AMD 3rd Generation Ryzen Threadripper TR 3960X Review

[tinytomlogan]

The Threadripper CPUs have been updated to the 3rd Generation and we're seeing how the 24 core, 48 thread TR 3960X performs.


AMD Threadripper 3960X Review

[AlienALX]

Amazing!

[AngryGoldfish]

It's absurd how CPUs are now at the stage where many programs and workloads can't leverage the potential fully. Obviously games are a big one, but it seems other programs and tasks may need to catch up. Intel is so far behind. It's amazing how a company so much bigger can fall so far behind.

[FTLN]

If they could have only priced it exactly the same as the 10980xe then it would have been the ultimate intel killer !

[Warchild]

Originally Posted by AngryGoldfish

It's absurd how CPUs are now at the stage where many programs and workloads can't leverage the potential fully. Obviously games are a big one, but it seems other programs and tasks may need to catch up. Intel is so far behind. It's amazing how a company so much bigger can fall so far behind.

Well, go back some years and AMD dominated the CPU market while Intel were stuck sucking their thumbs. Then Sandy Bridge came along and boom. flipped control!

Intel could have stayed ahead from the get go. Their issue is greed, how they tried to milk the consumer and business segment with minuscule increases in performance and (in my eyes) major price increases. Couple that with immature short handed tactics, like their demo of the 28core CPU at 5ghz on all cores, being WATERCOOLED, or the CPU vulnerabilities. Their image is very hurt. Consumer might not care much for spectre, but enterprise and business units will.

AMD were working hard towards Zen, but of course, when you are stuck in the RnD phase with nothing to compete with, Intel got complacent. Zen exploded on the scene and put a serious dent in dominance.


By the way TTL,

Is there any way to present the numerical values on your graphs a little clearer? For me its not very easy on the eyes to extrapolate. Could it be embedded in the bars themselves perhaps?

[tgrech]

Intel are behind because they havn't really released a new product for years, not from complacency but because they were too aggressive with 10nm and their expectations of EUV development, and have been stuck waiting for physicists to catch up. If Intel had actually been complacent and not set such crazy targets for 10nm they wouldn't be in this mess strangely.

[Avet]

Originally Posted by tgrech

Intel are behind because they havn't really released a new product for years, not from complacency but because they were too aggressive with 10nm and their expectations of EUV development, and have been stuck waiting for physicists to catch up. If Intel had actually been complacent and not set such crazy targets for 10nm they wouldn't be in this mess strangely.

They didn't release a new product in years because they didn't have to. If AMD was there to compete at this level in the past decade Intel would be on 5nm chips today, not struggling to make 10nm. They just chose to bask in mountains of gold and countless virgins like Dragons because they could sell you tweaked Sandy Bridge processors year after year since 3rd January 2011 until 25th November 2019. Would you trade gold and virgins for a fringe research in EUV that you don't even need??? Cmon...

Now we have a proper hype. Like back in the days when one month's cover in local "PC World" magazine was "Nvidia releases 9800 GX2 the fastest GPU on the planet." Next month the cover says "ATI dethrones Nvida with 4870 X2 the new GPU daddy." Now that AMD is back in the game... We will see a new technology revolution. I am loving it.

[tgrech]

Originally Posted by Avet

They didn't release a new product in years because they didn't have to. If AMD was there to compete at this level in the past decade Intel would be on 5nm chips today, not struggling to make 10nm. They just chose to bask in mountains of gold and countless virgins like Dragons because they could sell you tweaked Sandy Bridge processors year after year since 3rd January 2011 until 25th November 2019. Would you trade gold and virgins for fringe research in EUV that you don't even need??? Cmon...

Sorry but no, that's just not how the world works, lets check some facts.

• Work on 10nm began in the mid-2000's while AMD was competitive with Intel, long before Sandy Bridge
  
  
• Intel spent the last 8 years spending billions more on CPU research and development than any other tech company in the world anyway, as they always did.
  
  
• Intel has been unequivocally losing the real CPU war for the last decade in mobile, they have been decimated in a market they threw billions at during the start of the decade, and 10nm was supposed to save them in this much larger fight; They never had a chance to rest on laurels.
  
  
• Intel has invested more time and money into their 10nm node than any company in history has ever spent on any other lithographic process.
  
  
• We have had half a decade of leaks detailing 10nm's problematic development and showing that Intel has been throwing as many engineers as they can at it.
  
  
• Had Intel been on target for 10nm(And not watered it down when management finally realised it wouldn't work a few years ago) they would currently have a node equivalent to TSMC's upcoming 5nm, and could have released an architecture with a >25% higher IPC than Skylake.
  
  
• Public companies are controlled by shareholders, if investors got any hint Intel wasn't pushing to be the best, the harm to Intel's financials would have been grave and far beyond any (non-existent) savings.
  

This is a case of near criminal mismanagement in a company where the engineers are clearly too detached from the financials and direction as a whole, a company or organisation growing too large and then collapsing under its own inefficiency is hardly a novel concept.

[tinytomlogan]

Originally Posted by Warchild

By the way TTL,

Is there any way to present the numerical values on your graphs a little clearer? For me its not very easy on the eyes to extrapolate. Could it be embedded in the bars themselves perhaps?

Ill give it a look. I know bigger numbers can be done

[SPS]

We should really do compilation tests for these processors. I'd love to compare the times to compile UE4 from source with these multicore beasts.