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AMD Threadripper 2990WX Review
ocworkbench 3 Oct 2018
2018 is definitely the year for AMD. Since 2017, it has been pressurising it’s competitor head to head with more cores and threads for it’s desktop processor. Not only did AMD reign in the desktop, the war is brought to the HEDT workstation class processors.
At Computex 2018 Taipei, AMD showcased the 32 cores processor and within months, the ThreadRipper 2990WX is already on the shelf retailing at USD 1799.
The ThreadRipper 2990WX has a TDP of 250W, 32 core / 64 threads processor. It has a base frequency of 3 GHz and a boost frequency of 4.2 GHz. It support Quad Channel DDR4 and supports both Precision Boost 2 and Extended Frequency Range 2. Both Precision Boost 2 and XFR2 now operates across any number of cores and threads to give it even better overall performance.
Scalability in the “Zen” architecture starts with the CPU Complex (CCX), a natively quad core module. Each CCX has 64K L1 I-cache, 64K L1 D-cache, 512KB dedicated L2 cache per core, and 8MB L3 cache shared across cores. Each core within the CCX may optionally feature SMT for additional multi-threaded capabilities.
A die will contain 2 CCX and in the case of the ThreadRipper 2990WX, it has 4 Die with a total of 8 CCX and each CCX contain 4 cores. That makes it a total of 32 cores.
The 32 core Threadripper 2990WX has Dies 0 and 2 as IO Dies providing 32 PCIe lanes and two memory channels. The Die 1 and 3 are compute die without local PCIe or DRAM access. Die 1 and 3 has to access the PCIe via the Infiniity Fabric (red in colour).