AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 CPUs: Up to 96 Zen 4 Cores for Workstations
wccftech.com
wccftech.com
WCCF is known for jumping the gun. They are not SEO trash or a tech tabloid, but grains of salt are required.
So, hey AMD figure out a reasonable way to product segment your workstation users so you can flatten the price curve a bit so I don't have to keep buying used servers.
So, yes, but presumably given enough threads the limit becomes how fast one can collect and link the vmlinux which is mostly still done serially ala Amdahl's law. Oh and there is some IO/etc bounding at the beginning checking the config/etc. Some sites have kernel compile benchmarks and for the most part they tend to indicate nearly linear scalability. Although there tend to be two major config differences, some people benchmark with something like an allmodconfig vs people who benchmark with a more minimal kernel module setup. The former are the ones that can be as slow as an hour or so on machines without a lot of cores, and the latter are the ones that finish in sub 60 seconds on fairly modest hardware. But given enough cores its possible to turn the former into he latter.
I'm sure GPUs would still be more efficient for the specialize task of heaps of matrix math, but given the insane price premium on high-end nVidia cards I wonder if this could be an alternative?
96 AVX512 cores is roughly 3072 parallel fp16 calculations per cycle.
It's right here in black and white. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/233483/...
Also, since these will mostly sell through OEMs, I imagine many of these might get put together with the whole validated hardware+software package deal thing.
I'm using a single socket epyc milan as my daily driver and it's great. 64 cores and 512gb of memory is is good times. But that only works for me because it's headless and the thin clients talking to it can do things like make noises and connect to bluetooth keyboards.
You can get perfectly normal ATX motherboards for Epyc. There's even a mini-ITX one for some reason:
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=R...
So that you cat fit 2 motherboards in that 2 CPU setup! a.k.a. redundant motherboards. /s
Finally it turned out that it's not a 2U server with 12 bays, but two separate servers in one box, side by side. Half the bays go to one, half to the other. Each side has two CPUs in it, and one was completely powered off.
Noise that we find in server machines is because of the fans pushing loads of air basically out through the 1U/2U tunnel. With tower cases that is not the case and hence there's no noise.
The real issue is that there are no non-Pro threadrippers anymore. Those were even cheaper.
Since this will mostly be an OEM part, I think that makes sense. By slapping the same claimed TDP on all cores, vendors can offer all SKUs using the same thermal solution (though obviously the low end will probably be overspecced).
Also, I don't think it'll be down at 120-130W - the 7900X (also 12c/24T) has a TDP of 170W, and a max socket draw (which it will hit) of 230W.
The 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X has a TDP of 170W, and that's with a significantly smaller package. The 16-core EPYC 9174F already has a TDP of 320 W with a base frequency of 4.1GHz and a boost frequency of 4.4GHz, in a package quite similar to Threadripper.
The other 3 are running at 15% utilization
Nevertheless, Threadrippers are not really useful for software development, because using two computers with 7950X and 64 GB memory each as compilation servers would provide a much higher speed than one computer with a Threadripper 7960X and 128 GB memory, which would cost about the same.
Threadrippers are not useful for who wants many cores, because the 7950X cores are much cheaper, they are useful for those who want a large amount of memory in a single box or a large amount of PCI lanes (e.g. for multiple GPUs) in a single box.
Theoretically they could pack in 192 cores with the 16-core die, but haven't done so (on EPYC) for reasons unknown to me. Maybe a physical packaging limitation?
*wow, core counts so big I found it slightly difficult to multiply by 2 in my head.
This anti-competitive behavior should be illegal and it should be prosecuted. Clearly, there's some kind of backroom agreement where these "preferred" OEM's are giving AMD money, or some consideration of value, in exchange for locking out their competition. What other, benign explanation is there?
(Not unlike Intel paying OEM's illegal kickbacks to lock out AMD [a], come to think of it).
"the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series and select Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processors will be available from DIY retailers starting on November 21st"
So this time it appears that it will be a real product launch for everyone, not just for Lenovo or the like.
Multiple 7950X systems will always be faster than any of these Threadrippers for a given amount of money, but 7950X is limited to only 64 GB of fast memory (populating two sockets per channel slows a lot the memory), so anyone who needs a lot of memory (up to 1 TB) in a single system might want a 7960X (24 cores @ $1500).
The models with more cores have worse performance per dollar, so it is hard to justify their use instead of using multiple servers, for higher performance at a lower cost.
But yes, there's definitely a memory speed limitation there.
"Oops we sold out" is one thing. "Oops; we conspired with other companies to limit supply and to form a cartel" is entirely another. The industry's been caught doing the latter too often, and governments' oversight is IMO too slow, too weak, and lacking meaningful deterrent power. I think they need to be much more aggressive. This stuff victimizes consumers.
and as far as I can tell it's quite unlikely that there is bad intent involved
as far as I understand DIY sells of Threadriper solely exist for PR, mind share reasons a bit of edge case handling and maybe some book keeping trick to even out certain marked OEM demand fluctuations.
but I don't think they make relevant amounts of profit with DIY sells
I mean think about it most (by far) end users of Threadrippers are companies needing it for work stations.
Most larger companies only buy from OEMs like DELL for various reasons like warranty handling, uniform platforms, certain "enterprise" BIOS features etc.
Even for small companies the DIY part is often an issue, they might not have IT experts and even if this system goes e.g. to a software developer they might not be willing to hardware maintain their PC (and take responsibility for it).
This leafs a relative small number of private enthusiasts and small companies, to small to really be profitable.
Add to that that the demand of DIY is less predictable then that of OEMs, and production capacities for CPUs tend to be limited and even if less so currently tend to still often doesn't allow fast dynamic changes of the amount.
Idk. but if I would be AMD I think I would pin down my big customers on contracts with a more fixed demand (both fixed initially and fixed+%variety follow up) and then plan CPU production of that (with maxed out variety) and if there are any spare factory resources I would use them for either server CPUs or desktop CPUs whatever currently sells hotter. Then if the OMS don't max out their variety I would stock the remainder and once enough stock accumulated pass it the the consumer facing department to sell as DIY parts.
So they have at least initial contract for supply before they even start designing this (mostly work station) products (which often involve e.g. custom motherboards).
I.e. not only are they buying before release, they _need_ supply guarantees long long before release.
The customer can't do that for multiple reasons.
- They haven't signed a NDA contract nor are they in direct contact with first party sells personal so when it's time to early order they don't even know it exist.
- They buy in quantities of 1,2 maybe 10 instead of multiples of thousands (initial charge) with follow up guarantees. E.g. if you look at server CPUs you will see 1kU prices, because this CPUs are sold only (by AMD or Intel directly) in multiples of 1000 units.
If you (or lets say a PC retailer) do buy multiple thousand thread ripper CPUs at once and are willing to enter a contract for this sells long before they are sold (which likely involves an initial % of the price as down payment) you probably could get them early one. Through you would still be competing with DELL and similar for limited supply so you might still have a hard time to get the very first charge. And you also might have some problem getting compatible motherboards as many ORMs produce their own.
1. it's not a consumer product but mainly an OEM product
2. it's supply limited (much more so then server or desktop CPUs as the marked is in general more niche)
3. it's an OEM product, i.e. it only sells to companies always in large amounts and they put it into their product. BUT for such supply chains a minimal quantity is needed to be sold per customer. Or the customer won't buy because it's to little to do a product launch.
5. Only if there are left overs is selling to end users even considered, not because of backroom deals, but because it financially makes no sense at all. I would even go as far as to say AMD makes no (relevant degree of money) profit from the DIY sells of Threadripper.
Or in other words it's the standard procedure for companies selling to companies in case of limited demand to first sell to your second best customer as little as you can to satisfy their minimal needs, then continue to your 2nd best customer, 3rd best etc. If there is a huge step down between nth and n+1th best also maybe revisit the first n best customers first and increase their quantity.