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"One big disparity between the three machines was the Zen 4 machine was outfitted with 512GB of memory, while its competition had just 128GB each" This feels l
by wingmanjd 3y ago
"One big disparity between the three machines was the Zen 4 machine was outfitted with 512GB of memory, while its competition had just 128GB each"
This feels like cheating to me.
- RecycledEle 3y agoThey had to give the Eypc 4 more RAM to populate all its RAM channels. I've read it has 12 channels of DDR5.
- pyuser583 3y agoWhy? Extra RAM has no effect on most types of performance.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoThese chips have 8 channel ram, so you need at least 8 sticks to get full ram bandwidth.
- kijin 3y agoAren't there 16GB DDR5 sticks? With smaller sticks, they could populate all the channels while keeping total memory capacity the same as other setups. I don't see why they had to splurge all the way up to 512GB.
- coder543 3y ago> I don't see why they had to splurge all the way up to 512GB. Quoting the article: "To celebrate the much-hyped launch, our sister site PCMag put the flagship CPU through its paces (remotely) in several popular benchmarks." The people who did the benchmarks didn't splurge... they had no physical access to the remote machine at all. Certainly, it would have been ideal to talk to their remote contact and see if there were any 16GB sticks sitting around to test with instead, but I agree with the other comments that the memory capacity is unlikely to make a significant difference in these benchmarks. There will certainly be plenty of other benchmarks soon enough, once people get hands on with these processors.
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- _joel 3y agoThey're testing CPU performance, not memory capacity. They need that much for the channels.
- ahahahahah 3y agoIt just seems so incredibly sloppy to not have that be consistent. Do they expect all of their readers to then audit the code of the benchmarking that they are doing to ensure that it cannot possibly be bound by this?
- xcv123 3y agoThey used Cinebench. You can download this and verify that it uses less than 4GB of RAM. It is a CPU bound benchmark. Adding 384GB of RAM makes no difference whatsoever.
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- asfdgianionio 3y agoThere is no need to start out every article with remedial lessons. It is reasonable for an enthusiast magazine to assume familiarity with how computers work. The average ExtremeTech reader should already know what memory is and how increasing the amount of memory changes (or doesn't change) performance. It is not possible to give all the systems the same memory configuration. They don't support the same memory and don't have the same number of channels. And I expect giving all the systems 512 GiB of memory would only widen the lead because larger DIMMs are usually slower. >Do they expect all of their readers to then audit the code of the benchmarking that they are doing to ensure that it cannot possibly be bound by this? Cinebench is hardly obscure. The average ExtremeTech reader will already know what it is and what it measures.
- ksec 3y agoI feel sad just reading this reply has to be spelled out so clearly on HN. The standard practice that has been the case since before the Internet.
- vfclists 3y agoI guess that depends on how memory bound the test is.
- Dork1234 3y agoLarger sticks (or more sticks) of RAM are generally slower than smaller sticks. It might not be possible to duplicate same speed ram and capacity on the Intel board. I would hope they duplicated the test with the same speed of RAM before matching capacity. The results are so one sided, I doubt either capacity or speed matters.
- ksec 3y agoYou are not testing for Memory capacity, you could have a test where the whole data fits in 16GB of memory. But the memory is required there to populate the memory channel which push the CPU performance to max.