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Comment by jdsully | Hacker News Reader

I drove 2 hours to get my 3900X. I was worried it would be too much horsepower but it spends a lot of its time >80% utilization.

These cores are great for debugging threading issues. I would trade it for a 3950X if I could find one.

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I bought a 3900X also. I, too, would like a 3950X, but the 3900X is so fantastic it's hard to be too upset. I also have 4 Threadripper systems and I just could not get work done without them. My build times for compiling software would be atrocious without them.

Now I wanna change from 3700x to 3950x... :(

i went from old second generation i7 , to 3700x, its awesome :)

i also put in 64 gb of memory, so i can keep all the tabs open (insert "EVERYONE" meme gif from leon), while i develop

At the moment I don't feel the need to upgrade. My bigest problem is that my cpu fan tends to throtle up and down a lot, can't find correct fan curve.

There will be a BIOS option entitled "Fan Smoothing" or similar. On my ASUS board, it gives a range of times over which to average CPU temp rather than use the instantaneous value for fan control. I have mine set to 7 seconds I think, and it completely stopped the fan revving up/down issue.

That's what gets me...the desktop ones are all AM4...when my 3600 seems a little long in the tooth, a Processor + RAM upgrade is actually reasonable.

I’m still on an i5 4670k and 16 gigs of ram. I built this system in 2013. I secured a day one 3950x and it arrived this weekend - the rest of the components are getting here throughout next week - and the speed up of compiles and ability to run multiple VMs at once for testing distributed apps is what I’m most excited about! It’s basically a workstation and a gaming rig in one. Gaming is fun but man I can’t wait for some faster feedback loops when I’m developing.

I replaced a i5 2500k + 8gb with a 2700X and 32gb last year so I could run multiple VMs + have the odd game here and there. You're in for a treat :D

I was able to get rid of multiple computers and convert from physical to virtual and save on power bills. Once your build is complete you will be incredibly happy. AMD is killing it with these processors. I've never been happier with a tech product line. It just blows me away how much I'm able to accomplish on a shoestring budget now.

What's the latest on VM tech? Is it still using Virtualbox + spinning up multiple VMs?

There's also the 4xxx series on the same socket due sometime next year. The talk for zen3 is 15% ipc uplift and 10% higher clocks. Sure the 3900x will carry you until then.

Is the 3950x compatible with the same x570 mobos/ram as 3900x, ie drop in replacement?

Yes, it's the same CPU with better chiplets in it.

> I also have 4 Threadripper systems

Can you tell what you're using them for ?

Worker pool for compile jobs and simulations. The cost to run this locally and with local storage (over 10g) is cheaper than to do it in the cloud.

I'm curious as to why these processors make it easy to debug threading issues? Is it just due to the sheer number of cores or something? not sure why that would help either.

More cores _actually_ running simultaneously means more likely chance of encountering sporadic race conditions. Also makes it easier to measure (and thus work to improve) high thread-count scaling.

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