AMD Threadripper Pro Review: An Upgrade Over Regular Threadripper?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on July 14, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- ThreadRipper
- Threadripper Pro
- 3995WX
CPU Tests: Legacy and Web
In order to gather data to compare with older benchmarks, we are still keeping a number of tests under our ‘legacy’ section. This includes all the former major versions of CineBench (R15, R11.5, R10) as well as x264 HD 3.0 and the first very naïve version of 3DPM v2.1. We won’t be transferring the data over from the old testing into Bench, otherwise it would be populated with 200 CPUs with only one data point, so it will fill up as we test more CPUs like the others.
The other section here is our web tests.
Web Tests: Kraken, Octane, and Speedometer
Benchmarking using web tools is always a bit difficult. Browsers change almost daily, and the way the web is used changes even quicker. While there is some scope for advanced computational based benchmarks, most users care about responsiveness, which requires a strong back-end to work quickly to provide on the front-end. The benchmarks we chose for our web tests are essentially industry standards – at least once upon a time.
It should be noted that for each test, the browser is closed and re-opened a new with a fresh cache. We use a fixed Chromium version for our tests with the update capabilities removed to ensure consistency.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
Kraken is a 2010 benchmark from Mozilla and does a series of JavaScript tests. These tests are a little more involved than previous tests, looking at artificial intelligence, audio manipulation, image manipulation, json parsing, and cryptographic functions. The benchmark starts with an initial download of data for the audio and imaging, and then runs through 10 times giving a timed result.
We loop through the 10-run test four times (so that’s a total of 40 runs), and average the four end-results. The result is given as time to complete the test, and we’re reaching a slow asymptotic limit with regards the highest IPC processors.
Google Octane 2.0
Our second test is also JavaScript based, but uses a lot more variation of newer JS techniques, such as object-oriented programming, kernel simulation, object creation/destruction, garbage collection, array manipulations, compiler latency and code execution.
Octane was developed after the discontinuation of other tests, with the goal of being more web-like than previous tests. It has been a popular benchmark, making it an obvious target for optimizations in the JavaScript engines. Ultimately it was retired in early 2017 due to this, although it is still widely used as a tool to determine general CPU performance in a number of web tasks.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a test over a series of JavaScript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics.
We repeat over the benchmark for a dozen loops, taking the average of the last five.
Legacy Tests
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Qasar - Tuesday, July 27, 2021 - link
sorry but that is not HEDT, workstation, sure. the last HEDT platform intel had was x299 and socket 2066socket 3647, is there server/workstation platform, but hey if you consider a US $3k cpu to be a HEDT processor, then that's your choice :-)
mode_13h - Monday, July 26, 2021 - link
> at least amd HAS a HEDT cpu, when was the last one from intel ?Intel is doing an Ice Lake workstation platform. Not sure if HEDT will follow.
mode_13h - Sunday, July 25, 2021 - link
> 7 days to AugustThe rumor was that it would be *announced* at some point in August. It didn't say when, in August, but the rumored ship date wasn't until sometime in September. But it's just a rumor.
croc - Monday, July 26, 2021 - link
MY point is that the BIOS updates usually happen about a month before the product announcement. Not to mention some benchmarks and other 'leaked' information. Y'know,,, Hype generation, direct from horsey's mouth. August announcement? Don't think so. Chagall? Possible, but would break convention, not that AMD really has any when it comes to code names...mode_13h - Monday, July 26, 2021 - link
> BIOS updates usually happen about a month before the product announcement.Before announcement or ship?
> Hype generation
Seems to me that it's not necessary, in this case. AMD will already have more demand than it can satisfy.
Qasar - Tuesday, July 27, 2021 - link
" Not to mention some benchmarks and other 'leaked' information "considering how few leaks and info have come out about amd's products as of late until quite close to release, im not surprised there is little info out there about zen 3 TR
" Hype generation "
which amd doesnt need all that much, their products are more interesting then intels right now, intel needs the hype, not amd ;-)
Mikewind Dale - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
Given how much trouble Intel has had with their new process - even though Intel used to be the industry leader in fabrication - I suspect that if AMD had kept fabrication in-house, they'd be in serious trouble right.GlobalFoundries has also had trouble moving to a new, cutting-edge process. At the moment, they'd decided to stay one process behind TSMC, and cater to the portion of the market that doesn't need a cutting-edge process.
anakhizer - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
The article is excellent! However, the ordering of data in the tables is absolutely terrible.Please figure out how to sort the tables in a more logical manner like performance. As the tables are they are pretty much unreadable if you want to get the performance numbers with a glance.
kensiko - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
Performance wise, looking at all those graphs, the 5950x is such a great deal ! I really love my 5950x. I did love my TR1950x, it was not getting as hot at my 5950x. But no way I'm going back to Threadripper for just a home PC. Event at work I don't think we would get a Threadripper again, the Epyc gives what we want even if the frequency is a bit lower.mode_13h - Tuesday, July 20, 2021 - link
Threadripper still makes a lot of sense for people who have scalable workloads (or run lots of VMs) and who don't need the full memory bandwidth or PCIe lanes of EPYC or TR Pro.I personally wouldn't buy one, but they're popular for deep learning workstations and Linus Torvalds famously has one.