come out. You can't force vendors and chip makers to provide higher capacity components for your newly released hardware on day 1.

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