AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X

[scaryjim]

Absolutely CAT, it's very use-case specific.

For example, one of my side projects involves a lot of audio processing, for eventual output to a single large MP3 file. That final encoding stage - due to the inherent problems parallelising MP3 encoding - is massively single-thread dependent.

In fact, audio processing is pretty much the classic single-thread use case, and even then it does depend on whether your workflow can take advantage of bulk processing or not. But - just to go back to the original point I was making - it's wrong to say that single thread is "on the way out" - there will always be tasks for which it is important, and workflows for which it's the deciding factor.

One thing I can't argue with on Ryzen is that at most price points it's now close enough to Intel in single threaded performance that it's not really a major deciding factor. But that's only because AMD have got their single-threaded game together - not because single threaded performance has stopped being important.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Absolutely CAT, it's very use-case specific.

For example, one of my side projects involves a lot of audio processing, for eventual output to a single large MP3 file. That final encoding stage - due to the inherent problems parallelising MP3 encoding - is massively single-thread dependent.

In fact, audio processing is pretty much the classic single-thread use case, and even then it does depend on whether your workflow can take advantage of bulk processing or not. But - just to go back to the original point I was making - it's wrong to say that single thread is "on the way out" - there will always be tasks for which it is important, and workflows for which it's the deciding factor.

One thing I can't argue with on Ryzen is that at most price points it's now close enough to Intel in single threaded performance that it's not really a major deciding factor. But that's only because AMD have got their single-threaded game together - not because single threaded performance has stopped being important.

I don't think ignoring single threaded performance is what I meant,but if its not massively lower,then having significantly more threads is going to help AMD when it comes to productivity. The other issue for Intel is SKLX is based on a known core,so AMD has far more leeway to start getting optimisations to improve performance.

Plus once you get to the higher core count Intel CPUs,ie,the 12 cores ones,they are using enormous server chips,and AMD using smaller easier to make chips,is going to help them.

A consideration also is that I would argue most workstations run at stock clockspeeds and won't delidded and overclocked,so the fact that Intel can overclock more won't really figure into things.

I mean look at the Hardware.fr review for example:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/967-...w-w64-gcc.html

Look at even the Lightroom and DXO Optics results which are image processing.

Edit!!

But look at the LR results - there is apparently some improvement in the Ryzen scores over launch,since the consumer CPUs now match the Core i7 7700K,but they are all around the same performance. That hints at it not really scaling well to more cores.

However,TR seems to have massive improved scores,so that extra bandwidth is no doubt helping here.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Just wow:

https://youtu.be/bmRQmr_G3ew?t=1145

It shows you for content creators it is a very powerful CPU - Adored was playing WoW,recording WoW and then processing a previous recorded video at the same time.

Edit!!

BTW,8Pack on OcUK has said that TR has a +27C offset.

The offset is 27c confirmed by Rog engineers.

I also confirmed similar with temp probes on cpu and cooler base.

[QuorTek]

Dunno singlethread is possibly on the way out anyway ad developers now has a new aim to go towards for better multi threaded performance overall.

That's not strictly true - there will always be algorithms that simply can't be parallelised, and sometimes over-agressive threading can make code run slower (something I've fallen foul of myself a few times ). But developers are getting better at working out what works in parallel, and there are a lot of optimisation tools now that will do some of the work for you. But it's worth remembering that, for certain tasks, individual thread performance will still be key.

True but you got to admit that AMD in this case is giving everyone a huge gift that does not have to make you to go bankrupt entirely... and I have to admit that intel has been price gauging for anything from 6 cores and up badly... I hope we get an actual core war + performance would be good for the customers as well as what can be done with all those new nice shiny things.

[nobodyspecial]

Please retest games at 1080p where most of us play. Testing a res with less than 10% of the market (being generous, more like 5% or less) is probably not the best way to show us how WE will experience the perf of these chips. Did AMD tell you guys to do this res (JK)? I remember them telling people 'you're not testing it right' in the ryzen tests...LOL. Umm, it's not our problem we're not running where you'd like us to YET.

Benchmark where people actually ARE, not where you hope we'll be in a few years (maybe). I care far more about the work or fun I can have TODAY, than some magical time in the future that aligns with your product's skill-set.

[DDY]

Please retest games at 1080p where most of us play. Testing a res with less than 10% of the market (being generous, more like 5% or less) is probably not the best way to show us how WE will experience the perf of these chips. Did AMD tell you guys to do this res (JK)? I remember them telling people 'you're not testing it right' in the ryzen tests...LOL. Umm, it's not our problem we're not running where you'd like us to YET.

Benchmark where people actually ARE, not where you hope we'll be in a few years (maybe). I care far more about the work or fun I can have TODAY, than some magical time in the future that aligns with your product's skill-set.

I think those minded to buy a £800 CPU and a £350 motherboard to play games won't be playing them at 1080P.

However, I would like to see 1080P tests where the factor of GPU bottlenecking is minimised, which in principal should better demonstrate CPU performance.

[lumireleon]

The 10 core Intel is drawing same electricity as the TR 12 core in video encoding, what is happening here? Is Ryzen more efficient than Intel chips?

[lumireleon]

Please for ya tech geniuses ..........I can see the copy and write memory bandwidth of Ryzen Chips beat most intel chips but have high latency, how can latency hurt performance yet memory copy/write is way fast? This is the same issue we had with GDDR5 that it has higher latency than DDR4 and some people were complaining SONY PS4 would have memory performance issues before it was launched.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Who the heck would be buying a £1000 16 core exclusively for gaming especially at 1080p?

News flash - it's going to be the same as Ryzen 7 and a Coffeelake 6C/12T CPU is also going to beat all the SKL-X CPUs.

I am seriously going to argue about your sanity if people are buying this for gaming - megatasking and content creation yes,but exclusively for gaming,LOL.

[Corky34]

Please retest games at 1080p where most of us play. Testing a res with less than 10% of the market (being generous, more like 5% or less) is probably not the best way to show us how WE will experience the perf of these chips. Did AMD tell you guys to do this res (JK)? I remember them telling people 'you're not testing it right' in the ryzen tests...LOL. Umm, it's not our problem we're not running where you'd like us to YET.

Benchmark where people actually ARE, not where you hope we'll be in a few years (maybe). I care far more about the work or fun I can have TODAY, than some magical time in the future that aligns with your product's skill-set.

If all you want TR for is playing games then it's not the CPU for you.

[rainman]

Switch modes, disabling cores (remember? the actual reason you bought this CPU for in the first place) and not having a CPU which you plug in and just works - total deal breaker.

[kalniel]

Is it disabling cores, or just turning off SMT? There seems to be conflicting information in the reviews.

[Corky34]

Please for ya tech geniuses ..........I can see the copy and write memory bandwidth of Ryzen Chips beat most intel chips but have high latency, how can latency hurt performance yet memory copy/write is way fast? This is the same issue we had with GDDR5 that it has higher latency than DDR4 and some people were complaining SONY PS4 would have memory performance issues before it was launched.

Someone will hopefully correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK latency is how quickly a request for data is served whereas bandwidth is how much you can read/write, in the case of TR and i would assume Intel's yet to be released high core count CPUs higher latency hurts performance because a process running on a particular core may have to wait for a data request to come back to it.

Switch modes, disabling cores (remember? the actual reason you bought this CPU for in the first place) and not having a CPU which you plug in and just works - total deal breaker.

As has been mentioned gaming is not TR's intended market, that's not to say someone can't play games on it if they wish and AMD have given customers the ability to disable cores for that very reason, typically TR is roughly 30% faster in heavily threaded workloads but that comes at a cost of being roughly 5-10% slower in games.

Is it disabling cores, or just turning off SMT? There seems to be conflicting information in the reviews.

AFAIK it's disabling cores to reduce inter-core latency however you can also disable SMT if your intention is just to stop games that have problems with many cores from crashing, although IDK why you'd want to do that as the inter-core latency would still be there.

[scaryjim]

Switch modes, disabling cores (remember? the actual reason you bought this CPU for in the first place) and not having a CPU which you plug in and just works - total deal breaker.

It does "just work" - look at the gaming results in the review . It's not AMD's fault that some game engines throw their toys out of the pram when they meet a > 20-thread CPU, is it.

It's optimised for different types of workloads. As CAT and Corky both say above, you don't buy TR for an exclusively gaming machine. But the fact that you're going to lose a few percent of gaming performance really shouldn't matter if you're buying a 16C/32T CPU for content creation...

[Tarinder]

I did actually run 1080p numbers against a Core i9-7900X but chose not to include them because, as many have said, who would play at that resolution on such a setup.

However, if you want to see them, see the following:

[scaryjim]

I did actually run 1080p numbers against a Core i9-7900X ...

Above and beyond as usual Tarinder

Is that really the 1080p chart? Because comparing it with the Game Mode chart earlier in the review



It gives the TR the same result at 1080p and 1440p? And suggests that with Game Mode enabled TR would easily outpace the 7900X at 1080? Impressive...