Amd Ryzen Threadripper & X399 MegaThread! FAQ & Resources

[8350rocks]

Then do you suggest we ignore the empirical data, as the above 23 benchmarks, and the power throttling mechanism found by reviews, and embrace an invalid guess incompatible with all what we know?

AMD problem is not one of patents. AMD and Intel signed cross-licensing agreement where AMD can access Intel licenses and vice verse. The problem is that designing a latency-optimized memory controller or a latency-optimized microarchitecture is hard. This hardness is the reason why Bulldozer microarchitecture was optimized for throughput (not latency) and it is the same reason why Zen microarchitecture is optimized for throughput (not latency).

Are you sure that cross-licensing agreement covers things outside the X86 realm?

And, although I have an idea of what AMD wants to accomplish with Zen, vertically, it won't sway your view on it. But, take a closer look at the individual CCX as what Zen really is. Everything else built around it, is just a way to make it escalable.

Intel has access to AMD GPU patents for instance...

Latency/throughput microarchitecture and scalable/non-scalable SoCs are two different concepts that belong to different design points. One can design a latency-optimized core and a interconnect that scale-up well. Example? SKL-X. is a 10--20% ahead of Zen on latency, but the mesh interconnect has much better scaling than Infinity Fabric. In fact the mesh interconnect has better latency as well.

Cross licensing only pertains to x86 instructions and x86-64. Intel has no access to AMD patents outside of that barring a separate licensing agreement where they pay a royalty.

 

[goldstone77]

AMD releases budget 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor
By Matt Hanson 4 hours ago Computing components
"AMD has released its 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor, offering people who were put off by high price of the flagship 16-core Threadripper 1950X a chance to build a PC with all of the advanced Threadripper features for almost half the cash.

While we knew the entry-level Ryzen Threadripper 1900X was coming, AMD has now disclosed further information with the launch.

As we expected, the Threadripper 1900X will come with eight cores clocked at 3.8GHz, with a turbo that reaches 4.0GHz (and an XFR boost to 4.2GHz), and will cost $549 (about £420, AU$690) – almost half the Threadripper 1950X’s $999 (around £780, AU$1,260) asking price, and a fair bit cheaper than the mid-range Threadripper 1920X, which costs $799 (around £600, AU$1,000).

In fact, the price is within touching distance of the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, which comes with eight cores and 16 threads, and costs $499 (£500, around AU$650)."
Worth the upgrade?
"So is the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X worth the $50 increase over the Ryzen 7 1800X? If you’re solely using your PC for gaming, then probably not, with AMD providing benchmark results that show the Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1900X are pretty evenly matched when it comes to frames per second performance in games – with the 1800X actually performing better in some cases."

"However, as AMD is at pains to reiterate, Threadripper CPUs aren’t really aimed at gamers only – and the 1900X has access to all the advanced features of the Threadripper platform that the more expensive CPUs have, and which the Ryzen 7 series lacks.

This includes four-channel DDR4 2667 memory support (compared to Ryzen 7’s two channels), and 64 PCIe lanes. That’s an increase of 128% compared to Intel’s comparable 8-core Core i7 7820X, which features 5% less cache and is 8% more expensive. The 1900X also supports 8 DIMMS of memory for a huge 2TB of total RAM.

So, for people who value multi-tasking performance – the 1900X supports seven simultaneous PCIe devices like other Threadripper CPUs – AMD has offered a compelling choice with this affordable route into the Threadripper family.

Hopefully we’ll be getting our hands on a Threadripper 1900X soon to run our own benchmark tests, and see just how well this entry-level CPU performs.

NVMe RAID support

AMD has also announced a free update to the X399 platform – which Threadripper CPUs run on – which brings NVMe RAID support, allowing for incredibly fast data transfer speeds. This update includes NVMe RAID drivers, and supports bootable RAID 0, 1 and 10 modes for up to 10 devices.

The free update will be made available on September 25."
http://www.techradar.com/news/amd-releases-budget-8-core-ryzen-threadripper-1900x-processor

 

[juanrga]

AMD releases budget 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor
By Matt Hanson 4 hours ago Computing components
"AMD has released its 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor, offering people who were put off by high price of the flagship 16-core Threadripper 1950X a chance to build a PC with all of the advanced Threadripper features for almost half the cash.

While we knew the entry-level Ryzen Threadripper 1900X was coming, AMD has now disclosed further information with the launch.

As we expected, the Threadripper 1900X will come with eight cores clocked at 3.8GHz, with a turbo that reaches 4.0GHz (and an XFR boost to 4.2GHz), and will cost $549 (about £420, AU$690) – almost half the Threadripper 1950X’s $999 (around £780, AU$1,260) asking price, and a fair bit cheaper than the mid-range Threadripper 1920X, which costs $799 (around £600, AU$1,000).

In fact, the price is within touching distance of the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, which comes with eight cores and 16 threads, and costs $499 (£500, around AU$650)."
Worth the upgrade?
"So is the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X worth the $50 increase over the Ryzen 7 1800X? If you’re solely using your PC for gaming, then probably not, with AMD providing benchmark results that show the Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1900X are pretty evenly matched when it comes to frames per second performance in games – with the 1800X actually performing better in some cases."

"However, as AMD is at pains to reiterate, Threadripper CPUs aren’t really aimed at gamers only – and the 1900X has access to all the advanced features of the Threadripper platform that the more expensive CPUs have, and which the Ryzen 7 series lacks.

This includes four-channel DDR4 2667 memory support (compared to Ryzen 7’s two channels), and 64 PCIe lanes. That’s an increase of 128% compared to Intel’s comparable 8-core Core i7 7820X, which features 5% less cache and is 8% more expensive. The 1900X also supports 8 DIMMS of memory for a huge 2TB of total RAM.

So, for people who value multi-tasking performance – the 1900X supports seven simultaneous PCIe devices like other Threadripper CPUs – AMD has offered a compelling choice with this affordable route into the Threadripper family.

Hopefully we’ll be getting our hands on a Threadripper 1900X soon to run our own benchmark tests, and see just how well this entry-level CPU performs.

NVMe RAID support

AMD has also announced a free update to the X399 platform – which Threadripper CPUs run on – which brings NVMe RAID support, allowing for incredibly fast data transfer speeds. This update includes NVMe RAID drivers, and supports bootable RAID 0, 1 and 10 modes for up to 10 devices.

The free update will be made available on September 25."
http://www.techradar.com/news/amd-releases-budget-8-core-ryzen-threadripper-1900x-processor

That is the one I am awaiting anxiously. I said it would play games worse than the 1800X due to the huge die-die latency and even AMD is already giving slides where TR is slower.

 

[juanrga]

I have answered his question. I have confirmed that Intel has access to patents "outside the X86 realm" as part of a general cross-licensing agreement with AMD. "Cross-licensing" means that Intel can access AMD patents and AMD can access Intel patents. Intel and Nvidia signed a similar agreement.

Again, I direct you at the word 'blanket' and point at your evasive wording. Blanket means over then entire die, and the answer to that is no. There have been numerous lawsuits between AMD and Intel that show this. From the original MMX naming dispute to modern Quickpath tech being Intel exclusive despite likely being very easy to implement on Radeon IGPs. Modern x86 processors are mostly 'uncore' and AMD and Intel have little oversight into patents from either side in relation to uncore afaik. Sure AMD jut did the GPU deal, but that's unlikely to mean that they could just take what they want from Radeon and add it to Iris. 'Outside the x86 realm' means outside the actual major x86_64 cross licensing agreement AMD made with Intel that allowed them to implement EMT64 or vice versa with MMX etc etc. The answer to that AFAIK is no there is no all encompassing agreement.

Access means nothing: They are patents and can be accessed by anyone including me and you. Can you be more specific?

The reason why AMD CPU are more optimized for throughput than latency, doesn't have anything to do with "philosophy". Designing a latency-optimized muarch is very hard due the nonlinearities involved in the process, and AMD has to push in the opposite direction with Zen, due to lack of resources, as they did with Bulldozer. That is why the MC on RyZen is optimized for BW not latency; that is why Zen core is wider, with smaller IPC than Intel but higher SMT yields; that is why AMD brings moar cores (e.g. 32C vs 28C), and so on.

True, but so obviously subjectively written. Zen has higher yields because yields are done on a per-chip basis and there are 4+ in TR's MCM. 1 bad part on an i9 and it's the bin for you. 1 bad part on a TR and you're only binning 1 quarter of the chip, so binning for a 32c is about as difficult as an 8 core. To counter this a bit, Intel has had much more time and revisions with the node. Look at the RRP of TR4 and tell me that wasn't a great idea to reduce BOM, then realise that this strategy is also why 'moar cores' is better for them too. So you can turn more of them off between SKUs and use more half CCX units etc. TR's per core IPC is within 10% of i9's too.

Intel's 'very hard' 'optimised muarch' answer was only so difficult that it took 4 months for them to pull out the entire lineup from the TR announcement. You have to admit it's either a hack (rushed) or Intel were holding back on us and probably still are (they certainly had plenty of time to introduce their own massively multicore HEDTs before this).

As owner of a SkyX platform that's bad news in either direction.

Stop pretending that AMD is inventing the wheel. All companies have designed or are designing fast interconnects with tons of bandwidth for either homogeneous or heterogeneous chips. I can easily recall now designs from IBM, Nvidia, or Fujitsu.

EPYC/TR is not RyZen. As mentioned a couple times TR has a power throttling mechanism, from the SP3 inheritance, that reduces core clocks under the base clocks, when memory/IF are overclocked. The lack of performance that you mention is due to the cores loosing performance due to this automatic underclocking feature.

I'm not pretending AMD is reinventing the wheel, I am inferring that AMD is listening to it's inventors faster than Intel. i9s come with faster, lower latency core 2 core interconnects and a faster core itself, but lower lane counts of PCI and little in external (homo or hetero) new pipework otherwise UPI notwithstanding. This was it's response to AMD's IF and before that they had a ring interconnect which was already a fatter, lower latency pipe that simply couldn't scale to the cores needed because having the fastest pipe is not always having the lowest latency. The laser focus on latency lost to parallelism and throughput. Hold that thought.

AMD made a universally instructible SDN mesh interconnect that replaces Q/UPI/HyperTransport as well as core to core inter That's repurposing the fat multi socket pipe going to waste in i9 (but used for IGP in i7 downward) for HBM and GPGPU via NUMA. In addition, every CCX core is directly connected to the IMC via L2 then connected to IF, and IF is connected to the RAM and bridges dozens of times as a result... outside the cores. This actually gives the actual TR chip the capability to take and output far far more data without saturation than the i9, even if core 2 core isn't as great outside each MCM package... aka only relevant on processes that have over 16 threads worth of CPU demands, yet small enough to fit in L2+L3 without fetching from RAM. TR doesn't need L3 because it can access the RAM as fast many times and without having to copy to L3 first.

In short, isolate the effect of this and it looks like this: I might lose in a 20 core CPU-only render race with you, but if we both stack up on non-HBM GPUs then run the same render I will see a greater improvement than you due to PCI-E lanes. If we both stack up on HBM GPUs I will see a massive improvement due to deduplication of VRAM data and the fact that there is now a NUMA bus that can address that VRAM at super low latency compared to previous/current tech.

Latency is a key concept here. As stated in the AMD HSA specification, CPUs are a special kind of LCU: Latency Compute Unit.

Latency is the reason why AMD designed a new wider core, Zen, instead [of, I assume] reusing the narrow Jaguar cores for instance.

Latency is not IPC. Jaguar was technologically EOL long ago and was replaced because it was not competitive; there were dozens of reasons. You talk as if wider cores are not a throughput-prioritising decision: they are. In terms of die space, reducing the physical size of a wide pipe to fit it's predecessor (or making space for it elsewhere) and making a narrow pipe run faster are both very time consuming, as is parallelising with the intent to multiply throughput without regard to latency. I said before, latency improves throughput but not always the reverse so this is a non argument

Latency is the reason why L2 cache in Zen is private instead shared.

L2 is private in Zen because it's directly connected to the IMC. Fat L2 has always been the philosophy behind AMD's core cache distribution, whereas Intel liked faster, larger L3 than AMD and weaker L2. Intel switched to AMD's point of view just now because it makes sense when your ring is now a grid with an exponential amount of connections to bits of your SoC and your L3 needs access to all of them.

Latency is the reason why AMD targets higher clocks with turbo mode. It is also the reason why EPYC with higher-clocked RAM runs better due to reduction of both memory and IF latencies.

Latency is the reason why AMD locked the IF clock to the RAM clock. Otherwise, engineers would introduced intermediate buffers between clock domains and those buffers would increase latency.

Failing to acknowledge that this is only because AMD has a much much higher throughput IF solution consisting of multiple IMCs. Latency took a backseat compared to Intel's single IMC decision out of the core. Again, and I stress that I said this before, latency is important but not all-important. Certain bits are limited by other means. More specifically, having one part that is granularly of lower latency than another does not necessarily make for a lower latency total system, but having a high throughput part will ensure that it is *possible* to reach low latencies by virtue of optimal conditions. Often the latter will lead you to much lower latencies than the former, else we would not have multicore computers in the first place. The whole framework for threading and out-of order execution etc etc is something that would add significant internal latency to any computer compared to a single in-order arch design, but nothing compared to the advantages presented by the extra cores.

You mention "prediction and caches are the future, and all they do is improve throughput". This is wrong at two levels. First, they aren't the future, they are the present. Second they improve latency so much as throughput. Caches have much lower access times than main memory, which reduces latency when accessing data. Prediction algorithms ensure with some given probability that correct data/instructions are ready to enter the pipeline at the correct instant. When this doesn't happen, i.e. when the prediction fails, the cost is paid in the extra cycles needed to search the correct data/instructions, move the information to the pipeline and flush the incorrect data/istructions from the pipeline.

If you mean they are the present within present releases, sure they are, but that doesn't mean that the major performance benefits of parts in the next 5 years won't be down to improvements within prediction and caches.

Same happens with consoles. Latency is king. Contrary to a widespread myth GDDR5 doesn't have significantly worse latencies than DDR3. Moreover, the PS4 has cores clocked low (1.6GHz), which helps to reduces the latency gap between execution and memory pool.
Adding aGDDR5 memory subsystem optimized for throughput doesn't affect the same to jaguar cores @1.6GHz than to Skylake cores @4.5GHz. However, even with low core clocks, several game developers have had latency problems with the PS4. Precisely the first thing that Sony has made on the new Pro has been to increase the clocks on cores and memory, reducing latencies by up to 30%...

This all is well-known

Point number one is answered by point number two. PS4 GDDR CAS timing is in the high double to low triple digits, and I do not know the 'popular belief' stories but I know my and probably your GPU has much faster GDDR at much worse clock latencies. I am aware of GDDR's intrinsic strengths and that $ for $ you will find lower timings as a result of duplex design, but even with a 30% increase they lag severely behind similar clocked DDR3/4. I am also aware that the Xbox has DDR3 ram and a significant throughput deficit, yet a latency advantage further exacerbated by super low latency ESram... and has uglier games as a result and far more performance complaints. The example I gave was commentary on the example I gave, not the GDDR technology, but if you want commentary there, I will say that the large batch memory transfer optimisation is a core reason why it works better in GPUs but when L2+3 caches are big enough I'm sure it will be the same story for CPUs. Both AMD and Intel are moving toward parallelism and throughput over latency below L2 and I believe AMD is in the lead there. Everything below L2 is just a cache.

BIOS patches and microcode will remove the limitations on clocking IF I expect. Let's remember that TR shares more with EPYC than Ryzen and if Ryzen is anything to look at AMD is actually working on optimising IF on a daily basis... and still were late to market with 3200RAM support because of IF.

Those disputes between AMD and Intel were solved when both companies signed an agreement that included cross-licensing of patents.

When I mean "access to patents", evidently I mean that AMD can use technology based in Intel patents and vice verse, without being sued for patent violation. That is what the cross-licensing agreement granted to both companies: access to other's technology . I will repeat once again that the agreement is not limited to x86, but also includes other stuff, including graphics. Sure that you did heard rumors about a hybrid chip with Intel CPU and Radeon GPU. Guess what? Three different sources confirmed me that the prototype is real.

I have discussed "SMT yields"; this is a parameter of the microarchitecture. And you are confounding it with production yields, which is a parameter of the process node. I have discussed SMT yields as part of my explanation of why all the key elements in Zen point to a design optimized for throughput.

A minor note. ThreadRipper doesn't have four dies. There is only two.

Who has said you that the change from ring to mesh is a response to AMD? Intel has been using mesh in the Phi line, and we know that both ordinary Xeon line and Phi line are converging. We have known for a looong time that SKL Xeons would get AVX-512 support. I have known it since 2014 and it is evident that the SKL Xeon design was planned many years ago even before "Zen" was a public codename for a future muarch.

"This actually gives the actual TR chip the capability to take and output far far more data without saturation than the i9". Benchmarks tell the opposite

Yes, latency is not IPC. Never said both are the same, but IPC is a function of latency. Moreover CPUs are just LCUs: i.e. Latency Compute Units. That is the reason why latency is a key parameter for CPUs.

L2 is private in Zen because a shared L2 would increase latency and kill the IPC of the core. It is the same reason why the L2 is private in IBM and Intel high performance designs. The L2 being private doesn't have anything to do with the CCX approach neither with the IMC.

AMD has always used larger L2 and L1 because of latency issues with their designs. It doesn't have anything to do with the interconnect. IBM has been using larger L2 by similar reasons.

Intel changed now to a larger L2 and a non-inclusive L3 with SKL-SP. The non-inclusive L3 behaves similarly to the L4 in some Broadwell models. And the new L2 has a size of 1MB. Guess what other chip from Intel has 1MB L2 cache? The KNL Phi. It seems evident the change in cache hierarchy is motivated by the inclusion of AVX512 support and the convergence with the Phi line. Evidently those fundamental changes in the microarchitecture were made many many many years ago: before 2014.

GDDR5 has nearly identical latencies than DDR3: tRC = 40--48ns for both; tCCD = 2ns for GDDR5, 4ns for DDR3...

The reason why measuring latencies in GPUs gives significantly worse results is due to the memory controller and the cache structure. GPUs as TCUs (Throughput Compute Units) and the memory controller is optimized for throughput, not latency.

 

[modeonoff]

I plan to use Threadripper but I cannot find any motherboard that supports PCIe3.0 16x16x16x16. I need to run 1-4 Nvidia GPU at full speed at the same time. Any suggestion?

 

[goldstone77]

Sorry I'm late to the party, and this is now an old review that came out on August 10th. I still think it's worth posting so here you go!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JR_v-4BaQ&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X & 1920X Review
By Steven Walton on August 10, 2017
"After much speculation and an official unveiling last week, it's finally time to see if Threadripper can bring competition to the high-end desktop segment while delivering the value and efficiency we've come to expect from other Ryzen processors.
Before we jump into the benchmarks, here's how we've set up the comparison. For this review, we'll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel's competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X.
Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD's pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores. You also get quad-channel memory support and significantly more PCI Express lanes."
"While we're curious to see how Threadripper fares against AMD's more affordable lineup, I'm more interested in learning how they compare against Intel's Skylake-X parts, so you can expect an emphasis on those results.
The Skylake-X CPUs were installed on an Asrock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard, while the Threadripper CPUs were tested on the Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard. Both platforms were fitted with G.Skill's TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 64GB quad-channel memory kit. Big thanks go to G.Skill for providing all that memory."
"The X299 platform was installed on the Praxis Wetbench and was cooled using Thermaltake's Pacific RL360 custom liquid cooled kit. Meanwhile Threadripper was tested on a sheet of foam on my desk and was cooled by the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO liquid cooler."

Overclocking Results
"As expected the Threadripper CPUs were able to hit 4 GHz but unfortunately like Ryzen 7 weren’t able to go beyond that point. Extreme voltages might see you hit 4.1 - 4.2 GHz like what we’ve seen with some Ryzen CPUs but for 24/7 usage 4 GHz looks to be the limit."

"Anyway at 4 GHz the 1950X spat out an incredible score of 3408 pts in Cinebench though due to the way XFR works this overclock actually slightly reduced the single thread performance. You could probably fine tune the overclock to avoid this but with time against us we didn’t play around with the overclocking too much."

"Overclocked the Blender render time for the 1950X was cut down by an impressive 11% while the 1920X time was reduced by 6%. This means even overclocked the Core i9-7900X wasn’t much faster than the 1920X and wasn’t able to match the stock 1950X in this application."

"Interestingly this time when testing with Corona the 1920X saw a massive 17% performance improvement when overclocked while the 1950X was just 7% faster. This meant both overclocked Threadripper parts were much faster than the overclocked 7900X."

"Back to the kind of margins seen in Blender we find that while the 1950X was 9% faster overclocked the 1920X was just 5% faster. This meant when testing with Premiere Pro CC the 1920X did trail the Core i9-7900X while the 1950X was quite a lot faster."

"Finally we have the overclocking power consumption figures and here Threadripper looks quite good, especially in relation to the Core i7-7900X. Whereas the Intel CPU pushed total system consumption to 388 watts, the 1950X hit 358 watts, an 8% reduction for what was often between 20 - 30% more performance."

UMA vs. NUMA
"As mentioned on the last page, you switch between memory access modes on Threadripper processors. 'Distributes' mode uses 'Uniform Memory Access' is enabled by default so this is what we've been testing with so far. However, you can switch to 'local' mode for 'Non-Uniform Memory Access' and this allows each of the Zeppelin dies to prioritize which cores access certain parts of the system memory. This basically prioritizes the nearest cores to improve overall latency for gaming applications that tend to place a premium on fast memory access. So let's see how this impacts gaming performance as well as a few productivity workloads..."

"Switching to NUMA has improved the Battlefield 1 performance and now Threadripper is delivering similar frame rates to the Ryzen 7 1800X. In fact, the 1950X creeps ahead ever so slightly and now is that much slower than the Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X."

"F1 2016 also sees decent gains when switching to NUMA though this time isn't able to match the Ryzen 7 1800X and this means it's also well down on the Intel CPUs."

"Performance in Civilization VI was already great and no extra performance was had when switching to NUMA."

"Looking at application performance, we see a slight performance decline with POVRay, but nothing serious."

"Blender also saw a slight decline in performance with the 1950X being about 4% slower using NUMA."

"Last up we have the Corona test, in which both NUMA and UMA offered the same performance. There's not much to see here, so let's move on to some consumption figures."

"In a nutshell, for the same price you get more CPU performance, lower power consumption and improved operating temperatures with Threadripper, so why would you buy the Core i9-7900X over the 1950X?
Intel recently announced the specs for its upcoming 12, 14, 16 and 18-core Skylake-X parts. At a guess, I would say consumers will need to spend at least $1,400 on the i9-7940X to match AMD's 1950X and I seriously doubt the 40% price premium will be worth it.
The X299 platform's lack of ECC memory support is another issue. Whereas Threadripper supports ECC, the Skylake-X chips don't and that means anyone serious about their workstation won't even consider Intel's high-end desktop platform. Unless Intel is willing to budge on pricing I can't see why anyone would invest in X299.

At the beginning of 2017, who would have thought we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the very top of the high-end desktop CPU segment. It certainly wasn't us, but we're glad we can look forward to some competition. It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast."
"Pros: The Threadripper 1920X offers more performance, uses less power and runs cooler than the Core i9-7900X. It also supports ECC memory (Intel's X299 platform doesn't). Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the 1920X touts quad-channel memory support and more PCIe lanes.
Cons: The $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is competitively priced but nonetheless comes at a hefty premium. Threadripper falls a tad behind when it comes to gaming."

 

[goldstone77]

I plan to use Threadripper but I cannot find any motherboard that supports PCIe3.0 16x16x16x16. I need to run 1-4 Nvidia GPU at full speed at the same time. Any suggestion?

The difference from running a 1080Ti at 8X vs 16X is ~1% FPS. It makes me wonder if you really need 16X for all 4 GPUs to get the performance you are looking for since it doesn't look like PCI-E 3.0 is not fully saturated at 16X.

 

[goldstone77]

Spoiler

AMD releases budget 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor
By Matt Hanson 4 hours ago Computing components
"AMD has released its 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor, offering people who were put off by high price of the flagship 16-core Threadripper 1950X a chance to build a PC with all of the advanced Threadripper features for almost half the cash.

While we knew the entry-level Ryzen Threadripper 1900X was coming, AMD has now disclosed further information with the launch.

As we expected, the Threadripper 1900X will come with eight cores clocked at 3.8GHz, with a turbo that reaches 4.0GHz (and an XFR boost to 4.2GHz), and will cost $549 (about £420, AU$690) – almost half the Threadripper 1950X’s $999 (around £780, AU$1,260) asking price, and a fair bit cheaper than the mid-range Threadripper 1920X, which costs $799 (around £600, AU$1,000).

In fact, the price is within touching distance of the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, which comes with eight cores and 16 threads, and costs $499 (£500, around AU$650)."
Worth the upgrade?
"So is the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X worth the $50 increase over the Ryzen 7 1800X? If you’re solely using your PC for gaming, then probably not, with AMD providing benchmark results that show the Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1900X are pretty evenly matched when it comes to frames per second performance in games – with the 1800X actually performing better in some cases."

"However, as AMD is at pains to reiterate, Threadripper CPUs aren’t really aimed at gamers only – and the 1900X has access to all the advanced features of the Threadripper platform that the more expensive CPUs have, and which the Ryzen 7 series lacks.

This includes four-channel DDR4 2667 memory support (compared to Ryzen 7’s two channels), and 64 PCIe lanes. That’s an increase of 128% compared to Intel’s comparable 8-core Core i7 7820X, which features 5% less cache and is 8% more expensive. The 1900X also supports 8 DIMMS of memory for a huge 2TB of total RAM.

So, for people who value multi-tasking performance – the 1900X supports seven simultaneous PCIe devices like other Threadripper CPUs – AMD has offered a compelling choice with this affordable route into the Threadripper family.

Hopefully we’ll be getting our hands on a Threadripper 1900X soon to run our own benchmark tests, and see just how well this entry-level CPU performs.

NVMe RAID support

AMD has also announced a free update to the X399 platform – which Threadripper CPUs run on – which brings NVMe RAID support, allowing for incredibly fast data transfer speeds. This update includes NVMe RAID drivers, and supports bootable RAID 0, 1 and 10 modes for up to 10 devices.

The free update will be made available on September 25."
http://www.techradar.com/news/amd-releases-budget-8-core-ryzen-threadripper-1900x-processor

That is the one I am awaiting anxiously. I said it would play games worse than the 1800X due to the huge die-die latency and even AMD is already giving slides where TR is slower.

For most games you are right, but not all of them. The gaming mode switch did help in one instance.

 

[juanrga]

Spoiler

AMD releases budget 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor
By Matt Hanson 4 hours ago Computing components
"AMD has released its 8-core Ryzen Threadripper 1900X processor, offering people who were put off by high price of the flagship 16-core Threadripper 1950X a chance to build a PC with all of the advanced Threadripper features for almost half the cash.

While we knew the entry-level Ryzen Threadripper 1900X was coming, AMD has now disclosed further information with the launch.

As we expected, the Threadripper 1900X will come with eight cores clocked at 3.8GHz, with a turbo that reaches 4.0GHz (and an XFR boost to 4.2GHz), and will cost $549 (about £420, AU$690) – almost half the Threadripper 1950X’s $999 (around £780, AU$1,260) asking price, and a fair bit cheaper than the mid-range Threadripper 1920X, which costs $799 (around £600, AU$1,000).

In fact, the price is within touching distance of the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, which comes with eight cores and 16 threads, and costs $499 (£500, around AU$650)."
Worth the upgrade?
"So is the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X worth the $50 increase over the Ryzen 7 1800X? If you’re solely using your PC for gaming, then probably not, with AMD providing benchmark results that show the Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1900X are pretty evenly matched when it comes to frames per second performance in games – with the 1800X actually performing better in some cases."

"However, as AMD is at pains to reiterate, Threadripper CPUs aren’t really aimed at gamers only – and the 1900X has access to all the advanced features of the Threadripper platform that the more expensive CPUs have, and which the Ryzen 7 series lacks.

This includes four-channel DDR4 2667 memory support (compared to Ryzen 7’s two channels), and 64 PCIe lanes. That’s an increase of 128% compared to Intel’s comparable 8-core Core i7 7820X, which features 5% less cache and is 8% more expensive. The 1900X also supports 8 DIMMS of memory for a huge 2TB of total RAM.

So, for people who value multi-tasking performance – the 1900X supports seven simultaneous PCIe devices like other Threadripper CPUs – AMD has offered a compelling choice with this affordable route into the Threadripper family.

Hopefully we’ll be getting our hands on a Threadripper 1900X soon to run our own benchmark tests, and see just how well this entry-level CPU performs.

NVMe RAID support

AMD has also announced a free update to the X399 platform – which Threadripper CPUs run on – which brings NVMe RAID support, allowing for incredibly fast data transfer speeds. This update includes NVMe RAID drivers, and supports bootable RAID 0, 1 and 10 modes for up to 10 devices.

The free update will be made available on September 25."
http://www.techradar.com/news/amd-releases-budget-8-core-ryzen-threadripper-1900x-processor

That is the one I am awaiting anxiously. I said it would play games worse than the 1800X due to the huge die-die latency and even AMD is already giving slides where TR is slower.

For most games you are right, but not all of them. The gaming mode switch did help in one instance.

It did refer to the TR 1900X, which has the same number of cores than the 1800X.

 

[juanrga]

Sorry I'm late to the party, and this is now an old review that came out on August 10th. I still think it's worth posting so here you go!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JR_v-4BaQ&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X & 1920X Review
By Steven Walton on August 10, 2017
"After much speculation and an official unveiling last week, it's finally time to see if Threadripper can bring competition to the high-end desktop segment while delivering the value and efficiency we've come to expect from other Ryzen processors.
Before we jump into the benchmarks, here's how we've set up the comparison. For this review, we'll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel's competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X.
Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD's pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores. You also get quad-channel memory support and significantly more PCI Express lanes."
"While we're curious to see how Threadripper fares against AMD's more affordable lineup, I'm more interested in learning how they compare against Intel's Skylake-X parts, so you can expect an emphasis on those results.
The Skylake-X CPUs were installed on an Asrock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard, while the Threadripper CPUs were tested on the Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard. Both platforms were fitted with G.Skill's TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 64GB quad-channel memory kit. Big thanks go to G.Skill for providing all that memory."
"The X299 platform was installed on the Praxis Wetbench and was cooled using Thermaltake's Pacific RL360 custom liquid cooled kit. Meanwhile Threadripper was tested on a sheet of foam on my desk and was cooled by the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO liquid cooler."

Overclocking Results
"As expected the Threadripper CPUs were able to hit 4 GHz but unfortunately like Ryzen 7 weren’t able to go beyond that point. Extreme voltages might see you hit 4.1 - 4.2 GHz like what we’ve seen with some Ryzen CPUs but for 24/7 usage 4 GHz looks to be the limit."

"Anyway at 4 GHz the 1950X spat out an incredible score of 3408 pts in Cinebench though due to the way XFR works this overclock actually slightly reduced the single thread performance. You could probably fine tune the overclock to avoid this but with time against us we didn’t play around with the overclocking too much."

"Overclocked the Blender render time for the 1950X was cut down by an impressive 11% while the 1920X time was reduced by 6%. This means even overclocked the Core i9-7900X wasn’t much faster than the 1920X and wasn’t able to match the stock 1950X in this application."

"Interestingly this time when testing with Corona the 1920X saw a massive 17% performance improvement when overclocked while the 1950X was just 7% faster. This meant both overclocked Threadripper parts were much faster than the overclocked 7900X."

"Back to the kind of margins seen in Blender we find that while the 1950X was 9% faster overclocked the 1920X was just 5% faster. This meant when testing with Premiere Pro CC the 1920X did trail the Core i9-7900X while the 1950X was quite a lot faster."

"Finally we have the overclocking power consumption figures and here Threadripper looks quite good, especially in relation to the Core i7-7900X. Whereas the Intel CPU pushed total system consumption to 388 watts, the 1950X hit 358 watts, an 8% reduction for what was often between 20 - 30% more performance."

UMA vs. NUMA
"As mentioned on the last page, you switch between memory access modes on Threadripper processors. 'Distributes' mode uses 'Uniform Memory Access' is enabled by default so this is what we've been testing with so far. However, you can switch to 'local' mode for 'Non-Uniform Memory Access' and this allows each of the Zeppelin dies to prioritize which cores access certain parts of the system memory. This basically prioritizes the nearest cores to improve overall latency for gaming applications that tend to place a premium on fast memory access. So let's see how this impacts gaming performance as well as a few productivity workloads..."

"Switching to NUMA has improved the Battlefield 1 performance and now Threadripper is delivering similar frame rates to the Ryzen 7 1800X. In fact, the 1950X creeps ahead ever so slightly and now is that much slower than the Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X."

"F1 2016 also sees decent gains when switching to NUMA though this time isn't able to match the Ryzen 7 1800X and this means it's also well down on the Intel CPUs."

"Performance in Civilization VI was already great and no extra performance was had when switching to NUMA."

"Looking at application performance, we see a slight performance decline with POVRay, but nothing serious."

"Blender also saw a slight decline in performance with the 1950X being about 4% slower using NUMA."

"Last up we have the Corona test, in which both NUMA and UMA offered the same performance. There's not much to see here, so let's move on to some consumption figures."

"In a nutshell, for the same price you get more CPU performance, lower power consumption and improved operating temperatures with Threadripper, so why would you buy the Core i9-7900X over the 1950X?
Intel recently announced the specs for its upcoming 12, 14, 16 and 18-core Skylake-X parts. At a guess, I would say consumers will need to spend at least $1,400 on the i9-7940X to match AMD's 1950X and I seriously doubt the 40% price premium will be worth it.
The X299 platform's lack of ECC memory support is another issue. Whereas Threadripper supports ECC, the Skylake-X chips don't and that means anyone serious about their workstation won't even consider Intel's high-end desktop platform. Unless Intel is willing to budge on pricing I can't see why anyone would invest in X299.

At the beginning of 2017, who would have thought we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the very top of the high-end desktop CPU segment. It certainly wasn't us, but we're glad we can look forward to some competition. It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast."
"Pros: The Threadripper 1920X offers more performance, uses less power and runs cooler than the Core i9-7900X. It also supports ECC memory (Intel's X299 platform doesn't). Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the 1920X touts quad-channel memory support and more PCIe lanes.
Cons: The $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is competitively priced but nonetheless comes at a hefty premium. Threadripper falls a tad behind when it comes to gaming."

I have three objections to that review.

(i) They tested different versions of the essentially the same kind of workload. They tested rendering with Corona, CineBench, Blender, POVRay... This is useless to get a overall picture of the performance of a chip. For instance TR 1950X is faster than i9-7900X in Blender, but the 1950X is slower in WinRAR. Moreover, they didn't check any rendering application where the TR 1950X is slower. The i9-7900X is faster in Mental Ray or V-Ray for instance.

(ii) They used overclock RAM on the TR chips, which automatically overclocks the IF interconnect. but they didn't overclock the mesh interconnect on the SKL-X chips.

(iii) Pricing is incorrect. They give the price of the i9 as $1150, but even AMD reports the i9 as a $999 chip.

Therefore the performance/price graphics they gave are twice biased. One because they only measure rendering performance on benchmarks favoring AMD, and another because increased pricing of Intel chips.

 

[goldstone77]

Spoiler

Sorry I'm late to the party, and this is now an old review that came out on August 10th. I still think it's worth posting so here you go!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JR_v-4BaQ&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X & 1920X Review
By Steven Walton on August 10, 2017
"After much speculation and an official unveiling last week, it's finally time to see if Threadripper can bring competition to the high-end desktop segment while delivering the value and efficiency we've come to expect from other Ryzen processors.
Before we jump into the benchmarks, here's how we've set up the comparison. For this review, we'll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel's competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X.
Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD's pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores. You also get quad-channel memory support and significantly more PCI Express lanes."
"While we're curious to see how Threadripper fares against AMD's more affordable lineup, I'm more interested in learning how they compare against Intel's Skylake-X parts, so you can expect an emphasis on those results.
The Skylake-X CPUs were installed on an Asrock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard, while the Threadripper CPUs were tested on the Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard. Both platforms were fitted with G.Skill's TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 64GB quad-channel memory kit. Big thanks go to G.Skill for providing all that memory."
"The X299 platform was installed on the Praxis Wetbench and was cooled using Thermaltake's Pacific RL360 custom liquid cooled kit. Meanwhile Threadripper was tested on a sheet of foam on my desk and was cooled by the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO liquid cooler."

Overclocking Results
"As expected the Threadripper CPUs were able to hit 4 GHz but unfortunately like Ryzen 7 weren’t able to go beyond that point. Extreme voltages might see you hit 4.1 - 4.2 GHz like what we’ve seen with some Ryzen CPUs but for 24/7 usage 4 GHz looks to be the limit."

"Anyway at 4 GHz the 1950X spat out an incredible score of 3408 pts in Cinebench though due to the way XFR works this overclock actually slightly reduced the single thread performance. You could probably fine tune the overclock to avoid this but with time against us we didn’t play around with the overclocking too much."

"Overclocked the Blender render time for the 1950X was cut down by an impressive 11% while the 1920X time was reduced by 6%. This means even overclocked the Core i9-7900X wasn’t much faster than the 1920X and wasn’t able to match the stock 1950X in this application."

"Interestingly this time when testing with Corona the 1920X saw a massive 17% performance improvement when overclocked while the 1950X was just 7% faster. This meant both overclocked Threadripper parts were much faster than the overclocked 7900X."

"Back to the kind of margins seen in Blender we find that while the 1950X was 9% faster overclocked the 1920X was just 5% faster. This meant when testing with Premiere Pro CC the 1920X did trail the Core i9-7900X while the 1950X was quite a lot faster."

"Finally we have the overclocking power consumption figures and here Threadripper looks quite good, especially in relation to the Core i7-7900X. Whereas the Intel CPU pushed total system consumption to 388 watts, the 1950X hit 358 watts, an 8% reduction for what was often between 20 - 30% more performance."

UMA vs. NUMA
"As mentioned on the last page, you switch between memory access modes on Threadripper processors. 'Distributes' mode uses 'Uniform Memory Access' is enabled by default so this is what we've been testing with so far. However, you can switch to 'local' mode for 'Non-Uniform Memory Access' and this allows each of the Zeppelin dies to prioritize which cores access certain parts of the system memory. This basically prioritizes the nearest cores to improve overall latency for gaming applications that tend to place a premium on fast memory access. So let's see how this impacts gaming performance as well as a few productivity workloads..."

"Switching to NUMA has improved the Battlefield 1 performance and now Threadripper is delivering similar frame rates to the Ryzen 7 1800X. In fact, the 1950X creeps ahead ever so slightly and now is that much slower than the Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X."

"F1 2016 also sees decent gains when switching to NUMA though this time isn't able to match the Ryzen 7 1800X and this means it's also well down on the Intel CPUs."

"Performance in Civilization VI was already great and no extra performance was had when switching to NUMA."

"Looking at application performance, we see a slight performance decline with POVRay, but nothing serious."

"Blender also saw a slight decline in performance with the 1950X being about 4% slower using NUMA."

"Last up we have the Corona test, in which both NUMA and UMA offered the same performance. There's not much to see here, so let's move on to some consumption figures."

"In a nutshell, for the same price you get more CPU performance, lower power consumption and improved operating temperatures with Threadripper, so why would you buy the Core i9-7900X over the 1950X?
Intel recently announced the specs for its upcoming 12, 14, 16 and 18-core Skylake-X parts. At a guess, I would say consumers will need to spend at least $1,400 on the i9-7940X to match AMD's 1950X and I seriously doubt the 40% price premium will be worth it.
The X299 platform's lack of ECC memory support is another issue. Whereas Threadripper supports ECC, the Skylake-X chips don't and that means anyone serious about their workstation won't even consider Intel's high-end desktop platform. Unless Intel is willing to budge on pricing I can't see why anyone would invest in X299.

At the beginning of 2017, who would have thought we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the very top of the high-end desktop CPU segment. It certainly wasn't us, but we're glad we can look forward to some competition. It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast."
"Pros: The Threadripper 1920X offers more performance, uses less power and runs cooler than the Core i9-7900X. It also supports ECC memory (Intel's X299 platform doesn't). Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the 1920X touts quad-channel memory support and more PCIe lanes.
Cons: The $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is competitively priced but nonetheless comes at a hefty premium. Threadripper falls a tad behind when it comes to gaming."

I have three objections to that review.

(i) They tested different versions of the essentially the same kind of workload. They tested rendering with Corona, CineBench, Blender, POVRay... This is useless to get a overall picture of the performance of a chip. For instance TR 1950X is faster than i9-7900X in Blender, but the 1950X is slower in WinRAR. Moreover, they didn't check any rendering application where the TR 1950X is slower. The i9-7900X is faster in Mental Ray or V-Ray for instance.

(ii) They used overclock RAM on the TR chips, which automatically overclocks the IF interconnect. but they didn't overclock the mesh interconnect on the SKL-X chips.

(iii) Pricing is incorrect. They give the price of the i9 as $1150, but even AMD reports the i9 as a $999 chip.

Therefore the performance/price graphics they gave are twice biased. One because they only measure rendering performance on benchmarks favoring AMD, and another because increased pricing of Intel chips.

<i> I don't agree with your suggestions for inclusion or exclusion and neither did the reviewer, because these benchmarks shows real world performance for professionals who would and are buying these chips. Notice price drop on the notoriously not popular 7900X since the release of ThreadRipper.
<ii> Your complaint only shows the weakness of the mesh, and doesn't show real world applications for majority of the population that would just pop a memory dimm in have it work at it's registered speed which is the case here.
<iii> The review is almost a month old now. Amazon the 7900X is only $962.99. This price demonstrates the unpopularity of the entire skylake-x line in general. No professional wants to buy this chip, because of the numerous issues with this entire product line that caused outrage across the popular YouTubers! ThreadRipper still remains the better value!

 

[goldstone77]

AMD CPU Sales Overtake Intel For The First Time In Over A Decade At Germany’s Largest E-Tailer
By Khalid Moammer
7 hours ago

 

[juanrga]

Spoiler

Sorry I'm late to the party, and this is now an old review that came out on August 10th. I still think it's worth posting so here you go!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JR_v-4BaQ&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X & 1920X Review
By Steven Walton on August 10, 2017
"After much speculation and an official unveiling last week, it's finally time to see if Threadripper can bring competition to the high-end desktop segment while delivering the value and efficiency we've come to expect from other Ryzen processors.
Before we jump into the benchmarks, here's how we've set up the comparison. For this review, we'll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel's competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X.
Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD's pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores. You also get quad-channel memory support and significantly more PCI Express lanes."
"While we're curious to see how Threadripper fares against AMD's more affordable lineup, I'm more interested in learning how they compare against Intel's Skylake-X parts, so you can expect an emphasis on those results.
The Skylake-X CPUs were installed on an Asrock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard, while the Threadripper CPUs were tested on the Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard. Both platforms were fitted with G.Skill's TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 64GB quad-channel memory kit. Big thanks go to G.Skill for providing all that memory."
"The X299 platform was installed on the Praxis Wetbench and was cooled using Thermaltake's Pacific RL360 custom liquid cooled kit. Meanwhile Threadripper was tested on a sheet of foam on my desk and was cooled by the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO liquid cooler."

Overclocking Results
"As expected the Threadripper CPUs were able to hit 4 GHz but unfortunately like Ryzen 7 weren’t able to go beyond that point. Extreme voltages might see you hit 4.1 - 4.2 GHz like what we’ve seen with some Ryzen CPUs but for 24/7 usage 4 GHz looks to be the limit."

"Anyway at 4 GHz the 1950X spat out an incredible score of 3408 pts in Cinebench though due to the way XFR works this overclock actually slightly reduced the single thread performance. You could probably fine tune the overclock to avoid this but with time against us we didn’t play around with the overclocking too much."

"Overclocked the Blender render time for the 1950X was cut down by an impressive 11% while the 1920X time was reduced by 6%. This means even overclocked the Core i9-7900X wasn’t much faster than the 1920X and wasn’t able to match the stock 1950X in this application."

"Interestingly this time when testing with Corona the 1920X saw a massive 17% performance improvement when overclocked while the 1950X was just 7% faster. This meant both overclocked Threadripper parts were much faster than the overclocked 7900X."

"Back to the kind of margins seen in Blender we find that while the 1950X was 9% faster overclocked the 1920X was just 5% faster. This meant when testing with Premiere Pro CC the 1920X did trail the Core i9-7900X while the 1950X was quite a lot faster."

"Finally we have the overclocking power consumption figures and here Threadripper looks quite good, especially in relation to the Core i7-7900X. Whereas the Intel CPU pushed total system consumption to 388 watts, the 1950X hit 358 watts, an 8% reduction for what was often between 20 - 30% more performance."

UMA vs. NUMA
"As mentioned on the last page, you switch between memory access modes on Threadripper processors. 'Distributes' mode uses 'Uniform Memory Access' is enabled by default so this is what we've been testing with so far. However, you can switch to 'local' mode for 'Non-Uniform Memory Access' and this allows each of the Zeppelin dies to prioritize which cores access certain parts of the system memory. This basically prioritizes the nearest cores to improve overall latency for gaming applications that tend to place a premium on fast memory access. So let's see how this impacts gaming performance as well as a few productivity workloads..."

"Switching to NUMA has improved the Battlefield 1 performance and now Threadripper is delivering similar frame rates to the Ryzen 7 1800X. In fact, the 1950X creeps ahead ever so slightly and now is that much slower than the Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X."

"F1 2016 also sees decent gains when switching to NUMA though this time isn't able to match the Ryzen 7 1800X and this means it's also well down on the Intel CPUs."

"Performance in Civilization VI was already great and no extra performance was had when switching to NUMA."

"Looking at application performance, we see a slight performance decline with POVRay, but nothing serious."

"Blender also saw a slight decline in performance with the 1950X being about 4% slower using NUMA."

"Last up we have the Corona test, in which both NUMA and UMA offered the same performance. There's not much to see here, so let's move on to some consumption figures."

"In a nutshell, for the same price you get more CPU performance, lower power consumption and improved operating temperatures with Threadripper, so why would you buy the Core i9-7900X over the 1950X?
Intel recently announced the specs for its upcoming 12, 14, 16 and 18-core Skylake-X parts. At a guess, I would say consumers will need to spend at least $1,400 on the i9-7940X to match AMD's 1950X and I seriously doubt the 40% price premium will be worth it.
The X299 platform's lack of ECC memory support is another issue. Whereas Threadripper supports ECC, the Skylake-X chips don't and that means anyone serious about their workstation won't even consider Intel's high-end desktop platform. Unless Intel is willing to budge on pricing I can't see why anyone would invest in X299.

At the beginning of 2017, who would have thought we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the very top of the high-end desktop CPU segment. It certainly wasn't us, but we're glad we can look forward to some competition. It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast."
"Pros: The Threadripper 1920X offers more performance, uses less power and runs cooler than the Core i9-7900X. It also supports ECC memory (Intel's X299 platform doesn't). Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the 1920X touts quad-channel memory support and more PCIe lanes.
Cons: The $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is competitively priced but nonetheless comes at a hefty premium. Threadripper falls a tad behind when it comes to gaming."

I have three objections to that review.

(i) They tested different versions of the essentially the same kind of workload. They tested rendering with Corona, CineBench, Blender, POVRay... This is useless to get a overall picture of the performance of a chip. For instance TR 1950X is faster than i9-7900X in Blender, but the 1950X is slower in WinRAR. Moreover, they didn't check any rendering application where the TR 1950X is slower. The i9-7900X is faster in Mental Ray or V-Ray for instance.

(ii) They used overclock RAM on the TR chips, which automatically overclocks the IF interconnect. but they didn't overclock the mesh interconnect on the SKL-X chips.

(iii) Pricing is incorrect. They give the price of the i9 as $1150, but even AMD reports the i9 as a $999 chip.

Therefore the performance/price graphics they gave are twice biased. One because they only measure rendering performance on benchmarks favoring AMD, and another because increased pricing of Intel chips.

<i> I don't agree with your suggestions for inclusion or exclusion and neither did the reviewer, because these benchmarks shows real world performance for professionals who would and are buying these chips. Notice price drop on the notoriously not popular 7900X since the release of ThreadRipper.
<ii> Your complaint only shows the weakness of the mesh, and doesn't show real world applications for majority of the population that would just pop a memory dimm in have it work at it's registered speed which is the case here.
<iii> The review is almost a month old now. Amazon the 7900X is only $962.99. This price demonstrates the unpopularity of the entire skylake-x line in general. No professional wants to buy this chip, because of the numerous issues with this entire product line that caused outrage across the popular YouTubers! ThreadRipper still remains the better value!

(i) My remark was about real world performance. A complete review would have tested the chips on rendering, encoding, compiling, scientific computations, finance,... Instead the HU review was mostly rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering,... and games. Moreover even in the subset of rendering they didn't use any rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray.
(ii) The mesh interconnect is fine. My complain is about how biased are some recent reviews like HU that compare overclock to stock. To be unbiased, we would compare stock to stock or overclock to overclock.
(iii) The i9-7900X did launch at $999. This is the price reported even in AMD slides. The HU review inflated the prices of Intel chips and their performance/price graphs are biased.

Amazon selling it now with a 3% discount, just disproves your claim about unpopularity. From what I can see the chip and others in the SKL-X are selling well, despite the huge bias shown in the professional press. I have checked several owner threads and people is very happy with their SKL-X chips. Even der8auer wrote something about this bias from the media:

From my point of view Skylake-X is a pretty impressive CPU. We now have have a 10-core that's a lot cheaper than the Broadwell-E before and it clocks a lot higher. Even with the stock Intel paste I was able to reach 4.8 GHz on the CPU (i9-7900X) using Corsair 280 (mm) AIO. So there is still some headroom, I guess if you use a custom new water cooling you might be able to hit 4.9 GHz on a very very good chip without delidding. So after this test I delidded the CPU and replaced the stock TIM with liquid metal and this helped me push the CPU with an AIO to 5 GHz.

So we had Broadwell-E before who could run like 4.3-4.4 GHz, it cost 1700€. Now we have Skylake-X which is a lot cheaper and we CAN push it to 5 GHz, so what's all this negative press about? I don't really understand it. So from my point of view this is a very impressive CPU, so we have very high single-thread performance on the 10-core and also high MT performance, which we didn't have before in a Broadwell-E (probably comparing to mainstream).

 

[juanrga]

AMD CPU Sales Overtake Intel For The First Time In Over A Decade At Germany’s Largest E-Tailer
By Khalid Moammer
7 hours ago

Germany, a traditional pro-AMD place. I will leave you to guess why they are pro-AMD in that country.

Hint:

Spoiler

 

[goldstone77]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Sorry I'm late to the party, and this is now an old review that came out on August 10th. I still think it's worth posting so here you go!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JR_v-4BaQ&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X & 1920X Review
By Steven Walton on August 10, 2017
"After much speculation and an official unveiling last week, it's finally time to see if Threadripper can bring competition to the high-end desktop segment while delivering the value and efficiency we've come to expect from other Ryzen processors.
Before we jump into the benchmarks, here's how we've set up the comparison. For this review, we'll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel's competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X.
Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD's pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores. You also get quad-channel memory support and significantly more PCI Express lanes."
"While we're curious to see how Threadripper fares against AMD's more affordable lineup, I'm more interested in learning how they compare against Intel's Skylake-X parts, so you can expect an emphasis on those results.
The Skylake-X CPUs were installed on an Asrock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard, while the Threadripper CPUs were tested on the Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard. Both platforms were fitted with G.Skill's TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 64GB quad-channel memory kit. Big thanks go to G.Skill for providing all that memory."
"The X299 platform was installed on the Praxis Wetbench and was cooled using Thermaltake's Pacific RL360 custom liquid cooled kit. Meanwhile Threadripper was tested on a sheet of foam on my desk and was cooled by the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO liquid cooler."

Overclocking Results
"As expected the Threadripper CPUs were able to hit 4 GHz but unfortunately like Ryzen 7 weren’t able to go beyond that point. Extreme voltages might see you hit 4.1 - 4.2 GHz like what we’ve seen with some Ryzen CPUs but for 24/7 usage 4 GHz looks to be the limit."

"Anyway at 4 GHz the 1950X spat out an incredible score of 3408 pts in Cinebench though due to the way XFR works this overclock actually slightly reduced the single thread performance. You could probably fine tune the overclock to avoid this but with time against us we didn’t play around with the overclocking too much."

"Overclocked the Blender render time for the 1950X was cut down by an impressive 11% while the 1920X time was reduced by 6%. This means even overclocked the Core i9-7900X wasn’t much faster than the 1920X and wasn’t able to match the stock 1950X in this application."

"Interestingly this time when testing with Corona the 1920X saw a massive 17% performance improvement when overclocked while the 1950X was just 7% faster. This meant both overclocked Threadripper parts were much faster than the overclocked 7900X."

"Back to the kind of margins seen in Blender we find that while the 1950X was 9% faster overclocked the 1920X was just 5% faster. This meant when testing with Premiere Pro CC the 1920X did trail the Core i9-7900X while the 1950X was quite a lot faster."

"Finally we have the overclocking power consumption figures and here Threadripper looks quite good, especially in relation to the Core i7-7900X. Whereas the Intel CPU pushed total system consumption to 388 watts, the 1950X hit 358 watts, an 8% reduction for what was often between 20 - 30% more performance."

UMA vs. NUMA
"As mentioned on the last page, you switch between memory access modes on Threadripper processors. 'Distributes' mode uses 'Uniform Memory Access' is enabled by default so this is what we've been testing with so far. However, you can switch to 'local' mode for 'Non-Uniform Memory Access' and this allows each of the Zeppelin dies to prioritize which cores access certain parts of the system memory. This basically prioritizes the nearest cores to improve overall latency for gaming applications that tend to place a premium on fast memory access. So let's see how this impacts gaming performance as well as a few productivity workloads..."

"Switching to NUMA has improved the Battlefield 1 performance and now Threadripper is delivering similar frame rates to the Ryzen 7 1800X. In fact, the 1950X creeps ahead ever so slightly and now is that much slower than the Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X."

"F1 2016 also sees decent gains when switching to NUMA though this time isn't able to match the Ryzen 7 1800X and this means it's also well down on the Intel CPUs."

"Performance in Civilization VI was already great and no extra performance was had when switching to NUMA."

"Looking at application performance, we see a slight performance decline with POVRay, but nothing serious."

"Blender also saw a slight decline in performance with the 1950X being about 4% slower using NUMA."

"Last up we have the Corona test, in which both NUMA and UMA offered the same performance. There's not much to see here, so let's move on to some consumption figures."

"In a nutshell, for the same price you get more CPU performance, lower power consumption and improved operating temperatures with Threadripper, so why would you buy the Core i9-7900X over the 1950X?
Intel recently announced the specs for its upcoming 12, 14, 16 and 18-core Skylake-X parts. At a guess, I would say consumers will need to spend at least $1,400 on the i9-7940X to match AMD's 1950X and I seriously doubt the 40% price premium will be worth it.
The X299 platform's lack of ECC memory support is another issue. Whereas Threadripper supports ECC, the Skylake-X chips don't and that means anyone serious about their workstation won't even consider Intel's high-end desktop platform. Unless Intel is willing to budge on pricing I can't see why anyone would invest in X299.

At the beginning of 2017, who would have thought we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the very top of the high-end desktop CPU segment. It certainly wasn't us, but we're glad we can look forward to some competition. It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast."
"Pros: The Threadripper 1920X offers more performance, uses less power and runs cooler than the Core i9-7900X. It also supports ECC memory (Intel's X299 platform doesn't). Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the 1920X touts quad-channel memory support and more PCIe lanes.
Cons: The $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is competitively priced but nonetheless comes at a hefty premium. Threadripper falls a tad behind when it comes to gaming."

I have three objections to that review.

(i) They tested different versions of the essentially the same kind of workload. They tested rendering with Corona, CineBench, Blender, POVRay... This is useless to get a overall picture of the performance of a chip. For instance TR 1950X is faster than i9-7900X in Blender, but the 1950X is slower in WinRAR. Moreover, they didn't check any rendering application where the TR 1950X is slower. The i9-7900X is faster in Mental Ray or V-Ray for instance.

(ii) They used overclock RAM on the TR chips, which automatically overclocks the IF interconnect. but they didn't overclock the mesh interconnect on the SKL-X chips.

(iii) Pricing is incorrect. They give the price of the i9 as $1150, but even AMD reports the i9 as a $999 chip.

Therefore the performance/price graphics they gave are twice biased. One because they only measure rendering performance on benchmarks favoring AMD, and another because increased pricing of Intel chips.

<i> I don't agree with your suggestions for inclusion or exclusion and neither did the reviewer, because these benchmarks shows real world performance for professionals who would and are buying these chips. Notice price drop on the notoriously not popular 7900X since the release of ThreadRipper.
<ii> Your complaint only shows the weakness of the mesh, and doesn't show real world applications for majority of the population that would just pop a memory dimm in have it work at it's registered speed which is the case here.
<iii> The review is almost a month old now. Amazon the 7900X is only $962.99. This price demonstrates the unpopularity of the entire skylake-x line in general. No professional wants to buy this chip, because of the numerous issues with this entire product line that caused outrage across the popular YouTubers! ThreadRipper still remains the better value!

(i) My remark was about real world performance. A complete review would have tested the chips on rendering, encoding, compiling, scientific computations, finance,... Instead the HU review was mostly rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering,... and games. Moreover even in the subset of rendering they didn't use any rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray.
(ii) The mesh interconnect is fine. My complain is about how biased are some recent reviews like HU that compare overclock to stock. To be unbiased, we would compare stock to stock or overclock to overclock.
(iii) The i9-7900X did launch at $999. This is the price reported even in AMD slides. The HU review inflated the prices of Intel chips and their performance/price graphs are biased.

Amazon selling it now with a 3% discount, just disproves your claim about unpopularity. From what I can see the chip and others in the SKL-X are selling well, despite the huge bias shown in the professional press. I have checked several owner threads and people is very happy with their SKL-X chips. Even der8auer wrote something about this bias from the media:

From my point of view Skylake-X is a pretty impressive CPU. We now have have a 10-core that's a lot cheaper than the Broadwell-E before and it clocks a lot higher. Even with the stock Intel paste I was able to reach 4.8 GHz on the CPU (i9-7900X) using Corsair 280 (mm) AIO. So there is still some headroom, I guess if you use a custom new water cooling you might be able to hit 4.9 GHz on a very very good chip without delidding. So after this test I delidded the CPU and replaced the stock TIM with liquid metal and this helped me push the CPU with an AIO to 5 GHz.

So we had Broadwell-E before who could run like 4.3-4.4 GHz, it cost 1700€. Now we have Skylake-X which is a lot cheaper and we CAN push it to 5 GHz, so what's all this negative press about? I don't really understand it. So from my point of view this is a very impressive CPU, so we have very high single-thread performance on the 10-core and also high MT performance, which we didn't have before in a Broadwell-E (probably comparing to mainstream).

Der8auer used a Pre-tested Skylake-X i9 7900X using AIO! Most people can only get 4.4GHz-4.5GHz with custom liquid coolers! You must have forgot about De8auers "The X299 VRM Disaster" where he talks about X299 systems pulling so much power they could catch fire! Every YouTuber, Hardware Unboxed, and Tom's Hardware have all gave dismal reviews of the 7900X! You are not watching the entire video and using his statements without all the facts. I've went over this in great detail already on the X299 thread! Also, thermal throttling and VRM consuming over 400 watts of power added to the scandal! You really need to stop over hyping the 7900X, because it's notoriously unpopular, and your statements to the contrary defy history. Unless you are going to put up a real argument with verifiable numbers and links to back up your claims don't bother replying!

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7BqAjC4ZCc&ab_channel=der8auer"][/video]

There was very little interest in the X299 platform

Edit: Adding to context in rank of best selling
ThreadRipper 1950X 25/100 7800X 27/100 7900X 31/100 7820X 34/100 1900X 40/100 1920X 51/100
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Computer-CPU-Processors/zgbs/pc/229189#2
ThreadRipper 1950X 62/100 1920X 65/100 7820X 74/100 7900X 88/100 amazon UK best sellers list
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Processors/zgbs/computers/430515031#5

 

[aldaia]

Moreover even in the subset of rendering they didn't use any rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray.

Here they do use V-ray. Looks like 1950X trounces the i9-7900X by 36%, even the inferior 1920X is faster than i9-7900X in "rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray"

The review must be wrong! 😀😀😀

 

[modeonoff]

Can somebody please include benchmark for the 1900X?

 

[goldstone77]

Can somebody please include benchmark for the 1900X?

This is the only thing out right now, which is a simulated benchmark. 1950X with 1 8 core disabled. It should be really close to what you would find performance wise!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWhozA2J4rc&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]

 

[aldaia]

Germany, a traditional pro-AMD place. I will leave you to guess why they are pro-AMD in that country.

Hint:

Spoiler

Ryzen is not produced in GloFo Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany. Fab 1 is capable of manufacturing wafers at 40nm, 28 nm BULK and 22 nm FDSOI. AMD (through glofo) production in Germany is past history, soon no AMD product will be produced there.

Ryzen is produced in Fab 8, Luther Forest Technology Campus, Saratoga County, New York, United States

AMD market share in March was only 27% and climbed to 56% in just 5 months, there is much more going on than just "traditionally pro-AMD"

 

[juanrga]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Sorry I'm late to the party, and this is now an old review that came out on August 10th. I still think it's worth posting so here you go!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JR_v-4BaQ&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X & 1920X Review
By Steven Walton on August 10, 2017
"After much speculation and an official unveiling last week, it's finally time to see if Threadripper can bring competition to the high-end desktop segment while delivering the value and efficiency we've come to expect from other Ryzen processors.
Before we jump into the benchmarks, here's how we've set up the comparison. For this review, we'll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel's competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X.
Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD's pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores. You also get quad-channel memory support and significantly more PCI Express lanes."
"While we're curious to see how Threadripper fares against AMD's more affordable lineup, I'm more interested in learning how they compare against Intel's Skylake-X parts, so you can expect an emphasis on those results.
The Skylake-X CPUs were installed on an Asrock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard, while the Threadripper CPUs were tested on the Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard. Both platforms were fitted with G.Skill's TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 64GB quad-channel memory kit. Big thanks go to G.Skill for providing all that memory."
"The X299 platform was installed on the Praxis Wetbench and was cooled using Thermaltake's Pacific RL360 custom liquid cooled kit. Meanwhile Threadripper was tested on a sheet of foam on my desk and was cooled by the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO liquid cooler."

Overclocking Results
"As expected the Threadripper CPUs were able to hit 4 GHz but unfortunately like Ryzen 7 weren’t able to go beyond that point. Extreme voltages might see you hit 4.1 - 4.2 GHz like what we’ve seen with some Ryzen CPUs but for 24/7 usage 4 GHz looks to be the limit."

"Anyway at 4 GHz the 1950X spat out an incredible score of 3408 pts in Cinebench though due to the way XFR works this overclock actually slightly reduced the single thread performance. You could probably fine tune the overclock to avoid this but with time against us we didn’t play around with the overclocking too much."

"Overclocked the Blender render time for the 1950X was cut down by an impressive 11% while the 1920X time was reduced by 6%. This means even overclocked the Core i9-7900X wasn’t much faster than the 1920X and wasn’t able to match the stock 1950X in this application."

"Interestingly this time when testing with Corona the 1920X saw a massive 17% performance improvement when overclocked while the 1950X was just 7% faster. This meant both overclocked Threadripper parts were much faster than the overclocked 7900X."

"Back to the kind of margins seen in Blender we find that while the 1950X was 9% faster overclocked the 1920X was just 5% faster. This meant when testing with Premiere Pro CC the 1920X did trail the Core i9-7900X while the 1950X was quite a lot faster."

"Finally we have the overclocking power consumption figures and here Threadripper looks quite good, especially in relation to the Core i7-7900X. Whereas the Intel CPU pushed total system consumption to 388 watts, the 1950X hit 358 watts, an 8% reduction for what was often between 20 - 30% more performance."

UMA vs. NUMA
"As mentioned on the last page, you switch between memory access modes on Threadripper processors. 'Distributes' mode uses 'Uniform Memory Access' is enabled by default so this is what we've been testing with so far. However, you can switch to 'local' mode for 'Non-Uniform Memory Access' and this allows each of the Zeppelin dies to prioritize which cores access certain parts of the system memory. This basically prioritizes the nearest cores to improve overall latency for gaming applications that tend to place a premium on fast memory access. So let's see how this impacts gaming performance as well as a few productivity workloads..."

"Switching to NUMA has improved the Battlefield 1 performance and now Threadripper is delivering similar frame rates to the Ryzen 7 1800X. In fact, the 1950X creeps ahead ever so slightly and now is that much slower than the Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X."

"F1 2016 also sees decent gains when switching to NUMA though this time isn't able to match the Ryzen 7 1800X and this means it's also well down on the Intel CPUs."

"Performance in Civilization VI was already great and no extra performance was had when switching to NUMA."

"Looking at application performance, we see a slight performance decline with POVRay, but nothing serious."

"Blender also saw a slight decline in performance with the 1950X being about 4% slower using NUMA."

"Last up we have the Corona test, in which both NUMA and UMA offered the same performance. There's not much to see here, so let's move on to some consumption figures."

"In a nutshell, for the same price you get more CPU performance, lower power consumption and improved operating temperatures with Threadripper, so why would you buy the Core i9-7900X over the 1950X?
Intel recently announced the specs for its upcoming 12, 14, 16 and 18-core Skylake-X parts. At a guess, I would say consumers will need to spend at least $1,400 on the i9-7940X to match AMD's 1950X and I seriously doubt the 40% price premium will be worth it.
The X299 platform's lack of ECC memory support is another issue. Whereas Threadripper supports ECC, the Skylake-X chips don't and that means anyone serious about their workstation won't even consider Intel's high-end desktop platform. Unless Intel is willing to budge on pricing I can't see why anyone would invest in X299.

At the beginning of 2017, who would have thought we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the very top of the high-end desktop CPU segment. It certainly wasn't us, but we're glad we can look forward to some competition. It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast."
"Pros: The Threadripper 1920X offers more performance, uses less power and runs cooler than the Core i9-7900X. It also supports ECC memory (Intel's X299 platform doesn't). Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the 1920X touts quad-channel memory support and more PCIe lanes.
Cons: The $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is competitively priced but nonetheless comes at a hefty premium. Threadripper falls a tad behind when it comes to gaming."

I have three objections to that review.

(i) They tested different versions of the essentially the same kind of workload. They tested rendering with Corona, CineBench, Blender, POVRay... This is useless to get a overall picture of the performance of a chip. For instance TR 1950X is faster than i9-7900X in Blender, but the 1950X is slower in WinRAR. Moreover, they didn't check any rendering application where the TR 1950X is slower. The i9-7900X is faster in Mental Ray or V-Ray for instance.

(ii) They used overclock RAM on the TR chips, which automatically overclocks the IF interconnect. but they didn't overclock the mesh interconnect on the SKL-X chips.

(iii) Pricing is incorrect. They give the price of the i9 as $1150, but even AMD reports the i9 as a $999 chip.

Therefore the performance/price graphics they gave are twice biased. One because they only measure rendering performance on benchmarks favoring AMD, and another because increased pricing of Intel chips.

<i> I don't agree with your suggestions for inclusion or exclusion and neither did the reviewer, because these benchmarks shows real world performance for professionals who would and are buying these chips. Notice price drop on the notoriously not popular 7900X since the release of ThreadRipper.
<ii> Your complaint only shows the weakness of the mesh, and doesn't show real world applications for majority of the population that would just pop a memory dimm in have it work at it's registered speed which is the case here.
<iii> The review is almost a month old now. Amazon the 7900X is only $962.99. This price demonstrates the unpopularity of the entire skylake-x line in general. No professional wants to buy this chip, because of the numerous issues with this entire product line that caused outrage across the popular YouTubers! ThreadRipper still remains the better value!

(i) My remark was about real world performance. A complete review would have tested the chips on rendering, encoding, compiling, scientific computations, finance,... Instead the HU review was mostly rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering,... and games. Moreover even in the subset of rendering they didn't use any rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray.
(ii) The mesh interconnect is fine. My complain is about how biased are some recent reviews like HU that compare overclock to stock. To be unbiased, we would compare stock to stock or overclock to overclock.
(iii) The i9-7900X did launch at $999. This is the price reported even in AMD slides. The HU review inflated the prices of Intel chips and their performance/price graphs are biased.

Amazon selling it now with a 3% discount, just disproves your claim about unpopularity. From what I can see the chip and others in the SKL-X are selling well, despite the huge bias shown in the professional press. I have checked several owner threads and people is very happy with their SKL-X chips. Even der8auer wrote something about this bias from the media:

From my point of view Skylake-X is a pretty impressive CPU. We now have have a 10-core that's a lot cheaper than the Broadwell-E before and it clocks a lot higher. Even with the stock Intel paste I was able to reach 4.8 GHz on the CPU (i9-7900X) using Corsair 280 (mm) AIO. So there is still some headroom, I guess if you use a custom new water cooling you might be able to hit 4.9 GHz on a very very good chip without delidding. So after this test I delidded the CPU and replaced the stock TIM with liquid metal and this helped me push the CPU with an AIO to 5 GHz.

So we had Broadwell-E before who could run like 4.3-4.4 GHz, it cost 1700€. Now we have Skylake-X which is a lot cheaper and we CAN push it to 5 GHz, so what's all this negative press about? I don't really understand it. So from my point of view this is a very impressive CPU, so we have very high single-thread performance on the 10-core and also high MT performance, which we didn't have before in a Broadwell-E (probably comparing to mainstream).

Der8auer used a Pre-tested Skylake-X i9 7900X using AIO! Most people can only get 4.4GHz-4.5GHz with custom liquid coolers! You must have forgot about De8auers "The X299 VRM Disaster" where he talks about X299 systems pulling so much power they could catch fire! Every YouTuber, Hardware Unboxed, and Tom's Hardware have all gave dismal reviews of the 7900X! You are not watching the entire video and using his statements without all the facts. I've went over this in great detail already on the X299 thread! Also, thermal throttling and VRM consuming over 400 watts of power added to the scandal! You really need to stop over hyping the 7900X, because it's notoriously unpopular, and your statements to the contrary defy history. Unless you are going to put up a real argument with verifiable numbers and links to back up your claims don't bother replying!

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7BqAjC4ZCc&ab_channel=der8auer"][/video]

There was very little interest in the X299 platform

Edit: Adding to context in rank of best selling
ThreadRipper 1950X 25/100 7800X 27/100 7900X 31/100 7820X 34/100 1900X 40/100 1920X 51/100
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Computer-CPU-Processors/zgbs/pc/229189#2
ThreadRipper 1950X 62/100 1920X 65/100 7820X 74/100 7900X 88/100 amazon UK best sellers list
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Processors/zgbs/computers/430515031#5

The average overclock for the 7900X is 4549MHz. This means some people is achieving lower overclock and others are achieving higher overclock; this is the proper definition of average. Der8auer chip got 6% higher overclock than the average.

Der8auer praised the i9 chip, I quoted him just above and then you now change the argument to motherboards. Yes, he criticized some mobos for having an incorrect desing. He demonstrated that some incorrectly desinged mobos have a fancy (useless) plate above the VRM region that works as a heat insulator and overheats the VRM, generating a problem. He demonstrated that solving the problem is so easy as retiring that fancy plate from the mobo and ensuring proper cooling goes to the VRM region. Some of his problems were also related to the PSU that he chose

https://www.techpowerup.com/234744/intel-x299-platform-called-a-vrm-disaster-by-overclocker-der8auer

Tomshardware also wrote something about motherboards. If I am not misguided Tomshardware wrote that some motherboards violate Intel specifications. Thus it is just a question of choosing the correct mobo now and/or awaiting for the manufactures with issues to release revisions of their early desings. Also initial reviews used launch BIOS with problems that affected performance and power consumption. Some sites retested with the new BIOS and measured lower power consumption.

As demonstrated in a fomer post, the Hardware Unboxed comparison of TR vs i9 was incomplete and biased. And their review of the 7800X was even worse. Probably this was the worse review ever published! First, they tested an engineering sample instead a retail chip. Second, they used a mobo incompatible with the chip and even managed to burn the chip. Third, they crippled the performance of the chip by using GPU-bound and frame-limited settings.

There are some very wrong reviews of SKL-X and many biased SKL-X vs TR reviews: overclocked AMD chips compared to Intel chips on stock settings. Cherry picking benchmarks to favor throughput. Measuring performance on non-AVX workloads but measuring power consumption in AVX workloads, generating a bias in the measurement of efficiency,... This is a huge scandal!

The interest in the X299 platform is reflected in the high number of mobos available and chip sales. Your own amazon.com best selling chip says that the i9-7900X is just behind the TR 1950X in sales, and selling much better than the TR 1920X. The i9-7900X is #34 whereas the TR 1920x is #56.

I am surprised than the SKL-X chips are selling so well despite so many biased reviews and people paid for posting negative comments on forums and stores. Check the nest link. This guy didn't write a review of the Intel chip, he wrote a rant to try to increase sales of AMD chips

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0745486S1/ref=s9_acsd_simh_hd_bw_bxcb_c_x_2_w?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-11&pf_rd_r=52F601VWB4WCG4A9G553&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1381e980-855e-537b-94df-b4f4d642d410&pf_rd_i=229189

I agree with der8auer: "so what's all this negative press about? I don't really understand it."

 

[goldstone77]

AMD Threadripper 1950X review: Better than Intel in almost every way
Cheaper, faster, and more feature-rich than Skylake-X—what's not to love?
MARK WALTON (UK) - 8/10/2017, 9:10 AM

If Ryzen was a polite, if firm way of telling the world that AMD is back in the processor game, then Threadripper is a foul-mouthed, middle-finger-waving, kick-in-the-crotch "screw you" aimed squarely at the usurious heart of Intel. It's an olive branch to a part of the PC market stung by years of inflated prices, sluggish performance gains, and the feeling that, if you're not interested in low-power laptops, Intel isn't interested in you.

Where Intel charges $1,000/£1,000 for 10 cores and 20 threads in the form of the Core i9-7900X, AMD offers 16C/32T with Threadripper 1950X. Where Intel limits chipset features and PCIe lanes the further down the product stack you go—the latter being ever more important as storage moves away from the SATA interface—AMD offers quad-channel memory, eight DIMM slots, and 64 PCIe lanes even on the cheapest CPU for the platform.

Threadripper embraces the enthusiasts, the system builders, and the content creators that shout loud and complain often, but evangelise products like no other. It's the new home for extravagant multi-GPU setups, and RAID arrays built on thousands of dollars worth of M.2 SSDs. It's where performance records can be broken, and where content creators can shave precious minutes from laborious production tasks, while still having more than enough remaining horsepower to get their game on.

Sure, dive deep into the technicalities and Intel's Skylake-X is still the absolute fastest when it comes to pure instructions-per-clock performance and high-frame-rate gaming. But the sheer daring of AMD Threadripper and accompanying X399 platform is nothing short of astonishing. Its performance, particularly in content creation tasks and production workloads, wipes the floor with the Intel equivalent. Taken as a whole, there really is no competition—Threadripper is the High End Desktop (HEDT) platform to beat.

Double trouble

When AMD unveiled its Zen architecture, which finally morphed into a product as Ryzen, much was said about Infinity Fabric, the company's new interconnect designed for maximum scalability. The 14nm FinFET Zen core is designed as a four-core-complex (CCX), with Infinity Fabric used to bind two CCX together to create the eight-core CPUs of Ryzen 7. What many didn't quite realise at the time is just how well Infinity Fabric would work (after a few teething troubles were resolved, at least) and just how far AMD could push it.

Threadripper 1950X is effectively two eight-core Ryzen 1800X CPUs placed onto the same package joined together by Infinity Fabric. The result is a CPU measuring a mammoth 72mm by 55mm, which slots into the even larger TR4 motherboard socket. Threadripper is, physically at least, the biggest consumer CPU released since the cartridge slot format of the Pentium 2—and even then the CPU itself was just a small part of the cartridge.

The advantages and disadvantages of AMD's Infinity Fabric design are well documented at this point—and I'd advise taking a look at Peter Bright's excellent deep dive into the Zen architecture to learn more—but many of the quirks that arose from it have since been patched out or tweaked. Do note, however, that Infinity Fabric performance still depends greatly on memory speed. Thankfully, running 3200MHz memory with a Threadripper CPU is as simple as loading an XMP profile—a far cry from the memory issues that plagued Ryzen at launch.

Indeed, with Threadripper being based so heavily on Ryzen, it's a pleasingly stable platform. The only real difference is the memory configuration—which is now quad-channel with ECC support, thanks to the two dual-channel controllers present on each eight-core die—and the PCIe lane configuration, which now features 64 lanes, four of which are reserved for connection to the new X399 chipset.

With Threadripper, you can run two graphics cards at X16 PCIe speeds, two at X8, and still have enough lanes left over for three X4 NVMe SSDs connected directly to the CPU. Intel's i9-series offers a mere 44 PCIe lanes on the CPU by comparison, but does make up the difference with a further 24 lanes on the motherboard (they do, however, share a single X4 PCIe link to the CPU).

There are two Threadripper CPUs available at launch: the 16C/32T 1950X, and the 12C/24T 1920X. Both feature the same 512K of L2 cache per core (8MB total), 16MB per die (32MB total) of L3 cache, and 4.0GHz boost clock across four cores. They can both boost as far as 4.2GHz across the same four cores thanks to AMD's XFR (extended frequency range) enhancements, which offer increased clock speeds for those with suitably robust cooling setups. The only difference between them is the slight base clock bump to 3.5GHz on the 1920X, versus the 3.4GHz on the 1950X. Like the rest of the Ryzen line-up, both Threadripper CPUs are fully unlocked for overclocking.

At $1,000/£1,000, the 1950X offers 16C/32 where Intel offers just 10C/20T. While Intel's superior IPC performance and clock speeds do make up some of the difference, to get the same core count with an i9 costs $1,700, while the top-end 18C/36T i9-7980XE costs an eye-watering $2,000. The 1920X fares even better, offering 12C/24T for $800. Intel doesn't have an equivalent chip for the price, only the more expensive i9-7900X, or the $600 i7-7820X, which features a mere 28 PCIe lanes and just eight cores. Simply put, AMD offers a lot more for a lot less.

Holy motherboard, Batman!

The same isn't quite true of the X399 platform, which features motherboards that are just as expensive as the Intel X299 equivalent. That said, you do get a lot for your money. With Ryzen AMD showed it could cajole partners into making motherboards as good as those they make for Intel—with Threadripper it has convinced them to make them even better. The flagship is without doubt the £520/$550 Asus ROG Zenith Extreme, an EATX motherboard (over an inch wider than ATX) that's as fiercely over-the-top as the Threadripper CPU itself.

It features four full-length PCIe 3.0 X16 slots connected directly to the CPU (with an additional PCIe 2.0 X4 slot and PCIe 2.0 slot wired to the chipset); three M.2 SSD slots, two of which are mounted via a unique DIMM-style board, along with a U.2 port, all of which are connected directly to the CPU; six SATA 6Gbps ports connected to the chipset, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac+ and WiGig 802.11ad WiFi, excellent eight-channel audio courtesy of a ESS9018Q2C DAC (complete with LED-lit jacks); and eight USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports connected to the CPU, along with an ASMedia USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller and a swathe of other USB IO.

Then there's the onboard Intel I211-AT gigabit Ethernet; a 10 gigabit Ethernet PCIe expansion card; dual eight-pin power connectors for overclocking the CPU; numerous pump headers, a monoblock sensor and LN2 mode switches for extreme overclocking; a switch for turning individual PCIe lanes on and off (handy for when a card dies in a hardline liquid cooling setup); a customisable OLED display that shows detailed diagnostics during boot, and information like CPU temperature or clock speed when booted (or animated GIFs); and active VRM cooling with a finned heatsink and fan (take that, X299 VRM throttling).

There's even a hefty backplate that covers a good third of the rear of the motherboard, complete with built-in RGB lighting that lets you go full boy racer with a neon under glow. Suffice it to say, there's very little you could possibly want that's not already featured on the Zenith Extreme—except for Thunderbolt, since it's an Intel technology.

At the heart of the X399 platform is the imposing TR4 socket. Unlike the mainstream Ryzen CPUs, which use a pin grid array (PGA) with the pins on the back of the chip, Threadripper uses the same land grid array (LGA) as Intel CPUs, where the pins are mounted on the motherboard. There are 4,094 pins inside a TR4 socket, which makes it something of a fragile beast. To help protect the pins, AMD has over-engineered the CPU mounting mechanism and then some.

Opening the socket requires undoing three torx screws (a tool is included with every Threadripper CPU), after which the first part of the bracket lifts up. Each Threadripper CPU comes pre-mounted inside an orange bracket, which is part of the mounting process. You slide the bracket into a tray, which clips down onto the frame, which you secure with the outer frame and the three torx screws you undid to begin with. The procedure isn't as simple as simply placing the CPU in a socket and pulling a lever, but it is theoretically a safer approach: there's very little room for user error.

The size of the CPU and the socket means that no existing air or liquid cooling solutions fit. However, AMD includes a bracket inside the Threadripper box for liquid coolers that use the standard Asetek mounting mechanism (a circular pump onto which the teeth of the bracket grab). AMD has published a full list of compatible coolers, but notably absent (aside from a few Noctua models) are air coolers. AMD strongly recommends using a liquid cooler for Threadripper with good reason: both the 1920X and the 1950X sport a hefty 180W TDP.

That's a lot of heat to disperse, even for a liquid cooler. It's also worth noting that the sheer size of Threadripper means none of the existing coolers fully cover the heat spreader. AMD claims that this isn't a huge problem, since Threadripper's CPU cores fall under the radius of the most liquid cooler cold plates. Without any coolers to test that do cover the whole Threadripper heat spreader, I can't put AMD's claims to the test (expect a swathe of them to appear after launch), but I can say I was pleasantly surprised by temperatures under load.

Using the (admittedly OP) 360mm liquid cooler AMD provided resulted in temperatures hitting highs of just 78 degrees Celsius, even when overclocked. Compared to the i9-7900X system I've been wrestling with the past week or so—which features a thick 280mm radiator—Threadripper is a far easier CPU to tame. Using solder to attach the heat spreader for more efficient heat transfer, as AMD does with Threadripper and Ryzen, works well. Here's hoping Intel revisits its decision to stop using solder in favour of less efficient thermal material for Skylake-X—it makes a big difference.

Do I really need all these cores?

While $1,000 CPUs and 16 cores aren't for everyone, there are plenty of use cases outside of enthusiast e-peen waving (which, to be clear, is a perfectly valid use case, too). Games rarely benefit from more cores—although, as the likes of Rise of the Tomb Raider show, that's changing—but heavily multithreaded applications do. These tend to be focused on content creation and production work, with video encoding, 3D rendering, and software compilation all benefiting from the addition of extra cores.

The key, as anyone that works in a production environment will tell you, is time. Shaving minutes off a single render might not seem like much in isolation, but multiplied over several workstations over the course of a year, days of working time can be recovered. There's also the so-called "megatasker," the person who wants to play a game and stream to Twitch at the same time without dropping frames, or who wants to dedicate most cores to a render, while saving a handful of them for playing a game.

Interestingly, AMD has added a new set of tools to its Ryzen Master software, which allows users to tweak performance based on whether they're playing a game or working with production applications. It offers two memory access modes: Distributed and Local. Distributed (the default setting) places the system into a Uniform Memory Access (UMA) configuration, which prioritises an even distribution of memory transactions in order to improve bandwidth. This, AMD says, is ideal for the vast majority of production workloads.

Local Mode places the system into a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) configuration, which prioritises access via the physical distance of the memory DIMM from the CPU core that is accessing it. The goal is to reduce latency, which AMD says affects games like Gears of War Ultimate and Fallout 4. I haven't yet had the chance to test the two modes in depth (the Ryzen Master software arrived very late in the day), but from some brief testing there doesn't seem to be a huge difference in performance between the two modes.

What does make a difference, however, is Legacy Compatibility Mode. This automatically reconfigures the 1950X as an 8C/16T CPU and the 1920X as a 6C/12T CPU in order to improve compatibility with games that fail to launch when more than 20 logical CPU cores are detected. These include the likes of Dirt Rally, and Far Cry Primal. AMD also claims that certain games, older ones for the most part, run better (to an average of four percent) when presented with less physical cores. These include Fallout 4, Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm, and Civilization VI.

In an ideal world, AMD's Ryzen Master software would automatically toggle these modes when an affected game is launched, but for the hardcore performance tweakers out there it's nice to have the option nonetheless.

Performance

THREADRIPPER TEST SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
CPU AMD Threadripper 1950X/1920X
RAM 32GB quad-channel G-Skill RGB @ 3200MHz
HDD 512GB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 PCI-e 3.0 SSD
MOTHERBOARD Asus ROG Zenith Extreme
POWER SUPPLY Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 11
COOLING Thermaltake Floe Ring RGB 360mm liquid cooler
To get a better idea of just how well certain tasks and real-world applications scale across multiple cores, we've added two new tests to the standard Ars CPU benchmarking suite. The first is Blenchmark, a rendering benchmark for Blender 3D, the free 3D pipeline—modelling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, and motion tracking application. The benchmark renders a 3D image of a BMW across as many CPU (or GPU) cores as you give it access to. Coupled with the POV-Ray benchmark we already run, this gives a good indication of how well Threadripper handles heavy production tasks.

The second new benchmark, courtesy of one Peter Bright, is a Chromium compile test. It measures how long the computer takes to build a single instance of Google's Chromium Web browser using Google's standard method, which uses GN and Ninja to perform the build. Naturally, there are certain flags and optimisations you can use to reduce the overall build time, but for the purposes of benchmarking the standard build highlights the potential performance benefits of scaling all the way up to 16 cores in real-world tasks.

Z270 TEST SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Core i7-7700K/7600K
RAM 16GB dual-channel G-Skill DDR4 @ 3,000MHz
HDD 512GB Samsung SM951 M.2 PCI-e 3.0 SSD
MOTHERBOARD ROG Strix Z270E
POWER SUPPLY Corsair HX1200i
COOLING Corsair H100 liquid cooler
Those two benchmarks, along with the standard suite of CPU tests and gaming tests, were run on stock 1950X and 1920X chips on the Asus Zenith Extreme motherboard, and on an overclocked 1950X. Like Ryzen, overclocking Threadripper isn't as sophisticated as it is on Intel's chips. While you can deep-dive into voltages, the actual overclock is limited to all cores. You can't, for example, overclock two of the better cores up to 4.2GHz, while keeping the rest at 4.0GHz like you can with an Intel chip. Because of that, the overall overclock remains similar to that of Ryzen, topping out at around 4.1GHz with a particularly good chip.

RYZEN TEST SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
CPU Ryzen 7/Ryzen 5
RAM 16GB dual-channel Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 @ 2933MHz
HDD 512GB Samsung 950 Pro M.2 PCI-e 3.0 SSD
MOTHERBOARD Crosshair VI Hero
POWER SUPPLY Corsair HX750i
COOLING EK-XLC Predator 240
I wasn't able to get 4.1GHz out of our Threadripper chip, instead settling for an all-core 3.9GHz overclock at 1.3v (AMD recommends a maximum of 1.35v). I suspect that, with more tweaking time, 3.95GHz or 3.9GHz at a lower voltage is possible. The latter is particularly important, since both power consumption and temperatures shoot up dramatically the more volts you pump in. At stock clocks, the average voltage for the 1950X under load is around 1.12v, resulting in a total system power draw (that includes a GTX 1080 Ti) from the wall of 451W running Asus' Rog Real Bench, and a CPU temperature of 64 degrees Celsius.

X99 TEST SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Core i7-6950X, 6900K, 5960X
RAM 32GB quad-channel Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 @ 3,000MHz
HDD 512GB Samsung SM951 M.2 PCI-e 3.0 SSD, 500GB Samsung Evo SSD
MOTHERBOARD ASUS X99 Deluxe USB 3.1
POWER SUPPLY Corsair HX1200i
COOLING Corsair H110i GT liquid cooler
Overclocked, the CPU temperature rises to 78 degrees Celsius, and power draw to 552W, the highest on test. Considering the 1950X is a 16C/32T chip, that's not bad going. Intel's i9-7900X, when overclocked to 4.6GHz, pulls 507W from the wall for its 10C/20T.

Alongside the 1950X and 1920X are benchmarking results for Intel's current top-of-the-line and identically priced i9-7900X, along with older generation HEDT CPUs like the 10C/20T i7-6950X and i7-5930K. For comparison purposes there are also results for AMD's best mainstream CPU, the 1800X, and Intel's i7-7700K (the latter remains the best gaming CPU around in most games, thanks to its impressive single-core performance and high clock speeds). If you're wondering just how much performance you gain switching from a mainstream CPU to a HEDT chip, these comparisons are ideal.

X299 TEST SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Core i9-7900K
RAM 32GB quad-channel Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR4 @ 3200MHz
HDD 512GB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 PCI-e 3.0 SSD
MOTHERBOARD Asus ROG Strix X299 Gaming-E
POWER SUPPLY Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 11
COOLING Coolermaster Master Liquid Pro 280mm

Production

The results, at least in production tasks, speak for themselves. In the Chromium build, the 1950X turns in the fastest time, shaving six minutes from the i9-7900X. Overclocking both chips improves the time, but the 1950X still comes out ahead with a build time of one hour, 24 minutes. Even the cheaper 12C/24T 1920X turns in a faster time than a stock i9-7900X. Compared to an i7-7700K, which took over three hours to complete the same build, the time savings are huge over the mainstream Intel chips.

In Blender, render times drop to 45 seconds from the i9-7900X's 53 seconds. While overclocking the i9-7900X does make up the difference, doing the same for the 1950X puts it back at the top of the chart. In POV-Ray, the gains are even more substantial, coming in 30 percent faster to complete a render than the i9-7900X. In Cinebench, everyone's favourite willy-waving benchmark, the 1950X completely smashes the i9-7900X both at stock speeds and overclocked. At 3.9GHz the 1950X breaks 3000—double that of an 1800X.

The 1950X and 1920X only really begin to struggle in the single-threaded benchmarks where Intel's superior IPC performance wins out. Surprisingly, that IPC performance is enough to push Intel ahead in the 3DMark TimeSpy test, which is able to tap into more CPU cores courtesy of DX12. These aren't deal-breakers by any means, particularly if your workloads revolve around making use of as many cores as possible. I did run into a couple of oddities in Geekbench, where Threadripper memory scores are all over the place, although this doesn't appear to affect any of the other benchmarks.

Gaming

Onto gaming, and just like Ryzen, it's not Threadripper's strongest suit. Whether that's due to a lack of optimisations on the part of developers (many games still prefer raw IPC and clock speed), or simply due to the Zen architecture, the absolute best gaming performance belongs to Intel. At 1080p, where the work is pushed towards the CPU not the graphics card, the 7900X and the 7700K produce the highest frame rates.

Gaming Benchmarks arranged DirectX11 ontop of DirectX12 for easy comparison when available

That said, the gap is smaller under Threadripper than it is with Ryzen. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, for example, the 1920X comes in just five percent slower than the i9-7900X and i7-7900K, at least under DX11. DX12 widens the gap again in Intel's favour, but none of the frame rates are bad, it just depends on your priorities. For super high-frame rate gaming on a 144Hz monitor, where 1080p remains dominant, Intel is the best choice.

For everything else, 1440p, 4K (where the limitation is the graphics card) and of course production work, Threadripper is the most compelling option. Arguably, if graphics cards improve enough over the next few years to make 4K gaming at high frame rates possible, there's a chance that Threadripper users could be left behind. Equally, games could be developed with many cores in mind and negate most of the difference.

Move over Intel, there's a new sheriff in town

So compelling is the overall Threadripper package that these small differences in gaming performance matter little. If you're an enthusiast who just wants the very best components, without feeling like you're being taken for a ride, Threadripper provides all the PCIe lanes, I/O, and benchmark-crushing performance you could ever want, at a price under half what the competition is charging. Indeed, for the same price as a single Core i9-7980XE, you can buy a 1950X Threadripper CPU, a monster motherboard, graphics card, RAM, and NVMe storage.

If you work in an industry where time is money, Threadripper is not only a great value (relatively speaking), but offers rendering performance that can beat the absolute best workstations from Intel. It even supports ECC memory, which Intel reserves for its pricey Xeon chips. If you're a sole content creator or a small business looking at moving from mainstream platforms to workstations, the time savings over the likes of Ryzen 7 1800X or the Core i7-7700K are significant, even with the cheaper 1920X.

With Ryzen, AMD made the eight core CPU mainstream. It made an increasingly complacent Intel, which had long neglected and exploited its most vocal fans, pay attention to the desktop market again. With Threadripper, AMD hasn't just added more cores compared to Intel, it has changed the entire direction of the HEDT market for the better. It has made breathtaking levels of performance more accessible than ever and won the hearts and minds of the PC market's most vocal of communities.

For the last decade, the last word in desktop performance has belonged to Intel. Now it belongs to AMD.

The good

Better performance than the equivalent Intel chip for the price
Fully featured platform across all chips
While liquid cooling is a must, Theadripper is easier to tame than Skylake-X
Huge improvements in production tasks over mainstream CPUs
Competitively priced

The bad

Overclocking remains limited
Needs a suitably robust cooling setup and power supply
Lags behind Intel in overall IPC performance

The ugly

That you're seriously considering spending $1,000/£1,000 on a CPU

 

[juanrga]

Moreover even in the subset of rendering they didn't use any rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray.

Here they do use V-ray. Looks like 1950X trounces the i9-7900X by 36%, even the inferior 1920X is faster than i9-7900X in "rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray"

The review must be wrong! 😀😀😀

I have cited those guys in the past. Unlike HU the coverage of workloads was very broad and, unlike HU, they also included workloads where the i9 wins

They also included overalls

Bonus: V-Ray benchmark from other review, with the i9 being faster than the 1950x

 

[juanrga]

Germany, a traditional pro-AMD place. I will leave you to guess why they are pro-AMD in that country.

Hint:

Spoiler

Ryzen is not produced in GloFo Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany. Fab 1 is capable of manufacturing wafers at 40nm, 28 nm BULK and 22 nm FDSOI. AMD (through glofo) production in Germany is past history, soon no AMD product will be produced there.

Ryzen is produced in Fab 8, Luther Forest Technology Campus, Saratoga County, New York, United States

AMD market share in March was only 27% and climbed to 56% in just 5 months, there is much more going on than just "traditionally pro-AMD"

I know where RyZen is diffused. It doesn't change the fact that traditionally AMD chips have been diffused in Germany (from classic Athlons to recentest A10s) and that Germany has been traditionally pro-AMD, which explains why WCCFTECH had to select sales in that country to make another sensationalist article.

Overall, AMD marketshare has increased by only 4% since Q4 2016, and the relatively weak sales of RyZen didn't help AMD to compensate for losses reported this year. Regarding gaming niche, AMD is loosing marketshare. AMD lose another 1.37% in August

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

 

[goldstone77]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Sorry I'm late to the party, and this is now an old review that came out on August 10th. I still think it's worth posting so here you go!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9JR_v-4BaQ&ab_channel=HardwareUnboxed"][/video]
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X & 1920X Review
By Steven Walton on August 10, 2017
"After much speculation and an official unveiling last week, it's finally time to see if Threadripper can bring competition to the high-end desktop segment while delivering the value and efficiency we've come to expect from other Ryzen processors.
Before we jump into the benchmarks, here's how we've set up the comparison. For this review, we'll be testing the new Threadripper 1950X and 1920X along with the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1800X, as well as Intel's competing Core i7-7800X, 7820X and Core i9-7900X.
Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which until now was leading AMD's pack, the Threadripper 1920X comes at a 75% price premium and offers 50% more cores. You also get quad-channel memory support and significantly more PCI Express lanes."
"While we're curious to see how Threadripper fares against AMD's more affordable lineup, I'm more interested in learning how they compare against Intel's Skylake-X parts, so you can expect an emphasis on those results.
The Skylake-X CPUs were installed on an Asrock Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard, while the Threadripper CPUs were tested on the Asrock X399 Taichi motherboard. Both platforms were fitted with G.Skill's TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14 64GB quad-channel memory kit. Big thanks go to G.Skill for providing all that memory."
"The X299 platform was installed on the Praxis Wetbench and was cooled using Thermaltake's Pacific RL360 custom liquid cooled kit. Meanwhile Threadripper was tested on a sheet of foam on my desk and was cooled by the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 AIO liquid cooler."

Overclocking Results
"As expected the Threadripper CPUs were able to hit 4 GHz but unfortunately like Ryzen 7 weren’t able to go beyond that point. Extreme voltages might see you hit 4.1 - 4.2 GHz like what we’ve seen with some Ryzen CPUs but for 24/7 usage 4 GHz looks to be the limit."

"Anyway at 4 GHz the 1950X spat out an incredible score of 3408 pts in Cinebench though due to the way XFR works this overclock actually slightly reduced the single thread performance. You could probably fine tune the overclock to avoid this but with time against us we didn’t play around with the overclocking too much."

"Overclocked the Blender render time for the 1950X was cut down by an impressive 11% while the 1920X time was reduced by 6%. This means even overclocked the Core i9-7900X wasn’t much faster than the 1920X and wasn’t able to match the stock 1950X in this application."

"Interestingly this time when testing with Corona the 1920X saw a massive 17% performance improvement when overclocked while the 1950X was just 7% faster. This meant both overclocked Threadripper parts were much faster than the overclocked 7900X."

"Back to the kind of margins seen in Blender we find that while the 1950X was 9% faster overclocked the 1920X was just 5% faster. This meant when testing with Premiere Pro CC the 1920X did trail the Core i9-7900X while the 1950X was quite a lot faster."

"Finally we have the overclocking power consumption figures and here Threadripper looks quite good, especially in relation to the Core i7-7900X. Whereas the Intel CPU pushed total system consumption to 388 watts, the 1950X hit 358 watts, an 8% reduction for what was often between 20 - 30% more performance."

UMA vs. NUMA
"As mentioned on the last page, you switch between memory access modes on Threadripper processors. 'Distributes' mode uses 'Uniform Memory Access' is enabled by default so this is what we've been testing with so far. However, you can switch to 'local' mode for 'Non-Uniform Memory Access' and this allows each of the Zeppelin dies to prioritize which cores access certain parts of the system memory. This basically prioritizes the nearest cores to improve overall latency for gaming applications that tend to place a premium on fast memory access. So let's see how this impacts gaming performance as well as a few productivity workloads..."

"Switching to NUMA has improved the Battlefield 1 performance and now Threadripper is delivering similar frame rates to the Ryzen 7 1800X. In fact, the 1950X creeps ahead ever so slightly and now is that much slower than the Core i7-7820X and Core i9-7900X."

"F1 2016 also sees decent gains when switching to NUMA though this time isn't able to match the Ryzen 7 1800X and this means it's also well down on the Intel CPUs."

"Performance in Civilization VI was already great and no extra performance was had when switching to NUMA."

"Looking at application performance, we see a slight performance decline with POVRay, but nothing serious."

"Blender also saw a slight decline in performance with the 1950X being about 4% slower using NUMA."

"Last up we have the Corona test, in which both NUMA and UMA offered the same performance. There's not much to see here, so let's move on to some consumption figures."

"In a nutshell, for the same price you get more CPU performance, lower power consumption and improved operating temperatures with Threadripper, so why would you buy the Core i9-7900X over the 1950X?
Intel recently announced the specs for its upcoming 12, 14, 16 and 18-core Skylake-X parts. At a guess, I would say consumers will need to spend at least $1,400 on the i9-7940X to match AMD's 1950X and I seriously doubt the 40% price premium will be worth it.
The X299 platform's lack of ECC memory support is another issue. Whereas Threadripper supports ECC, the Skylake-X chips don't and that means anyone serious about their workstation won't even consider Intel's high-end desktop platform. Unless Intel is willing to budge on pricing I can't see why anyone would invest in X299.

At the beginning of 2017, who would have thought we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the very top of the high-end desktop CPU segment. It certainly wasn't us, but we're glad we can look forward to some competition. It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast."
"Pros: The Threadripper 1920X offers more performance, uses less power and runs cooler than the Core i9-7900X. It also supports ECC memory (Intel's X299 platform doesn't). Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the 1920X touts quad-channel memory support and more PCIe lanes.
Cons: The $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is competitively priced but nonetheless comes at a hefty premium. Threadripper falls a tad behind when it comes to gaming."

I have three objections to that review.

(i) They tested different versions of the essentially the same kind of workload. They tested rendering with Corona, CineBench, Blender, POVRay... This is useless to get a overall picture of the performance of a chip. For instance TR 1950X is faster than i9-7900X in Blender, but the 1950X is slower in WinRAR. Moreover, they didn't check any rendering application where the TR 1950X is slower. The i9-7900X is faster in Mental Ray or V-Ray for instance.

(ii) They used overclock RAM on the TR chips, which automatically overclocks the IF interconnect. but they didn't overclock the mesh interconnect on the SKL-X chips.

(iii) Pricing is incorrect. They give the price of the i9 as $1150, but even AMD reports the i9 as a $999 chip.

Therefore the performance/price graphics they gave are twice biased. One because they only measure rendering performance on benchmarks favoring AMD, and another because increased pricing of Intel chips.

<i> I don't agree with your suggestions for inclusion or exclusion and neither did the reviewer, because these benchmarks shows real world performance for professionals who would and are buying these chips. Notice price drop on the notoriously not popular 7900X since the release of ThreadRipper.
<ii> Your complaint only shows the weakness of the mesh, and doesn't show real world applications for majority of the population that would just pop a memory dimm in have it work at it's registered speed which is the case here.
<iii> The review is almost a month old now. Amazon the 7900X is only $962.99. This price demonstrates the unpopularity of the entire skylake-x line in general. No professional wants to buy this chip, because of the numerous issues with this entire product line that caused outrage across the popular YouTubers! ThreadRipper still remains the better value!

(i) My remark was about real world performance. A complete review would have tested the chips on rendering, encoding, compiling, scientific computations, finance,... Instead the HU review was mostly rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering, rendering,... and games. Moreover even in the subset of rendering they didn't use any rendering application where the i9-7900X is faster than the TR 1950X like V-ray.
(ii) The mesh interconnect is fine. My complain is about how biased are some recent reviews like HU that compare overclock to stock. To be unbiased, we would compare stock to stock or overclock to overclock.
(iii) The i9-7900X did launch at $999. This is the price reported even in AMD slides. The HU review inflated the prices of Intel chips and their performance/price graphs are biased.

Amazon selling it now with a 3% discount, just disproves your claim about unpopularity. From what I can see the chip and others in the SKL-X are selling well, despite the huge bias shown in the professional press. I have checked several owner threads and people is very happy with their SKL-X chips. Even der8auer wrote something about this bias from the media:

From my point of view Skylake-X is a pretty impressive CPU. We now have have a 10-core that's a lot cheaper than the Broadwell-E before and it clocks a lot higher. Even with the stock Intel paste I was able to reach 4.8 GHz on the CPU (i9-7900X) using Corsair 280 (mm) AIO. So there is still some headroom, I guess if you use a custom new water cooling you might be able to hit 4.9 GHz on a very very good chip without delidding. So after this test I delidded the CPU and replaced the stock TIM with liquid metal and this helped me push the CPU with an AIO to 5 GHz.

So we had Broadwell-E before who could run like 4.3-4.4 GHz, it cost 1700€. Now we have Skylake-X which is a lot cheaper and we CAN push it to 5 GHz, so what's all this negative press about? I don't really understand it. So from my point of view this is a very impressive CPU, so we have very high single-thread performance on the 10-core and also high MT performance, which we didn't have before in a Broadwell-E (probably comparing to mainstream).

Der8auer used a Pre-tested Skylake-X i9 7900X using AIO! Most people can only get 4.4GHz-4.5GHz with custom liquid coolers! You must have forgot about De8auers "The X299 VRM Disaster" where he talks about X299 systems pulling so much power they could catch fire! Every YouTuber, Hardware Unboxed, and Tom's Hardware have all gave dismal reviews of the 7900X! You are not watching the entire video and using his statements without all the facts. I've went over this in great detail already on the X299 thread! Also, thermal throttling and VRM consuming over 400 watts of power added to the scandal! You really need to stop over hyping the 7900X, because it's notoriously unpopular, and your statements to the contrary defy history. Unless you are going to put up a real argument with verifiable numbers and links to back up your claims don't bother replying!

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7BqAjC4ZCc&ab_channel=der8auer"][/video]

There was very little interest in the X299 platform

Edit: Adding to context in rank of best selling
ThreadRipper 1950X 25/100 7800X 27/100 7900X 31/100 7820X 34/100 1900X 40/100 1920X 51/100
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Computer-CPU-Processors/zgbs/pc/229189#2
ThreadRipper 1950X 62/100 1920X 65/100 7820X 74/100 7900X 88/100 amazon UK best sellers list
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Processors/zgbs/computers/430515031#5

The average overclock for the 7900X is 4549MHz. This means some people is achieving lower overclock and others are achieving higher overclock; this is the proper definition of average. Der8auer chip got 6% higher overclock than the average.

Der8auer praised the i9 chip, I quoted him just above and then you now change the argument to motherboards. Yes, he criticized some mobos for having an incorrect desing. He demonstrated that some incorrectly desinged mobos have a fancy (useless) plate above the VRM region that works as a heat insulator and overheats the VRM, generating a problem. He demonstrated that solving the problem is so easy as retiring that fancy plate from the mobo and ensuring proper cooling goes to the VRM region. Some of his problems were also related to the PSU that he chose

https://www.techpowerup.com/234744/intel-x299-platform-called-a-vrm-disaster-by-overclocker-der8auer

Tomshardware also wrote something about motherboards. If I am not misguided Tomshardware wrote that some motherboards violate Intel specifications. Thus it is just a question of choosing the correct mobo now and/or awaiting for the manufactures with issues to release revisions of their early desings. Also initial reviews used launch BIOS with problems that affected performance and power consumption. Some sites retested with the new BIOS and measured lower power consumption.

As demonstrated in a fomer post, the Hardware Unboxed comparison of TR vs i9 was incomplete and biased. And their review of the 7800X was even worse. Probably this was the worse review ever published! First, they tested an engineering sample instead a retail chip. Second, they used a mobo incompatible with the chip and even managed to burn the chip. Third, they crippled the performance of the chip by using GPU-bound and frame-limited settings.

There are lots of very wrong reviews of SKL-X and lots of biased SKL-X vs TR reviews. Overclocked chips compared to Intel chips on stock settings. Cherry piccking benchmarks to favour thoughput. Measuring performance on non-AVX workloads but measuring power consumption in AVX worklaods, generating a bias in the efficiency tyowards AMD,... This is a huge scandal!

The interest in the X299 platform is reflected in the high number of mobos available and chip sales. Your own amazon.com best selling chip says that the i9-7900X is just behind the 1950X in sales, and selling much better than the 1920X. The i9-7900X is #34 whereas the 1920x is #56.


I am surprised by the chips selling so well despite the existence of so many biased reviews and people paid for posting negative comments on forums and stores. Check this paid review. This guy didn't write a review of the Intel chip, he wrote a rant to try to increase sales of AMD chips

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0745486S1/ref=s9_acsd_simh_hd_bw_bxcb_c_x_2_w?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-11&pf_rd_r=52F601VWB4WCG4A9G553&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1381e980-855e-537b-94df-b4f4d642d410&pf_rd_i=229189

You claim that SKL-X sales are

I agree with der8auer: "so what's all this negative press about? I don't really understand it."

You are attempting to rewrite history with your comments! It's not going to work!
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWFzWRoVNnE&ab_channel=LinusTechTips"][/video]
I have some things to say - Core i9 & X299
2,486,595 views 117K likes 1K dislikes

“I have been conspicuously silent. About Intel’s new high end desktop X299 platform, and the CPU’s to go along with it. And this was on purpose, but probably not for the reasons that you think. I’ve spent the last few days walking the show floor, chatting with industry folks, and generally trying to wrap my head around what the actual hell it is Intel is trying to do with this launch.”

He goes on into a rant about how much he doesn't like what Intel is doing! Other popular YouTuber's express the same issues with Skylake-X. You are the only one demonstrating bias when the overwhelming community is saying the opposite! Your excuses are weak at best when compared to the overwhelming outrage and disappointment expressed by the community as a whole!

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpoies2JcmI&ab_channel=der8auer"][/video]
der8auer
39,781 views likes 651 dislikes 116

You try to cherry pick a Intel loyalist, and use that to establish a false narrative out of historical context. It's extremely telling about you and your agenda. Which you clearly express in favor of Intel even when no favor exists!

 

[juanrga]

i9 consuming less power than the TR 1950X. Even OC to 4.6GHz it is consuming less power than 3.9GHz TR. Still the i9 is accused of consuming huge amounts of power and putting houses on fire. LOL