The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review: 24 and 32 Cores on 7nm
by Dr. Ian Cutress, Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on November 25, 2019 9:05 AM ESTTest Bed and Setup
As per our processor testing policy, we take a premium category motherboard suitable for the socket, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the manufacturer's maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.
| Test Setup | |
| AMD TR3 | Threadripper 3970X Threadripper 3960X |
| Motherboard | ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme (BIOS 0601) |
| CPU Cooler | Thermaltake Riing 360 CLC |
| DRAM | Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB 8x8 GB DDR4-3200 |
| GPU | MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G |
| PSU | Corsair AX860i |
| SSD | Crucial MX500 2TB |
| OS | Windows 10 1909 |
For our motherboards, we are using the latest firmware. It should be noted that our Intel tests do not have the latest Intel security updates for JCC and others, as the motherboard vendors for the models we used have not implemented them yet.
The latest AMD TR3 benchmarks were run by Gavin Bonshor, while I attended Supercomputing in Denver last week. Unfortunately both Intel and AMD decided to sample processors before the annual trade show conference, with launches only a couple of days after the show finished. As a result, our testing has been split between Gavin and myself, and we have endeavored to ensure parity through my automated testing suite.
Also, our compile test seems to have broken itself when we used Windows 10 1909, and due to travel we have not had time to debug why it is no longer working. We hope to get this test up and running in the new year, along with an updated test suite.
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our multiple test beds. Some of this hardware is not in this test bed specifically, but is used in other testing.
| Hardware Providers | |||
| Sapphire RX 460 Nitro | MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC | Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs |
Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs |
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| G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX |
Crucial Ballistix DDR4 |
Silverstone Coolers |
Silverstone Fans |
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RSAUser - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
I've only seen the Mozilla benchmarks on LTT, very strange that they're the only ones showing such a workload. I'd be very interested on how these chips handle e.g. large SQL Server DB's and requests, especially with those huge caches.The Mozilla benchmark had near 2x the performance for the 3970X vs the 10980X and serve the home has the ryzen chip at near 30 compiles an hour for the Linux Kernel vs around 16 for Intel.
I'd actually be really interested in the financial market for this TR due to the floating point performance increase. We'll probably be upgrading our servers next year based on current projections, so this has been a really nice development.
Dolda2000 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
Why is it that Intel gains so incredibly much more from AVX512 than AMD gains from AVX2?In the 3DPM2 test, the AMD CPUs gain roughly a factor of two in performance, which is exactly what I'd expect given that AVX2 is twice as wide as standard SSE. The Intel CPUs, on the other hand, gain almost a factor of 9, which is more than twice what I'd expect given that AVX512 as four times as wide as SSE.
What causes this? Does AVX512 have some other kind of tricks up its sleeves? Does opmasking benefit 3DPM2?
AnGe85 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
The Intel parts are derived from Xeon dies (LCC 10 cores, and HCC up to 18 cores). As such they have two AVX-512-FMA-Units.Zen/+ shows a +70 % increase in performance, Zen2 and the 9900K(S) about +90 % with AVX2 in 3DPM2.1 and the Xeon-based parts reach up to +700 %. Ian has obviously done a good job or at least used a good lib ;-)
Dolda2000 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
But Zen 1/2 also has two 256-bit FMAs per core. And Intel also has two SSE units per core as well, so I don't see how that would explain the ratios.yeeeeman - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
Intel has 512bit unitsDolda2000 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
Exactly, which should make it 2× as fast, not 4.5×.abufrejoval - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
The other element of magic is typically halved operand size=twice the data element throughput.Could be FP16 vs FP32 in that code, which means 32 vector elements per 512 bit register and then again of these registers there could be mulitples under SIMD per instruction and clock.
Xyler94 - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
Servethehome also mentioned in their reviews of Epyc Rome Processors, the same basic Zen2 platform that the new TR CPUs are made on, that most programs aren't optimized for AMD's new AVX2 pipes, so the results are lower than they should be. I don't know if that's still the case, but it may be a reason why it's showing such a disparity between the two.Slash3 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
Wow.Just wow.
shaolin95 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
Why wont yuo enable IGPU for the 9900k on the Premiere test? It will change the performance dramatically.