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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lefty2 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
except that they haven'tDr. Swag - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
How so? You have the performance numbers, and they gave you power draw numbers...bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Just do a avx512 benchmark and Intel will jump over 300watts , 400watts(overclocked) only from the cpu. (prime95 avx512 benchmark).See der8auer's video "The X299 VRM Disaster (en)"DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
The Chromium build time results are interesting. Anandtech's results have the 1950X only getting 3/4ths of the 7900X's performance. Arstechnica's getting almost equal results on both CPUs, but at 16 compiles per day vs 24 or 32 is seeing significantly worse numbers all around.I'm wondering what's different between the two compile benchmarks to see such a large spread.
cknobman - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I think it has a lot to do with the RAM used by Anandtech vs Arstechnica .For all the regular benchmarking Anand used DDR4 2400, only the DDR 3200 was used in some overcloking.
Arstechnica used DDR4 3200 for all benchmarking.
Everyone already knows how faster DDR4 memory helps the Zen architecture.
DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
If ram was the determining factor, Ars should be seeing faster build times though not slower ones.carewolf - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Anandtech must have misconfigured something. Building chromium is scales practically linearly. You can move jobs all the way across a slow network and compile on another machine and you still get linear speed-ups with more added cores.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
We're using a late March v56 code base with MSVC.Ars is using a newer v62 code base with clang-cl and VC++ linking
We locked in our versions when we started testing Windows 10 a few months ago.
supdawgwtfd - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Maybe drop it then as it is not at all usefull info.Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I refrained from posting on the previous article, but now I'm quite sure Anand is being paid by Intel. It is not that I argue against the benchmarks, but how it is presented. I was even under the impression that this was an Intel review.The previous article was stated as "Introducing Intel's Desktop Processor" Huge marketing research is done on how to market products. By just stating one thing first or in a different way, quite different messages can be conveyed without lying outright.
By making the "Most Powerful, Most Scalable" Bold, that is what the readers read first, then they read "Desktop Processor" without even reading that is is Intel's. This is how marketing works, so Anand used slanted journalism to favour Intel, yet most people will just not realise it eat it up.
In this review there are so many slanted journalism problems, it is just sad. If you want, just compare it to other sites reviews. They just omit certain tests and list others at which Intel excel.
I have lost my respect for Anandtech with these last two articles of them, and I have followed Anandtech since its inception. Sad to see that you are also now bought by Intel, even though I suspected this before. Congratulations for making this so clear!!!