3950x got a release date 25 nov!

Even if all you do is light browsing, a system with lots of cores feels faster and smoother. According to task manager, I have about a hundred processes running right now. Some of those are single threaded processes and some of those are multi-threaded processes. This is on my AMD Ryzen 9 3900X system, and it feels completely smooth. In this system, I have three NVMe SSD drives, and no hard drives. This system replaced a well aged Intel i7-4770K that had several SATA SSD drives, and this 12 core AMD system is noticeably faster and smoother even when doing lightweight activities like browsing.

 

Yeah, the only time I use SATA SSD drives these days is for external backups using a USB3 to SATA adapter. For everything else, NVMe is the only way to go.

 

At what point do we get bottlenecked by the shared memory bus, though?

Game and engine programmers put a lot of effort into optimising memory access and thread inter-dependencies just to get a single application to maximise resource efficiency. There's only so much an OS can do with generic approaches.

 

Good question, and the answer appears to be that we're not bottlenecked yet even with 12C/24T. Below are benchmarks for productivity and gaming apps that show single channel memory is not that different from dual channel. That said keep in mind that AMD's 3900X and 3950X have massive 64MB L3 caches to help with memory constrained workloads.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-zen-2-memory-performance-scaling-benchmark/2.html
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-zen-2-memory-performance-scaling-benchmark/3.html

Additionally we're on track for DDR5 which will have 1.36x the performance on a per-clock basis compared to DDR4, and the specification calls for the base speed to be twice the transfers per second as DDR4. We've been told by AMD that the Ryzen 4000 series will be DDR4 but that they will be adopting DDR5 for the 5000 series due in 2021.

https://www.techpowerup.com/248656/...formance-increase-over-ddr4-at-same-data-rate

 

I was pretty sceptical that dual channel memory would be enough for 16 cores, but the available benchmarks tell another story, I'm impressed what you can do without going full HEDT

 

That said the Threadripper 3960X and 3970X reviews just left NDA and they're smoking everything in both apps and games.

Spoiler: Hardware Unboxed Review

 

Yeah 64 cores, 128 threads will do that

I tried to grab a 3950x but they were gone in seconds will have to wait two weeks

 

Current reviews only cover the 24 (3960X) and 32 (3970X) core variants.