AMD Threadripper Pro Review: An Upgrade Over Regular Threadripper?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on July 14, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- ThreadRipper
- Threadripper Pro
- 3995WX
CPU Tests: Synthetic
Most of the people in our industry have a love/hate relationship when it comes to synthetic tests. On the one hand, they’re often good for quick summaries of performance and are easy to use, but most of the time the tests aren’t related to any real software. Synthetic tests are often very good at burrowing down to a specific set of instructions and maximizing the performance out of those. Due to requests from a number of our readers, we have the following synthetic tests.
Linux OpenSSL Speed: SHA256
One of our readers reached out in early 2020 and stated that he was interested in looking at OpenSSL hashing rates in Linux. Luckily OpenSSL in Linux has a function called ‘speed’ that allows the user to determine how fast the system is for any given hashing algorithm, as well as signing and verifying messages.
OpenSSL offers a lot of algorithms to choose from, and based on a quick Twitter poll, we narrowed it down to the following:
- rsa2048 sign and rsa2048 verify
- sha256 at 8K block size
- md5 at 8K block size
For each of these tests, we run them in single thread and multithreaded mode. All the graphs are in our benchmark database, Bench, and we use the sha256 results in published reviews.
AMD has had a sha256 accelerator in its processors for many years, whereas Intel only enabled SHA acceleration in Rocket Lake. That's why we see RKL matching TR in 1T mode, but when the cores get fired up, TR and TR Pro streak ahead with the available performance and memory bandwidth. This is all about threads here, and 128 threads really matters.
GeekBench 5: Link
As a common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic.
DRAM Bandwidth
As we're moving from 2 channel memory on Ryzen to 4 channel memory on Threadripper then 8 channel memory on Threadripper Pro, these all have associated theoretical bandwidth maximums but there is a case for testing to see if those maximums can be reached. In this test, we do a simple memory write for peak bandwidth.
For 2-channel DDR4-3200, the theoretical maximum is 51.2 GB/s.
For 4-channel DDR4-3200, the theoretical maximum is 102.4 GB/s.
For 8-channel DDR4-3200, the theoretical maximum is 204.8 GB/s.
Here we see all the 4-channel Threadripper processors getting around 83 GB/s, but the Threadripper Pro can only achieve closer to its maximums when there are more cores present. Along with the memory controller bandwidth, AMD has to manage internal infinity fabric bandwidth and power to get the most out of the system. The fact that the 64C/64T achieves better than the 64C/128T might suggest that in 128T there is some congestion.
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Qasar - Tuesday, July 27, 2021 - link
sorry but that is not HEDT, workstation, sure. the last HEDT platform intel had was x299 and socket 2066socket 3647, is there server/workstation platform, but hey if you consider a US $3k cpu to be a HEDT processor, then that's your choice :-)
mode_13h - Monday, July 26, 2021 - link
> at least amd HAS a HEDT cpu, when was the last one from intel ?Intel is doing an Ice Lake workstation platform. Not sure if HEDT will follow.
mode_13h - Sunday, July 25, 2021 - link
> 7 days to AugustThe rumor was that it would be *announced* at some point in August. It didn't say when, in August, but the rumored ship date wasn't until sometime in September. But it's just a rumor.
croc - Monday, July 26, 2021 - link
MY point is that the BIOS updates usually happen about a month before the product announcement. Not to mention some benchmarks and other 'leaked' information. Y'know,,, Hype generation, direct from horsey's mouth. August announcement? Don't think so. Chagall? Possible, but would break convention, not that AMD really has any when it comes to code names...mode_13h - Monday, July 26, 2021 - link
> BIOS updates usually happen about a month before the product announcement.Before announcement or ship?
> Hype generation
Seems to me that it's not necessary, in this case. AMD will already have more demand than it can satisfy.
Qasar - Tuesday, July 27, 2021 - link
" Not to mention some benchmarks and other 'leaked' information "considering how few leaks and info have come out about amd's products as of late until quite close to release, im not surprised there is little info out there about zen 3 TR
" Hype generation "
which amd doesnt need all that much, their products are more interesting then intels right now, intel needs the hype, not amd ;-)
Mikewind Dale - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
Given how much trouble Intel has had with their new process - even though Intel used to be the industry leader in fabrication - I suspect that if AMD had kept fabrication in-house, they'd be in serious trouble right.GlobalFoundries has also had trouble moving to a new, cutting-edge process. At the moment, they'd decided to stay one process behind TSMC, and cater to the portion of the market that doesn't need a cutting-edge process.
anakhizer - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
The article is excellent! However, the ordering of data in the tables is absolutely terrible.Please figure out how to sort the tables in a more logical manner like performance. As the tables are they are pretty much unreadable if you want to get the performance numbers with a glance.
kensiko - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
Performance wise, looking at all those graphs, the 5950x is such a great deal ! I really love my 5950x. I did love my TR1950x, it was not getting as hot at my 5950x. But no way I'm going back to Threadripper for just a home PC. Event at work I don't think we would get a Threadripper again, the Epyc gives what we want even if the frequency is a bit lower.mode_13h - Tuesday, July 20, 2021 - link
Threadripper still makes a lot of sense for people who have scalable workloads (or run lots of VMs) and who don't need the full memory bandwidth or PCIe lanes of EPYC or TR Pro.I personally wouldn't buy one, but they're popular for deep learning workstations and Linus Torvalds famously has one.