Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Rendering
Many of these workloads stress the memory subsystem, diminishing Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX's big core count advantage due to accesses from the remote memory controllers.
Threadripper 2950X doesn't suffer the same fate. Rather, it chews through some of the challenging tasks that stymied AMD's first-gen 1950X. In fact, the 2950X in stock form often beats or lands close to the overclocked 1950X.
Intel’s processors maintain their lead in the single-threaded POV-Ray and Cinebench tests, but it's easy to see that AMD’s extra cores help offset their lower IPC in threaded benchmarks.
Encoding & Compression
Our threaded compression and decompression metrics work directly from system memory, removing storage throughput from the equation. This workload benefits heavily from threading, but either memory throughput or poor software scaling holds the 29990WX back from realizing
its potential in the compression test. Threadripper 2950X, which utilizes two dies with directly-attached memory controllers, offers a nice boost compared to the 1950X at stock settings. Surprisingly, the 2950X's 4.1 GHz all-core overclock is faster than the same chip with PBO enabled, even though PBO offers the benefit of higher boost frequencies. Closer examination of our benchmark reveals that, even though the workload stresses all cores heavily, it is sporadic in nature. That forces the 2950X to frequently adjust its clock rate, and like all adaptive algorithms, slow response times can penalize performance.
y-cruncher, a single- and multi-threaded program that computes pi using AVX instructions, is a great test to measure Threadripper’s AVX performance. Intel’s Core i9 employs two 256-bit AVX FMA units per core that operate in parallel, whereas Ryzen's Zen architecture divides 256-bit AVX operations across two FMA units per core. Intel's AVX instruction support shines during the single-threaded benchmark. However, spreading the workload across the 2950X's 16 cores and 32 threads puts it on competitive footing.
Threadripper 2950X outstrips the much more expensive 2990WX in the HandBrake x265 test, which relies heavily on AVX instructions, and the H.264 test.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
