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I'm not a hardware review expert but I think one of the biggest advantages of the Ryzen 5000 series vs the 3900x is the CPU performance for apps that don't take

by nickjj 6y ago

I'm not a hardware review expert but I think one of the biggest advantages of the Ryzen 5000 series vs the 3900x is the CPU performance for apps that don't take advantage of parallelism across many cores. The 5000 series has a completely new architecture and is supposedly WAY faster than the 3000 series for single core tasks. That's partly why gaming performance is so much better with the 5000 series since it often comes down to execution speed on 1 core, but that would also apply to many programming benchmarks too. It would be interesting to see the same benchmarks with the 5000 series. I know the author said he didn't have that CPU to test it against, but IMO it would be a more fair comparison considering the 3900x is using an older CPU architecture that has been drastically improved upon with hardware that's available today (ie. the 5000 series isn't the next gen, it's the current gen).

Macha 6y ago
> with hardware that's available today I'm not sure the 5900x or 5950x qualify as "available today". Orderable today for delivery in 2-3 months, maybe. That said, I do agree, the 5900x looks to be about 15-20% faster on single/few core tasks than the 3900x from benchmarks I've seen. Also worth mentioning is that the M1 is one process node head of the 3900x/5900x (TSMC 5nm vs TSMC 7nm). There's a much slower rate of process shrinks these days, so I'd imagine 5nm will be available to AMD before Apple jumps to the next node.
- nickjj 6y ago
  > I'm not sure the 5900x or 5950x qualify as "available today". Orderable today for delivery in 2-3 months, maybe. Yeah the supply is low but I mean it's the current generation of chip that was released a few months before M1. It seems reasonable to compare the current gen vs the current gen instead of the current gen (M1) vs the previous gen (AMD 3000 series). Hopefully the demand slows down in the next few months. I'm thinking about upgrading my workstation and I'm going AMD this time around (I've used Intel CPUs since the Pentium II era).
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    Eh, comparing what people can buy today makes sense. Especially if the comparer doesn't even have access to the theoretically launched but unavailable part.

by nickjj 6y ago

Macha 6y ago

> with hardware that's available today I'm not sure the 5900x or 5950x qualify as "available today". Orderable today for delivery in 2-3 months, maybe. That said, I do agree, the 5900x looks to be about 15-20% faster on single/few core tasks than the 3900x from benchmarks I've seen. Also worth mentioning is that the M1 is one process node head of the 3900x/5900x (TSMC 5nm vs TSMC 7nm). There's a much slower rate of process shrinks these days, so I'd imagine 5nm will be available to AMD before Apple jumps to the next node.

nickjj 6y ago
> I'm not sure the 5900x or 5950x qualify as "available today". Orderable today for delivery in 2-3 months, maybe. Yeah the supply is low but I mean it's the current generation of chip that was released a few months before M1. It seems reasonable to compare the current gen vs the current gen instead of the current gen (M1) vs the previous gen (AMD 3000 series). Hopefully the demand slows down in the next few months. I'm thinking about upgrading my workstation and I'm going AMD this time around (I've used Intel CPUs since the Pentium II era).
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Eh, comparing what people can buy today makes sense. Especially if the comparer doesn't even have access to the theoretically launched but unavailable part.