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from the when-does-the-seamripper-go-on-sale dept.
AMD's Threadripper 2 TR 2990WX will be available for retail on August 13. The CPU has 32 cores and the suggested retail price is $1,799, compared to $1,999 for Intel's 18-core i9-7980XE. A 24-core TR 2970WX will be available in October for $1,299.
The 16-core TR 2950X ($899, August 31) and 12-core TR 2920X ($649, October) replace their counterparts from the last generation of Threadripper CPUs, but have slightly improved "12nm" Zen+ cores like the other Threadripper 2 CPUs. The 16 and 12-core chips use 2 dies while the 24 and 32-core versions use 4 dies.
A benchmark leak shows the 32-core TR 2990WX outperforming Intel's 18-core i9-7980XE by 53% in the multithreaded Cinebench R15 (this is an early result, may not represent the final performance, and may be overly favorable to AMD).
Also at Tom's Hardware and Engadget.
Related: First Two AMD Threadripper Chips Out on Aug. 10, New 8-Core Version on Aug. 31
Intel Teases 28 Core Chip, AMD Announces Threadripper 2 With Up to 32 Cores
AMD Ratcheting Up the Pressure on Intel
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday August 07 2018, @04:59AM (5 children)
I too hang on to old computers.
Problem is, with these 14nm chips, the same performance as that Q9500 can be had in a much smaller and lower power package. Your aging system probably uses about 100W, while the low power versions of these newer systems use only 30W max, and 10W for low intensity work such as text editing. If you run your computer 8 hours per day, that's about half a kilowatt hour of additional power used. Sure, at 10 cents per kWh, that's only 5 cents per day, but it adds up. Comes to about $18 per year. That's $54 per year if you run them 24/7 so you can do stuff like Folding at Home. Plus, you get integrated graphics that actually performs decently-- a bit better than that Radeon HD 7450, actually. Integrated graphics isn't total garbage like it was 15 years ago.
Throw in the facts that hard drives last about 5 years, and that an SSD is way, way faster, and may now exceed the HDD in reliability and longevity, and that computers don't have to be in huge towers any more, you should seriously consider upgrading soon. You could wait a bit longer, for 10nm, 7nm, or even 5nm stuff. And for fixes to Spectre. And I'd certainly like hardware decoding of the latest video codec, AV1, but that's probably 3 years or more away. I decided to upgrade last year, before the Spectre story broke. I'd rather not have that vulnerability, but it sounds like it's going to be a couple of years wait for chip makers to get on the ball and really fix that issue. Right now, they're offering lame mitigations that don't totally fix it. One other thing was that before I upgraded, I didn't have any x86 chips with the latest additions to the instruction set, SSE4. All that was enough to persuade me it was time. I wanted to wait a bit longer for AMD's Ryzen, but they were taking too long to suit me. Now of course, Ryzen is available, and it's had a wonderful dampening effect on prices. Yeah, now is a good time to upgrade.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday August 07 2018, @05:12AM
Wow, I hope not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Adoption [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Tuesday August 07 2018, @03:02PM (2 children)
Where have you been buying your drives? If that's the statistical average than I've been hitting well above it for over a decade. I've still got ten year old 120gb drives in a raid5 array, spinning merrily.
- D
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:43AM (1 child)
My older hard drives all still work. It's my newer 1T and 1.5T WD drives that failed early, the green in just 9 months, and the blue in 3 years. For the 3rd drive, got a Fujitsu, and it's been working fine.
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:22AM
Well, that's fair. Of the three drives I've purchased in the past five years (two 1TB and two 2TB), one of the 1TB ones has failed. Well SMART data showed signs of imminent failure, so I replaced it and it's buddy with the 2TB drives and kept the other 1TB as a spare.
Now you've got me wondering when the 2TB ones are going to pack it in. Thanks!
- D
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday August 07 2018, @06:39PM
My electric is $0.11 per kwh so I save even more by the switch. But when you jump from an older processor to a new one it gets expensive quickly. I need to replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory. And while SSDs are more energy efficient, they're not cheap. I have SSDs for all of my boot drives but the data is on spinning rust drives for cost reasons.