The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTCPU System Tests
Our first set of tests is our general system tests. These set of tests are meant to emulate more about what people usually do on a system, like opening large files or processing small stacks of data. This is a bit different to our office testing, which uses more industry standard benchmarks, and a few of the benchmarks here are relatively new and different.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
PDF Opening
First up is a self-penned test using a monstrous PDF we once received in advance of attending an event. While the PDF was only a single page, it had so many high-quality layers embedded it was taking north of 15 seconds to open and to gain control on the mid-range notebook I was using at the time. This put it as a great candidate for our 'let's open an obnoxious PDF' test. Here we use Adobe Reader DC, and disable all the update functionality within. The benchmark sets the screen to 1080p, opens the PDF to in fit-to-screen mode, and measures the time from sending the command to open the PDF until it is fully displayed and the user can take control of the software again. The test is repeated ten times, and the average time taken. Results are in milliseconds.
This opening test is single threaded, so the high-frequency Intel parts get a clear win. There's not much between the Threadripper CPUs here.
FCAT Processing: link
One of the more interesting workloads that has crossed our desks in recent quarters is FCAT - the tool we use to measure and visually analyze stuttering in gaming due to dropped or runt frames. The FCAT process requires enabling a color-based overlay onto a game, recording the gameplay, and then parsing the video file through the analysis software. The software is mostly single-threaded, however because the video is basically in a raw format, the file size is large and requires moving a lot of data around. For our test, we take a 90-second clip of the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark running on a GTX 980 Ti at 1440p, which comes in around 21 GB, and measure the time it takes to process through the visual analysis tool.
Similar to PDF opening, single threaded performance wins out.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that ray traces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
Dolphin likes single thread performance as well, although having some cores to back it up seems to be required.
3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link
This is the latest version of the self-penned 3DPM benchmark. The goal of 3DPM is to simulate semi-optimized scientific algorithms taken directly from my doctorate thesis. Version 2.1 improves over 2.0 by passing the main particle structs by reference rather than by value, and decreasing the amount of double->float->double recasts the compiler was adding in. It affords a ~25% speed-up over v2.0, which means new data.
Our first pure multithreaded test, and the 1950X wins with 32 threads. The 1920X beats the 1950X in SMT-off mode, due to 24 threads beating 16 threads.
DigiCortex v1.20: link
Despite being a couple of years old, the DigiCortex software is a pet project for the visualization of neuron and synapse activity in the brain. The software comes with a variety of benchmark modes, and we take the small benchmark which runs a 32k neuron/1.8B synapse simulation. The results on the output are given as a fraction of whether the system can simulate in real-time, so anything above a value of one is suitable for real-time work. The benchmark offers a 'no firing synapse' mode, which in essence detects DRAM and bus speed, however we take the firing mode which adds CPU work with every firing.
DigiCortex requires a mash of CPU frequency and DRAM performance to get a good result, and anything with quad-channel memory is usually preferred. The 1950X in SMT-off mode wins here due to its low main memory latency combined with having 16 threads to access it. The Broadwell-E is the nearest competitor, over Skylake-X, most likely due to the mesh vs ring topology. The 1950X in Creator mode scores way down the field however, lower than the standard Ryzen chips, showing that under a unified memory architecture there can be significant performance drops. The 1920X failed in this test for an unknown reason.
Agisoft Photoscan 1.0: link
Photoscan stays in our benchmark suite from the previous version, however now we are running on Windows 10 so features such as Speed Shift on the latest processors come into play. The concept of Photoscan is translating many 2D images into a 3D model - so the more detailed the images, and the more you have, the better the model. The algorithm has four stages, some single threaded and some multi-threaded, along with some cache/memory dependency in there as well. For some of the more variable threaded workload, features such as Speed Shift and XFR will be able to take advantage of CPU stalls or downtime, giving sizeable speedups on newer microarchitectures.
The variable threaded nature of Agisoft shows that in our workflow, it's a mix of cores, IPC and frequency required to win. AMD takes a back seat here, likely due to its AVX implementation.
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Vorl - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
the answer to both of you is that "this is a High end PC processor, not a workstation CPU, and not a server CPU. That was clearly covered at the start of the article.If you want raw number crunching info, there will be other sites that are going to have those reviews, and really, maybe anandtech will review it in that light since it really is such a powerful CPU in another review for server stuff.
Also, there is a LOT of value in having a standardized set of tests. Even if a few tests here and there are no longer valuable like PDF opening, the same tests being used across the board are important for BENCH. you can't compare products if you aren't using the same tools.
Unfortunately AMD is ahead of the curve currently with massive SMP being given to normal consumers now at a reasonable price. It will take a little time for dev's to catch up and really make use of this amazing CPU.
With the processing power in a CPU like this imagine the game mechanics that can be created and used, For those of us that are more interested in making this a reasonably priced workstation/server build for VMs etc, cool for us, but that isn't where this is being marketed, and it's not really fair to jump all over the reviewer for it.
Zstream - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Utter rubbish. This CPU is designed for a workstation build. Some a product labeled Xeon is a workstation CPU, but this isn't?mapesdhs - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Yeah, TR doesn't really look like something that's massively aimed at gamers, it has too many capabilities and features which gamers wouldn't be interested in.pm9819 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
AMD themselves call it a consumer cpu. Is Intel paying them as wellLolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
It's a HEDT/workstation, a year ago people called Workstation a dual Xeon 8 cores, which a sole 1950X replicates.Intel draws a line not supporting ECC, AMD supports ECC in all their main cpu's server or not all the way back to Athlon 64.
16cores/32threads, ECC, 64 pci-e lanes, upgrade path to 32cores/64threads with zen3. Smells Workstation to me.
Another thing is server cpu's which EPYC is, with features tailored to it, like a massive core count with low clock speeds to maximize efficiency and damn expensive mobos without any gamerish gizmo, just think to put on building without looking at net. TR can do a bit of that too, but optimized to an all around performance and budget friendly.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Dan sums it up. Some of these tests are simply check boxes - is it adequate enough.Some people do say that an automated suite isn't the way to do things: unfortunately without spending over two months designing this script I wouldn't have time for nearly as much data or to test nearly as many CPUs. Automation is a key aspect to testing, and I've spent a good while making sure tests like our Chromium Compile can be process consistent across systems.
There's always scope to add more tests (my scripts are modular now), if they can be repeatable and deterministic, but also easy to understand in how they are set up. Feel free to reach out via email if you have suggestions.
Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Ian, I understand that you see them as checkboxes, but this is not a normal CPU John doe is going to buy. It has a very specific audience and I feel you are missing that audience badly. I guy that buys this to use for rendering or 3Dstudio Max, is not going to worry about games. Yes, it would be a great bonus to also be OK at it. Other sittes even did tests of running rendering as well as play games at the same time. TR shined like a star against Intel. This is actually something that might happen in real life. A guy could begin a render and then while waiting, decide to play a game.I would not buy TR to open pdf's, would I?
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
No, but you open things like IDEs and Premiere. A PDF test is a gateway test in that regard with an abnormally large input. When a workstation is not crunching hard, it's being used to navigate through programs with perhaps the web and documents in tow where the UX is going to be indicative of something like PDF opening.Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Including useless benchs not only you waste target audience time, you too having to write and upload images from that useless benchs instead of making the article more interesting.How about a "the destroyer for HEDT/Workstion", a typical productivy load + some gaming, out of a sudden people will get TWICE the cpu resources, they can do things they couldn't before on the same machine.
They could get a dual socket mobo with 2x10c Xeons paying the hefty premium with pathetic clock speeds if they wante to game a bit while doing work, TR fixed that, with mass consumer type of gaming performance while reducing the multicore costs by more than half (cores counts + ECC support without paying intel tax).
Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
And that audience few months ago was limited to do their productivity thing with 6-8 cores or 10 paying the huge intel tax, probably they couldn't game without hurting other things and had a 2 secondary PC for killing time.With TR and the massive 16 core count they can finally do all of that off a single PC or focus the entire powerhorse when they need (leaving things do work during their sleep).