AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper 2950X And 2990WX Review: Beastly Zen+ Many-Core CPUs

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X & 2990WX: JetStream, LAME, Blender

Next up, we have some numbers from the JetStream Benchmark Suite developed by WebKit. The JetStream Benchmark Suite uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate JavaScript performance, and all of the results are tabulated with roughly equal weighting. The benchmark measures both metrics of traditional JavaScript programming styles used on websites as well as new JavaScript-based technologies used on more modern, rich web applications. Scores in this benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing and running advanced web applications.

JetStream JavaScript Benchmark
JavsScript Performance Testing

All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Microsoft's Edge browser, with default browser settings, on a clean install of Windows 10 Professional x64.

jet
*AMD Threadripper 2990WX (b) Results = 16 Cores Enabled, With UMA Memory Configuration

The Threadripper 2950X showed a marginal improvement in performance over the first-gen 1950X here, but the Threadripper 2990WX's lower clocks and memory configuration appear to hold it back, somewhat. Note that we also ran this benchmark with 1/2 of the Threadripper 2990WX's cores disabled, which also affords the ability to run with a UMA memory configuration. As you can see, performance for the Threadripper 2990WX [the (b) result] was significantly better and almost in-line with the higher-clocked 2950X.

LAME MT
Audio Conversion and Encoding
In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular, day-to-day use case for many end users, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications.

In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.

lame

This particular audio encoding test will utilize only one or two threads, so it doesn't fully take advantage of the immense computing resources available with a many core processor. As you can see, Intel's Coffee Lake-based Core i7-8700K smokes everything else, thanks to its higher clocks, improved IPC over-previous gen architectures, and lower latency access to memory. All of the AMD Ryzen processors are fairly tightly grouped at the lower end of the spectrum in this test.

Blender
3D Rendering Benchmark

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a CPU-focused BMW model for these tests here...
blender

The 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX is really able to find its stride in the compute intensive, highly multi-threaded Blender benchmark. Here, the Threadripper 2990WX decimates all and pulls ahead of the Core i9-7980XE by nearly a 50 second finishing time lead. The Threadripper 2950X also shows a marked improvement over the original Threadripper 1950X and nearly catches Intel's current flagship.

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