Countdown to the release of 32 core Threadripper!!!

OhWee

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I'm getting excited! Threadripper 2 32 core! Looks like it launches on 13 August! And possibly as 'cheap' as $1500 US!

Note that the 24 core EPYC 7401P is currently priced in the $1200 range, and the 32 core 7551P is just over $2200..., so $1500-$1600 US sounds about right to me.
note: EPYC pricing has climbed a bit recently. Looks like there's a stronger demand for them now.

Anyways, for those of us using Daz Iray, I'm sure we've all been there...

Iray scene won't fit in GPU memory, so render goes CPU only. Which is painfully slow with 8 or less CPU cores. For reference:
- 8 Core Ryzen 1800 X, 2018 starter @ 18 minutes
- 16 core Threadripper 1950x, starter scene @ 9.25 minutes
-18 core Intel I9-7980 XE, starter scene @ 8.33 minutes
- 1080 Ti @ starter scene @ 1 minute
- Multiple 1080 Ti's - faster (divide by 2, 3, or 4 for rough estimate).

Sure, there's things you can do to shoehorn a complex scene with multiple characters into GPU memory, but it takes time to do that. But of course it will often take less time than just doing a CPU only render. Or, you can hide some of the characters and do a scene in multiple passes (different character groups in each pass), using Photoshop, etc. to merge the characters together once the renders are done. I just did this with a crossover render, in fact.

Of course, not having everything in the scene at the same time can mess with lighting reflections, shadows and such...

Even people with 1080 Tis have hit this GPU memory wall more often than they'd like...

As noted above, 16 core Threadripper will of course have better CPU only render times, as do the more expensive Intel HEDT multicore options...

But, extrapolating from the above results, 4.7 minutes (starter scene) for a 32 core CPU only render is getting within striking distance of the 'well, versus setting up multiple render passes, then merging them in photoshop, or spending the time to see if I can reduce texture sizes to make it fit, might as well just do the CPU only render' territory.

Of course, if the 16 GB+ new Nvidia card rumors end up being true...

If you are using 3Delight or other CPU only render engines though, yeah those 32 cores are already rather tantalizing!

Anyways, yeah I'm getting excited. Plus, the 60 PCIe lanes will be nice for multiple GPUs, etc. in any case! If I end up doing a build, it'll be my first desktop system in years....

The cheaper Threadripper options are already a nice value proposition for multiple (3-4) GPUs, so it'll be interesting to see if we get updated 8, 12, and 16 core versions along with the 24 and 32 core versions.

Around 1 month until launch! Looking forward to the reviews!
 

MaxCarna

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I read a article once that concluded that when you use multiple GPU the number of cores in the processor makes the difference. The author was using 4 1080, got better results with 2 xeon than using one top of line i7. I'm founding very hard to find motherboards for two Epyc and space for 4 gpus.

This Threadripper could be the answer, very nice tip!.

Now I'm really anxious about GTX 1180, the jump to 16gb will be greater than 8gb to 11gb, from TI version. I want to see if Iray will be compatible, from 9xx to 10xx it took a long time.
 

OhWee

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One of the prototype PCBs that has been seen out in the wild has 12 GB of GDDR6, but what's interesting about that is that the GDDR6 chips come in 1 GB and 2 GB versions, so a 24 GB GDDR6 card isn't out of the question. GDDR6 is significantly faster than GDDR5, so that in of itself is already appealing, plus the die shrink on the GPU should increase core performance significantly as well. The question is, when?

Of course, a 24 GB next gen version would likely be a Quadro or Titan card. The Quadro P6000 has 24 GB of GDDR6, but still retails for around $5k (most people can't afford that). And the top end Nvidia card has 32 GB of HBM2, but of course retails in the $9K range (yeah, not rushing out to buy that one). Supposedly you can 'stack' the VRAM with 2 of those Quadro GV100's with NVLink (so a 64GB block of VRAM), but of course Daz3D would have to create a software implementation for that, which may be unlikely as the 'target audience' would be a very tiny subset of Daz users.

Nonetheless, there is speculation about a next gen Nvidia card with 16 GB of HBM2 as well, and a 32 GB version. AMD's next gen 'pro' card will most likely have 16 and 32 GB versions, and then there's the gaming card, which will show up at some point, but of course Radeon is pretty much useless for Iray.
 

OhWee

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Also, yeah unless you go with a rackmount server config, not many good EPYC mobo options for multiple GPUs. There is a nice Asrock board for single socket EPYC though (4 double-spaced PCIe 16 slots), but at this point might as well wait on TR2.
 

MaxCarna

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I was flirting with the mob Z10PE-D8 WS for 2 Xeon, then I turned my attention to Epyc, but AMD first start to sell them only inside servers. Then started to see some benchmarks of a single i9 being better than 2 xeon. Now this Threadripper seems very attractive.

I'm currently using a Ryzen 7 1700, really liked it, but the lack of the onboard GPU it is a little bit annoying, you can't isolate the main GPU to work for render only.

 

OhWee

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There are now Ryzens with APUs, but of course you sacrifice 4 cores for the inclusion of the Vega APU. The Vega APU might be nice for driving the Daz viewport though! And the Vega APU actually doesn't do badly with games, although certainly you are better off with a Discrete GPU, unless your discrete GPU is a really low end one. But, if you wanted to do some light gaming while rendering with your Nvidia discrete GPU... well possibly.

I'd say that Ryzen's biggest weakness is the lack of PCIe lanes, but a number of mid and lower end Intel CPUs have a comparable number of PCIe lanes, depending on how far down the product stack you are. That's what makes Threadripper so damn appealing for those of us looking at multi-GPU setups with an eye on upgradeability.

The 'hot' and pretty much verified EPYC rumor is 48 Core 7 NM EPYCs in 2019, which could be interesting on that single socket Asrock board I just mentioned, but of course those won't be cheap...
 
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MaxCarna

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I was looking to a few comparisons about the current model 1950x against i9 7980XE, it called my attention that Threadripper support ECC memories.




This means it work on server motherboards? Like with hot swap dual PSU and SAS disks?
 
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OhWee

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I was looking to a few comparisons about the current model 1950x against i9 7980XE, it called my attention that Threadripper support ECC memories.




This means it work on server motherboards? Like with hot swap dual PSU and SAS disks?
As far as I know/have read, TR4 isn't pin compatable with SP3, despite having the same(?) number of pins. The BIOS supposedly won't recognize a Threadripper if it's placed in an EPYC mobo (and vice versa), although I haven't read about anyone actually trying to do this.

As for hot swapping drives, power supplies, etc. I have absolutely no clue. That might be a question for the servethehome.com guys.

I did see this article about someone trying to simulate a 32 core Threadripper using an overclocked EPYC chip:

But there's a lot of caveats with the setup used, so I didn't find the results overly useful. Among other things, the simulated benches used DDR4 2400 memory, which is just stupid since every article I've read about EPYC says you should get DDR4 2667 due to the performance boost, plus Threadripper 2 supposedly supports DDR4 3200...
 

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Thanks to the Amazon Prime sale going on, there are some screamin' Threadripper (1) deals out there!

Newegg has the 1950x for $699 right now. Same at Amazon. the 8 core and 12 core versions are also discounted!

While I do suggest waiting another month or two for Threadripper 2 to drop, for those on a budget, or that need to upgrade now for whatever reason, well $699 for 16 cores really is a good deal!

There are a also couple of sub-$300 (sale price) Threadripper mobo options as well (so you could come in at a hair below $1000 before shipping, taxes, etc.), but I'd suggest not 'cheaping out' on the motherboard/pay attention to the PCIe-16 slot layouts with an eye on a possible multi-GPU config. Do your research and pick a good one!

That being said, the two aforementioned mobos do have decent Newegg ratings.

Ram is an added expense of course...
 

MaxCarna

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Newegg has the 1950x for $699 right now.
Today I was making some searches, EPYC 7281 16-Core costs $696. A great dual slot mob MBD-H11DSI-NT-O costs $599. Two of those would be $1392, less than the announced for threadripper 32.

Have a redundant PSU with hot swap, Ecc memory, SAS RAID and so on, can be strongs benefits to consider.

A whole system with 2 1080ti was around 6k. But I included many fancy features like 128gb RAM, 240gb SSD M2 for OS, 960gb SSD SATA for DAZ, 6tb SAS 12gb/s, SAS 8 units 12gb/s controller, tower case with 5 coolers and PSU 1280w...
 
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OhWee

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In case you might be wondering how those dual 7281's might stack up against a 7551P (single socket 32 core EPYC):



The C-Ray benchmark is probably the closest thing the linked review has to show rendering potential, but of course we have Threadrippers, Ryzens, and other Intel/AMD CPUs being benched in the thread, which do show rather linear scaling.

Interestingly, I did spot a mention of the current version of Daz (4.10) being a bit slower than 4.9 when doing Iray renders. The bench at the end of the linked thread shows the 4.11 Beta being a bit faster with Iray renders than 4.10, so hopefully this holds true for the full 4.11 release.
 

f95zoneuser463

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@OhWee
Did you try the 4.11 Beta yourself already? And if so, any problems?
I did not, I just noticed it. But I'm worried about potential problems ... on the other hand I just made a backup ... it's tempting to get more performance just from a software update and I'm damn curious about the deep learning denoiser.
 

OhWee

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@OhWee
Did you try the 4.11 Beta yourself already? And if so, any problems?
I did not, I just noticed it. But I'm worried about potential problems ... on the other hand I just made a backup ... it's tempting to get more performance just from a software update and I'm damn curious about the deep learning denoiser.
Nope, haven't tried 4.11 yet. I'm patient when it comes to Daz, so I'm good with waiting on the official release. That being said, I haven't read about anyone having significant issues with 4.11 yet. There's a on the Daz forum which is following the progress.
 

f95zoneuser463

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I could not resist and installed the 4.11.0.171 Beta. The installer does not replace the older 4.10 stable version (wasn't sure about that before). I've tested saving a scene in 4.11 and loading in 4.10. Works fine in case something goes wrong. In 4.11 switching to iray is faster.

The new denoiser is very good to get very fast previews. Helpful for adjusting lights! During the rendering process the image starts grainy as usual, then the denoiser kicks in after a configured iteration-count was reached. The image now looks like it was painted with watercolors. Obviously this effect disappears with more iterations.
4.11 beta denoiser.png
I'm not sure about the result when aiming for VERY high quality renders. This will probably become standard and it will spawn a new wave of low quality CG-porn games because it is fast ... but instead of having grainy renders they will now look water-colored.
I still need to test more stuff like ...
  • a low light scene, the grainy hell in iray
  • I'm not sure what the best setting for optimal speed is. If I'm aiming for 3000 iterations for example, is it faster to let it kick in at 3000+ iterations? Does it improve the quality if it kicks in later? *must investigate*
sorry for off-topic btw.
 

MaxCarna

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In case you might be wondering how those dual 7281's might stack up against a 7551P (single socket 32 core EPYC):

In page I only found single configuration, don't know if I looked right but I found this other with dual, we have to interpose the graphics:


In the chess one, 7551p made 70000000 and dual 7281 around 65000000. One 7551p costs $2313.31 almost the double of two 7281 for $1392. But is good to stay attencious to see if the Threadripper x32 will perform close to 7551p.
 

OhWee

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Yeah, Max, I was mainly just referring to the charts on page 5 of that review, which included dual as well as single EPYC configs. Those are the most recent set of charts that STH has done.
 

MaxCarna

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Yeah, Max, I was mainly just referring to the charts on page 5 of that review, which included dual as well as single EPYC configs. Those are the most recent set of charts that STH has done.
That's true, I have missed because dual 7281 was present only in one graphic that I'm posting below, the second c-ray. But here Dual EPYC 7281 was slightly better, just over the 7551p in black. That's a good topic, thank you for all this info.

 

OhWee

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Yeah I saw that too. Not sure if that's a 'margin of error' thing or if 2 sockets actually helps in some way, even with the same number of cores. It's fascinating though!
 

OhWee

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Well, looks like Gigabyte's 8 GPU EPYC server is now available. Only 1 CPU socket though, so only 32 cores... at least until the 7nm EPYCs drop.


Powering it could be an issue though... it has redundant 2200W power supplies so you'd probably need two 20 amp circuits to run both of them.
 

OhWee

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Looks like we have some pricing and other details on Threadripper 2...



The 24 core at $1299... hmmm that one is intriguing. $1799 for the flagship 32 core, well that's more than people were hoping price wise, but still cheaper than Intel's 18 core. And of course the 16 core Mk II at $899 probably means a price drop for the Mk I 16 core... by all accounts so far, the Mk II will be faster and better of course!