It’s been a few days that the embargo on the Threadripper 2 CPUs expired and loads of tech reviewers are eager to bring out their long awaited reviews publicly. I and many others have been excited to see how it performs in the real world, AMD has recently shown that it’s Zen processors are living up to their promises and who doesn’t love rooting for an underdog?

However, what irks me is that tech reviewers, like Tom’s Hardware, AnandTech and HotHardware reviews of the 2990WX, in their eagerness reach conclusions that are based on their personal judgement. In this case they claim that the NUMA setup and lack of memory controllers cause certain workloads to underperform when compared to Intel’s 7980XE. However, it’s slowly becoming apparent that there’s a high likelihood of there being an issue with the scheduler in Windows, which all these reviewers tend to use.

For example, Phoronix’s review reported a win on Linux for the Threadripper CPU, whereas the review on AnandTech reported a loss:

Of course AMD should have put more effort into testing on Windows and gotten Microsoft ready with a proper day-1 working scheduler for Windows. But what I can and will fault the tech reviewers for, is that they such a stubborn habit to exclusively use one operating system for testing CPUs. Tom’s Hardware in particular has an otherwise great test setup, they have two different locations doing the same tests, use sophisticated hardware to measure voltage and temperature, provide a varied set of benchmarks to support their findings and, as I’ve seen in the past, often communicate with vendors when they encounter strange behaviour.

So then, why did they not look into this further? They’ve had the CPUs for over a week, have the hardware and know-how to perform benchmark analysis and on top of that, it’s public knowledge that when Ryzen was first introduced, the Windows scheduler had to be updated to reach better performance.

In fact, after Phoronix came out with their review, Tom’s Hardware did another article on the 2990WX where they made the same likely faulty conclusion.

The reason why this hasn’t come up so far is that the CPUs tested so far and the main demographic of these reviewers, are gamers. And PC gamers often exclusively use Windows. But Threadripper isn’t for gamers, as the reviewers have also, correctly, concluded. Threadripper is for a niche that uses a whole different slew of products: Blender, Handbrake, compiling, etc. The assumption that this niche also mainly uses Windows is most likely incorrect.

So what I’d ask of the big tech review sites is this: please consider adding various benchmarks on Linux on top of your existing set of benchmarks. This ensures that mistakes like the ones you made with the 2990WX are not repeated as well as give more than just the Gamer market insights into which CPUs they should buy.

Of course, one could assume they’re getting paid by Intel to stave off their impending doom…oh sorry, I let my inner AMD fanboy come out.