With the CoreWarsⓇ in full swing, I feel like the industry as a whole still has some serious catching up to do.
As a result, for anyone 100% dedicated to gaming, the performance of a $1000 1950x on paper will likely match that of an 1800x in games. For other heavily threaded applications, the thing will be an unstoppable monster.
At this time, there are very few games/game engines that will take advantage of all the cores and even in those unique cases (i.e. Star Citizen), higher single threaded performance will likely provide a higher framerate still (at least for now).
With 8-cores finally becoming affordable to the masses, I feel like in just a few years game engines will really start to take advantage of the added cores but until that time comes, I think the Ryzens are still a pretty wise investment for a futureproof rig.
No matter the direction that you decide to take, both Ryzen and the Threadripper are based on the use of ZEN cores, so their lifespan will likely run parallel (4 year platform cycle). This means that once Zen2 and Zen3 are available, AMD can quickly bump up the entire range, so you could always buy into either platform (AM4 or TR4) on the cheap and upgrade later as the platform continues to mature.
I think that is my plan- I want to buy into Threadripper on the 'cheap' (1920x) and if needed, replace the processor with a faster one later.
If we're lucky, I will even replace the ATX motherboard with an mATX/ITX motherboard if one is ever released.
I would buy a Threadripper ITX board. I probably wouldn't build Threadripper without it. I already have a 1700 so that would be my only real incentive to upgrade any time soon. I would also build Ryzen on STX if possible.
I think the Geeks here will have no issue with a ITX TR board. But from a practical point, given the size ... its going to be a challenge. And also the market is smaller for a 800/1000$ processor. On the other hand, Asrock did make the X299E-ITX/AC board...
Seems our PC guys in the company are starting to go bonkers over Threadripper after seeing the clock speeds are the same as Ryzen. Sadly it will be awhile before the game engines are optimized for multi-threaded performance like this, and several years after that until games get released on those optimized engines.
Seems like it wouldn't actually be that hard to do threadripper itx, since technically it's a SOC and doesn't need a chipset to run.
I'm picturing a threadripper m-itx board with 4x so-dimm slots, vram on a riser and as many m.2 slots as can be squeezed on the back (gotta use those pcie lanes somehow )
All zeplin dies are SoCs. Epyc motherboards won't even have chipsets at all. Got to Supermicro's website and look at the epyc systems. Under chipset they all just say "SoC".
Did Bill from Asrock already reply to this thread?
I am also very interested in an TR4 itx board. If Asrock will make a board i will make the HSLP-48 compatible.
But please no 4xSODIMM board. I think a 2x normal DIMM solutions is better because it will save space and you don't need stacked daughter boards for controller s.o. As I know from my Asrock x99e-itx the performance lost between quad and dual channel is very low.