AMD Threadripper 2970WX
Zak Storey has run out of fingers and toes keeping track of AMD’s threads.
Zak Storey has run out of fingers and toes keeping track of AMD’s threads. Even his benchmarks are feeling the strain.
After smashing a personal target in a Cinebench overclocking push, it’s hard to ignore the sensation of victory hovering overhead. Over 5,000 points in Cinebench, competitive gaming scores, low idle power draw, x264 over the 81fps mark… it’s all there.
That said, the 2970WX isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s not aimed at gamers, either. It’s a finely honed tool, tempered to maximise your efficiency in any and all workloads. There are 24 cores thumping away at the heart of this chip, six per CPU die, each die communicating with one another to break up those application processes across the 48 threads. Those zeros and ones are catered for by a huge 78.25MB of cache (64MB of L3, 12MB of L2, 2.25MB of I-Cache). On top of all of that, there’s support for quad-channel memory, 64 PCIe lanes, and all the features that the mainstream Threadripper series has had for the last year or more. Oh, and at stock, it’s cool. Seriously cool. We’re talking maximum load temperatures of 50°C, under a 240mm AIO.
Thanks for the memory…
Let’s talk about memory first. Basically, only two of the dies have direct access to the memory channels, each one having two. The other two dies have to send and receive their memory requests through those first two dies directly, in a sort of piggyback mode. In short, you can expect memory latency all the way up above 100ms per request. This isn’t a problem for professional workloads, but not good for gaming.
With two lanes going into two dies, and there being four lanes in total, the obvious question is: why not redesign the chip so that one memory channel comes from each die? The reason for that is bandwidth. Split the channels up, and you cut the bandwidth in half for those two main dies, reducing performance significantly. Then why no octo-channel memory instead? Well, that would mean a new socket, and new motherboards.
How great an effect does this have, then? Well, overall, it depends on which game you’re testing. Switch to game mode, however, and AMD’s RyzenMaster drops to local mode memory only. Doing so is a bit annoying, because it does require a full system restart, but in today’s age of superfast SSDs, it’s just that: an annoyance at most.
Computational performance, though, is nothing short of spectacular. Over 4,400 points in Cinebench, 172 in single-core mode, x264 above 80fps, and load temps of 50°C make this a killer production part.
Is this CPU for you, then? Well, it depends on what you want. For the price, it’s an incredible feat of engineering brilliance. If CAD/CAM, 3D design, or rendering is your game, those 24 cores are simply awe-inspiring. If you’re solely after a gaming chip, though, the 2950X is both better value for money, and less annoying overall in games that need that local memory mode.