The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores
by Ian Cutress on August 6, 2018 9:00 AM ESTEnough Jibber-Jabber, Show Me the Money Chips
All-in-all, the new chips look a lot like the old ones:
AMD sampled us the 2990WX and the 2950X for our launch day review. Both of these CPUs are coming out in August, first with the 2990WX on the 13th, and then with the 2950X on the 31st.
On the rear, there are slightly different component arrangements to account for the different dies that are active:
2990WX (left) and 2950X (right)
The packaging is certainly different, with AMD taking into account the public's commentary about the packaging from the first generation. My only feedback to AMD on this is to make the new CPU packaging stackable – as a reviewer having these chips around un-stacked is an organizational nightmare.
Also in the box is a Torx screwdriver for the socket and an Asetek water cooler bracket, as with the first generation.
If we add some EPYCness to the mix, there’s a pretty pattern. Here are 172 cores of Zen:
AMD also bundled two motherboards with the press kits: a second revision of the ASUS X399 Zenith Extreme, with a new VRM cooling kit, and the MSI X399 MEG Creation, the 19-phase monster seen at Computex.
At first, Summer wasn’t interested.
Then she had a sniff.
Now they are good friends. I think. (ed: Ian, if you kill that processor with static electricity, I will end you)
A side note about stacking. The processors do kind of stack on their own.
But this isn’t an advised strategy.
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gipper51 - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
It is comical the number of folks who think the only purpose for a high end PC is to play games.rocky12345 - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
This is true 100% I blame a lot of it on the tech sites (not Anandtech of coarse) that try to focus on gaming with CPU's that clearly are made for more than just gaming yes they can game but CPU's like this are designed for so much more. When Anandtech's review comes out I am sure they will have the proper tests done for CPU's like this and yes they may also through in a few games just to show that these CPU's can also do a bit of gaming which is fine.edzieba - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
"Make a list of the top 15 reasons people who actually do work and could use a high-end workstation to take care of business. Now question: will the Core i9-7980XE be faster atany single one?"I'm in the middle of a rush rollout of quad-core machines to replace several tens of thousands (workdwide, only a 'few' thousand in this building) of dual-octacore-CPU workstations because before purchase and rollout, nobody bothered to look at users' actual workloads. Turns out threaded workloads were exceptionally rare, so all the monster workstations were utterly worthless in real world performance compared to the 'low spec' machines the back office staff were using.
Pretty much any highly threaded workload has already been offloaded to a GPU (or Phi) coprocessor, or moved entirely to a remote HPC cluster. For desktop workstations, threaded workloads are the exception rather than the rule.
edzieba - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
And this is at a Fortune 5 company, who not only should know better but were repeatedly told their purchasing decision was a terrible mistake. But it's hard to fight simple "more cores is more better!" marketing with specific-use-case benchmarking numbers, eyes start to glaze over.mapesdhs - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Also shows that the very people employed to provide proper advice on such things are often the first to be ignored. Been through that lunacy several times when I was a sysadmin.johnnycanadian - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Oh man -- I know this may sound quite unethical and downright sketch, but hopefully you, as an enthusiast, can get a few of the older machines sent your way to noodle around with ... or build your own (somewhat TDP/performance obsolete) data centre! :-)edzieba - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Nope, they take Data Remanence very seriously (and a good chunk of the drives pass through my hands anyway). A machine that went walking out the building without being processed through bag & tag and scanned by the disposal service would make a lot of people very upset and generally be considered a bad move.rocky12345 - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
Yea they would rather have them sent to the recycle plant and destroyed most likely once the hard drives are removed of coarse. I am just guessing that they send them to the recycle plant to get destroyed maybe they send them off for donations for all I know without the hard drives..lolguyr - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
edzieba: "Turns out threaded workloads were exceptionally rare, so all the monster workstations were utterly worthless in real world performance compared to the 'low spec' machines the back office staff were using."Certain industries benefit greatly. I worked in software development, and many-core workstations are a great benefit. Developers typically run the entire stack locally: database, app/web server, and client, so they can find where the problems are without affecting coworkers. Each one of those platforms is multi-threaded (or multi-process), so 40+ threads is common.
Your general point is true, and has been for decades: be aware of your runtime environment, and allocate resources which reflect those realities.
jospoortvliet - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
I must say it surprised me to discover even excel and other office apps are slowly going multithreaded though... as are browsers, with Chrime earlier and now Firefox leading. If you can do even CSS and JavaScript multithreaded every normal computer user suddenly benefits. I doubt they get benefit beyond 16 threads soon but a hyperthreaded octacore is finally useful for a normal user and ibcannimagine a heavy multitasking desktop office worker keeping 16 real/32 logical cores busy. I know i have run out of space on my quad-core years ago and i hope AMD brings more than 8 cores to mainstream soon as threadripper is a tad expensive...