AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X roundup

[williamcll]

Reviews for the 3990X are coming out for the past view days and Linus himself have already submitted two videos about it.

Pros:

Great price

Great performance

Plenty of bandwidth for PCIe 

Cons:

Limited capacity for non-regular memory

Limited software to use all cores/Nodes

Needs BIOS upgrade first

Performance does not scale up compared to cheaper models 

 

Overclocking:

https://hwbot.org/submission/4348879_microcenter_slp_045_cinebench___r20_ryzen_threadripper_3990x_32898_marks Linus' build is overclocked to 4.3Ghz and is functionally scaled in performance. 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-overclock-record

 

Written reviews:

https://www.techspot.com/review/1980-amd-threadripper-3990x/

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-threadripper-3990x-review

https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/139208-amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x/

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-review

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-review-64-cores-for-a-workstation/

Video reviews:

Spoiler

 

 

Thoughts: It's a great chip, but I don't think I have a use for it myself anytime soon.

[otherworldlynob]

Dude, that CPU costs 6.5x more than my entire setup

[otherworldlynob]

Dude, that CPU costs 6.5x more than my entire setup

[Chiyawa]

There's a little error on 4:19, where the base clock for Threadripper is 64Cores/128Threads?

 

Anyway, I was curious, what was Linus showing at 17:57?

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

Anyway, I was curious, what was Linus showing at 17:57?

The kidney that wouldn't even cover the cost of an Intel Xeon 9282

[Chiyawa]

12 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The kidney that wouldn't even cover the cost of an Intel Xeon 9282

I mean that device.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Chiyawa said:

I mean that device.

Oh, that's his mic pack

[Chiyawa]

Just now, leadeater said:

Oh, that's his mic pack

Oh, I see,

Thank you.

[SeriousDad69]

This processor is really just AMD flexing by shitting on Intel's entire lineup top to bottom with a mere HEDT part. They probably don't expect to sell that many.

[Speakerator]

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, huilun02 said:

More cores and cheaper than Intel's non-consumer Cascade Lake-AP that doesnt even exist yet.

This consumer HEDT part has limited capacity for non consumer oriented memory.

Software cant use this many threads, must be the hardware's fault.

PCIE gen4 is detrimental to the user.

 

Too many cons, wont buy

Eh nah.

 

This is something I would buy if I had a use case. I don't. Only video encoding (on the CPU) or render farms (on the CPU) would have a use case here. Most other use cases require ECC memory to even be viable (eg any server use) and really, if you're going to do that, just get a server configuration.

 

HEDT requires fast cores, and the more cores you have, the slower they all operate at. Likewise, the more cores you have, the more memory has to be slower and the memory bus is shared by more cores so the overall bandwidth goes down. Hence virtual machines are probably not a good use case. VM's use cases diminish once you have more more VM's than memory channels. Web servers might pass with this, but I don't think the power requirements make it viable as the typical 1U server requires a 120w CPU TDP or lower, and already sound like get engines cranked to full blast during regular operation.

[leadeater]

45 minutes ago, Kisai said:

VM's use cases diminish once you have more more VM's than memory channels. Web servers might pass with this, but I don't think the power requirements make it viable as the typical 1U server requires a 120w CPU TDP or lower, and already sound like get engines cranked to full blast during regular operation.

Most VMs in server virtualization don't really do much and are largely idle, 30 Windows VMs is quite common for the last few years which is 15 VMs per CPU. High density virtual hosts usually have a pair of ~140W TDP CPUs and it's all really about the number of cores and threads so you don't get contention between vCPUs and pCPUs time wise, memory bandwidth is rarely a consideration at all funnily.

 

When you're hosting database VMs you use different CPU SKUs with higher clocks and less cores and avoid sharing physical CPU threads at all if they are high performance database VMs.

 

Memory channels and bandwidth for the most part is just an HPC thing. Additionally you generally don't want average CPU utilization on the host to be more than 50% so you can accommodate load spikes without getting large resource contention and all the VMs effectively stalling then triggering VM load shedding on to other hosts which could then cause a cascade of CPU spiking and VM moves etc. Cluster behavior is usually configured to preference a host being over utilized for a good length of time before shifting VMs off it for that reason, nice low sensitivity to CPU spikes is good for the cluster, bad for the VMs on the host.

 

Edit:

Oh and as long as the servers aren't Supermicro or equiv they are actually fairly quiet, at least HPE and Dell ones are. More expensive servers have senor arrays in them and can monitor the temperature of the air and components throughout the server and control each fan as required. Cheaper ones just look at the hottest or closest to Tmax and run all the fans at set duty cycle steps with very little granularity. As you can tell not much of a fan (heh, get it)  of Supermicro.

[Doobeedoo]

The actual GOAT CPU though, especially for the scalable workloads. Linus had a good point as far as artificial limitations compared to Epyc part, they can still do more. But oh wow is it awesome to see how tiers of platforms are getting more blurred. 

[hishnash]

Memory limitation is the biggest issue on this part it makes it a very limited option in high end Workstations that are not GPU powered.

[xtroria]

I feel this CPU should’ve been an EPYC instead of a ryzen.

 

Only professionals would need something of this scale.

 

Even for most youtubers, do they need more than 16 cores? 
 

i know some people will say why am i whining when we are given better, but I’m just saying the product is a hype marketing more than anything for consumers

[yolosnail]

8 hours ago, xtroria said:

I feel this CPU should’ve been an EPYC instead of a ryzen.

 

Only professionals would need something of this scale.

 

Even for most youtubers, do they need more than 16 cores? 
 

i know some people will say why am i whining when we are given better, but I’m just saying the product is a hype marketing more than anything for consumers

It is already EPYC, apart from a few firmware tweaks and being binned for higher clocks rather than lower power consumption.

At a guess I'd say these were dud EPYC chips where all memory channels didn't meet validation, but were able to sustain a higher clock.