At the end of the day we still have the third party me_cleaner to disable the proprietary secret coprocessor on Intel chips while AMD chips still have their equivalent PSP With no first or third party means to disable it.<p>Until such a time I can get the equivalent tool to stop the hardware spyware built into the CPU I can have no enthusiasm or motivation to buy AMD chips. Not to say I <i>want</i> to buy Intel parts - they have nothing to do with third party efforts to nullify their backdoor - but if I were buying a chip tomorrow it would be a begrudging Intel purchase just for me_cleaner.
Given Intel's struggles around their process shrink, AMD may have come up with the perfect product at the perfect time. You can already see their effect with Intel finally adding more cores to their chips to try and stay competitive.<p>I do think that Intel will manage to get silicon out a bit earlier then their current end of CY19, but if they don't, TR and Ryzen may be the default go-to for manufacturers.
I'm very excited for AMD and their market successes lately. I never wanted a world controlled by Intel, and even if all my computers are Intel at the moment I feel the world benefits from this competition.<p>That being said... Processor pre-orders? I had No idea that was a thing. Hope you get a QA discount. It doesn't talk about sockets but for sake of preorderers I hope it's compatible with original threadripper boards. edit: Actually it does, and they mention it's compatible with existing main boards too. I missed that this was multiple pages.
Bloody hell, this processor has more cores than the dual socket Xeon HPCs that my lab bought 2 years ago. Amazing.
Honest question: Isn't the memory throughput an issue when you try to feed 32 hungry processors?
While I can see Intel's leadership in single-core performance with 6 cores (overclocked 8700K can have 5+ GHz and future flagships probably will be even faster with 8 cores), at high-core workstation AMD is a winner, hands down. Competition is good.
Curious that there's quad-channel DDR4. AMD's similar Epyc processors that have four chips on the module are octal-channel (because there's a dual-channel controller on each chip). Won't these therefore perform worse than they should?
This is great. Paying twice as much for a processor with twice as many cores makes a lot of sense in this case. I'm glad it wasn't more.<p>I've got my costs down for a TR machine and it comes in at around $4K CAD.
It may be of no concern to many, but 3D artists constantly express problems with filling DIMM slots when using Threadrippers. Supposedly, 128 GB RAM is only reliable on a couple of motherboards. I just constantly read these stories on forums. (And to be sure, these aren’t situations where users were mixing RAM sets)
Does anyone in here know if Zen2 is going to implement AVX properly?
Threadripper2 will not, all AVX2 instructions will operate at ~SSE speeds, as on past AMD chips.