Hacker News Reader

Comment by frozenport | Hacker News Reader

Some applications need 70+ cores. AMD doesn't have that.

The Intel top x-series (that competes with Threadripper) only has 36 cores (not 70+), is limited to a single socket, and it's not shipping yet.

Even with dual sockets 70+ cores is not easy (or cheap) and other things like memory performance become more important than core count. AMD has a bandwidth advantage with single and dual sockets having 8 channels per socket instead of Intel's 6.

Intel doesn't have competition with 4 or more socket systems, but that topic drifting pretty far from a thread discussing Threadripper.

Which Intel part has 36 cores? Do you mean threads, or is there a Knights Landing card with so few cores I'm not aware of?

I scale my CAD-like software to high core counts. Memory performance from the hardware side isn't a tunable parameter.

If you need the performance, AMD has no product in this space.

Memory performance is just as tunable as core count. Ryzen = 2 channels, Threadripper = 4 channels, and Epyc is 8 channels per socket for 1 or 2 sockets. So there's a factor of 8 to pick from.

I'd be surprised that a CAD program prefers cores over memory bandwidth. Generally if you have a complicated 3D object doing anything with that object isn't going to be cache friendly.

Have you tried your CAD-like software on two platforms with the same core count but double the memory channels?

Yeah, so a large part of my optimization is to move from memory to compute bound. But things like matrix inversion, for example, thanks to the hard work of library authors can scale pretty well. This happens on the CPU because the data typically exceeds GPU memory. So, you can get out the box scaling for much of your code.

The 3D rendering is taken care by the GPU.

CAD 'needs' 70 cores and CAD is VR? Let's not get carried away.

What VR application needs 70 cores?

Also AMD is going to have dual socket 32 core Epyc available this year.

Some OSes are terrible at NUMA

64 cores on 2P EPYC 7601/7551/7501. Intel has its 4P platform, which in theory almost doubles the ceiling (4 * 28 cores in the top tier Xeon Platinum aka new E7). If you really need that many cores, you should either use specialized hardware (GPUs, FPGAs etc.) or clustering anyways.

There's a thing in between. Think Thunder ARM chips or Power8

Reply on news.ycombinator.com