AMD Introduces New AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000/Pro 7000 WX

Regardless, it's the memory channels and extra PCIE lanes that makes Threadripper shine, oh, and now HEDT gets Registered ECC which is fantastic.

Yes and it is Zen 4 Core, so a lot faster than the 3000 days. My only concern is the Quad Memory Channel. Not sure if the 64 Core will be limited by it.

But this is exciting for Desktop Computing.

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When these 'base clocks' are listed, would a lower core CPU with a higher base clock run more calculations at its max thread count than a higher core cpu? Say 64 threads on a 32 vore 4Ghz CPU vs a 2.5Ghz 96 core monster

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You know that GPUs are just CPUs with a massive core count, right?

Like in the 1000s of cores

So depends on what calculations you need done, there is no answer.

It depends on how the program uses the cores, not even only what calculations you need done

Your cache question doesn't really have a simple answer either. E.g. an AMD CPU is split into different CCXs. To simplify somewhat, each core is broken up into several smaller compute units, with their own caches and memory controller. Intel has a completely different ring-based approach that's harder to summarise in once sentence.

Overall though, for the sort of work you're describing the limiting factor is often memory bandwidth, not raw compute. Different platforms have very different membw/core figures, and I suspect if you started measuring that then you'd find it easier to predict your codes performance.

https://openbenchmarking.org/tests

On AMD chip's (I just dunno about the Intel architecture), each chip is divided up into chiplets with their own set of cores and L3 cache. For these Threadrippers, those will be 8 physical cores, and 32MB of L3 cache. Each core can access the L3 cache within their own chiplet only.

You'll need to dig into the enabled cores+cache arrangements for any particular chip you might be interested in to figure out what will be good for your workloads.

The base clock is only when all cores are loaded, and especially on Threadripper / Ryzen is far from meaningful in practice as they will permanently turbo. So it's very possible that the 96 core threadripper and the 32 core threadripper when asked to run the same 32 threads will actually end up running around the same clockspeed.

See for example this chart on the 5950X from anandtech: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/CoreFreqScale-5950v3...

Note that there's not 2 frequencies, there's a whole range of them and that range varies by the actual workload demands.

The general rule of thumb is that within a generation, higher clock speed yields better performance per core. If you only have 32 data points, then you will probably get better performance with the 4 GHz 32-core CPU.

> if I'm doing a massive serial calculation does an individual core get to use the full cache

Your single core will get to use the entire L3 cache, but L2 and L1 caches are per-core and so your single core doing the work will not have access to those. So yes, there conceivably could be a benefit due to the larger L3 cache.

On a broader note, these kinds of factors (frequency, cache size, parallelism) tend to be extremely workload-specific and unpredictable, so the only real way to find out what's faster is to measure your specific workload.

Threadripper has a significantly higher boost clock, but that only counts when you're not using all the threads, so you only care about this in a workstation running mixed workloads. In a data center you don't use a high core count processor for a single-thread performance-sensitive workload, you put it on something with fewer cores like a Ryzen 7700X because it has a higher boost clock than any Threadripper while costing less and using less power.

I do more or less the same - I look for tower servers. The hardware is good, the maintenance is easy, plenty of space for storage and memory, and so on.

With Threadripper, I can compile as well as play games, all on one machine.

And remember that with "hyper-threading" it appears at 192 cores - which is just insane.

It's a bit weird (but cool!) that AMD seems to expect to use this chip on ordinary workstations rather than HPC clusters. Hopefully a few of those workstations are bought by the kernel and application developers (who have reasonably parallel workloads like compiling operating systems), otherwise you're likely to have more than an order of magnitude more cores than the average person designing your operating system. Usually, the problem is the opposite - the devs are on new flagship workstation-class devices, and the users on little edge devices (sometimes still with HDDs instead of SSDs!) have a poor experience, but this is kind of the opposite.

The 96 core part has 480MB of cache and 8 channels of DDR5.

Compare that to a 7950X (not the X3D model) which has 16 cores, but only 80MB of cache and 2 channels of DDR5. The 96-core part has 6X as many cores, but 4X as much memory bandwidth and 6X as much cache. The interfaces have scaled similarly to the core count.

Of course, if your workload isn't really very parallel then you won't see much benefit. Such is life with high core counts.

There are still some embarrassingly parallel applications out there that could benefit from this sort of hardware. I'm not sure if it's absolutely necessary to have this number of cores under each desk though. To me this sounds like a luxury/vanity/status symbol.

The 96 core 7995WX: 3.6W/core

The 12 core 7945WX: 29.2W/core

The motherboards on the other hand...