
The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores - srinikoganti
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13123/amd-threadripper-2-teaser-pre-orders-start-today-up-to-32-cores
======
zanny
At the end of the day we still have the third party me_cleaner to disable the
proprietary secret coprocessor on Intel chips while AMD chips still have their
equivalent PSP With no first or third party means to disable it.

Until such a time I can get the equivalent tool to stop the hardware spyware
built into the CPU I can have no enthusiasm or motivation to buy AMD chips.
Not to say I _want_ to buy Intel parts - they have nothing to do with third
party efforts to nullify their backdoor - but if I were buying a chip tomorrow
it would be a begrudging Intel purchase just for me_cleaner.

~~~
Laaas
You can disable PSP on some motherboards AFAIK. My motherboard has an option
that at least seems like it disables PSP.

~~~
brobinson
My MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard had an option to disable the PSP,
but it was removed in the latest bios update. The latest one has an option to
turn on SVM (Secure Virtual Machine, needed for virtualization). I can either
run VMs _or_ have PSP disabled...

~~~
daeken
Enabling virtualization is pretty simple, someone could probably write a
little EFI app to do it and chainload from there.

------
InTheArena
Given Intel's struggles around their process shrink, AMD may have come up with
the perfect product at the perfect time. You can already see their effect with
Intel finally adding more cores to their chips to try and stay competitive.

I do think that Intel will manage to get silicon out a bit earlier then their
current end of CY19, but if they don't, TR and Ryzen may be the default go-to
for manufacturers.

~~~
florakel
It is time to give AMD a chance. Intel is plagued by problems with the 10nm
process technology resulting in no significant innovation on their CPUs'
performance or power consumption for over two years now. And just recently
they pushed their 10nm products even further back to the second half of 2019.
AMD might have the first 7nm CPUs out by then. Of course process technologies
are not easily comparable between fabs but it is still crazy to see Intel
starting to fall behind in process technology - a game they dominated for
decades.

~~~
mbell
> It is time to give AMD a chance. Intel is plagued by problems with the 10nm
> process technology resulting in no significant innovation on their CPUs'
> performance or power consumption for over two years now.

The difference between 14nm and 14nm+++ is pretty close to a full node step...

> And just recently they pushed their 10nm products even further back to the
> second half of 2019. AMD might have the first 7nm CPUs out by then. Of
> course process technologies are not easily comparable between fabs but it is
> still crazy to see Intel starting to fall behind in process technology - a
> game they dominated for decades.

The numbers used for process 'sizes' don't really hold any meaning anymore and
can't be directly compared. Intel's 14nm is 'better' in almost every metric
than other fabs 10nm process. Intel's 10nm process is expected to be similarly
comparable to other fabs 7nm.

Intel isn't really behind on process tech, but the competition has closed the
gap considerably.

~~~
deaddodo
> Intel's 10nm process is expected to be similarly comparable to other fabs
> 7nm

No, Intel's 10nm is worse than TSMC's 7nm in every metric. Not significantly
so, but it is so.

It also seems to be viable whereas Intel's hasn't been proven yet (the only
released product is a mobile chip with the iGPU disabled due to defects and
low yields).

------
jchw
I'm very excited for AMD and their market successes lately. I never wanted a
world controlled by Intel, and even if all my computers are Intel at the
moment I feel the world benefits from this competition.

That being said... Processor pre-orders? I had No idea that was a thing. Hope
you get a QA discount. It doesn't talk about sockets but for sake of
preorderers I hope it's compatible with original threadripper boards. edit:
Actually it does, and they mention it's compatible with existing main boards
too. I missed that this was multiple pages.

~~~
AboutTheWhisles
What is strange about pre-ordering hardware that might initially be in short
supply?

Pre-orders don't make sense in the case of downloadable games, where there is
no scarcity.

~~~
wmf
Pre-ordering a product that hasn't been reviewed and benchmarked means you
could get something much worse than you expect. For example, there may be apps
that can't take advantage of 32 cores so you could spend $1,800 to get no
benefit.

~~~
some_account
Not to mention that with so many cores, if they want to read and write to
disk, the disk is going to be a huge bottleneck.

------
whatever1
Bloody hell, this processor has more cores than the dual socket Xeon HPCs that
my lab bought 2 years ago. Amazing. Honest question: Isn't the memory
throughput an issue when you try to feed 32 hungry processors?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Threadripper uses quad-channel DDR4-2666 memory. That gets you 80 GB/s memory
bandwidth, which is possible because the processor sits in an enormous
4094-pin TR4 socket. Your Xeons were probably in 2011 pin sockets with
DDR3-1866 resulting in 70 GB/s memory bandwidth. One Threadripper has more
than double the pin count and slightly more total memory bandwidth than your
dual Xeon machine.

Also, your the Intel setup has a 25 GB/s QPI bus between the processors.
Threadripper runs an Infinity Fabric bus, with 42 GB/s between each die
internally (aggregate 170 GB/s). While a couple of those internal dies are not
directly connected to the memory, you should have little trouble sharing meals
among those hungry processors.

~~~
aeleos
Actually with this release threadripper 2 will support DDR4-2933 which should
increase the memory bandwith and the throughput of the infinity fabric if I'm
not mistaken (I am pretty sure infinity fabric runs at the ram speed)

~~~
dragontamer
Most people overclock RAM using XMP settings and hit 3200 MT/s easily (which
also overclocks the infinity fabric).

I've seen some people hit 3466MT/s on higher-end more expensive RAM on AMD's
12nm stuffs (Ryzen 2). So that's probably the practical limit.

3200 MT/s on Hynix dies is probably a reasonable expectation.

------
vbezhenar
While I can see Intel's leadership in single-core performance with 6 cores
(overclocked 8700K can have 5+ GHz and future flagships probably will be even
faster with 8 cores), at high-core workstation AMD is a winner, hands down.
Competition is good.

~~~
dev_dull
AMD has always had great OC performance but my impression is that they have
been power hogs. Is that incorrect or has it changed?

~~~
iforgotpassword
They had their ups and downs. The athlon 64 was a masterpiece in both
performance and power consumption, in part because they made power management
an integral part of the platform not just for laptops. At the time it was
released Intel was busy pushing the pentium 4 to its limits, making it a great
replacement for central heating during winter.

Then Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture and while
bulldozer (iirc) improved in that regard again Intel was still ahead,
especially as bulldozer sucked pretty much in every other regard. Ryzen seems
to be about on par with current Intel CPUs (performance per watt), depending
on benchmark.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture

Funny thing is that Core, AFAIK, came from a separate laptop chip branch. For
64 bits Intel was betting on Itanium, which crashed and burned like iAPX-432
did before. And so Intel once again was forced to stay on the 8080 treadmill
...

~~~
harias
Threadripper was born out of side-projects too.

"They worked on it in their spare time and it was really a passion project for
about a year before they sought the green light from management, which is
quite unusual – it was something they really cared about."

------
hsivonen
Does this generation still lack the kind of performance counters that are
needed for rr?

------
ramshanker
Go AMD Go.

Ryzen is default choice now for me and my brother. This pushes even more
people toward DEFAULT RED.

------
mizzack
Roughly linear pricing per core? What is this wizardry?

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> Roughly linear pricing per core? What is this wizardry?

It's called "marketing", and it's definitely _not_ limited by the laws of
physics as we know them.

You too can learn the ways of marketing, but it comes at a very steep price:
your eternal soul. (JK, that's sales.)

~~~
montalbano
I think the modularity of the manufacturing process helps too.

~~~
geezerjay
Modularity helps cutting production costs, but that's just a lower bound.
Prices are set based on marketing strategies and on how much the company is
able to get for a product.

~~~
snovv_crash
With a monolithic die that lower bound is not linear though: the bigger the
die, the higher a chance of defects and the rarer the parts that don't need to
have sections fused off.

With a modular design the lower bound is, indeed, linear, allowing AMD to
severely undercut Intel.

------
h4b4n3r0
That pricing is actually more reasonable than I was expecting. I might get
myself a 32 core quad GPU workstation. Unthinkable even just a year ago.

~~~
Iwan-Zotow
Good god! Why on earth you need 32 core quad GPU workstation?

~~~
dagmx
Rendering scales fairly linearly with hardware. If I'm rendering with Arnold
for example, it can saturate all my cores pretty well and gives back an almost
linear rendering time reduction.

Same with GPU systems like redshift, alternatively I can dedicate half the
machine to rendering and the other half to continued work.

~~~
gt_
Does 16+ threads actually contribute to render times with Redshift?

I know

Unless you’re using Houdini, I think you’ll get the same result using Redshift
with 16 threads. Houdini is the only DCC that uses more than one thread to
prep the scen

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Curious that there's quad-channel DDR4. AMD's similar Epyc processors that
have four chips on the module are octal-channel (because there's a dual-
channel controller on each chip). Won't these therefore perform worse than
they should?

~~~
Symmetry
Ultimately they're limited by the number of pins that the socket they use has,
even if the silicon could support more channels. They want to be able to
maintain socket compatibility and they want to have some SKUs with just 2
working dies so 4 channels it remains.

------
bhouston
This is great. Paying twice as much for a processor with twice as many cores
makes a lot of sense in this case. I'm glad it wasn't more.

I've got my costs down for a TR machine and it comes in at around $4K CAD.

------
harias
An image says x series is for gamers. Are modern games that CPU intensive?
Don't most major game engines depend almost entirely upon the GPU?

~~~
josteink
IME gamers are those who most likely are willing to shell out noticeably more
money for something which they perceive _may potentially_ improve their game
performance.

Statistically I’m pretty sure most of them aren’t too scientific about their
assumptions.

Hence the huge market for lots of HW which no normal person would buy,
explicitly targeted at gamers.

TLDR: reality doesn’t matter as long as the x CPUs are faster :)

~~~
ionised
Gamers don't buy new CPUs hoping they _might_ be faster, that's ridiculous.

They check benchmarks and see what kind of gains they can expect over what
they currently have.

------
swarnie_
That TR 1900X SKU looks like an Intel killer for its target audience.

~~~
paulmd
Not really, it's kind of a weird entry in the lineup. Due to the dual-NUMA
layout of TR it's essentially a pair of 4-cores smushed together, which is
essentially the worst of all worlds. Desktop users will be better off using
the 2700X (same number of cores but on a single NUMA node, and higher clocks),
high-core-count users will be better off with the 1920X/1950X or the
2920X/2950X.

The sole advantage is that it's a lot of PCIe lanes for the money, so it can
make sense for storage builds that want to address a lot of NVMe, or GPU
compute builds that need very little CPU horsepower.

Also, like all TR boards, the motherboards are extortionate. They start at
about $350 and go up from there. And that doesn't even buy you a futureproof
system - the higher core counts on the TR 2000 series mean that first-gen
boards likely won't be able to turbo the new processors, you're running base-
clocks.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKe7CnZT9ZE)

~~~
dragontamer
> The sole advantage is that it's a lot of PCIe lanes for the money, so it can
> make sense for storage builds that want to address a lot of NVMe, or GPU
> compute builds that need very little CPU horsepower.

That's what I was thinking. The 1900x looks useful for quad-GPU Redshift
rendering setups.

Its certainly not "mainstream". The 1920x / 2920x is far better bang for your
buck. But the price from AMD scales very well. If you're willing to spend
bigger bucks on cooling, the 2990WX is great. But 250W TDP is going to be a
tough-one to design around.

Custom-cooling is probably the answer. Enermax's TR4 AIO turned out to be all
sorts of awful, unfortunately. And Noctua's Air coolers cap out at 180W TDP
designs.

------
faragon
I hope AMD hits hard the low end, too.

~~~
llampx
Most chips sold these days are server chips or mobile (cellphone or notebook).
I hope these gains filter down to the mobile SKUs.

------
gt_
It may be of no concern to many, but 3D artists constantly express problems
with filling DIMM slots when using Threadrippers. Supposedly, 128 GB RAM is
only reliable on a couple of motherboards. I just constantly read these
stories on forums. (And to be sure, these aren’t situations where users were
mixing RAM sets)

~~~
sounds
I've seen that as well. I believe it boils down to a few AMD motherboard
integrators that have rushed out products that are marginal - they work ok for
simple use cases, but maxing them out reveals some edge cases they didn't work
out.

The solution, of course, is to name them. Can you share which motherboards
you've seen people complaining about?

~~~
dragontamer
AMD's memory controller has worse compatibility compared to Intel's. AMD's 1st
Gen Ryzen was known to have issues with Hynix dies.

Remember: DDR4 goes straight to the CPU these days. I'm fairly certain that
motherboard makers can make a simple wire connection between the DDR4 pins and
the CPU itself without much issue.

[https://community.amd.com/thread/217871](https://community.amd.com/thread/217871)

The AMD Community knows to avoid Hynix and to buy Samsung. Hynix did improve
with some BIOS updates (in particular: increasing V_soc voltage to 1.1 and
other tricks). Update your BIOS if you have any issues.

Zen+ dies have better DDR4 compatibility.

~~~
ksec
Hasn't the latest BIOS fix most of the issues?

AMD's memory controller is actually from Rambus.

The good thing is as more EPYC moves inside DC, there will be lots more memory
testing done for AMD.

------
throwaway42342
Imagine what'd happen what'll happen once AMD starts competing with Nvidia
(for AI stuff).

------
gameswithgo
Does anyone in here know if Zen2 is going to implement AVX properly?
Threadripper2 will not, all AVX2 instructions will operate at ~SSE speeds, as
on past AMD chips.

~~~
floatboth
Zen 1 already implements AVX2 properly.

It doesn't have 256 bit wide units, so it's 2 clock cycles instead of 1… but
that's actually _good_. Intel's 256 bit units cause horrible downclocking
issues: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-
frequen...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequency-
scaling/)

What even is "SSE speeds"?!

