AMD Q4: 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, Threadripper Up To 32-Core 3970X, Coming November 25th
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTTRX40: More High-End Motherboards for TR3
The new sTRX4 socket will be paired with a TRX40 chipset – a design that AMD says comes from an in-house team and built on GlobalFoundries 14nm. The new chipset, updated from the previous X399 in this space and even updated from the X570 in the consumer space, is the other half in the CPU-to-chipset bandwidth story. By using a PCIe 4.0 x8 link, AMD is removing almost any practical bandwidth limitation downstream from the CPU.
The new TRX40 chipset will come with a degree of modularity.
From the chipset, we can see motherboard manufacturers afforded a full PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, up to another x8 lanes as two x4 connections or further bifurcated, or instead of those bifurcated lanes, either four or eight more SATA ports. That’s 8 SATA ports on top of the four already present on the chipset.
So I like these modular systems. It allows motherboard manufacturers to go crazy with offering potential systems. For example:
| Potential TRX40 Variants | |||||||
| AnandTech | CPU | Chipset | |||||
| TRX40 SATA Powerhouse 20 drives |
x48 for PCIe slots | x8 for downlink | 8x SATA from options | x8 for dual NVMe | 8x SATA from options | 4x SATA from chipset | |
| TRX40 NVMe Powerhouse 18+ drives |
x48 for PCIe slots | x8 for downlink | dual NVMe from options | x8 for dual NVMe | dual NVMe for options | - | |
So that would be a motherboard with x16/x16/x16 (or x16/x8/x16/x8) in terms of PCIe 4.0 slots, a single x8 slot for a pair of NVMe drives, and then TWENTY SATA ports, all directly supported on the system without any additional controllers.
If SATA isn’t your thing, then the same arguments could be made for 48 PCIe lanes and six PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe slots, making a total of 18 high capacity PCIe 4.0 drives. The fact that AMD has put more PCIe lanes into their high end desktop platforms, plus this amount of modularity, wants me to play Dr. Frankenstein.
To be fair, those ideas are a bit extreme. Motherboard manufacturers will likely have to partition off a few lanes for 10 GbE networking, perhaps Thunderbolt, or maybe something more exotic like a RAID controller, or an RGB controller.
As noted in some of our previous news posts, motherboard manufacturers have been slowly leaking names of their TRX40 products. At this point in time we have seen mentions of the following:
- ASRock TRX40 Creator
- ASRock TRX40 Taichi
- GIGABYTE TRX40 AORUS XTREME
- ASUS Prime TRX40 Pro
- ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme
- MSI TRX40 Creator
- MSI TRX40 Pro 10G
- MSI TRX40 Pro Wi-Fi
We expect details of some of these to perhaps be announced today, or on the 25th when the CPUs come to market. GIGABYTE has even been showing previews of their motherboards on social media, with one showing an obscene number of power phases, and we’ve seen images of boards with 8 SATA ports. We’ll have our usual motherboard overview article up on that date, and we’ll be looking at reviews of these motherboards through the new year.
I will address comments about potential TRX80/WRX80 motherboards which have been put into the ether as potential other chipsets being launched. When asked, AMD said that the only chipset they are launching today is TRX40.
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Teckk - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
You mean other than Chrome and Electron apps on the system ?!?On a serious note, can't think of anything other than Virtual Machines, Image/Video Editing and Debugging in IDEs but I don't know if that falls under 'casual everyday programs'. But again they could be for the person buying a 16-core processor for casual everyday use :)
DPUser - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Audio loves multiple cores... lots of parallel processes happening in a big multi-track, multi-plugin, multi-virtual instrument mix.shreduhsoreus - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Audio also prefers that those cores are all on the same die, otherwise you can't get full utilization of the CPU at low buffer settings. Scan Pro Audio has found that the 3900X starts having dropouts at 70% utilization. I actually returned a 3900X because they're not that great for low latency audio production.MattMe - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Is that right? I'd always understood that single core perf is extremely important in audio, not only for latency but because if you have a complex I/O chain (instrument running through multiple plugins) it has to stay on the same core.In Live if I have an instrument input that runs through a gate and compressor, then into another track that is running plugins (effects/loopers), that all has to be processed by a single core according to Ableton documentation. So although other instruments can be running on other cores, the single core perf is still a potential bottleneck (and frequently is!)
(The reason I use the example of routing audio through different tracks is for monitoring and looping at multiple points of the chain.)
zmatt - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
I can't speak to all DAWs, it depends on which one you are talking about specifically. But I've seen good results with FL Studio with more cores and threads versus improving single threaded perf.valinor89 - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
While not really needing that many cores by a long stretch I am amazed at how some Antivirus software insist on analizing all the drives on my PC serially. I get that when there is only one drive it would be I/O bound but when I have multiple drives I don't see a reason they could not scan them in paral·lel. specially when I do a Scan on demand and don't expect to be doing anything else with the PC.timecop1818 - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
Who gives a shit about AV in 2019? If you're dumb enough to download and run pornhubvideo.jpg.mkv.exe then you deserve to get buttcoined or randomware'dOliseo - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
lol. It's cute you thinking that's how you get viruses in 2019 and not by compromised websites instead.Xyler94 - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
Congratulation! You're part of a 1% club who knows how to detect BS stuff! Good on you!!For the rest of the population, those not hooked to forums like this, Anti-Virus programs are still needed. They help with many other things than downloading Trojan viruses. The easiest way to get most is actually phishing links. Even though at home I taught my mother how to look for BS links in emails, and I have a Pi-Hole VM to stop most ads, including mal-advertisement, there hasn't been a virus in our house, but I still bought a year of Bit-Defender for my mother's PC (And I may install it onto my own PC just to help clean it)
Irata - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
3950X is probably more of a "want" than a "need" CPU for a considerable part of buyers.I'd say the plus part of having many cores is that you can have several things run in parallel without having to worry much about performance.