AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review

Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by MindTooth on Monday November 25, 2019 @09:51AM (#21628549)

Here are some of Linux stuff: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-linu...

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by disintegore on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:01AM (#21628643)

Kernel 5.4 compiled under 24 seconds. Insane.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by Someone1234 on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:15AM (#21628764)

That is insane. I'm surprised it can even go that low, I would have expected it to hit an IO bottleneck before then (large object files/linking/source reads, etc).

Even with a fast SSD on my lowly i7, I often wind up sitting at IO or lock contention instead of actual CPU bottlenecks (although it could be argued faster CPU = faster lock release = faster compilation).

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by esotericn on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:12AM (#21629441)

The entire Linux kernel source tree will trivially fit in tmpfs in RAM.

On one of these systems I'm fairly sure you could just whack the entire thing in /tmp and -j64 it, the compile artifacts aren't that big either.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by trunc on Monday November 25, 2019 @02:08PM (#21631579)

I've done builds in /dev/shm/ on Xeon and Threadripper with only a trivial speed-up. If it can fit in tempfs, make/cc can just load it all into RAM anyway, so I guess you only reduce the build time by the time it takes for the first read. Which would explain why '-j' on a big codebase tends to trigger my OOM killer.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by zaarn on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:42AM (#21629056)

They used a Samsung Pro NVMe which should be able to hold almost all of the linux kernel sources in it's read cache without that many issues.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by pradn on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:53AM (#21629198)

NVMes are magic. Just the same improvement that SSDs have over HDDs. Probably the only upgrade worth getting for my home PC at this point.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by charwalker on Monday November 25, 2019 @01:36PM (#21631251)

Technically, 100%. I'm full SSD right now though which has a seriously noticeable difference from from HDD but for what I do most days NVME isn't justifiable. I see others who can take advantage of the speeds and do so with huge returns.

I do have 2 super SFF HP boxes that only take NVME in the M.2 drive so have one on hand but it isn't installed at the moment.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by Beltiras on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:08AM (#21629397)

PCI-ex version 4, double the xfer rate. It can handle a massive 16 GB/s. Are there even disks that can handle that speed?

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by gameswithgo on Monday November 25, 2019 @07:58PM (#21634705)

not yet.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by spoonalious on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:01PM (#21635311)

https://www.aorus.com/AORUS-Gen4-AIC-SSD-8TB

15000MB/sec, available now for $3119 AUD.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by wtallis on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @08:41AM (#21638138)

That's just four SSDs mounted on one riser card with a fan. If you're going to count the aggregate bandwidth of an array, then the question's almost meaningless.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by thebruce87m on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:10AM (#21628730)

Compile on boot

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by mkl on Monday November 25, 2019 @07:13PM (#21634357)

That was already a thing back in 2004: https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html

15 seconds to compile and run a Linux kernel of the time (64MB RAM required!).

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by kami8845 on Monday November 25, 2019 @02:52PM (#21632061)

This comment made my day :)

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by yborg on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:07AM (#21629383)

Now there is no excuse to not Install Gentoo.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by mastax on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:59AM (#21630108)

Hah! There is something cathartic about recompiling the world with -march=native even if it makes no noticable difference.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by lazyjones on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:18AM (#21628800)

With half the cores of the upcoming (early 2020) 3990X ...

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by Scuds on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:42PM (#21630636)

Would the best use of this CPU be in a group or multi-group build+integration server? It's $2000 for the CPU alone, so this can't be general-use.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by disintegore on Monday November 25, 2019 @03:02PM (#21632157)

I also imagine it'd be useful as a rendering machine for small to medium media companies.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by undersuit on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:41PM (#21630622)

"Also, our compile test seems to have broken itself when we used Windows 10 1909, and due to travel we have not had time to debug why it is no longer working. We hope to get this test up and running in the new year, along with an updated test suite."

So there's that. I'd give them a break with the fact they also had to produce the review for Intel's launch on the same day: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15039/the-intel-core-i9-10980...

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by dumpsterkid on Monday November 25, 2019 @09:55AM (#21628579)

LinusTechTips has compile time for Mozilla Firefox as a comparative benchmark in their review video

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by xbmcuser on Monday November 25, 2019 @09:53AM (#21628562)

Here you can see some compiling benchmarks by linus tech tips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8apEJ5Zt2s

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by ATsch on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:03AM (#21628663)

This is my frustration with almost all tech sites. The AMD press deck included compilation benchmarks, but the only others to reliably provide them are Phoronix.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by close04 on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:53AM (#21630048)

Most reviewers don't bother doing compile benchmarks because they're not as familiar with them and perhaps they don't come in the same "canned" form as every other gaming benchmark. It may also be that each site caters to a particular audience.

On the other hand bench results have to be comparable and relevant (in time). Which is easy when you run the same still widely played GTA V year after year on every new CPU. But comparing compilation time for kernel version 3.11 (released at the same time as GTA V) seems a lot less relevant today.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by ATsch on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:28PM (#21630471)

Maybe this would change if someone would pre-package a build environment with source code, a nice gui and fancy abstract visualization of the compile process.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by vlovich123 on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:53PM (#21630794)

Phoronix does this already AFAIK.

https://github.com/phoronix-test-suite/phoronix-test-suite

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by ATsch on Monday November 25, 2019 @01:44PM (#21631345)

Phoronix does do this, but it's unfortunately harder to use than would be required for wide adoption in the press. It really has to be as simple as downloading an exe that pops up a window with a "go" button when run, and has to show some nice things happening on screen. Game and graphics benchmarks do this, so that's what they use.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by agumonkey on Monday November 25, 2019 @10:06AM (#21628689)

There's a void to film then.

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Re:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review by gowld on Monday November 25, 2019 @11:52AM (#21630024)

Anandtech is a site for benchmark fanbois, not shopping for compute value.

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