Threadripper benchmarks breakdown

[YoloSwag]

5 hours ago, Suika said:

So the question is, for me anyway, who's the intended audience? A streamer would be better suited taking their $1,500-1,700 budget and building a second PC with the sole purpose of video capture and streaming. A content creator, at least in Adobe Premiere, is still better off with CUDA acceleration... Is TR's attractiveness in PCIe lanes and 3D rendering? I'm honestly not convinced that TR, or X299 at this current time, is a platform I'd consider if I were a dedicated streamer or content creator. It is impressive to see AMD really competing with Intel in the enthusiast and professional market, but it seems niche now.

It comes down really to PCIe lanes for content creators and data crunching. That's one of the biggest advantages of TR vs X299.

 

You could have a bunch of SSDs, a bunch of expansion cards like two-four GPUs at running at 8X, and the good news is you won't even need the highest part to get it. There's even an upcoming TR 1900X which is basically just a Ryzen 1700/1800 but would still have 60 PCIe lanes for $549. I'd say the best entry level CPU for startup content creators and data crunching is still the 1700, but step it up a bit and it's a whole new world.

[Skanky Sylveon]

9 minutes ago, VFe said:

For games in particular it's difficult, you kinda have to assume a "base" level of access to cores in your designs, we're only just recently seeing games that require 4 cores to run well, gonna be a long time.

I agree, which is a shame.  I don't think we are going to see advanced AI in games, before games that scale up to more cores exist.

 

But those games will run like crap on lower core machines.  Which could really end up hurting their sales.

14 minutes ago, VFe said:

It's possible to put certain game elements in expanding thread pools to make use of all available cores, but there's a very small amount of systems you can do that with, majority of the engine will be stuck to 1-4 cores by design.

The only engine that I know that does this really well is the Nitrous engine, Ashes of the Singularity uses said engine.

17 minutes ago, VFe said:

A lot of this is Amdhal's law at play, rather than a design challenge that can be overcome.

I know, the challenge that multi threading puts on developers rarely pays off.

[leadeater]

28 minutes ago, VFe said:

For games in particular it's difficult, you kinda have to assume a "base" level of access to cores in your designs, we're only just recently seeing games that require 4 cores to run well, gonna be a long time.

 

It's possible to put certain game elements in expanding thread pools to make use of all available cores, but there's a very small amount of systems you can do that with, majority of the engine will be stuck to 1-4 cores by design.

 

A lot of this is Amdhal's law at play, rather than a design challenge that can be overcome.

Galactic Civilization 3 not too long ago updated their game engine to handle many cores rather well, was in the Crusaders DLC update and the Ludicrous update. It is the type of game that will be able to utilize more cores more easily though, the update made a huge difference to turn times late game. All TBS games become extremely painful late game so even minor improvements help a lot.

 

Quote

The best way to describe Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade is that it is the answer to the mid to late game grind that 4X strategy games have struggled with for years," said Wardell. "With Crusade, we answer this with both features such as the new citizen system that allows players to execute powerful actions late game as well as taking full advantage of the new, 64-bit, multi-core custom game engine that was made exclusively to make space 4X games.

 

Quote

What core-neutral AI means is that the game will use all the CPU cores you have no matter how few or how many are on your PC," said Wardell.  We found that a large percentage of our players have at least 4 CPU cores and many have 6 or more.  This meant we could, literally, cut down turn times by a factor of 8 to 12 depending on the CPU. This matters because anyone who plays these types of games know that the late game can slow to a halt. It also allowed us to develop a substantially more intelligent series of computer opponents as well as create a more life-like background simulation that the players tap into.

Quote

• AI now fully uses the new Crusade multicore engine in pathfinding, diplomacy, ship movement, tactical analysis, economic planning, planetary invasions, citizen assignments, etc. are all broken up into tiny jobs and sent out to your CPU cores drastically reducing turn times.
• Improvements to AI trade intelligence based on the new multi-turn need analysis system.
• Continued improvement to turn times thanks to Crusade multicore

http://www.stardock.com/games/article/483323/ludicrous-update-to-galactic-civilizations-iii-crusade-arrives

 

There have been more updates to the game after this further improving the multi-core usage, I have some serious respect for Stardock for actually doing this sort of work as I'm a big fan of both TBS and RTS games and have been on HEDT for a long time waiting and waiting for this to happen.

[WereCat]

4 hours ago, Suika said:

My argument here is why are you investing that much in a platform when you could invest even less in an i7-7700k and separate R5 1600 rig with a capture card that can accomplish the same thing, but yield better gaming performance and a similar viewer experience? Streaming just seems like an unusual justification when the superior solution is likely going to be an entire machine dedicated to the process, as opposed as to one machine to do it all. At least for me, it breaks down like this:

 

$1,310 for the i7-7700k and R5 1600 system, better gaming experience and similar viewer experience (not including components like storage that would be included in the TR build)

  Reveal hidden contents

i7-7700k - $300

 

H100i - $100

16GB - $120

Z270 - $150

 

R5 1600 - $200

B350 - $80

16GB - $120

Capture Device - $150

Extra PSU - $50

Extra case - $40

 

vs.

$1,540 for Threadripper, with inferior gaming performance and similar viewer experience (Ryzen can't hit 144Hz as easily as Intel, which immediately doesn't sell to me). Also less spacious than a second rig, probably less power consumption, but being a new platform, it may not be as easy to deal with.

  Reveal hidden contents

1920X - $800

 

H100i - $100 (dunno if compatible, just assuming)

32GB - $240

TR4 - $400

 

 

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to own one of these chips as impractical as it is, but it seems to entertain a more niche audience than just "streamers and content creators." I mean, my 5930k is still plenty to get by when simultaneously playing and recording. The massive thread advantage to Threadripper doesn't yield enough of a benefit to justify it to me. You'd really have to go overkill from what most streamers do to really sell it.

If you play on G-Sync or Free-Sync monitor with high refresh rate and you want to play on that FPS with G-Sync or Free-Sync enabled then you're out of luck using the capture card/device under the condition that you want to use windowed/borderless mode which as a streamer you most likely want to manage the other applications on the fly.

[XenosTech]

1 hour ago, VagabondWraith said:

What's up with Tom Logan's power consumption? I mean, an overclocked processor will obviously pull more watts but holy sh!t this doesn't seem right. I haven't read Tom's full review yet to see what he was testing to get that number, bit holy moly that looks awfully high.

His is just way off for some reason... Every one else is around 400ish Watts and he's like 200W over everyone else I've looked up so far.

[VFe]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Galactic Civilization 3 not too long ago updated their game engine to handle many cores rather well, was in the Crusaders DLC update and the Ludicrous update. It is the type of game that will be able to utilize more cores more easily though, the update made a huge difference to turn times late game. All TBS games become extremely painful late game so even minor improvements help a lot.

RTS or "High Unit Games" are an example of a genre that is embarrassingly easy to parallelize.

 

You can scale those games on highend systems to pretty insane numbers(tens of thousands of units, GPU or Ram becomes a bottleneck first before CPU).

 

However those same game engines will not be able to make a game like say, Uncharted 5, COD Whatever, Final Fantasy 16, etc run any better, because the relationships of the data needed is much more bottlenecked with synchronous steps and then Amdhal's Law smacks the gamedev in the face.

 

So there are game engines that can highly scale very specific types of games, but those techniques are not generalizable to games as a whole, just specific games that fit the mold.

(Which isn't a knock against them, they're just genre specific engines).

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, VFe said:

So there are game engines that can highly scale very specific types of games, but those techniques are not generalizable to games as a whole, just specific games that fit the mold.

(Which isn't a knock against them, they're just genre specific engines).

Yea it's just a real pain that RTS and TBS game makers have taken so long to bother with more than 4 cores. 6+ core desktop CPUs have been around for a very long time now.

 

TBS games in particular are the easiest since there is very very few real time elements to the game and turn processing is just a huge computation crunch, odd interactions with cores and frame dipping etc doesn't matter it doesn't effect player enjoyment just get the turn done as fast as possible. During turns FPS is usually less than 1 late game, you literally can't do anything during turn processing in every TBS game.

[Suika]

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

If you play on G-Sync or Free-Sync monitor with high refresh rate and you want to play on that FPS with G-Sync or Free-Sync enabled then you're out of luck using the capture card/device under the condition that you want to use windowed/borderless mode which as a streamer you most likely want to manage the other applications on the fly.

Valid argument, but I'd imagine that concern would depend on the streamer, and what they're streaming. The streamers I tune into, that I know of, use monitors without any sort of adaptive refresh rate so it's a bit of a null point, but I typically only tune into pros.

[ApolloFury]

5 hours ago, VagabondWraith said:

What's up with Tom Logan's power consumption? I mean, an overclocked processor will obviously pull more watts but holy sh!t this doesn't seem right. I haven't read Tom's full review yet to see what he was testing to get that number, bit holy moly that looks awfully high.

 

Here's in contrast:

From Techspot / Hardware Unboxed (same publication)

UPDATE: Overclock power consumption

Oh gosh didn't realise these images are so big lol

But yea inconsistent results from different reviewers.

[LAwLz]

6 hours ago, huilun02 said:

I like how people trying to find reasons against TR. 

They talk about gaming like they forgot the whole reason of going HEDT in the first place. 

To me it seems like the opposite.

People are trying to find scenarios where TR would be good.

 

Don't get me wrong, TR seems like a good product, but it's really niche. All of its strengths are things only a very, very small minority will find useful.

Lots of threads - Even most "heavily threaded" applications doesn't scale that high. It would be interesting to see how x264 scales these days (future video idea for Linus?). In Anandtech's benchmark twice the number of cores resulted in a less than 50% performance increase. Not saying that 50% performance increase is bad, but 100% more cores, for less 50% performance increase in one of the best (non-data center) threaded programs out there does not exactly bode well for other programs.

 

Lots of PCIe lanes - How many PCIe lanes do people need? Even most enthusiasts will be satisfied with the ones on Ryzen. I find it hard to believe that anyone outside of data centers will need 60 of them.

 

Let's be real here, nobody is going to constantly go into the BIOS and change between gaming and creator mode, nor is anyone going to pay  a ~600 dollar price premium for a ~100MHz increase. That's just something they did for marketing purposes.

 

I think Threadripper is a halo product. Like the i9, it's a product that makes very little sense to 99.9% of people who will even know what it is. But for people that got a ton of money to burn then it's a great way to get a massive e-peen.

 

The way I see it, this is what AMD's product stack is like:

R3 - Entry level

R5 - Mid-tier (most people)

R7 - Enthusiast

Threadripper - I got more money than sense, or want bragging rights.

EPYC - Data center and other servers.

[Taf the Ghost]

@LAwLz

 

HEDT is much more Mindshare vs Sales rate. It's not quite a Halo Product in the standard sense, as the lower-tier is still within a normal purchase range. However, that's not completely the point of the product. The point is to get it in offices & prosumer hands, which means AMD has better mindshare and their products are viewed more favorably. 

 

For practical uses, especially since Skylake-X is neutral or worse for gaming than Kaby Lake, it's down to what you'd do with a low-SKU server part or Workstation system. With 60 PCIe lanes available, you can toss in 3 compute cards, a high-speed LAN and still have room for two separate NVMe drives. Along with using ECC memory if you so desire. The 8c 1900X could serve as a great NVMe file server in an smaller office, or plenty of other types of operations where I/O is important but shelling out for an extremely expensive server isn't really important.

[ravenshrike]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

Let's be real here, nobody is going to constantly go into the BIOS and change between gaming and creator mode, nor is anyone going to pay  a ~600 dollar price premium for a ~100MHz increase. That's just something they did for marketing purposes.

*blinks* You don't go into BIOS, you use Ryzen Master and a reboot. The type of people that use high core count Threadripper will probably end up rebooting their computer when they're done working if they want to play games. Otherwise they'll deal with the slowdown. As for the Mhz increase, I don't think anyone has claimed that's even a tertiary selling point for the platform, just something interesting about it.

[XenosTech]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

@LAwLz

 

HEDT is much more Mindshare vs Sales rate. It's not quite a Halo Product in the standard sense, as the lower-tier is still within a normal purchase range. However, that's not completely the point of the product. The point is to get it in offices & prosumer hands, which means AMD has better mindshare and their products are viewed more favorably. 

 

For practical uses, especially since Skylake-X is neutral or worse for gaming than Kaby Lake, it's down to what you'd do with a low-SKU server part or Workstation system. With 60 PCIe lanes available, you can toss in 3 compute cards, a high-speed LAN and still have room for two separate NVMe drives. Along with using ECC memory if you so desire. The 8c 1900X could serve as a great NVMe file server in an smaller office, or plenty of other types of operations where I/O is important but shelling out for an extremely expensive server isn't really important.

Not to mention that would make a great toy for people like me and @leadeater who deal with enterprise stuff and TR offers a cheaper way to get more lanes so we can cram more shit in a regular pc case to test stuff rather than buy a server but I think leadeater would buy the sever still lol

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Don't get me wrong, TR seems like a good product, but it's really niche. All of its strengths are things only a very, very small minority will find useful.

Lots of threads - Even most "heavily threaded" applications doesn't scale that high. It would be interesting to see how x264 scales these days (future video idea for Linus?). In Anandtech's benchmark twice the number of cores resulted in a less than 50% performance increase. Not saying that 50% performance increase is bad, but 100% more cores, for less 50% performance increase in one of the best (non-data center) threaded programs out there does not exactly bode well for other programs

Currently it's only 60% more cores and in the applications that scale well with threads TR gets close to 60% performance increase over the 7900X. But your view of the situation is correct, the 7900X is a better CPU for mixed usage general workloads so if anyone has concerns over performance consistency over a wide range of unknown/semi-known applications Intel is the better choice.

 

If you have fixed dedicated workloads in mind that you know will suit TR well then it is the better choice, by a decent amount too.

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, XenosTech said:

Not to mention that would make a great toy for people like me and @leadeater who deal with enterprise stuff and TR offers a cheaper way to get more lanes so we can cram more shit in a regular pc case to test stuff rather than buy a server but I think leadeater would buy the sever still lol

I'd be more inclined to go with single socket EPYC depending on PCIe lane configuration and motherboard features. All the current TR motherboards don't fit my requirements for what I'd want to use them for. I want either 4 M.2 slots or 4 U.2 ports or a combination of 4 where all can be used. EPYC motherboards are also far more likely to come with onbaord single or dual 10Gb ports, not an add in board.

[LAwLz]

12 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

*blinks* You don't go into BIOS, you use Ryzen Master and a reboot. The type of people that use high core count Threadripper will probably end up rebooting their computer when they're done working if they want to play games. Otherwise they'll deal with the slowdown. As for the Mhz increase, I don't think anyone has claimed that's even a tertiary selling point for the platform, just something interesting about it.

I don't buy that people will restart their computer whenever they want to play a game, and then restart it when they are done.

 

It's like with manual fan controllers. A lot of people think they are cool but nobody in their right mind goes through all that hassle whenever they want to run a slightly more intensive program... and that's with something you just reach down a twist a dial to do.

 

Imagine what a massive pain in the ass changing a setting and then restarting your computer would be, just to play a game.

Hell, I get annoyed when the launcher for a game is slow. It would drive me insane if I had to save all the things I had opened, close all programs, change the "mode" of my processor, restart my computer and then launch the game (as well as launch all the programs I just closed down).

 

 

1 minute ago, XenosTech said:

Not to mention that would make a great toy for people like me and @leadeater who deal with enterprise stuff and TR offers a cheaper way to get more lanes so we can cram more shit in a regular pc case to test stuff rather than buy a server but I think leadeater would buy the sever still lol

I "deal with enterprise stuff" too, and I really don't see the point.

EPYC on the other hand...

 

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Currently it's only 60% more cores and in the applications that scale well with threads TR gets close to 60% performance increase over the 7900X. But your view of the situation is correct, the 7900X is a better CPU for mixed usage general workloads so if anyone has concerns over performance consistency over a wide range of unknown/semi-known applications Intel is the better choice.

 

If you have fixed dedicated workloads in mind that you know will suit TR well then it is the better choice, by a decent amount too.

I was looking at the 8 core vs 16 core (1700X vs 1950X). That's 100% more cores but "only" a <50% increase.

 

I should probably add that I think the 7900X is a stupid product for 99.9% of people too.

[XenosTech]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

I'd be more inclined to go with single socket EYPC depending on PCIe lane configuration and motherboard features. All the current TR motherboards don't fit my requirements for what I'd want to use them for. I want either 4 M.2 slots or 4 U.2 ports or a combination of 4 where all can be used. EPYC motherboards are also far more likely to come with onbaord single or dual 10Gb ports, not an add in board.

I know you're more inclined towards EPYC but I have to use the poor mans solution until I move out of this country and get a job that doesn't pay me in jumping beans

[ravenshrike]

Just now, LAwLz said:

I don't buy that people will restart their computer whenever they want to play a game, and then restart it when they are done.

Except if you're not WORKING, as in the thing that people do to make money, why would you need to have it in all core mode? So you switch it, get up to pee, and then start playing games. The vast, vast majority of people don't switch between working and playing games willy nilly.

[leadeater]

7 minutes ago, XenosTech said:

I know you're more inclined towards EPYC but I have to use the poor mans solution until I move out of this country and get a job that doesn't pay me in jumping beans

The 7351P is $750 so less than the 1950X 

 

Edit:

Interesting the 7251 is $475 and 7281 is $650.

[XenosTech]

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I "deal with enterprise stuff" too, and I really don't see the point.

EPYC on the other hand...

You do know an EPYC single socket solution is about $3000 here and some other places just for the cheapest cpu after taxes and shit. Not all of us are going to spend that kind of money on just the cpu alone. 1900x would be plenty enough for me or the 10 core (if it ever does come to market), I just want a ton of lanes for cheap as possible. Cheap and intel don't go in the same sentence past the consumer platform

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, XenosTech said:

You do know an EPYC single socket solution is about $3000 here amd some other places just for the cheapest cpu after taxes and shit. Not all of us are going to spend that kind of money on just the cpu alone. 1900x would be plenty enough for me or the 10 core (if it ever does come to market), I just want a ton of lanes for cheap as possible. Cheap and intel don't go in the same sentence past the consumer platform

Some people don't want to put a 42U rack in their house and fill it with servers, switches and firewalls either, I do but I'm not the most logical person out there either heh.

[XenosTech]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The 7351P is $750 so less than the 1950X 

I wasn't looking that high tbh 8-10 cores is my sweet spot for VM useage in my case

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Some people don't want to put a 42U rack in their house either and fill it with servers, switches and firewalls either, I do but I'm not the most logical person out their either heh.

Yeah I don't have that kind of space lol maybe in about 20 years when I can afford to buy my own house comfortably. I do want to put a server room in my house just not a 42u. (Just had a flashback to when I walked into a gov office and it was floor to ceiling with just servers,firewalls,switches,load balancers and UPS's caked in dust)

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, XenosTech said:

I wasn't looking that high tbh 8-10 cores is my sweet spot for VM useage in my case

Check my edit, there's cheaper options 

[grimreeper132]

15 hours ago, Suika said:

So the question is, for me anyway, who's the intended audience? A streamer would be better suited taking their $1,500-1,700 budget and building a second PC with the sole purpose of video capture and streaming. A content creator, at least in Adobe Premiere, is still better off with CUDA acceleration... Is TR's attractiveness in PCIe lanes and 3D rendering? I'm honestly not convinced that TR, or X299 at this current time, is a platform I'd consider if I were a dedicated streamer or content creator. It is impressive to see AMD really competing with Intel in the enthusiast and professional market, but it seems niche now.

it's for people who do CAD rendering (which scales almost perfectly with cores) and other rendering tasks, and other workstation uses, it's not for the average joe who just wants a gaming machine these are for professionals who want/need the best performance

[XenosTech]

53 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Check my edit, there's cheaper options 

Ouuu that 7251 is looking mighty close to the 1900x *throws wallet at screen*