Threadripper Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/30...cpu-review

With the launch of the Threadripper 3960X and 3970X,SEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce AMD has taken a decisive leadership position in the high-end desktop market. I’m not going to say that Intel doesn’t build chips that could take on the Threadripper 3970X — it does — but it doesn’t sell them in this space or for these kinds of prices.

Intel’s dramatic price cuts make Cascade Lake objectively a far better deal than any previous Intel Core X CPU. If you bought into Skylake X with, say, a 7900X for $1,000, a 10980XE for $1,000 may be the best upgrade path for your machine (assuming, of course, that you can use the extra cores). At the same time, however, it’s hard to ignore the fact that AMD’s 16-core is now beating Intel’s 18-core in a number of tests. For now, Cascade Lake’s 50 percent price cut will make plenty of people happy, but the Ryzen 9 3950X is nipping at the heels of Intel’s HEDT product line.

If the 3950X represents the dog nipping at the back of Intel’s heels, the 3960X and 3970X are the 24-ton and 32-ton elephants sitting on its head. [That’s quite a scene happening here. -Ed] These chips offer amazing, unbeatable performance that Intel cannot match in the short term. It’s not clear when Chipzilla will field a product that can rival what AMD has dropped in-market today.

Last year, the 2990WX had too many flaws and shortcomings to be considered a serious product. The 3970X fixes them. Its gaming performance is excellent. Its application performance is phenomenal. Intel has been driven back to a barricade built on 1080p gaming and lightly threaded workloads that are well-tuned for its CPU cores. Given Intel’s long-standing dominance of the market, that barricade is a good deal stronger than it may look to AMD’s most adoring fans — but the company has been driven backward, make no mistake.

Cascade Lake will not be driven from the field. While its performance was a bit odd in places, the Core i9-10980XE delivers some nice additional single-threaded performance. But the excitement and energy in the PC desktop market right now is being driven by AMD. The Threadripper 3970X and 3960X represent one of the largest leaps forward for high-end desktop computing that I’ve ever seen any company deliver.

Well done.

https://www.techpowerup.com/261460/amd-p...0x-in-2020

AMD is hours away from market-availability and reviews of its 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper HEDT processors, which includes two models at launch, the 24-core 3960X, and the 32-core 3970X, with prices starting at USD $1,399. The two are closely related to the 2nd generation EPYC "Rome" server processor family, which we know includes core-counts going all the way up to 64. It was hence obvious that a 64-core Threadripper will launch at some point, and that point is 2020, and the part goes by the name 3990X.

The slide detailing the 3990X mentions its core count of 64-core/128-thread, total cache (L2 + L3), which is a staggering 288 MB, and TDP of "just" 280 W. There is no mention of the chip's clock-speeds, and with the 3970X already priced close to $2,000, one can expect even higher prices for a chip with double the core count. At some point these products stop being HEDT and enter the realm of workstations. Intel's short-term response to even the 3970X could be limited to somehow sell the 28-core "Cascade Lake-SP" with quasi-HEDT branding the way it sells the Xeon W-3175X, and on a different platform than the X299.

https://www.techpowerup.com/261465/hedt-...ontroversy

The review embargoes on AMD's and Intel's processors were originally scheduled to lift simultaneously, but Intel did something that angered multiple reviewers. The company pulled its review embargo forward by 6 hours, hoping that reviews that come out at the earlier NDA time can't include data on AMD 3rd gen Threadripper performance, which is embargo'd until later. These reviews could then influence HEDT purchase decisions without giving people exposure on AMD's parts. Prominent YouTube-based journalist Linus Sebastian of LinusTechTips, who keeps a cooler head than his sub-zero hardware on camera, made unprecedented comments highlighting Intel's decision to "chicken out" of direct comparisons with competing AMD hardware. In an innovative move, Sebastian blurred out performance graphs of possible AMD chips without changing their positions in graphs sorted "higher is better" or "lower is better," to suggest that something faster than Intel's chips exists. Technically that is "revealing performance data", but it seems unlikely that AMD will complain. Another prominent publication, AnandTech, refused to post its Intel review before the embargo on its AMD review lifts; just so it could include AMD data in its Intel review (and vice versa).

From the 10th gen Intel Core XE reviews we've read/watched, there is a consensus that with nearly identical IPC to "Skylake-X," and the same 14 nm process as the previous generation, Intel cannot possibly compete with 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper, and that the Core i9-10980XE will not be the fastest HEDT processor you can buy, by a long shot. In nearly all tests, the i9-10980XE offers similar performance levels to the previous-generation i9-9980XE, which it shares nominal clock-speeds with. DLBoost, which accelerates AI applications, is mentioned in most reviews, but none delved too deep into practical applications of the instruction-set, let alone comparative performance benchmarks.