so thanks for watching guys don't forget to drop a like on a minute
you can't just do that like we gotta actually talk about this thing
well i showed them all they needed to know yeah it's faster and that
okay yes that was pretty definitive but
there is way more to the story here guys we're gonna give you the rundown on
AMD's threadripper 3990x the first desktop 64 core processor
and we're going to give you the rundown on our sponsor glassware instantly see
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so AMD's 32 core threadripper 3970x
already beats the pants off Intel's top-end core i9 and xeon products so the
first question we had to ask ourselves here was
given that they have no competition in this segment already
why is AMD even bothering to launch this product yeah it's overkill in pretty
much every possible way 64 cores 128 threads 288 megabytes of
cash and official support for up to 3 200 megahertz memory with single rank 8
Gigabyte sticks even if that doesn't carry over to all the higher capacities and the craziest
thing about it is that the normal rule where high core count cpus have poor
performance in lightly threaded applications
just doesn't seem to apply here we've got about a four percent drop in
our single thread cinebench score compared to our ryzen 9 3950x that's
AMD's highest boosting desktop chip
so from a business perspective one of the obvious concerns when you go all out
on a desktop processor is that even though this thing is still pricey at 4
000 us dollars this is essentially the exact same
silicon as their 64 core epic server
processor only you get 88 instead of 128
pci express gen 4 lanes and four of the
eight memory channels are disabled so
that's thousands of dollars less for
what is essentially still 64 cores
so there's this risk then of competing
against yourself by giving customers the option of
getting most of the benefit of your professional grade product with a
cheaper one yeah cheaper the only two
possible answers to me are that the they're doing it out of uh share
vindictiveness to embarrass Intel or it's more of a marketing exercise to use
their technological advantage right now to pump their stock price relieve some
of their debt and grab some important mind share the halo effect works yeah
see top end product it performs better slightly lower in product i can afford
oh it's probably better blur studio famously rendered terminator dark fate
on 3rd gen threadripper and giving studios like that twice as many cores is
probably going to result in a lot more headlines like that that's great
marketing and besides the thing is epic is still going to be the best tool
for certain things it's the only way to get support for two
zen 2 cpus on a single motherboard and as i discovered with our new NVMe server
both pci express lanes and memory bandwidth can quickly become bottlenecks
when you're throwing enough data around like in a high-speed storage server now
to be clear you would never run that
many drives on a threadripper workstation so i wouldn't expect it to
be a problem it's all about using the right tool for
the job and this is gonna be the right tool for
a lot of jobs it's got a massive 280 watt TDP that's
25 higher than the 64 core epic 7742
but it results in a nearly thirty percent higher base clock and a max
boost as high as four point three gigahertz way higher than epic this
thing is going to scream but like in what i mean cinebench yeah but do we
actually have anything that can properly stress a 64 core CPU like look at this
is that not ridiculous like just look at it
nobody's ever seen anything like that yeah that's a bit of a problem with
Windows splitting threads into groups of 64 applications have to explicitly add
support for spanning multiple thread groups in order to use all 128 threads
on the 3990x at once that's not a major deal breaker for specialized workloads
designed with multi-socket machines and massive core counts in mind but it may
limit us when we try to push it just like we did with our epic 7742 now AMD
told us that we should expect the best bang for buck with workloads that can
utilize one to two gigabytes of RAM per thread typical benchmarks like cinebench
here are so short that they don't give you a clear idea of how much time you
can end up saving on a large-scale project okay so that was a lot of
talking but what i'm hearing is we don't have anything
well one suggestion they had was we could compile a large program like a web
browser okay why don't we throw what we have at it uh we don't have to let this
single threaded uh cinebench r20 run no i already know what the answer is yeah i
know it was about 500 500 exactly 500 okay
and this thing's impressive and like look at this it's turboing up to i saw
it go as high as around 4.2 in this load sitting around the 4.05
4.15 range like
it's great i love it already so review over then
um no no okay so let's let's see if it could possibly justify its four thousand
dollar price all right it's fired up holy crap i have never seen this run
like this uh yeah no this is supposed to take like
10 minutes plus we are turboing to three gigahertz on 64
cores what kind of heat is this thing kicking off it's not even that crazy
no no it's not even the heat pipes are only kind of warm and it is kind of cool
here in the warehouse but yeah that's true that's an advantage the craziest thing
about this is that this benchmark takes two and a half three minutes to even
start running because it has to go fetch a bunch of resources and it's largely a
single or two threaded task that means we've only actually been running this
for about a minute and a half and it's
half done you know what that might be
remember how you said like oh doesn't this normally take like a minute a minute and a half
and it took much longer yeah it's hammering the SSD
okay we'll talk about that more later should have gone optane oh
well AMD didn't recommend opting well AMD
has a [ __ ] agenda i think what i'm gonna have to do is
time it after the resources have loaded that's the only fair thing to do between
no i think it's fair for you know if your bullet it doesn't work
because of other system bottlenecks and you didn't work around that then
you should have to run the benchmark same way as everybody else i mean we
could show it in both we could show both ways holy crap
so from resource fetching being finished to completing this render
was under three minutes no about three minutes yeah that's
that's more like titan rtx with the new ray tracing renderer
running on CPU yeah unreal now let's hit
it with v-ray more like hit v-ray with it
yeah look at all those cores light up yeah the crazy thing about watching this
is it almost looks like a GPU demo yeah
like how how quickly the image
goes from totally crappy to like okay it's starting to look photorealistic
it's not it's not GPU performance but it's
it's also not CPU performance it's like it's some weird in between just because
of so many threads like that's kind of the thing with gpus they
have a lot of compute units that can crunch on little kind of like sub thread
lit things but like this this is just
straight up threads wow
72 752.
how did our 3970x do uh
44643 now it's not perfect scaling
but that is pretty darn good
yeah and our Intel bench like 36 000.
NVIDIA except not except actually just running on a CPU
so what you're looking at right now is crisis the original crisis
but running completely in software on the CPU our
GPU is doing nothing
actually wait no our GPU is not doing nothing why is our GPU doing something
it's uh doing i think it's doing the media decode oh yeah i think you're
right oh that's hilarious okay single player you know what's funny
at first i thought that this wasn't working because last time when i tried doing it
on the CPU the background was black it didn't load
it's just working like way better yeah
wow wait are you sure this looks like it
might be running on GPU um you'll see here we go all right rock on there go
though okay hold on wait for it yeah every everything that
it has to load will take a little a little while but then
then it gets a little bit better every time
okay we're good we good we good
oh we less good this is nothing fuds
and if you guys want to see it do even more we actually have an upcoming video
planned where we're gonna put this thing under our completely redesigned subzero
chiller so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that this is crazy
this is definitely running smoother than last time Anthony yeah
this is noticeably better actually look it's hitting all the cores
a little bit yeah yeah this is way more playable than last time like i i can
play games like this if i have to i used to on my pentium 4. that's right you had
a pretty crappy computer when you started here didn't you um i know it
wasn't that bad i had a 6 700k and uh oh
okay 1080 when i started here yeah like i i got me some kills yo yeah you
struggled to even hit anything last time yeah like it's to be clear it's not
great yeah it's not what you'd call a good experience but like
the fact that it's running acceptably on a CPU unreal yeah like the 64 core i
mean cryengine cryengine yeah yeah
really impressive numbers like mind blowing but the thing is if you're
actually considering purchasing one of these monsters you got to make sure you
do your research not every load is going to scale the way that some of the ones
we showed did for example we did a firefox compile benchmark and it only
outperformed the 32 core threadripper by a very narrow margin now
some compiles will get a lot of benefit from the additional course it's just
that not all of them will you also need to make sure that you do your research
the low volume motherboards for these kinds of bleeding edge platforms can be
quirky at best so make sure you check out user reviews and
we got a really counter-intuitive configuration tip from AMD themselves
they actually recommended against using
a pci express gen 4 SSD with the 3990x
like what so get this guys
most gen 4 ssds are improperly tuned for
desktop workloads because huge bandwidth numbers look great in the marketing
materials thing is though it's iops that you actually want for peak system
responsiveness and with so many threads
pounding the SSD while you're working on something that becomes even more of a
concern with a CPU like this one so on a
poorly optimized drive even a mundane task like a background antivirus scan
could become crippling so the best choice would obviously be something like
Intel's optane although AMD didn't specifically mention octane for fairly
obvious reasons grow up guys all right so then AMD is
clearly not shying away from the reality that most people who don't want to worry
about that kind of nonsense should just buy a Ryzen 9 39 50 x which raises the
question who is this thing actually for
the answer apparently is the desk side
compute sector people who need immediate access to large amounts of processing
power at their desks that means it's for vfx artists who are doing iterations on
a project or programmers who are recompiling large complex application
packages on the fly so the kind of stuff that would take a lot longer if you had
to throw it into the processing queue for a group server every time you tweak
something i can also see the utility of this kind of a CPU in a virtualization
environment at 39.90 us dollars you're
looking at a relatively low cost for a
lot of cores and with the ability to split everything into four distinct
pneuma nodes you've got this natural splitting point for a handful of 16 core
vms with minimal performance loss due to memory access overhead
except that there's an elephant in the room that puts a bit of a damper on my
excitement for this product overall AMD and their
infinite wisdom decided to pull an Intel
with their total memory capacity support
by only supporting standard unbuffered
dimms that means that threadripper even though
it has an on paper support for up to two
terabytes of RAM is practically speaking stuck with a
maximum of gigabytes today so while it smokes the
xeon w3275 in raw compute
that chip from Intel supports up to one terabyte of RAM which for some workloads
is far more important than how many cores you have
so why doesn't AMD want their flagship
64 core Threadripper to support registered or load reduced dimms
well because despite the fact that epic
supports a whopping 4 terabytes of memory and considering that even
supporting registered dimms would have doubled threadripper's maximum capacity
without even surpassing an eighth of epix they simply didn't want to risk
stepping on their big boy CPU's toes
it's one of those artificial limitations that in this case
seriously hurts the 3990x's future
utility in high-end vfx work because remember 256 gigs is the standard for
that kind of work in 4k today
that's to say nothing for when compositions get more complex and higher
in resolution so this is just the craziest
4 000 dead end that i sincerely hope can be
fixed by a firmware update not by waiting around for bigger
unbuffered dimms to come along like seriously guys you don't need to do
this epic still has double the total
memory bandwidth double the theoretical memory capacity
more pci express lanes and for the non-p skus dual socket support don't you think
that's enough differentiation or are you starting to regret all the
big specs that you guys built into the platform now that you're actually
selling cpus that don't have any competition
this right here is exhibit a for why you shouldn't fanboy folks
still a win is a win and i can't deny AMD that
as inapplicable as this may be for
almost a hundred percent of you watching today and even much of its target market
unfortunately it serves its most important function as a halo product
extremely well and it's an incredibly exciting milestone for personal
computing not only is AMD putting an unprecedented amount of processing power
in the high-end desktop market but at this price
Intel's not even in the same ballpark their closest competitor overall is the
28 core xeon w 3275 which costs a good
500 more and while it may support
practically speaking four times the memory that threadripper does it just
doesn't come close to the compute performance on display here to even
approach that you would need dual xeon platinum 8280s and with those costing
over ten thousand dollars each there's a very real discussion to be had about
which you need more the horsepower or the memory capacity
i mean fortunately for Intel they do have a bigger and every way data center
CPU that might smoke threadripper the xeon 9282 with 56 cores but i have no
way of knowing if it works really well because it costs so much that Intel
doesn't even list a price meaning it's probably high enough that i couldn't even trade an autographed kidney for one
so then that's it AMD is so far ahead in compute
performance on the desktop right now that the only useful comparison is a
data center CPU and they've begun purposely kneecapping their desktop
chips in ways that make them only just barely marketable to their target
audience seemingly in an effort to keep their profits higher so that they can
sell epic chips instead which is really frustrating because the epics don't
turbo the same way and actually might not be as good for this kind of a
workload it's like bizarro world the situation right here is where Intel was
when they launched sandy bridge just like kicking AMD while they were down
you know artificially limiting their best cpus and pulling a big enough lead
that for their competitor to catch up they would need a whole new architecture
which Intel is presumably working on and i am very excited to see it those guys
really do do their best work with egg all over their faces don't they
and i do my best work in my sponsor segways today's video is brought to you
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the video description thanks for watching guys go check out our AMD epic
7742 video if you're wondering what to watch next it is the
big boy pants equivalent to the 3990x
that AMD clearly wants you to buy instead i'll see you over there