The 64 Core Threadripper 3990X CPU Review: In The Midst Of Chaos, AMD Seeks Opportunity
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on February 7, 2020 9:00 AM ESTAMD 3990X Against Prosumer CPUs
The first set of consumers that will be interested in this processor will be those looking to upgrade into the best consumer/prosumer HEDT package available on the market. The $3990 price is a high barrier to entry, but these users and individuals can likely amortize the cost of the processor over its lifetime. To that end, we’ve selected a number of standard HEDT processors that are near in terms of price/core count, as well as putting in the 8-core 5.0 GHz Core i9-9900KS and the 28-core unlocked Xeon W-3175X.
| AMD 3990X Consumer Competition | ||||||
| AnandTech | AMD 3990X |
AMD 3970X |
Intel 3175X |
Intel i9- 10980XE |
AMD 3950X |
Intel 9900KS |
| SEP | $3990 | $1999 | $2999 | $979 | $749 | $513 |
| Cores/T | 64/128 | 32/64 | 28/56 | 18/36 | 16/32 | 8/16 |
| Base Freq | 2900 | 3700 | 3100 | 3000 | 3500 | 5000 |
| Turbo Freq | 4300 | 4500 | 4300 | 4800 | 4700 | 5000 |
| PCIe | 4.0 x64 | 4.0 x64 | 3.0 x48 | 3.0 x48 | 4.0 x24 | 3.0 x16 |
| DDR | 4x 3200 | 4x 3200 | 6x 2666 | 4x 2933 | 2x 3200 | 2x 2666 |
| Max DDR | 512 GB | 512 GB | 512 GB | 256 GB | 128 GB | 128 GB |
| TDP | 280 W | 280 W | 255 W | 165 W | 105 W | 127 W |
The 3990X is beyond anything in price at this level, and even at the highest consumer cost systems, $1000 could be the difference between getting two or three GPUs in a system. There has to be big upsides here moving from the 32 core to the 64 core.
Corona is a classic 'more threads means more performance' benchmark, and while the 3990X doesn't quite get perfect scaling over the 32 core, it is almost there.
The 3990X scores new records in our Blender test, with sizeable speed-ups against the other TR3 hardware.
Photoscan is a variable threaded test, and the AMD CPUs still win here, although 24 core up to 64 core all perform within about a minute of each other in this 20 minute test. Intel's best consumer hardware is a few minutes behind.
y-cruncher is an AVX-512 accelerated test, and so Intel's 28-core with AVX-512 wins here. Interestingly the 128 cores of the 3990X get in the way here, likely the spawn time of so many threads is adding to the overall time.
GIMP is a single threaded test designed around opening the program, and Intel's 5.0 GHz chip is the best here. the 64 core hardware isn't that bad here, although the W10 Enterprise data has the better result.
Without any hand tuned code, between 32 core and 64 core workloads on 3DPM, there's actually a slight deficit on 64 core.
But when we crank in the hand tuned code, the AVX-512 CPUs storm ahead by a considerable margin.
We covered Digicortex on the last page, but it seems that the different thread groups on W10 Pro is holidng the 3990X back a lot. With SMT disabled, we score nearer 3x here.
Luxmark is an AVX2 accelerated program, and having more cores here helps. But we see little gain from 32C to 64C.
As we saw on the last page, POV-Ray preferred having SMT off for the 3990X, otherwise there's no benefit over the 32-core CPU.
AES gets a slight bump over the 32 core, however not as much as the 2x price difference would have you believe.
As we saw on the previous page, W10 Enterprise causes our Handbrake test to go way up, but on W10 Pro then the 3990X loses ground to the 3950X.
And how about a simple game test - we know 64 cores is overkill for games, so here's a CPU bount test. There's not a lot in it between the 3990X and the 3970X, but Intel's high frequency CPUs are the best here.
Verdict
There are a lot of situations where the jump from AMD's 32-core $1999 CPU, the 3970X, up to the 64-core $3990 CPU only gives the smallest tangible gain. That doesn't bode well. The benchmarks that do get the biggest gains however can get near perfect scaling, making the 3990X a fantastic upgrade. However those tests are few and far between. If these were the options, the smart money is on the 3970X, unless you can be absolutely clear that the software you run can benefit from the extra cores.
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darealist - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
$4000 to ripoff their loyal fanbase. All the shillz be liek "it's a steal!" while typing on their 1600x build ROFL.levizx - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
what a stupid dipshitSpunjji - Monday, February 10, 2020 - link
*facepalm*It *is* a steal - for a 64 core CPU.
I can't afford one, I'd never have any use for one, and I don't think anyone who qualifies as AMD's "loyal fanbase" would either. It's basically an industrial tool - the people who need this will buy it based on that need.
StuntFriar - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
While it's a little specific, it would be cool to benchmark some Unreal Engine 4 game developer workflows, such as doing a full rebuild/repackage of a game (for Windows, Android, iOS and consoles), rebaking the lighting for a level, importing assets, etc...I'm suggesting UE4 because Epic already has a bunch of freely available demo projects (some are graphical showcases, others are actual playable games that will pass certification on some consoles with a little work) so it's easy to set up a test that other folks can try at work for themselves - which would make it far easier to decide if a CPU upgrade would be worth it.
For fun, you could even do the same tests on Windows, MacOS and Linux to see if there's a tangible difference between operating systems (though the vast majority of developers would be using Windows regardless).
The UE4 Editor seems to be highly parallel in most of its building/compiling tasks and I do wonder they scale up proportionately past 16 cores.
Probably worth doing some Unity Engine benchmarks too since that's the most popular engine on the planet. Haven't used it in over a year, but it seemed to favour higher single-threaded performance for a lot of the building and asset import tasks. But again, it's fairly easy to set up benchmarks that users can replicate at work.
Cheers.
Betonmischer - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
Hi Ian! I'd like to chime in on the difference between the Pro and the Enterprise versions of Windows 10 in regards to 128 thread management. Are you absolutely sure that your Pro test system is up to date? I see 2 sockets on the screenshot, which shouldn't happen on either version. Here's the picture of what it looks like on my colleague's test bench. It's Windows 10 Pro, and it's detecting a 128-thread CPU as a single socket. We found no impact on performance either, including the benchmarks that you specifically listed on page 3.https://imgur.com/G2VqgoU
realbabilu - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
Since this is targeted to very segmented market like render farm. A bench single cpu tr4 3990x vs clustered cheaper several ryzen 3950x will be fascinating.msroadkill612 - Monday, February 10, 2020 - link
I sometimes fantasise about clusters/arrays of Renoir apuS, each w/ a 2TB NVME of "edge" data, for rendering and AI.What do folks think?
hammer256 - Sunday, February 9, 2020 - link
Hm, I wonder if AMD would release a higher clocked EPYC 7702p variant for workstation use, raise the TDP to say 320W, have threadripper clocks, and sell it for $5-6K. For the 64 core use cases I can't imagine an extra $1-2K would matter for the target audience. For those people I imagine 8 channels of registered memory would matter a lot more for the bandwidth, ECC, and capacity, but still want the high clocks.B3an - Sunday, February 9, 2020 - link
In your Handbrake test, could the 3960X/3970X both be scoring lower than the 3950X because you're also using Windows 10 Pro? Why else would they be scoring lower considering that the 3990X scores quite significantly higher than all those CPU's when using Windows 10 Enterprise?Betonmischer - Monday, February 10, 2020 - link
Windows 10 Pro in this review's case is highly likely out of date. Otherwise it would present the 3990X as single-socket like Windows 10 Enterprise did.