The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTCPU 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.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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 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.
Overall, all of our web benchmarks show a similar trend. Very few web frameworks offer multi-threading – the browsers themselves are barely multi-threaded at times – so Threadripper's vast thread count is underutilized. What wins the day on the web are a handful of fast cores with high single-threaded performance.
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bigboxes - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
You're acting just like the fanboi trolls you claim to loathe.Alexvrb - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link
Yeah that was definitely a pot<->kettle comment. LOL.trivor - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
For those of you considering this CPU the fact is you are going to get MUCH better value by choosing one of the Ryzen CPUs - Ryzen 7 1800X is now at around $420 for 8/16 and the 7 1700 (8/16 again) has been on sale for as little as $299. Now, if you need the high thread counts for work on things like content creation and you still want to be able to run games it will be competitive (read: not the king of the hill) when you are running your games. So, if you do more than 50% of your computing time is gaming then go for an Intel CPU OR one of the Ryzen 5/7 consumer CPUs.Lord of the Bored - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Which would explain why the introduction doesn't mention the Netburst fiasco by name."The company that could force the most cycles through a processor could get a base performance advantage over the other, and it led to some rather hot chips, with the certain architectures being dropped for something that scaled better. " is, to my eye, actually attention-grabbing in the way it avoids using any names like Preshott, I mean Prescott and only obliquely references the 1GHz Athlon, the Thunderbirds, Sledgehammer, and the whole Netburst fiasco that destroyed the once-respected Pentium name.
But no, let's just say that "certain architectures" were dropped and there were "some rather hot chips" and keep Intel happy. They need that bone right now, though not as much as they did during the reign of Thunderbird and the 'hammers.
Hurr Durr - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
If the unword "NetBurst" triggers you so much, it`s not processors you should spend money on, but shrinks.Lord of the Bored - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Hey, we were an Athlon house. I didn't suffer through the series of mis-steps that plagued Intel. I just thought the sentence was conspicuous in how hard it tried to not name names.mlambert890 - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
"name names"? There are 2 companies that make CPUs. Everyone knows Netburst was Intel P4 era. It's not Watergate ok?Conspiracy obsession has become a legitimate mental illness.
fallaha56 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
handy not to show the new Intel chip struggle eh?Breit - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Is it possibly to bench the Intel CPUs (especially the i9-7900x) for those latency/single-thread tests with Hyperthreading turned off? This would probably give a better comparison to AMDs Game Mode and hopefully higher numbers too due to double the cache/registers available to one thread.cheshirster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Skylake-X sucks at gaming.7800X is slower than 1600X.