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HOT STUFF
ISSN 1330-626X
AMD OWERPOWERS
TWO XEONS
IN FOCUS VIDILAB AMD WORKSTATION
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VIDI no. 259 / 2017
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VIDILAB AMD WORKSTATION IN FOCUS
AMD owerpowers
POWERFUL AMD WORKSTATION
TWO A XEONS
AUTHOR: MARIO ŠEŠLEK
ccording to AMD, Threadripper was result of enthusiast engineers in their spare time. Only when they were confident in design of their creation, they’ve shared idea with the rest of the company. To make one processor, especially one that will satisfy enthusiasts and the most demanding users, it takes millions of dollars, and man-hour investment in order to have success. On the blueprint of the AMD’s plans for Epyc™ processors, resourceful engineers have figured out way to use existing server technology and make unprecedent high-end desktop chip, without excessive investment. Taking into o account that technology has been already proven, they were certain of their success. Few months later and here we are with the result in our hands. We have decided to make our own workstation with Threadripper, to test is it capable of all the things he’s been praised for.
This will be summer to remember for AMD. They’ve bring to the market superb product for which end-users cannot say anything else but words of praise. We’ve use it for making workstation that has no competition. Testing of the workstation was done in renewed machine learning company Microblink. We’ve pitted our Threadripper workstation against theirs with two Xeon CPUs inside
Our configuration used Threadripper 1950X, but we’ve also tested more affordable 1920X version. There’s 32GB of DDR4 memory, as well as M.2 SSD. Since we were testing AMD’s CPU, we’ve also chose Radeon Vega 64 GPU. All of this was powered by 1000W PSU. We’ve piled up all of this in to Phanteks Enthoo Luxe case that turned up to be perfect house for our components. Testing was done in series of real-world as well as synthetic tests. But in order not to leave it all on usual benchmarks, we’ve taken our system to Microblink, company most know for application Photomath. They are working on many different projects all revolving around machine learning. Our workstation we’ve compered against dual-CPU Xeon system in range of real-world demanding tests. Results will speak for themselves, but we were impressed, to say at least, with the performance of our creation and AMD’s Threadripper.
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IN FOCUS VIDILAB AMD WORKSTATION
TECHNOLOGY
Frankenstein’s processor reborn New features of AMD processors paved the way to stronger combinations with minimal development investments, while the results are better than with competing hardware AUTHOR: MARIO ŠEŠLEK
Threadripper is actually made of two Ryzen eight-core chips. They’re interconnected with AMD’s Infinity fabric technology in to a virtually unified CPU that shatters record and enables them to sell it for truly affordable price. We’ve received two samples – 1950X that’s flagship of the series, can process 32 threads, as well as 1920X model featuring 24 thread processing. Besides new processors, there’s new platform with X399 chipset and massive LGA type TR4 socket with 4094 pins on mainboard itself.
TR4 socket for AMD Threadripper line comes from server roots where big dimensions are not uncommon. Pins are now on the motheboard, for security reasons
Due to nature of interconnecting two Ryzen cores in to one Threadripper processor, it is possible to offer to the enduser 64 PCI Express lanes 3rd generation, regardless of the processor model that 42
VIDI no. 259 / 2017
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IN FOCUS VIDILAB AMD WORKSTATION Test results Threadripper 1950x
Threadripper 1920X
2952
2401
Cinebench 15 Multithreaded Singlethreaded
164
164
MP Ratio
17,97
14,66
3D Mark Spy CPU Score
9802
9415
CPU Test
32,93
31,63
Points
7774
7809
Wprime 1024, 4 cores
342,948
346,847
1024, all cores
55,97
70,463
32, 4 cores
11,376
11,505
08:46,0
11:02,0
LEDs are the most important You know that the lighting is important because smaller fan was choosen to look better when illuminated
Blender 3D, 2.78c Classrom benchmark
you chose. There’s eight DDR4 memory slots that natively supports ECC. Although you might think there’s no difference between Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1900X, later is composed out of two Ryzen dies, so it offers all of the goodies like more expensive models. It’s intended for those that don’t need huge core count, but do require 64 PCIe lanes for connecting add-on cards and high-speed drives. The idea is that when you need more processing power, you can simply get it by swapping for more powerful Threadripper processor. That’s truly impressive, especially if you put it in perspective of limitations that Intel’s competing platform has. The most powerful LGA2066 processor has maximum of 44 PCI lanes, while slower models have only 28, or even just 16 PCI lanes
Threadripper New processor belongs to server-class, and this is visible from its dimensions. AMD designed interesting packaging for it, where the processor is firmly fastened
Is this the processor we’ve hoped all to be? Answer to that question depends on the workload you intend to run on it. AMD points out that processor shines in multitasking scenarios. That’s when its parallelism comes to spotlight. With the arrival more and more faster M.2 SSDs that are using PCIe lines for communication, 64 lines will be very useful. Threadripper’s main competitor is Intel’s i9-7900X that supports 20 simultaneous threads. In some test Intel has lead, despite lower thread count. You should notice that not all apps can scale up to 32 threads, and take that in to account before purchasing.
Real testing in Microblink
In time of our testing, Intel Core i9 was not available on our market, but we’ve done something even better. We’ve took our ultimate configuration and bring it to real-world testing in developer company – Microblink. That’s where we’ve compared our Threadripper PC with their build servers. ELITE SPECIFICATIONS AMD AND INTEL HIGH END CPUS Ryzen 1800X
How much PCI lines?
Well, first of all let’s remind about PCI Express. PCIe lanes are one of the most important factor when you buy high-performance computer that should deliver highest levels of productivity. One graphics cad will take 16 lanes, USB 3.1 additional two, each M.2 SSD will take four PCIe lanes. Every add-on
card will need all available PCIe lanes for communication with processor. Of course, that doesn’t mean that PC with only 16 PCIe lanes won’t be useful for anything but graphics card, but as we’ve said, if you expect maximum performance out of your system, this is one of the first bottlenecks that will transpire. Here comes Threadripper with its offering that crushes present monopoly on the HEDT market. Only thing that remains for AMD is to speed-up performance of applications that are running on one core, because that’s only field that still belongs to competition. In case that you want to use this processor for gaming, there’s gaming option, that turns off one Ryzen die for higher performances and faster RAM communication. But in reality, performance difference is difficult to notice.
Threadripper 1900X
Threadripper 1920X
Threadripper 1950X
Intel i97960X
Intel i97920X
Intel i97900X
Intel i97820X
Intel i97800X
8/16
8/16
12/24
16/32
16/32
12/24
10/20
8/16
6/12
3.6GHz
3.8GHz
3.5GHz
3.4GHz
2.8GHz
2.9GHz
3.3GHz
3.6GHz
3.5GHz
4.0GHz
4.0GHz
4.0GHz
4.0GHz
4.2GHz
4.3GHz
4.3GHz
4.3GHZ
4.0GHz
16MB
16MB
32MB
32MB
22MB
16.5MB
13,75MB
11MB
8.25MB
95W
125W
180W
180W
165W
140W
140W
140W
140W
3,830 kn
4,500 kn
6,500 kn
8,500 kn
13,230 kn
Unknown (1.200 dollar)
8,200 kn
Unknown (600 dollar)
Unknown (390 dollar)
24 PCIe
64 PCIe
64 PCIe
64 PCIe
44 PCIe
44 PCIe
44 PCIe
28 PCIe
28 PCIe
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VIDI no. 259 / 2017
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IN FOCUS VIDILAB AMD WORKSTATION
Ultimate workstation PC we have bring to world renewed developer Microblink, where we’ve put Threadripper to real world tasks, and impressions are more than positive for AMD
VIDILAB WORKSTATION IN THE HANDS OF PROFESSIONAL
Real world stress test MIcroblink Lead developer Nenad Mikša
AUTHOR: DINKO KADI
took contole over Vidilab workstation and squeezed the last thread from the processor. The final result could be interesting to those who spend thousands on Xeon architecture
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e were fortunate not to hand ta ke our workstation to sixteen floor where Microblink offices are situated. Instead, smart elevator helped us. While we were going up, so did our excitement. Our intention was to check out what does Threadripper can do in real life scenario with workloads that put food on table for developers who use it. OK, not only food to the table, but also world-wide fame that Microblink’s Photomath app has broth to its developers. Our hosts were founder Damir Sabola and Nenad Miksha – ArchLinux kung-fu master.
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IN FOCUS VIDILAB AMD WORKSTATION
in the cold room
Microblink CEO Damir Sabol demonstrated one of the server rooms where build servers fighting Vidilab ultimate workstation are located
We’ve compared our workstation with Microblink’s build server that has two Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 (16 cores and 32 threads in total) combined with two mechanical hard drives in RAID0 and NVMe SSD, just like our Threadripper.
results, compiling times on Threadripper system are same between two runs, meaning our I/O subsystem is much faster. Results obtained on Microblink build server were with same source code taken from RAID0 of Seagate Constallation 1TB 7200rpm drives and Samsung 950 Pro 512GB NVMe SSD.
What did we do?
On latest distribution of ArchLinux M ic robl i n k ’s s ou rc e c o de for BlinkBarcode, BlinkID, BlinkInput and PhotoPav was compiled. According to Nenad Miksha, 1700 C++ source libreries were compiled with the help of GCC 7.2.0 and Ninja build framework with the help of CMake system build generator. After source was compiled, we’ve run all unit and integration tests that Microblink runs before each release of its apps. In this case we’re talking about more than 3000 tests that work by loading video sequence and do recognition algorithms characteristic for Microblink’s SDK.
According to Miksha, unlike synthetic benchmarks that are usually used, testing with the help of compiling of source code in real-world workloads gives much more real picture of performance, and interaction between processor and I/O subsystem. Considering that our test
Spartan linux
ArchLinux is a reliable working environment where we ran a series of tests. Vidilab workstations achieved the best results
writeback their results on to the disk (although writing is much less used than reading), second run is much more consistent thanks to drive’s caching algorithm. After in-depth testing, results shows that one Threadripper is faster than two Xeons combined! Most of Microblink’s developers their job are doing on MacBook Pro notebooks, so out of curiosity we’ve run tests on that platform, albeit, there’s no GCC on OSX. Instead there’s Clang that’s little bit faster, so direct comparison isn’t straightforward, but still are interesting.
Part of the test with compiling is very processor intensive, for both CPU and I/O subsystem, with CPU being much murre stressed. As you can see from
Performance for Microblink tasks execution Vidilab (SSD SATA III)
Vidilab (NVME SSD)
Microblink Build server (RAID0 HDD)
Microblink Build server (NVME SSD)
MacBook Prodeveloper machine
The first time
3m30.967s
3m33.353s
The second time
3m31.340s
3m31.149s
4m22.197s
4m21.661s
7m28.711s
4m11.381s
4m18.057s
Compilation duration
Test The first measurement
2m36.859s
3m0.533s
4m15.845s
3m32.705s
The second measurement
2m36.264s
2m41.080s
2m50.809s
2m52.449s
9m32.379s
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