The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM 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.
One of the interesting data points in our test is the Compile, and it is surprising to see the 1920X only just beat the Ryzen 7 chips. Because this test requires a lot of cross-core communication, the fewer cores per CCX there are, the worse the result. This is why the 1950X in SMT-off mode beats the 3 cores-per-CCX 1920X, along with lower latency memory support. We know that this test is not too keen on victim caches either, but it does seem that the 2MB per core ratio does well for the 1950X, and could explain the performance difference moving from 8 to 12 to 16 cores under the Zen microarchitecture.
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.
SYSmark 2014 SE: link
SYSmark is developed by Bapco, a consortium of industry CPU companies. The goal of SYSmark is to take stripped down versions of popular software, such as Photoshop and Onenote, and measure how long it takes to process certain tasks within that software. The end result is a score for each of the three segments (Office, Media, Data) as well as an overall score. Here a reference system (Core i3-6100, 4GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, Integrated HD 530 graphics) is used to provide a baseline score of 1000 in each test.
A note on context for these numbers. AMD left Bapco in the last two years, due to differences of opinion on how the benchmarking suites were chosen and AMD believed the tests are angled towards Intel processors and had optimizations to show bigger differences than what AMD felt was present. The following benchmarks are provided as data, but the conflict of opinion between the two companies on the validity of the benchmark is provided as context for the following numbers.
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BOBOSTRUMF - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Actually Intel's 140 can consume more than 210 if You want the top unrestricted performance limited. Read tomshardware reviewFiliprino - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
How comes WinRAR is faster with the 10 core Broadwell than with the 10 core Skylake?What did they change on Cinebench going from 10 to 11.5? Threadripper is the faster CPU in Cinebench 10, but in the newer one it is not. Then again Cinebench 15 shows TR as the faster CPU. Is this benchmark reliable?
How comes Chromium compilation is so slow? Others have pointed out they get much better scaling (linear speedup). That makes sense because compilation basically consists in launching isolated processes (compiler instances). Is this related with the segfaulting problem under GNU/Linux systems?
For encoding I would start to use FFmpeg when benchmarking so many cores. In my brain lies a memory of FFmpeg being faster than Handbrake for the same number of cores. Maybe the GUI loop interrupts the process in a performance-unfriendly way. Too much overhead. HPC workloads can suffer even from the network driver having too many interrupts (hence, Linux tickless configuration).
I have read SYSMARK Results and I find strange that TR media results are slower than data, being TR slower than Intel in media and faster than Intel in data. Isn't SYSMARK from BAPCo (http://www.pcworld.com/article/3023373/hardware/am... You already point it out on the article, sorry.
How comes R9 Fury in Shadow of Mordor has AMD and Intel CPUs running consistently at two different frame rates (~95 vs ~103)?
The same but with the GTX 1080. Both cases happen regardless of the Intel architecture (Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake all have the same FPS value).
What happens with NVIDIA driver on Rocket League? Bad caching algorithm (TR has more cores/threads -> more cache available to store GPU command data)? You say you had issues but, what are your thoughts?
How comes GTA V has those Under 60 and 30 FPS graphs knowing that the game is available for PS4 and XBox One (it has been already optimized for two CCX CPU, at least there is a version for that case)? Nevertheless, with NVIDIA cards, 2 seconds out of 90 is not that much.
What I can think is that all these benchmarks are programmed using threading libraries from the "good old times" due to bad scaling. And in some cases there is architecture-specific targeted code. I also include in my conception the small dataset being used. I also would not make a case out of a benchmark programmed with code having false sharing (¡:O!)
Currently for gaming, it seems that the easiest way is to have a Virtual Machine with PCIe passthrough pinned to one of the MCM dies.
As a suggestion to Anandtech, I would like to see more free (libre) software being used to measure CPU performance, compiling the benchmarks from source against the target CPU architecture. Something like Phoronix. Maybe you could use PTS (Phoronix Test Suite).
Filiprino - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Positive things: ThreadRipper is under its TDP consumption. Intel is more power hungry. The Intel 16-core might go through the rough in power consumption.Good gaming performance. Intel is generally better, but TR still offers a beefy CPU for that too, losing a few frames only.
Strong rendering performance.
Strong video encoding performance.
When you talk about IPC, it would be useful to measure it with profiling tools, not just getting "points", "miliseconds" and "seconds".
Seeing how these benchmarks do not scale by much beyond 10 cores you might realize software has to get better.
Chad - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Second ffmpeg test (pretty please!)mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Ian, a query about the CPU Legacy Tests: why do you reckon does the 1920X beat both 1950X and 1950X-G for CB 11.5 MT, yet the latter win out for CB 10 MT? Is there a max-thread limit in V11.5? Filiprino asked much the same above.
"...and so losing half the threads in Game Mode might actually be a detriment to a workstation implementation."
Isn't that the whole point though? For most workstation tasks, don't use Game Mode. There will be exceptions of course, but in general...
Btw, where's C-ray? ;)
Ian.
Da W - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
ALL OF YOU COMPLAINERS: START A TECH REVIEW WEBSITE YOURSELVES AND STFU!hansmuff - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Don't read the comments. Also, a lot of the "complaints" are read by Ryan and he actually addresses them and his articles improve as a result of criticism. He's never been bad, but you can see an ascension in quality over time, along with his partaking in critical commentary.IOW, we don't really need a referee.
hansmuff - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
And of course I mean Ian, not Ryan.mapesdhs - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
It is great that he replies at all, and does so to quite a lot of the posts too.Kepe - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Wait a second, according to AMD and all the other articles about the 1950X and Game Mode, game mode disables all the physical cores of one of the CPU clusters and leaves SMT on, so you get 8 cores and 16 threads. It doesn't just turn off SMT for a 16 core / 16 thread setup.AMD's info here: https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/20...