 Yeah. So thanks for watching guys. Don't forget to drop a like. Hey, hold on a minute. You can't just do that. Hey, we got to actually talk about this thing. What? I showed them all they needed to know. Yeah, it's faster. And that... Okay, yes, that was pretty definitive. But there is way more to the story here, guys. We're going to give you the rundown on AMD's Threadripper 3990X, the first desktop 64-core processor. And we're going to give you the rundown on our sponsor, Glassware. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with Glassware. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off at the link below. So AMD's 32-core Threadripper 3970X already beats the pants off Intel's top-end Core i9 and Xeon products. Well, the first question we had to ask ourselves here was, given that they have no competition in this segment already, why is AMD even bothering to launch this product? Yeah, it's overkill in pretty much every possible way. 64 cores, 128 threads, 288 megabytes of cache, and official support for up to 3200 megahertz memory with single rank 8 gigabyte sticks, even if that doesn't carry over to all the higher capacities. And the craziest thing about it is that the normal rule where high-core-count CPUs have poor performance in lightly threaded applications just doesn't seem to apply here. We've got about a 4% drop in our single thread Cinebench score compared to our Ryzen 9 3950X. That's AMD's highest boosting desktop chip. So from a business perspective, one of the obvious concerns when you go all out on a desktop processor is that even though this thing is still pricey at $4,000, this is essentially the exact same silicon as their 64-core EPYC server processor. Only you get 88 instead of 128 PCI Express Gen 4 lanes, and four of the eight memory channels are disabled. So that's thousands of dollars less for what is essentially still 64 cores. So there's this risk then of competing against yourself by giving customers the option of getting most of the benefit of your professional-grade product with a cheaper one. Yeah, cheaper. The only two possible answers to me are that they're doing it out of sheer vindictiveness to embarrass Intel. Or it's more of a marketing exercise to use their technological advantage right now to pump their stock price, relieve some of their debt, and grab some important mindshare. The halo effect works. Yeah, see top-end product? It performs better. Slightly lower end product I can afford? Oh, it's probably better. Blur Studio famously rendered Terminator Dark Fate on 3rd Gen Threadripper, and giving studios like that twice as many cores is probably going to result in a lot more headlines like that. That's great marketing. And besides, the thing is, Epic is still going to be the best tool for certain things. It's the only way to get support for two Zen 2 CPUs on a single motherboard, and as I discovered with our new NVMe server, both PCI Express lanes and memory bandwidth can quickly become bottlenecks when you're throwing enough data around, like in a high-speed storage server. Now to be clear, you would never run that many drives on a Threadripper workstation, so I wouldn't expect it to be a problem. It's all about using the right tool for the job. And this is going to be the right tool for a lot of jobs. It's got a massive 280W TDP, that's 25% higher than the 64-core Epic 7742, but it results in a nearly 30% higher base clock and a max boost as high as 4.3GHz. Way higher than Epic. This thing is going to scream. But like in what? I mean, Cinebench, yeah, but do we actually have anything that can properly stress a 64-core CPU? Like look at this! Is that not ridiculous? Like just look at it. Nobody's ever seen anything like that. Yeah that's a bit of a problem. With Windows splitting threads into groups of 64, applications have to explicitly add support for spanning multiple thread groups in order to use all 128 threads on the 3990X at once. That's not a major deal-breaker for specialized workloads designed with multi-socket machines and massive core counts in mind, but it may limit us when we try to push it, just like we did with our Epic 7742. Now AMD told us that we should expect the best bang for buck with workloads that can utilize 1-2GB of RAM per thread. Typical benchmarks like Cinebench here are so short that they don't give you a clear idea of how much time you can end up saving on a large-scale project. Okay, so that was a lot of talking, but what I'm hearing is we don't have anything. One suggestion they had was we could compile a large program like a web browser. Okay. Why don't we throw what we have at it? We don't have to let this single-threaded Cinebench R20 run. No I already know what the answer is. Yeah I know. What was it, both 500? 500 exactly. 500 exactly. Okay. Man this thing's impressive and like look at this. It's turboing up to, I saw it go as high as around 4.2 in this load, sitting around the 4.05, 4.15 range. Yeah. It's great. I love it already. So review over then? No, no. Okay, so let's see if it could possibly justify its $4,000 price. All right, it's fired up. Holy crap. I have never seen this run like this. Yeah, no. This is supposed to take like 10 minutes plus. We are turboing to three gigahertz on 64 cores. What kind of heat is this thing kicking off? It's not even that crazy. No, no it's not. Even the heat pipes are only kind of warm. It is kind of cool here in the warehouse but. Yeah that's true. That's an advantage. The craziest thing about this is that this benchmark takes two and a half, three minutes to even start running because it has to go fetch a bunch of resources and it's largely a single or two threaded task. That means we've only actually been running this for about a minute and a half and it's half done. You know what that might be. Remember how you said like oh doesn't this normally take like a minute, a minute and a half and it took much longer? Yeah. It's hammering the SSD. Oh okay we'll talk about that more later. Should have gone Optane. Well AMD didn't recommend Optane. Well AMD has a f***ing agenda. I think what I'm gonna have to do is time it after the resources have loaded. That's the only fair thing to do between. No I think it's fair for you know if your bull**** doesn't work because of other system bottlenecks and you didn't work around that then you should have to run the benchmark same way as everybody else. We could show it in both ways. We could show both ways. Holy crap. So from resource fetching being finished to completing this render was under three minutes. No about three minutes. Yeah that's more like Titan RTX with the new ray tracing renderer running. On CPU. Yeah. Unreal. Now let's hit it with V-Ray. More like hit V-Ray with it. Yeah. Look at all those cores light up. Yeah the crazy thing about watching this is it almost looks like a GPU demo. Yeah. How quickly the image goes from totally crappy to like okay it's starting to look photorealistic. It's not. It's not GPU performance but it's also not CPU performance. It's like. It's some weird in between because of so many threads like that's kind of the thing with GPUs they have a lot of compute units that can crunch on little kind of like sub thread lit things but like this this is straight up threads. Wow. 72 752. How did our 30 39 70 X do? 44 643. Now it's not perfect scaling. That is pretty darn good. Yeah and our Intel bench like 36,000. Nvidia. Nvidia. It's not except actually just running on a CPU. So what you're looking at right now is crisis the original crisis but running completely in software on the CPU. Our GPU is doing nothing. Actually wait no our GPU is not doing nothing. Why is our GPU doing something? It's doing I think it's doing the media decode. Oh yeah I think you're right. Oh that's hilarious. Okay single player. You know it's funny. At first I thought that this wasn't working because last time when I tried doing it on the CPU the background was black. It didn't load. It's just working like way better. Yeah. Wow. Wait are you sure this looks like it might be running on GPU. You'll see. Here we go. All right. Rock on. There go the oof oof. Okay hold on. Wait for it. Yeah. So if it has to load we'll take a little while but then it gets a little bit better every time. Okay we good? We good. We good. Oh we less good. This is knucking fuzz. And if you guys want to see it do even more we actually have an upcoming video planned where we're going to put this thing under our completely redesigned SubZero chiller. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. This is crazy. This is definitely running smoother than last time Anthony. Yeah. This is noticeably better. Actually look it's hitting all the cores a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. This is way more playable than last time. Like I can play games like this if I have to. I used to on my Pentium 4. That's right you had a pretty crappy computer when you started here didn't you? Um no it wasn't that bad. I had a 6700K and a 1080 when I started here. Yeah like I got me some kills yo. Yeah you struggled to even hit anything last time. Yeah. Let's be clear it's not great. Yeah it's not what you'd call a good experience but like the fact that it's running acceptably on a CPU. Unreal. Yeah like the 64 core epic. I mean CryEngine. CryEngine. Yeah yeah yeah. Really impressive numbers like mind blowing. But the thing is if you're actually considering purchasing one of these monsters you got to make sure you do your research. Not every load is going to scale the way that some of the ones we showed did. For example we did a Firefox compile benchmark and it only outperformed the 32 core thread ripper by a very narrow margin. Now some compiles will get a lot of benefit from the additional cores it's just that not all of them will. You also need to make sure that you do your research. The low volume motherboards for these kinds of bleeding edge platforms can be quirky at best. So make sure you check out user reviews. And we got a really counter intuitive configuration tip from AMD themselves. They actually recommended against using a PCI express Gen 4 SSD with the 3990X. Like what? So get this guys. Most Gen 4 SSDs are improperly tuned for desktop workloads because huge bandwidth numbers look great in the marketing materials. Thing is though it's IOPS that you actually want for peak system responsiveness. And with so many threads pounding the SSD while you're working on something that becomes even more of a concern with a CPU like this one. So on a poorly optimized drive even a mundane task like a background antivirus scan could become crippling. So the best choice would obviously be something like Intel's Optane. Although AMD didn't specifically mention Optane for fairly obvious reasons. Grow up guys. All right. So then AMD is clearly not shying away from the reality that most people who don't want to worry about that kind of nonsense should just buy a Ryzen 9 3950X which raises the question who is this thing actually for? The answer apparently is the desk side compute sector. People who need immediate access to large amounts of processing power at their desks. That means it's for VFX artists who are doing iterations on a project or programmers who are recompiling large complex application packages on the fly. So the kind of stuff that would take a lot longer if you had to throw it into the processing queue for a group server every time you tweak something. I can also see the utility of this kind of a CPU in a virtualization environment. At $39.90 US dollars you're looking at a relatively low cost for a lot of cores. And with the ability to split everything into four distinct NUMA nodes you've got this natural splitting point for a handful of 16 core VMs with minimal performance loss due to memory access overhead. Except that there's an elephant in the room that puts a bit of a damper on my excitement for this product overall. AMD in their infinite wisdom decided to pull an Intel with their total memory capacity support by only supporting standard unbuffered DIMMs. That means that Threadripper, even though it has an on paper support for up to 2 terabytes of RAM, is practically speaking stuck with a maximum of 256 gigabytes today. So while it smokes the Xeon W3275 in raw compute, that chip from Intel supports up to 1 terabyte of RAM, which for some workloads is far more important than how many cores you have. So why doesn't AMD want their flagship 64 core Threadripper to support registered or load reduced DIMMs? Well, because despite the fact that EPYC supports a whopping 4 terabytes of memory and considering that even supporting registered DIMMs would have doubled Threadripper's maximum capacity without even surpassing an eighth of EPYC's, they simply didn't want to risk stepping on their big boy CPU's toes. It's one of those artificial limitations that in this case seriously hurts the 3990X's future utility in high end VFX work. Because remember 256 gigs is the standard for that kind of work in 4K today. That's to say nothing for when compositions get more complex and higher in resolution. So this is just the craziest $4,000 dead end that I sincerely hope can be fixed by a firmware update, not by waiting around for bigger unbuffered DIMMs to come along. Like seriously, guys, you don't need to do this. EPYC still has double the total memory bandwidth, double the theoretical memory capacity. More PCI Express lanes and for the non-P-SCU's dual socket support. Don't you think that's enough differentiation? Or are you starting to regret all the big specs that you guys built into the platform now that you're actually selling CPU's that don't have any competition? This right here is exhibit A for why you shouldn't fanboy, folks. Still a win is a win and I can't deny AMD that. As inapplicable as this may be for almost 100% of you watching today and even much of its target market, unfortunately, it serves its most important function as a Halo product extremely well and it's an incredibly exciting milestone for personal computing. Not only is AMD putting an unprecedented amount of processing power in the high end desktop market, but at this price, Intel's not even in the same ballpark. Their closest competitor overall is the 28 core Xeon W3275, which costs a good $500 more and while it may support practically speaking, four times the memory that Threadripper does, it just doesn't come close to the compute performance on display here. To even approach that, you would need dual Xeon Platinum 8280s and with those costing over $10,000 each, there's a very real discussion to be had about which you need more, the horsepower or the memory capacity. I mean, fortunately for Intel, they do have a bigger in every way data center CPU that might smoke Threadripper, the Xeon 9280 with 56 cores, but I have no way of knowing if it works really well because it costs so much that Intel doesn't even list a price, meaning it's probably high enough that I couldn't even trade an autographed kidney for one. So then that's it. AMD is so far ahead in compute performance on the desktop right now that the only useful comparison is a data center CPU and they've begun purposely kneecapping their desktop chips in ways that make them only just barely marketable to their target audience, seemingly in an effort to keep their profits higher so that they can sell epic chips instead, which is really frustrating because the epics don't turbo the same way and actually might not be as good for this kind of a workload. It's like Bizarro World. The situation right here is where Intel was when they launched Sandy Bridge, just like kicking AMD while they were down, you know? Artificially limiting their best CPUs and pulling a big enough lead that for their competitor to catch up, they would need a whole new architecture, which Intel is presumably working on and I am very excited to see it. Those guys really do do their best work with egg all over their faces, don't they? And I do my best work in my sponsor segues. Today's video is brought to you by the Massdrop Object 2 headphone amplifier, AKA the O2 amp. This amp was designed and created with the feedback from over 500 Massdrop members on what they wanted and over 6,000 of them are out there in the wild. It serves as an ideal baseline reference amplifier and can power everything from in-ear monitors to the HD800s. You can adjust the input, output, and power arrangements in two different gains, medium and standard. It delivers big, clear, and accurate sound and it ships for free in the US. So check it out at the link in the video description. Thanks for watching, guys. Go check out our AMD EPYX 7742 video if you're wondering what to watch next. It is the big boy pants equivalent to the 3990X that AMD clearly wants you to buy instead. I'll see you over there.