Science & Technology
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2 vs. Intel Skylake-X: Battle of the High-End CPUs
It's one of the greatest questions of our time: AMD or Intel? Today, that rivalry has entered a new stage of Cinebench taunting as AMD's 2000-series Threadripper processors, commonly known as Threadripper 2, come to market to compete against Intel's Skylake-X series.The high end desktop (HEDT) segment is the land of stupid-high prices, with the $1,999 Core i9-7980XE capping the top of Intel's line and the $1,7999 Ryzen Threadripper 2 2990WX serving as AMD's halo product. These chips straddle the line between professional workstation-class products, like Intel's Xeon W line, and the upper end of the desktop PC stack. For prosumers and creators, like the streamers and video producers of the world, this class of processor is worth the premium.
There“s never been a better time to buy a high-end processor. To help you decide which processor platform to get, we“ve put Ryzen Threadripper 2 and Skylake-X through a seven-round face-off.
AMD holds the core-count advantage with its range-topping 32C/64T Threadripper 2990WX. Core counts vary based on pricing. Intel“s lineup spans from six cores to eighteen, while AMD“s spans from eight cores to 32.
All Threadripper 2 and Skylake-X models come equipped with multithreading, meaning software can assign two threads to each core. Intel calls this Hyper-Threading, and AMD uses the more generic Simultaneous multithreading, or SMT.. Intel and AMD have similar peak clock speeds at each step on the ladder, but not all cores are created equal. Intel holds the per-core performance advantage and generally processes more instructions per cycle (IPC). Intel“s per-core performance advantage equates to more performance and responsiveness in lightly-threaded applications, such as most games and general desktop PC applications.
AMD“s Ryzen Threadripper 2 offers improved performance in heavily-threaded productivity applications, like rendering, video editing, and transcoding, and it also boosts performance in game titles that can utilize the extra cores and threads. Threadripper 2 also comes with Precision Boost 2, which is similar to Intel“s multi-core boost implementation that provides higher boost frequencies when applications exercise multiple cores at once. Neither company discloses the full list of turbo frequencies, so it“s hard to make comparisons based on the specifications alone, but we“ll see how the different approaches impact performance below.
AMD also supports ECC memory, which is a critical component for professionals and semi-professionals who value every bit of their data. ECC detects and corrects errors automatically to help ensure data integrity, and AMD“s ECC support blurs the line between workstation-class processors and their high end desktop equivalents.
Winner: AMD
The Threadripper 2 lineup comes with 60 PCIe lanes exposed to the user regardless of price, while Intel reaches a hard limit of 44 but charges you extra for each step up the ladder. AMD also supports ECC memory, which is an important advantage for professional and semi-professional workloads.