Pretty much anything from an i7 920 onward can keep GPUs fed these days. For gaming purposes, CPUs haven't been the bottleneck for over a decade. That's why you don't see significant improvement from generation to generation, since our favorite CPU tests happen to be with GPU sensitive benchmarks.
40% over Excavator probably still puts it well behind even Haswell on IPC. If I'm looking at it right, Bench on this site has 4 single threaded tests (3 Cinebench versions and 3D Particle...). I crunched some numbers and found that if you add 40% to Excavator @ 4Ghz (X4 860 turbo), it still loses to Skylake @ 3.9Ghz (turbo) by between 32% & 39% across the four benchmarks. Haswell @ 3.9Ghz (turbo) would still be faster by 24% to 33%.
If it really is 40% minimum, AND they can sustain decent clock speeds, then that's at least enough to be in the ballpark, but it's still well short of Intel in those few benchmarks at least. TBH I don't know how representative those benchmarks are of overall single-threaded performance.
It could well be a case of AMD offering significantly poorer lightly threaded performance, but a genuine 8 core CPU at an affordable (i.e. not $1000) price.
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tipoo - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Meanwhile Intel worked on shortening pipelines...Curious to see how this will go, hope for AMDs sake it's competitive.masouth - Friday, September 2, 2016 - link
I hope it works out for AMD as well but reading about long pipelines and higher freqs always reminds me of the P4 days/shudder
junky77 - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
The problem is now having Intel/AMD provide fast enough CPUs to feed the new GPUs that don't seem to slow down..gamerk2 - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
Pretty much anything from an i7 920 onward can keep GPUs fed these days. For gaming purposes, CPUs haven't been the bottleneck for over a decade. That's why you don't see significant improvement from generation to generation, since our favorite CPU tests happen to be with GPU sensitive benchmarks.Death666Angel - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
The story is much more complicated than you are making it seem:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNjT5R5XI4
tipoo - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
A Skylake i3 presents better frametimes than old i7s like the 920 or 2500Krhysiam - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
40% over Excavator probably still puts it well behind even Haswell on IPC. If I'm looking at it right, Bench on this site has 4 single threaded tests (3 Cinebench versions and 3D Particle...). I crunched some numbers and found that if you add 40% to Excavator @ 4Ghz (X4 860 turbo), it still loses to Skylake @ 3.9Ghz (turbo) by between 32% & 39% across the four benchmarks. Haswell @ 3.9Ghz (turbo) would still be faster by 24% to 33%.If it really is 40% minimum, AND they can sustain decent clock speeds, then that's at least enough to be in the ballpark, but it's still well short of Intel in those few benchmarks at least. TBH I don't know how representative those benchmarks are of overall single-threaded performance.
It could well be a case of AMD offering significantly poorer lightly threaded performance, but a genuine 8 core CPU at an affordable (i.e. not $1000) price.
gamerk2 - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
I except the following:~40% average IPC gain in FP workloads
~30% average IPC gain in INT workloads
~20% clock speed reduction.
Average performance increase: ~15-20%, or Ivy Bridge i7 level performance.
Michael Bay - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
Well, nothing stops them from their own brand of tick-tock, especially considering largely stagnant intel IPC.looncraz - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
40% over Excavator is almost exactly Haswell overall, particularly once you shape the performance to match what is known about Zen.http://excavator.looncraz.net/