The 64 Core Threadripper 3990X CPU Review: In The Midst Of Chaos, AMD Seeks Opportunity
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on February 7, 2020 9:00 AM ESTAMD 3990X Against Prosumer CPUs
The first set of consumers that will be interested in this processor will be those looking to upgrade into the best consumer/prosumer HEDT package available on the market. The $3990 price is a high barrier to entry, but these users and individuals can likely amortize the cost of the processor over its lifetime. To that end, we’ve selected a number of standard HEDT processors that are near in terms of price/core count, as well as putting in the 8-core 5.0 GHz Core i9-9900KS and the 28-core unlocked Xeon W-3175X.
| AMD 3990X Consumer Competition | ||||||
| AnandTech | AMD 3990X |
AMD 3970X |
Intel 3175X |
Intel i9- 10980XE |
AMD 3950X |
Intel 9900KS |
| SEP | $3990 | $1999 | $2999 | $979 | $749 | $513 |
| Cores/T | 64/128 | 32/64 | 28/56 | 18/36 | 16/32 | 8/16 |
| Base Freq | 2900 | 3700 | 3100 | 3000 | 3500 | 5000 |
| Turbo Freq | 4300 | 4500 | 4300 | 4800 | 4700 | 5000 |
| PCIe | 4.0 x64 | 4.0 x64 | 3.0 x48 | 3.0 x48 | 4.0 x24 | 3.0 x16 |
| DDR | 4x 3200 | 4x 3200 | 6x 2666 | 4x 2933 | 2x 3200 | 2x 2666 |
| Max DDR | 512 GB | 512 GB | 512 GB | 256 GB | 128 GB | 128 GB |
| TDP | 280 W | 280 W | 255 W | 165 W | 105 W | 127 W |
The 3990X is beyond anything in price at this level, and even at the highest consumer cost systems, $1000 could be the difference between getting two or three GPUs in a system. There has to be big upsides here moving from the 32 core to the 64 core.
Corona is a classic 'more threads means more performance' benchmark, and while the 3990X doesn't quite get perfect scaling over the 32 core, it is almost there.
The 3990X scores new records in our Blender test, with sizeable speed-ups against the other TR3 hardware.
Photoscan is a variable threaded test, and the AMD CPUs still win here, although 24 core up to 64 core all perform within about a minute of each other in this 20 minute test. Intel's best consumer hardware is a few minutes behind.
y-cruncher is an AVX-512 accelerated test, and so Intel's 28-core with AVX-512 wins here. Interestingly the 128 cores of the 3990X get in the way here, likely the spawn time of so many threads is adding to the overall time.
GIMP is a single threaded test designed around opening the program, and Intel's 5.0 GHz chip is the best here. the 64 core hardware isn't that bad here, although the W10 Enterprise data has the better result.
Without any hand tuned code, between 32 core and 64 core workloads on 3DPM, there's actually a slight deficit on 64 core.
But when we crank in the hand tuned code, the AVX-512 CPUs storm ahead by a considerable margin.
We covered Digicortex on the last page, but it seems that the different thread groups on W10 Pro is holidng the 3990X back a lot. With SMT disabled, we score nearer 3x here.
Luxmark is an AVX2 accelerated program, and having more cores here helps. But we see little gain from 32C to 64C.
As we saw on the last page, POV-Ray preferred having SMT off for the 3990X, otherwise there's no benefit over the 32-core CPU.
AES gets a slight bump over the 32 core, however not as much as the 2x price difference would have you believe.
As we saw on the previous page, W10 Enterprise causes our Handbrake test to go way up, but on W10 Pro then the 3990X loses ground to the 3950X.
And how about a simple game test - we know 64 cores is overkill for games, so here's a CPU bount test. There's not a lot in it between the 3990X and the 3970X, but Intel's high frequency CPUs are the best here.
Verdict
There are a lot of situations where the jump from AMD's 32-core $1999 CPU, the 3970X, up to the 64-core $3990 CPU only gives the smallest tangible gain. That doesn't bode well. The benchmarks that do get the biggest gains however can get near perfect scaling, making the 3990X a fantastic upgrade. However those tests are few and far between. If these were the options, the smart money is on the 3970X, unless you can be absolutely clear that the software you run can benefit from the extra cores.
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kramik1 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
If I am not mistaken all newer AMD CPUs support ECC. It just depends if the motherboard BIOS will support it and get QA for it. Some users on Reddit were saying that even some B450 boards worked with ECC. I would be surprised if the board you were testing with didn't support it. It is not a feature that AMD sells like Intel.Ian Cutress - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
ECC might work, but it's not validated. There's a difference there.Mikewind Dale - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
I have a Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi with a Ryzen 7 2700X and KingstonKingston KSM26ED8/16ME (DDR 2666 ECC). The Gigabyte specifications page says it supports ECC. And indeed, when I run "cmd /k wmic memphysical get memoryerrorcorrection", the output indicates that ECC is working.
So just check your motherboard's specs, and if it says it supports ECC, you should be good to go.
willis936 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
I wonder if a linux host with a 128 thread windows client vm would have higher performance than running windows on bare metal.Ratman6161 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Hmmm. could be interesting to install VMWare ESXi on it then create a VM with all processors assigned to it??Mikewind Dale - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Can I suggest you make a test where you run two instances of a given application? In many of these tests, 64 cores barely outperform 32 cores. However, that could mean that one instance of a given application has trouble using more than 32 cores. It may still be that two simultaneous instances of the same application could together use 64 cores effectively.For me at least, this is a realistic use case. I run statistical regressions in Stata, and one script file often contains dozens of different regressions to run. Now, Stata has a multicore version, licensed per core, which parallelizes the underlying linear algebra. But Stata also allows free trivial parallelization, in which each regression is run as a single-thread process, simultaneously. Stata does this by opening additional instances of itself in the background. So the user opens one instance of Stata, and then Stata opens an independent instance of itself in the background. Each regression is run on a different thread, in a different instance of Stata, and all the results are pooled together later.
My suspicion is that even when an application cannot effectively use 64 cores in a single instance, running two instances of the same application at once would be able to use 64 cores. I'd like to see a test of this.
Slash3 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Small note, on page one in your Ryzen chart you list the 3950X as having only 32MB of L3 cache. As a dual chiplet CPU It has 4x16MB = 64MB of L3.Slash3 - Sunday, February 16, 2020 - link
...still not fixed, guys.Scipio Africanus - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
As others may have said, this is a halo product. If it makes money great, otherwise break-even or even a small loss is fine. Audi doesn't need its R8 to be a cash cow, BMW doesn't need the I8 to make big bucks, or Acura for the NSX to rake in the dough, they have their core offerings for that. But these products exist to give the consumer something to be wowed by for the brand.iAPX - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Just to be clear, 3990x is the king but 3970x is the best performance/price option?This is incredible, AMD took the crown and is now the clear leader on some markets.