Threadripper Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd...25-14.html

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX is nothing short of phenomenal in workloads that can utilize its arsenal of execution cores. Rendering is a good example. But it doesn't scale well in other applications. The distributed architecture leaves half of the processor's compute resources stranded from the memory and I/O controllers, which can drastically reduce performance in applications sensitive to bandwidth or PCIe traffic. Unless you have a very specific workload that can't get enough parallelism, you're better off with Threadripper 2950X.
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Considering the raw horsepower on offer, AMD's pricing is extremely competitive. Ryzen Threadripper 2950X kept pace with the $1700 Core i9-7960X in many of our tests, but sells for almost half of its price. Both Intel and AMD HEDT platforms are expensive, but X399 motherboards are particularly pricey, which you'll have to consider when weighing your options. Populating all four memory channels will also be expensive in these trying times, but that extra cost applies to both high end platforms.

While we still recommend the mainstream Ryzen 7 2700X or Core i7-8700K for gaming, they clearly can't keep pace with Threadripper in productivity-oriented applications. Intel's Skylake-X processors are still brutally competitive on the performance front, but the company needs to be adjust its pricing.

If you're after the utmost in threaded performance for the dollar, the Ryzen Threadripper 2 series delivers. AMD clearly takes the lead with the most raw computing power on the desktop PC market, and at ultra-competitive pricing. We can't wait to see Intel's response.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/...0X/20.html

With the introduction of these new Threadrippers, things are looking pretty shaky for Intel. The Core i9-7900X clearly cannot compete with the Threadripper 2950X at $900, and we doubt those two extra cores you get by paying $1000 for the i9-7920X will make much of a difference. Perhaps the best way forward for Intel would be to snap out of its arrogance, and price the i9-7900X at $700 (competitive to the Threadripper 2920X), and get the i9-7920X below the Threadripper 2950X. Perhaps the 14-core i9-7940X could be offered at $1000. We doubt Intel will make the right choice, and so for prosumers, the Threadripper 2950X takes the crown.

https://techreport.com/review/33977/amd-...eviewed/14

In other cases, software doesn't seem to know quite what to make of the 2990WX, as evidenced by our 7-zip compression results, the Indigo benchmark's "Bedroom" test scene, and our Veracrypt AES test. AMD acknowledges that the 2990WX's hardware might be in front of the software in some cases, so some patience might be required until developers can tune their applications to get the most from the chip. I'm fairly confident devs will be able to smooth out those wrinkles with time, but we have to judge the Ryzen 2990WX as it stands today.

One might be tempted to think a chip with this many cores and threads can handle both work and play, and that might be true for high-resolution gaming at sub-100-Hz refresh rates, but we'd still advise caution with the 2990WX after hours. We ran our high-refresh-rate 1920x1080 gaming tests on the 2990WX just to see what would happen, and it trails far behind the rest of the high-end desktop pack. On top of that, its sheer thread count and NUMA-ness seem capable of causing show-stopping playability problems with some titles, as our Far Cry 5 tests demonstrated.

To get around those issues, AMD lets owners shut off the 2990WX's compute dies or even reduce the chip to just one eight-core, 16-thread die through the Ryzen Master utility, and those measures do work. Still, those are Band-Aids, not panaceas. If for some reason you primarily envision yourself running this chip in its 16-core mode, the Threadripper 2950X is a much better choice and costs much less.

We're not holding gaming performance against the 2990WX, to be clear—high-end desktop platforms are rarely the right choice for gamers trying to push the most frames possible. Given the behavior we saw, though, developers may need to begin thinking about NUMA nodes and single-socket-server-like core counts as they refine today's titles and prototype tomorrow's.

If AMD works with software developers to address the issues we observed with some of our multithreaded benchmarks, we'll immediately crown the Threadripper 2990WX as the chip to get in the vast majority of ultra-high-end desktops. For the moment, though, I'm holding off on the full-throated endorsement a TR Editor's Choice award would imply.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/27...e-i9-7900x

It’s no accident that we talk about the Core i9-7980XE as a competitor for the Threadripper 2950X as opposed to the Core i9-7900X. Put simply, the Core i9-7900X didn’t match the Threadripper 1950X and it’s not going to match the 2950X any better. If you’re working heavily with AVX512 it may make sense to invest in an Intel HEDT CPU. If you aren’t, it’s hard to make that argument. Even in tests that heavily favor Intel, like Maxwell Render 4, the 16-core 2950X is still 1.29x faster than the Core i9-7900X — and $100 less expensive. Intel still leads in absolute single thread performance, but if you’re buying a 16-core CPU you clearly care about more than 1T. And if you care about more than 1T in the HEDT segment, AMD is offering an excellent value at every price point.