Watch Task Manager Dance with a 64-Core Ryzen Threadripper

The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is an absolute beast. 64 cores, 128 threads, 4.3 GHz turbo, and a price that would let us build four or five more-than-decent computers. For productivity tasks, nothing surpasses it right now (unless we dive into servers), but a video from China posted on Reddit shows us another application: designing a specific load to make Task Manager dance with 128 threads, and using its CPU usage report as a monitor.

The 64-core monster

When I installed my current Ryzen 7 1800X and saw its 16 processing threads in action, I felt unbeatable for a brief moment, but the truth is I arrived (very) late to the party. Ten years ago it would have been madness to imagine a 64-core chip on a desktop... and today the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X exists. Debuting in February of this year with a chilling $3,990 price tag, AMD's flagship processor floats around the web averaging $3,500... and of course, it needs everything else.

There are workloads that definitely justify such an investment, to the point that the processor eventually pays for itself with the time saved. But that doesn't stop us from experimenting, playing with the Threadripper... and that's exactly what a user of the Chinese video service Bilibili did last March. Three months later, the video made its way to Reddit, and this is what we found:

How Task Manager was made to dance

In essence, the original user simulated a load across all 128 processing threads (in a 14 x 9 grid with two threads at 100%) to reproduce in Task Manager the frames of the famous 'Bad Apple' video. Now, if you're thinking there's a trick there... you're right: Task Manager doesn't update percentages that quickly. In fact, its fastest option is High, with only two updates per second. What the video creator did was accelerate the content five times to make everything smoother.

As expected, the questions go in the direction of "how long until we play at original resolution" or "what does it take to run Doom in Task Manager". One user indicated that we would need to surpass 23,000 threads to match the graphics of a Game Boy, so... AMD, we'll be waiting. (?)