And entry-level TR was never $250. That's the EOL "we need to dump old inventory" fire sale price.
2990WX is pretty bad for most use cases. Its only good for rendering.
The 24-core 3960x probably is better due to lower latency, and better balanced I/O.
Reinforcement learning might be a good use case for 2990WX.
> Reinforcement learning might be a good use case for 2990WX.
Hmm, the 2990wx is better than the 2950x for that task, but the 3960x has 256-bit AVX2 vectors. Since the 2990wx only has 128-bit AVX2 vectors, I would place my bets on the cheaper, 24-core 3960x instead.
Doubling the SIMD-width in such a compute-heavy problem would be more important than the +12 cores that the 2990wx offers.
EDIT: The 3960x also fixes the latency issues that the 2990wx has, so its acceptable to use the 3960x in general-use case scenarios (aka: video games). The latency-issue made the 2990wx terrible at playing video games.
Yeah, no one is buying these HEDTs for "purely" gaming tasks, but any "creative" individual who does video rendering during the week, but plays Counterstrike on the weekend, needs a compromise machine that handles both high-core counts AND high-clock speeds for the different workloads.
No they weren't. I certainly wasn't. There was no reason at all to believe TR3 would be a price drop. Ryzen 3000 wasn't and neither was X570. If the mainstream platform parts didn't get a price drop why would the HEDT halo products? Particularly since new generations are almost never price drops, especially without any competition?
> instead we got overpriced TRX40 (compared to high-end x399)
X399 at launch ranged from $340 to $550. TRX40 at launch ranges from $450 to $700. Yes there was a bump there, but there is also overlap in pricing, too. You are getting PCI-E 4.0 instead along with a substantially higher spec'd chipset. You're also getting in general a higher class of board quality & construction. Similar to the X570 vs. X470 comparison.
> but it's still an untypical situation
Untypical in that they are actually a lot faster generation over generation, sure. Untypical in that they are priced similarly or slightly more? Not really. That's been status quo for the last decade or so. The company with the halo product sets the price. The company in 2nd place prices cuts in response. AMD has the halo, they were never going to price cut it.
For x399 users TRX40 is underwhelming as it just feels like "pay for the same stuff again" if you want to use new CPUs.
Halo boards are always stupidly overpriced. X570 tops out at $1000, too. That's a terrible way to judge a platform's costs.
> PCIe 4's usefulness is questionable (basically just for 100 Gigabit networking right now).
Not true at all. It's more bandwidth to the chipset, meaning you can run double the PCI 3.0 gear off of that chipset than you could before without hitting a bottleneck (well actually 4x since the number of lanes to the chipset also doubled...). That means more SATA ports. More M.2 drives. More USB 3.2 gen 2x2.
> For x399 users TRX40 is underwhelming as it just feels like "pay for the same stuff again" if you want to use new CPUs.
Not disagreeing on that but that's very different from TRX4 is "overpriced vs X399." Just because it's not worth upgrading to the new platform doesn't make the new platform overpriced vs. the old one.
Not necessarily the case in practice since that would require some sort of chipset or active converter exposed by the motherboard to mux 3.0 lanes to bifurcated 4.0 lanes. A 3.0 x4 device still needs those four lanes to get full speed so in a PCI-e 4.0 setting you’ll actually be using up four of the PCIe 4.0 lanes, but inefficiently.
This is a new market segment. If you want a fast cpu, the Ryzen 7 and 9 series are completely fine if you want that price range!
The exact same price range as you're used to still exist.
On the other hand, people have been used to paying exorbitantly for Xeon processors, like 2000-5000 per cpu, so this is a breath of fresh air.
There was no reason to kill TR4. It could have been a "legacy" board with PCIe 3.0 support, like X470 is for the desktop socket.
AMD just killed TR4 because they wanted everyone to buy new boards. The classic Intel move.
(meanwhile Intel put a new generation of chips on X299, while also putting out a compatible X299X socket that increases lane count. Intel doing it right for once, AMD doing it wrong for once.)
I know video games don't really get bandwidth bottlenecked, but all you gotta do is perform a "Scan" or "Reduce" on the GPU and bam, you're PCIe bottlenecked. (I recommend NVidia CUB or AMD ROCprim for these kinds of operations)
CUB Device-reduce is extremely fast if the data is already on the GPU: https://nvlabs.github.io/cub/structcub_1_1_device_reduce.htm.... However, if the data is CPU / DDR4 RAM side, then the slow PCIe connection hampers you severely.
I pushed 1GB of data to device-side reduce the other day (just playing with ROCprim), and it took ~100ms to hipMemcpy the 1GB of data to the GPU, but only 5ms to actually execute the reduce. That's a PCIe-bottleneck for sure. (Numbers from memory... I don't quite remember them exactly but that was roughly the magnitudes we're talking about). That was over PCIe 3.0 x16, which seems to only push 10GBps one-way in practice. (15Gbps in theory, but practice is always lower than the specs)
Yeah, I know CPU / GPU have like 10us of latency, but you can easily write a "server" kind of CPU-master / GPU-slave scheduling algorithm to send these jobs down to the GPU. So you can write software to ignore the latency problem in many cases.
Software can't solve the bandwidth problem however. You gotta just buy a bigger pipe.