The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores
by Ian Cutress on August 6, 2018 9:00 AM ESTX399 Motherboards: The MSI X399 Creation
For the motherboard situation, AMD clarified that all motherboards on the market today will be able to run the new 250W processors. The differences will be in how well each motherboard will be able to overclock, with AMD citing that the newer models and revisions should perform better, given that they were built with a higher power rating already in mind. Boards like the X399 Creation should also help in pushing the first generation Ryzen Threadripper.
Box. Has board inside.
As noted back at Computex, the MSI X399 Creation is a very visually busy motherboard. Lots of angles, and lots of shades of grey. I know it is customary in some Asian languages and magazines to be very dense, and this is kind of what that looks like. Most of the time I prefer a simpler, elegant design. This design does not scream elegance.
The key headline for this motherboard is the power delivery. MSI has put 16 phases on the processor, and another three for "uncore" portion of the chip, or as AMD calls it, the SoC. In order to fit them in, the DRAM slots are slightly further down than average, but it also allows MSI to put in a larger heatsink, which also connects to the heatsink near the rear panel of the board.
In case you forget the name: Creation.
Storage on the motherboard comes in two forms: eight SATA ports, and seven M.2 drives. That is not a typo: MSI has enabled this motherboard with seven M.2 slots. Three come from on the board, and are found under the chipset heatsink. Here are two of them:
The other four comes from an add-in PCIe card. We also saw this at Computex, and it uses a dual-slot design. It looks like a GPU:
But inside are four M.2 slots, with thermal pad on the heatsink to assist with cooling.
MSI states that this was built specifically with Threadripper in mind, so I’m going to annoy our SSD reviewer, Billy Tallis, to hand over a few more drives.
Also on the board is an extensive rear panel, with USB 3.1 ports, USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi:
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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.