The AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive on 1800X, 1700X and 1700
by Ian Cutress on March 2, 2017 9:00 AM ESTThe Ryzen Die
Throughout the time leading up to the launch of Ryzen, AMD reaffirmed its commitment to at least +40% IPC improvement over Excavator. This was specifically listed as a goal relating to performance, at an equivalent energy per cycle, resulting in a 40% increase in efficiency. At the Tech Day, AMD listed an overall 2.7x (or 270%) performance per watt improvement, split into the following:
Obviously a number of benefits come from moving the 28nm TSMC process to GloFo’s 14nm FinFET process which is used via a Samsung license. Both the smaller node and FinFET improvements have been well documented so we won’t go over them here, but AMD is stating that Zen is much more than this as a direct improvement to immediate performance, not just efficiency. While Zen is initially a high-performance x86 core at heart, it is designed to scale all the way from notebooks to supercomputers, or from where the Cat cores (such as Jaguar and Puma) were all the way up to the old Opterons and beyond, all with at least +40% IPC.
The first immediate image out of the presentation is the CPU Complex (a CCX), which shows the Zen core design as a four-CPU cluster with caches. This shows the L2/L3 cache breakdown, and also confirms 2MB of L3 per core with 8 MB of L3 per CCX. It also states that the L3 is mostly inclusive of the L2 cache, which stems from the L3 cache as a victim cache for L2 data. AMD is stating that the protocols involved in the L3 cache design allow each core to access the L3 of each other core with an average (but range) of latencies.
Over the next few pages, we’ll go through the slides. They detail more information about the application of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), New Instructions, the size of various queues and buffers, the back-end of the design, the front-end of the design, fetch, decode, execute, load/store and retire segments.
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mikeZZZ - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
Anadtech, can we please run closer to real life scenarios such as a gaming benchmark with a file compression benchmark running at the same time. Even gaming enthusiasts run more than one program at a time. For example, file decompression in the background while playing a game, or baseball game streaming in a small window while playing a game. You already have many individual benchmarks, so why not go the extra but significant benchmark of running two? We know this favors the higher core CPUs (maybe even Ryzen 7 1700 over all other lower core ones CPUs) but that is closer to real life and should be very meaningful to someone wanting to make an informed purchase.ValiumMm - Saturday, March 4, 2017 - link
Would also like to see thisUrQuan3 - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
Just want to put out a quick comment about benchmarking with Handbrake. In dealing with Broadwell-E, and especially ThunderX, I've found that Handbrake often doesn't scale well past about 10 cores, and really doesn't scale well past 16 or so. What seems to happen is that the single-threaded parts of Handbrake tend to dominate the encode time. In extreme cases, ultra-fast and placebo will take almost the same amount of time as x264 is consuming input faster than the rest of Handbrake can generate it. On ThunderX, I've found I can complete four 1080p placebo encodes in the same amount of time that I can complete one. I would expect a similar result on a 48 core Intel, though I do not have access to one beyond 24 cores. Turbo boost would hide this effect a bit.I am not knocking using Handbrake for benchmarking. The Handbrake and ray-trace results are the two that I care about most. I just thought I'd give a heads up about this limitation. You can check CPU usage statistics to get an indication of when you are running up against this limit.
Oh, and I am very excited to see multiple ray-tracers in your runs. Please continue.
Meteor2 - Saturday, March 4, 2017 - link
Presumably though you can have several x264 jobs running simultaneously on that hardware? So while your time to encode a certain piece doesn't decrease, you have more total-throughput (e.g. encoding several different bitrates for adaptive streaming). Should give good efficiency too on a larger Broadwell-E or a ThunderX.UrQuan3 - Tuesday, March 7, 2017 - link
Exactly. It's the first time I've thought about installing a queue manager for a single computer.jade5419 - Saturday, March 4, 2017 - link
I agree with this. In my experience Handbrake has a core / thread limit.I have a Z600 system with dual Xeon 5570 @ 2.93GHz, 6 core / 12 threads (total 24 threads), 48GB of RAM and a Z620 system with dual Xeon E5-2690 @ 2.9GHz 8 core / 16 threads (total 32 threads), 64GB RAM.
The two systems transcode video at the same speed using Handbrake 1.0.3. Monitoring CPU usage shows all threads of the Z600 at 100% utilization whereas the CPU utilization on the Z620 is approximately 80%.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, March 5, 2017 - link
Ever tried running GTA5 on 28 cores?It doesn't work. You have to adjust the game 'launchers' core affinity to < 26 cores or it won't even load.
Given this discovery, I expect there are many more applications out there, that may crap-out as we see more and more cores come into the mainstream.
Just a thought.
mapesdhs - Sunday, March 5, 2017 - link
I'd love to know why this happens. I'm guessing something dumb within Windows.Outlander_04 - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
There is more than enough good news to make me want to buy a 6 core Ryzen when they become available .Likely that will be the sweet spot for gamers
0ldman79 - Saturday, March 4, 2017 - link
I'm looking forward to seeing Ryzen updated in the bench.There aren't any apps or benchmarks that cross over between the FX series and the Ryzen series, so we can't do any side by side comparison.
Great review guys. Looking forward to the six core Ryzen. I think just like the FX series the six core will be the sweet spot.