AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Offers Incredible Linux Performance

[dispat0r]

I wonder how much these results could further be improved upon with a purpose built driver for AMD Zen CPUs akin to Intel's "intel_pstate / intel-cpufreq" instead of utilising the rather generic "acpi-cpufreq"?

Any status update on that front, bridgman?

On a 3970x you can have idle=poll with no difference in power usage so something is up with acpi_idle.

[Black Overlord]

I’m for 6 clusters based on the 3950s, for this money), 1.5 times more memory and cores, just for the full Ikea Helmer. 6 clusters of 3950x / 64ram 3200 / ssd240 / 750v Performance will be even higher than 1.5 times, since there are 3 GHz on all cores, and in the 3950x - 4 GHz. There are 384 memories, instead of 256 possible, you still need to try to find good 32GB dies, and when there are a lot of dice, their frequency decreases, those 2666 MHz - I think it will be the maximum for them. Apart from the flexibility of work and the fantastic fault tolerance and reliability: 6 nodes instead of one, those work will not stop in any case, if something fails. You can divide into 3 stations 2 clusters or 2 3, and do 2-3 tasks at the same time. Tale in general. 😀

[chithanh]

The Threadripper 3990X was able to build the Linux 5.4 kernel in just 22 seconds! With some tuning of storage so it's no longer the bottleneck (or building from RAM), we can perhaps see it break 20 seconds... More testing as time allows.

I wonder why the Corsair MP600 was used for this review. According to LTT, AMD specifically recommends not using the current generation of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, due to low number of IOPS.

This CPU is clearly amazing and I have been looking into putting a system together for scientific calculations. Trouble is there is barely any UDIMM ECC memory available.

Yeah, LTT calls out AMD on this one too. The lack of RDIMM/LR-DIMM support really limits the appeal of this CPU. AMD apparently hopes to sell more Epyc CPUs through these market segmentation games.

Does anyone have experience with building an affordable (as in <$10k) 64 core system for science/computing?

64 Zen1 cores is now "cheap" to build. Epyc 7551 costs around 1300 EUR here, a dual socket Supermicro H11DSi costs around 600 EUR. Add cooler, case, PSU, SSD and you will be at around 3600 EUR. For Zen2 with Epyc 7452 add another 2000 EUR.

[betam4x]

Wow, this CPU is a beast. Go AMD

I read somewhere that with such powerful CPUs, VMware changed their license for CPUs with 32 cores and increased prices for 64 core CPUs.

They did, however, under Linux, KVM is free and works just fine.

[betam4x]

I wonder why the Corsair MP600 was used for this review. According to LTT, AMD specifically recommends not using the current generation of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, due to low number of IOPS.

Yeah, LTT calls out AMD on this one too. The lack of RDIMM/LR-DIMM support really limits the appeal of this CPU. AMD apparently hopes to sell more Epyc CPUs through these market segmentation games.

64 Zen1 cores is now "cheap" to build. Epyc 7551 costs around 1300 EUR here, a dual socket Supermicro H11DSi costs around 600 EUR. Add cooler, case, PSU, SSD and you will be at around 3600 EUR. For Zen2 with Epyc 7452 add another 2000 EUR.

The build times are definitely IO bound. My 1950X gets similar results (20-30 seconds). Sometimes the build system runs so fast, it errors out due to timing issues.

[betam4x]

I have no use for this many cores, but I might buy one for the hell of it.

[111alan]

Have you tried "node interleave" option for dual xeon config? Some of the tests seems to be numa-unaware.

[intelfx]

Hot damn.

[numacross]

This CPU is clearly amazing and I have been looking into putting a system together for scientific calculations. Trouble is there is barely any UDIMM ECC memory available. Most UDIMM ECC tops out at 2133MHz (you would probably want to feed this thing with 3200MHz memory.

Samsung has a product that fits, but it's not available yet in volume. In the meantime there's the 2666MHz version with the same status, but it's available for purchase. I've had success with running Samsung UDIMM ECC 2400 at 2933 or even 3200MHz on Zen+/2, but it requires a bit of tuning just like Threadripper 3

TPU published a very nice article about tuning TR3 with great results:

[nuetzel]

With the 'right' switch for 'MKL-DNN DNNL v1.1'...?