AMD ThreadRipper Prices [Rumor]

[Saki630]

What do we do? Will [H]ardocp get review samples?

It looks as if AMD may be more economical with negligible performance differences if both camps can OC the chips past 4ghz and run a GTX1080ti.

 

[mesyn191]

....

All the Intel HEDT chips have been Xeon's with various features or hardware disabled as necessary for product differentiation or for binning and qualification purposes.

No one has done any detailed benching on Threadripper of any sort, at least publicly, but performance wise its likely the core is essentially the same as Ryzen. And the new Intel i9 HEDT chips are all fundamentally the same chip as Kabylake and Skylake too BTW.

So the new Intel HEDT chips will probably have about a 9% IPC advantage at the same clock, which isn't a big deal in of itself, but they will clock higher too. How much higher? Especially vs stock Threadripper or when overclocked? Don't really know but in general these big highly multicore chips tend to be poor overclockers compared to the smaller 4 and 2 core versions.

Personally I'm expecting Threadripper to top out around 4Ghz like Ryzen does. I'm expecting the higher core count i9's to top out around 4.6Ghz. That is for all cores at that clock and on air BTW. So Intel's HEDT is guaranteed to be the top performer over all but the prices will be a swift kick in the balls to anyone but a well off or rich person. On value, if these prices are correct, it looks like AMD's HEDT Threadripper will win hands down. Personally I care more about value these days, I still run Sandybridge, but everyone is different.

They'll both be furnaces when overclocked of course but Threadripper might have a nice edge on temps against some of the i9's thanks to the better IHS implementation. Delidding and re-TIM'ing a i9 with better paste will fix that of course but its a hassle that won't be necessary with Threadripper. Both of them will have expensive platforms of course, think of the prices X99 had when it was new and maybe add some more on top of that. Especially for Threadripper. The 1 mobo for Threadripper that we've seen so far has a "speculated" price of around $500 by Linus. I'm hoping that is for the top end and that maybe ASRock or someone else will put out one closer to $200-300 but I'm not hoping too much. That huge Threadripper socket looks like it costs some mooonnneeeyy.

Be aware I have no special insider info, just educated guessing at this point for the top clocks.

 

[Deleted member 184142]

All the Intel HEDT chips have been Xeon's with various features or hardware disabled as necessary for product differentiation or for binning and qualification purposes.

No one has done any detailed benching on Threadripper of any sort, at least publicly, but performance wise its likely the core is essentially the same as Ryzen. And the new Intel i9 HEDT chips are all fundamentally the same chip as Kabylake and Skylake too BTW.

So the new Intel HEDT chips will probably have about a 9% IPC advantage at the same clock, which isn't a big deal in of itself, but they will clock higher too. How much higher? Especially vs stock Threadripper or when overclocked? Don't really know but in general these big highly multicore chips tend to be poor overclockers compared to the smaller 4 and 2 core versions.

Personally I'm expecting Threadripper to top out around 4Ghz like Ryzen does. I'm expecting the higher core count i9's to top out around 4.6Ghz. That is for all cores at that clock and on air BTW. So Intel's HEDT is guaranteed to be the top performer over all but the prices will be a swift kick in the balls to anyone but a well off or rich person. On value, if these prices are correct, it looks like AMD's HEDT Threadripper will win hands down. Personally I care more about value these days, I still run Sandybridge, but everyone is different.

They'll both be furnaces when overclocked of course but Threadripper might have a nice edge on temps against some of the i9's thanks to the better IHS implementation. Delidding and re-TIM'ing a i9 with better paste will fix that of course but its a hassle that won't be necessary with Threadripper. Both of them will have expensive platforms of course, think of the prices X99 had when it was new and maybe add some more on top of that. Especially for Threadripper. The 1 mobo for Threadripper that we've seen so far has a "speculated" price of around $500 by Linus. I'm hoping that is for the top end and that maybe ASRock or someone else will put out one closer to $200-300 but I'm not hoping too much. That huge Threadripper socket looks like it costs some mooonnneeeyy.

Be aware I have no special insider info, just educated guessing at this point for the top clocks.

For gaming, both will be rip offs, and mostly for epeen, outside of needing chipset features if you are doing GPU compute. But people keep on saying these are not for gaming and as such AMD wins. That is not the case, what matters is what sort of license your program uses, per core or per CPU, that will decide which is the best value. If you are paying $5k per license and its for each core, you are going to go Intel, as the higher price means nothing to the license fees. And if it's per CPU/socket you would be stupid not to go AMD, even if prices are not correct, they would have to be a good deal higher to not make it the value.

Most uses here, that people use such as folding, video and photos editing etc etc, again, assuming the same prices AMD would probably be the better choice, as for personal use most people here are not dealing with enterprise licensing. Assuming it's not thread limited, but if it is, Neither i9 or TR are the right choice for value.

 

[Shotglass01]

That looks like one meaty chip. I for one am glad they're coming to the table with a HEDT offering. This one, this one, I may build.

 

[BlackManx]

THINK AGAIN! (cartoonish evil laugh)

Thank you much for posting this!!! It looks like my liquid-cooled mini Lian Li ITX project will live on.

 

[The Cobra]

If this is true, my 5 year upgrade cycle will be broken in three years with the 16 core CPU from AMD in a few months. Do I need more cores...NO. Do I want more cores...YES.

 

[Makeroflostsouls]

Dang if the pricing is close , I'll be grabbing a 12 or 16 core. Need more pcie lanes as I'll only went with a 5820k on my last build . Not that I really need more cores lol Or really need an upgrade at all but i have no issue supporting AMD , been forever since I have had one of there chips.

 

[Uvaman2]

Looks amd is going for volume and faster market penetration.

 

[yyv_146]

I find it very hard to believe that the top end chip will be less than $1,000, but AMD has surprised us before.

Seems like I picked the wrong time to start a 2U Xeon build If the price is really in the $800, I could have built two workstations and still come out cheaper...

 

[Spire3660]

THINK AGAIN! (cartoonish evil laugh)

Goddamn!

 

[Todd Walter]

The 12 core part is looking rather interesting...

It looks like the one to get; 24 threads and highest stock frequency of the bunch. Pricing will be key!

 

[Trimlock]

I'll jump from RyZen to get this only if it doesn't take me 3 months to get the motherboard I want, 6 months to read a review on them and not have to play the driver/BIOS update lottery.

I'm doubting all of those but if they do manage to pull it off, I'm game.

Sorry, but isn't intel's i9 line basically a direct rip off from their xeon lines? Even the prices seem consistent.
Since amd is putting out that 12/16 core chip, assuming each core is comparible to ryzen cores, how does it stack up again it's xeon counterparts in terms of price and performance?

Rip off? Intel makes very few CPU's that are directly released to the public and those are just the very low end CPU's i3 and below. Everything else is made form the same die as the other Xeons.

 

[Azphira]

The wire management is like basket weaving on matx with x99 let alone itx...

 

[Azphira]

Then again there is comedy to be had with itx

 

[WorldExclusive]

500 is too low, imho, but, if thats the case, i will like to see the local intel fanbois explain how it is still better to buy intel for almost or double the price and maybe 10% higher overall performance.

And before you start, these cpus are not gaming ones.

How can someone be an Intel fanboy when they were on top for the last few years with no threat from AMD.
So just becasue AMD has a price competing product everyone should jump ship? Motherboard stability, options and pricing also plays a part.

 

[grtitan]

How can someone be an Intel fanboy when they were on top for the last few years with no threat from AMD.
So just becasue AMD has a price competing product everyone should jump ship? Motherboard stability, options and pricing also plays a part.

Then pay double for Intel and be happy.

It's all good either way.

 

[Spire3660]

The wire management is like basket weaving on matx with x99 let alone itx...

Who cares what it looks like.... None of my ITX rigs are pretty inside. (Bit Fenix Prodigy, Silverstone RV-01B, Corsair 380T)

 

[mesyn191]

For gaming, both will be rip offs, and mostly for epeen, outside of needing chipset features if you are doing GPU compute.

Yeah for common use cases HEDT stuff was always silly to buy. For pros who like to bring some of their work home something like TR will be a godsend but not a huge amount of those guys around.

Realistically AMD's existing 6C/12T and 8C/16T Ryzen parts are more than enough cores for what most people are going to be doing for a long time.

At least AMD is bringing the normally super high cost HEDT chips down to a more reasonable level so I think they deserve some credit there.

what matters is what sort of license your program uses, per core or per CPU, that will decide which is the best value.

This is absolutely correct of course but I think this will be more of a consideration for the proper server Zen chips (Epyc) rather than HEDT stuff like the Intel i9's or TR.

 

[yyv_146]

500 is too low, imho, but, if thats the case, i will like to see the local intel fanbois explain how it is still better to buy intel for almost or double the price and maybe 10% higher overall performance.

And before you start, these cpus are not gaming ones.

People who run tasks that may need this level of power also care about things like RAM compatibility and math libraries. An entire generation of statistical and analysis packages were developed around Intel's math kernel and CPU optimizations (well, at least the competent developers did that). AMD won't be able to match that with a solid chip alone.

Let's say that the 16 core chip is $800. Awesome price, but I won't buy it until some runs a whole bunch of benchmarks, either with what I use or something that approximates that particular set of workloads. Until evidence is concrete that there isn't any issues in the pipeline, I'd play it safe and stick to Xeon's.

One last thing is that when you're building that kind of hardware, CPU pricing becomes less important in the grand scheme of things. Try populating a top-tier Xeon with the theoretical limit of 800Gb's of RAM...

 

[yyv_146]

Yeah for common use cases HEDT stuff was always silly to buy. For pros who like to bring some of their work home something like TR will be a godsend but not a huge amount of those guys around.

Realistically AMD's existing 6C/12T and 8C/16T Ryzen parts are more than enough cores for what most people are going to be doing for a long time.

At least AMD is bringing the normally super high cost HEDT chips down to a more reasonable level so I think they deserve some credit there.


This is absolutely correct of course but I think this will be more of a consideration for the proper server Zen chips (Epyc) rather than HEDT stuff like the Intel i9's or TR.

EPYC seems to be targeted at people who either can key in their own optimizations at the per core level or work at a scale where that's implicitly resolved (e.g. they use commercial software which takes care of that). I see TR as somewhere below that - which means that it'll be highly dependent on the specific workload. I can see TR being a great chip in a render system out of the box, for example.

 

[mesyn191]

People who run tasks that may need this level of power also care about things like RAM compatibility and math libraries.

There is no indication of any RAM or math/software incompatibility issues though. There are currently some bugs with Ryzen's IOMMU and some VM stuff but they seem to be fixing those issues and they might be fixed by the time TR launches. Out of the box it'll support the JEDEC standard stuff and will have ECC too.

An entire generation of statistical and analysis packages were developed around Intel's math kernel and CPU optimizations (well, at least the competent developers did that). AMD won't be able to match that with a solid chip alone.

Huh? The biggest difference between the Intel and AMD chips so far is the cache structure, everything else is apparently similar enough to not cause any sort of performance regressions AFAIK. Other than that Zen seems run all the Intel optimized stuff, that doesn't use AVX2 much, just as well as Broadwell which isn't far behind Skylake/Kabylake at all.

I'd play it safe and stick to Xeon's.

If you're in the market for something like Xeon you won't be in the market for i9's or Threadripper though. You should be comparing Xeon to Epyc if you're in the market for Xeon's.

CPU pricing becomes less important in the grand scheme of things. Try populating a top-tier Xeon with the theoretical limit of 800Gb's of RAM...

This is normally true but AMD appears to be offering a large enough price difference from Intel's chips here that its enough to make a difference for a lot of use cases. We're talking about over $1K difference for top end TR vs top end i9 if these price rumors are correct.

But again this is for TR vs i9 so HEDT and not server Xeon's and Epyc's. We already know Intel tends to charge a arm and a leg for higher core count Xeon's with decent to higher clocks, like $3000-4000+. If AMD prices Epyc at around half of what Intel is currently selling their Xeon's for that will amount to significant savings. Enough to buy 128GB of DDR ECC RAM (about $1.5K) and have some money left over for a good 1TB M2 SSD or some such. So that is definitely enough cost savings to matter.

 

[mesyn191]

EPYC seems to be targeted at people who either can key in their own optimizations at the per core level or work at a scale where that's implicitly resolved

It all depends on how good the IF bus/protocol is. In theory ccNUMA can make all those cores work together without the software having to know a thing about the underlying cache structure and bus.

I think AMD did a good job with previous 2S and 4S and multi die MCM Opterons here in the past with HT so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Emission]

Then again there is comedy to be had with itx

 

[grtitan]

People who run tasks that may need this level of power also care about things like RAM compatibility and math libraries. An entire generation of statistical and analysis packages were developed around Intel's math kernel and CPU optimizations (well, at least the competent developers did that). AMD won't be able to match that with a solid chip alone.

Let's say that the 16 core chip is $800. Awesome price, but I won't buy it until some runs a whole bunch of benchmarks, either with what I use or something that approximates that particular set of workloads. Until evidence is concrete that there isn't any issues in the pipeline, I'd play it safe and stick to Xeon's.

One last thing is that when you're building that kind of hardware, CPU pricing becomes less important in the grand scheme of things. Try populating a top-tier Xeon with the theoretical limit of 800Gb's of RAM...

You made some good (bias) points, but so far, the only place/benchmarks that i had seen Rysen (Zen) fall behind itenl is on 1080p gaming, everything else, Ryzen takes it (except software coded for intel AND reviews were intel cpu was clocked 1 full GHZ higher than ryzen).

 

[funkydmunky]

Being agnostic, I'll wait to see how it shakes out. Fanboi much?

I'm constantly amazed how supposed rational people are so emotional about computer parts.

Fanboi should not be used in your post at all. You are complaining about what you are doing.

 

[N4CR]

The silence from our residential Intel stock shills is deafening.

 

[M76]

Personally I'm expecting Threadripper to top out around 4Ghz like Ryzen does. I'm expecting the higher core count i9's to top out around 4.6Ghz. .

My 6-core shit tops out at 4.3, and even there it sometimes gets wonky, with water no less. So if I9 consistently gets 4.6 from 12 or 16 cores I'd be really surprised.

Now I'll go and bash my head into a wall, for not waiting another 8 months before buying this crap. I'd have easily weathered this time on sandy bridge.

 

[yyv_146]

You made some good (bias) points, but so far, the only place/benchmarks that i had seen Rysen (Zen) fall behind itenl is on 1080p gaming, everything else, Ryzen takes it (except software coded for intel AND reviews were intel cpu was clocked 1 full GHZ higher than ryzen).

But that's a comparison between consumer-grade Ryzen vs. consumer-grade, LGA 115x Intel...I'm not doubting that the story might be similar between I9 and TR, but that remains to be prove with real-world benchmarks from reviewers...

...either way, we'll know very soon.

 

[Stimpy88]

The silence from our residential Intel stock shills is deafening.

Intel is running around like a headless chicken to counter Threadripper, and Ryzen in general.

Until Intel get their act together, and come up with a plan instead of a kneejerk reaction, then I guess he'll stay away.

The whole X299 platform is a joke, and a bad one at that.

 

[grtitan]

Intel is running around like a headless chicken to counter Threadripper, and Ryzen in general.

Until Intel get their act together, and come up with a plan instead of a kneejerk reaction, then I guess he'll stay away.

The whole X299 platform is a joke, and a bad one at that.

Nah, the silence is because, like intel, they are not acknowledging that amd is an option again.

 

[Todd Walter]

People who run tasks that may need this level of power also care about things like RAM compatibility and math libraries. An entire generation of statistical and analysis packages were developed around Intel's math kernel and CPU optimizations (well, at least the competent developers did that). AMD won't be able to match that with a solid chip alone.

<snip>

Math libraries optimize themselves at compile time; they also check for succeptability to any number of errata or quirks. If it's important enough, you also check at runtime to make sure nothings changed.

 

[N4CR]

Pity the new Imac didn't get Threadripper. Wonder if they will go for Ryzen/Threadripper in future?

 

[Stimpy88]

Pity the new Imac didn't get Threadripper. Wonder if they will go for Ryzen/Threadripper in future?

I think Intel must have given Apple one hell of a discount. Apple is pretty AMD friendly, and their decision smells of Intel's money.

 

[Shintai]

I think Intel must have given Apple one hell of a discount. Apple is pretty AMD friendly, and their decision smells of Intel's money.

Or maybe the performance and perf/watt is simply awful on Naples and TR parts.

If anything, Apple is giving AMD more than what they deserve by still using their crappy GPUs.

 

[Stimpy88]

Or maybe the performance and perf/watt is simply awful on Naples and TR parts.

If anything, Apple is giving AMD more than what they deserve by still using their crappy GPUs.

At least try to hide the fact that you're on Intel's payroll dude... Jeez you come out with some classics.

However, I have to say that until we know the performance and stability of AMD's lineup, you could be right.

 

[EuphoricRage470]

At least try to hide the fact that you're on Intel's payroll dude... Jeez you come out with some classics.

Just because somebody has a different opinion than you do doesn't mean they're on some company's payroll. Coming out with accusations like this only shuts down intelligent discussion and turns forums into echo chambers.

I mean, let's look at this: You basically started this line of dialog by saying that Intel "bought" the Apple design, and then when Shintai gave what is probably a much more reasonable explanation (do you really think big Apple can be bribed by little ol' Intel?), you accused him of being improperly on the take.

 

[Stimpy88]

Just because somebody has a different opinion than you do doesn't mean they're on some company's payroll. Coming out with accusations like this only shuts down intelligent discussion and turns forums into echo chambers.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Try reading some of his posts before making stupid PC statements.

And regarding the comment you added after your initial post, I had to admit that he has a point, and I have addressed that in my reply to him.