AMD Ryzen Threadripper
AMD drops mega-threads on the desktop
Price $ 1440 for 1950X; $ 1149 for 1920X www.amd.com
Just when we thought things couldn’t get any more exciting in the CPU world, along comes AMD with another bombshell. With quite possibly the coolest product name ever, the Threadripper series of CPUs takes core-counts to the next level, offering Enterprise-level performance at consumer priced dollars. But is it any good for gaming, given that its main strength is how many cores it has? We all know that the Ryzen 7 wasn’t particularly great when it came to game performance, so can Threadripper reverse that trend? Let’s find out.
What’s on the inside
Threadripper CPUs are truly huge. Each chip is 569 x 638 x 272mm, and comes in a special orange plastic mounting plate. This then slides into the new TR4 socket that comes with compatible X399 motherboards, and AMD has gone for a radical redesign of its CPU packaging. Rather than the pins being mounted on the CPU as we’re used to with prior AMD chips, known as a pin grid array, AMD has switched to the same method as Intel, where the pins are inside the CPU socket, all 4094 of them in fact. This is known as a land grid array design, which is much less prone to bent pins than PGA.
Mounting the CPU is an interesting twist on prior chips. Once mounted inside its plastic sheath, it then slides into the TR4 socket’s swinging arm, which is then locked into place using a special screwdriver supplied by AMD. Thanks to the new socket design, most existing coolers won’t work with the TR4 socket, but AMD has kindly supplied an adaptor to get around this issue. However, this doesn’t work with all coolers, so check first – most cooler suppliers are offering TR4 upgrade kits for free or under $20. By the way, there’s no cooler included with these CPUs, so you’ll need to fork out for one of your own. AMD supplied us with the Thermaltake AIO Floe Riing TT Premium Edition, which has a whopping 360mm radiator, but whose water block only covers around half of the CPU. Despite this, temperatures reached just 58C during our Prime95 testing.
Core Count and base speCs
Despite all those cores, the 1950X and 1920X only output 180W of TDP. Speaking of cores, the 1950X has a whopping 16 cores, while the 1920X drops this slightly to 12. Each of these cores is equipped with AMD’s new simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which operates similarly to Intel’s hyperthreading, which means each core delivers two threads of performance. This means the 1950X can handle a crazy 32 threads, while the 1920X can handle 24.
When it comes to speeds, the 1950X has a Base speed of 3.4GHz which Boosts up to 4GHz under load. The 1920X is actually even faster clocked, with a Base speed of 3.5GH and Boost
of 4GHz. There’s a catch though – they’ll both only hit 4GHz when four cores are active. Both chips also come with the same XFR technology of Ryzen, which can add another 200MHz under the perfect thermal conditions.
Threadripper uses the same Zen architecture of the Ryzen chips – it just delivers more of them. There are also a couple of minor changes to connect all those cores. Each core gets 512K of L2 cache, with another 16MB of L3 cache per die (each die has eight cores)
One huge benefit of Threadripper and the accompanying X399 chipset is the incredible number of PCIe lanes it brings to the table. In the past AMD has really lagged behind Intel in this regard, but Threadripper totally changes this, delivering 64 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes, though four of those lanes are reserved for the X399 chipset. This means there’s plenty of room for added drives, extra GPUs and the like, perfect for professional workstation owners this chip is aimed at.
The X399 chipset also brings quad-channel memory support to the table, with a speed of DDR4-2666MHz. Even better, it has full ECC support, which is crucial for those who simply can’t allow their data sets to be misread from memory. On Intel’s side, if you want ECC support, you have to buy a rather expensive Xeon CPU. AMD states that Threadripper can handle up to 1TB of system memory, but there’s a catch – they must be UDIMMs, which currently max out at 16GB.
One interesting nugget about the memory is that it can be run in two modes, selectable via AMD’s desktop software. There’s the distributed mode, for day to day productivity apps, and then the Local mode. This switches the system into NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) mode, which is apparently better for programs that have more predictable memory access. We found that changing between the two made very little difference, with a 2% drop in 3DMark’s Cloud Gate benchmark.
DEliDDing THE bEasT
If you were to remove the lid of the CPU, you’d be rather surprised at what you find. Threadripper 1950X uses two Core Complexes (CCX), each of which is equipped with eight cores. Yet there’s another two silicon dies included,
if you want to run multiple apps while gaming, Threadripper can do the job handily
but they’re non-functioning. AMD has included these to better balance heat load and heatsinks; they don’t actually do anything. However, it does suggest that AMD could include another two CCX for a 32-cored beast in future.
The two functional CCX units use ‘Infinity Fabric’ to communicate with each other, which offers 102GB/ sec die-to-die bandwidth. The entire CPU is built using a 14nM FinFET manufacturing process, but AMD has stayed mum about the total number of transistors used within.
TESTING THE RIPPER
Unlike Ryzen, Threadripper was a million times easier to test. We didn’t have to wade through a host of options to set the system up correctly, and the memory we used worked perfectly, first time, every time. All we had to do was update the motherboard BIOS and away we went. While AMD supplied us with basically everything needed for a new PC build, including an M.2 drive, 32GB of memory, and a 1250W PSU, we used the exact same components as our prior Core-X testing to ensure our results were comparable. The only change was the cooler used, as our H105 didn’t have the right mounting clip, and the PSU, as the X399 board requires two 4-pin connectors, a feature our Corsair 850W PSU doesn’t have.
As you can see from the productivity results, Threadripper is a winner. It may have a slower IPC count per core than Intel, but when you feed massively multithreaded software through it, it takes the lead in most of the tests. We were a little surprised at the Handbrake results though; AMD’s data shows that Threadripper takes the lead, while it lost out by a long way here. This is likely because we use a different video container than the one AMD used for testing, which is accelerated by Intel’s Media Engine. We tried three different versions of Handbrake to ensure the issue wasn’t on our end, but the result remained the same every time.
When it came to game performance, Threadripper is the mirror-image of Ryzen. It’s weaker IPC per core performance means that these lesser threaded applications are beaten out by Intel’s products. Most games only use four cores at most, which is why Threadripper did so badly. However, if you want to run multiple apps while gaming, Threadripper can do the job handily. We ran both the 3DMark Cloud Gate test at the same time as the POVRAY test, and found only a small increase in the POV-RAY result. On the other hand, when we tried to run Ghost Recon and 3DMark at the same time, the system slowed to a crawl. We’re guessing this is a limitation of the 16GB of memory we used for testing. If you’re going to buy a Threadripper, we suggest loading it up with at least 32GB of memory.
CONCLUSION
As it’s based on the Zen architecture, we weren’t particularly surprised by the gaming results. However, the productivity results show that AMD has a real winner on its hands for those who need as many threads as possible, such as content creators, Twitch streamers and scientific loads.
Once again AMD has socked it to Intel, this time at the super high end of the market. At $1440 for the 1950X, it handily beats out Intel’s Core i9-7900X. Without Threadripper, there’s no way in hell Intel would be selling the i9-7900X at such a cheap price; just look at its prior pricing to see what they expected consumers to pay, with ten core chips in the $2000 region. With the added benefit of ECC memory support and a huge amount of PCIe 3.0 lanes, AMD has regained the lead in the super high speed end of the CPU world, and we couldn’t be happier.