the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small10 MAXIMUMPC MAR 2020 maximumpc.com
quickstart
New year starts with a bang for Team Red
AMD’s 64-Core Beast
fast shortly. The Threadripper
3990X will cost $3,990. If that
sounds like a lot, comparable
64-core Intel chips are twice
that or more. AMD claims the
3990X will outperform two
Xeon 8280s in selected tasks.
For HEDT systems, this surely
is the top of the tree for now.
AMD made almost exactly the
same claims when it launched
the Threadripper 3970X last
year; it wasn’t wrong then, and
this is even more of a jump.
Now to laptops. We have a
new set of 4000 series mobile
chips, the Renoir family. These
run 7nm Zen 2 cores, with
overhauled Vega graphics. We
get the Ryzen 7 4800, Ryzen 5
4600, and Ryzen 3 4300U. All
bar the 4300U come in both
a “U” version, for low-power,
ultra-thin devices, and an
“H” version for fatter things
geared to gaming and content
creation. The top models
are the Ryzen 7 4800U and
4800H, with eight cores and 16
threads. The 4800U has a base
clock of 1.8GHz, and maximum
boost of 4.2GHz. The TDP is
15W, but it can be configured
from 10 to 25W by the laptop
manufacturer, depending
on cooling. The eight-core
Vega graphics engine runs at
1,750MHz. The 4800H has aTDP of 45W, so you get a better
base clock of 2.9GHz, but the
same boost. The graphics
engine has seven cores, and
runs at 1,600MHz. AMD says
the Renoir chips offer twice the
performance per watt over the
last generation: 70 percent
due to the die shrink, and
30 percent due to better IPC
(instructions per clock).
We got a set of charts to
substantiate AMD’s claims.
These show the 4800U beating
Intel’s Core i7-1065G7 by 28
percent on the 3DMark Time
Spy benchmark; it repeats
this feat over a selection of
other productivity tests, and a
selection of games. The 4800H
is pitted against the Core
i7-9750H, and it wins by a good
margin, too. It also makes a
comparison with Intel’s
desktop i7-9700K, which it
beats as well—not by much,
but this is against a desktop
chip with over twice the TDP.
While the Threadripper
3990X will attract a lot ofattention, the new laptop chips
are an important step. The
mobile market, particularly
gaming laptops, has never
been one of AMD’s strong
points. We’ve had to wait a
while for the 7nm Zen 2 core
to reach the mobile market,
but it has put the company
right back in the mix. AMD’s
Zen 2 chips are superb—dollar
for dollar, they’re hard to beat.
But that final crown, being the
world’s fastest, always seems
to be snatched away by Intel
due to one thing: Can you build
the world’s fastest gaming rig
using AMD CPUs? Sorry, AMD,
but if you want to unequivocally
be proclaimed the greatest,
you need to beat Intel at what
it has always done so well, and
build the best desktop gaming
chip. The Threadripper 3990X
will give you the bragging
rights for content creation
and productivity; the 4800
looks good for the laptop
title, too. One more belt to be
undisputed champion. –CLAMD HAS ANNOUNCED the
arrival of the “world’s highest
performance desktop and
ultra-thin laptop processors.”
Big talk. First to the desktop:
The new Threadripper 3990X
is a beast, with 64 cores and
128 threads. It has a base clock
of 2.9GHz, with a maximum
boost rate of 3.4GHz. It shares
the same basic design as the
Epyc 7702P server chip, but
with fewer memory channels
and bumped speeds. It will
drop into existing sTRX
motherboards, with a quick
BIOS update to optimize
performance. Feeding it data
means it needs 1GB per core
as a minimum for complex
tasks; 2GB is better, so you’ll
want 128GB of main memory
to give it room to breathe. The
TDP is still quoted at 280W,
the same as all Threadrippers
over 24 cores, but surely it
must produce more heat? Not
according to AMD.
Is this the world’s highest
performance desktop chip?
It will be at many jobs, but
not all. It’s geared toward
multithreaded tasks, video
rendering, and such. AMD
estimates it as being twice
as fast as a 3970X. It’s not a
gaming chip, but it will do it,
and fast. We’ll find out howThat final crown, being the
world’s fastest, always seems
to be snatched by Intel.
The new Threadripper 3990X: 64 cores of awesome.©^AMD