2nd Gen Threadripper 2990WX: AMD’s 32-core CPU is insanely fast but not for everyone
Stop, AMD. You had us at 32-core, 64-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX consumer CPU. You didn’t have to make it better by saying this weapon of thread destruction could be ours for $1,799 (available on Newegg or Amazon) —just $76 more than what Intel wanted us to pony up for its 10-core Core i7-6950X two years ago. In Millennialese: That. Is. Just. Insane.
But before you invest too much thought or cash into the concept of a 32-core CPU sitting in your PC at home, there’s a lot of caveats you need to know. Simply put: This CPU may be too much power for most of us.
WHAT IS RYZEN THREADRIPPER 2990WX?
If you’re wondering just how AMD went from an 8-core Ryzen 7 1800X to a 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X to a 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX in the space of 16 months, while it took Intel three years just to go from a 6-core Core i7 to a 10-core Core i7, the magic is in the design.
What makes a 32-core Theadripper even possible is the multi-chip design. Rather than the single contiguous or monolithic die approach that Intel takes, AMD CPUs are multiple chips joined together by the company’s high-speed Infinity Fabric. The original 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X joined two 8-core chips together. With the 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX AMD joins four 8-core chips together.
This method comes with its own special penalty, though. Although the sTR4 socket for Threadripper is physically the same as the server socket used for AMD’s Epyc CPUs, sTR4 is wired to support four-channel memory using two of the dies, rather than eight-channel memory using four dies.
On Threadripper, that essentially means that of the four dies in the 2990WX, two are pure compute-only dies, without direct access to memory and to PCIe. Those two compute dies must talk through an I/O die that has PCIe and access to the memory. This design means an I/O die with memory access has 64ns of latency to memory, while a compute-only die has a latency of 105ns.
There’s also a reduction in bandwidth
