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So, by happenstance I came across this Forbes story on how Threadripper entered production:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleat ... 22200a230c

And then on Page 3 of said story, I saw this little nugget:

Interestingly, some of the original team behind Threadripper joined AMD from the press, with a critical and appreciative eye for PC hardware from years of reviewing a wide range of products. This perspective was core to creating the Threadripper concept and product definition. It is very much a CPU made by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts.

Hmmm. Does that sound like any AMD employees we might be familiar with at TR?...

Well it's good that AMD's management are encouraging their employees to do stuff like this. Now that AMD is on a roll heating up the CPU market with new designs, we will start seeing reasonable prices on mid-range and high end CPUs? If AMD can keep up their Linux support of Ryzen and Radeon products, I might just go all AMD for my next build.

If you are inferring that Scott had to do with it, that's probably not the case. He's on the graphics side, and from what I can tell, they are very disparate teams.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

If you are inferring that Scott had to do with it, that's probably not the case. He's on the graphics side, and from what I can tell, they are very disparate teams.

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. But it sounds like they are hiring people with a track record in the tech press on both sides. Given their historically weak marketing, this is a positive step in that area. It probably does not have a big effect on engineering though.

"Hey, we built this thing... tell us how to sell it!"

The HEDT market in general probably wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't possible to easily repackage server hardware for the enthusiast market. To say Threadripper was "created for enthusiasts by enthusiasts" sort of misses the point of why it really was created in the first place, but I guess that comes with the territory when dealing with halo products like this.

Re Scott being in RTG, as opposed to original AMD - you're quite right. It's still _really_ interesting, and you'll note that the quote in the article itself strongly implies that one or more ex-reviewers were directly involved in the early "skunkworks" phase of development. So in this case, it almost certainly had an effect on engineering.

just brew it! wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

If you are inferring that Scott had to do with it, that's probably not the case. He's on the graphics side, and from what I can tell, they are very disparate teams.

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. But it sounds like they are hiring people with a track record in the tech press on both sides. Given their historically weak marketing, this is a positive step in that area. It probably does not have a big effect on engineering though.

"Hey, we built this thing... tell us how to sell it!"

I absolutely agree about the genesis of the HEDT market. But the point of the original article was that this particular HEDT product was cooked up outside of the existing product roadmap, by a bunch of enthusiasts inside AMD. The story details are surprising enough to carry a whiff of verisimilitude. It reminds me strongly of the genesis of the new Ford GT, actually.

Redocbew wrote:

The HEDT market in general probably wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't possible to easily repackage server hardware for the enthusiast market. To say Threadripper was "created for enthusiasts by enthusiasts" sort of misses the point of why it really was created in the first place, but I guess that comes with the territory when dealing with halo products like this.

It is entirely plausible that enthusiasts within the company convinced them to come up with a middle ground between the single-die Ryzen and the 4-die Epyc. Whether or not it was a smart business move remains to be seen, but it has certainly stirred things up in the HEDT CPU market.

Really wish I had a use case to justify getting one for personal use.

just brew it! wrote:

It is entirely plausible that enthusiasts within the company convinced them to come up with a middle ground between the single-die Ryzen and the 4-die Epyc. Whether or not it was a smart business move remains to be seen, but it has certainly stirred things up in the HEDT CPU market.

Really wish I had a use case to justify getting one for personal use.

I know what you mean. It is way overkill for anything I would do with it, I would be better off with Ryzen 5 or 7 or even with Coffee Lake CPUs when they come out. But at this point my current system is good enough.

just brew it! wrote:

It is entirely plausible that enthusiasts within the company convinced them to come up with a middle ground between the single-die Ryzen and the 4-die Epyc. Whether or not it was a smart business move remains to be seen, but it has certainly stirred things up in the HEDT CPU market.

Really wish I had a use case to justify getting one for personal use.

Ego? Because you can?

Those always work for me.

the wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Really wish I had a use case to justify getting one for personal use.

Ego? Because you can?

Those always work for me.

Unfortunately, those factors alone are not enough to outweigh the $1000 price tag.

It is a cool story. I had a hard time choosing between i9 and ThreadRipper, in the end I went with a 7900x because of the single threaded and AVX performance, both of which are beneficial to the workloads I run on my media server. I probably still could have gone with ThreadRipper and been happy in the long run. Sadly, there were no X399 motherboards in stock (zero) at my local Micro Center on launch day, so that helped make my decision for me.

Also, shout out to Jim Prior (cavemanjim) if he's around. Way to go!

just brew it! wrote:

the wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Really wish I had a use case to justify getting one for personal use.

Ego? Because you can?

Those always work for me.

Unfortunately, those factors alone are not enough to outweigh the $1000 price tag.

You could always go with the 1900X and the best motherboard and then wait for a drop in price for a 2X upgrade that still runs in the same socket.
From my post on a front page thread...

Not to mention the clear indications that with sufficient cooling and improvements in process technology this design has legs...

TR Frontpage AMD's in-house team of extreme overclockers tried their hand at putting a Threadripper 1950X under liquid nitrogen last night, and the net result was a roughly 5.2 GHz all-core overclock. With 16 cores and 32 threads churning away at those speeds, the chip produced a Cinebench all-core score of 4188.

Wasn't me, guys. I am indeed on the graphics side of things and was very busy otherwise when this happened. I'm pretty sure some of the former press guys on the CPU side are quoted or named in the article, including James Prior (Rage 3), Don Woligroski (Tom's), and Robert Hallock (dunno which site). They did good work and deserve some credit, along with a lot of smart engineers and others, for making Threadripper happen.

Sure Wasson wasn't directly responsible for Threadripper, but we all know he served as a source of inspiration.

He was probably busy at the time getting Vega into OMG INTEL chips.