The AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
by Dr. Ian Cutress on August 13, 2018 9:00 AM ESTHEDT Benchmarks: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
So this is where AMD broke our graphing engine. Because we report Corona in rays per second, having 12 million of them puts eight digits into our engine, which it then tries to interpret as a scientific number (1.2 x 10^7), which it can’t process in a graph. We had to convert this graph into millions of rays per second to get it to work.
The 2990WX hits out in front with 32 cores, with its higher frequency being the main reason it is so far ahead of the EPYC processor. The EPYC and Core i9 are close together, however the TR2950X at half the cost comes reasonably close.
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
The additional cores on the 2990WX puts it out ahead of the EPYC and Core i9, with the 2990WX having an extra 58% throughput over the Core i9. That is very substantial indeed.
LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths
As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.
Taken from the Linux Version of LuxMark
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.
Intel’s Skylake-X processors seem to fail our OpenCL test for some reason, but in the C++ test the extra memory controllers on EPYC sets it ahead of both TR2 and Core i9. The 2990WX and Core i9 are almost equal here.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
This test is another that loves the cores and frequency of the 2990WX, finishing the benchmark in almost 20 seconds. It might be time for a bigger built-in benchmark.
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just4U - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Ian, were you testing this with the CM Wraith Cooler? If not is it something you plan to review?Ian Cutress - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Most of the testing data is with the Liqtech 240 liquid cooler, rated at 500W. I do have data taken with the Wraith Ripper, and I'll be putting some of that data out when this is wrapped up.IGTrading - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
To be honest, with the top of the line 32core model, it is interesting to identify as many positive effect cases as possible, to see if that entire set of applications that truly benefit of the added cores will persuade power users to purchase it.Like you've said, it is a niche of a niche and seeing it be X% faster of Y% slower is not as interesting as seeing what it can actually do when it is used efficiently and if this this makes a compelling argument for power users.
PixyMisa - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
Phoronix found that a few tests ran much faster on Linux - for 7zip compression in particular, 140% faster (as in, 2.4x). Some of these benchmarks could improve a lot with some tweaking to the Windows scheduler.phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, August 15, 2018 - link
It'd be interesting to redo these tests on a monthly basis after Windows/BIOS updates are done, to see how performance changes over time as the Windows side of things is tweaked to support the new NUMA setup for TR2.At the very least, a follow-up benchmark run in 6 months would be nice.
Kevin G - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Chiplets!The power consumption figures are interesting but TR does have to manage one thing that the high end desktop chips from Intel don't: off-die traffic. The amount of power to move data off die is significantly higher than moving it around on-die. Even in that context, TR's energy consumption for just the fabric seems high. When only threads are loaded, they should only be with dies with the memory controllers leaving two dies idle. It doesn't appear that the fabric is powering down while those remote dies are also powering down. Any means of watching cores enter/exit sleep states in real time?
I'd also be fun to see with Windows Server what happens when all the cores on a die are unplugged from the system. Consdiering the AMD puts the home agent on the memory controller on each die, even without cores or memory attached, chances are that the home agent is still alive consuming power. It'd be interesting to see what happens on Sky Lake-SP as well if the home agents on the grid eventually power themselves down when there is nothing directly connected to them. It'd be worth comparing to the power consumption when a core is disabled in BIOS/EFI.
I also feel that this would be a good introduction for what is coming down the road with server chips and may reach the high end consumer products: chiplets. This would permit the removal of the off-die Infinity Links for something that is effectively on-die throughout the cluster of dies. That alone will save AMD several watts. The other thing about chiplets is that it would greatly simplify Thread Ripper: only two memory controller chiplets would be to be in the package vs. four as we have now. That should save AMD lots of power. (And for those reading this comment, yes, Intel has chiplet plans as well.). The other thing AMD could do is address how their cache coherency protocols work. AMD has hinted at some caching changes for Zen 2 but lacks specificity.
gagegfg - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
do not seem to exist more than once the 16 additional core of the 2990wx compared to the 2950xIan Cutress - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2133?vs=21...Chaitanya - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Built for scientific workload.woozle341 - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Do you think the lack of AVX512 is an issue? I might build a workstation soon for data processing with R and Python for some Fortran models and post-processing. Skylake-X looks pretty good wit its quad memory channels despite its high price.