Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCPU Office Tests
The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modeling, and so on and so forth.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to compile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.
For our test, we compile a version of v56 under MSVC and report the time in 'Compiles per Day', a more scalable metric to represent over time. Other publications might perfom this test differently (Ars Technica uses a clang-cl compiler with VC++ linking, for example).
One of the interesting data points in our test is the Compile. Because this test requires a lot of cross-core communication and DRAM, we get an interesting metric where the 1950X still comes out on top due to the core counts, but because the 1920X has fewer cores per CCX, it actually falls behind the 1950X in Game Mode and the 1800X despite having more cores.
PCMark8: link
Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.
Strangely, PCMark 8's Creative test seems to be failing across the board. We're trying to narrow down the issue.
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MrSpadge - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
It's definitely good that reviewers test the game mode and the others, so that we know what to expect from them. If they only tested creator mode the internets would be full of people shouting foul play to bash AMD.deathBOB - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Ian - why not just enable NUMA and leave SMT on?Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The fourth corner of testing :)lelitu - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Looking at setting up something for a home VM host, and linux development workstation makes NUMA with SMT the most useful set of benchmarks for my usecase.I'm particularly interested in TR, because it's brought the price of entry low enough that I can actually consider building such a system.
Ratman6161 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
ThreadRipper is big bucks for your purposes if I'm reading this correctly. For a home lab sort of environment a lot of cores helps as does a lot of RAM, but you don't necessarily need a boatload of CPU power. For example, in my home ESXi system I've got an FX8350 which VMWare sees as an 8 Core CPU. I've also given it 32 GB of DDR3 RAM (purchased when that was cheap). The 990FX motherboards work great for this since they have plenty of PCIe lanes available. In my case, those are used for an ancient ATI video card I happened to have in a drawer, an LSI x8 RAID card and an x4 Intel dual port gigabit NIC. The RAID card has 4 1 TB desktop drives hooked up to it in a RAID 5.All of the above can be had pretty cheap these days. I'm thinking of upgrading my storage to 4x2 TB SAS drives - available for $35 each on Amazon...brand new (but old models). The system is running 6 to 7 VM's (Windows Servers mostly) at any given time. But with only two users, I don't run into many cases where more than two VM's are actually doing anything at the same time. Example: Web server and SQL Server serving up a web app.
For this environment, having a storage setup where the VM's are not contending for the disks and also having plenty of RAM seems to make a lot more difference than the CPU.
Of course if you have the bucks and just want to, ThreadRipper would be terrific for this - just way to expensive and overkill for me.
lelitu - Monday, August 21, 2017 - link
That depends a lot on what you want the VMs for. Unfortunately for the sort of performance testing and development I do a VM toaster isn't actually good enough. Each VM needs at least 4 uncontended cores, and 10GB uncontended RAM. Two VMs is the absolute minimum, 3 would be better.That's not going to fit into anything less than a ryzen 7 minimum, and a Threadripper, *if* it performs as I expect in SMT + NUMA mode would be almost perfect. Unfortunately, you're right, it's a *lot* of coin to drop on something I don't know will actually do what I need well enough.
Thus, I wish there were SMT+NUMA workstation and VM benchmarks here.
JasonMZW20 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Seems like Game Mode should have bumped up the base clocks to 1800X levels, especially for Nvidia cards using a software scheduler that seems to scale with CPU frequency. AMD's hardware scheduler is apparent in overall FPS stability and being mostly CPU agnostic.Matching base clocks with 1800X or even 1900X (3.8GHz) might be better on TR for gaming in Game Mode.
lordken - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Also for some weird reason that 1800X is much faster with higher fps in civilization and tomb rider?peevee - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
"because the 1920X has fewer cores per CCX, it actually falls behind the 1950X in Game Mode and the 1800X despite having more cores. "Sorry, but when 12 cores with twice memory bandwidth are compiling slower than 8, you are doing something wrong. Yes, Anandtech, you. I'd seriously investigate. For example, the maximum number of threads were set at 24 or something.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
When you have a bank of cores that communicate with each other, and replace it with more cores but uneven communication latencies, it is a difference and it can affect code paths.