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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
574 Comments
View All Comments
Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Find me these so-called people buying Intel HEDT CPU's (aka OG Ryzen 7's direct competition) for gaming & never for HPC uses.... Oh wait. They don't exist.Haawser - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Yeah, but if you're a gamer who streams, Ryzen is waaaay better than anything Inter offer for $499. Especially if you're gaming at 4K, or going to be. Different people have different needs, even gamers.Jimster480 - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Yes but no,Because Broadwell-E and Haswell-E HEDT platforms are in the same boat as Ryzen.
But this is what this Ryzen 7 release is meant to do.
Compete with the HEDT platforms, not against the "APU" chips.
Those chips will come later, albeit with much higher clockspeeds to compete with intel.
For now you have Intel with 10-20% clockspeed advantages in clockspeed dependent applications.
Meteor2 - Saturday, March 4, 2017 - link
I hope you're right but there's no indication they will be clocked higher. AMD has access to processes which are generation behind Intel's, at least for a couple of years. We can't expect miracles.nos024 - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Lol, butt hurt? Why even bother running gaming benchmarks? You even said it yourself that ryzen wont make it to your so called grown-up workstation because if low pcie count.So tell me who is this $500 Ryzen chip designed for? Not grown ups running workstation, or pathetic kiddies gamers...so theyre for Wannabes?
Tunnah - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
He literally said it is ideal to replace his aging 3770k, he gave an example of how it will be used. Try more reading and less being a turdddriver - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Ryzen is that much more affordable that with the price difference I could have built another whole system, dedicated to running the 2 HBA adapters, thus saving on the need of 16 lanes. 40 - 16 is exactly 24, which is what ryzen has. If it was available a year ago I would have simply built two systems, offering a good 50-60% more CPU performance, double the GPU performance, with enough need to accommodate my IO needs, even if between two systems, that wouldn't have been much of an issue.The pci lane count is lower than intel E series chips, however it is still 50% higher than what you can get from intel outside the E series. It will actually suffice in most workstation scenarios, even if you end up running graphics at x8, which is not really a big deal.
ddriver - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
"you even said it yourself that ryzen wont make it to your so called grown-up workstation because if low pcie count"I did not say that. Not all workstations require 40 pcie lanes. Most could do with 24. I was talking about my workstation in particular, which has plenty of pcie hardware. For the vast majority of HPC scenarios that would not be necessary, furthermore as already mentioned, with the saved money you can build additional systems dedicated to specific tasks, offloading both the need of more pcie lanes and the cpu time the attached hardware consumes.
It remains to be seen how much IO will the server zen parts have. Ryzen is not particularly a workstation grade chip, it just happens to be GOOD ENOUGH to do the job. AMD give you 50% more performance and 50% more IO at the same or better price point, and I think they will do the same for the chips they actually design for workstation.
It looks like the 16 core workstation chip will have 64 pcie lanes, and the 32 core - a whooping 128 lanes. So intel E series looks like a sad little orphan with its modest 40 lanes... And no, xeons aren't much better, they are in fact worse, the 24 core E7-8894 v4 only has a modest 32 lanes.
So no, while I will not be replacing my main 10 core workstation with a ryzen, because that would win me nothing, I am definitely looking forward to replacing it next year with a Naples system, and I definitely wished ryzen was available last year as I could have spent my money much better than buying intel.
Intel999 - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
"So tell me who is this $500 Ryzen chip designed for?"Logic would imply it is aimed at anyone that works in an environment where they need superior multithreading performance. For instance, anyone that has bought a 6900k or 6950k, but more importantly it is for those individuals that "wanted" to buy either of Intel's multi core champs but couldn't due to ridiculous prices.
I'd dare to make a bet there are more people that wanted to buy a 6900k than there are people that actually did. Now they can buy one and still put food on the table this month.
FriendlyUser - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Exactly right. I was always tempted by the 6850K, but the price of the CPU+platform was simply ridiculous. For much less I got a faster CPU and a high-end MB. I won't miss the 40PCIe lanes.