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: SPEC
SPEC2017 and SPEC2006 is a series of standardized tests used to probe the overall performance between different systems, different architectures, different microarchitectures, and setups. The code has to be compiled, and then the results can be submitted to an online database for comparison. It covers a range of integer and floating point workloads, and can be very optimized for each CPU, so it is important to check how the benchmarks are being compiled and run.
We run the tests in a harness built through Windows Subsystem for Linux, developed by our own Andrei Frumusanu. WSL has some odd quirks, with one test not running due to a WSL fixed stack size, but for like-for-like testing is good enough. SPEC2006 is deprecated in favor of 2017, but remains an interesting comparison point in our data. Because our scores aren’t official submissions, as per SPEC guidelines we have to declare them as internal estimates from our part.
For compilers, we use LLVM both for C/C++ and Fortan tests, and for Fortran we’re using the Flang compiler. The rationale of using LLVM over GCC is better cross-platform comparisons to platforms that have only have LLVM support and future articles where we’ll investigate this aspect more. We’re not considering closed-sourced compilers such as MSVC or ICC.
clang version 10.0.0-svn350067-1~exp1+0~20181226174230.701~1.gbp6019f2 (trunk)
-Ofast -fomit-frame-pointer
-march=x86-64
-mtune=core-avx2
-mfma -mavx -mavx2
Our compiler flags are straightforward, with basic –Ofast and relevant ISA switches to allow for AVX2 instructions. We decided to build our SPEC binaries on AVX2, which puts a limit on Haswell as how old we can go before the testing will fall over. This also means we don’t have AVX512 binaries, primarily because in order to get the best performance, the AVX-512 intrinsic should be packed by a proper expert, as with our AVX-512 benchmark. All of the major vendors, AMD, Intel, and Arm, all support the way in which we are testing SPEC.
To note, the requirements for the SPEC licence state that any benchmark results from SPEC have to be labelled ‘estimated’ until they are verified on the SPEC website as a meaningful representation of the expected performance. This is most often done by the big companies and OEMs to showcase performance to customers, however is quite over the top for what we do as reviewers.
For each of the SPEC targets we are doing, SPEC2006 rate-1, SPEC2017 rate-1, and SPEC2017 rate-N, rather than publish all the separate test data in our reviews, we are going to condense it down into a few interesting data points. The full per-test values are in our benchmark database.
Single thread is very much what we expected, with the consumer processors out in the lead and no real major differences between TR and TR Pro.
That changes when we move into full thread mode. The extra bandwidth of TR Pro is clear to see, even in the 32C/64T model. In this test we're using 128 GB of memory for all TR and TR Pro processors, and we're seeing a small bump when in 64C/64T mode, perhaps due to the increased memory cap/thread and memory bandwidth/thread as well. The 3990X 64C/128T run kept failing for an odd reason, so we do not have a score for that test.
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DesireeTR - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
OK, found the news too. IDK if I can link any other website here other than Anandtech, but look for "Lenovo is Using AMD PSB to Vendor Lock AMD CPUs" from servethehome, dated April 5th 2021. Lenovo P620 with Threadripper Pro was tested and found that they used the strict PSB lock-in like Dell do on their PowerEdge servers.Threska - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
I think "permanently" is the biggest concern, otherwise it could be a great feature as part of a "root of trust" if the user could control it, especially via hardware modification. e.g. jumper.DesireeTR - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
Yeah, and if this trend continues, the Ryzen PRO definitely is next on the line getting this PSB. Laptops might be OK, since they use soldered BGA processor anyway, but definitely a big no no for prebuild towers.arashi - Saturday, July 17, 2021 - link
If it can be overridden like that then it isn't a root of trust anymore.Threska - Saturday, July 17, 2021 - link
There's the presumption you trust yourself.Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
Dear Anandtech: If you ever review the motherboards, I'll relate something a few things I discovered about the Supermicro M12SWA-TF:First, it cannot use sleep mode. If you put the computer to sleep, then when you wake it up, the fans will all spin at low RPM, and they will fail to adjust to temperature. HWiNFO64 reports two sets of sensors: one set is direct, and the other is indirect, via the IPMI. After waking from sleep, the direct sensor readings were still reported, but the indirect-via-IPMI sensors were all null. When I logged into the BMC/IPMI, all the sensors were null there too. And when I ran a CPU burn-in after waking from sleep, my CPU temperature quickly climbed higher than normal, and the fans did NOT ramp up their RPM. (I was prepared for this, so I was running only a single-threaded CPU benchmark.)
Not only did rebooting the computer fix the problem, but so did Windows hibernate. The fact that Windows hibernate fixed the problem told me that the problem was hardware, not OS.
I contacted Supermicro, and they said this behavior is normal (!!!!!!). They explained that the IPMI controls the fan RPM, but it only connects to the sensors during POST. If you put the computer to sleep, the IPMI loses its connection to the sensors, and it cannot resume that connection until the computer POSTs again.
So if you review the motherboards, make sure to test the sleep behavior.
Second, the Supermicro board is programmed with critical low fan RPM threshholds that are lower than Noctua's RPM. If you Google, you'll see a lot of people have problems with using Noctua fans with Supermicro boards. What happens is, the the Noctua fan's RPM will drop below the critical low RPM threshholds, so the Supermicro board will think the fan is failing, and it will quickly ramp the fan up to 100% PWM. Once the fan exceeds the critical low RPM threshold, the alert will end, and the fan will drop its RPM back down again, starting the cycle over. So the fans cycle back and forth between high and low RPM. When I logged into the IPMI, I saw that I every single fan was triggering the low RPM alert every few seconds.
The solution is to reprogram the IPMI with new critical low RPM thresholds. Supermicro's own IPMI software does NOT allow this, because Supermicro explained to me that some people have overheated and fried their motherboards using insufficient cooling. So I had to use a third-party tool called "ipmitool".
Usually, ipmitool is obtained via "sudo apt-get install ipmitool". However, I found that the Linux version was unable to establish a connection with my BMC, even though other IPMI tools had no problem with establishing that connection. But other IPMI tools did not have the ability to reprogram the fan thresholds.
Luckily, the Windows version of ipmitool was able to establish a connection and alter my fan thresholds just fine. The Windows version is available at https://www.dannynieuwenhuis.nl/download-windows-i...
If you Google, you'll find many, many different websites offering instructions for how to use ipmitool to modify your Supermicro board to be compatible with Noctua fans. I'll just give a few sample lines of code here, in case anyone needs them:
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipaddress> -U <username> -P <password> sensor thresh FAN1 lower 40 140 240
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipaddress> -U <username> -P <password> sensor thresh FAN1 upper 1650 1750 1850
Where:
--- FAN1 is the name of the fan header, as labeled in the motherboard manual. Options are FAN1-FAN6 and FANA-FAND.
--- "lower" numbers are lower non-recoverable, lower critical, and lower non-critical, in that order.
--- "upper" numbers are upper non-critical, upper critical, and upper non-recoverable, in that order.
To calculate the thresholds, I did the following:
First, I looked up Noctua's specs. FAN1 is my Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3. According to Noctua, its fan's RPM are 300 +/-20% to 1500 +/- 10% RPM.
Second, I set the lower non-critical to 300*0.8 (i.e. -20%) and the upper non-critical to 1500*1.1 (i.e. +10%).
Third, for the critical and non-recoverable thresholds, I just added or subtracted 100%.
Do the same for every other fan in every other header. I wrote about every line in a .BAT file in Windows, which read like this:
REM **************************************************************************************************
REM **********
REM FAN1 is Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3: 300 +/-20% to 1500 +/- 10% RPM
REM **********
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipaddress> -U <username> -P <password> sensor thresh FAN1 lower 40 140 240
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipaddress> -U <username> -P <password> sensor thresh FAN1 upper 1650 1750 1850
REM **************************************************************************************************
REM **************************************************************************************************
REM **********
REM FAN2 is Noctua NF-A15: 300 +/- 20% to 1200 +/- 10%
REM **********
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipaddress> -U <username> -P <password> sensor thresh FAN2 lower 40 140 240
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipaddress> -U <username> -P <password> sensor thresh FAN2 upper 1320 1420 1520
REM **************************************************************************************************
and so forth, for every fan header. This successfully solved the problem of the fans triggering the threshold alerts and cycling up and down.
Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
"Second, the Supermicro board is programmed with critical low fan RPM threshholds that are lower than Noctua's RPM."I meant *higher*. The Supermicro default critical low fan RPM thresholds are *higher* than Noctua's.
Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
Oh, and because sleep mode is dangerous, threatening to potentially fry your CPU (since the fans no longer respond to temperature), I not only set my computer never to sleep, but I removed sleep from the power options in the start menu. That way, I cannot accidentally put the computer to sleep.If you do ever put your Supermicro M12SWA-TF to sleep, you will not receive any alerts that every sensor is null. If you log into the BMC, you'll see every sensor is null, but there are no alerts. And the fans all spin at minimum RPM regardless of your fan setting, and regardless of temperature. So sleep mode appears to have the potential to fry your CPU.
Threska - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
You keep saying "fry" but haven't CPUs had thermal protection for ages at this point?Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, July 14, 2021 - link
Threska, possibly. But I didn't want to find out.At best, sleep mode would cause the computer to constantly downclock or shut down without any clear cause (unless the user realized it was because sleep mode deactivated the IPMI's reporting of the sensors while the sensors themselves were still reporting values to software such as HWiNFO).