
AMD 16-Core ThreadRipper Enthusiast CPUs to Reportedly Utilize 4094 Pin Socket - rbanffy
http://hothardware.com/news/amd-16-core-threadripper-cpus-to-utilize-4094-pin-socket
======
ricw
Finally it looks like the desktop CPU market could become interesting and
competitive again. Intel being pushed to release a new top of the line core i9
processor?! I cannot remember anything like this since the amd64 days more
than 10 years ago.

Would love to play with one of these setups..

~~~
013a
The i9 isn't new. Its a rebranded Skylake-X/KabyLake-X chip. This has been on
their roadmap for over a year [1]; they just changed the name to trick
consumers into thinking its something new.

The hype between here and reddit about i9 is astounding to me. You've been
able to get an i7 in a 10 core variant for a year now [2]. Need 6 cores? Take
a time machine back to Q3'11 and pick up an i7 3930k [3]. And if you needed
twelve cores, you could buy Xeon [4]! Heck, go crazy, get 22 [5]!

The only difference is likely price; hopefully the i9 is cheaper.

Fundamentally, why you should not be excited about these things: They'll use
the enthusiast motherboard socket/chipset, not the consumer socket. And
they'll have a 140W TDP, whereas Ryzen has 95W max. These two things are what
makes Ryzen so amazing. If you ignore these two things, then you might as well
by Xeon; Intel has lead in that category for years and continues to.

[1] [http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-x-kaby-lake-
x-q2-2017-road...](http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-x-kaby-lake-
x-q2-2017-roadmap-leak/)

[2] [http://ark.intel.com/products/94456/Intel-
Core-i7-6950X-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/94456/Intel-
Core-i7-6950X-Processor-Extreme-Edition-25M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz)

[3] [http://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Intel-
Core-i7-3930K-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Intel-
Core-i7-3930K-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz)

[4] [http://ark.intel.com/products/91767/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-...](http://ark.intel.com/products/91767/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-2650-v4-30M-Cache-2_20-GHz)

[5] [http://ark.intel.com/products/93805/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-...](http://ark.intel.com/products/93805/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-E5-4669-v4-55M-Cache-2_20-GHz)

~~~
izacus
The problem is of course the fact that 6+ i7 chips don't actually fit the
consumer motherboards, but you need to go to the server segment where MBs are
significantly more expensive and lack a whole slew of additional features nice
for desktop machines.

~~~
valarauca1
>server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive

False-ish

Single socket server boards are on par with home motherboards. They only
become expensive when you start wanting 2+ NIC's and A LOT of sockets. But
then yes your feature thing is mostly true.

> and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines.

False-ish

Intel's server socket (for non E7's) is 2011v3 which is also their enthusiast
socket. I dropped a XEON E5v4 2030 into a 2011v3 ""ethusiast board"" and it
worked without a problem.

Sure my enthusiast board doesn't support ECC RAM, and I can't over clock a
XEON. But a 2011v3 board in and of itself is only ~50-60 more then an EXTREME
low end <$100 stock standard home user motherboard.

You get what you pay for if you want a dirt cheap board to drop a server class
CPU into you can find it.

~~~
paulmd
You don't need to go to a server board for ECC - a lot of the X99 boards
actually do support it. Not all of them (EVGA doesn't, a lot of Gigabyte
boards don't) but a lot do (Asrock usually does).

And you can find motherboards in pretty much any price range except the barest
of dirt cheap. There are motherboards like the GA-X99-SLI that regularly hit
$125 or lower. Cheapest thing on Newegg right now is a $150 Asrock board that
supports ECC.

The only price range that you "can't get" for X99 is the under-$100 price
range, i.e. the super-shitty low-end chipsets. And you actually can get it if
you are willing to take an open-box item. I paid $60 after tax for my last X99
board.

Also realize that most of the people who are bitching up a storm about X99's
$150 motherboards likely turned around and paid $250 for an X370 board when
Ryzen launched. I mean, you gotta get one of the nice ones with the external
clockgen so you can get your $300 Samsung B-die memory kit to run stable,
right? (but that's totally different! /s)

~~~
sireat
Problem is that you cannot have both via current (from 2011+ on) Intel route:
high clock speed on the CPU(achieved by OC) AND ECC.

You want ECC you have to get Xeons.

You want OC you have to get regular mainstream K chips or enthusiast -E chips
without ECC support.

I think the last chipset which let you OC Xeons and still use ECC was X58 on
1366 socket.

Disclaimer: I am not counting tiny BCLK OC available on Xeons.

~~~
valarauca1
Because ECC and OC are targeted at different audiences. If you want both...
you don't understand one or the other.

ECC is to guarantee system stability. Solving rare event that become regular
once you have hundreds of boxes running.

OC INCREASES system instability. You put more power into a chip, increasing
the probability of incorrect or malformed answers.

Now both these scenarios are rare, especially for single box home enthusiasts.
Generally if you have a stable OC you won't hit garbled instruction results.
Likewise you may almost never have an error that ECC would present.

\---

Having OC and ECC basically says, "I want to solve one extremely rare error
while opening myself up to another!" This is an idiotically unsound decision.

~~~
Dylan16807
ECC can help you ensure that your OC is still stable. And these chips are
optimized for power use in servers. There is often a lot of room for stable
overclocking.

You're also not guaranteed perfect operation inside the CPU without an
overclock, so if it's idiotic to combine OC and ECC, it's idiotic to use ECC
at all.

------
mariusmg
ThreadRipper is the perfect name for a 16cores/32 threads CPU

------
m-j-fox
I wonder why it needs so many pins? It only has 4 DDR channels, which is going
to be a bottleneck keeping those cores fed. 8 channels would be more
appropriate for 16 cores and it would explain why so many pins.

~~~
maksimum
The Naples chips also have 4094 pins and do have 8 channels as well as support
for 2+ CPUs per board. Maybe these Threadripper chips are Naples chips where
memory controllers or interprocessor communication controllers failed QA?

~~~
gsnedders
> Maybe these Threadripper chips are Naples chips where memory controllers or
> interprocessor communication controllers failed QA?

I'd be highly surprised if they were anything else.

------
bitL
Can't wait! Postponed my Ryzen purchase as rumors started to surface about
June launch of 16c version - this could allow running 4x GTX 1080 for ML and
provide significant boost for movie rendering.

~~~
BuckRogers
I don't blame you, I was going to hold off, then realized since I'm all mITX
from here on out that I'd just build now. None of this stuff is going to be
65W TDP (at least the 8-core or more parts) so the 1700 will continue to make
a lot of sense for those moving to mini-ITX.

~~~
astrodust
These are going to be 150W+ for sure, heat be damned when you need
performance.

------
tscs37
AMD was sooo close to having a perfect 4096 socket. SO CLOSE!

But, alas, it was not meant to be.

~~~
ant6n
Missing corner pins means you won't accidentally insert it the wrong way.

~~~
tscs37
What about a socket that is like USB-C, there is no wrong way to insert it.

Though I imagine such a socket would be an insane task to complete and have
numerous problems with latency and speed.

~~~
SmellTheGlove
Engineering a socket like that has to be a low priority. It's not as though
people are reseating their CPUs every day, and generally speaking, the people
that do it can handle aligning it properly.

~~~
solotronics
I helped a friend build a computer back in school and when he got the parts in
the mail he hurriedly started building (against my advice to wait until I got
there) he put the CPU in the wrong way and bent some of the pins. So it does
happen more than you would think.

~~~
SmellTheGlove
I'm not even mad. It's hard to jam them in the wrong way nowadays! What socket
was this?

------
simcop2387
Well damn this looks like it might be in the right spot for what I'm after.
It'll depend on price-point to be exact but I've got a semi-server semi-gaming
setup that I want to upgrade from an older i5 and have been waiting to see
Naples and early adopter stuff get hammered out. 16 cores is a great spot for
me to give a few to a gaming VM, while still being able to have plenty left
over for running build/smoke VMs and other random projects like testing
syzkaller to check that I'm not doing something inherently stupid with a
sandbox I work on. Can't wait to see more about this.

~~~
hmottestad
For Intel's Xeon processors, the more cores you have the lower the frequency
you get. Quad core might give you an extra gigahertz, which might be of more
value to games than 12+ cores.

~~~
NaliSauce
True for old games, but for them the single core performance is enough (except
maybe supreme commander with 5'000 units on the field). Looking forward with
DX12 and Vulcan more cores seems to be more future proof.

Plus shouldn't XFR (or Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 Frequency for Intel)
somewhat alleviate that particular issue?

------
jacquesm
AMD is a great company and I wish them every bit of success and luck with this
but I can't help but thinking that fighting two formidable competitors on
their home turf (Intel and NVIDIA) is a bit much. Just one of those would be a
battle.

------
gigatexal
It's like cheapish g34 quad setups all over again. Looking forward to
benchmarks.

------
phkahler
Who would they be marketing such a thing to? 8-core Ryzen seems like enough
for most people and any more cores will probably have to be down-clocked for
thermal reasons.

I thought for the high end they'd go to something like the EHP concept from a
couple years ago - put a CPU, GPU, and HBM2 all on a single substrate and
market that thing. Call it BraZen because it would be. Give me that in the
case from their project quantum...

~~~
paulmd
Workstation users. CAD, raytracing, and video editing people need as much CPU
horsepower as they can get, and quad-channel RAM is pretty nice too.

("preview" rendering is done with GPU acceleration - but final encodes are
still done on CPU for quality reasons)

Small-business servers, databases, that kind of stuff too.

We'll see where they go with this - but I would caution enthusiasts to tamp
down their expectations a little bit because this is not necessarily going to
be an ideal product for gaming. I would not be surprised to see lower clocks
to keep TDP under control, and some fairly high price tags to go along with
these chips.

I'm imagining this as being more of a competitor to the high-end Xeons, with
3.5 GHz boost clocks and 3 GHz base clocks and a $2000 price tag. It would
still be a screaming great deal at that price.

In comparison Intel wants $1700+ for most of the high-core-count Xeons, and
you're getting fewer cores and lower clocks.

~~~
phkahler
I hear you. I'm a raytracing guy and I look forward to Ryzen and would love to
try Naples. But this intermediate thing sounds like a 3rd platform squarely
between those. It even has 16 cores rather than 8 or 32, so if the core count
doubled or halved it would be very much be competing with one of the other
market segments processor.

~~~
bitL
It seems 16c will be clocked at 3.1-3.6GHz, whereas Naples significantly lower
(which is OK for servers). I'd go with 16c for sure for movie rendering (ehm,
if only ReelSteady could do a multicore image stabilization rendering...?)

------
et2o
How much of a performance hit would be expected for single threaded
performance with the new 16-core processors?

~~~
sp332
Top-end Ryzen chips have a TDP of 95W. (Edit: AM4 socket is rated at >140W
TDP.) The new sockets are designed for 180W and up, so they will probably run
at the same clock frequencies. That means no hit for single-thread
performance.

~~~
jplayer01
180W!? That thing is a monster.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Cores come at a power cost. This is why Intel has been hesitant to move to
consumer 8 or 16 core CPUs. There's a lot of pushback on using this much power
and serious environmental concerns. Intel's engineering has been focused on
power savings, so they've actually been going the opposite way for years now
on the consumer end.

This is also why you won't been seeing these 16c chips on non-specialist Dells
and HPs. They'll be high-end workstations and servers only. Joe Consumer or
Joe Officeworker doesn't need 16 cores.

6-8c comes in at a more modest power profile, so we'll probably see the
industry standardize on 6-8c for a while. I think Intel is now forced to move
toward 6-8c now, which may be questionable move for most consumer loads, but
if everyone stays under 100w for consumer CPUs I think it'll be okay. I don't
want the performance race to be driven by AMD's ideas that burning 200+w for a
CPU is reasonable. Outside of specialist applications, its not.

~~~
mtgx
The main reason they've been doing that is because it's been much easier to
lower power consumption per core than increase performance per core. This way
they could still claim "significant improvements" year over year.

It's also a way better strategy to make "better server chips", because it
means you can add more cores.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
That's assuming there's no trivial single-core advancements possible at this
fab size, which there might not be. The run up to Ryzen had a lot of AMD types
cheering about "lazy" intel getting beat but Ryzen's per core performance is
on par with a 2600k from 2011 and is consistently edged out by a 7700k at the
same, or below, pricing.

Also Intel's gains have been modest, but very real outside of power savings.
CPU passmark benchmark:

2600k (2011) : 8484

7700k (2016): 12196

Both are 4 cores so its a one-to-one comparison. A ~30% increase per core is
pretty impressive this late in the Moore's law game. If it wasn't then we'd
see Ryzen doing much better per core, but its not. My workloads cannot make
effective use of 8 cores so its academic that I can buy a 8c chip now. It
would literally be downgrade from my intel for me.

------
nanistheonlyist
I break out in cold sweat when I think about routing a 4094 pin socket. How
does anyone layout a motherboard for this in a reasonable time frame?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Presumably there must be a lot of computer assistance?

~~~
skummetmaelk
Not really, autorouting is generally extremely bad. Especially for
applications with such high performance criteria. On the plus side the work
only has to be done once since later motherboards are mostly just iterations
on a previous design.

~~~
cdawzrd
The latest high-end PCB tools actually provide useful autorouting features,
because they have figured out that if you combine human ability to solve the
difficult pattern-recognition and planning problems, you can have a computer
solve the details.

For example, Xpedition's sketch routing feature:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIi13gI9xEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIi13gI9xEA)

Routing 4094 signals sounds daunting, but it is a bit less daunting when you
realize that a good fraction of them are power/ground (and route directly to
planes), and the rest of them are mostly logically organized into buses/groups
that can be routed together.

~~~
astrodust
Yeah, a good portion of those pins will be wired directly to the power
regulator components that are next to the socket, and a good chunk more break
out neatly into channels for memory and PCI-e.

Seems like it's almost boring these days since everything's encapsulated in a
layer of abstraction. A lot of the more complicated wiring is in breaking out
PCI-e channels into things like ethernet, audio, and other miscellaneous ports
that involve good chunks of analog circuitry.

------
GlobalServices
I would have put two more pins and made it an integer power of two. And it
would have looked nice on the bottom! (64 x 64)

~~~
daxorid
They usually take a pin or two out from square-matrix pinouts to create
sufficient asymmetry to prevent you from inserting the chip rotated 90
degrees.

