Threadripper is no more!

lopoetve said:
The nice part is that HEDT systems make great servers and the like when done - my x99 box is a massive 14T all flash system, with two sas cards, a dual port 10G card, and 16 drives (plus expansion for more - and two free NVMe slots). X399 is now our central controller for Site Delta, and has 25T of mixed storage (doubles as a plex server!). Etc.

Expansion opens options. Consumer systems are really limited to compute only- especially since Ryzen doesn’t have an integrated GPU, so you have to burn a slot on a basic GT 710. And it gets finicky above 64G of ram, while Threadripper doesn’t blink at 128G, and only gets picky at 256.

I’m an edge case- but there are others that aren’t far off.
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I am officially jealous, :censored: but SWMBO would never agree to me spending the money for a fully loaded HEDT system.
 
philb2 said:
I am officially jealous, :censored: but SWMBO would never agree to me spending the money for a fully loaded HEDT system.
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Work and OEM donations get part of it, gray market strip and sales get more - and I only buy/upgrade every 3-5 years (and buy used for everything but the main gaming system and main workstation). They also get built out over time on sales - except GPUs. Which you just suck it up and buy.
 
uOpt said:
Oh come on. On a regular desktop you cannot even make a raid10 out of 4 NVMe SSDs without going through the southbridge.

And then there is 10+Gb ethernet and SAS controllers.
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I know all of this.

What I am saying is ... unless you can make a CPU in your basement that is comparable then there is no amount of complaining about it that will change anything. We have to move on. Or you can petition by signature, AMD and Intel.

I am using a 5800x and I have 2 NVME on it, a 10gbit Eth card (Intel XFSR) and a 6900xt at 8x 4.0 lanes so its running full blown speed essentially since to this very day even the 3090ti cant even saturate 16 3.0 lanes.

We can make up for more lanes by reducing the lanes and making them generationally faster. This is the way moving forward.

I wish we could have HEDT but since we apparently cant its time to demand more realistic options i.e. faster lane tech so we dont need to wire in so many etc...
 
tangoseal said:
I know all of this.

What I am saying is ... unless you can make a CPU in your basement that is comparable then there is no amount of complaining about it that will change anything. We have to move on. Or you can petition by signature, AMD and Intel.

I am using a 5800x and I have 2 NVME on it, a 10gbit Eth card (Intel XFSR) and a 6900xt at 8x 4.0 lanes so its running full blown speed essentially since to this very day even the 3090ti cant even saturate 16 3.0 lanes.

We can make up for more lanes by reducing the lanes and making them generationally faster. This is the way moving forward.

I wish we could have HEDT but since we apparently cant its time to demand more realistic options i.e. faster lane tech so we dont need to wire in so many etc...
Click to expand...
The history of tech is full of examples where some kind of tech just reached a dead end.

Floppy disks, anyone. CD and all its variations? multi-GPU operations. Math co-processors (anyone remember 8087?) Dual AMD CPUs. Heck, even spinning rust drives, for a lot of users. Fax? Coax Ethernet. So now HEDT is set to join that list. Hate to say it, but it's time to move on so you can take advantage of the best of currently offerred tech products.
 
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philb2 said:
The history of tech i7s full of examples where some kind of tech just reached a dead end.

Floppy disks, anyone. CD and all its variations? multi-GPU operations. Math co-processors (anyone remember 8087?) Dual AMD CPUs. Heck, even spinning rust drives, for a lot of users. Fax? Coax Ethernet. So now HEDT is set to join that list. Hate to say it, but it's time to move on so you can take advantage of the best of currently offerred tech products.
Click to expand...
I hate that you're right.
 
philb2 said:
The history of tech i7s full of examples where some kind of tech just reached a dead end.

Floppy disks, anyone. CD and all its variations? multi-GPU operations. Math co-processors (anyone remember 8087?) Dual AMD CPUs. Heck, even spinning rust drives, for a lot of users. Fax? Coax Ethernet. So now HEDT is set to join that list. Hate to say it, but it's time to move on so you can take advantage of the best of currently offerred tech products.
Click to expand...
  • Floppies deserved to die many years before they did. Even CD-Rs (remember those?) couldn't fully unseat them; it took flash drives to render them worthless.
  • Music CDs are seeing a mild uptick in sales after years of decline. Streaming's more convenient but still skimps on bitrate relative to physical media; there's a niche market for movie fans. Plus movie rips have to come from somewhere, and OBS isn't foolproof...
  • Multi-GPU setups are crazy useful for compute running in parallel, but SLI/Crossfire are pretty much gone, and good riddance.
  • Math co-processors were simply brought into the CPU. x87 support's still around, though the x86_64 spec thankfully demoted its stack-based 80-bit ass to deprecated status and moved float handling to SSE and SSE2 as a baseline. Yay, IEEE compliance.
  • Do you mean multi-socket boards? They're still around at the high end for EPYC and Xeon configs, albeit mostly for servers.
  • Hard drives are still a useful, durable way to keep files, they're just not fast. For a lot of home users I predict they'll ebb away in the next 5-10 years outside of a backup drive or NAS context, but they're not going anywhere in datacenters.
  • Faxes are like a ghost haunting the chapel of technology, but sometimes you still need to send one. Ugh.
  • I'm literally having an ethernet cable drop in my house tomorrow afternoon after years of putting it off. Wireless is great for convenience but questionable for security and has lots of weird corner cases.
  • HEDT... honestly was only ever a way to wring some margin out of people who wanted the best and biggest, but weren't willing to pony up for serious workstation/enterprise kit. I bought a 7940x because a friend of mine ordered an x299 motherboard, got two, and they told him to keep the second, and he gave it to me. I paid a lot because it was an investment and it's held up, but I wouldn't do it again because it's massive overkill. And now it's brimming with relatively slow PCIe 3.0 lanes and is less attractive for purchase than a performance-class consumer PC because that will deliver higher per-thread performance in a smaller form factor on an updated platform.
The tech market will inevitably shift under your feet at a moment that feels wrong. It's just the nature of the thing.

edit: And now having watched Linus' video, it looks like:
  • Threadripper Pro's essentially becoming a capital-W workstation product with pricing to match. If AMD can sell them as fast as they can make them at full pricing without creating an entire sub-tier to go after a less affluent market segment, that's smart business. It sucks if you were leveraging all those PCIe lanes or quad-channel memory bandwidth at the price point; the salad days appear to be over.
  • Supply is constrained by contracts with OEMs - it looks like Lenovo's sucking up most of them.
  • I wouldn't call this "resting on their laurels" so much as getting to a position and making a strategic pivot. They're a business, they're not your buddy, and sometimes things are only insanely good for a little while.
 
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I don't think we need more explanation on why HEDT is no longer a good option for CPU makers. You guys made it very clear. I now don't know what to get !!! The last available HEDT (aka 3970x threadripper) or the new generation of 5950x. It will be the later of course but I wanted 32 cores:(

When will we start seeing 32 cores in mainstream?
 
sram said:
I don't think we need more explanation on why HEDT is no longer a good option for CPU makers.
Click to expand...

Is that saying the next Sapphire Rapids-AP HEDT will either not be enough to count or too much and too expensive (the cpu/platform ?)

They are rumored to have a lower end of just 28-36 instead of up to 56 cores, 64 instead of 112 PCIe 5.0 lanes and 4 channel instead of 8 for ram, which open the door to be possible no ?

64 PCIE 5.0 lanes is like the bandwidth of 256 pci 3.0 if I count right, which not so long ago would be quite a lot, same goes for 4 channel of DDR5 bandwitch wise.
 
sram said:
I don't think we need more explanation on why HEDT is no longer a good option for CPU makers. You guys made it very clear. I now don't know what to get !!! The last available HEDT (aka 3970x threadripper) or the new generation of 5950x. It will be the later of course but I wanted 32 cores:(

When will we start seeing 32 cores in mainstream?
Click to expand...
Don't hold your breath. Damned little scales to 32 cores in a linear fashion; even 16 is an extravagance beyond the work most people would find themselves doing. Memory bandwidth is a pinch point that grows more important as core count scales, too - sky-high DDR5 clocks or quad-channel support are both expensive to address that issue. I'd love to see something that provides a meaningful CPU performance bump without power requirements ballooning - the 7940x is hard enough to cool as it is, I don't need a smaller replacement socket outputting even more heat in absolute terms.
 
KazeoHin said:
Mt argument for HEDT is this:

The silicon exists, and I want it and I want to overclock it. I want the best.

Best.

Not "best for..."

The best.

I want 64 unlocked ryzen cores, 8 channel memory and 128 PCIE lanes.

Why? Who cares. Charge a ton for it. I'll save up. I'm not rich but I spend more on my PC than my car. I want to be able to run games at 144+FPS Max settings and then hop in blender and have no tiny gpu memory limit.

Right now we have CPUs that can do one or the other, but nothing stopping AMD making one that can do both. They just don't. Call it "Epyc Threadripper" I don't care. Just unlock it and sell it.
Click to expand...
You'll never have a HEDT high core count CPU that can game faster than a lower core count CPU. Sure bump the TDP to 1000w on a 64-core HEDT but you can also do the same to a 16-core consumer CPU and games will run a lot faster on that 16 core 1000W cpu due to sky high clock speed (assuming they are on the same architecture). Video games have never been and probably will never be able to utilize multicore processor as well as professional applications. Intel's X58, X79, X99 and X299 and AMD's ThreadRipper platforms have never been able to run video games faster than their consumer counterparts. So to say "HEDT" is the absolute best for everything... that's just pipe dream.
 
Halon said:
  • Floppies deserved to die many years before they did. Even CD-Rs (remember those?) couldn't fully unseat them; it took flash drives to render them worthless.
  • Music CDs are seeing a mild uptick in sales after years of decline. Streaming's more convenient but still skimps on bitrate relative to physical media; there's a niche market for movie fans. Plus movie rips have to come from somewhere, and OBS isn't foolproof...
  • Multi-GPU setups are crazy useful for compute running in parallel, but SLI/Crossfire are pretty much gone, and good riddance.
  • Math co-processors were simply brought into the CPU. x87 support's still around, though the x86_64 spec thankfully demoted its stack-based 80-bit ass to deprecated status and moved float handling to SSE and SSE2 as a baseline. Yay, IEEE compliance.
  • Do you mean multi-socket boards? They're still around at the high end for EPYC and Xeon configs, albeit mostly for servers.
  • Hard drives are still a useful, durable way to keep files, they're just not fast. For a lot of home users I predict they'll ebb away in the next 5-10 years outside of a backup drive or NAS context, but they're not going anywhere in datacenters.
  • Faxes are like a ghost haunting the chapel of technology, but sometimes you still need to send one. Ugh.
  • I'm literally having an ethernet cable drop in my house tomorrow afternoon after years of putting it off. Wireless is great for convenience but questionable for security and has lots of weird corner cases.
  • HEDT... honestly was only ever a way to wring some margin out of people who wanted the best and biggest, but weren't willing to pony up for serious workstation/enterprise kit. I bought a 7940x because a friend of mine ordered an x299 motherboard, got two, and they told him to keep the second, and he gave it to me. I paid a lot because it was an investment and it's held up, but I wouldn't do it again because it's massive overkill. And now it's brimming with relatively slow PCIe 3.0 lanes and is less attractive for purchase than a performance-class consumer PC because that will deliver higher per-thread performance in a smaller form factor on an updated platform.
The tech market will inevitably shift under your feet at a moment that feels wrong. It's just the nature of the thing.

edit: And now having watched Linus' video, it looks like:
  • Threadripper Pro's essentially becoming a capital-W workstation product with pricing to match. If AMD can sell them as fast as they can make them at full pricing without creating an entire sub-tier to go after a less affluent market segment, that's smart business. It sucks if you were leveraging all those PCIe lanes or quad-channel memory bandwidth at the price point; the salad days appear to be over.
  • Supply is constrained by contracts with OEMs - it looks like Lenovo's sucking up most of them.
  • I wouldn't call this "resting on their laurels" so much as getting to a position and making a strategic pivot. They're a business, they're not your buddy, and sometimes things are only insanely good for a little while.
Click to expand...

On an offtopic slightly, threadripper pro etc ...

Im building a simple 7313p Epyc 3rd gen for a small client and its absolutely blazing in vsphere. Id almost suggest a legit server cpu for your HEDT home rig instead of an HEDT cpu at this time.
 
tangoseal said:
On an offtopic slightly, threadripper pro etc ...

Im building a simple 7313p Epyc 3rd gen for a small client and its absolutely blazing in vsphere. Id almost suggest a legit server cpu for your HEDT home rig instead of an HEDT cpu at this time.
Click to expand...
The problem is finding a board that is good for workstation use - most server boards are finicky and picky about consumer kit (GPUs/sound/etc), and come with NO user-friendly options. I've done many a supermicro or Tyan based workstation in the past, and they're a PITA - HEDT combined the best of both worlds in that sense (heck, even Xeon-W/TR Pro do on boards like the Sage/etc).
 
T
lopoetve said:
The problem is finding a board that is good for workstation use - most server boards are finicky and picky about consumer kit (GPUs/sound/etc), and come with NO user-friendly options. I've done many a supermicro or Tyan based workstation in the past, and they're a PITA - HEDT combined the best of both worlds in that sense (heck, even Xeon-W/TR Pro do on boards like the Sage/etc).
Click to expand...
Tyan? Supermicro? IIRC they were early on motherboard makers I think before companies like ASUS. There was a third early on motherboard maker whose name I can't recall.
 
philb2 said:
T

Tyan? Supermicro? IIRC they were early on motherboard makers I think before companies like ASUS. There was a third early on motherboard maker whose name I can't recall.
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Asus and Gigabyte don't make Epyc workstation boards; they make a handful of server boards (and Asus stopped at Rome). Supermicro and Tyan both still make a LOT of server kit - along with Quanta, they're the key white-box manufacturers out there.

Asus makes two Xeon-W boards (they actually dropped the dominus), and I haven't followed Gigabyte on the Xeon-W side (but they also dropped the Aorus C621 last I checked). They both make "workstation versions" of some of their full Xeon boards, but now we're talking 10k in processors for a single system, assuming you're buying new and not going for a base silver proc.

This is a market I play a LOT in - options are really limited outside of HEDT without getting to stupid costs, although if you want 2T of ram in a workstation, well... Asus provides: https://www.asus.com/Commercial-Servers-Workstations/WS-C621E-SAGE/.
 
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I run Supermicro boards (dual and single, registered and unbuffered RAM) for many years. I have not found a PCIe card that refused to work. Firewire, USB3.0, dual GPU, quad Ethernet.

Likewise, mine have been eating all memory I scraped off the net for them.
 
uOpt said:
I run Supermicro boards (dual and single, registered and unbuffered RAM) for many years. I have not found a PCIe card that refused to work. Firewire, USB3.0, dual GPU, quad Ethernet.

Likewise, mine have been eating all memory I scraped off the net for them.
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With windows 10, or one of the server OSes? Consumer cards?
 
lopoetve said:
Asus and Gigabyte don't make Epyc workstation boards; they make a handful of server boards (and Asus stopped at Rome). Supermicro and Tyan both still make a LOT of server kit - along with Quanta, they're the key white-box manufacturers out there.

Asus makes two Xeon-W boards (they actually dropped the dominus), and I haven't followed Gigabyte on the Xeon-W side (but they also dropped the Aorus C621 last I checked). They both make "workstation versions" of some of their full Xeon boards, but now we're talking 10k in processors for a single system, assuming you're buying new and not going for a base silver proc.

This is a market I play a LOT in - options are really limited outside of HEDT without getting to stupid costs, although if you want 2T of ram in a workstation, well... Asus provides: https://www.asus.com/Commercial-Servers-Workstations/WS-C621E-SAGE/.
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I am guessing that stupid costs are OK to the people who really need this sort of system. But several pay grades beyond mine. Of course, to the perfectly honest with myself I don't really "need" this kind system. Still it's fun to window-shop for this sort of stuff.:D
 
lopoetve said:
With windows 10, or one of the server OSes? Consumer cards?
Click to expand...

FreeBSD and Linux. Consumer video cards and things like PCIe USB3.0 cards. I guess the rest of the cards (SAS etc) don't count as consumer.
 
uOpt said:
FreeBSD and Linux. Consumer video cards and things like PCIe USB3.0 cards. I guess the rest of the cards (SAS etc) don't count as consumer.
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I can definitely believe Linux - personally haven't tried to run BSD as a workstation OS in more than 15 years, so I'll buy that too. I'm 99% of the time having to try with Windows 7/10 - which plays... less well at best, in my experience. Server 2019 works, but then you sometimes run into OTHER issues with things not liking a Server OS (even when that's stupid).
 
lopoetve said:
I can definitely believe Linux - personally haven't tried to run BSD as a workstation OS in more than 15 years, so I'll buy that too. I'm 99% of the time having to try with Windows 7/10 - which plays... less well at best, in my experience. Server 2019 works, but then you sometimes run into OTHER issues with things not liking a Server OS (even when that's stupid).
Click to expand...

What exactly is the problem then? Drivers in regular Win10?
 
uOpt said:
What exactly is the problem then? Drivers in regular Win10?
Click to expand...
Drivers, stability (lots of weird crashes in games), sound issues (it tends to be absent outside of the aforementioned sage boards). Lots of tweaking just to get it to play nice - and it’ll never be as fast as a HEDT system, unless you really need that amount of ram or dual sockets worth of cores. They’re generally just not consumer friendly either (although I’ve got a bunch of them as servers).
 
I can understand AMD sees no future in non-pro HEDT platform, but making TRX40 one and done platform deserves a big middle finger from me.
 
Yeah, at this point tr is not for enthusiasts, it's for professionals that need the power it provides for business purposes and will be paying for itself. For the enthusiast, it's 9-18 months behind desktop on core technology and platform features along with requiring a new board every 2 years if you want to stay on the latest.
 
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