Threadripper 7000 Storm Peak CPU Surfaces with 64 Zen 4 Cores

[frognumber]

I recently ran some machine learning benchmarks on CPU versus GPU. The gap for a multicore CPU was much smaller than I expected. I, for one, am excited by a 64-core CPU in a way I wouldn't have been a year ago.

Between Hugging Face, Stable Diffusion, and Whisper, I'm using ML workloads a lot more. Being able to do so:

* with a standard instruction set

* with open-source software

* with my full system RAM

* without having to worry about what is in VRAM versus main RAM

is a big step up. I see about a 10x speed difference between an older 16-core CPU and a hot-off-the-press high-end Ampere card costing 3x as much as the CPU. If 64 core could bring that within 2x, or even 4x, I'd dump the GPU entirely.

[bitL]

Inference or training? I think with full training you are out of luck with CPUs, the gap is much bigger. 64c TR could only get to roughly 1TFlops.

[ggerganov]

Recently, I've been implementing my custom inference code in C for various models (GPT, Whisper) and am interested to see how it compares to various GPUs in terms of performance. So far, I've been running it only on my MacBook M1 as I don't have the necessary hardware.

[londons_explore]

It seems super easy for someone to fake these identifiers sent back to projects like Folding@Home...

People might do it just for fun, or maybe to manipulate the share price (make performance better or worse than expected), or maybe even for marketing.

[jakuboboza]

Anyone is using 64 cores besides Linus :) I'm much more excited for 7900x on 12 cores rather than 64 cores. But I understand the limited amount of people that needs this power on desktop can also be excited.

[green_on_black]

If I'm not lighting up my Windows Task Manager, what was even the point of making money?

[Neil44]

People trying to cram 500 VPS customers onto a single box!

[rwmj]

I could use an almost indefinite number of cores for fuzzing and compiling. Currently I have to limit my fuzzing runs to 12 cores because the 3 year old AMD machine can't handle more without impacting other development work.

[TacticalCoder]

But then if 64 is not useful to you, why the 7900X instead of the 7700X and it's 8 cores? The 7700X is way less power hungry and boosts to nearly the same speed as the 7900X.

Genuinely asking as I plan to replace my Ryzen 3700X with a 7700X.

[api]

Some common dev work loads that benefit: huge builds (especially for C++ and Rust), running lots of VMs to run a copy of a cloud infrastructure locally, emulating foreign hardware for testing (qemu), large scale data analytics locally instead of paying some ridiculously expensive SaaS to do it.

[JonChesterfield]

Parallel builds of C++.

[ajuc]

It would be handy for people that use gentoo :)

[bitL]

You might want to wait for 7900X3D based on what we see with 5800X3D vs the latest Zen4...

[fomine3]

I thought whether Torvalds or Sebastian

[lakomen]

I'm reminded of ... that ... Was it power cpu or risc? The one with the 1024 cpu cores. I did a search but can't find it.

Essentially 1024 cores soc server, affordable. Compared to that 64 cores sounds rather unimpressive. IMHO.

[imtringued]

Having 64 powerful cores sounds more impressive than 1024 weak cores.

Also why even mention that 1024 core CPU instead of upmem. 128 cores per DIMM slot and up to 2560 cores in a single machine and they are fast precisely because they are directly attached to memory with a total memory bandwidth of 2.56TB/s.

[anotherhue]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

[supernovae]

Are you thinking the old sparc Niagara?

[SomeHacker44]

Parallela?

[revanx_]

Imho if cpu manufacturers figure out how to slap a large cache on the same die (something like amd 3D V-Cache but much more) we may actually see graphic cards become obsolete in favor of software rendering.

[api]

Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon.

It is true that a chip like this probably could render pretty decent 3d in software though. I wonder if combining this with the GPU in a clever way could allow more people to experience real time raytracing?

[bitL]

GPU is a bandwidth monster, CPU is a latency monster. You can't have both on the same silicon.

[madduci]

Finally I can compile Chrome and Firefox faster

[cabirum]

Can I use it in a base of my kettle to boil water?

[rienko]

the cpu is certified by AMD to be running up to 105 celsius, but it thermal throttles automatically at 95 celsius, so out of the box probably not enough to boil water, but just barely :P.

the fun fact, is that if you manually reduce the power limit to 65W the initial single thread results so virtually no loss in ST performance vs 170W, and it appears that the original AMD slides stating 75% more efficient cores at that level not too far off.

[awestroke]

It's AMD, not Intel

[skellyclock]

Great for monero mining

edit: seethe