** = Old results marked were performed with the original BIOS & boost behaviour as published on 7/7.

Benchmarking Performance: Web Tests

While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.

We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

WebXPRT 3: Modern Real-World Web Tasks, including AI

The company behind the XPRT test suites, Principled Technologies, has recently released the latest web-test, and rather than attach a year to the name have just called it ‘3’. This latest test (as we started the suite) has built upon and developed the ethos of previous tests: user interaction, office compute, graph generation, list sorting, HTML5, image manipulation, and even goes as far as some AI testing.

For our benchmark, we run the standard test which goes through the benchmark list seven times and provides a final result. We run this standard test four times, and take an average.

Users can access the WebXPRT test at http://principledtechnologies.com/benchmarkxprt/webxprt/

WebXPRT 3 (2018)

WebXPRT 2015: HTML5 and Javascript Web UX Testing

The older version of WebXPRT is the 2015 edition, which focuses on a slightly different set of web technologies and frameworks that are in use today. This is still a relevant test, especially for users interacting with not-the-latest web applications in the market, of which there are a lot. Web framework development is often very quick but with high turnover, meaning that frameworks are quickly developed, built-upon, used, and then developers move on to the next, and adjusting an application to a new framework is a difficult arduous task, especially with rapid development cycles. This leaves a lot of applications as ‘fixed-in-time’, and relevant to user experience for many years.

Similar to WebXPRT3, the main benchmark is a sectional run repeated seven times, with a final score. We repeat the whole thing four times, and average those final scores.

WebXPRT15

Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks

Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of javascript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.

Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.

Speedometer 2

Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute

A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.

The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.

Google Octane 2.0

Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute

Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.

The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.

Mozilla Kraken 1.1

Web Tests Analysis

Overall, in the web tests, the new Ryzen 3900X and 3700X perform very well with both chips showcasing quite large improvements over the 2700X.

We’re seeing quite an interesting match-up against Intel’s 9700K here, which is leading all of the benchmarks. The reason for this is that SKU has SMT turned off. The singe-threaded performance advantage of this is that the CPU core no longer has to share the µOP cache structure between to different threads, and has the whole capacity dedicated to one thread. Web workloads in particular are amongst the most instruction pressure heavy workloads out there, and they benefit extremely from turning SMT off on modern cores.

Whilst we didn’t have the time yet to test the new 3900X and 3700X with SMT off, AMD’s core and op cache works the same in that it’s sharing the capacity amongst two threads, statically partitioning it. I’m pretty sure we’d see larger increases in the web benchmarks when turning off SMT as well, and we’ll be sure to revisit this particular point in the future.

SPEC2006 & 2017: Industry Standard - ST Performance & IPC Benchmarking Performance: CPU System Tests
Comments Locked

447 Comments

View All Comments

  • Tkan215 - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link

    true the future is more cores. People and customers should feel awake that single core aint the future its just a stopping rock. more cores !
  • Tkan215 - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link

    yes i called it a tie because of the margin of error and patches were not taken into account. also, Intel get enormouse game support so really many factors as they are not equal playing ground
  • watzupken - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link

    Intel's bad moment just started. Clearly while there are some areas where Intel chips are still doing well, however the victories are significantly lesser now. Looking at the power metrics, they lost the fab advantage, so they are now in the disadvantage. To top it off, Intel is still charging monopolistic prices on their existing chips. Have not really seen the rumored price cuts, which may be too little and too late.
  • StrangerGuy - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link

    IMO the $200 CPU landscape is now buy 3600 non-X, or get ripped off by Intel anything even if the latter for cheaper by $50.
  • mikato - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link

    Yeah I really wish a 3600 was tested.
  • Maxiking - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link

    Intel is waiting for 10nm, considering the fact AMD didn't even match Skylake prepatches performance... IF Intel fixes the 10nm, AMD will be be smashed to the ground. If it is a big if, but it is a fact.
  • Mahigan - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link

    AMD actually beat Intel on a clock for clock basis now. What you're seeing is Intel's higher boost clocks saving the day (somewhat).

    If Intel can't go past 5GHz with their 10nm, due to the new core design, and only are able to get say 10-15% more performance per clock then Gen3 Ryzen will most likely end up, with its 7nm+ and improvements AMD aren't done making, in tough competition.
  • just4U - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link

    Intel won't be doing any smashing anytime soon there Max.. I was damn pleased with the overall value/performance of my 2700x in comparison to my highly overclocked 8700K (4.9Ghz) and basically shrugged of the 9 series intel. The addition of a 12core.. with great performance levels really changes the game.

    Even if Intel brings something out it's not going to destroy anything. All we've seen over the past 5 years is small bumps upwards in performance.
  • Korguz - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link

    Maxiking intel has been waiting for 10nm for 204 years now.. and they are still kind of waiting for it. skylake prepatch ? as in specture and meltdown ? um.. kind of need those fixes/patches in place, even if it means a performance hit.. but by all means.. get skylake, dont fix/patch it, and worry about that.. and spend more.. its up to you... either way.. zen2.. looks very good....
  • Targon - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link

    What RAM was used in the Intel system? The Ryzen system used DDR4-3200, but it's CL16, not CL14 RAM. That CAS latency difference would be enough for Ryzen to at least tie the 9900k if not beat it in the gaming tests.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now