Power Consumption, Overclocking, and Pricing
Given the 250W TDP, it's no surprise that the Threadripper 2990WX has the highest power consumption of any stock configuration processor we've tested.
At 387W for the entire system power consumption, the 2990WX requires about 125W more than the i9-7980XE and Threadripper 2950X systems.
That being said, the 12nm Threadripper 2950X's power draw is almost identical to the Skylake-X processors based on even older 14nm technology than Intel's latest processors.
Overclocking
For some quick overclocking testing, we decided to put the 250W behemoth Threadripper 2990WX through its paces with the MSI MEG X399 Creation motherboard, featuring a 19-phase VRM.
With the 2990WX, we were able to hit an all-core overclock of 4.1GHz at 1.2375V, with the temperature remaining under 70 degrees Celsius. This overclock provided a Cinebench R15 score of 6224, roughly 20% performance advantage compared to stock clock speeds.
However, this additional performance comes at the detriment of power consumption. Full system power consumption jumped from 387W to a peak of 620W with this overclock enabled. This 233W increase is almost the same as our measured power consumption for an i9-7980XE system
Pricing and Availability
The first of the 2nd generation Threadripper processors to launch is the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, starting today with an MSRP of $1799.
Next comes the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X for $899 on August 31st. This price represents a $100 price drop from the launch MSRP of the 16-core Threadripper 1950X just last year.
In October, we'll see the release of the 12-core 2920X and 24-core 2970WX variants for $649 and $1299 respectively. Frankly, it's bizarre to see such a staggered CPU launch like this, with a 2-month gap for full processor availability.
In the end, the story with 2nd generation Threadripper is significantly more compelling than the release of the Ryzen 2000-series processors earlier this year. While AMD made smart moves in their product positioning, considerably undercutting Intel in key areas, the overall performance king for gamers remained in the Intel camp with their Coffee Lake processors. However, the HEDT market is a whole other story.
Not only is AMD easily capturing the numbers race with a core count of 32 that Intel isn't likely to match or surpass soon, but the competitive landscape is also ideal for AMD with their X-series Threadripper processors.
AMD has an extraordinary opportunity with 2nd generation Threadripper to capture a significant portion of the HEDT market that Intel created and has mostly remained unopposed within. With the relative market lag of Intel's HEDT processors, AMD has been able to develop a processor in the Threadripper 2950X that wins or remains extremely competitive in almost every scenario.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X
For gamers and enthusiasts looking for a step-up from the entry-level CPU platforms, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X represents an immense value at $900, without sacrificing performance compared to Intel's Skylake-X CPUs.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX
While there are some software optimization and compatibility issues, including gaming, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX is an unparalleled product for users who frequently do 3D rendering or media encoding. At $1799, there is just no other option that comes close in highly-optimized multi-core tasks.
“Due to this, the WX-series
“Due to this, the WX-series Threadripper processors must remain in a NUMA configuration, and present themselves as four individual NUMA nodes to an operating system, akin to a quad-CPU system. Additionally, the Infinity Fabric link between each of these dies is effectively running at half the speed of the 2-die arrangement found with the X-series processors.”
What are yoh refering to here? AFAIK, it is fully connected in the 4 die threadripper, just like it is in Epyc. In the two die variant, you only have one link between the two die and that is it. In the 4 die variant, they have 3 links in use each to connect to the other 3 die with a single hop latency. I don’t think I would refer to anything as half speed other than the memory bandwidth. I suspect that windows does not have the necessary NUMA optimizations to handle such a configuration properly anyway. I would be running linux on such a system. It gets a lot of use in HPC and can handle, in some cases, thousands of processor cores with a wide variety of memory configurations.
The mp3 encode as a benchmark does seem a bit odd. The gamming benchmarks, while not really odd, are of little importance. If you are going to buy a $900 or $1700 dollar processor for gaming at 1080p, unless you are using a software renderer, it would be a compelete waste. For game developers, this might still be a good system, assuming you are a developer capable of making your game perform well with many cores available, or at least not crash on start-up. As noted, windows looks like a problem here. It might have been good to test at 4k, just to see if it is graphics card limited, or whether the cpu is the bottleneck. It could hit windows scaling issues though. Also, nvidia’s driver is probably a near worst case scenario on any system that doesn’t have a single, last level cache. It seems to have a lot of fine grained, thread to thread communication. Maintaining a single last level cache with good latency is a major bottleneck to scaling to more cores, so it would be better in most cases if it would just go away, and developers would optimize their software for multiple core clusters They have to do that anyway for the consoles with similar 4 core cluster architectures. I wouldn’t be surprised to see cell phones go with core clusters also, due to better power consumption.
Well, off to look for linux compile benchmarks on Threadripper.
I stumbled on this customer
I stumbled on this customer review of the TR 1900X at Newegg:
“- Large 20% memory performance difference between NUMA and non-NUMA settings.
“On my system, the NUMA setting (memory interleave on) for some reason reduces CPU performance by
about 15%, while boosting RAM performance by 20%.”
…
“Wish amd could improve the memory controller and reduce CPU-RAM latency to competitive levels.”
Perhaps this is something to consider, and compare, when benching TR2 CPUs.
p.s. I believe der8auer at
p.s. I believe der8auer at YouTube switched memory interleave ON when running 2 x ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 add-in cards with 8 x Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSDs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CoAyjzJWfw
fast-forward starting around 7:30 on the counter
for the BIOS setup in that video
@ 8:07 on the counter: “Memory Interleaving”
Paul Alcorn’s recent article
Paul Alcorn’s recent article is a fun and easy read:
“AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2 vs. Intel Skylake-X:
Battle of the High-End CPUs” (August 14, 2018)