The 64 Core Threadripper 3990X CPU Review: In The Midst Of Chaos, AMD Seeks Opportunity
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on February 7, 2020 9:00 AM ESTAMD 3990X Against Prosumer CPUs
The first set of consumers that will be interested in this processor will be those looking to upgrade into the best consumer/prosumer HEDT package available on the market. The $3990 price is a high barrier to entry, but these users and individuals can likely amortize the cost of the processor over its lifetime. To that end, we’ve selected a number of standard HEDT processors that are near in terms of price/core count, as well as putting in the 8-core 5.0 GHz Core i9-9900KS and the 28-core unlocked Xeon W-3175X.
AMD 3990X Consumer Competition | ||||||
AnandTech | AMD 3990X |
AMD 3970X |
Intel 3175X |
Intel i9- 10980XE |
AMD 3950X |
Intel 9900KS |
SEP | $3990 | $1999 | $2999 | $979 | $749 | $513 |
Cores/T | 64/128 | 32/64 | 28/56 | 18/36 | 16/32 | 8/16 |
Base Freq | 2900 | 3700 | 3100 | 3000 | 3500 | 5000 |
Turbo Freq | 4300 | 4500 | 4300 | 4800 | 4700 | 5000 |
PCIe | 4.0 x64 | 4.0 x64 | 3.0 x48 | 3.0 x48 | 4.0 x24 | 3.0 x16 |
DDR | 4x 3200 | 4x 3200 | 6x 2666 | 4x 2933 | 2x 3200 | 2x 2666 |
Max DDR | 512 GB | 512 GB | 512 GB | 256 GB | 128 GB | 128 GB |
TDP | 280 W | 280 W | 255 W | 165 W | 105 W | 127 W |
The 3990X is beyond anything in price at this level, and even at the highest consumer cost systems, $1000 could be the difference between getting two or three GPUs in a system. There has to be big upsides here moving from the 32 core to the 64 core.
Corona is a classic 'more threads means more performance' benchmark, and while the 3990X doesn't quite get perfect scaling over the 32 core, it is almost there.
The 3990X scores new records in our Blender test, with sizeable speed-ups against the other TR3 hardware.
Photoscan is a variable threaded test, and the AMD CPUs still win here, although 24 core up to 64 core all perform within about a minute of each other in this 20 minute test. Intel's best consumer hardware is a few minutes behind.
y-cruncher is an AVX-512 accelerated test, and so Intel's 28-core with AVX-512 wins here. Interestingly the 128 cores of the 3990X get in the way here, likely the spawn time of so many threads is adding to the overall time.
GIMP is a single threaded test designed around opening the program, and Intel's 5.0 GHz chip is the best here. the 64 core hardware isn't that bad here, although the W10 Enterprise data has the better result.
Without any hand tuned code, between 32 core and 64 core workloads on 3DPM, there's actually a slight deficit on 64 core.
But when we crank in the hand tuned code, the AVX-512 CPUs storm ahead by a considerable margin.
We covered Digicortex on the last page, but it seems that the different thread groups on W10 Pro is holidng the 3990X back a lot. With SMT disabled, we score nearer 3x here.
Luxmark is an AVX2 accelerated program, and having more cores here helps. But we see little gain from 32C to 64C.
As we saw on the last page, POV-Ray preferred having SMT off for the 3990X, otherwise there's no benefit over the 32-core CPU.
AES gets a slight bump over the 32 core, however not as much as the 2x price difference would have you believe.
As we saw on the previous page, W10 Enterprise causes our Handbrake test to go way up, but on W10 Pro then the 3990X loses ground to the 3950X.
And how about a simple game test - we know 64 cores is overkill for games, so here's a CPU bount test. There's not a lot in it between the 3990X and the 3970X, but Intel's high frequency CPUs are the best here.
Verdict
There are a lot of situations where the jump from AMD's 32-core $1999 CPU, the 3970X, up to the 64-core $3990 CPU only gives the smallest tangible gain. That doesn't bode well. The benchmarks that do get the biggest gains however can get near perfect scaling, making the 3990X a fantastic upgrade. However those tests are few and far between. If these were the options, the smart money is on the 3970X, unless you can be absolutely clear that the software you run can benefit from the extra cores.
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james4591 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
It's only useless to people who don't know how to use it.SanX - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Useless is probably Ian's own test of 3D particle movement which demonstrates just one single feature of AVX instruction set. Was there any real life or synthetic tests which use AVX512 or AVX256 to get a clue what improvement it really gives? Watching pure single instruction speed improvement having 12x speed boost is pathetic has no sense. Compile with and without AVX and show us if it gets any meaningful speedup at east from something useful like Gauss elimination Ax=B solvernsmeds - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
For AVX influence on Gaussian elimination take a look at HPL. It does have a huge impact as the matrix update in every reduction step fits extremely well to AVX512. See http://www.top500.org If you want to experiment there are implementations available from Intel (MKL) and AMD (BLIS, libFLAME and HPL-FLAME from github) see eghttps://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&...
Several scientific workloads fit well to AVX512 usage but definitely not all. Adapting a code to effectively use AVX512 can be labour intensive though and for research purposes may make the code harder to adapt for researchers. It may be more important that researchers can implement new ideas easily than run at optimal efficiency. And only for large problem sizes the effort of putting data nicely in memory may be amortized by the the speedup from AVX512.
realbabilu - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
Just checking the Openblas, Intel MKL, and Blis with lapack DGETRI inverse matrix and Crout inverse of fortran polyhedron benchmark. The march=core-avx512 and march=core-avx2 help the calculation faster. From 30s to 17s in 9750H.nt300 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Another phenomenal processor from AMD.Catering to a market that wants such processors.
Anybody claiming these are useless don't understand the Computer Industry.
AshlayW - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
Another useless comment from a tool.Zak90 - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
?timecop1818 "Another useless processor from AMD"-->Idiot!!!
levizx - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
Another waste of food water and air waste skin suit spottedevernessince - Sunday, February 9, 2020 - link
AnandTech would be better off disabling article comments if they aren't going to bother moderating blatant trolls.nt300 - Sunday, February 9, 2020 - link
Another Superior Processor from AMD.Bar None, AMD annihilates Intel in everything. AMDs price/performance is KING.