The 64 Core Threadripper 3990X CPU Review: In The Midst Of Chaos, AMD Seeks Opportunity

In the diagram above, we can see where it says Windows 10 Home is limited to 64 cores (threads), whereas Pro/Education versions go up to 128, and then Workstation/Enterprise to 256. There’s also Windows Server.Now the thing is, Workstation and Enterprise are built with multiple processor groups in mind, whereas Pro is not. We saw significant differences in performance.In order to see the differences, we did the following comparisons:This isn’t just a case of the effect SMT has on overall performance – the way the scheduler and the OS works to make cores available and distribute work are big factors.In 3DPM, with standard non-expert code, the difference between SMT on and off is 8.6%, however moving to Enterprise brings half of it back.When we move to hand-tuned AVX code, the extra threads can be used and per-thread gets a 2x speed increase. We see the improvement moving from SMT off to SMT On, and then another small jump moving to Enterprise.Similarly in our Blender test, having processor groups was no problem, and Enterprise gets a small jump.POV-Ray benefits from having SMT disabled, regardless of OS version.Whereas Handbrake (due to AVX acceleration) gets a big uplift on Windows 10 EnterpriseFrom our multithreaded test data, there can only be two conclusions.