The latest PC World magazine (September 2017) takes the new $1000 AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU (1950X Zen) and slaps it on the lab bench. Including a stress test with Blender…
“Half the time to render the image”. They also tested POV-ray, and Corona running under 3DS Max, finding a 21% speed advantage when rendering…
Nice, though possibly many hobbyists will be using affordable pay-as-you-go online render farms fairly soon, where you don’t mind if your 5000px precious takes a few days to come back to you — just so long as the rendering isn’t burning up your CPU for a week. Although I guess we’ll always have to factor in those who, for privacy reasons, don’t want their mega-boobies ‘Wonder Woman vs. Cucumber Man’ renders to pass through a render farm.
However, for smaller studios doing “must have it yesterday” client work Threadripper’s affordable under-the-desk speed is going to be very tempting. Especially to add to a network setup. Intel isn’t really a viable alternative, as they’ve compromised security to get their current speed.
Note that it only scores such amazing performance when software uses more than a single thread. Thus not much use in speeding up image editors. But beefy multi-threaded software should see big performance gains…
“Threadripper 1950X outpaced all comers by significant margins. It simply destroys any 8-core CPU and makes you question how the 10-core Core i9-7900X can dare to be priced the same as the Threadripper 1950X. [Why buy it at $1,000? Not really for gaming.] You buy a 16-core CPU for work. Real work. Real work means modelling, encoding, and doing five things simultaneously, because it’s work. For that, Threadripper 1950X is an incredible breakthrough in performance and cost. Just four years ago, consumers paid $1,000 to get a 6-core CPU. Today, the same $1,000 gets you 16 cores. That’s something to be applauded loudly by anyone who cares about performance.”
Excellent. Hopefully by the time of my circa 2020 next-PC mid-range purchase, one of these uber-beasts will be in the slot. Presumably by that time there will also have been improvements in memory, motherboards, onboard GPUs and suchlike as well.