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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iwod - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
1. Multiple Thread application are INSANELY hard to write CORRECTLY. ( That is why we haveRUST )
2. There are still a lot of performance to be squeezed out from parallelism. As proved by Servo.
3. Because Software has to care about the lowest common denominator, that is why no one is optimising for 8 Core yet.
If we could push the bottom market to 8 Core, middle market to 16 and top end market to 32 Core, and each segment is then differentiated by its Full Core Speed. We may see software optimise for Multiple Core sooner.
The only problem is 1. There is no incentive for them to do so and 2. The computer we have today are fast enough for majority of use case.
Foeketijn - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
I'm now regulary waiting for excel to do some numbercrunching. 3 to 4 minutes 100% on all 8 threads (xeon e3 1240). I am wondering if such a threadripper would make that 20 to 30 seconds. If a 2700x would half that time, I am going to hit myself in the head for not going the threadripper route.BigDH01 - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
Depending on the nature of your formula graph in Excel the problem may not be easily to parallelize. Excel performs some tricks to try and determine if formulas can be calculated concurrently but they can and do fall victim to fragile nodes in their directed cyclic graphs. Even if your graph is very flat, they don't always get parallelism correct as maintaining those facts are either 1) hard to determine in a scalable manner 2) push a lot of state handling to the graph editing side of things which can cause massive slowdowns in user experience to make simple edits. Unfortunately, a lot of programs we use on the desktop aren't just hard to parallelize, but don't parallelize very well (far less than linear scaling). Traversing your graph while tracking state (because excel keeps track of circular dependencies) in the correct order is just a hard problem and even though they can pound your CPU by speculatively executing, you probably won't see a huge speedup unless you've taken steps to make your graph as flat as humanly possible. And if you are doing the latter, why not just use Access?Cooe - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
*facepalm*Then you obviously aren't the target market.
cerealspiller - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Legitimate is overrated :-)eastcoast_pete - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Go AMD, keep holding chipzilla's feet to the fire and their pricing honest (Intel just reported new record earnings, so there is room there).Unrelated, while I assume that the inactive dies in the cheaper TRs may well be dies that binned too low or are just defective, and are locked down better than Fort Knox, just out of interest: Has anybody tried and succeeded to bring back the dead, i.e. reactivate the inactive ones? Anybody? Even trying would, of course, immediately void your warranty, but maybe, just maybe, somebody tried. Would love to hear what happened, successful or not.
drajitshnew - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
I have thinking about the same thing since it was revealed that the inactive dies have also been etched by derbauer-- are not just pieces of silicon.I would like to read that review too.
Da W - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
And then somehow, you'll see on Tomshardware ''We tested the new CPU with our 1995 suite of games, Intel has superior IPC and shows a 2% advantage on single threaded games, so Intel is better, buy Intel.'' :)Da W - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Seriously though i've been waiting for this AMD for almost 2 decades. Good job!evernessince - Wednesday, August 8, 2018 - link
Seriously. Tom's hardware has some crazy single threaded benchmarks. I stopped reading them when they refused to remove project cars from their benchmark suite, which was heavily optimized for Nvidia. It's like they don't realize what an outlier is.