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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 comparis

by 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.

by nullc 2y ago

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.