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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lipscomb88 - Sunday, February 9, 2020 - link
Ltt showed crysis running on a software renderer on a 3970x and a 3990x. Definitely a difference between those two chips but it still chugs at times. Really cool to see.At some point, a high cord count cpu mimics the parallelization in gpus well enough to render well.
Spunjji - Wednesday, February 12, 2020 - link
It's notable in that video that the vast majority of the cores flicker around 2-5% utilisation; it looks like there's still a significant bottleneck besides the sheer number of cores for processing.ZoZo - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Better grap this one before it is replaced by the 4990X at $4990.Irata - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Ian and Gavin: Thanks for the review and particularly the Windows version analysis.While I agree with your conclusions, I have a suggestion for future high core count CPU reviews:
How about trying to run several things at once, i.e. A game while the CPU is rendering, rendering while compiling....
Perhaps there are actual use cases that could apply where you run several demanding tasks at once that could not be done so far since the CPU power was not there.
Hulk - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
I second this suggestion. One thing that annoys me with my 4770k is that if I'm rendering a video using Handbrake and trying to work on an audio project in Presonus Studio One there isn't enough compute for Studio One so it's all distortion. But realistically 12 cores would probably do this for me;)Irata - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
I remember seeing one review for TR3 (the 32c version) that die a multi tasking stress test which was very interesting.Afair it was on Adoredtv but another reviewer did it.
DannyH246 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Compiling was asked for in previous workstation class CPU reviews, and many people asked for it for AMD's 16 core Ryzen release....instead we get a gaming benchmark where they show Intel's 8 core CPU winning. What do you expect from IntelTech.com.Thanny - Saturday, February 8, 2020 - link
That used to be routine in the early days of multi-core CPU reviews.Seems these days everyone has forgotten about the concept of multitasking.
alpha754293 - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
I'm currently in discussions/in the works of getting a system put together in order to replace my four-node micro-cluster with either one or two of these AMD 3rd gen Threadripper systems.The price-per-performance is too compelling of a story for me NOT to dump my entire micro-cluster now and switch over to this.
eastcoast_pete - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link
Thanks Ian and Gavin! While the business cases for this 64 core TR CPU are limited, video editing and software-based encoding are two of them. A lot of people don't realize that a lot of video is already shot in 8K 60p, and those RAW files are enormous and tax any CPU, even this beast. Also, some of these editing suites either already have patches available, and apparently one of two of them are from AMD. So, not the CPU for gaming, but it has a place for certain tasks.