eidairaman1You have been here since 2006 and never filled out your specs and hardly post, yet you would on a Topic relating to AMD. Hmmm

Salty_sandwichjust a few questions
why would anyone buy a cpu with more than 8 cores if they just going to use the system for gaming?
I thought an 8 core CPU was the sweet spot in CPU's right now ? (probs due to consoles?)
do any games use or support more than 8 core cpu ?

I don't know so i'm asking.

R-T-BRate the point, not the person.

qubitOk great, so when you talk about crippled dies, do you mean disabled dies to make a lower end processor? If so, why is that a bad thing? It just means that they can still sell lower end products through binning.

efikkan(facepalm)
No, not at all. Where do you get this from? Two dies on 2970WX/2990WX have to go through the Infinity Fabric to access memory, which causes significant latency. Many workloads are latency sensitive, and this only gets worse when using multiple applications at once. AMD could have made Threadripper without these limitations, but perhaps not on this socket.
I thought this was a tech forum…

R-T-BHe means the fact that two dies do not have a direct connection to the memory controller, and must talk via another CCX via proxy.

Honestly, it IS an odd design. But it's not useless.

qubitDo you really know enough about the Threadripper and EPYC designs to know why they designed them the way they did?

W1zzardTR 2nd gen is designed like that for socket compatibility and to avoid user complexity of 8-channel memory

qubitDo you really know enough about the Threadripper and EPYC designs to know why they designed them the way they did? You'd have to know them pretty well to make a criticism like that and I suspect you don't. I certainly don't know enough about it.

efikkanYou can have all the opinions you want, I only care about the facts.

Those familiar with the core layout should know how these CPUs work, and the sacrifices AMD have made by letting two dies not having direct access to memory.


Due to these limitations, 2990WX(32-core) goes from performing very well in some tasks to performing badly, sometimes even worse than the 2950X(16-core), if the task is not ideal. One example. The 2950X(16-core) performs as expected and scales fairly well, while the 2990WX(32-core) is really a mixed bag.

The sad thing is that 2990WX(32-core) would have been a much better product if the dies were either balanced with one memory channel each, or the full 8 channels.

qubitOk, it's a limitation, but have you seen W1zard's reply to me a couple of posts up. That should clarify to you why these limitations exist.

Can you finally see that it's not a flawed design as you put it, but one that's working within cost and compatibility constraints?

efikkanSo you're down to semantics?
When you have a 2990WX(32-core) which is basically a double 2950X(16-core), and it performs as expected in a wide range of controlled benchmarks, but suddenly performs worse than the 16-core due the core configuration having severe limitations in design. Any engineer would call that a design flaw. It's not a bug, but a principal mistake in the design, an oversight since they didn't foresee this type of configuration early enough. It ruins what would otherwise have been a much better product.

eidairaman1Send AMD An email to the developers of ryzen master, they would know

The more surprising announcement comes in the form of a new software feature for the Threadripper WX-series processors called "Dynamic Local Mode" which aims to address some of the performance issues caused by the non-traditional memory structure of these processors, where not all CPU cores have direct access to a memory controller.

According to the blog post on AMD's website, Dynamic Local Mode will run as a Windows 10 service and measure how much CPU time each thread is utilizing.

This service will then begin to reallocate these demanding threads to the CPU cores which have direct memory access until it runs out of available cores. In that case, the service will start to assign threads to the remaining cores.

This dynamic operation ensures for applications that aren't consuming all 48/64 threads on the WX-series processors, that direct memory access will be available when needed. In particular, this should provide an advantage to gaming, which typically takes up less than eight cores, but is dependant on fast memory access.

efikkanSo you're down to semantics?
When you have a 2990WX(32-core) which is basically a double 2950X(16-core), and it performs as expected in a wide range of controlled benchmarks, but suddenly performs worse than the 16-core due the core configuration having severe limitations in design. Any engineer would call that a design flaw. It's not a bug, but a principal mistake in the design, an oversight since they didn't foresee this type of configuration early enough. It ruins what would otherwise have been a much better product.

Captain_TomThat's like calling Vega's gaming performance a "design flaw" because it doesn't game as well as it renders. But it's not a flaw, it's a premeditated sacrifice they knew ahead of release. Get over yourself lol.

Oh, and I am an engineer - that's not a design flaw. It costs $1800, not $5,000+.

HTCDoes this mean now Windows performance is more inline with Linux performance in applications?

For example, 7-Zip.

R0H1TNo, inherently the Windows scheduler is pretty bad compared to Linux especially for high core count CPUs.

HTCAnd doesn't this software help mitigate / eliminate that?

Dynamic Local Mode will run as a Windows 10 service and measure how much CPU time each thread is utilizing.

This service will then begin to reallocate these demanding threads to the CPU cores which have direct memory access until it runs out of available cores. In that case, the service will start to assign threads to the remaining cores.

This dynamic operation ensures for applications that aren't consuming all 48/64 threads on the WX-series processors, that direct memory access will be available when needed. In particular, this should provide an advantage to gaming, which typically takes up less than eight cores, but is dependant on fast memory access.

cucker tarlsonThat +47% really means huge improvement in multi threaded games. The other results around 10% are in games that prioritize single core perfromance like FC5, 10% is still neat.

John NaylorI'm anxious to see what "+47% improvement" actially means when averaged over TPUs Gaming Test Suite. I expect single digits. Not thet single dogits is nothing... all improvements welcome. OTOH I'm still in the "it ain't real till we see those results"camp.

R0H1TIt means up to 47% over regular 2990WX numbers, without dynamic local mode enabled, tested internally at AMD.

HTCSlight correction there: for all we know, only one applications sees this kind of boost but it wouldn't surprise me if the uplift were ... say ... 15% to 20% in general applications.

R0H1TYeah the regular qualifier "up to" applies here too, although 47% may not be the upper limit on say linux.