You can sign up to get a daily email of our articles, see the Mailing List page.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Today, AMD officially made the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X available as a seriously high-end desktop processor. Along with that, System76 jumped in right away to give it as an option on their powerful Thelio Major.

Coming with a huge amount of cores, the Threadripper 3990X certainly isn't cheap in the region of around $3,990/£3,696. For that you get a lot of everything though with 64 cores, 128 threads, PCIe 4.0 support, 32MB L2 cache with a base clock of 2.9GHz up to 4.3GHz boost. It's a monster. For gaming, quite likely serious overkill but if you play games and do plenty of content creation, compiling software and things like that all those cores will obviously come in handy. Nothing like playing a game while all your work is going on in the background eh? Find out more here.

If you're after a Linux system with it right away, Linux-focused hardware vendor System76 are coming in hot with the Thelio Major now having the option to configure it with a 3990X. System76 said they spent a lot of time on the internals to accommodate such a powerful CPU. From the press release that was sent over:

Optimizing for the heat produced by a 280 watt, 64-Core CPU was a significant engineering undertaking. We added a large 5.5" (140mm) duct that pulls cool air in from the side of the system, directs it across the heat sink, and exhaust through the rear. This has the added benefit of physically compartmentalizing GPU and CPU heat sources and the air that's pulled in to cool them.

I have some serious computer envy right now looking over the possible specifications of the Thelio Major. You can become envious too using their special landing page which shows some of the tests you can try on your current CPU. Trying out the circular motion blur test detailed on it, which the 3990X can do in around 44 seconds, my current Intel i7 i7 5960x took almost 3 and a half minutes!

You can see more about the Thelio Major from System76 on their official site.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: AMD, Hardware
13 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
13 comments
Page: «2/2
  Go to:

peta77 Feb 9, 2020
Quoting: ShmerlDepends on the game. dxvk for example uses a percentage of all available cores for some tasks. So if something is CPU bound and can be parallelized, good games will parallelize it according to available hardware.

As long as it's not using those cores at almost 100% it's just task scheduling and core cycling to reduce heat in each single core. If your system load isn't close to you number of logical cores, it doesn't really use them and you'd be fine with a lot fewer of them.

Quoting: ShmerlGames using a few cores is a thing of the past, before Vulkan was a thing. Single core performance is oversold, it doesn't matter as much as it did in the previous decade.

Vulkan allows parallel access to the driver, but actual communication to the GPU is still sequential. So, if you have lots of pre-processing done on the CPU which can be done in many threads, it will help. If not, the performance gain can stall very quickly and adding more cores won't change anything.

Quoting: ShmerlAnd you can say goodbye to Intel's high frequency of individual cores, once they'll switch to smaller node process. Physics will dictate such limitation. So get used to what AMD are already doing now, Intel will have no choice but to deal with the same reality.

I'm not trying to belittle AMDs accomplishments, what I wanted to emphasize is that every benchmark has to be taken with a grain of salt. There was no judgement or anything like it intended. Just that you should take a closer look at marketing statements before making a decision to buy.
Shmerl Feb 9, 2020
Quoting: peta77Vulkan allows parallel access to the driver, but actual communication to the GPU is still sequential.

Not if you are using different GPU queues. Modern GPUs have more than one, and they should be used in parallel for maximum performance. So real parallelism on the CPU side (through multiple cores) paired with real parallelism on the GPU side (through units that process compute and graphics queues) allow maximizing performance, as long as your code takes advantage of that.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 February 2020 at 10:37 pm UTC
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.