AMD Pushes Back 3rd Gen Threadripper & Ryzen 9 3950X Until November

[coder]

So which box you want to get? I think Threadripper's looks very nice on the desk or shelf.

With the new I/O die, there's basically no downside (except cost) to going with Threadripper. Before, you'd take a hit of potentially being an extra hop away from DRAM - now, you're always 1 hop away.
:-/

So, now the only question is whether you need the extra capabilities enough to justify the price.

[LeJimster]

I know everyone is citing capacity as the reason for the delay. But I'm wondering if its due to not enough volume of chiplets capable of hitting the advertised boost speed. Maybe they want to avoid any more negative PR by making sure stable bios and adequate quality chips are available at launch.

I'm also wondering if the boost clocks will be even higher on threadripper. Looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

[angrypie]

Milking every single MHz out of the CPUs is kinda pointless when they already have an IPC advantage over current-gen intel. Also I don't think anyone should be buying 12- and 16-core CPUs only for gaming, 8-core (and even 6-core) Ryzens are already enough for that.

[caligula]

Milking every single MHz out of the CPUs is kinda pointless when they already have an IPC advantage over current-gen intel. Also I don't think anyone should be buying 12- and 16-core CPUs only for gaming, 8-core (and even 6-core) Ryzens are already enough for that.

Hardcore gamers yearn for those 6 GHz single core CPUs, with no iGPU on chip, paired with ultra low latency low bandwidth RAM. It's the single thread performance that counts. Maybe even use a real time OS with no threading at all.

[angrypie]

Hardcore gamers yearn for those 6 GHz single core CPUs, with no iGPU on chip, paired with ultra low latency low bandwidth RAM. It's the single thread performance that counts. Maybe even use a real time OS with no threading at all.

They'd be pretty satisfied with old DOS games if it weren't for the wanking over graphics quality. I mean who the hell still plays games for fun amirite.

[coder]

It's the single thread performance that counts.

Well, single-thread performance counts, but it's certainly not as if games don't use multiple cores. Even moreso, as we're transitioning from a baseline of dual-core to quad-core CPUs.

These guys claim that 60% of their players now have >= 4 cores:

https://worldoftanks.eu/en/news/general-news/update-1-4-concurrency/

(hint: don't specify your region, or it will redirect you to the main page)

[coder]

They'd be pretty satisfied with old DOS games if it weren't for the wanking over graphics quality. I mean who the hell still plays games for fun amirite.

Uh, no, not really. I like 2D shooters, and there are plenty of good ones on old systems (specifically 16-bit & 32-bit). But, as soon as you get into true 3D, a lot of older games are just too basic.

Low-res and lack of AA always bugged me. It wasn't until mostly later PS3 games that I felt the graphical quality was really good enough to be a non-issue. That said, Nintendo was always good at cartoony-style 3D, but then N64 even had tri-linear interpolation (though most games just used bi-linear).

[caligula]

They'd be pretty satisfied with old DOS games if it weren't for the wanking over graphics quality. I mean who the hell still plays games for fun amirite.

Well I wasn't implying they should use ancient legacy systems. The system could run a modern 64-bit OS. It's just that the typical OS features bring unnecessary overhead for games. Imagine a Linux with most subsystems cut off. It mainly needs to support modern GPUs (latest generation Radeon and Geforce), DDR4 RAM, Core i7/i9/Ryzen CPUs, 1 or 2 file systems, generic NVMe disks, wired ethernet (Intel), a single sound card driver (e.g. Intel HDA).

[angrypie]

Well I wasn't implying they should use ancient legacy systems. The system could run a modern 64-bit OS. It's just that the typical OS features bring unnecessary overhead for games. Imagine a Linux with most subsystems cut off. It mainly needs to support modern GPUs (latest generation Radeon and Geforce), DDR4 RAM, Core i7/i9/Ryzen CPUs, 1 or 2 file systems, generic NVMe disks, wired ethernet (Intel), a single sound card driver (e.g. Intel HDA).

I wasn't implying that either. I was pointing out that a close-to-metal, single-task OS for single-core CPUs already exists, but people migrated from it for some reason. Probably because handwritten Assembly scales poorly once you want to do something more complex than a Super Mario clone. John Carmack is one of a kind.

Unless you want to pay like $3k for a game, which is likely the price of a game that isn't just slapping textures to a bloated game engine made by underpaid code monkeys.

(Forgot to add that hardware for high-level languages is... not a good idea. Just ask Sun and Intel.)

[coder]

Well I wasn't implying they should use ancient legacy systems. The system could run a modern 64-bit OS. It's just that the typical OS features bring unnecessary overhead for games.

Hence, Vulkan. That was about giving rendering engine developers the low-level access to the GPU that they really wanted.

Imagine a Linux with most subsystems cut off. It mainly needs to support modern GPUs (latest generation Radeon and Geforce), DDR4 RAM, Core i7/i9/Ryzen CPUs, 1 or 2 file systems, generic NVMe disks, wired ethernet (Intel), a single sound card driver (e.g. Intel HDA).

Unless you're talking about removing the kernel/userspace boundary, I don't see any big wins from that. I don't believe there's a whole lot of overhead weighing down Linux gaming, beyond the sort of stuff that's already addressed by Game Mode.