jaggerwildWasn't August the original date? wow three more months(opps 2)September 21 now).

The original rumors said late September, early October.

Chloe PriceAnd also, that isn't for us typical gamers. A 6-core will be enough for years for gaming.

While this is true, a few AAA titles will begin needing 8cores soon to run well. GTA6 is on the horizon and the rumor mill suggests it will need 6+ cores running 3+ghz and that's just for medium settings.

lexluthermiesterWhile this is true, a few AAA titles will begin needing 8cores soon to run well. GTA6 is on the horizon and the rumor mill suggests it will need 6+ cores running 3+ghz and that's just for medium settings.

Benefiting from more cores is not the same as needing more cores, or as in most cases, just because they recommend e.g. i9-9900K, doesn't mean they recommend it because of 8C/16T.
No game needs more than 6 cores unless you're doing streaming or have a lot of background tasks. And if anything, more than 6 cores is not going to impact your FPS, at most it will impact stutter. Fewer faster cores are still going to be better than more slower cores.

efikkanBenefiting from more cores is not the same as needing more cores, or as in most cases, just because they recommend e.g. i9-9900K, doesn't mean they recommend it because of 8C/16T.
No game needs more than 6 cores unless you're doing streaming or have a lot of background tasks. And if anything, more than 6 cores is not going to impact your FPS, at most it will impact stutter. Fewer faster cores are still going to be better than more slower cores.

Um, let's review...

lexluthermiesterWhile this is true, a few AAA titles will begin needing 8cores soon to run well. GTA6 is on the horizon and the rumor mill suggests it will need 6+ cores running 3+ghz and that's just for medium settings.

Yup, that's what I said. Context is important...

notbThis is exactly what I was talking about.
What if AMD managed to shrink the I/O die and magically release a 32-core AM4 CPU for $2000 and consuming 250W? Still mainstream because AM4?

What if Intel decides that socket 2066 is small enough and unifies the non-server lineup? Your world would fall apart?

As of 2019 a 12-core CPU for $700 is not priced for mainstream, is not available in mainstream and - most importantly - isn't addressing mainstream computing needs.
This socket classification makes no sense anymore. In your approach it has nothing to do with meaning of the word "mainstream" and becomes just an alias for the socket used - hence, redundant.

You're talking hypotheticals and blowing things way out of proportion. There will never be a 2000$ 250W mainstream CPU. Not with smaller process nodes. 250W on AMD's side gets you 64c/128t EPYC CPU today on 7nm. More cores at same TDP or same cores at less TDP in the years to come.

When it comes to s2066 i feel like in order to compete with Threaripper it might be scrapped in favor of their own 4000+ pin socket that runs 3175X currently. Ofcourse not right now but possibly in the years to come.

Where do you take this 700$ price for 3900X? MSRP is 500$. And 3950X MSRP is 750$ not 1000$. And don't come talking about availablility. Intel had the same issues for a long t
These might not be addressing mainstream computing needs now. But in the years to come these can be picked up for half the price when games will take advantage of 12-16 cores while still being AM4 compatible. Hell of a deal. Kind of like 1st and 2nd gen TR right now.

efikkanBenefiting from more cores is not the same as needing more cores, or as in most cases, just because they recommend e.g. i9-9900K, doesn't mean they recommend it because of 8C/16T.
No game needs more than 6 cores unless you're doing streaming or have a lot of background tasks. And if anything, more than 6 cores is not going to impact your FPS, at most it will impact stutter. Fewer faster cores are still going to be better than more slower cores.

Ah yes the "x cores is enough argument". Especially few faster cores vs more slower cores. I've head this time and time again.
There was no point in getting 6c/12t in 2011 when 2500K came out. Try playing MP game on a 2500K today = stutterfest. Fewer cores regardless of their speed NEVER ages well. Case in point: 7700K today. There were similar arguments when dualcore CPU's arrived. When quadcore CPU's arrived etc. It's baffling how people constantly make the same mistake year after year.

Next gen consoles will be 8c/16t. They have no background programs running. Games are heavily optimized for specifc fixed hardware. Name me one time when PC port required the same or less hardware to get the same performance at same or silimar settings to a console. The answer is never. PC's are general purpose machines and thus have overhead, also background programs. 12 cores or more will give buffer on PC when it comes to running next gen console games with overhead and background tasks taken into account. 4c and 4c/8t is about to get rough. 6c/6t will also be impacted heavily. 6c/12t will be better off thanks to 12 threads and 8c/16t will be mostly ok but to run next gen PC ports at highest settings only 12c/24t or more will be the smoothest.

lexluthermiesterUm, let's review...

lexluthermiesterWhile this is true, a few AAA titles will begin needing 8cores soon to run well. GTA6 is on the horizon and the rumor mill suggests it will need 6+ cores running 3+ghz and that's just for medium settings.

Yup, that's what I said. Context is important...

You missed the point entirely.
There are always many claiming that you need extra cores (and memory on graphics cards) to "future proof" your PC, while the fact remains that the PC will be outdated in other ways long before that is ever needed, if the benefits happen at all. We heard this same argument both with Bulldozer and with Zen when comparing to faster cores from Intel, with many claiming that more slower cores will be beneficial even for gaming in the long run, but that has never happened.

And while more cores are beneficial for many things, there are diminishing returns for each new thread which are added. The difference of 2->4 cores is substantial, but 4->6 is much less significant, 6->8 will only matter in edge cases, and beyond 8 even less than that, unless you add extra workloads like encoding streams etc. And even though games use multiple threads more than before, there are scaling limits involved. Even 5-10 years from now, rendering will be mainly controlled by one thread, with perhaps 1-3 helper threads for separate GPU simulations or rendering passes, 1 thread for game logic, and then the remaining threads for sound, networking etc. Only 2-3 of these will be doing heavy work, the rest will be mostly idling. The trend in graphics programming is that GPUs are doing more and more of the heavy lifting themselves. Many forum members seem to think that one day we will have 8 threads feeding the GPU rendering the frame together. While it is technically possible even today, the synchronization overhead will make the performance utterly terrible.

When buying a PC for a specific workload like gaming, you should look what hardware configuration is the optimal setup right now and in the immediate future, anything beyond that is going to a wild guess and will likely be a waste of money.

efikkanYou missed the point entirely.

No, I didn't. Let it go...

lexluthermiesterWhile this is true, a few AAA titles will begin needing 8cores soon to run well. GTA6 is on the horizon and the rumor mill suggests it will need 6+ cores running 3+ghz and that's just for medium settings.

I doubt that, a 4c/8t can still handle games well like my 7700K @ 5.1 last year.

MephisHell, 6 cores will be more than enough for "most desktop users" for probably the next 5 years.

Upcoming consoles are 8 cores (expected in 2020), based on Zen 2 (or even Zen 3). So, nope.

TomorrowGames are heavily optimized for specifc fixed hardware.

medi01Upcoming consoles are 8 cores (expected in 2020), based on Zen 2 (or even Zen 3). So, nope.

This is not how programs work... Some of you are just unable to learn stuff... I don't understand why. :/

A game does not require 8 cores. It just may or may not be able to use them.
But by general principle, a perfectly parallel program should work just as well on a single fast core and on 8 cores with 1/8 of performance.

Next gen consoles will use 8 cores, because that's what AMD provided. Don't expect too much performance - especially not Ryzen 7 levels.
The CPU will be dialed down - similar to Intel's -T or high-end mobile parts. Consoles don't need more anyway.
This is in fact a very simple matter. The top-end consoles of today pull around 250W and that's unlikely to change.
Simply imagine a gaming PC with Zen2 + Navi using 250W under load.

Evidently, most people here are not programmers. The reality is, the more timing sensitive and more synchronized a workload is, the harder it is to do parallelization, and the workload sets the theoretical limit of what you can gain. Doing more parallelization badly is worse than less parallelization well. If you have a bunch of threads spending most of their time waiting for a mutex or semaphores, then the workload is actually more serial than parallel, while it may look like those threads are actually doing "something" based on the CPU load. If you have multiple threads chained in a pipeline, the overhead of synchronization can get quite variable. Even worse, if your threads run into OS scheduling overhead, it can add a 1-20 ms lag, and is the main cause of game stutter. In games, most workloads are synchronized with one of two things; either the game tick(game loop) or frame rendering, so lag in any of these can quickly cause severe stutter.

Multithreading is hard, and it only scales well when you have individual "work chunks" can can be processed independently with as little synchronization as possible. Most game engines today are bloated already, so the last thing we need is more poorly implemented parallelization. Any kind of low-level optimization is rare in games these days, and if anything they should start by getting rid of abstractions and overhead, then it will also become easier to do proper parallelization.

notbNext gen consoles will use 8 cores, because that's what AMD provided. Don't expect too much performance - especially not Ryzen 7 levels.
The CPU will be dialed down - similar to Intel's -T or high-end mobile parts. Consoles don't need more anyway.
This is in fact a very simple matter. The top-end consoles of today pull around 250W and that's unlikely to change.
Simply imagine a gaming PC with Zen2 + Navi using 250W under load.

Is it really that hard to imagine? A R7 3700 non-X + Motherboard + 5700 non-XT likely pulls less than 320W, seeing as a 3700X with a 2080 Ti pulls only 365W total system power(tpucdn.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/images/power-gaming.png)

Not much needs to be sacrificed to get down to around 250W. Even to simply remove the chipset(as it's included in these power consumption calcs) as the extra I/O isn't needed and you're already down to around 300W. You could further reduce the base & boost clocks a few 100mhz's to get down to 250W. This is all assuming the consoles are using a full 5700-like Navi, and not a cut down version that will take less power.

notbThis is not how programs work... Some of you are just unable to learn stuff... I don't understand why. :/

A game does not require 8 cores. It just may or may not be able to use them.
But by general principle, a perfectly parallel program should work just as well on a single fast core and on 8 cores with 1/8 of performance.

Next gen consoles will use 8 cores, because that's what AMD provided. Don't expect too much performance - especially not Ryzen 7 levels.
The CPU will be dialed down - similar to Intel's -T or high-end mobile parts. Consoles don't need more anyway.
This is in fact a very simple matter. The top-end consoles of today pull around 250W and that's unlikely to change.
Simply imagine a gaming PC with Zen2 + Navi using 250W under load.

You are unbelievable :) You are so tough with what you believe that there's no arguments with you. No matter what people say you always counter it.
Let's look what you wrote.

notbA game does not require 8 cores. It just may or may not be able to use them.

Now this sentence is just totall crap and amusing at the same time. If a game uses 8 core than it uses 8c if not then it is not. Which game? Not all of them are the same. You make it sound like a game chooses by itself whether it wants to use 8c or less. It is not the game, it is the developers to decide.

notbNext gen consoles will use 8 cores, because that's what AMD provided. Don't expect too much performance - especially not Ryzen 7 levels.
The CPU will be dialed down - similar to Intel's -T or high-end mobile parts. Consoles don't need more anyway.

This one is also hilarious. Consoles will use 8c but that is only because AMD provided 8c. AMD could have provided 4c right and yet we have 8 cores. Do you know why 8c?
You've answered it below. Dialed down but the performance must stay. Developer is the one who will decide not AMD and not the game itself. You need a headroom for the performance as well. If it is in fact dialed down that is because they want the console to be more efficient. Less power, lower voltage, less frequency more cores to keep up with the workload.
When they are building a console they don't get a game from a PC for instance and build a console upon it. There are loads of other stuff in the equation that needs to be considered. The game is just the outcome of the work and the PLANNING they've put into the build. You are trying to outsmart console builder and developers? What is wrong with you? Stating that 8cors is useless is immature and blind.

Finally a new CPU to further push down the price of previous Gen TR4 chips. BTW TR4 chips are great for EVERYTHING. I can't wait to see what the clock speeds will be on the 24 core part. If there are 24 cores all tied to the memory controller just that alone should make whatever they call it much faster than the 2970WX. I just hope that pricing will not be too high.

kapone32BTW TR4 chips are great for EVERYTHING.

I have to agree here. Recently built a 2920X based system that not only benchmarked well in power user tasks but also gaming. The one we got was easily all core OC'd to 4.2ghz without much extra voltage, and it stay cool on a Noctua aircooler.

ratirtIf a game uses 8 core than it uses 8c if not then it is not. Which game? Not all of them are the same. You make it sound like a game chooses by itself whether it wants to use 8c or less. It is not the game, it is the developers to decide.

None of this is correct.
Programs don't "use cores". They don't even see cores.
Programs just send instructions, which the OS and CPU try to run as fast as possible.

Any program can be run on a single core. Even if a program can use 8 or 16 or million threads, it can be executed on a single core - returning the exact same result.
We make multi-core CPUs not because that's better, but because the cores we can make aren't fast enough for our needs.

To utilize many cores, a program must be able to run parallel threads.
Sometimes it's very easy because the problem is perfectly parallel (like adding long vectors) and you can use every core available.
Sometimes it's hard because the problem isn't parallel. And games, as a whole, aren't parallel.
Every game is fundamentally a sequential program, because it has a timeline. Games played by humans are interactive and even more limited.

There's no magical variable USE_CORES=8 that many people on this forum believe in (also suspecting that Intel bribes game studios to set it low).
You have to "chop" the program into parts that can be run separately.

For example: one thread loads maps, one does the AI, one feeds the GPU, one communicates with the server and so on.
And even if you manage to "chop" the game into N parts, it'll still run on any number of cores smaller than N.

So the answer is "no". No game NEEDS 8 cores. No software NEEDS 8 cores. At best, they may be able to UTILIZE 8 cores, which is something entirely different.

lexluthermiesterI have to agree here.

Of course you do :-D

Recently built a 2920X based system that not only benchmarked well in power user tasks but also gaming.

Name 3 "power user tasks" that you've benchmarked. I'm honestly curious.

notbOf course you do :-D

Did you have a point with that comment other than just being snarky?

notbName 3 "power user tasks" that you've benchmarked. I'm honestly curious.

Video rendering, CAD and processing RAW image files in RAM. Any other questions or are you done with typical your snarky nonsense?

notbNone of this is correct.
Programs don't "use cores". They don't even see cores.
Programs just send instructions, which the OS and CPU try to run as fast as possible.

I was mocking you when you said games don't use 8 cores. They use resources dummy. Depending on the game there are variety of resources needed. You base your premise "games don't use 8 cores" on what? Because games today dont use? It is an application, program just like any other. They can all use as many cores as there's present.

notbAny program can be run on a single core. Even if a program can use 8 or 16 or million threads, it can be executed on a single core - returning the exact same result.
We make multi-core CPUs not because that's better, but because the cores we can make aren't fast enough for our needs.

To utilize many cores, a program must be able to run parallel threads.
Sometimes it's very easy because the problem is perfectly parallel (like adding long vectors) and you can use every core available.
Sometimes it's hard because the problem isn't parallel. And games, as a whole, aren't parallel.
Every game is fundamentally a sequential program, because it has a timeline. Games played by humans are interactive and even more limited.

There's no magical variable USE_CORES=8 that many people on this forum believe in (also suspecting that Intel bribes game studios to set it low).
You have to "chop" the program into parts that can be run separately.

For example: one thread loads maps, one does the AI, one feeds the GPU, one communicates with the server and so on.
And even if you manage to "chop" the game into N parts, it'll still run on any number of cores smaller than N.

So the answer is "no". No game NEEDS 8 cores. No software NEEDS 8 cores. At best, they may be able to UTILIZE 8 cores, which is something entirely different.

Thanks for the heads up but everyone here knows that.
Stop saying no game needs because you have simply no idea what you are talking about. I'm telling you for the last time. Depends on the software, application. just stop.

ratirtStop saying no game needs because you have simply no idea what you are talking about. I'm telling you for the last time. Depends on the software, application. just stop.

This. All of it.

Somehow AMD launch these processors to fast.
They could extend them more. Example from Threadripper 1xxx to Threadripper 3xxx 6 months more then now.
AMD lose nothing to launch him on Spring. Intel no answer.

lexluthermiesterI have to agree here. Recently built a 2920X based system that not only benchmarked well in power user tasks but also gaming. The one we got was easily all core OC'd to 4.2ghz without much extra voltage, and it stay cool on a Noctua aircooler.

That is my next CPU!! I usually take video reviews with a grain of salt but Wendel from Level1 was spot on. I was gobsmacked by the performance of the Noctua Air cooler. I have the NHD14 TR4, Which one do you have?

kapone32That is my next CPU!! I usually take video reviews with a grain of salt but Wendel from Level1 was spot on. I was gobsmacked by the performance of the Noctua Air cooler. I have the NHD14 TR4, Which one do you have?

That's a nice cooler! We used this one;
www.amazon.com/Noctua-NH-U12S-TR4-SP3-Premium-Grade-Cooler/dp/B074DW3FS2
We substituted the standard fan with a pair of Noctua blacks in push/pull config.

lexluthermiesterThat's a nice cooler! We used this one;
www.amazon.com/Noctua-NH-U12S-TR4-SP3-Premium-Grade-Cooler/dp/B074DW3FS2
We substituted the standard fan with a pair of Noctua blacks in push/pull config.

Nice I ordered another brown fan when I got the cooler for push/pull as well. As far as I can tell there is a 3 degree difference between yours and mine. I usually idle in the low 40s but I was shocked when I saw my fans spinning at 400 RPM I bumped it up to 800 for 40 C and now it is in the mid 30s. I have never seen the CPU go past 58 C with this cooler.

kapone32As far as I can tell there is a 3 degree difference between yours and mine.

It was a client system. But I am thinking of going with a 2920X for my personal system. What's holding me back is Windows 7 support.. So I might be stuck with an older Xeon until issues with Windows 10 can be worked out..

lexluthermiesterIt was a client system. But I am thinking of going with a 2920X for my personal system. What's holding me back is Windows 7 support.. So I might be stuck with an older Xeon until issues with Windows 10 can be worked out..

Understood can't say I blame you