How is the $1800 2990WX outperforming the $1980 i9-7980XE in every rendering test they performed not convincing?
There are clearly workloads where the 32 core TR chip does not perform well (probably due to the memory configuration) but it seems pretty good at rendering.
Faster with 2x more cores and twice more power consumption. Hardly a win in my book - it means each core is way weaker and power hungry. Intel will easily match that sometimes soon without sweating.
Tom's Hardware saw a stock 2990WX at a lower power consumption than a stock i9-7980XE during a Prime95 "torture loop". Overclocked, the AMD part was higher than the Intel one, but only slightly.
Where have you seen that it has double the power consumption? Under what workloads?
Personally, I don't care about "weaker cores". If a system has 2048 cores clocked at 7 THz and it is 20% faster at my workload than a single-core CPU at 700 MHz, it is faster.
The fact that the "weaker cored" system is cheaper than the "burly muscly" single core system is a bonus.
Power consumption doesn't even matter that much either. It is the equivalent to a single 60W light bulb (or several of those new-fangled LED bulbs). Big whoop.
If I were Pixar and was running one of these 24/7 then, well, it's theoretically possible that the extra you pay in electricity would make up for the lower capital price. But for a hobbyist running this at most 10 hours a week I really doubt that that's a consideration.
But more importantly, The Tech Report looked at task energy for the Threadripper in rendering tasks and found that it took less energy to finish a render than competitorys. It's power was higher but the time was shorter to an even greater extent.
2x core count hardly ever offers anywhere near a 100% performance gain, even across Intel's lineup [1]. Very few workloads are that parallelizeable, and almost everything (from the program to the OS to the CPU itself) introduces some form of overhead when running in parallel.
Slightly faster yes. Cheaper? For now. Price is elastic. The i9 could be priced at any price point because there was no competition until now. Do you think Intel will keep it overpriced for long?
AMD has manufacturing cost advantage - CPUs are built from 4- core CCXes that can be binned separately.
Intel on the other hand needs to manufacture a monolithic CPU that not only is fault free in enough cores, but performs well. That's harder and yields are way lower.
80% yield on a 4 core block is a 16.7% yield on a 32 core block - and that's before binning
Intel could do that. But AMD came out with this method first.
AMD has only been doing this "infinity fabric" thing for a year. Intel was caught with their pants down. It seems like Intel is researching chiplet technology and trying to recreate AMD's success here.
It takes several years to create chips. So Intel realistically won't be able to copy the strategy until 2020 or later. But you better bet that Intel is going to be investing heavily into chiplet technology, now that AMD demonstrated how successful it can be.
Because it's not free. Communication between cores in different CCXes (and memory access - there is a single memory controller per CCX) has slightly higher latency than within a single CCX (or a monolithic CPU, but here Intel's advantage decreases with core count due to a different interconnect).
Also because they didn't have to innovate - no competition since early Opterons.