Anyone planning on testing the 7980XE?
The specs don't impress me and it's overpriced. It has a low base clock and a relatively small cache, both
critical for CPU mining. Intel is known for better single threaded performance but that doesn't matter when
mining.
The 24 MB cache limits the number of threads mining cryptonight to 12, not even enough to load all the physical cores.
A Threadripper 1920X (12C/24T, 32MB cache) will likely perform better for less than half the price.
Compute intensive algos are irelevant because GPUs are much more efficient and CPUs can't comptete.
The 7980XE doesn't yet have SHA support, unlike Ryzen, but that's less of an issue because there are few algos
that can use it.
It does have AVX512 but I don't see much benefit in that because it only improves compute performance. On those
algos that could potentially use it the gain would be small, less than the gain from AVX to AVX2. There are fewer opportunities
to promote AVX2 to AVX512 because AVX512 works on larger vectors, only algos that use vectors of 512 bits or greater
can use it.
I'm curious for some real results to compare, but I won't be bying one.
