AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review

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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