4 ms·

None of the architectural differences seem to have done much for general performance of the CPU which is what has made it such a disappointing release. I guess

None of the architectural differences seem to have done much for general performance of the CPU which is what has made it such a disappointing release. I guess even AMD realised no one is going to care about the underlying changes if they didn't work to improve performance.

nullc 2y ago
Hm? IPC improvement appears to be extremely impressive. If you're put off by gaming comparisons with X3D parts, that isn't really an apples to apples comparison. The current Zen5 parts don't have the huge additional caches that are such a win on some applications, but parts with those are planned for later release. Similarly, going to 128 cores with the full arch or 192 cores with the cut down one is a big step up from 96/128, but these parts are also not shipping yet. Separately, the performance/joule improvement looks very good-- for plenty of applications the total cost is dominated by energy usage so zen5 looks like a big win for those. Though again, this is mostly a factor for server parts that aren't shipping yet. I think it would be fair to say zen5 is impressive while the initial zen5 offerings are less so.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  I'd also argue that some of the Zen5 features have the potential to be a big boost for gaming but the adoption just isn't there yet. AMD's AVX512 is a big deal because unlike Intel's implementation it doesn't trigger a 50 thousand cycle delay to start using it along with a massive downclock. That means you can do SIMD way faster on these CPUs and there's virtually no induced latency (occasionally a 50 cycle delay for the 4x512 to presumably to finish charging caps if they are still depleted) and importantly no downclock which allows you to do burst AVX512 operations wherever you see a use instead of needing to carefully apply their use to compensate for a massive perf hit. And while games generally push expensive SIMD to the GPU, having no-cost AVX512 lets you accelerate SIMD ops that aren't big enough to justify the latency of GPU offload or the hit to GPU occupancy. It'll require engines and devs to adopt but there is a performance opportunity there if they are willing to take advantage of it.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    AVX512 triggering downclocks and taking a long time to switch to was an issue many generations ago. These days Intel's issue is they've stopped doing 512 on consumer SKUs.
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      I mean yeah that's also a major issue but the downclocks are still an issue.
vardump 2y ago
Doubling floating point performance is disappointing?
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Are you referring to "up to doubling AVX512 SIMD performance"? Floating point performance certainly didn't double in total, that SIMD includes non float instructions too, and even in heavily AVX512 workloads the actual performance increase is rarely anywhere close to double because unfused AVX512 ops are rarely anywhere near the performance of just doing AVX256 ops. https://i.imgur.com/Y1pJFq5.png https://i.imgur.com/Y1pJFq5.png This type of workload increased 27%, nearly half the average across the board performance increase Phoronix found for these types of task for Zen 3 -> Zen 4. https://i.imgur.com/xaD3x9Z.png https://i.imgur.com/xaD3x9Z.png
  - vardump 2y ago
    If you have a suitable workload, you do get nearly 100% improvement. There are 2x FPU resources now. Obviously less with generic code. Amdahl’s law and all.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      There are certainly not 2x the FPU resources now, there are up to 2x of certain FPU resources for certain instructions.
eightysixfour 2y ago
Seems like this was a scheduler issue in Windows, again. In Linux they show a decent performance uplift. > When taking the geometric mean of those nearly 400 raw benchmark results, it sums up the greatness of Zen 5 with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors. The Ryzen 7 9700X delivered 1.195x the performance of the Core i5 14600K competition or 1.15x the performance of the prior generation Ryzen 7 7700X. The Ryzen 5 9600X came in at 1.35x the performance of the Core i5 14500 and 1.25x the performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X. Or if still on Zen 3 for comparison, the Ryzen 5 9600X was 1.82x the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X. ... > The raw performance results alone were impressive for this big Linux desktop CPU comparison but it's all the more mesmerizing when accounting for the CPU power use. On average across the nearly 400 benchmarks the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X were consuming 73 Watts on average and a peak of 101~103 Watts. The Ryzen 5 7600X meanwhile had a 92 Watt average and a 149 Watt peak while the Ryzen 7 7700X had a 99 Watt average and 140 Watt peak. The Core i5 14600K with being a power hungry Raptor Lake had a 127 Watt average and a 236 Watt peak. The power efficiency of these Zen 5 processors are phenomenal! https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-9600x-9700x/16 https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-9600x-9700x/16
- zamadatix 2y ago
  The Windows scheduler/admin issue is the difference of a few percentage points and it also applies to Zen 4. That it is such a big thing this generation is precisely why it's a lame release. E.g. look at the Phoronix numbers you linked. More than "it's Linux" they benchmark a bit heavier in the workstation/server tasks which is particularly good for focusing on what this generation improves (things like AVX 512 performance). Despite this: 5600X -> 7600X = 45% increase 7600X -> 9600X = 25% increase The last generation was nearly twice, and not just in hyper specific workloads. If anything levels out about this generation it'll probably be when AMD gets around to releasing the 3D versions early next year. They shoot themselves in the foot from a media/review perspective on that each release because there are always CPUs from the previous generation that smash certain cache heavy workloads better than the new shiny thing at release and then the 3D version comes out with less general discussion and coverage months later.
  - 2y ago
ksec 2y ago
I disagree here. Mostly because people have very wrong expectation on CPU improvement. Largely distorted by media and Apple in the news cycle. Zen 5 brings ~13% for integer and ~25% for Floating Point performance increase for the current code, while lowering power usage on the same node compared to Zen 4. If we were to measure power / performance the Zen 5 is easily 25% to 50% uplift. And it is also ignoring two things. Zen 5 was largely designed for 3nm in the first place. Some of the things for 4nm could be argued as not optimal as it should be. Second being Zen 5 was a ground up design and layering the foundation for Zen 6 and Zen 7. I dont know if it was a missed opportunity in messaging. If I were to judge tech news circle from HN, Reddit, and most popular media. Hard core nerds that used to care and studying CPU Hardware changes are largely gone. All the details about front and back end design, Core to Core latency, things that Anandtech and other media that does deep dive into it no longer gets any views. And all that consumer cares if whether they could get higher performance, or more core. So I guess it is a mixed AMD not doing good enough in marketing and media generally dont want to talk about things that dont interest their reader. And then finally, AMD really cares about datacenter market, more so than consumer. Which is where Zen 5 is good at.

nullc 2y ago

Hm? IPC improvement appears to be extremely impressive. If you're put off by gaming comparisons with X3D parts, that isn't really an apples to apples comparison. The current Zen5 parts don't have the huge additional caches that are such a win on some applications, but parts with those are planned for later release. Similarly, going to 128 cores with the full arch or 192 cores with the cut down one is a big step up from 96/128, but these parts are also not shipping yet. Separately, the performance/joule improvement looks very good-- for plenty of applications the total cost is dominated by energy usage so zen5 looks like a big win for those. Though again, this is mostly a factor for server parts that aren't shipping yet. I think it would be fair to say zen5 is impressive while the initial zen5 offerings are less so.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
I'd also argue that some of the Zen5 features have the potential to be a big boost for gaming but the adoption just isn't there yet. AMD's AVX512 is a big deal because unlike Intel's implementation it doesn't trigger a 50 thousand cycle delay to start using it along with a massive downclock. That means you can do SIMD way faster on these CPUs and there's virtually no induced latency (occasionally a 50 cycle delay for the 4x512 to presumably to finish charging caps if they are still depleted) and importantly no downclock which allows you to do burst AVX512 operations wherever you see a use instead of needing to carefully apply their use to compensate for a massive perf hit. And while games generally push expensive SIMD to the GPU, having no-cost AVX512 lets you accelerate SIMD ops that aren't big enough to justify the latency of GPU offload or the hit to GPU occupancy. It'll require engines and devs to adopt but there is a performance opportunity there if they are willing to take advantage of it.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  AVX512 triggering downclocks and taking a long time to switch to was an issue many generations ago. These days Intel's issue is they've stopped doing 512 on consumer SKUs.
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    I mean yeah that's also a major issue but the downclocks are still an issue.

vardump 2y ago

Doubling floating point performance is disappointing?

zamadatix 2y ago
Are you referring to "up to doubling AVX512 SIMD performance"? Floating point performance certainly didn't double in total, that SIMD includes non float instructions too, and even in heavily AVX512 workloads the actual performance increase is rarely anywhere close to double because unfused AVX512 ops are rarely anywhere near the performance of just doing AVX256 ops. https://i.imgur.com/Y1pJFq5.png https://i.imgur.com/Y1pJFq5.png This type of workload increased 27%, nearly half the average across the board performance increase Phoronix found for these types of task for Zen 3 -> Zen 4. https://i.imgur.com/xaD3x9Z.png https://i.imgur.com/xaD3x9Z.png
- vardump 2y ago
  If you have a suitable workload, you do get nearly 100% improvement. There are 2x FPU resources now. Obviously less with generic code. Amdahl’s law and all.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    There are certainly not 2x the FPU resources now, there are up to 2x of certain FPU resources for certain instructions.

eightysixfour 2y ago

Seems like this was a scheduler issue in Windows, again. In Linux they show a decent performance uplift. > When taking the geometric mean of those nearly 400 raw benchmark results, it sums up the greatness of Zen 5 with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors. The Ryzen 7 9700X delivered 1.195x the performance of the Core i5 14600K competition or 1.15x the performance of the prior generation Ryzen 7 7700X. The Ryzen 5 9600X came in at 1.35x the performance of the Core i5 14500 and 1.25x the performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X. Or if still on Zen 3 for comparison, the Ryzen 5 9600X was 1.82x the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X. ... > The raw performance results alone were impressive for this big Linux desktop CPU comparison but it's all the more mesmerizing when accounting for the CPU power use. On average across the nearly 400 benchmarks the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X were consuming 73 Watts on average and a peak of 101~103 Watts. The Ryzen 5 7600X meanwhile had a 92 Watt average and a 149 Watt peak while the Ryzen 7 7700X had a 99 Watt average and 140 Watt peak. The Core i5 14600K with being a power hungry Raptor Lake had a 127 Watt average and a 236 Watt peak. The power efficiency of these Zen 5 processors are phenomenal! https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-9600x-9700x/16 https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-9600x-9700x/16

zamadatix 2y ago
The Windows scheduler/admin issue is the difference of a few percentage points and it also applies to Zen 4. That it is such a big thing this generation is precisely why it's a lame release. E.g. look at the Phoronix numbers you linked. More than "it's Linux" they benchmark a bit heavier in the workstation/server tasks which is particularly good for focusing on what this generation improves (things like AVX 512 performance). Despite this: 5600X -> 7600X = 45% increase 7600X -> 9600X = 25% increase The last generation was nearly twice, and not just in hyper specific workloads. If anything levels out about this generation it'll probably be when AMD gets around to releasing the 3D versions early next year. They shoot themselves in the foot from a media/review perspective on that each release because there are always CPUs from the previous generation that smash certain cache heavy workloads better than the new shiny thing at release and then the 3D version comes out with less general discussion and coverage months later.
- 2y ago

ksec 2y ago

I disagree here. Mostly because people have very wrong expectation on CPU improvement. Largely distorted by media and Apple in the news cycle. Zen 5 brings ~13% for integer and ~25% for Floating Point performance increase for the current code, while lowering power usage on the same node compared to Zen 4. If we were to measure power / performance the Zen 5 is easily 25% to 50% uplift. And it is also ignoring two things. Zen 5 was largely designed for 3nm in the first place. Some of the things for 4nm could be argued as not optimal as it should be. Second being Zen 5 was a ground up design and layering the foundation for Zen 6 and Zen 7. I dont know if it was a missed opportunity in messaging. If I were to judge tech news circle from HN, Reddit, and most popular media. Hard core nerds that used to care and studying CPU Hardware changes are largely gone. All the details about front and back end design, Core to Core latency, things that Anandtech and other media that does deep dive into it no longer gets any views. And all that consumer cares if whether they could get higher performance, or more core. So I guess it is a mixed AMD not doing good enough in marketing and media generally dont want to talk about things that dont interest their reader. And then finally, AMD really cares about datacenter market, more so than consumer. Which is where Zen 5 is good at.