we're going to be talking about AMD's phenom CPU
where am i my why is my shirt black
like hey hey whoa oh wait oh what where
am i now oh i got my own media group
cool oh check this out i ride one of these
sick
oh this must be my my office
oh look at this thing is this this a CPU
wow look at the size of it
ripper too could the is it could it be
the future
no no it's not the future it's today it's the AMD ryzen
threadripper ii 2990wx and it is right now and our video about
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so young lioness there came from a world where the Intel core 2 and AMD phenomx 4
series of quad-core processors had the
highest core counts among consumer products but in the 10 years since then
the situation has changed a lot with AMD
launching an industry shaking 16 core
Threadripper processor last year and then following it up today with the
debut of the 2990 wx a 32 core
64 thread successor now they've created a ton of excitement
amongst both consumers and professionals
and they have sown a lot of discord with
their competition over at Intel who have reacted to the disruption with their own
high-end desktop chips based on the same dna as their xeon server lineup and then
this weird like 28 core demo thing that
they were doing at computex this year and then shortly afterward tried to hide
anyway hype train aside though one thing that
we know about threadripper 2 before we
even start testing it is that this
is not a gaming centric CPU i mean even
ignoring the 1300 and eighteen hundred
dollar price tags when we dig even a little bit further
into the specs we find that the wx series so these are the two new high-end
ones doesn't turbo up as fast as its ex
brethren the direct zen plus replacements for last year's thread
ripper one of course with that said we're still going to run
some gaming benchmarks anyway so normally we actually breeze by our test
benches but this time there are a couple of important notes so AMD has created a
really solid upgrade path for their x 399 customers by allowing existing
boards like this zenith extreme from ASUS to run the new chips with nothing
but a BIOS update with that said ASUS
did have some concerns about overclocking and up to 200 250 watt chip
on boards that weren't necessarily designed for that so they equipped us
with their rog zenith extreme cooling kit you shouldn't need this kind of
thing for stock operation or if you have excellent air flow over your socket area
already but if you're overclocking we would
strongly recommend it all right the first big surprise in our
gaming testing was discovering that threadripper 1
is actually faster in some cases in
spite of threadripper 2's higher clock speeds
even after multiple runs these results persisted which might seem like some
kind of a mistake but as it turns out the less sophisticated first generation
precision boost so that's AMD's dynamic clock speed optimization engine kept the
core clocks higher more often with precision boost 2 more aggressively
utilizing its intermediate clocks instead of being either full out or
clocked down so we actually ended up losing some raw speed but what we're
getting back in return is more consistency
another thing that impacted gaming is uma versus numa memory access modes
now it's quite a bit more complicated but in layman's terms uma is typically
better for multi-threaded workloads thanks to its more consistent memory
bandwidth while pneuma can come out ahead sometimes thanks to a small
latency advantage in lighter ones it
should be noted that only the x series allows you to decide which mode you
prefer wx only runs in numa mode this
was to retain intergenerational compatibility and i would say that there
are probably some creator by day gamer by night folks out there who are going
to be pretty pleased with the upgrade path that AMD has provided here i mean
the 2990 wx isn't
far and away the fastest CPU in every
test that we ran blender which leverages Intel's avx 512
extensions is a notable exception and single threaded tests are obviously not
its strong suit but this this is one
powerful piece of silicon even Intel's marginally more expensive 7980xe
is no match when threadripper2wx
gets to stretch its legs now on the subject of stretching them
let's uh try some overclocking shall we
now you can still overclock threadripper
2 manually but in theory anyway AMD's
precision boost overdrive allows the user to simply
set a higher power budget and then watch while precision boost 2 and xfr so
that's extended frequency range too do all the heavy lifting only some of our
workloads actually improved in performance while others straight up
regressed we think this has to do with some kind of weird thermal limit as
indicated by the identical 68 degree t-die reading at both stock and
overclock speeds in spite of our beefy cooler but that may require further
investigation let us know if you'd like to see a dedicated threadripper 2
overclocking video for now i'm just going to grab this grab this baby
here's what we can say 32 cores in a consumer or prosumer or
workstation chip whatever you want to classify it as
sounds amazing it is exactly the
headline that AMD needs as a company right now to gain valuable what's called
mind share where normal consumers are more likely to run out and buy normal
ryzen chips because the world record holders and the influential content
creators that they admire are using AMD
in the real world though the potential market for a product like this
is pretty limited now the 2990 wx
is the high-end workstation king
but you need workloads like heavy virtualization or 3d rendering or gas
exploration that take advantage of it otherwise honestly speaking you'd be
better off spending half as much on a
2950x the 16 core drop in replacement
for the older 16 core but now with zen plus or looking at Intel's lineup if avx
512 support or single threaded performance are also important to you
but maybe at the end of the day it doesn't matter who it's for
maybe this was just about building an amazing piece of technology and then
patiently waiting for the use cases to show up because
i mean if there's anything that the history of computing has shown us it's
that if you breed a faster horse someone somewhere is going to build a
more challenging course
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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked
it's hard to be an Intel fanboy today isn't it
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