The State of Thread Ripper and Its Impact on High-End Desktop Computing

In the realm of high-end desktop computing, AMD's Threadripper has been making waves with its impressive performance capabilities. The original Threadripper model featured 64 lanes versus 128 lanes for the Epic and last-gen ThreadRipper CPUs, which catered to the needs of enthusiasts who require immense compute capacity. This configuration allowed users to replicate the performance of more powerful server-based systems in a desktop setup.

One of the key aspects that sets Threadripper apart from its competitors is its socket design. The original model utilized a server socket, specifically the socket 47, which offered enhanced peripheral connectivity compared to traditional desktop sockets. This feature provided users with increased flexibility and potential for future upgrades. Although Intel has also introduced high-end server CPUs in recent times, their desktop counterparts often lack similar features.

The development of Threadripper can be seen as an effort by AMD to tap into the enterprise market's demand for high-performance computing solutions. However, it is essential to note that the company's aim is not solely focused on delivering server-based hardware on a desktop scale; rather, they are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of performance and compatibility.

AIB partners have played a significant role in refining the Threadripper motherboard design, ensuring its appeal to desktop users. These modifications allowed for better heat dissipation and optimized airflow within the system's case. This aspect is particularly important when using high-end components like server-grade motherboards in a standard desktop setup.

The performance of AMD's Threadripper CPUs has been consistently impressive, with some models rivaling those of Intel's Xeon offerings at significantly lower price points. For instance, the 74o 2 processor boasts an impressive price-to-performance ratio, outperforming its Intel counterpart by over $500 in a single benchmark. This disparity highlights the competitive edge that AMD's Threadripper has gained in the high-end desktop market.

The introduction of PCIe 4.0 and NVMe RAID on the Threadripper platform is another noteworthy aspect. The ability to utilize multiple PCI Express lanes for data transfer and storage applications has opened up new possibilities for enthusiasts. With four gigabytes per second as the maximum throughput for a single PCIe slot, the addition of more lanes can significantly boost performance in scenarios that require high-speed storage.

In conclusion, AMD's Threadripper has cemented its position as a leader in the high-end desktop market. Its impressive performance capabilities, competitive pricing, and innovative features such as enhanced peripheral connectivity and superior data transfer speeds have made it an attractive option for enthusiasts and professionals alike.

The emergence of newer, more powerful ThreadRipper models with increased memory channels is expected to further solidify AMD's dominance in this segment. These upgraded CPUs promise even better performance and compatibility, potentially rendering Intel's high-end desktop offerings less competitive. As a result, the market is poised for a major shift, with Threadripper poised to take center stage.

Looking ahead to future developments, it is essential to consider the implications of Intel's upcoming X $2.99 platform. Although this new offering may boast improved features and performance, it is unlikely to match the raw power and compatibility of AMD's ThreadRipper CPUs. With its focus on delivering exceptional compute capacity and enhanced connectivity, Threadripper has positioned itself as a benchmark for high-end desktop systems.

The potential for future competition in this segment will undoubtedly drive innovation and push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of performance and compatibility. As enthusiasts and professionals continue to demand more from their computing hardware, it will be exciting to see how AMD and other manufacturers respond to these demands.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enbig news from AMD today they're delaying the 3950 X it's for the am 416 core until November but other big news thread Ripper is out in November but what if we didn't have to wait what if we could have threader pearlite today I mean don't you want to know how thread Ripper is gonna perform I mean kinda kinda sorta so once your eyes clickbait let's find out this is the epic 74 o2p it's a 24 core processor the p means it's designed for a single socket which lets aim to charge list and a dual socket configuration and boy howdy this thing is fast and you might be thinking why are you talking about a thread Ripper what are you opening with about thread Ripper when this is really an epic server CPU and a gigabyte server motherboard and our lovely be quiet case which actually is quiet it's on right now and you can can barely hear it this is the lower bound for what I would expect a 24 cord thread Ripper system to be able to perform this thing is beastly it is ungodly it is not normal I think to try to run a server motherboard like this as a workstation but that's what we're gonna do or that's what actually I've done and I've already done all the testing and my goodness thread Ripper is coming and it is gonna completely take over the high-end desktop market and you know not to like talk about market forces or anything like that this socket for thread Ripper is basically the same as what AMD has for the server platform now the thread Ripper motherboards are gonna be a lot more bling there's gonna be RGB this is you know relatively understated green it's gonna go in your rackmount server and stay there forever this is designed to go than a 2-u rack mount server so it's a little big in fact it normally does not fit in the dark Bass Pro 900 case I had to go a little off script and modify the case so there it is the dark bass pro 900 right behind me it's a little bit of a mess it's completely disassembled and a server motherboard will not fit in the dark Bass Pro 900 the drive cage is in the way not to worry I can cut a piece of wood to fit now I could use a piece of metal but I'm in a hurry it's easier to work with wood and wood is gonna be perfectly structural one thing though the case does sort of depend on the motherboard being screwed in for structural support so just a minor a little bit of movement you can see the motherboard tray is kind of shifting a little bit it's not good gonna have to screw it in gonna use wood screws it's fine do you have to do like a dado stop cut or like a pocket cut I don't know not a woodworker but need to notch the wood a little bit so that the motherboard tray will sit where it's supposed to normally it's using it from the back the way that I've cut the wood it's going to screw in from the front but that was the easiest way to do this with the fewest number of cuts possible you also use the 3d printer and print a few guides to make the cuts more accurate and also to have things that the motherboard will snap into and and mounts and spacers and stuff like that so that we can do it really professionally I've got two GPUs in here right now and our TX 2080 as well as a Radeon 5700 XT all of our benchmarks on Windows were done with the Radeon 57 card of XT I've also got a liquid HH HL 2 1.2 million I ops per second nvme Drive in there well it's actually like 4 nvme Drive sandwiched into one half hi 1/2 length card and then I've also got a PCI Express by 4 gigabyte rsn DMA this thing is ridiculous 24 cores of performance 48 threads 256 gigabytes of registered error correcting memory running at 20 666 the timings aren't the best on that but this thing can manage 3.3 5 gigahertz flat out on all 24 cores and the inner max like Tech 2 cooler at our cooler could keep it all cool without really any headache I think most of the workloads that I ran were well above 3 gigahertz even things like premiere rendering and really AVX heavy workloads not really a problem 3.25 gigahertz 23.1 5 gigahertz basically across the board on all 24 cores no boost shenanigans here every core hits 3.35 gigahertz this is incredible for what web servers or any kind of workload where there's gonna be kind of a lot of CPU cores kind of busy all the time I don't know because I haven't tested to 32 or the 48 the 64 core CPUs but I suspect that some player in the 24 to 32 core neighborhood was gonna be the sweet spot for thread Ripper based on heat production and everything else during my benchmark runs I would see the cores operating it one to one point one volts which is kind of shocking considering that you know we see rising 9 3900 X spiking up to one point one point five volts and heavily you know heavily single thread workloads or you've got one or two cores that are just you know bursting to their 4.6 gigahertz top-end clock this thing I mean there's a big difference between 3.3 and 4.6 gigahertz but I feel like that the time that AMD is gonna take to make thread Ripper go to around 4 gigahertz we're gonna see a voltage increase and some other stuff but in terms of raw performance even at 3.3 5 gigahertz this system is incredible it is incredible performance please keep in mind as you look through the results that we're using register 2 error correcting memory it's not the fastest the latency is gonna be over a hundred nanoseconds because well is 256 gigs which is a lot of it which offsets some of the speed but it's not the fastest because I don't have any 3200 err corrected memory that will work in this platform yet so you'll see some things in like the puget like the playback benchmark in premiere is a little lower than it should be compared to the 39-yard x and that's just down the memory latency and that will not be a problem in thread river with comparison systems at 79 80 XC a 3600 x i'm at 3900 x everything out of 2080 except for this thing which had a 5780 the 2080 like mixing pci express may be a little problematic that's a story for another day if you want a full review of this motherboard in an actual to you chassis that it's designed for serve the home has a great review of the gigabyte chassis that this is designed to go into yes it does do i PMI yes you get the OCP mezzanine slot so you can install a 10 gig or a 40 gig adapter if you go full in VMA uses almost all 128 PCI Express lanes for nvme interfaces if you want to build like a ridiculous storage server but you don't have to you could just go nuts like I did I mean I've got two GPUs in here I've still got five slots free although you know sort of finagle things around a little bit really get that to work the way that it's supposed to because by 8:00 or by 16 it's like x16 x16 x16 x16 x16 not exactly now with the 2990 AMD had 32 cores on the Windows desktop but let me tell you Windows was not ready for 32 cores on the desktop in that scenario the 2990 in linux is glorious it is a sight to behold it is an incredible incredible machine just it purrs like a kitten but the Numa node thing like the software engineering required to do that Microsoft really didn't step up to the plate and handle that they're gonna have to do that because Intel can't manage more than twenty eight cores in a single Numa node so Twitter fur does give you some advantages like higher clock memory the motherboards have more onboard features where you'd have to use some add-in cards here so there are some differences like that but already the 24 quarter this 24 core CPU in general will outperform the 32 core 2990 WX in most workloads it'll it'll meet or beat it in most workloads even under Linux now under Windows it's a completely different story the the thread Ripper 2990 WX under windows is severely gimped by Windows now Intel has got a refresh coming up as well they're gonna refresh this rumor has it it's gonna be on the X $2.99 socket same as existing cps it's gonna be our third refresh on that socket i'll intel seems like they're trying to get a lot of mileage out of the X $2.99 socket are we gonna see up to 28 cores on that socket maybe but Intel's gonna have some problems on his hand this is basically the server socket for AMD I mean I know it's a little different but thread Ripper and epic same socket same functionality 64 lanes versus 128 lanes for epic and last gen thread Ripper there's rumors that there's gonna be another thread Ripper that has 128 lanes and even more memory channels but can't substantiate that we're not talking about that I just like replicating this performance even in a four channel configuration it is beastly and you look at that and you what intel has on the server-side like the new Mac Pro's socket 36 47 that's a server socket it's a big socket like the AMD sockets for lots of peripheral connectivity on the Mac Pros you've got 64 PCI Express Lanes just like thread Ripper I need to look at the higher-end enterprise market and there are some higher-end enterprise Intel CPUs but they're not really available on the high-end desktop side whereas AMD's sort of issues that middle of the market part and just says ok we're going to real Abel reprise three o'clock our server parts and offer those on the desktop not to say that he hasn't done a lot of work to be able to support that I mean that's that's a big deal it's not like they're just slapping a different sticker on there there's a lot of qualification and engineering that goes into that AIB partners put in a lot of work in the motherboards to make them appealing to desktop users because again putting a server motherboard in a desktop case even a big one like the dark Bass Pro 900 it's not an optimal situation it's just you're not supposed to do that and it if I didn't crank up the airflow in this case it would actually overheat because I mean you look at the vrm situation and it's like that's not that's not like a desktop board but it's not overclocked and you know all that kind of stuff so Intel saves money because they don't have to go through the complexity of the big server socket and AIB partners save on motherboard production costs but you the consumer don't save those CPUs are not cheaper this 74o 2 processor is $1,200 and it runs circles around the $1,700 desktop part and runs circles around the xeon counterpart that's more than twice as expensive that's just i mean what a time to be alive for competition so whatever the X $2.99 refresh is that's coming I just don't see how it could compete with the thread Ripper CPUs that are coming like I mean even just things like nvme raid envy me raid with PCI Express 4 is a truly glorious thing I mean it's not for everybody and you know your gaming workload it's not gonna make a bit of a difference but if you're a computer power user and doing just completely insane things with virtual machines and you know your your entire life lives on a machine like this it's nice and on the Intel X $2.99 platform all those into slots go through the chipset meaning that all of those slots combined can only do at most four gigabytes per second well the single PCI Express for nvme can do north of five so if you're gonna do raid I mean we're getting like nine gigabytes per second and it's just not possible without using CPU PCI Express Lanes on the Intel platform if this truly is a preview of what's coming in thread Ripper for the market the high-end desktop market AMD is gonna own it they're gonna devour it whole better connectivity better speed better compatibility and it's not just like better speed by a little bit it's better speed by a lot this is a AMD's server platform on the desktop it's not a middle of the road toe in the water it's gonna cost more but not as much as a $10,000 you know platinum 8180 Intel CPU but still gonna cost a lot you know the higher margin part cuz it's high-end desktop no it's just this this issues all of that it's like here it is put up or shut up and that's really what thread Ripper should be granted this is an epic server this is not designed for desktop use everything about it is not designed for desktop use but if you look past that and you look at the numbers and you see how this performs and those benchmark results those jaw-dropping benchmark results if this is a preview of the worst case scenario for thread Ripper there's a lot of people that are gonna be very very happy and very excited with what AMD is doing in the high-end desktop market in 2019 and into 2020 I'm Wendell this is level 1 this is thread Ripper light I basically acting a little bit like a crack addict here except instead of crack it's compute capacity and this is gonna have to tide me over until thread Ripper I'm just gonna pretend it's thread Ripper it's close enough it's so gloriousbig news from AMD today they're delaying the 3950 X it's for the am 416 core until November but other big news thread Ripper is out in November but what if we didn't have to wait what if we could have threader pearlite today I mean don't you want to know how thread Ripper is gonna perform I mean kinda kinda sorta so once your eyes clickbait let's find out this is the epic 74 o2p it's a 24 core processor the p means it's designed for a single socket which lets aim to charge list and a dual socket configuration and boy howdy this thing is fast and you might be thinking why are you talking about a thread Ripper what are you opening with about thread Ripper when this is really an epic server CPU and a gigabyte server motherboard and our lovely be quiet case which actually is quiet it's on right now and you can can barely hear it this is the lower bound for what I would expect a 24 cord thread Ripper system to be able to perform this thing is beastly it is ungodly it is not normal I think to try to run a server motherboard like this as a workstation but that's what we're gonna do or that's what actually I've done and I've already done all the testing and my goodness thread Ripper is coming and it is gonna completely take over the high-end desktop market and you know not to like talk about market forces or anything like that this socket for thread Ripper is basically the same as what AMD has for the server platform now the thread Ripper motherboards are gonna be a lot more bling there's gonna be RGB this is you know relatively understated green it's gonna go in your rackmount server and stay there forever this is designed to go than a 2-u rack mount server so it's a little big in fact it normally does not fit in the dark Bass Pro 900 case I had to go a little off script and modify the case so there it is the dark bass pro 900 right behind me it's a little bit of a mess it's completely disassembled and a server motherboard will not fit in the dark Bass Pro 900 the drive cage is in the way not to worry I can cut a piece of wood to fit now I could use a piece of metal but I'm in a hurry it's easier to work with wood and wood is gonna be perfectly structural one thing though the case does sort of depend on the motherboard being screwed in for structural support so just a minor a little bit of movement you can see the motherboard tray is kind of shifting a little bit it's not good gonna have to screw it in gonna use wood screws it's fine do you have to do like a dado stop cut or like a pocket cut I don't know not a woodworker but need to notch the wood a little bit so that the motherboard tray will sit where it's supposed to normally it's using it from the back the way that I've cut the wood it's going to screw in from the front but that was the easiest way to do this with the fewest number of cuts possible you also use the 3d printer and print a few guides to make the cuts more accurate and also to have things that the motherboard will snap into and and mounts and spacers and stuff like that so that we can do it really professionally I've got two GPUs in here right now and our TX 2080 as well as a Radeon 5700 XT all of our benchmarks on Windows were done with the Radeon 57 card of XT I've also got a liquid HH HL 2 1.2 million I ops per second nvme Drive in there well it's actually like 4 nvme Drive sandwiched into one half hi 1/2 length card and then I've also got a PCI Express by 4 gigabyte rsn DMA this thing is ridiculous 24 cores of performance 48 threads 256 gigabytes of registered error correcting memory running at 20 666 the timings aren't the best on that but this thing can manage 3.3 5 gigahertz flat out on all 24 cores and the inner max like Tech 2 cooler at our cooler could keep it all cool without really any headache I think most of the workloads that I ran were well above 3 gigahertz even things like premiere rendering and really AVX heavy workloads not really a problem 3.25 gigahertz 23.1 5 gigahertz basically across the board on all 24 cores no boost shenanigans here every core hits 3.35 gigahertz this is incredible for what web servers or any kind of workload where there's gonna be kind of a lot of CPU cores kind of busy all the time I don't know because I haven't tested to 32 or the 48 the 64 core CPUs but I suspect that some player in the 24 to 32 core neighborhood was gonna be the sweet spot for thread Ripper based on heat production and everything else during my benchmark runs I would see the cores operating it one to one point one volts which is kind of shocking considering that you know we see rising 9 3900 X spiking up to one point one point five volts and heavily you know heavily single thread workloads or you've got one or two cores that are just you know bursting to their 4.6 gigahertz top-end clock this thing I mean there's a big difference between 3.3 and 4.6 gigahertz but I feel like that the time that AMD is gonna take to make thread Ripper go to around 4 gigahertz we're gonna see a voltage increase and some other stuff but in terms of raw performance even at 3.3 5 gigahertz this system is incredible it is incredible performance please keep in mind as you look through the results that we're using register 2 error correcting memory it's not the fastest the latency is gonna be over a hundred nanoseconds because well is 256 gigs which is a lot of it which offsets some of the speed but it's not the fastest because I don't have any 3200 err corrected memory that will work in this platform yet so you'll see some things in like the puget like the playback benchmark in premiere is a little lower than it should be compared to the 39-yard x and that's just down the memory latency and that will not be a problem in thread river with comparison systems at 79 80 XC a 3600 x i'm at 3900 x everything out of 2080 except for this thing which had a 5780 the 2080 like mixing pci express may be a little problematic that's a story for another day if you want a full review of this motherboard in an actual to you chassis that it's designed for serve the home has a great review of the gigabyte chassis that this is designed to go into yes it does do i PMI yes you get the OCP mezzanine slot so you can install a 10 gig or a 40 gig adapter if you go full in VMA uses almost all 128 PCI Express lanes for nvme interfaces if you want to build like a ridiculous storage server but you don't have to you could just go nuts like I did I mean I've got two GPUs in here I've still got five slots free although you know sort of finagle things around a little bit really get that to work the way that it's supposed to because by 8:00 or by 16 it's like x16 x16 x16 x16 x16 not exactly now with the 2990 AMD had 32 cores on the Windows desktop but let me tell you Windows was not ready for 32 cores on the desktop in that scenario the 2990 in linux is glorious it is a sight to behold it is an incredible incredible machine just it purrs like a kitten but the Numa node thing like the software engineering required to do that Microsoft really didn't step up to the plate and handle that they're gonna have to do that because Intel can't manage more than twenty eight cores in a single Numa node so Twitter fur does give you some advantages like higher clock memory the motherboards have more onboard features where you'd have to use some add-in cards here so there are some differences like that but already the 24 quarter this 24 core CPU in general will outperform the 32 core 2990 WX in most workloads it'll it'll meet or beat it in most workloads even under Linux now under Windows it's a completely different story the the thread Ripper 2990 WX under windows is severely gimped by Windows now Intel has got a refresh coming up as well they're gonna refresh this rumor has it it's gonna be on the X $2.99 socket same as existing cps it's gonna be our third refresh on that socket i'll intel seems like they're trying to get a lot of mileage out of the X $2.99 socket are we gonna see up to 28 cores on that socket maybe but Intel's gonna have some problems on his hand this is basically the server socket for AMD I mean I know it's a little different but thread Ripper and epic same socket same functionality 64 lanes versus 128 lanes for epic and last gen thread Ripper there's rumors that there's gonna be another thread Ripper that has 128 lanes and even more memory channels but can't substantiate that we're not talking about that I just like replicating this performance even in a four channel configuration it is beastly and you look at that and you what intel has on the server-side like the new Mac Pro's socket 36 47 that's a server socket it's a big socket like the AMD sockets for lots of peripheral connectivity on the Mac Pros you've got 64 PCI Express Lanes just like thread Ripper I need to look at the higher-end enterprise market and there are some higher-end enterprise Intel CPUs but they're not really available on the high-end desktop side whereas AMD's sort of issues that middle of the market part and just says ok we're going to real Abel reprise three o'clock our server parts and offer those on the desktop not to say that he hasn't done a lot of work to be able to support that I mean that's that's a big deal it's not like they're just slapping a different sticker on there there's a lot of qualification and engineering that goes into that AIB partners put in a lot of work in the motherboards to make them appealing to desktop users because again putting a server motherboard in a desktop case even a big one like the dark Bass Pro 900 it's not an optimal situation it's just you're not supposed to do that and it if I didn't crank up the airflow in this case it would actually overheat because I mean you look at the vrm situation and it's like that's not that's not like a desktop board but it's not overclocked and you know all that kind of stuff so Intel saves money because they don't have to go through the complexity of the big server socket and AIB partners save on motherboard production costs but you the consumer don't save those CPUs are not cheaper this 74o 2 processor is $1,200 and it runs circles around the $1,700 desktop part and runs circles around the xeon counterpart that's more than twice as expensive that's just i mean what a time to be alive for competition so whatever the X $2.99 refresh is that's coming I just don't see how it could compete with the thread Ripper CPUs that are coming like I mean even just things like nvme raid envy me raid with PCI Express 4 is a truly glorious thing I mean it's not for everybody and you know your gaming workload it's not gonna make a bit of a difference but if you're a computer power user and doing just completely insane things with virtual machines and you know your your entire life lives on a machine like this it's nice and on the Intel X $2.99 platform all those into slots go through the chipset meaning that all of those slots combined can only do at most four gigabytes per second well the single PCI Express for nvme can do north of five so if you're gonna do raid I mean we're getting like nine gigabytes per second and it's just not possible without using CPU PCI Express Lanes on the Intel platform if this truly is a preview of what's coming in thread Ripper for the market the high-end desktop market AMD is gonna own it they're gonna devour it whole better connectivity better speed better compatibility and it's not just like better speed by a little bit it's better speed by a lot this is a AMD's server platform on the desktop it's not a middle of the road toe in the water it's gonna cost more but not as much as a $10,000 you know platinum 8180 Intel CPU but still gonna cost a lot you know the higher margin part cuz it's high-end desktop no it's just this this issues all of that it's like here it is put up or shut up and that's really what thread Ripper should be granted this is an epic server this is not designed for desktop use everything about it is not designed for desktop use but if you look past that and you look at the numbers and you see how this performs and those benchmark results those jaw-dropping benchmark results if this is a preview of the worst case scenario for thread Ripper there's a lot of people that are gonna be very very happy and very excited with what AMD is doing in the high-end desktop market in 2019 and into 2020 I'm Wendell this is level 1 this is thread Ripper light I basically acting a little bit like a crack addict here except instead of crack it's compute capacity and this is gonna have to tide me over until thread Ripper I'm just gonna pretend it's thread Ripper it's close enough it's so glorious\n"