AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Review

[DerekA_C]

To show off Ryzen Threadripper’s overclocking chops, AMD showed off a Ryzen Threadripper 1950X with all cores overclocked to 5.187GHz using liquid nitrogen. A CineBench R15 result of 4,122 is enough to break the world record for a 16-core CPU, AMD said.
You may not care about liquid-nitrogen overclocking, but AMD’s motivation behind the demo was a shot at Intel, which kicked off the launch of Skylake-X by overclocking a Core i9-7900X to 5.7GHz. Core count eclipses clock speed, though in this one test, its score was “just” 3,181.

 

[BlasterMaster555]

The reason to get the Threadripper is because it has ALL OF THE CORES

 

[the nerd 389]

Daw's have been around ages, Digital audio workstations can pound a cpu memory load and yet nothing in the so called tech community ever evolved for the millions of composers doing mock ups for film and TV, a test bench isnt available for heavy audio users in studios because all geeks think about is gaming and office productivity, this was mostly useless for me. i wouldnt expect Hanz Zimmer to glean anything useful here, That being said, AMD finally made the chip ive been waiting for, the future looks interesting now, for AMD. great stuff. Ryzen 1800 looks pretty amazing in some benches and the numbers really caught me off guard. But you seriously need a benchmark for a 100 set orchestra with native instrument patches and libraries, until reviewers start doing that its almost useless to people with music production degrees to read this.

The convolution test is precisely what you should be looking at. It involves an FFT->complex multiplication of the spectra->IFFT. This is the exact process used to apply FIR filters, many audio effects, impulse response simulations, and many other DAW operations. I don't know how much more representative you could make it.

For recording operations, the actual mixing is usually done with an FPGA or ASIC embedded within the mixer. Things only get really intense if you also want to apply effects as you record.

 

[cryoburner]

You get more than 64 PCIe with Intel x299 chipset 44 from CPU and additional from chipset itself.

That only applies to Intel's $1000+ CPUs. Otherwise, you only get 28 lanes, or just 16 from Kaby Lake-X, whereas Threadripper provides 64 lanes throughout its lineup.

Also, I don't see how you could expect much different from the gaming results. Threadripper uses the same cores as the rest of the Ryzen lineup, so it naturally will perform very similar to a Ryzen 5 or 7 in games. Almost no existing games make full use of all the cores provided by a Ryzen 7 processor, so any additional cores will just sit around with little to no utilization, unless they're being used to encode a stream or perform some other multithreaded task.

Installing a 16-core, 32-thread processor in a system today is a lot like installing 32 or more gigabytes of RAM. It will be useful for certain people under a certain selection of workloads, but for the vast majority of people, it's not going to provide any substantial performance benefit anytime soon. Game developers generally optimize their games to run well on the hardware that most of their target audience is using at the time of a game's release. Currently, that would be systems with quad-core processors, and it will likely be some time before enough gaming systems have 6+ cores to justify explicitly targeting those systems, let alone those with more than 8 cores.

So sure, Threadripper is probably something of a waste for a gaming system, but so is Intel's X299 platform. In either case, you're likely to get comparable or better performance from a consumer-oriented platform costing a fraction of the amount. If someone really cared about maximizing frame rates for a 144Hz monitor, an i7-7700K would likely serve them better than an i9-7900X, and likewise, if they cared about streaming performance, an 8-core Ryzen 7 will likely be just as capable as a 16-core 1950X. Without streaming, on a standard refresh rate screen or at high resolutions, even a Ryzen 5 should provide virtually indistinguishable gaming performance to any of the processors tested here. And since these are much less expensive platforms, you'll be more willing to upgrade them a few years down the line to a processor with better gaming performance than anything available today.

 

[switch_130]

price/performance...

game at 1080p - intel
game at 1440 or 4k - draw
power consumption with more cores - amd (what will Intel draw be with more cores)
more cores for the same price - amd
better multi - amd
pci lanes - amd

but sh*t I cant game on my 1000 buck cpu at 1080p with TR...

buy your 1000 intel cpu for your 1080p gaming joy and shut up.

 

[sfcampbell]

Wow, I've never really paid much attention to non-gaming CPU benchmarks, but it's very evident that even highly-threaded software is all over the map in terms of scaling to the number of available cores. I understand that scaling is never perfect, but only a very few applications actually scaled well to 16 cores/32 threads.

You bring up a very good point @Brian_R170. As CPU technologies are evolving so rapidly on all fronts, you have to wonder: "how effectively are we assessing the real capabilities of these CPUs vs. how much of the results is just an illustration of inadequacies in the software?"

 

[gio2vanni86]

I've had AMD and intel. The lanes being all open at 64 for me is a buy period. Intel didnt announce anything upcoming with that so I'm back to with AMD. I need those lanes.

 

[tamalero]

Its my imagination or way too many of the "office" tests here do not even scale past 4 cores?

Power also is way off, both anantech and toms's power consumption seems way larger than what others reviewers have published.

 

[John Wittenberg]

I'm glad that there is some competition now, but Intel backslid in gaming with Skylake-E compared to Broadwell-E.

Hopefully AMD comes out with a refresh that can offer not only bang for the buck, but force Intel to get a bit more serious on HEDT gaming.

 

[sfcampbell]

I just looked at gaming benchmark and stopped reading there because as i thought Intel CPUs are killing Thread Ripper in gaming.

ThreadRipper is basically two 1800X stitched together. Since practically no game makes full use of the 1800X and equivalents, there were absolutely no sensible reasons to expect TR to fare any better. Simple logic dictates that the extra complexity in workloads where the extra cores are unnecessary would lead to worse performance and TR does indeed perform worse than Ryzen 7 in many games.

Nothing unexpected there.

If you're really trying to be a pundit for Intel talking points, I believe the word you're looking for is "glued together", rather than "stitched together". But if scalable processor expansion is so inferior to monolithic architectures, why is Intel so desperate to develop & field their Mesh Interconnect? After all, only monolithic CPUs from Intel can carry an $8,000-$12,000 price tag... what a totally rational strategy!

Such closed-minded marginalization of TR's Infinity Fabric architecture reeks of jealous that Infinity Fabric made it to market before Mesh did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctgAzn5Wx8o

 

[sfcampbell]

Bad gaming performance of Ryzen and Thread Ripper will slowly creep to 1440p and 4k with a new Nvidia cards as it will remove GPU limitation in those resolutions. Gaming performance will just get worse.

My conclusion:

For best gaming experience 7700K or 6/12 Coffee Lake
For best overall experience gaming and content creation is 7900x

Everything else sucks.

I'm assuming your a troll...

No need to assume -- you're right!

 

[phenomiix6]

The TR 1950X on Amazon:

"Temporarily out of stock.
Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item."

Seems to be selling well.

https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Threadripper-32-thread-Processor-YD195XA8AEWOF/dp/B074CBH3R4

 

[phenomiix6]

The TR 1920X too:

"Currently unavailable.
We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."

https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Threadripper-24-thread-Processor-YD192XA8AEWOF/dp/B074CBJHCT

 

[phenomiix6]

Newegg is restricting purchases to one per customer.

 

[iban__]

Please include a Premiere Pro CC performance in cpu reviews as it is one of the most (if not the most) used adobe apps

 

[dalauder]

@KHOASIX - Unfortunately, youtube and reddit drives the gaming crowd to believe this. That's the only reason why I'm looking at this. AMD was doing a really good job at marketing towards gaming too.

Good thing for AMD those aren't the people who were actually going to buy these $1000 CPUs.

 

[Shumok]

For FREAK777POWER I strongly recommend Intel cpu's. I think you should buy a bunch of them for your family and friends. They are just gold..GOLD. Buy a bunch of Intel stock too, while you are at it...surely it will go thru the roof after people see what an awesome value the Intel chips are.

For everyone other than FREAK777POWER I recommend AMD.

 

[Fahjjer]

This would be a monster Chess engine CPU. Can we get a Fritz benchmark

 

[drajitsh]

Very fair & balanced review. Though, you could have explored scenarios which are memory & i/o bound. And compare costs there.
You have said that sockets for threadripper & Epyc are identical, but not interchangeable. Please explain.

 

[Reynod]

Spintel had to overclock the i9 to 4.9 (1Ghz faster)to beat threadripper ... then only on a few games.

 

[shdes_aus]

So many of you complain about how AMD is not as good as Intel even when seeing the benchmarks clearly beating Intel in some of them. They haven't done that since Opteron.
Put ALL of that aside, Intel have SLASHED their prices. Some to the tune of over $300
You do NOT have Intel to thank for that. AMD have made some Intel CPUs over $300 cheaper and you want to complain?

Intel should be worried. They have been clearly ripping off the market for so long with their overpriced hardware because no one could compte.

AMD do now compte, with a shoe string buget compared to Intel with their resorces.
If anything can be taken out of this it's monoplolies are a bad thing. Intel would charge much more if it was the only choice.

 

[spdragoo]

" then that means the Intel chip provides less performance per clock cycle...which, last time I checked, was part of the definition of IPC. "

That statement is completely untrue. On a clock per clock basis, the Intel chips are faster than Ryzen chips. IE, Intel still has a faster IPC. AMD straight out even admitted that before the launch of Ryzen. The situation you're seeing with those benchmarks being so close is due to GPU bound, not CPU bound.

GPU-bound? At 1080p? With a GTX 1080 (Founders Edition)?!? I seriously think you don't understand what the term "GPU-bound" actually means.

 

[spdragoo]

Very fair & balanced review. Though, you could have explored scenarios which are memory & i/o bound. And compare costs there.
You have said that sockets for threadripper & Epyc are identical, but not interchangeable. Please explain.

Just as a guess, it's probably a pin compatibility issue. Kind of like how Skylake, Kaby Lake & the upcoming Coffee Lake are all LGA sockets with 1151 pins...but Skylake & Kaby Lake use Socket LGA 1151 (for 100-/200-series chipset motherboards), while Coffee Lake will use Socket LGA 1151 v2 (300-series chipsets), so Coffee Lake CPUs won't work in the Skylake/Kaby Lake motherboards (& vice versa).

 

[TJ Hooker]

Spoiler

" then that means the Intel chip provides less performance per clock cycle...which, last time I checked, was part of the definition of IPC. "

That statement is completely untrue. On a clock per clock basis, the Intel chips are faster than Ryzen chips. IE, Intel still has a faster IPC. AMD straight out even admitted that before the launch of Ryzen. The situation you're seeing with those benchmarks being so close is due to GPU bound, not CPU bound.

GPU-bound? At 1080p? With a GTX 1080 (Founders Edition)?!? I seriously think you don't understand what the term "GPU-bound" actually means.

Why not? It's entirely plausible that you could be GPU bound at 1080p with a GTX 1080 in the right circumstances. Given that all the CPUs being reviewed are very powerful (and therefore capable of pushing very high framerates), you can still run into situations where the GPU becomes the limiting factor, especially in games that rely much more heavily on GPU than CPU.

 

[zippyzion]

So, I've now read or watched about a dozen different reviews of Ryzen and I want to voice my observations so far. It is really 'A Tale of Two Tasks' across the spectrum. For the most part the numbers fall along the line of 'if you use TR for work you're going to win, if you use it for games you're going to lose', which is really what everyone expected, but win or lose at what? Even if TR isn't the fastest in all workloads it is competitive. Even if TR isn't the fastest at all games you're still going to have a premium experience. It's a prosumer product designed for blasting math and content creation, we are lucky it works as well as it does for games.

Now, everyone is comparing TR to the 7900X so it is really easy to say this, in some places the numbers aren't matching up. Some people are getting better results from game mode (PC World is an example) and some people (like Tom's) are getting worse performance. Some people (like Bitwit) aren't seeing any change at all. Curiouser still, a few people are showing TR winning in some games, even at 1080p, which is weird.

Benchmark presentation varies wildly, but Tom's is the most dour I've seen. Reading Tom's coverage you'd think that Threadripper is nothing special (not said but perceived). Other reviewers are fawning over TR. Some of them are clearly playing the ratings game, but a few of them that think TR is very special are reviewers I trust. For the most part, those reviewers that are also content creators (Linus) love Threadripper, and they have good reason to, but those who are gamers are pretty 'meh' and consider it an option only if you want the cool factor.

'The Tale of Two Tasks' is dominating TR coverage, but I have to ask myself, what the crap? When did we, as the hardware enthusiast community, become more enamored by games then by the raw power of the hardware? Gamers look at CPUs like they are hot hatchbacks or small sports cars. As long as they are fast and gamers can have a lot of fun, those are the things to buy. Content creators look at CPUs like muscle cars or drag racers. They need to go from point A to point B as fast as possible, preferably in a straight line. Still there are others that see them as pickup trucks. Doesn't matter what else they do as long as they can move and work with huge amounts of data. Shouldn't hardware enthusiasts like all of those things? Shouldn't we revel in the capabilities of the machine? Shouldn't we sit there and say "Gosh, that thing has a lot of power. It's awesome." whether it is a hatchback, muscle car, or pickup?

So what gives? If we marvel at the power, capabilities, and technical prowess required to create it, then Threadripper is a clearly awesome product. If we just focus on one thing, we miss the wonder of it all. This chip is a beast, but if we look at it from only one angle we miss the sum of it's parts. Coverage shouldn't be 'The Tale of Two Tasks' or 'Dr Worker and Mr Gamer', we should be looking at everything, and Tom's is the closest I've seen so far to doing that... but come on Tom's, a little enthusiasm for an impressive product really wouldn't hurt.

Ok... rant over.