[erkken]

I have a very cpu intensive application in Rust, that is able to use all cores given to it.

I am thinking about going for the Epyc 7502p with 32 cores but having a hard time knowing if the Threadripper counterpart with 32 cores would be better given its higher frequency.

Guess it is very hard to answer but which one would you go for? Will the threadripper perform much better?

[vardump]

Depends on how memory intensive workload you have. AFAIK, Epyc supports 8 memory channels, while Threadripper supports only 4. So TR has effectively only 50% memory bandwidth available.

[erkken]

It's not memory intensive at all - just CPU bound

[justinclift]

Does the application and/or data set fit comfortably in the cache of one of the processors, but not the other?

(I haven't checked if they've different cache sizes ;>)

[lliamander]

Go with the 3970X. Threadripper will be both cheaper and faster. It has between a 30%-50% clockspeed advantage, which should be fairly noticeable.

The 7502p is better in situations where you need more memory (either bandwidth or capacity) or you need to to consume less power (such as in a server deployment or a fanless case).

[greggyb]

> The 7502p is better in situations ... (such as in a server deployment or a fanless case).

There are almost no cooling solutions that can passively dissipate the heat from a 180W TDP CPU. I am not aware of any commercially available at present. Fanless is not really in the cards for any of these CPUs.

[lliamander]

Oh, they're rare, but they exist: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15261/turemetal-fanless-pc-ep...

[greggyb]

Neato! I had seen a demo of one of their cases, but didn't realize they were actually in production, and covered up to 180W.

Thanks for sharing!

Ninja edit: Ooof $700-$1400 for the chassis and custom fab for the CPU block. If I'm going for silence, I'd probably just spring for the radiator case instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfbcD248n4Y&t=361s

Ninja edit 2: Looks like there's a retailer (rather than going through the manufacturer to Taobao) in the US selling it for $1090. Unsure where to price out a custom CPU heat spreader to integrate with this (per the Anandtech article, that was a custom component Turemetal made for one customer). Either way this is awesome to see available.

[littlestymaar]

Was the “in Rust” part mandatory? ;)

On HN I still don't know if it's an easy way to get upvotes, or the best way to get down-voted hell.

[qchris]

I sort of figure that got put in there for context, because Rust code so commonly gets multi-threaded in a serious way because of the borrow checker and drop-in parallel libraries. It makes it a little bit more clear that, yes, this person probably will benefit a lot from having those extra cores/threads, rather than focusing on processors where they could improve performance more with better memory or clock speed options instead.

[Koshkin]

In Rust We Trust.

[beastman82]

The former

[gameswithgo]

Threadripper will be faster unless you need the memory bandwidth of EPYC.