Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Sounds about right.

I’m struggling to justify the cost of a Threadripper (let alone pro!) for a AAA game studio though.

I wonder who can justify these machines. High frequency trading? data science? shouldn’t that be done on servers?

Threadripper very rarely seems to make any sense. The only times it seems like you want it are for huge memory support/bandwidth and/or a huge number of pcie slots. But it's not cheap or supported enough compared to epyc to really make sense to me any time I've been specing out a system along those lines.

I bought a threadripper pro system out of desperation, trying to get secondhand PCIe 80G A100s to run locally. The huge rebar allocations confused/crashed every Intel/AMD system I had access to.

I think the Xeon systems should have worked and that it was actually a motherboard bios issue, but I had seen a photo of it running in a threadripper and prayed I wasn’t digging an even deeper hole.

Yeah, that makes sense if you just have ~proof that some configuration works and want to just be done with it.

This is why a business like Puget Systems, or a line like HP Z Workstations, persist. You know in advance that your rig will work.

I've been tempted, but had a hard time finding a case where I needed more than the 9950x but less than a single socket epyc. Especially since the epyc motherboards are cheaper, CPUs are cheaper, and the Epycs have 3x the memory bandwidth of the thread ripper and 1.5x the memory bandwidth of the Threadripper pro.

Yeah I don't get it either. To get marginally more resources than the 9950X you have to make a significant leap in price to a $1500+ CPU on a $1000 motherboard.

No, you get it.

This is pure market segmentation. If you need that little bit extra, you’re forced to compromise, or to open your wallet big time, and AMD is betting on people who “really” need that slightly extra oomph to pay.

The premium is about getting more i/o. More memory channel, a lot more lanes. Maybe also a very high power limit.

If you need that in a single system, you gotta pay up. Lower tier SP6 processors are actually pretty reasonably priced, boards are still spendy though.

Doubly so when a $650 Epyc motherboard and a $650 Epyc CPU gets you 3x the threadipper's bandwidth and 1.5 the thread ripper pro's bandwidth.

Seems like threadripper is too low volume to be price competitive with Epyc and there's a relatively price insensitive workstation market out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com