4 ms·

It 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

It 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 ago
They 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.
deleted 3y ago
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asfdgianionio 3y ago
There 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 ago
  I 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.
dathinab 3y ago
it's not sloppy, it's required! you want to max out memory channels on all devices to test max performance but you also want to use RAM DIMs which are equally good, if possible the same as AMD has more memory channels this means it will get more "equally good"(1) RAM DIMs and in turn have more memory and as long as you make sure that no of your benchmarks perform pressure wrt. RAM capacity (e.g. max RAM usage 64GiB) you now have a fair benchmark wrt. max performance naturally if you don't plan to max out your RAM channels on AMD you do need a different benchmark for non-max performance (1): "equally good" is also a bit tricky as different vendors have slightly subtle differences in access patterns and DDR5 ram training also can make the same RAM run with different settings on different systems which can make the same ram dim not equally good, but there probably is some RAM which doesn't have such issues

xcv123 3y ago

They 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

asfdgianionio 3y ago

There 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 ago
I 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.

dathinab 3y ago

it's not sloppy, it's required! you want to max out memory channels on all devices to test max performance but you also want to use RAM DIMs which are equally good, if possible the same as AMD has more memory channels this means it will get more "equally good"(1) RAM DIMs and in turn have more memory and as long as you make sure that no of your benchmarks perform pressure wrt. RAM capacity (e.g. max RAM usage 64GiB) you now have a fair benchmark wrt. max performance naturally if you don't plan to max out your RAM channels on AMD you do need a different benchmark for non-max performance (1): "equally good" is also a bit tricky as different vendors have slightly subtle differences in access patterns and DDR5 ram training also can make the same RAM run with different settings on different systems which can make the same ram dim not equally good, but there probably is some RAM which doesn't have such issues