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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Are individual cores in this thing something nearly as powerful as in conventional quad-core desktop/server CPUs?

Also can it sleep/downclock individual cores to cool down when its full power is not needed?

Yes. Threadripper is essentially just four well-binned Ryzen 7s tied together with a creative interconnect. The memory bandwidth doesn't increase as proportionally as the core count, but each individual core should operate just as fast as in a typical desktop part.

Edit: To answer the second part of the parent question, since the dies are the same, it should have all the same power-saving features available in AMD's laptop and desktop processors.

Epyc is 4 ryzen 7's. The threadripper (at least the ones shipping today) are two Ryzen 7s.

The memory bandwidth does increase proportionally (it's 2x ryzen for threadripper and 4x ryzen for eypc).

Individual cores do tend to be lower on the threadripper and epyc because of power/heat limitations, so they tend to be lower clocked and tend to have less cache per core.

According to the linked article, Threadripper 2 uses the equivalent of 4 Ryzen 7s, however they disable the memory busses on two of them which yields only a 2x increase in memory bandwidth. You're correct that Threadripper tends to clock slightly lower, but the cache is on-die so it shouldn't be any different per-core than in a typical Ryzen.

Wow. Now I am amazed. Thanks!

Particularly in case of Threadripper, they use cherry picked binned cores so they can actually hit even [slightly] higher clocks than their mainstream cousins.

We don't know the Threadripper 2's clocks yet, but last gen TR 1950x could hit 4.2Ghz with Turbo, while the best mainstream Ryzen the 1800x could do 4.1Ghz with Turbo.

The Ryzen 2 top dog right now can do 4.25Ghz with Turbo.. so we could perhaps expect TR2 to hit 4.3Ghz+ on Turbo.

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