Analyzing Creator Mode and Game Mode

Way back on page 3, this review explained that AMD was promoting two modes: Creator Mode with all cores enabled and a uniform memory access (UMA) architecture, and Game Mode that disabled one of the dies and adjusted to a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA). The idea was that in Creator Mode you had all the threads and bandwidth, while Game Mode focused on compatibility with games that freaked out if you had too many cores, but also memory and core-to-core latency by pinning data as close to the core as possible, and keeping related threads all within the same Zeppelin die. Both methods have their positives and negatives, and although they can be enabled through a button press in Ryzen Master and a reboot, most users who care enough about these settings are likely to set it and forget it. (And then notice that if the BIOS resets, so does the settings…)

*This page has been edited on 8/17, due to a misinterpretation in the implementation of Game Mode. This original review has been updated to reflect this. We have written a secondary mini-article with fresh testing on the effects of Game Mode.

Power Consumption and Distribution 2017: The Core Wars (Conclusions)
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  • sorten - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Swole? Threadripped?
  • Rottie - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    AMD Ryzen CPU is not fast enough. Apple is not ready for AMD Ryzen CPU, sorry AMD. I love AMD but I hated Intel even though I have a Skylake based MacBook Pro. :(
  • Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    One small correction, Ryzen has 24 PCIE lanes, not 16. it has 16 for graphics only, but saying only 16 may make people (like me) wonder if you can't run an NVME at x4 and still have the graphics card at 16x, which you totally can do.
  • Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    This is under Feeding the beast section btw, where you said "Whereas Ryzen 7 only had 16 PCIe lanes, competing in part against CPUs from Intel that had 28/44 PCIe lanes,"
  • fanofanand - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    He already answered this question/statement to someone else. there are 20 lanes from the CPU, 16 of which are available for graphics. I don't think his way of viewing it seems accurate, but he has stated that this is how PCIe lanes have been counted "for decades"
  • WaltC - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Nice review, btw! Yes, going all the way back to Athlon and the triumph of DDR-Sdram over Rdram, and the triumph of AMD's x86-64 over Itanium (Itanium having been Intel's only "answer" for 64-bit desktop computing post the A64 launch--other than to have actually paid for and *run* an Intel ad campaign stating "You don't need 64-bits on the desktop", believe it or not), and going all the way back to Intel's initial Core 2 designs, the products that *actually licensed x86-64 from AMD* (so that Intel could compete in the 64-bit desktop space it claimed didn't exist), it's really remarkable how much AMD has done to enervate and energize the x86 computing marketplace globally. Interestingly enough it's been AMD, not Intel, that has charted the course for desktop computing globally--and it goes all the way back to the original AMD Athlon. The original Pentium designs--I owned 90MHz and 100MHz Pentiums before I moved to AMD in 1999--were the high-point of an architecture that Intel would *cancel* shortly thereafter simply because it could not compete with the Athlon and its spin-off architectures like the A64. That which is called "Pentium" today is not...;) Intel simply has continued to use the brand. All I can say is: TGF AMD...;) I've tried to imagine where Intel would have taken the desktop computing market had consumers allowed the company to lead them around by the nose, and I can't...;) If not for AMD *right now* and all the activity the company is bringing to the PC space once again, there would not be much of a PC market globally going on. But now that we have some *action* again and Intel is breaking its legs trying to keep up, the PC market is poised to break out of the doldrums! I guess Intel had decided to simply nap for a few decades--"Wake me when some other company does something we'll have to compete with!" Ugh.
  • zeroidea - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Hi Ian,
    On the Civ 6 benchmark page, all results after the GTX 1080 are mislabeled as GTA 6.
  • Ahmad Rady - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Can you try to test this CPU using windows server?
    This is a MCM CPU looks like 4 CPUs attached to each other.
    I think windows 10 Pro can't get the most of this CPU unless we have windows 10 Pro for WS
  • Pekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Vray has a Rendering Benchmark too maybe you could use both
  • Pekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    I went to check both page of Vray and Corona Benchmark

    Corona match more or less the graphic and Vray has the following

    AMD 1950 : 00:46-00:48 sec
    I9 7900: 00:54-00:56 sec
    I7 6950: 01:00-01:10 sec
    I5 5960: 01:23-01:33 sec

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