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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goldgrenade - Thursday, January 4, 2018 - link
Idk, I use my 1920x for gaming and working, and... really everything. Second best CPU on the market with 1950x beating it out unless you can't get enough cooling.LOVE this CPU.
rauelius - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I really want to build a 1920x1080 build.goku4liv - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
21/08/2017 INTEL LAUNCH 8 SERIES OF CPU................. AMD DEAD !!goldgrenade - Thursday, January 4, 2018 - link
HAHAHAHA xDHope you invested in AMD despite your comment. Looks like my gut instinct in buying AMD since 2009 was right. Intel chips have a security flaw, that when fixed for series 8 and 9 will remove approximately 30% of performance...
So who has the best chip now? Take 30% off any Intel benchmark against its then AMD rival and see which one would have been better.
Draven31 - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
NUMA appeared in Windows machines in 1998/1999 with the SGI Visual PC (which, yes, was a windows machine) and iirc, a workstation from Intergraph about the same time.halotron - Friday, March 16, 2018 - link
The benchmark Chromium Compile is excellent!Please do that for the next 2000-series of Ryzen/Threadripper as well.
Thanks