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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drajitshnew - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
You have written that "This socket is identical (but not interchangeable) to the SP3 socket used for EPYC,".Please, clarify.
I was under the impression that if you drop an epyc in a threadripper board, it would disable 4 memory channels & 64 PCIe lanes as those will simply not be wired up.
Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
No AMD have stated that won;t work. Its probably not hardware incompatible, but they probably put microcode on the CPUS so that if it doesn;t detect its a Ryzen CPU it doesn't work. There might also be differences in how the cores are wired up on the fabric since its 2 cores instead of 4. Remember, Threadripper has only 2 Physical Dies that are active. on Epyc all processors are 4 dies with cores on each die disabled right down to the 8 core part. (2 enabled on each physical die)Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Wish there was an edit function..... but to add to that, If you pop in an Epyc processor, it might go looking for those extra lanes and memory busses that don;t exist on Threadripper boards, hence cause it not to function.pinellaspete - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
This is the second article where you've tried to start an acronym called SHED (Super High End Desktop) in referring to AMD Threadripper systems. You also say that Intel systems are HEDT (High End Desktop) when in all reality both AMD and Intel are HEDT. It is just that Intel has been keeping the core count low on consumer systems for so long you think that anything over a 10 core system is unusual.AMD is actually producing a HEDT CPU for $1000 and not inflating the price of a HEDT CPU and bleeding their customers like Intel was doing with the i7-6950X CPU for $1750. HEDT CPUs should cost about $1000 and performance should increase with every generation for the same price, not relentlessly jacking the price as Intel has done.
HEDT should be increasing in performance every generation and you prove yourself to be Intel biased when something finally comes along that beats Intel's butt. Just because it beats Intel you want to put it into a different category so it doesn't look like Intel fares as bad. If we start a new category of computers called SHED what comes next in a few years? SDHED? Super Duper High End Desktop?
Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
theres a good reason for that. Intel is not just inflating the cost because they want to. It literally cost them much more to produce their chips because of the monolithic die aproach vs AMDs Modular aproach. AMDs yeilds are much better than INtels in the higher core counts. Intel will not be able to match AMDs prices and still make significant profit unless they also adopt the same approach.fanofanand - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link
"HEDT CPUs should cost about $1000 "That's not how free markets work. Companies will price any given product at their maximum profit. If they can sell 10 @ $2000 or 100 at $1000 and it costs them $500 to produce, they would make $15,000 selling 10 and $50,000 selling 100 of them. Intel isn't filled with idiots, they priced their chips at whatever they thought would bring the maximum profits. The best way for the consumer to protest prices that we believe are higher than the "right" price is to not buy them. The companies will be forced to reduce their prices to find the market equilibrium. Stop complaining about Intel's gouging, vote with your wallet and buy AMD. Or don't, it's up to you.
Stiggy930 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Honestly, the review is somewhat disappointing. For a pro-sumer product, there is no MySQL/PostgreSQL benchmark. No compilation test under Linux environment. Really?name99 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
"In an ideal world, all software would be NUMA-aware, eliminating any concerns over the matter."Why? This is an idiotic statement, like saying that in an ideal world all software would be aware of cache topology. In an actual ideal world, the OS would handle page or task migration between NUMA nodes transparently enough that almost no app would even notice NUMA, and even in an non-ideal world, how much does it actually matter?
Given the way the tech world tends to work ("OMG, by using DRAM that's overclocked by 300MHz you can increase your Cinebench score by .5% !!! This is the most important fact in the history of the universe!!!") my suspicion, until proven otherwise, is that the amount of software for which this actually matters is pretty much negligible and it's not worth worrying about.
cheshirster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Anandtechs power and compiling tests are completely out of other rewiewers results.Still hiding poor Skylake-X gaming results.
Most of the tests are completely out of that 16-core CPU target workloads.
2400 memory used for tests.
Absolutely zero perf/watt and price/perf analisys.
Intel bias is over the roof here.
Looks like I'm done with Anandtech.
Hurr Durr - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Here`s your pity comment.