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Steve's reviews are focused on gaming and he probably isn't wrong there. 9700X seems to bring very little for gaming, compared to 7700X. 7700X is almost the sam

Steve's reviews are focused on gaming and he probably isn't wrong there. 9700X seems to bring very little for gaming, compared to 7700X. 7700X is almost the same performance, sometimes even better, and cheaper to buy. Most gamers do not care about 10% lower power consumption, especially when they have to pay more upfront for it. Yes, the better energy efficiency allows 9700X to boost higher to get somewhat higher performance in multi-thread, but for some reason, gaming does not benefit noticeably. Zen 5 seems interesting for laptops and low-power client devices, but so does the new Intel Lunar Lake (for now, at least), so we have to wait for reviews and comparisons there. > has not tested... floating-point computations, cryptography or ML/AI. That is true, but small fraction of people care about these specialized workloads, it's overhyped in marketing. But if you care about those, I think you may be right that Zen 5 may be more interesting there.

adrian_b 2y ago
I agree that upgrading from Zen 4 to Zen 5 would make very little sense for a gamer. However this fact was already well known and it has been discussed for some months. It was not a surprise and verifying this fact is certainly a stupid justification for calling Zen 5 a flop. Zen 5 does exactly what it has been announced that it will do. It provides a much greater energy efficiency than any previous x86 CPU. It has a greater single-thread performance at a given clock frequency than any previous x86 CPU, but Arrow Lake S, which is expected in October or November, will have about the same IPC in the big cores, so about the same single-thread performance. For any application that can use AVX-512 instructions, the desktop variant of Zen 5, i.e. Granite Ridge, can have a double throughput in comparison with any previous desktop CPU. For some people this will not matter at all, but for others this will be decisive. The same happened at the previous SIMD throughput doublings that happened while keeping the same number of cores, e.g. Sandy Bridge after Nehalem or Haswell after Sandy Bridge. For some people this did not matter, while for others it was a great improvement.
- stracer 2y ago
  It's a flop for people who expect that after 20months, they'll get 13%-18% more. Perhaps Steve did not know this "already well known fact" and thus wrote about flop and Intel 11-th gen vibes. How did you know before benchmarks were out? Did AMD say gaming performance will stagnate? (that would be very stupid thing for them to say). In which applications is AVX-512 performance decisive? Video editing / 3D modelling?
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    There have been a lot of comments on many Internet forums, during the last months, based on various benchmarks of engineering samples, that the gaming performance of these new models will be only marginally better than of the existing Zen 4 models and some times even lower than of those with 3D cache. Only when the models of Zen 5 with big 3D cache will be launched it is expected that they will be noticeably faster for gaming. When a 5.5 GHz 9700X matches or exceeds in single thread performance a 6.0 GHz 14900K, that is an almost 10% over the older competition and it certainly is 13%-18% over the corresponding model of the same clock frequency from AMD's previous generation. There are many professional applications where the AVX-512 performance is decisive. There would have been much more, had Intel not prevented this by their market segmentation policies, which force most software developers to support only the weakest and most obsolete CPUs. I am myself interested in certain CAD/EDA engineering applications, where I expect a good speed-up from a 9950X, at a much lower price than for any previous solutions. This is a nice change at a time when most computing solutions increase in price, instead of decreasing, like in the old days.
    - effie 2y ago
      > There have been a lot of comments on many Internet forums Still, the non-improvement in default setting surprised people, e.g. see the embarrasing confession by PCWorld, they did not believe the performance increase is so minuscule and asked AMD if that is for real. > it certainly is 13%-18% over the corresponding model of the same clock frequency from AMD's previous generation. More like 10%. And you have to overclock for that. Overclocking has become a fool's errand, you can expect it to cause problems, crashes, etc. Granted, if crashes are rare, gamers may go for it.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Zen 5 does exactly what it has been announced that it will do. It provides a much greater energy efficiency than any previous x86 CPU. I buy my computers to use them, not to be "efficienr". I dont' give a shit how much my laptop or desktop uses, but i need power when i use it.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > I buy my computers to use them, not to be "efficienr" Not every product is meant for you. I bet folk who cool their computers with HVAC and draw power by the MW do care about efficiency a lot. Also, Zen 5 beats Intel in single thread performance while being efficient (by default). You could always change your bios to get even more perf using more power.

adrian_b 2y ago

I agree that upgrading from Zen 4 to Zen 5 would make very little sense for a gamer. However this fact was already well known and it has been discussed for some months. It was not a surprise and verifying this fact is certainly a stupid justification for calling Zen 5 a flop. Zen 5 does exactly what it has been announced that it will do. It provides a much greater energy efficiency than any previous x86 CPU. It has a greater single-thread performance at a given clock frequency than any previous x86 CPU, but Arrow Lake S, which is expected in October or November, will have about the same IPC in the big cores, so about the same single-thread performance. For any application that can use AVX-512 instructions, the desktop variant of Zen 5, i.e. Granite Ridge, can have a double throughput in comparison with any previous desktop CPU. For some people this will not matter at all, but for others this will be decisive. The same happened at the previous SIMD throughput doublings that happened while keeping the same number of cores, e.g. Sandy Bridge after Nehalem or Haswell after Sandy Bridge. For some people this did not matter, while for others it was a great improvement.

stracer 2y ago
It's a flop for people who expect that after 20months, they'll get 13%-18% more. Perhaps Steve did not know this "already well known fact" and thus wrote about flop and Intel 11-th gen vibes. How did you know before benchmarks were out? Did AMD say gaming performance will stagnate? (that would be very stupid thing for them to say). In which applications is AVX-512 performance decisive? Video editing / 3D modelling?
- adrian_b 2y ago
  There have been a lot of comments on many Internet forums, during the last months, based on various benchmarks of engineering samples, that the gaming performance of these new models will be only marginally better than of the existing Zen 4 models and some times even lower than of those with 3D cache. Only when the models of Zen 5 with big 3D cache will be launched it is expected that they will be noticeably faster for gaming. When a 5.5 GHz 9700X matches or exceeds in single thread performance a 6.0 GHz 14900K, that is an almost 10% over the older competition and it certainly is 13%-18% over the corresponding model of the same clock frequency from AMD's previous generation. There are many professional applications where the AVX-512 performance is decisive. There would have been much more, had Intel not prevented this by their market segmentation policies, which force most software developers to support only the weakest and most obsolete CPUs. I am myself interested in certain CAD/EDA engineering applications, where I expect a good speed-up from a 9950X, at a much lower price than for any previous solutions. This is a nice change at a time when most computing solutions increase in price, instead of decreasing, like in the old days.
  - effie 2y ago
    > There have been a lot of comments on many Internet forums Still, the non-improvement in default setting surprised people, e.g. see the embarrasing confession by PCWorld, they did not believe the performance increase is so minuscule and asked AMD if that is for real. > it certainly is 13%-18% over the corresponding model of the same clock frequency from AMD's previous generation. More like 10%. And you have to overclock for that. Overclocking has become a fool's errand, you can expect it to cause problems, crashes, etc. Granted, if crashes are rare, gamers may go for it.
hulitu 2y ago
> Zen 5 does exactly what it has been announced that it will do. It provides a much greater energy efficiency than any previous x86 CPU. I buy my computers to use them, not to be "efficienr". I dont' give a shit how much my laptop or desktop uses, but i need power when i use it.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > I buy my computers to use them, not to be "efficienr" Not every product is meant for you. I bet folk who cool their computers with HVAC and draw power by the MW do care about efficiency a lot. Also, Zen 5 beats Intel in single thread performance while being efficient (by default). You could always change your bios to get even more perf using more power.