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It seems we are stuck at 16C/32T for desktop CPUs for a bit longer. I guess most things that scale beyond run even better on GPUs. But not all! I wonder if we will get non-"Pro" Threadrippers this generation?

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There's really no point in going beyond 16 core CPUs. Games only use 4 cores, maybe 6 cores max. Which means for games, you want to maximize performance-per-core and don't care about having more than 8 cores. More than 8 cores is only useful for very few use cases where the task is very parallelizable or you care about power consumption efficiency and some of those cores are efficiency cores.

I make use of all the cores on my Threadripper regularly for multi-process parallelism. Large compiles regularly saturate all my cores. Development against multiple Kubernetes clusters also makes it beneficial to have a ton of cores.

So there is definitely a use case, it’s just maybe not for you

Your Threadripper also has a lot more DRAM bandwidth than can be economically provided on a mainstream motherboard. 16 cores is a reasonable limit for AMD's mainstream platform, and going beyond that would require more expensive motherboards and a bigger, more power-hungry IO die—exactly the wrong direction for them to be moving with this product segment.

Umm Threadripper CPUs have historically been on their own sockets/mobo platforms. They aren’t drop-in replacements for the mainstream CPUs. The grandparent comment was wondering if we’d get Threadrippers in this generation, which has nothing to do with “this product segment,” whatever that means

I didn't say there were no use cases, I said there were

> very few use cases

The average person is not compiling programs or dealing with Kubernetes.

The average person is not buying a 7950 so I have no idea what you are getting at.

I get the confusion, I meant the average person buying these CPUs is not compiling programs or dealing with Kubernetes.

I don't know. Typically the 5950/7950 is not targeted towards gamers. It sacrifices single core performance for more cores. Usually it's more of a prosumer audience that actually do need those attributes.

I've been seeing these CPUs marketed as next gen gaming CPUs but maybe I'm wrong

Yes the 5900/7900 but those have 12 cores. The higher end 5950/7950, which has a higher core count, actually perform slightly worse in games and are targeted towards a prosumer.

Don't get me wrong, they still work amazingly well for games. It's just that they sacrificed some performance in those chips for the higher core count so it only makes sense they'd want to push that further.

But my guess is they don't want to compete with their threadripper line. Unfortunately those come much later in the product cycle so we'll probably be waiting some time for a Zen 4 threadripper.

7950X has more L3$ per CCX and higher single threaded clock, so I'm not sure why you think the 7900X would perform better in games.

tbf, a lot of things still haven't been optimized for when AMD introduced >4 cores with first gen Ryzen. I'm running a 5950x and unless I'm doing something like 3D rendering I rarely notice more than ~8 of my cores ramping up at a time.

Sounds like you need to install Gentoo. Excellent replacement for space heaters in winter time.

Unfortunately most packages spend more time during the configure step or other ~single threaded parts than actually compiling stuff in parallel when you have that many cores. You can compile multiple packages in parallel but doing that without running out of memory when you do get to a couple of big packages is tricky.

Ideally, portage would take memory (including ramdisk) requirements of packages into account when scheduling builds (some packages do check for free memory) and ask as a make jobserver [0] (with patches for non-make build systems to support jobservers) to always fully use the available resources.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Job-Slots...

Raptor Lake is rumoured to go to 24C/32T. 16 of 24 the cores are efficiency cores though, we'll see how that compares to the all performance core design of Ryzen 7000.

There is little doubt that Intel Raptor Lake will be better than AMD Raphael at single-threaded tasks, because both will have about the same clock frequency, but Raptor Lake will have a higher IPC.

There is also little doubt that AMD Raphael will be better than Intel Raptor Lake at multi-threaded tasks, even if they now have the same number of threads. The reason is that AMD is made with the much more efficient TSMC process and the consequence is that at equal power consumption the AMD CPUs will reach much higher clock frequencies.

This is the essential difference between single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks, during the former the performance is limited by the maximum turbo clock frequency, while during the latter the performance is limited by the clock frequency at a fixed power consumption, which depends more on the manufacturing process than on the microarchitecture of the CPU.

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