The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnalyzing Creator Mode and Game Mode
Way back on page 3, this review explained that AMD was promoting two modes: Creator Mode with all cores enabled and a uniform memory access (UMA) architecture, and Game Mode that disabled one of the dies and adjusted to a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA). The idea was that in Creator Mode you had all the threads and bandwidth, while Game Mode focused on compatibility with games that freaked out if you had too many cores, but also memory and core-to-core latency by pinning data as close to the core as possible, and keeping related threads all within the same Zeppelin die. Both methods have their positives and negatives, and although they can be enabled through a button press in Ryzen Master and a reboot, most users who care enough about these settings are likely to set it and forget it. (And then notice that if the BIOS resets, so does the settings…)
*This page has been edited on 8/17, due to a misinterpretation in the implementation of Game Mode. This original review has been updated to reflect this. We have written a secondary mini-article with fresh testing on the effects of Game Mode.
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verl - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
"well above the Ryzen CPUs, and batching the 10C/8C parts from Broadwell-E and Haswell-E respectively"??? From the Power Consumption page.
bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yep if you use AVX-512 it will down clock to 1.8Ghz and draw 400w just for the CPU alone and 600w from the wall. See der8auer's video title "The X299 VRM Disaster (en)", all x299 motherboards VRMs can be ran into thermal shutdown under avx 512 loads, with just a small overclock, not to mention avx512 crazy power consumption. That is why AMD didn't put avx 512 in Zen, it is power consumption monster.TidalWaveOne - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Glad I went with the 7820X for software development (compiling).raddude9 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
In ars' review they have TR-1950X ahead of the i9-7900X for compilation:https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/08/amd-thre...
In short it's very difficult to test compilation, every project you build has different properties.
emn13 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yeah, the discrepency is huge - converted to anandtech's compile's per day the arstechnica benchmark maxes out at a little less than 20, which is a far cry from the we see here.Clearly, the details of the compiler, settings and codebase (and perhaps other things!) matter hugely.
That's unfortunate, because compilation is annoyingly slow, and it would be a boon to know what to buy to ameliorate that.
prisonerX - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
This is very compiler dependent. My compiler is blazingly fast on my wimpy hardware becuase it's blazingly clever. Most compilers seem to crawl no matter what they run on.bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Looks like anandtech's benchmark for compiling is bunk, it's just way off from all the other benchmarks out there. Not only that, no other test shows a 20% improvement over the 6950x which is also a 10 core/20 thread cpu. Something tells me the 7900x is completely wrong or has something faster like a different pcie ssd.Chad - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
All I know is, for those of us running Plex, SABnzbd, Sonarr, Radarr servers simultaneously (and others), while encoding and gaming all simultaneously, our day has arrived!:)
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
We checked with Ars as to their method.We use a fixed late March build around v56 under MSVC
Ars use a fixed newer build around v62 via clang-cl using VC++ linking
Same software, different compilers, different methods. Our results are faster than Ars, although Ars' results seem to scale better.
ddriver - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Of every review out there, only your "superior testing methodology" presents a picture where TR is slower than SX.