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AMD Threadripper 1950X Trounces Core I9-7900X In Multithreading Benchmark (pcper.com)
dryriver writes: The Cinebench R15 benchmark is a popular tool for measuring how well CPUs cope with multithreaded compute loads. AMD's Threadripper 1950X 16 core CPU, priced at $999 according to AMD, benchmarks 41% faster in Cinebench R15 than Intel's also $999 10 core Core i9-7900X CPU. While Intel's Core i9-7900X scores 2186 points on Cinebench, AMD's Threadripper 1950X scores 3046 points. Even the cheaper 12 core $799 Threadripper 1920X is over 200 points faster in Cinebench R15 than Intel's Core i9-7900X. Intel has its own 16 core Core i9-7960X in the works, performance yet unknown, priced at $1,699, but AMD's 16 core part currently appears to be a full $700 cheaper than Intel's MSRP. It remaines to be seen who is faster in single-threaded performance -- Intel may take that crown --and what the power consumption of a fully loaded Threadripper looks like compared to its Core i9 counterpart.
The quad channel memory most definitely will help, even more so than than on Intels new processors.
There are many reasons, but one crucial one is the very architecture of these new Threadripper CPUs. These higher core count processors are literally multiple lower core Ryzen chips in one die.
I won't get into any pros or cons of that aspect, but just mention it to explain the significance of the quad channel DDR4. The way AMD has designed these smaller "packages" to work together as one CPU is, to put it very simply, to have them communicate through the DDR4 bus.
This is significantly different than Intels so-called ring bus, or uncore. So it's a pretty big change for HEDT users who have essentially been exclusively using Intel since around 2007.
I don't claim to know every technical detail of TR/Ryzen, but I do know the end result of this is that your DDR4 memory speed with TR can have a large impact on performance. In particular, running higher than the official platform speed memory, or just overclocking above standard gives very nice increases in many scenarios.
I'm on mobile so I can't look it up right now, so don't hold be to this, but I remember what I saw being something like maybe 20-30%ish(?) improvement in some gaming benchmarks I believe. And there were a couple others that I only remember the numbers right now, but it was around 30% and 40% even in one case.
So I think that couple persuade a decent part of the HEDT community who isn't super hardcore, and probably games more or as much anyways as they utilize the massive multithreaded advantages of a HEDT platform. So I think that's pretty exciting, and gives TR at least a decent ranking in parts of the HEDT user base.
...a 40,000 BTU air conditioner for all the heat AMD product creates.
Except if you look at the specs this generation, it's Intel that is using more power and generating more heat.
They're also useful for video encoding, animation, multimedia production, simulation, and AI.
Have you ever tried to transcode MPEG2 video to x.265 or VP9 on a desktop PC? 2 hrs of VHS-quality video can turn into 10 hours of transcoding easily on a 4core/8thread PC. Transcoding 1080p or 4K from MPEG2 or MPEG4 to HEVC can take even longer. Lots of art school students use animation on their home laptops, plenty of people work with video encoding and online streaming at home, too.
Gaming is mostly a GPU-bound task, but these also have a lot of PCIe lanes to help with that, and lots of games are being compiled for multi-cpu now.
That's great if you can do everything you need with what you have. I'd say that's the case for most people. I know some who do everything they need at home on their cell phones and/or tablets, but other people have different use-cases.