AMD's ThreadRipper and Intels Core X announced!
artphobe
Posts: 97
Atm AMD's ThreadRipper is known to be announced soon at Computex (in a couple of hours) with the 16 core / 32 thread SKU.
Intel already released their Core-X series with pricing here
Core i7-7940X | Core i7-7960X | Core i9-7980XE | |
Cores/ Threads |
14/28 | 16/32 | 18/36 |
Price | $1399 | $1699 | $1999 |
Will update when AMD announces their pricing!
Great news for all renderers!
Post edited by artphobe on
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16 cores for about the current price of the 6950X, nice! Looking forward to seeing the AMD processor.
...and being Skylake (LGA 1151) they still should support older versions of Windows.
That 16 core one has my interest as well. as it is a lot easier to find large quad channel memory kits (64 GB, 128 GB) than for older V3 Xeons (most of which tends to be ECC registered DDR3 server memory that is only compatible with certain specific brands of motherboards).
Need to see what the forthcoming X299 MBs wil be priced at
Such CPUs could actually render my 4K iRay scenes in a reasonable amount of time. Well those without alot of water, glass, reflectivness, fog, rain, and so on...
Man, if I had a 10-Core CPU, I'd probably switch back to Reality just to enjoy the freedom of not having to worry about capping my 980 Ti's VRAM. God, what I wouldn't give to have Iray use my 32 GB RAM for textures... that's the one thing I hate about GPU rendering.
heavy sigh...
I'm running a 4770K with x2 980 Ti and 32 GB RAM, and this news makes me feel like I'm running an 80's style solar calculator from Texas Instruments...
I've been looking into getting a WIndows workstation for rendering (currently using an iMac) for the last year or more. Is it just me, or have things been more of a moving target in the last year or so than in recent years?
This year is very much a year of change for PCs and workstations. However, you may need to wait a couple of months for the new products to hit the market. Intel has said 'in the coming weeks' for their new Skylake X and Kaby Lake X products, and AMD has said that Threadripper will be out sometime this summer. Be vague, man, be vague... RX Vega (the consumer version) is slated to be launched at SIGGRAPH in late July, although Vega may not be the best choice for Daz as far as GPUs go.
So if you aren't in a major hurry, I'd suggest waiting a couple of months for the new products to enter the market. I'd expect that 'older' products will drop in price around that time, as the newer products displace them in the market, which may be nice depending on how unimportant the 'bleeding edge' is to you.
In the meantime, Ryzen is great for rendering (6/8 cores, 12/16 threads) and the major OEMs are bringing Ryzen systems into the market. If you aren't on a budget, yeah there are some great Intel options too. It all comes down to your budget and what you are looking for.
If you use Iray, yeah you'll need an Nvidia GPU. The 1080Ti is very nice. The Nvidia 'pro version' 12GB Titan XP will give you up to 8-15% better performance over the 1080Ti (depending on which benchmark you are looking at) for almost double the price. If your budget is not constrained, maybe the XP is for you, otherwise the 1080Ti shouldl do you just fine. Lesser Nvida cards are good too, depending on what you want to spend.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-titan-xp,5066.html
This is the 1st Generation of consumer affordable (well $2000 CPU is not affordable for me) datacenter centric CPUs and I think I will wait til the 2nd generation of them comes out. I'd like to see AMD's pricing on their competition with intel. It has to be very good to move the natural inertia businesses have in taking risks with such business critical HW & SW.
I must start saving
on the bright side the longer I take to save the less expensive they will be
I hope
..true. Current edition high core count Xeons are very pricey.
Getting 16 cores for the price of the current 10 core i7 is definotely attractive. or for about 300$ more, 18 cores.
I would not be surprised to see AMD release a 24 core version at some point in the near future, once Intel's 18 core processors hit the market. The pieces are all there, and Threadripper uses the same size package as EPYC, which has four 8 core modules as opposed to Threadripper's two 8 core modules. If I understand AMD's architecture correctly, said 3 core module could theoretically have 96 lanes and 6 channels of memory. Dunno what you'd do with the 4th 'core slot' though... maybe an onboard Vega module? Naaah, that'd just be silly...
More likely, the 24 core version would be an EPYC module with 8 cores disabled (similar to Ryzen 5 with 6 cores vs Ryzen 7 with 8 cores), in which case it'd have all 128 lanes of PCIe.
The pieces for such a part are already in place, as long as X399 can support a full EPYC CPU, it should be able to handle anything in between EPYC 32 and Threadripper 16.
We'll see if my educated guess here pans out. Intel kept the 18 core thing very well under wraps, and the 12 core i9 enthusiast part was the best we had heard about until the last week or so. I also remember seeing in one of the 'leaks' that the 14, 16, and 18 core parts didn't have firm release dates, Found it: 12 Cores in August, more than that TBD, at least according to the leak talked about on the videocardz website.
https://videocardz.com/69900/exclusive-intel-to-launch-18-core-core-i9-7980xe-cpu
If Intel can get the larger core counts (beyond 12) to market fast enough, they can steal some of Threadripper's thunder to be sure, But if Threadripper can hit the market before even the 14 core Intel part, AMD will be in good shape for a bit, and have more time to one up Intel with the theoretical 24 core part targetted at Enthusiasts that I'm speculating about here...
Intel's reported 30% increase in performance and higher base clocks could put the 12 core part in the same league as Threadripper, anything larger than that has the potential to overshadow Threadripper, hence why I think a 24 core AMD part is in the works. If AMD's Threadripper pricing is similar to what they did with Ryzen, Threadripper could be the Value option versus Intel's premium option to help make it more attractive. Intel has already indicated that they are taking Ryzen pricing seriously with their i9 MSRPs (a little higher, but more cores at each of their current pricing points, at least that's how I'm seeing it).
Yep, quite the interesting year in the story of Intel vs AMD processors!
While Intel has said that they'd continue limited support for Skylake, x299 hasn't been mentioned, and I'm not seeing Skylake X mentioned either. Most of the article from March and April predate the official Skylake X's/x299's release announcement.
X299 postdates Windows official commitment for support of Skylake, so they could draw a red line for X299 if they wanted to. At the very least, X299 will require additional effort to support, as it includes NVMe and USB 3.0, which was the part of the reasoning Intel used for drawing the line with Kaby Lake and Bristol Ridge. Note that Intel had no problem with Microsoft drawing the line with Kaby Lake, so they may not care that much about Skylake X support for Win 7/8.1 either.
I guess we'll find out when the new chipsets and Skylake X's finally hit the market, unless Microsoft makes an official support announcement for X299 sooner... I hope you are right, but until we see X299 systems in action running Windows 7 or 8.1, I wouldn't make too many assumptions.
No the Core I9's will use the new LGA 2066 Socket which will be part of the new X299 Chipset. And as such probably wont have Win7 support but maybe Win8..
Yeah I banished the tiles to the dark recesses of my OS the millisecond I got my 8.1 laptop and was able to hook up to the internet. The shell I'm using to boot directly to desktop is from www.classicshell.net. The tiles are still there somewhere, I jiust don't see/use them 99% of the time. Adobe Reader kicks me into that world though, so I usually drag my .pdf's into Firefox so I don't have to deal with that look.
....I use PDF Xchange, though as this would be a dedicated production/rendering system, there would be little need for viewing PDFs on it as I have my two notebooks.
Whoever came up with the idea to turn a desktop workstation into a giant smartphone ought to have been sacked.
Still waiting on Threadripper pricing, but here's a blurb about 9 Trheadripper models (10 core to 16 core).
https://hothardware.com/news/amd-threadripper-rumored-family-9-cpus-varying-core-counts-speeds
Makes my old school K6-III and III+ processors look positively tiny! And the III's were on a 250 nanometer process (III+ was 180 NM), or roughly 17 times the process scale of Ryzen/Threadripper... and about 8-9 times slower on clock speed, not counting all of the other enhancements. That was a mere 18 years ago...
Naples/EPYC has 19.2 Billion transistors, compared the the K6-III's mere 21.4 Million transistors. Thats less than 0.2%.... Ryzen has 4.8 Bilion transistors btw.
Even the first gen Pentium III's from that time were on a 250 nm process (and eventually with a slightly higher clock speed than the K6-2+ and III+), with a mere 9.5 millions transistors, dropping to a 180 nm process in 2000. Subsequent P-III generations were faster of course.
Yeah I know transistor counts aren't everything, but I"m still trying to wrap my brain around millions of transistors in a CPU, let alone BILLIONS.... the fact that we now have billions of transistors operating in concert without random glitches all over the place is truly impressive! And that's just on my puny 13.5" 2 in 1 laptop...
Yeah, Ryzen would be the 'better' processor to compare a K6-III with, but I agree with you. Threadripper has a massive package. Makes me think of something from Family Guy...
CPU Wars wise, this year has been at least as exciting as the year that Athlon hit the market. A lot more actually IMHO. Interestingly, the first Athlon was introduced just a few short months after the K6-III's hit the market, and for a short period of time the K6-III was the fastest processor (clock speed wise anyways), until the Athlon and second gen P-III's hit the market. The K6--2 and IIII's Tri Level Cache (up to 2 MB level III depending on mobo) didn't hurt either.
And just a year later, the Thunderbird debuted. alongside Coppermine. That's when CPUs from both companies broke the GHz barrier. Exciting times.
And yeah, overclocking was fun in those days! Yeah, people still overclock, but in those days a mere 100 MHz overclock could mean a decent increase in performance. Sure, these days overclocking is still a thing, but processors are already quite fast these days. Back then, overclocks were much more noticeable, even in day to day stuff. I still remember digging deep into pcr registry settings to eek out extra bits of performance, as well as the usual clock, bus, and voltage stuff.
I still remember comparing a Geforce 2 MX vs a MX-400, (the MX-400 had faster VRAM), to see just how much of a difference faster VRAM would make. Matrox was around too, although they were falling behind NVidia and ATI, and then there were the Voodoos.... 3DFX was acquired by NVidia in 2000 due to bankruptcy issues, and the Voodoos were no more.
These days, I guess we still have some minor players in the graphics industry (S3 is still alive? Really?) but it's been NVidia vs ATI/AMD for a while now. Matrox is still a company apparently too, insignificant as they are (I had a Matrox card for a bit in the '90s).
Got off track there reminiscing about the old days. In short, I'm really liking seeing the CPU wars back in force this year. The GPU wars are a little quieter, at least until Vega actually hits the market, but combined with the CPU front, whell that makes this quite the intersting year. Nvida has Volta lurking in the wings of course...
...even if I am not able to directly participate, indeed it does bring back the excitement of those "heady" days. Crikey I still remember the Pentium 50's & 66's, Multisyc colour monitors,100 MB+ 3.5" HDDs, and 56K internal modems.
Just sad that on the OS front, a lot of poor decisions have been made in recent years.
I'm in the horribly excited camp. It's great to see some competition back in the CPU market. I loved PCs back in the days you guys are reminiscing about, but I didn't know much about hardware. I remember a friend of mine getting a Voodoo card and something like 64 MB of RAM and I was completely blown away. To that point most of my experience with computers was with older Apple computers.
Well, it's not a suggested MSRP, but we have a leak r.e. possible Threadripper 16 pricing:
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-16-core-cpu-849-us-price-x399-motherboards/
$849 US. Not bad, if it's accureate...
Of course, the x399 Threadripper boards are expected to be a bit pricey. Just looking at everything they've crammed onto the board (including the massive socket and 8+1 DIMM slots), I'm not really surprised, but this may make x299/Skylake-X look more attractive if x299 has a lower price than x399.
Cooler costs will factor in too. Threadripper's cooler will be similarly massive.
So what your saying is due to my 10 core proceesor Reality Lux would render in decent times? I gotta tell ya iray just files. I may give it a spin. It's just for what I do I need to make alot more scene adjustments using Reality but looking back I do like how alot of the stuff came out..
How about 300 baud modems, orange or green monochrome monitors and $400.00 forty meg hard drives on a card and that being considered overkill for a hard drive of course one meg of ram was also overkill
...yeah I remember using a 300 baud modem, dialing up listening for that "squeal" and then quickly putting the handset into the acoustic modem
My first system (an old 286) had an amber screen monitor, a whopping 20 MB HDD, 250K of memory and a blistering fast 12.5 MHz CPU.
My old Pentium system had a "screaming" 66 MHz CPU, an "insane" 4 MB of memory, along with a 135 MB HDD, 24 bit colour, a NEC Multisync colour monitor (that weighed a tonne), and 33.6K external modem. Felt I was on top of the world. (today a piece of clothing content here in the store could easily fill half that HDD).