Threadripper Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd...x-review/6

We've done our best to show you the best of the Threadripper 3990X's performance, but we can't tell the whole performance story due to spotty software support for a processor of this class. Outside of AMD's targeted workloads, most software can't extract the best performance from this processor. We also encountered plenty of difficulties finding workloads that would scale in Windows on our server test platforms, largely due to the difficulties associated with NUMA. However, those challenges explain perfectly why this processor could find a profitable niche: A large number of applications don't scale well with NUMA architectures, particularly with Windows, which is the operating system of choice for visual effects artists.

AMD has plenty of experience in pushing the software ecosystem forward to support heavily threaded chips, and the company is already working with several companies to improve processor grouping support, and hopefully, industry-standard benchmarks like SPECWorkstation 3 will also get an upgrade.

In either case, the Threadripper 3990X is an incredibly impressive chip. Just three years ago, an eight-core $1,000 chip represented the best the industry had to offer on an HEDT platform, but now we have up to 64 cores and 128 threads at our disposal, and AMD says it won't slow down as it shrinks to smaller process nodes. As crazy as it sounds, we'll see higher core counts in the future. Hopefully the software and operating system ecosystems respond with performance-boosting optimizations so this kind of incredible performance benefits more types of workloads.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/30...pper-3990x

But the 3990X isn’t trying to be all things to all people. It’s the laurel wreath. It’s a victory lap. The 3970X is the CPU that’s actually intended to go toe-to-toe with what Intel has to offer; it’s the 3990X that clinches the deal, for the AMD customer for whom money is no object.

As for the significance of that? This is the first time in 15 years that AMD has had a product that competed for the “money is no object” segment in the first place. You have to go back to the days of dual-core Opteron and Athlon 64 FX, when AMD was facing off against Prescott and Smithfield, to find a time when AMD was so confident of its endgame to launch a part in this kind of position. Other reviewers, with access to more expensive Xeons than I have, have confirmed that AMD wins benchmarks against $20K worth of Xeon CPUs in multiple areas. That’s the kind of performance disparity that can make even the “Money is no object” crowd sit up and take notice.