Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

I wish they'd go back to the way they did the original Threadrippers. These absurd prices kinda make them pointless for a large number of people when combined with how AMD has bungled the socket support with Threadripper and how expensive the motherboards are. The lower prices and overlap with the top range of regular Ryzens made threadripper very appealing for applications where you want lots of IO and RAM, but not necessarily a more capable CPU.

View on HN

7950X3D is $43.75 per core. The 24 core Threadripper part is $62.50 per core. It's certainly a higher price, but imo it's not outrageous for more memory channels, registered ECC, and more PCIE lanes.

The motherboards on the other hand...

I don't necessarily agree on looking at pricing that way. One reason being that the 24 core part is 8 ccds with 3 cores each, while the 7950x is 2 ccds with 8 cores each, so the threadripper is able to go with much lower quality chips which would have otherwise gone in the bin.

What do you think the appropriate way of looking at pricing is? Once you get beyond 8 cores, your ability to saturate the CPU comes down to very specific parallelized workflows that can benefit close to linearly from extra cores. If you have that kind of workflow (render farms, encoding, etc) then the marginal cost of a CPU feels relevant.

I'm sure there are other workflows, especially in the cloud where you are rending out fractions of a CPU. But for individual professionals, what else besides marginal core cost would you consider?

Don't you incur the cross-CCD latency every time you hit the 3D L3 cache anyways?

Still, that's good info., I must have missed that part where they are doing their CCD layout like that.

I don't think you get a cross-CCD hit for 3D v-cache - rather the entire L3 cache for that chiplet is slightly slower (latency wise) - https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/01/21/deep-diving-zen-3-v-ca...

Threadripper doesn't have V-cache though.

imagine if it had a shared cache....

A shared cache would be slower. Better for some apps, worse for others.

Even if it uses chips with defective cores, it's four times the silicon. The 24-core Threadripper is actually greatly advantaged compared to the 7950x for the right workload. There is four times the L3 cache, and four times the bandwidth from the chiplets to the io die. If you just needed a place to sell chips with a core defect, there are Ryzen SKUs for that.

You mean the Threadripper has a lot more cache on the 24 core part so it's going to be much better in those workloads that fit into its cache but not into the 7950x's?

I wouldn't hold your breath. As long as there's an insatiable demand for EPYC server CPUs, the workstation parts need to have similar margins because they use the same dies.

I looked at AMD's earnings. There's not an insatiable demand, AMD is not making a profit.

When there was a real insatiable demand for GPUs AMD actually did make money hand over fist

> Data Center segment revenue was $1.3 billion, down 11% year-over-year primarily due to lower 3rd Gen EPYC processor sales as Enterprise demand was soft and Cloud inventory levels were elevated at some customers.

https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1146/am...

Judging by AMD's Q2 financials, there most probably isn't insatiable demand for EPYC CPUs right now. But probably AMD won't sell the chips with discount as Threadrippers, either because they already sit finalized in EPYCs in a warehouse, or to prevent companies buying lots of Threadrippers and using them in datacenters. They probably want to make the big money in the datacenter, and they're willing to take a short-term revenue hit if it helps to motivate the buyers to spend in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com