[KirinDave]

I don't really understand why this is newsworthy, so maybe someone could help me understand. It's a big, power hungry desktop CPU with incremental performance gains over the last generation.

Why is this important? Is there some kind of architectural breakthrough these CPUs are using? Are these CPUs recovering performance lost to Spectre/Meltdown mitigation?

[barkingcat]

This is a big power hungry desktop CPU with incremental performance gains with the x86/x64 instruction set from someone not Intel and forcing intel to compete on pricing and performance.

Just that alone is newsworthy.

[KirinDave]

I think that's it: it's sort of an intel vs AMD interest piece. It's newsworthy in that it's a market signal, not a technology signal. The desktop CPU market segment is seeing a lot of transformation as secondary purpose built processors and SBCs become more and more of the market, so this is just sort of a fun puff piece.

Thanks for helping me answer the question.

[Karliss]

3970x almost halves the LLVM compilation time compared to 2990wx using the same core count. I would call that more than incremental performance gain.

[KirinDave]

Why? Isn't that within a modest error margin for the general arc of these? I'm looking at this graph over time and it seems like a linear projection wouldn't be broken by this.

"The next generation of processors is not quite twice as fast as the current generation" just seems like a pretty normal statement to me.

[unethical_ban]

The last decade has been pretty stagnant in CPU development. That AMD has gotten ahead, and is making significant CPU advancements in each generation for the past two years, is something we haven't seen in 10-15 years.

[yellowapple]

Yep. My top-of-the-line Threadripper 1950X is already multiple generations behind the bleeding edge; I built that machine last year, and there are already newer CPUs blowing it out of the water.

It reminds me of the 90's when Moore's Law was still a Law-with-a-capital-L and I love it.

[KirinDave]

Other than benchmarks, do you actually feel this? Dev environments have gone to great lengths to reduce the total amount of compilation required and for nearly every other application, a GPU does most of the work. And if you've got a lot of ML to do, you probably would save more time with a TPU.

I don't really see what the point of faster desktop CPUs are without being accompanied by substantial power use reduction. I'm a software engineer and other than when I'm lazy about my Haskell build process and dont offload it to a farm, it doesnt really seem to matter at all. It doesnt come into play with my CAD work, and it doesn't make my Java GC cycles faster.

[yellowapple]

You're right that the individual tasks don't feel much faster. What's impressive and more relevant to me is that I can do more of them at the same time. I can have Firefox open on a bunch of tabs and a resource-intensive video game or CAD program running and Spotify and Slack and a bunch of Emacs windows and a bunch of terminal and file manager windows and even a couple VMs all at the same time, and can Alt-Tab freely among them (or even put them on separate monitors). My desktop doesn't break a sweat in the process. My previous desktop (with an early-gen i7) could handle a fraction of that under the same operating system (Slackware). My desktops before that under any operating system handled even less, as do most laptops even today.

And that's with 16 cores. The 3990X is gonna have four times that many. That's four times the number of things my computer can be doing at the same time at the same per-core load.

My work laptop, according to htop, is running 263 "tasks" right now (which I assume to be processes+threads). If AMD can in the next few years pull off another quadrupling like they're trying to do with the 3990X, then I'd be very close to being able to give every process and thread on a computer its own x86 core. That's fucking ludicrous.

[KirinDave]

Has it though? We've been seeing meteoric improvements in low power applications and in specialized processing packages like GPUs, TPUs and SBUs.

That desktop CPU performance has slowed down is more a sign to me of fundamental challenges with the architecture (e.g., gains at the cost of isolation as in Specter and Meltdown), not process challenges.

So I think maybe this is story for folks who have interest in AMD vs. Intel, which is reasonable, but it's not particularly exciting except from a vendor diversity standpoint.

[mattmar96]

Dont take these gains for granted. We're nearing the physical limit for current technologies. Transistors a handful of atoms across. My guess is in 20 years we will celebrate a 5 percent gain.

[KirinDave]

I'm not sure that's true for other parts of the market. Certainly single board computers and microcontrollers have been seeing incredible gains, as have TPUs and GPUs.

It is cool we are reaching limits for our current process, but I was under the impression that in a post-Specter/Meltdown world what we're really waiting for is new architectures that support better speed under safe isolation.

[zamadatix]

Just to note AMD CPUs were not affected by Meltdown in the first place.