4 ms·

The Zen 2 16 core chip is 105 watt TDP. The chips its wiping the floor with are 165 TDP. TDP doesn't necessarily correlate with real world usage, but benchmar

by sbov 7y ago

The Zen 2 16 core chip is 105 watt TDP. The chips its wiping the floor with are 165 TDP. TDP doesn't necessarily correlate with real world usage, but benchmarks show that AMD is much better at their chips running closer to TDP than Intel chips are, so the gap is probably actually wider. The strength of Intel chips is being able to pump a lot of power through them to hit higher clock rates. It sounds like you're saying performance/power is a benefit for Intel, possibly based upon the history of AMD chips, but that line of thought has been wrong since the Ryzen architecture.

tmd83 7y ago
I think even on 1st gen Zen processor intel had performance/watt advantage though the gap was lower. It's Zen 2 that has completely obliterated intel in performance/watt. Which is almost a bigger shock than the AMD taking the performance crown. Taking both the performance and efficiency crown in a single generation specially when it's not even a full new generation is beyond impressive. Of course it was only feasible with the foundation build up by Zen 1 but it's still very encouraging after the major stagnation that was there in desktop processor for a long while.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  This is good to know. Are there any reputable benchmarks that show those advantages? Something like FLOPS/watt on some LAPACK or Tensorflow test, or amount of joules to compile the Linux kernel, or anything of this sort?
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  It's going to depend heavily on which specific CPU you're talking about and which specific workload, but at least on Handbrake the Ryzen 2700 was the performance/watt king per legitreviews: https://legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/performance-per-watt.png https://legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/performa... Maybe Intel took that back with their lower clocked 8c/16t chips, dunno, this isn't something that comes up all that much in consumer reviews. But there's at least not a significant gap in either direction, it's pretty much a wash. On the server side of things Anandtech didn't seem to go much into it but at least with this one: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/22 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd... The dual EPYC 7601 used 100w less than the Xeon competition in povray while also being the fastest system by a substantial margin at povray, too. Which would put performance, power, and performance/watt all firmly in the EPYC 7601's domain on that one test. And Intel took it back on MySQL. So 50/50 split.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    There are a lot of factors to unpack here, but the 8700K has 2 less cores than the 2700X, which is the reason the 8700K is coming out behind. The direct comparison here is the 9900K, but the 9900K ships with significantly higher stock clocks (4.7 GHz all-core), which also reduces its perf/watt. When limited to its "official" 95W TDP, the 9900K does about 4.3 GHz and has a higher perf/watt than Ryzen (both higher performance and lower power consumption). So basically you are in a situation where the Ryzen pulls less at stock, has slightly higher efficiency at stock, but has a much lower clock ceiling. While the 9900K ships with much higher clocks and worse efficiency, but has a much lower power floor if you pull the clocks back to 2700X levels. https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/HandBrake_265.png https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/HandBra... https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/Power_Handbrake.png https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/Power_H... https://www.techspot.com/review/1744-core-i9-9900k-round-two/ https://www.techspot.com/review/1744-core-i9-9900k-round-two... Of note, the 2700X is actually pulling ~130W under AVX loads (33W more than the 95W-limited 9900K). The Stilt noted that the default power limit AMD ships is 141.75W and the 2700X will run it for an unlimited amount of time (whereas Intel at least claims PL2 obeys a time limit, although in practice all mobo companies violate the spec and boost for an unlimited amount of time as well). So really "TDP" is a joke all around these days. Nobody really respects TDP limits when boosting, and it doesn't directly correspond to base clocks either (both 9900K and 2700X can run above baseclocks at rated TDP). It is just sort of a marketing number. https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technical.2500572/page-72#post-39391302 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technica... Epyc is a different matter and once again more cores translates into better efficiency than fewer, higher-clocked cores. But the gotcha there is that Infinity Fabric is not free either, the infinity fabric alone is pulling more than 100W on Epyc chips (literally half of the total power!). https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-2990wx-and-2950x-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29... Similarly, the 2700X spends 25W on its Infinity Fabric, while an 8700K is only spending 8W. So, Infinity Fabric pulls roughly 3x as much power as Intel is spending on its Ringbus. This really hits the consumer chips a lot harder, mesh on the Skylake-X and Skylake-SP is closer to Infinity Fabric power levels (but still lower). Plus, GF 14nm wasn't as good a node as Intel 14nm. So Ryzen is starting from a worse node. Moneyshot, core for core, power efficiency on first-gen Ryzen and Epyc was inferior, but of course Epyc lets you have more cores than Xeon. Ryzen consumer platform's efficiency was strictly worse than Intel though. And that goes double for laptop chips, which are the one area that Intel still dominates. Raven Ridge and Picasso are terrible for efficiency compared to Intel's mobile lineup. And AMD mobile won't be moving to 7nm until next year. Because of that whole "nobody obeys TDP and it doesn't correspond to base clocks or any other performance level", we'll just have to wait for reviews and see what Zen2 and Epyc are actually like. I am really interested in the Infinity Fabric power consumption, that's potentially going to be the limitation as we move onto 7nm and core power goes down, while AMD scales chiplet count up further.
- ac29 7y ago
  > It's Zen 2 that has completely obliterated intel in performance/watt. Which is almost a bigger shock than the AMD taking the performance crown. Why is this shocking? Zen 2 is 7nm and Intel's latest is at 14nm. It would be a far bigger shock if they didn't beat Intel in performance/watt. Zen 2 vs whatever Intel releases on 10nm in the next ~6-18 months is a much more interesting comparison.
cptskippy 7y ago
I believe he's speaking historically. AMD wasn't really a consideration but for budget until they launched the Athlon in the late 90s. The success of Athlon was as much about Intel's fumble with Netburst as it was with Athlon being a solid competitor. It took Intel almost a decade to roll out Core and in that time AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself. Ultimately AMD fumbled with the Bulldozer/Excavator lines of CPUs and lost almost everything they had gained. The reasons AMD couldn't capture the market are complex but the short answer is that Intel influences every aspect of a computer from software, to compilers, to peripherals, to firmware.
- nolok 7y ago
  > It took Intel almost a decade to roll out Core and in that time AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself. And by AMD failed you mean Intel used illegal means to stop them from it, right ? The US, Japanese and Korean fair trade comission equivalent all either blamed Intel or fined them. The EU was still too young in that area to be in time but in 2009 they gave one of their biggest fine ever at 1.45 billions € to Intel for what they did, along with an approriate "oh and if you do it again we won't be late, and won't be so nice". Calling it "AMD failed to capture the market" is technically true, but that's one funny point of view.
- geezerjay 7y ago
  > Ultimately AMD fumbled with the Bulldozer/Excavator lines of CPUs I've heard this baseless assertion before but so far I've never heard any semblance of support. Why do you believe that AMD "fumbled" with their Bulldozer line?
  - theresistor 7y ago
    As someone who works on low-level CPU performance code, everyone I work with "knows" that Bulldozer was a performance dud for most use cases. This article about Zen starts with an overview of why Bulldozer failed to deliver: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amds-moment-of-zen-finally-an-architecture-that-can-compete/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amds-moment-of-zen-f...
jsgo 7y ago
Not Ryzen related, but seems you're pretty up to speed with AMD products. Does that include Radeon as well? I have a MBP and I am considering a Radeon VII for my external GPU (currently GTX 1080 but only usable in Windows. Thanks Mojave). My main concern though is thermals and noise. Does it perform on par with Nvidia there or little bit worse or considerably so? Power draw I'm not that concerned with.
- xigency 7y ago
  In the most recent generations, Radeon has run hotter than nVidia cards for similar performance. Seems to be true of the Radeon VII as well [0]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18194190/amds-radeon-vii-is-a-hot-loud-powerful-answer-to-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18194190/amds-radeon-vii-...
  - jsgo 7y ago
    thanks for that. That's a huge bummer. Really wish Apple wouldn't force the Metal issue with Nvidia. Yeah, it'd be nice and all, but as a user, I'm fine with the various scripts I have to run after macOS updates to get the card running again but they just nixed that outright. Oh well, hopefully AMD can solve the fan problems or Nvidia and Apple can work something out, either or.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      The Radeon 5700 and 5700 XT are supposed to be competitive with the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 at slightly lower prices. Only reference cards right now, but things might be looking up once OEMs have a chance to put better coolers on instead of AMD's reference blower. I'm planning to hold out for next gen when they get ray tracing hardware to be a bit more future proof (my GTX 970's not dead yet), but since I'm thinking of trading my Wintendo out for a Mac + eGPU setup it's nice to see that AMD could actually be a good GPU option now. Those were just announced this week, so keep an eye out for 3rd party benchmarks soon.
      - tracker1 7y ago
nolok 7y ago
> benchmarks show that AMD is much better at their chips running closer to TDP than Intel chips are, so the gap is probably actually wider AMD gives their TDP with enabled turbo (similar to real usage), Intel gives TDP at rest / no turbo enabled. There is still some variance from both between given and real TDP, but the core of the difference is well assumed, and dates back to almost a dozen CPU generations back when Intel already had to guzzle power like crazy to superclock their chips in the vague hope that they could compete with AMD's products of the time (and then they never reverted it once they took the lead back with the core architecture) It's kind of similar to the whole "Intel wants comparison dont with SMT off", due to the last 15 years being theirs, the whole thing is biased toward Intel, ... yet they still massively lose those comparison.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  This is accurate, several "95W" TDP intel chips will happily guzzle upwards of 200W+ for sustained periods (providing they don't down clock due to heating)
  - ztjio 7y ago
    No this is absolutely not accurate. This only happens due to motherboard defaults running all cores at turbo speeds simultaneously as well as automatic overclocking behaviors on by default.
    - beatgammit 7y ago
      The reasoning doesn't matter, what matters is what the average consumer sees. If most consumer motherboards do it "wrong", Intel should use those numbers instead of the less common, but "correct" case.
    - piva00 7y ago
      And almost every benchmark will run on one of those motherboards, or do you have a list of curated benchmarks where they were done with TDP limitations per spec?
- 7y ago

by sbov 7y ago

tmd83 7y ago

I think even on 1st gen Zen processor intel had performance/watt advantage though the gap was lower. It's Zen 2 that has completely obliterated intel in performance/watt. Which is almost a bigger shock than the AMD taking the performance crown. Taking both the performance and efficiency crown in a single generation specially when it's not even a full new generation is beyond impressive. Of course it was only feasible with the foundation build up by Zen 1 but it's still very encouraging after the major stagnation that was there in desktop processor for a long while.

H8crilA 7y ago
This is good to know. Are there any reputable benchmarks that show those advantages? Something like FLOPS/watt on some LAPACK or Tensorflow test, or amount of joules to compile the Linux kernel, or anything of this sort?
kllrnohj 7y ago
It's going to depend heavily on which specific CPU you're talking about and which specific workload, but at least on Handbrake the Ryzen 2700 was the performance/watt king per legitreviews: https://legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/performance-per-watt.png https://legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/performa... Maybe Intel took that back with their lower clocked 8c/16t chips, dunno, this isn't something that comes up all that much in consumer reviews. But there's at least not a significant gap in either direction, it's pretty much a wash. On the server side of things Anandtech didn't seem to go much into it but at least with this one: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/22 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd... The dual EPYC 7601 used 100w less than the Xeon competition in povray while also being the fastest system by a substantial margin at povray, too. Which would put performance, power, and performance/watt all firmly in the EPYC 7601's domain on that one test. And Intel took it back on MySQL. So 50/50 split.
- paulmd 7y ago
  There are a lot of factors to unpack here, but the 8700K has 2 less cores than the 2700X, which is the reason the 8700K is coming out behind. The direct comparison here is the 9900K, but the 9900K ships with significantly higher stock clocks (4.7 GHz all-core), which also reduces its perf/watt. When limited to its "official" 95W TDP, the 9900K does about 4.3 GHz and has a higher perf/watt than Ryzen (both higher performance and lower power consumption). So basically you are in a situation where the Ryzen pulls less at stock, has slightly higher efficiency at stock, but has a much lower clock ceiling. While the 9900K ships with much higher clocks and worse efficiency, but has a much lower power floor if you pull the clocks back to 2700X levels. https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/HandBrake_265.png https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/HandBra... https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/Power_Handbrake.png https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/Power_H... https://www.techspot.com/review/1744-core-i9-9900k-round-two/ https://www.techspot.com/review/1744-core-i9-9900k-round-two... Of note, the 2700X is actually pulling ~130W under AVX loads (33W more than the 95W-limited 9900K). The Stilt noted that the default power limit AMD ships is 141.75W and the 2700X will run it for an unlimited amount of time (whereas Intel at least claims PL2 obeys a time limit, although in practice all mobo companies violate the spec and boost for an unlimited amount of time as well). So really "TDP" is a joke all around these days. Nobody really respects TDP limits when boosting, and it doesn't directly correspond to base clocks either (both 9900K and 2700X can run above baseclocks at rated TDP). It is just sort of a marketing number. https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technical.2500572/page-72#post-39391302 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technica... Epyc is a different matter and once again more cores translates into better efficiency than fewer, higher-clocked cores. But the gotcha there is that Infinity Fabric is not free either, the infinity fabric alone is pulling more than 100W on Epyc chips (literally half of the total power!). https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-2990wx-and-2950x-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29... Similarly, the 2700X spends 25W on its Infinity Fabric, while an 8700K is only spending 8W. So, Infinity Fabric pulls roughly 3x as much power as Intel is spending on its Ringbus. This really hits the consumer chips a lot harder, mesh on the Skylake-X and Skylake-SP is closer to Infinity Fabric power levels (but still lower). Plus, GF 14nm wasn't as good a node as Intel 14nm. So Ryzen is starting from a worse node. Moneyshot, core for core, power efficiency on first-gen Ryzen and Epyc was inferior, but of course Epyc lets you have more cores than Xeon. Ryzen consumer platform's efficiency was strictly worse than Intel though. And that goes double for laptop chips, which are the one area that Intel still dominates. Raven Ridge and Picasso are terrible for efficiency compared to Intel's mobile lineup. And AMD mobile won't be moving to 7nm until next year. Because of that whole "nobody obeys TDP and it doesn't correspond to base clocks or any other performance level", we'll just have to wait for reviews and see what Zen2 and Epyc are actually like. I am really interested in the Infinity Fabric power consumption, that's potentially going to be the limitation as we move onto 7nm and core power goes down, while AMD scales chiplet count up further.
ac29 7y ago
> It's Zen 2 that has completely obliterated intel in performance/watt. Which is almost a bigger shock than the AMD taking the performance crown. Why is this shocking? Zen 2 is 7nm and Intel's latest is at 14nm. It would be a far bigger shock if they didn't beat Intel in performance/watt. Zen 2 vs whatever Intel releases on 10nm in the next ~6-18 months is a much more interesting comparison.

cptskippy 7y ago

I believe he's speaking historically. AMD wasn't really a consideration but for budget until they launched the Athlon in the late 90s. The success of Athlon was as much about Intel's fumble with Netburst as it was with Athlon being a solid competitor. It took Intel almost a decade to roll out Core and in that time AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself. Ultimately AMD fumbled with the Bulldozer/Excavator lines of CPUs and lost almost everything they had gained. The reasons AMD couldn't capture the market are complex but the short answer is that Intel influences every aspect of a computer from software, to compilers, to peripherals, to firmware.

nolok 7y ago
> It took Intel almost a decade to roll out Core and in that time AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself. And by AMD failed you mean Intel used illegal means to stop them from it, right ? The US, Japanese and Korean fair trade comission equivalent all either blamed Intel or fined them. The EU was still too young in that area to be in time but in 2009 they gave one of their biggest fine ever at 1.45 billions € to Intel for what they did, along with an approriate "oh and if you do it again we won't be late, and won't be so nice". Calling it "AMD failed to capture the market" is technically true, but that's one funny point of view.
geezerjay 7y ago
> Ultimately AMD fumbled with the Bulldozer/Excavator lines of CPUs I've heard this baseless assertion before but so far I've never heard any semblance of support. Why do you believe that AMD "fumbled" with their Bulldozer line?
- theresistor 7y ago
  As someone who works on low-level CPU performance code, everyone I work with "knows" that Bulldozer was a performance dud for most use cases. This article about Zen starts with an overview of why Bulldozer failed to deliver: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amds-moment-of-zen-finally-an-architecture-that-can-compete/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amds-moment-of-zen-f...

jsgo 7y ago

Not Ryzen related, but seems you're pretty up to speed with AMD products. Does that include Radeon as well? I have a MBP and I am considering a Radeon VII for my external GPU (currently GTX 1080 but only usable in Windows. Thanks Mojave). My main concern though is thermals and noise. Does it perform on par with Nvidia there or little bit worse or considerably so? Power draw I'm not that concerned with.

xigency 7y ago
In the most recent generations, Radeon has run hotter than nVidia cards for similar performance. Seems to be true of the Radeon VII as well [0]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18194190/amds-radeon-vii-is-a-hot-loud-powerful-answer-to-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18194190/amds-radeon-vii-...
- jsgo 7y ago
  thanks for that. That's a huge bummer. Really wish Apple wouldn't force the Metal issue with Nvidia. Yeah, it'd be nice and all, but as a user, I'm fine with the various scripts I have to run after macOS updates to get the card running again but they just nixed that outright. Oh well, hopefully AMD can solve the fan problems or Nvidia and Apple can work something out, either or.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    The Radeon 5700 and 5700 XT are supposed to be competitive with the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 at slightly lower prices. Only reference cards right now, but things might be looking up once OEMs have a chance to put better coolers on instead of AMD's reference blower. I'm planning to hold out for next gen when they get ray tracing hardware to be a bit more future proof (my GTX 970's not dead yet), but since I'm thinking of trading my Wintendo out for a Mac + eGPU setup it's nice to see that AMD could actually be a good GPU option now. Those were just announced this week, so keep an eye out for 3rd party benchmarks soon.
    - tracker1 7y ago

nolok 7y ago

> benchmarks show that AMD is much better at their chips running closer to TDP than Intel chips are, so the gap is probably actually wider AMD gives their TDP with enabled turbo (similar to real usage), Intel gives TDP at rest / no turbo enabled. There is still some variance from both between given and real TDP, but the core of the difference is well assumed, and dates back to almost a dozen CPU generations back when Intel already had to guzzle power like crazy to superclock their chips in the vague hope that they could compete with AMD's products of the time (and then they never reverted it once they took the lead back with the core architecture) It's kind of similar to the whole "Intel wants comparison dont with SMT off", due to the last 15 years being theirs, the whole thing is biased toward Intel, ... yet they still massively lose those comparison.

throwaway2048 7y ago
This is accurate, several "95W" TDP intel chips will happily guzzle upwards of 200W+ for sustained periods (providing they don't down clock due to heating)
- ztjio 7y ago
  No this is absolutely not accurate. This only happens due to motherboard defaults running all cores at turbo speeds simultaneously as well as automatic overclocking behaviors on by default.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    The reasoning doesn't matter, what matters is what the average consumer sees. If most consumer motherboards do it "wrong", Intel should use those numbers instead of the less common, but "correct" case.
  - piva00 7y ago
    And almost every benchmark will run on one of those motherboards, or do you have a list of curated benchmarks where they were done with TDP limitations per spec?
7y ago