Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCPU Web Tests
One of the issues when running web-based tests is the nature of modern browsers to automatically install updates. This means any sustained period of benchmarking will invariably fall foul of the 'it's updated beyond the state of comparison' rule, especially when browsers will update if you give them half a second to think about it. Despite this, we were able to find a series of commands to create an un-updatable version of Chrome 56 for our 2017 test suite. While this means we might not be on the bleeding edge of the latest browser, it makes the scores between CPUs comparable.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
SunSpider 1.0.2: link
The oldest web-based benchmark in this portion of our test is SunSpider. This is a very basic javascript algorithm tool, and ends up being more a measure of IPC and latency than anything else, with most high-performance CPUs scoring around about the same. The basic test is looped 10 times and the average taken. We run the basic test 4 times.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: link
Kraken is another Javascript based benchmark, using the same test harness as SunSpider, but focusing on more stringent real-world use cases and libraries, such as audio processing and image filters. Again, the basic test is looped ten times, and we run the basic test four times.
Google Octane 2.0: link
Along with Mozilla, as Google is a major browser developer, having peak JS performance is typically a critical asset when comparing against the other OS developers. In the same way that SunSpider is a very early JS benchmark, and Kraken is a bit newer, Octane aims to be more relevant to real workloads, especially in power constrained devices such as smartphones and tablets.
WebXPRT 2015: link
While the previous three benchmarks do calculations in the background and represent a score, WebXPRT is designed to be a better interpretation of visual workloads that a professional user might have, such as browser based applications, graphing, image editing, sort/analysis, scientific analysis and financial tools.
Overall, all of our web benchmarks show a similar trend. Very few web frameworks offer multi-threading – the browsers themselves are barely multi-threaded at times – so Threadripper's vast thread count is underutilized. What wins the day on the web are a handful of fast cores with high single-threaded performance, and it becomes a balance between cores and cross-core communication.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
104 Comments
View All Comments
peevee - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Compilation scales even on multi-CPU machines. With much higher communication latencies.In general, compilers running in parallel on MSVC (with MSBuild) run in different processes, they don't write into each other's address spaces and so do not need to communicate at all.
Quit making excuses. You are doing something wrong. I am doing development for multi-CPU machines and ON multi-CPU machines for a very long time. YOU are doing something wrong.
peevee - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
BTW, when you enable NUMA on TR, does Windows 10 recognize it as one CPU group or 2?gzunk - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
It recognizes it as two NUMA nodes.Alexey291 - Saturday, September 2, 2017 - link
They aren't going to do anything.All their 'scientific benchmarking' is running the same macro again and again on different hardware setups.
What you are suggesting requires actual work and thought.
Arbie - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
As noted by edzieba, the correct phrase (and I'm sure it has a very British heritage) is "The proof of the pudding is in the eating".Another phrase needing repair: "multithreaded tests were almost halved to the 1950X". Was this meant to be something like "multithreaded tests were almost half of those in Creator mode" (?).
Technically, of course, your articles are really well-done; thanks for all of them.
fanofanand - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Thank you for listening to the readers and re-testing this, Ian!ddriver - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
To sum it up - "game mode" is moronic. It is moronic for amd to push it, and to push TR as a gaming platform, which is clearly neither its peak, nor even its strong point. It is even more moronic for people to spend more than double the money just to have half of the CPU disabled, and still get worse performance than a ryzen chip.TR is great for prosumers, and represents a tremendous value and performance at a whole new level of affordability. It will do for games if you are a prosumer who occasionally games, but if you are a gamer it makes zero sense. Having AMD push it as a gaming platform only gives "people" the excuse to whine how bad it is at it.
Also, I cannot shake the feeling there should be a better way to limit scheduling to half the chip for games without having to disable the rest, so it is still usable to the rest of the system.
Gothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
first coders should do their job.. that is the main problem today. lazy and uncompetent coders.eriohl - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Of course you could limit thread scheduling on software level. But it seems to me that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation why Microsoft and the game developers haven't been spending much time optimizing for running games on systems with NUMA.HomeworldFound - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
You can't call a coder that doesn't anticipate a 16 core 32 thread CPU lazy. The word is incompetent btw. I'd like to see you make a game worth millions of dollars and account for this processor, heck any processor with more than six cores.