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Comment by nabakin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

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