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 ESTBenchmarking Performance: CPU Web Tests
One of the issues when running web-based tests is the nature of modern browsers to automatically install updates. This means any sustained period of benchmarking will invariably fall foul of the 'it's updated beyond the state of comparison' rule, especially when browsers will update if you give them half a second to think about it. Despite this, we were able to find a series of commands to create an un-updatable version of Chrome 56 for our 2017 test suite. While this means we might not be on the bleeding edge of the latest browser, it makes the scores between CPUs comparable.
SunSpider 1.0.2 [link]
The oldest web-based benchmark in this portion of our test is SunSpider. This is a very basic javascript algorithm tool, and ends up being more a measure of IPC and latency than anything else, with most high performance CPUs scoring around about the same. The basic test is looped 10 times and the average taken. We run the basic test 4 times.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1 [link]
Kraken is another Javascript based benchmark, using the same test harness as SunSpider, but focusing on more stringent real-world use cases and libraries, such as audio processing and image filters. Again, the basic test is looped ten times, and we run the basic test four times.
Google Octane 2.0 [link]
Along with Mozilla, as Google is a major browser developer, having peak JS performance is typically a critical asset when comparing against the other OS developers. In the same way that SunSpider is a very early JS benchmark, and Kraken is a bit newer, Octane aims to be more relevant to real workloads, especially in power constrained devices such as smartphones and tablets.
WebXPRT 2013 and 2015 [link]
While the previous three benchmarks do calculations in the background and represent a score, WebXPRT is designed to be a better interpretation of visual workloads that a professional user might have, such as browser based applications, graphing, image editing, sort/analysis, scientific analysis and financial tools. Web2013 is the older tool, superceded by Web2015, however both still are highly relevant for high-performance web applications today.
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EchoWars - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
No, apparently the failure was in your education, since it's obvious you did not read the article.Notmyusualid - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
Ha...sharath.naik - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
I think you missed the biggest news in this information dump. The TDP is the biggest advantage amd has. Which means that for 150watt server cpu. they should be able to cram a lot more cores than intel will be able to.Meteor2 - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
^^^This. I think AMD's strength with Zen is going to be in servers.Sttm - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
Yeah I can see that.UpSpin - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
According to a german site, in games, Ryzen is equal (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) to the Intel i7-6900K in high resolution games (WQHD). Once the resolution is set very low (720p) the Ryzen gets beaten by the Intel processor, but honestly, who cares about low resolution? For games, the probably best bet would be the i7-7700K, mainly because of the higher clock rate, for now. Once the games get better optimized for 8 cores, the 4-core i7-7700K will be beaten for sure, because in multi-threaded applications Ryzen is on par with the twice expensive Intel processor.I doubt it makes sense to buy the Core i7-6850K, it has the same low turbo boost frequency the 6900K has, thus low single threaded performance, but at only 6 cores. So I expect that it's the worst from both worlds. Poor multi-threaded performance compared to Ryzen, poor single threaded performance compared to i7-7700K.
We also have to see how well Ryzen can get overclocked, thus improving single core performance.
fanofanand - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
That is a well reasoned comment. Kudos!ShieTar - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Well, the point of low-resolution testing is, that at normal resolutions you will always be GPU-restricted. So not only Ryzen and the i7-6900K are equal in this test, but so are all other modern and half-modern CPUs including any old FX-8...The most interesting question will be how Ryzen performs on those few modern games which manage to be CPU-restricted even in relevant resolutions, e.g. Battlefield 1 Multiplayer. But I think it will be a few more days, if not weeks, until we get that kind of in-depth review.
FriendlyUser - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
This is true, but at the same time this artificially magnifies the differences one is going to notice in a real-world scenario. I saw reviews with a Titan X at 1080p, while many will be playing 1440p with a 1060 or RX480.The test case must also approximate real life.
khanikun - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
They aren't testing to show what it's like in real life though. The point of testing is to show the difference between the CPUs. Hence why they are gearing their benchmarking to stress the CPU, not other portions of the system.