AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX, 2920X Arrive October 29 Along With Performance Boosting Dynamic Local Mode
AMD has already unleashed the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and Threadripper 2950X onto the masses, but now AMD is ready to deliver the remaining two members of the lineup. The company announced that the Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX (24 cores, 48 threads) and Threadripper 2920X (12 cores, 24 threads) will be available to purchase on October 29th. The former will have an MSRP of $1,299, while the latter will be priced at $649.
In addition to the availability of the last two members of the Ryzen Threadripper 2000 family, AMD also said that overall performance of Threadripper WX processors has increased since launch for systems with NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards thanks to optimizations have been included in recent WHQL drivers releases, as well as specific updates in games like Far Cry 5 (Update 9) to address performance hiccups that affect systems with "many logical processors".
Furthermore, the recently Windows 10 October 2018 Update brings further stability and optimizations for "products leveraging 64 or more logical processors".
There's also one other trick that AMD has up its sleeve that's specifically aimed at the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and Threadripper 2970WX. Called Dynamic Local Mode, it allows these many-core processors to "automatically migrate the system’s most demanding application threads onto the cores with local memory access". Simply put, if apps need local DRAM access, they will get that access when requested.
We have to remember that every die on Ryzen Threadripper X processors has a direct connection to local memory. However, with Ryzen Threadripper WX processors, not every die has that direct connection (and memory is accessed through Infinity Fabric), hence the need for Dynamic Local Mode to serve as a traffic cop of sorts to ensure that priority is given to applications that require local memory access.
As to how it's implemented, AMD's Robert Hallock writes:
Dynamic Local Mode is implemented as a Windows 10 background service that measures how much CPU time each thread on the system is consuming. These threads are then ranked from most to least demanding, and the top threads are automatically pushed to the CPU cores that contain direct memory access. Once these cores are consumed by work, additional threads are scheduled and executed on the next available CPU core. This process is continuous while the service is running, ensuring the most demanding threads always get preferential time on cores with local memory.
Dynamic Local Mode should address some of the performance shortcomings that we saw in certain benchmarks during our review of the 32-core, 64-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX. In AMD's own testing, with Dynamic Local Mode turned on, it has witnessed up to a 47 percent gain in performance in games like Battlefield 1. Games like Far Cry 5 and PUBG have seen smaller -- but still respectable -- gains of 10 percent and 12 percent respectively.
AMD says that Dynamic Local Mode will be available as an option to enable in the Ryzen Master software beginning October 29th.
