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Comment by pella | Hacker News Reader

Phoronix: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Offers Incredible Linux Performance

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3990x-th...

"When taking the geometric mean of the benchmarks for this article today, The Threadripper 3990X came out overall 26% faster than the dual Xeon Platinum 8280, which is a very nice accomplishment since such a configuration currently retails for $20,000 USD worth of processors alone."

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Looking at Linux performance seems like a good idea. Linux doesn’t have all of Windows’ hangups about core count.

Yep. From user-land, numactl FTW

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/numactl.8.h...

This isn't a NUMA issue per se. The Windows kernel has some kind of hangup about scheduling across more than 64 logical CPUs.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/procthread/pr...

Looking at Linux performance is a great idea since those CPUs probably will be utilized in Linux machines as well (lots of render farms run on Linux).

I would assume render farms would rely much more on GPUs than on CPUs.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38029698/why-do-we-use-c... from a few years ago. The gist is CPUs are more versatile in the work they can do, support larger scenes, and the render doesn't have to be in real-time so it's not a make-or-break comparison as video games would be.

I'm not thinking on the specialized GPU parts for shading and mapping, but pure floating point hardware. With 3D you are doing lots and lots of floating point ops that should map easily to what GPUs do best.

OTOH, GPUs are still harder to program than CPUs and I can only imagine what the SFX crew would hear when they have to explain the movie can't be released in summer because the GPUs are too hard to write software for.

I think some do, some don't. I think some of the more complex models used in animations can't be easily parallelised.

As Linux becomes more competitive with Windows from a user experience point of view, I wonder if superior support for these new crazy AMD processors might help give it a boost. I'm sure many graphics people would move (if only Linux had good support for applications like Photoshop).

I'm curious what performance would be like on a linux hosting a 128 thread windows VM. I expect it to be worse than running windows on the bare metal, but maybe not. I could see a series of deficiencies in windows being eliminated with the linux host -> windows client topology.

I assume that the issue with processor groups on windows is that something somewhere is hardcoded to represent some kind of per-CPU state as bits in machine word. Having some kind of hypervisor as an additional layer will not help with that.

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