I’m building a new workstation (= my main PC for FEA [structural, EM], EDA, compiling [esp FPGA], games, …) which means a wide variety of loads. 3D cache is traditionally an improvement for my usecases, but a 9554 has basically the same price tag for 2x the cores.
1P system, 12x64GB RAM, RTX A6000 from my old workstation.
Since Genoa-X is pretty new, there’s not a lot of benchmarks around. Does anyone have experience in deciding between the two parts (or an alternate one).
FWIW, 9684X is about 2x the price of the 9384X for me, but also feels like “too many cores” for a general purpose workstation. While I’d be able to use the cores for some workloads, I don’t think I’d get my money’s worth.
For HDL synthesis I’d image you’d care more about clocks than core count, the majority of it single threaded. A 13900K would wipe the floor with Genona.
That being said some of the fancier toolchains are getting more advanced features, vivaldo can use up to 4 threads before performance regression for synthesis.
I think Genoa would be good for some of the really large EM problems, >200m DoF.
Typically the only place I’ve seen the 3D cache CPUs improve performance in engineering applications reasonably well is on very specific CFD problems, not EM (not sure about structural).
A 9374F would probably be a better choice than those sub-4GHz CPUs for most workstation tasks.
It’s hard to find benchmarks, but e.g. AMD claims Synopsys VCS has a 66% speedup on a 16-core Milan-X vs 16 core Milan. So there’s indications of it being worth it. But yeah, it does seem like CFD is what benefits the most.
I think the new Threadripper might be a real contender just due to the high clockspeeds.
E: found this when googling earlier
Ram Peddibhotla, AMD’s corporate VP of product management, said it’s using the 3D Genoa internally to not only to benchmark it against the competition, but also to speed up steps in the chip design process where it uses EDA, including verification. He added that a 16-core Genoa X CPU is used to do functional verification runs on one of its graphics cards over 70% faster than a 16-core Genoa EPYC without the 3D V-Cache.