There’s no denying that AMD has outted a very credible 32-core processor with the Threadripper 2990WX, however in certain conditions and even gaming, performance regresses as most software has no idea what to do with so many threads let alone Windows dealing with assigning the fastest cores towards the right software.
That seems to have been addressed with a 3rd party utility. LevelOneTechs posted a blog identifying key issues with the complicated design and actually have been able to fabricate a solution for the Threadripper performance regressions. LevelOneTechs mentions that programs such as Adobe Premiere, Indigo’s Renderer, 7zip as well as games using Nvidia drivers have been seeing patches with varying degrees of success, he tested extensively to see what was going on. While testing the Indigo renderer Wendell noticed that “taking a single thread out of the list of available threads to run the program on (called CPU Affinity) via the windows task manager would improve performance to similar levels as he was seeing on Linux”.
They decided to isolate this behavior and then got together with Jeremy Collake at Bitsum to create a utility called CorePrio. In the utility there is a checkbox for ‘NUMA Dissociater’ which effectively eliminates the Windows vs Linux performance disadvantage by automating the thread tweaking. Once you watch and read the entire documentation, you wonder this: AMD needs to work with Microsoft to get a kernel level fix so that the CPU works as intended. It’s a long and deep story though, that is told best by watching the video really, have a read and grab Coreprio here.
