martinkrol

tht said:

How much memory do Threadripper 3900 series systems support. The motherboards advertised on the AMD website say 256 GB memory max, but that really can’t be the max memory supported as the Zen+ MCMs supported 2 TB. Maybe it’s true as the Ryzen 9 3950x seems to support 128 GB max memory, and the Threadrippers are 2 of these chips in a package. 

That’s kind of Achilles heel if RAM support is so low and would give OEMs some pause with using them. 

128, or 512 as the threadrippers support is plenty on both ends. In a workstation 128 is enough for 95% of pro users. if you are an editor working on really high resolution frames then sure 256 might be needed but more than that is questionable, especially if they already have nvme drive arrays in their system. I work in visual fx, where we do fluid simulations/ pyro simulations, massive rigid body simulations, build large environments for movies and render on both our farm and leverage our boxes when we are away, and I can tell you there is no need currently for 1.5TB of ram. In fact, we have an epyc servers with 2 processors and its got 384mb ram, and what we do with it is split it into many virtual nodes for compositors to render on.

1.5TB ram is in the server category because if you would saturate 1.5TB ram your xeons would be incapable of doing heavy calculation on them at that point. At least on a timely basis. For the rest of our farm, no other server has over 256gb ram because it is not necessary. Ai needs a lot of ram, but they generally use high-end GPUs and the amount of system ram required is not high. Perhaps simulation for research would make more sense, but then, they build servers that are very focused on CPUs, or GPUs, so the amount of expandability is not necessary.  1.5TB in a workstation way overkill for current workloads and computational power. 

Also, if you look at companies like Weta, or ILM, not 1 artist there will have a workstation with 1.5TB ram. not 1 artist will even have 512gb ram. and only a small portion of the teams will have access to 256gb. 256GB+ is always reserved for either the main editor or the render farm. Not in a workstation form factor. 

Your comment saying its the Achilles heel if ram support is so low, then I think you have not worked on top-end Films where there is always a heavy focus on large data sets, computational power, etc. but all within reason and needs to work in lockstep with the rest of the systems.

Top photographers don't need as much as 256gb ram currently. even 128 might be overkill for 99% of photographers.

Top filmmakers don't need over 256gb ram currently. I have worked with plenty of editors and almost all usually have only 128gb ram.
Most matte painters work with 128gb ram nowadays.

top graphic designers don't need over 256gb ram currently. in fact, most can manage on 64gb ram

top fx artists don't need over 256gb ram currently, 128 is plenty for most work, but there are instances when going over 128 is needed. However it's very rare that an fx artist maximizes 256gb ram.  And there are many reasons as to why. One reason being is that software like Houdini where a lot of FX is worked on for movies is constantly getting more efficient, and allows us to use less ram for fx. For example. in 2012 we would need 128gb ram to simulate a pyro nuclear explosion with lots of high-resolution detail, but because Houdinis pyro simulation has gotten so much more efficient, we could do the same with half the ram required, or less. The same goes for fluid simulations, etc. When you factor in the fact that the software can do distributed simulations we need even less ram than that per node.

If the reason to get these is for the ram, then I feel its focus is not on the entertainment/advertizing industry, unless someone feels like burning money. In that case, I can give them an address where they can send that money and I'll make better use with it. Cheers