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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power!

Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper?

Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?

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I would say it is the first 16-core "consumer chip", since every other 16-core chip has either been HEDT-class or server-grade, both requiring expensive motherboards. I would be happy to try plopping this into my B450 motherboard from my 2700X. I'm happy with my current NVMe storage, which is just about the only thing that takes advantage of the extra bandwidth. Graphics cards aren't there yet.

I had 24 core workstation 5 years ago for price of this single chip. Refurbished server...

The problem with this strategy is that they often have much lower clock speeds/ IPC, plus they are often quite power-hungry and lose the ability to overclock (that one's subjective). So you do often get bitten by Amdahl's law. However, if it is purely a rendering machine and single-threaded performance isn't an issue, you can get a lot of processing power for the money.

It was good complement for light laptop.

And potentially REALLY NOISY...

GamersNexus had a fun video playing with a new Epyc server with Wendell from L1Techs... the delta fans on that pull up to 7A. Not 0.7A, 7A. More wattage than your CPU.

https://youtu.be/la0_2Kmrr1E?t=164

Not an epyc thing, servers are hilariously loud and I've seen so many posts on selfhosted and homelab about "the wife made me get rid of my R710 because you can hear it in the closet/basement/etc all the time"....

That's fair - looks like you need LGA 2066 for the Intel chips with those core counts, which aren't terribly expensive ($150+) but it's hard to find exactly which motherboards support something like the i9-9960X.

Running a 2700X in an X470 but this is 3x the price of that chip, and personally, I won't get the necessary benefit. Still pleased to see exploding CPU power in the past few years!

Also, nice to have that socket compatibility. I imagine I'll upgrade to the top-of-the-line CPU of last AM4 iteration in 4-5 years when their prices have dropped to a reasonable level. Let's see if that actually happens though as changing a CPU is work wise about the same as a full rebuild.

I did some math for myself and realized that I can skip the 4 extra cores, and go with the Ryzen 9 3900X (530€ vs 820€).

That's 44.16 € / Core (3900X) vs 51.25 € / Core (3950X) where I live. Yes, the base clock is 200 Mhz lower, but for my use case (homeserver with gaming vm and minecraft server etc), I need cores that I can assign. Im not ready to pay 290€ für an extra 4 cores yet.

the 3900x base clock is actually higher.

I'm looking forward to a 3950X, this is the first time you can get a lot of cores without the expense of low clockspeeds.

I was interested in the new ThreadRippers however, I do beleive this gen is overpriced. I realise this is how supply and demand works, but I don't think the expense is worth it personally.

In addition, from what I've seen so far. AMD/ OEMs are chrging a large premium for TRX40 mother boards. You're talking ~$550 & up. Bare in mind that for a similar price you can get i an Epyc board with double the memory channels (8), AND add an addional CPU, AND duel 10gbe! (you would think a single port would be default on most workstations late 2019) It's a lot of money for 2 addional memory chennels & and PCIe lanes (PCIe is a serial interface so it only needs one wire per lane, per direction).

I am waiting for the 3990X announcement before pulling the trigger on 3rd gen TR. I am already running a 2950X in my main workstation, and it's currently really hard to make an argument for even more performance... That said, I am targeting the 3970X as my next upgrade option, but AMD might be able to upsell me on the 3990X. Once the trigger has been pulled on 3rd gen, I will look at repurposing the 2950X workstation as a Jenkins build agent. We currently only have 2 vCPUs in AWS for Jenkins, so this could make a huge difference for our build process and give the old machine a really good 2nd life.

In terms of the 3990X specifically, I am most interested to see if they are going to provide additional platform capabilities. There were rumors regarding a TRX80/WRX80 platform, which seemed to imply to some tech journalists that there would be an octal channel variant of TR available early next year. It would be very hard to turn this down if it were an option.

The step from Ryzen to Threadripper is quite a big one. I'd benefit from a Threadripper system, but budget only allows a (top tier) Ryzen for now. I suppose spare money could go towards a Threadripper right now and I wouldn't consider it wasted per se.

Even if you can get a good price for the CPU, the mainboards are very pricey compared to the consumer CPU boards.

Last time I checked, motherboard's for thread ripper cpus were around 200~300$, is that still the case?

The motherboard cost really erases the budget for entry, as that's the price of a decent ryzen cpu.

Exactly, and there's not a lot of used DDR4 (w/ or w/o ECC) on the market.

If you look at performance per watt AND performance per dollar it is a record breaker. Also, it is the highest base clock speeds of any of the AMD chips.

I'm waiting for 64 core CPU. 32 is nice but still not enough.

Are you on 48 cores currently?

I feel your comment is just pointlessly snarky without mentioning for what workloads it's not enough.

Nothing is ever enough but we'll always be limited by the economics of scale and in case you're in the exclusive demographic where this doesn't apply to you than you'd have resources for workarounds to performance limitations without complaining (server grade chips, FPGAs, supercomputers, dedicated ASICs, clusters, etc.).

Try running kubernetes dev environment with all the crap your team has hoarded on it, elastic, Prometheus, 5 different database engines and dashboard, etc. Then watch the system chug.

64 cores ought to be enough for anybody...

Yeah, that's what... 10kb of RAM per core?

Funny story. The Vega64 has 8GB of RAM and 4MB of L2 cache (last-level cache) across 4096 SIMD-cores. That's 1kB of L2 cache and 2MB RAM per core.

It gets worse: although there are 4096 cores, the Vega64 isn't fully loaded until you stick 4-threads-per-core (Or more precisely, 16-wavefronts per Compute Unit (256-SIMD-cores)). That means you will actually need to run 16384 SIMD-threads before the Vega64 is fully utilized.

That's less than 512kB main-RAM per core, and less than 256 bytes of L2 cache per core. Better hope your threads are sharing a lot of memory...

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AMD addresses this problem with NAVI / RDNA: NAVI is fully utilized at 1-thread per core. So you only need 2816 threads on the 5700 XT to fully utilize the system.

Then you can buy an EPYC 7702P. It's not like they don't make 64 core CPUs. Or get a dual-socket board and buy two 7702s if 128 cores are more to your liking.

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