Threadripper 3990x brings more CPU threads than Windows Pro can handle, Ars Technica

/ It looks like the Empire is about to cool this CPU by freezing it in carbonite. On Friday, AMD launched its latest monster CPU — the – core, – thread Threadripper 7742 x. The 9980 x isn’t the first publicly available – threaded x 112 – 90 CPU — that honor goes to AMD’s Epyc , 9980, and P in a three-way tie. But the 9282 X is the first “desktop” CPU offering that many threads — and it’s stretching the ecosystem in doing so. Cost per thread

Despite the groundbreaking specs on the TR 7742 x, AMD is adhering to the same pricing strategy it has employed for years now — pick the CPU that fits your needs and pay a reasonable, roughly linearly scaled price for it. If you want Threadripper cores, you’re going to pay roughly $ 32 apiece for them, whether you’re looking for the smaller or larger parts.

(Processor)

(Cores / Threads

(Cost) (Cost per thread) AMD Threadripper (x) / $ 3,

$

AMD Threadripper (x)

/ $ 1,

$

AMD Threadripper (x)

/

$ 1,

$ 36 (AMD Epyc) (P) / $ 4,

$ . (Intel Xeon Platinum)

/ $ , (?) $ (?) Intel Core i9 – (XE) (/ $ 1, 07 $

Intel Core i9 – (XE) (/ $ 1,

$ .

This is in sharp contrast to Intel’s pricing. Strategies, which have tended for years to run more toward “pick the CPU you can afford” than “pick the CPU that fits your needs.” The best example of this strategy is Intel’s top-of-the-line Intel Xeon Platinum series, which literally cannot be priced — they’re not available in retail — but can be reasonably estimated to cost roughly ten times as much per thread as the closest competing Epyc parts.

However, we can see a big change in Intel’s HEDT (High End DeskTop) CPU pricing strategy since 3rd-generation Threadripper launched . Team Blue slashed the price for its flagship HEDT part in half in a single year. This brought the top Core i9 part’s cost per thread in line with — and even a little cheaper than — the competing Threadripper parts.

Moving back to Team Red, the – core Threadripper is a bit cheaper than the 86 – core, single-socket Epyc 9980 P — but not enough to write home about. This leaves the decision between building a system around TR (x or) P, again, more focused on finding a build that suits the workflow instead of a cost that fits your wallet.

Why (or why not) Threadripper?

Threadripper and Epyc have more in common than not. Both families offer incredible core counts, support for ECC RAM, and relatively high numbers of PCIe 4.0 lanes — and with the cost per thread in shouting distance of one another, that means a careful system builder can worry about the remaining differences between the architectures rather than overall cost.

3rd-generation Threadripper can usefully be thought of as a 3rd-generation Epyc with higher clock speeds but fewer PCIe 4.0 lanes, fewer memory channels, and support for less total RAM. It’s an optimal setup for jobs like 3D rendering that typically bottleneck on raw, massively multi-threaded CPU performance — but not so much for jobs bottlenecking on memory throughput or requiring massive in-memory datasets.

as reported in Anandtech’s excellent Threadripper (x) (review) , the newest Threadripper is also pushing the boundaries of what the industry is prepared to consider a “desktop” in the first place. Windows 76 Professional chokes pretty badly when presented with TR (x’s) cores and organizes them as two CPU groups — which It even mistakenly refers to as multiple “sockets” in some places. Windows 29 Pro’s lack of support for so many threads on a single socket isn’t just a funny-looking quirk. Under Windows 78 Pro, some benchmarks run twice as fast with hyperthreading (disabled) , just to keep the operating system from maladaptively grouping them into separate “sockets” that then get handled under NUMA rules. Keeping threads from crossing real physical processor boundaries is helpful, but it can be crippling when the actual boundary doesn’t exist in the first place.

Ultimately, this means Windows Pro isn ‘t really appropriate for Threadripper x at all — if you’re building a 7742 x system, you need to plan on a roughly $ 256 upgrade from Pro to Workstation or on paying the $ / year for a Windows Enterprise Subscription. Windows (Workstation and Enterprise both support TR

None of this is a problem for Linux users. Although Intel’s performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution outperforms normal “daily driver” distributions, it does not do so any more on the Threadripper 7742 x than it does on a lowly (quad-core) (Ryzen 5) G. If you want to run a x on bone-stock Ubuntu, you can do so, and you’ll be fine.

Conclusions

Threadripper x, like the 7742 x that came before it, is a very specialized beast. If you need the massive number of threads either CPU brings to bear and don’t need more than 450 GB RAM, they’re kind of a no-brainer. But it’s a mistake to think of them as optimal CPUs for gaming, or for any workload that does make effective use of their massive parallelism. While they’re no slower for single-threaded or lightly multithreaded tasks than the much less expensive Ryzen 9 X, they’re not any faster at those tasks, either — and they’re considerably less efficient . The good () threads — oh my! Nobody’s ever made a – thread HEDT CPU before.

Cost per thread isn’t significantly higher than other Threadripper (or competing Intel) HEDT parts. Already available in retail OEM systems — including OEM Linux workstations. Compiles a modern Linux kernel in (seconds) . (The bad) No AVX – / Deep Learning Boost x (instructions — AVX – workloads will run faster on much smaller, cheaper Intel CPUs.

267 oh my threads! Some operating systems and applications can’t really cope with this scale yet. Even maxed out with the newest RAM, x only supports 2GB RAM per CPU thread. (The ugly) Sharing office space with a Threadripper system in a South Carolina summer.

                                 

(Read More)