now the whole industry has been really excited about how AMD's 3rd gen ryzen
processors have finally caught up to Intel in key consumer applications like
gaming but in the background AMD has
been quietly not just catching up to Intel but surpassing them by an
incredible margin with their second generation of epic
server processors and in my hands i have the epic rom 7742
a 64 core
128 thread eight channel memory absolute
monster of a CPU welcome to
today's episode of holy sh
where we are gonna take this thing for a little test drive guys the full review
will come make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that but today is going
to be more about the stuff that AMD didn't want to see us a processor
because they knew we were gonna do like running cinebenching games and all that
kind of fun stuff speaking of fun this segue to our
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so while we get set up here i want to fill you guys in on some of what's special about AMD's epic roam platform
so as i mentioned before this is a 77 42
with 64 cores and 128 threads but
contrary to what you might think if your only CPU experience is with Intel
processors even though it has 64 cores in it its
225 watt TDP is not
actually that much higher than Intel's
top of the line server chips which only have a mirror
it's hard to wrap my brain around saying that a mere 28 course on board and the
unfairness of this comparison doesn't end at the core counts and the thermals
at the top end AMD boasts nearly seven
times the cash four times the maximum memory capacity two extra memory
channels pci express gen four which is
double the speed of gen three not to mention that they've got nearly three
times as many lanes on board and
they come in at four thousand dollars less and that's just at
the top end up and down the stack
Intel's xeon scalable processors are
under attack from AMD epic rome and it
gets better than that so a little over 15 years ago AMD made a huge step
forward in computer architecture by taking the memory controller off of the
north bridge that that second chipset that motherboards used to have on them and
integrating it into the CPU now
they've done themselves one further by taking nearly everything that still
existed whether you want to call it a a chipset or an i o hub or whatever else
but that still existed on a separate ship on the motherboard and integrated
it right into the CPU yes even all those
pci express lanes that is the secret
sauce that makes epic so modular and scalable and flexible it means that
whether we're talking about a motherboard like this one that super micro very kindly sent over to us along
with the CPU for us to do this preliminary testing or whether you're
talking about a fully integrated server that takes all those pci express lanes
and wires them up directly to NVMe drives all across the front of the thing
instead of using you know splitters and switches and all that kind of nonsense
AMD doesn't have to go head-to-head with
Intel in terms of raw CPU performance
that's not to say that they can't actually the CPU performance we're
expecting will be very good but it means
that the solution is just capable of stuff that Intel flat
out cannot do right now so why don't we fire it up
it's like mind-blowing that we have 64
processing cores and a northbridge effectively
sitting under a single Noctua cooler
getting all hot and bothered let me take off my sweater nice sweater
right lct store.com also this shirt
so for lulls more than anything else we're going to kick things off with cinebench r15 a benchmark that everyone
knows is sort of light for modern multi-core
processors never mind modern epic
look at all those threads it's ridiculous
it's so dumb and this is cool only two pneuma domains
and if you're nerdy enough you'll know why that's really cool it is incredibly
hard to do that with this many cores
AMD has figured out a way even in their dual or multi-socket configurations to
dramatically reduce the number of pneuma domains that are required for these
massive core counts something that Intel actually lorded over them just last
generation so no more anticipation let's do it
and it's gone
8450 in cinebench r15
on a single CPU it's not even running
long enough to load up the the to get hot the fan didn't even spin up
so obviously we're gonna need something a little heavier let's step up to cinebench r20 which is based on a much
more modern version of maxon cinema 4d
this thing wrecks r20 the way that high-end desktop Intel
chips wreck r15 like
boom this just beat a 48 core configuration
of dual xeon platinum 8168s
so more perspective here each of those chips is within striking
distance of the cost of a single
7742 and that's ignoring that it takes two of
them to not even have the same performance not to mention all the
memory channels and pci express lanes and blah blah blah all that other stuff
it's madness and things get a little bit more crazy here now the eagle-eyed among
you probably noticed that we're only running four memory sticks in this
motherboard right now the reason is that
at least in our early testing we were having trouble getting unbuffered ecc
memory to run in it we are also going to be significantly
upgrading the memory capacity of our system here each of these
is a 32 Gigabyte dim
so that will be 256 gigs of RAM so there it is 256 gigs
of RAM and this hardware is too new to have the readout for how many memory
channels and what speed it's running at and all that noise so i guess we'll have to fire up like
hw info yeah okay cool let's do that all right so we're running at 26.66
which happens to be the rated speed of our memory we've got our rtx 2080 ti
which is totally inappropriate everything here is looking
pretty right all right let's try cinebench r20 again
now to be clear i'm not expecting a huge difference in performance going from
quad to eight channel memory in this particular workload
uh there are very few if any single user
use cases where you're really going to get a benefit from that much memory
bandwidth it's more for like actual legitimate server use and as expected
our score is pretty darn similar if you got eight channels y'all might as well
use them on the subject of single user workloads though here's one that can
really benefit from extra CPU power let's go ahead and do the classic bmw
blender render and see just how much of our CPU we can
load up here wow
even blender which is traditionally a
very multi-threaded workload cannot take
advantage of all 128 of our threads
maxing out at around 80 85 of them or so
it's only using half of them is blender numa aware that's fine we
have a solution to unlock this fully armed and operational
battle station we're just going to run two instances of
the render at the same time
there it is so we are turboing to just
shy of 2.5 gigahertz we are seeing
100 usage of all 64 of our cores 128
threads and i am willing to bet that this thing is kicking out some heat i
needed to dry my hair cool
the fan's not really ramping up okay these fins are getting pretty
toasty is this fan going to ramp up at some point i might not be on the right header
supermicro doesn't label their headers particularly clearly
we could just try a different one oops
so impressively it still managed to finish while running two blender
instances simultaneously in a minute and 14 seconds apiece all
right so now that we've got our fan figured out properly let's go ahead and have a look at what we can expect in
terms of CPU temperatures under a very heavy load so my friends that is 128
instances of prime95 i've never seen anything quite like that
and let's see what that does to our poor
7742 i wonder if it detects this as a power virus
every thread is only running at 93 94
so this isn't working and we think the CPU might be detecting prime95 as a
so-called power virus because it's even throttling below its base speed so we're
going to go ahead and kill that all right so this is more like it now we're
hitting every core for all it's worth we're actually managing to turbo a
little above our base clock to 2.5 gigahertz and
shockingly temperatures are not even just
reasonable they're downright under control we're actually only at about 50
degrees on the CPU now that our fan
turns up when there's heat going into the heatsink
now that might seem unintuitive having 64 cores running at a mere
up to 52 degrees when you've got like an eight
core Intel processor like a 9900k
that'll easily run at you know 70 plus
and it's only eight cores but in this case
epic's size and the lower frequency of its cores means that not only are the
cores more spread out making it easier to transfer heat into the heatsink but
because they're running at a lower frequency and a lower voltage it means
they're running much more efficiently pushing for that last little bit of
frequency requires a lot more power to be pumped through the chip and therefore
a lot more waste heat that dual gooseberry render though but enough of
all that it's time to answer the question you've all been waiting for can
it run crisis okay then 720p it is but we're gonna crank
everything to very high very high is grayed out also motion blur sucks
anytime now if this takes any longer i'm gonna have a mid-life crisis
that is pretty slow
wait a minute Anthony is this the CPU renderer version
yeah that's why i told you not to run over 720p
oh wow i'm surprised this is like running at all then
yeah i had everything on the blow and it's actually semi-playable on low
okay why don't we try that then i friggin figures i knew you were you had
some crazy trick up your sleeve alright so i
turned the in-game settings down to low and this is pretty darn impressive but
the best is yet to come so in order to
get this it's using a renderer called swift shader in order to get it to even
launch the game you have to change your CPU affinity to something other than all
processors so it looks like eight eight processors total so we
instead are going to allow it an entire pneuma
node now let's see how it runs
this is crazy now to be clear
no one at google where they're developing the software expects anyone
to game on cpus
as the graphics card anytime soon it's designed more
as like a compatibility layer but uh
it's working come on i want one kill
yes all right so now that we're not being
silly here it is 4k everything cranked to high
it's actually kind of amazing how still
kind of respectable this game looks all these years later
i mean the ai is dumb as toast by modern
standards and stuff but honestly crisis didn't run well but that's in large part
due to it just being really really old and not particularly well optimized
let's run something a little more modern and see how that goes shall we i mean
apex isn't exactly the most demanding game on the market but it's certainly
popular so so let's go have a look at how things are running here we are using
a grand total of two percent of our CPU
right now um
overall utilization and we peaked out about 12
in game we'll be turboing up to around three point okay nothing amazing like
3.3 3.4 gigahertz but that's more than enough to run this game
at 144 frames per second average we're actually locked to our refresh rate
because i didn't bother to adjust it holy crap i think my team is bothering
to respawn me here wow that uh that was a waste of effort
appreciate you guys though okay so i don't have any of my stuff now
though like i'm just naked at this point right wow they're like pinging stuff for
me i wonder if they know who i am uh h to thank them
thanks all right all right i'm coming i'm ready to contribute to the team now they're
they're trying so hard to help me like i feel so bad for them right now
seven squads left so we're actually like doing respectably
i think i'm not as much of a liability as dennis
oh no they pinged a thing we're oh we're going somewhere no no i don't want to go
anywhere i liked this place this place seemed pretty good oh oh shoot there's
like enemies all over the town run
i got a kill they totally like set it up for me but
whatever i want to win brandon i am a competitive gamer
hey there's nothing wrong with being supportive okay bras are supportive and
they're very popular
actually that's true millennials are apparently killing bras
okay there's only three squads left ladies and gentlemen
oh they're picking me up again go team if
they can kill that guy they may actually pick me up again let's see if i'm the
chico can take this guy out oh they might get him no way
wow we're one of the final squads these guys
oh man this is hilarious how do i heal
i don't know how to heal oh no hold four
hold it and then drag your mouse yeah let go and then now press four oh my goodness they go so
fast i can't keep up what where are we going okay i'm healing
i'm healing they can't hear me but whatever it's chill please just hit him
oh you gotta be kidding me i think i just got hit in the head
okay that's fine i will just heal more i'm just i'm a distraction i'm a
distraction i'm bleeding out no
no is it 1v3 right now oh no
no i leveled up so that's it for now this
thing renders it crunches it games it slices it dices it's pretty freaking
amazing and we've actually got a fair bit more content planned around AMD's
epic roam processors for the future so make sure you're subscribed so you don't
miss any of it and i think all that's left is to thank
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