MARCH 2020 PCWorld 29Anandtech’s review interestingly digs
deep into one of the biggest challenges
for AMD’s 64-core, 128-thread chip:
Windows itself.
Cutress and Bonshor ran the Threadripper
3990X through different flavors of Windows
to show off the issues in how the OS handles
not just 64-core processor pools, but also
how some versions of it treat the new CPU as
a dual-socket system even though the
Threadripper is a single chip. As part of their
testing, Cutress and Bonshor found disabling
SMT in the CPU in Windows 10 Pro yielded
better performance in some workloads, while
Windows 10 Enterprise performed far better..
TOM’S HARDWARE SAID
MORE IS YET TO COME AFTER
THREADRIPPER 3990X
Paul Alcorn of Tom’s Hardware, who also
showed the Threadripper 3990X outpacing
Intel’s dual socket Xeon chips was a bit less on
the fence on the 64-core part saying (go.
pcworld.com/alcn): “The Threadripper
3990X is pretty much exactly what AMD says
it is: A highly specialized processor that
provides incredible performance in a narrow
cross-section of workloads, but at an
extremely attractive price point given its
capabilities.”
Yet, like Anandtech.com, Alcorn said
there are clearly limitations—not all of them
within AMD’s control. “We’ve done our best
to show you the best of the Threadripper
3990X’s performance, but we can’t tell the
whole performance story due to spotty
software support for a processor of this class,”
Alcorn writes. “Outside of AMD’s targeted
workloads, most software can’t extract the
best performance from this processor.”
Still, Alcorn notes in his review: “...the
Threadripper 3990X is an incredibly
impressive chip. Just three years ago, an
eight-core $1,000 chip represented the best
the industry had to offer on an HEDT platform,
but now we have up to 64 cores and 128
threads at our disposal, and AMD says it
won’t slow down as it shrinks to smaller
process nodes. As crazy as it sounds, we’ll
see higher core counts in the future.
Hopefully the software and operating system
ecosystems respond with performance-
boosting optimizations so this kind of
incredible performance benefits more types
of workloads.” Amen, Paul.HOTHARDWARE’S TAKE ON
THREADRIPPER 3990X
Marco Chiappetta of Hothardware.com
described Threadripper 3990X as a “beast”
(go.pcworld.com/hthd) though with the
same “under the right conditions” qualifier as
other reviews.
Chiapetta continues: “The AMD Ryzen
Threadripper 3990X isn’t perfect and it’s
meant to appease a specific sub-set of users,
obviously. Even still, we must commend AMD
for continually and aggressively pushing the