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The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising the Bar
- ucha 7y agoI'm very impressed by the performance of the 3700X given its extremely low power consumption. AMD has historically delivered subpar mobile processors that had a higher power consumption that Intel counterparts. A processor with a TDP of half the 3700X's will be very competitive if the graphics module consumption can be contained. I'm looking forward to Zen 2 mobile CPUs although I do not know when they will be announced.
- jonatron 7y agoYes, the performance per watt is a huge jump: https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/132374-amd-ryzen-9-3900x-ryzen-7-3700x/?page=12 https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/132374-amd-ryzen-9-3900x-...
- microcolonel 7y agoAlso keep in mind that Intel and AMD have different ways of measuring TDP, the difference would be greater with a standard measure.
- washadjeffmad 7y agoAgreed. And Bulldozer was an ultimately underwhelming run, but AMD still set the stage during that time for many technologies and practices that continue to raise the tide for consumers. Mantle API was opened to Khronos and became Vulkan, and opening their hardware has allowed open driver development to keep parity with the proprietary, negating the GPU vendor as middleman problem. And not all of the A-series were awful, but it seems those were the favored ones for OEMs to put in the very popular $300 Ultrabook competitors. I'd also hazard to say that if we went back and benchmarked the Intel CPUs of that time with the mitigations of today, they wouldn't have fared better than AMD's. We've come a long way from the world before smartphones, parallelism, SoC, and affordable flash, and I'm just glad we're finally here.
- ohithereyou 7y ago>opening their hardware has allowed open driver development to keep parity with the proprietary, negating the GPU vendor as middleman problem Except until recently, AMD GPU performance was a bag of wet farts for both industry and gaming.
- onli 7y agoThat's not accurate. AMD only recently lost the ability to compete with Nvidia in the high end for a while. But they still had cards like the RX 580, that are the best option for their budget, and Fury, Vega and the Radeon VII all were not slow. They just were not better than Nvidia's cards. See https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/gpu https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/gpu (I run a meta benchmark that includes those cards).
- SubiculumCode 7y agoOne advantage of AMD laptop processors are their superior integrated graphics, while not competing with a dedicated chip, outperforms anything integrated that Intel has to offer, last I checked.
- makomk 7y agoShame about the idle power consumption, though, which seems to have rather suffered this generation.
- trynumber9 7y agoI've only seen that with total system power draw. X570 chipset is power hungry, check again in a few months for a test with a B450/X470 chipset.
- makomk 7y agoAs I understand it the I/O die on the actual processors is basically the same die as the X570 chipset, and there's no way of avoiding the power draw from that. Plus there's the question of what kind of performance you can expecct with lesser chipsets and motherboards.
- trynumber9 7y agoThere are benchmarks. There is no performance difference between a B450 chipset and X570. https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1869/bench/Chipset_CB_Single.png https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1869/bench/Chipset...
- tyingq 7y agoCurious why the TDP is the same for the 8, 12, and 16 core. I assume it's binned parts, but the switched off cores still consume power? Or some other reason?
- omni 7y agoTDP is based on the base frequency, which decreases on those models as the core count increases. May not explain it fully but probably contributes to constant TDP.
- chupasaurus 7y agoAMD measures TDP at boost, IIRC.
- qzw 7y agoFrequency differences can explain a (small) part of it, but I think a larger part comes down to market positioning and signaling vs competing Intel chips. The TDP is sort of an indicator of the overall "beefiness" of the chip. Edit: I understand some would disagree with what I said, but I can't see what else would explain why the 3800X with one CPU chiplet at 3.9GHz base freq would be the same 105W as the 3900X with two chiplets at 3.8GHz. And by "beefiness" I mean the overall performance potential, including possible overclocking headroom.
- penagwin 7y agoI wonder if since it's the same "chip" they have the same TDP listed, even though some of the cores are turned off.
- AdrianB1 7y agoThe reported TDP is the designed TDP for the motherboard power delivery, not the measured consumption of each processor. To keep the number of TDP values low and to allow motherboard makers design a small number of variants, TDP values are rounded up to 65W, 95W and 105W. That means everything that goes above 65W in real life will be classified as 95W, even if the real consumption is 70 or 75W.
- harry8 7y agoWhat's the inter-thread latency on these things?
- snvzz 7y agoIf you mean context switch latency, Phoronix's review has measurements. It's an order of magnitude lower than Intel's.
- harry8 7y agoNo. Two threads, each running on its own core. Send an int64 from one to another (and usually back)
- snvzz 7y agoSo, inter-process communication? There's this: https://i.redd.it/2z5580uugja31.jpg https://i.redd.it/2z5580uugja31.jpg AMD does much better than intel, as long as the peer is in the same CCX. For the case where it is not, zen2 has improved considerably relative to zen/zen+.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoAww yisss, finally, tangible performance gains and huge value increases for consumers in the CPU space. Intel getting curb stomped is just a bonus. I'm worried about AMD since AFAIK, the enthusiast PC builder/Gamer for who these chips are addressed is a niche market and most volumes are in OEMs laptops (Dell, HP, Lenovo) that companies buy in bulk for their workforce and that's where AMD has zero presence while intel has a deathgrip on those OEMs. Can AMD still recover in this market?
- dijit 7y agoEnterprises tend to move slowly, but leaving performance and money on the table is stupid, the small companies will adopt, then it will percolate slowly to larger companies. As all technology does.
- solarkraft 7y ago> while intel has a deathgrip on those OEMs New Ryzen Notebooks are appearing. A friend of mine has one and is pretty happy with it (apart from some touch screen issues on Linux, which have been fixed in the latest kernel). I don't know much about AMD's OEM strategy, but it seems like they're making some progress. What incentives can Intel still offer OEMs to go with them?
- endemic 7y agoI was amazed to see some Lenovo laptops with AMD processors. Of course, not the flagship models, but still...
- lettergram 7y agoThe T495 has an AMD processor, not exactly flagship, but very close (T490/T490s is their flagship).
- pedrocr 7y agoThe flagship is the X1. The T4x0s is the budget version of the same form factor.
- polskibus 7y agoIt seems that 9700K still beats AMD in many workloads. I wonder if the comparison is with spectre et. al. mitigations on Intel turned on or off?
- neogodless 7y agoIt probably is, though they didn't explicitly state that. Windows 1903 is used, and AMD's latest strategy to improve Windows performance is in place. Basically, if the higher clock of the 9700K can be put to use in a single-threaded application, then that chip can still come out on top. But in enough scenarios, the Ryzen 3700X and 3900X are quite competitive.
- beatgammit 7y agoSingle threaded performance isn't really that interesting anymore except for some specific gaming benchmarks, and even in gaming, you're unlikely to be bottlenecked by single threaded performance (though memory latency could be an issue).
- polskibus 7y agoIt is still important in compilation. That means it affect developers work many many times per day.
- jandrese 7y agoCompiling has generally been easier to parallelize I thought? Using make -j<whatever> has been around for a long time. If you're only compiling one file then it's harder to get an improvement, but a single file should be quick anyway so there's not a huge need to speed it up. It's not like you're doing something silly and including boost are you?
- polskibus 7y agoIn large projects, that are multiple dependency chains, that cannot be fully parallelized. There's a critical, often a bit long path, for which single threaded is still very important. Another thing is that various platforms like nodejs, etc. may not be able to utilize parallelism much, adding to the ST importance.
- arithma 7y agoTerribly tangential, but is there a possibility at all that the higher core counts will converge with GPU core counts in the future, in a large CPU, many smaller medium cores, and hundreds/thousands of micro cores. Programming those would require a new paradigm possibly.
- Const-me 7y agoI think that’s unlikely to happen. See what happened to Intel’s Larrabee / Knights Landing / Xeon Phi. They have 50-70 x86 cores (initially Pentium, later Atom) on the chip, with extra AVX512 vector units. CPU cores are spending a lot of transistors minimizing latency: branch prediction, microops fusion, sophisticated multi-level caches. GPUs are fine without most of that (they do have caches but much simpler ones), they are spending majority of their transistors and electricity on ALUs. Instead of fighting latency, GPU cores embrace it and optimize for bandwidth on massively parallel workloads: they have cheap hardware threads so they switch threads instead of stalling the pipeline.
- mantap 7y agoIn that case it would make more sense to move the smaller cores to a PCI card a la Xeon Phi. The programming paradigm to enable this exists, it's just pure functional programming. But people are intimidated by Haskell. We need more investment in functional programming before the dream of a 1000 core computer can be realized.
- tempguy9999 7y ago> The programming paradigm to enable this exists, it's just pure functional programming Whether more cores can be used is ultimately down to the problem, not any language. Some problems are naturally paralisable, some just aren't. FP maybe exposes a bit more parallelism, but it may introduce more overheads such as less efficient cache use. FP is not a solution, it may be part of the solution.
- yvdriess 7y agoOn paper. Parallel programming in Haskell is hard. GHC's style of by-demand lazy evaluation and the ubiquitous use of monads impose a lot of sequential execution. There has been good research around parallel FP programming languages, but that was mostly around the 90s (Sisal, pH)
- lettergram 7y agoThe AMD subreddit has a megathread with all the comparisons on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c9ncvh/3rd_generation_ryzen_reviews_megathread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c9ncvh/3rd_generation_...
- kyriakos 7y ago3700X looks like a great CPU for an all around work station at 65W and 16 threads.
- jnordwick 7y agoCan anybody explain the poor memory latency numbers? Is this due to the new L3 and chiplet design or is it from the larger L3? Intel chunks their LL cache out too, so I wasnt expecting such a big difference. Also AMD got stomped on the system performance testing (those tests seem like they might be difficult to unpack into individual reasons given their breadth). Why would that be the case. And WOW. Any vectorised workloads written for AVX-512... Besides the larger operand sizes, the instruction set changed seem to matter hugely. I did a small not using avx512 too effectively scan hash table for the keys, and it made a huge difference too. Still considering the top Ryzen chip for a sorely need new desktop, but I don't play games so it would mostly be a cost thing.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoIf I understand correctly, the higher memory latency is a between-chiplet problem for the most part, with the highest latencies being between CCX's. If you don't game, I see absolutely no reason not to buy Ryzen, but you might not need to buy an X570 mobo.
- jnordwick 7y agoIntel's L3 is sharded out into 2mb chunks on a ring bus too so I would have expected more comparable numbers. Is Intel's QPI link and cache coherency implemention that much better?
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoThe improvement in the Dolphin benchmark (which probably indicates improvements in other JIT-based emulators/runtimes) is pretty impressive, especially compared to first-generation Ryzen. For a while that benchmark had every AMD processor performing worse than every Intel processor in a given review. If the Chromium compilation benchmark (which reportedly was screwed up and will be added later) shows similar improvements, I think this generation will finally convince me to replace my Ivy Bridge box. edit: I just saw the Phoronix benchmarks, which show LLVM compilation going from 547 seconds on 2700X to 406 seconds on 3700X. I'm not sure whether those were run with the same chipset/RAM/storage versus the 2700X result being an older one pulled out of the database, though.
- phire 7y agoDolphin is probably very happy with the improvements to branch prediction. As for compiling, Gamers Nexus' review of the six core 3600 had it absolutely trashing other CPUs (33% faster than the 9900k, 11% faster than the 2700x) in their GCC self compilation test.
- madengr 7y agoAre these actually on sale yet? I don’t seem them listed an Amazon. I’ll be using this soon to build a MAME arcade cabinet, probably along with the new GPU. One thing Intel has the advantage is in the engineering desktop. I use a couple of programs that are compiled with Intel compilers. Also one that uses AVX 512. Will Intel compilers optimize for AMD?
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- sbov 7y agoNewegg seems to have the 3600x and 3700x for sale, but the 3800x and 3900x currently say out of stock.
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- aristophenes 7y agoThe new Ryzens perform very well, it's even more impressive considering that the Intel chips did not have the Fallout/Zombieload mitigations applied[1], that come with significant performance degradations. LinusTechTips, that used to somewhat favor Intel, did their benchmarks with current patches to everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3aEv3EzMyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3aEv3EzMyQ [1] https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1147867180282699782 https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1147867180282699782
- jchw 7y agoHah, LTT is really milking the hype in that one. Good show. I can't say they're wrong to be excited, though. When's the last time a processor launch really mattered to anyone? The improvements to compile time alone have me sold, though it will be tough to pick between 12c/16c. The biggest component missing in these reviews is where and when I can find these things on shelves. Especially as someone not terribly concerned with gaming performance.
- aristophenes 7y agoYou can buy them in most MicroCenters today, if they did not all sell out. Amazon has a 3600 and Newegg has 3600 and 3700 but not 3800 and 3900 (don't know if they sold out or if they just don't have them yet). The short answer is they are available now, if they don't get sold out from your preferred retailer.
- fwip 7y agoI believe the 3800s are not yet available anywhere, but 3900 might have sold out.
- jchw 7y agoNo MicroCenter here in south bay, sadly. That’s alright, though, I am mostly curious when it’ll start showing up. I didn’t really plan to fire off a purchase today, but I did stop into my local computer store and they did not have any yet. So it seems supply may be at least a bit limited for now.
- FpUser 7y agoNot to worry. Dev community will quickly release new and shiny interpreter of interpreter. That'll take care of performance gains ;)
- passive 7y agoWhat's most exciting to me is how the new processors seem to do particularly well in less optimized benchmarks. From my experience these are more representative of day-to-day PC use, and I feel like the last decade of CPU releases has focused more on identifying which well optimized applications perform well i on which processors. Ryzen 3 seems like a very strong improvement to general computing.
- dmix 7y ago> Incorporating a significantly upgraded CPU architecture and built using TSMC's latest generation manufacturing process How much of their innovation is due to TSMC vs AMDs in house research?
- wmf 7y agoThe ~15% IPC improvement is due to AMD while the frequency and power efficiency are more attributable to TSMC.
- gumby 7y agoInteresting that they didn't choose Global Foundries. I guess splitting that off really was worth it. One of Intel's big strength is their fabs. But perhaps that's becoming another drag on execution?
- wmf 7y agoGlobal Foundries will never have 7 nm and Intel has failed to deliver 10 nm for years, so yeah, being tied to one fab looks like a bad idea.
- 0x64 7y agoIntel's 10 nm was delivered early last year in the form of one U-series CPU with a broken iGPU - not that it were a great chip, but they did deliver. Ice Lake mobile CPUs, built on the 10 nm+ process, are shipping as we speak, with Dell's XPS lineup already being available with said chips in them.
- wtallis 7y agoGot a source for Ice Lake products that are actually available? Dell's XPS 7390 was supposed to be one of the first, and it's still "coming soon": https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13-2-in-1/spd/xps-13-7390-2-in-1-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13-2-in...
- snvzz 7y agoThe radeon 5700/xt is also amazing. That really was unexpected, unlike the CPUs which we already knew would be good.
- bobcostas55 7y agoThe 5700 costs almost $100 more than the Vega 56 while being just a few % faster. The price:performance ratio on the new lineup of graphic cards is worse than the previous generation...
- jagger27 7y agoAnd according to Gamer's Nexus the reference blower cooler is abysmal.
- shmerl 7y agoDon't buy reference design for AMD GPUs. Just wait for Sapphire to make custom cards. They are always a lot better.
- m0zg 7y ago"Abysmal" in what way? Enthusiast sites often confuse sufficient cooling with under-cooling. Cooling becomes more efficient when there's a high temperature differential. So engineers set up fan control so it only _really_ begins to kick in when the chip reaches 80C or thereabouts. Enthusiasts often confuse this with insufficient cooling. The chips themselves, however, don't really mind.
- ben-schaaf 7y agoIIRC it was 95C under load with 52db. So loud and hot. Normalising fan speed to 40db made it throttle. I'd certainly call that abismal.
- m0zg 7y agoThat does sound pretty bad, if true, but more on the noise front rather than temp, assuming 95C is Tjunction and not Tcase.
- lettergram 7y agoIt doesn't appear to work well with Linux, aka wont boot. At least current / new distributions of Linux... (at least ones utilizing systemd) https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-3700x-3900x-linux&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-37...
- shmerl 7y agoI suspect this will be fixed soon, since chips just came out, and a lot more people will look at it, besides AMD themselves.
- shmerl 7y agoWhat's the story with the chipset fan noise? Is it a big issue on new motherboards?
- sam_goody 7y agoThese advances cause me odd feelings. AMD works closely with both China (THATIC, HMC & CHICC are owned by AMD and the RPC Army, and what percentage of AMD is vested is murky) and at least one Islamic country (it is 6.9% owned by Mubdala IC). I don't pretend that USA is perfect, nor that Intel is above back-doors or poorly written kernel code. And I don't know what is AMD's commitment to their partners. But I have a bias that the company with the best technology should not be working with those that would love to destroy American values, and especially when the hardware made by those companies will be in every computer I run at home. On chips that are running proprietary code that have access to everything I do. Now, competition is surely a good thing, but am I wrong to be concerned that AMD seems to be winning? Please comment if downvoting so that I can learn something from it (I greatly respect the opinion of other HN'ers) if my statements or concerns are wrong and why. Or vote me up so that the comment stays around long enough to get useful feedback.
- GordonS 7y ago> I don't pretend that USA is perfect OK, good. > I have a bias that the company with the best technology should not be working with those that would love to destroy American values I presume you mean China? China would "love to destroy American values" then? TBH, I'm not sure if you're buying into the latest "red danger" FUD by the US gov and tabloid media, or if you work for them...
- dang 7y agoPlease do not respond to flamebait with flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 7y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines, which include: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." Nationalistic flamewar is particlarly unwelcome here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- p1mrx 7y agoWhy didn't they measure system idle power consumption? That is a key metric for energy efficiency, since home computers spend a lot of time doing nothing.
- jccalhoun 7y agopc perspective rand idle power consumption benchmarks: https://pcper.com/2019/07/amd-ryzen-7-3700x-ryzen-9-3900x-review/#ftoc-heading-16 https://pcper.com/2019/07/amd-ryzen-7-3700x-ryzen-9-3900x-re...
- p1mrx 7y agoSo they're about 10 watts better than last-gen Ryzen, but still 10 watts worse than Intel.
- spitfire 7y agoI'd like to see a comparison running different speeds of memory, different CAS latencies, etc. Can you run this thing safely with 3200mhz? or do you really need 3600mhz?
- onli 7y agoThere is one from a german magazine, https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/artikel/hardware/prozessoren/50163-amds-ryzen-7-3700x-und-ryzen-9-3900x-im-test.html?start=13 https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/artikel/hardware/proze.... You can use DDR4-3200 (that's also shown by most other benchmarks using that speed), but you get a performance increase from using DDR4-3600.
- gigatexal 7y agoAnyone know when 3950x reviews are due out and better yet when the chip might hit stock here in the EU?
- neogodless 7y agoThe launch date is in September.
- ksec 7y agoA lot of the software still has optimisation with Intel specific in mind, and for AMD to score close or equal to Intel in most single threaded benchmarks is an amazing achievement. The Radeon 5700 is also amazing and seems to be better than the new / Price Reduced 2060 Super. I am wondering what are the chances of Apple choosing AMD in near future.
- ajross 7y agoSo... not to sound like a naysayer here.. I mean, I do work for Intel, but I'm genuinely interested in the product. Are these really, y'know, launched launched? I can't find any 3000 series CPUs for sale on either Amazon or Newegg... Who's stocking them?
- demilicious 7y agoAlready sold out most places, it seems.
- ajross 7y agoBut who stocks it? Amazon and Newegg don't (i.e. you can't look the products up at all as of right now, even just to see that it's out of stock), which implies that they're filling the channel only with exclusive retailers or OEMs. Or, less charitably, that this is a paper launch with product to demo but not to actually sell...
- jazoom 7y agoHow far did you look? I've already bought one of these new chips in Australia from a local computer store. I don't know what your definition of "launched" is, but it's obviously much more exacting than mine.
- AmVess 7y agoThey were in stock but sold out instantly. The demand for these products is really strong. Inventories will be filled and instantly depleted for a month or more. It's not a paper launch at all.
- onli 7y agoThe less broadly reviewed 3600X (which should completely beat the i5-9600K) is still in stock on Amazon.com, https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-3600X-12-Thread-Processor/dp/B07SQBFN2D https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-3600X-12-Thread-Processor/d.... 3600, 3700X and 3900X are completely missing there though. But Newegg and B&H list those (Newegg also has the 3600X in stock), so the others will be in stock at one point. In Germany alternate.de has them listed as being shipped in a few days (it's already possible to buy them now), with the Ryzen 5 3600 being in stock currently. So while there is limited supply, the hype and demand around those processors is big and they are somewhat available, this is no paper launch.
- imagetic 7y agoWell, they sold out instantly! Good for AMD. I'll be excited if I have the opportunity to build a workstation using a 3900X. That's such a sweet spot for a 12 core to price for media work. Unless someone buys me a Mac Pro, I'll probably be crawling back to Windows / AMD with this release now that they have motherboards with TB3 and 10GbE on them.
- myrandomcomment 7y agoI plan to build a new gaming machine on AMD. Civ6 with a huge world might even work well. Fingers crossed :)
- polskibus 7y agoAccording to https://www.anandtech.com/show/14605/the-and-ryzen-3700x-3900x-review-raising-the-bar/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14605/the-and-ryzen-3700x-390... They are rerunning all tests due to a mobo firmware upgrade showing non trivial improvements in turbo/boost mode. There is still a chance that Intel with be beaten, even without taking ZombieLoad etc. patches into consideration on Intel.
- skydv 7y agoELI5 can I buy a laptop with Ryzen 9?