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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WaltC - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Above I meant to say that "In the past I've seen much better reviews from AT,"--you guys going to get a decent editing system for the news section anytime soon?Irata - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Good point. Check OEM workstations like the Dell Precision 7920 and what is the installed OS ? Windows 10 for workstations. And that's for the lowest end 6C6T Xeon Bronze model.The OS version's name kinda gives it away.
Irata - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
You could use a car comparison test as an analogy: if you are comparing a two seater to a sedan and your conclusion is that the sedan's passenger seat is more spacious, you are missing an important point - the sedan has space for three passengers, the two seater only for one, i.e. you can do things with the sedan that you cannot with the two seater.29a - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
They always halfass AMD reviews, just look at EVERY Ryzen release.sandtitz - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
You have some good points there.No software can scale up to infinite number of threads, and is 128-way already beyond some of the software tested? Some numbers saw regressions for whatever reasons.
I appreciate this article mostly for the Windows 10 Pro vs. Workstation/Enterprise benchmarking since I always thought the difference was in licensing and max CPU/Mem support.
I'm sure there are going to be enthusiasts and business users who have a need for 64 core CPU and wouldn't know the difference between Windows Pro and Workstation and would just go for the cheaper if the hardware doesn't surpass what the Pro license allows:
I've delivered some fully loaded HP Zbook laptops to end users and they had the Win 10 Workstation license from the factory. Since the CPU (E-2186M) nor the memory (64GB) didn't even approach the Pro limits I was a bit perplexed but didn't think too much of it. Perhaps HP engineers had internally benchmarked and found out speed differences?
jospoortvliet - Sunday, February 9, 2020 - link
The real question is why anyone expects a consumer os to do well with such a cpu... even the workstation version of Windows is a joke when compared to the Linux performance: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...A 30-60% difference is no joke, and shows how big the gap between win and Lin still is. This cpu is simply too “pro” for Windows...
sandtitz - Sunday, February 9, 2020 - link
Well, that's where the Win10 Pro Enterprise/Workstations comes to play.Had you read this Anandtech article you'd see how much faster it is than the plain Win10Pro.
Mr. Larabel didn't use the Enterprise version for testing. This is quite understandable since Microsoft doesn't make it clear that there is a tremendous performance boost.
tuxRoller - Saturday, February 15, 2020 - link
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...While this is using Clear Linux as reference, its advantage over Windows Enterprise ranges from 7-29% (geometric mean) with 16 - 64(+SMT) cores, respectively.
valinor89 - Monday, February 10, 2020 - link
The baffling tittles and subtittles are references to Sun Tzu's "The art of war", I believe.alysdexia - Monday, May 4, 2020 - link
i9-9900T is more efficient and thriftier than Threadrippers.