The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review: 16 Cores on 7nm with PCIe 4.0
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 14, 2019 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Encoding Tests
With the rise of streaming, vlogs, and video content as a whole, encoding and transcoding tests are becoming ever more important. Not only are more home users and gamers needing to convert video files into something more manageable, for streaming or archival purposes, but the servers that manage the output also manage around data and log files with compression and decompression. Our encoding tasks are focused around these important scenarios, with input from the community for the best implementation of real-world testing.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Handbrake 1.1.0: Streaming and Archival Video Transcoding
A popular open source tool, Handbrake is the anything-to-anything video conversion software that a number of people use as a reference point. The danger is always on version numbers and optimization, for example the latest versions of the software can take advantage of AVX-512 and OpenCL to accelerate certain types of transcoding and algorithms. The version we use here is a pure CPU play, with common transcoding variations.
We have split Handbrake up into several tests, using a Logitech C920 1080p60 native webcam recording (essentially a streamer recording), and convert them into two types of streaming formats and one for archival. The output settings used are:
- 720p60 at 6000 kbps constant bit rate, fast setting, high profile
- 1080p60 at 3500 kbps constant bit rate, faster setting, main profile
- 1080p60 HEVC at 3500 kbps variable bit rate, fast setting, main profile
7-zip v1805: Popular Open-Source Encoding Engine
Out of our compression/decompression tool tests, 7-zip is the most requested and comes with a built-in benchmark. For our test suite, we’ve pulled the latest version of the software and we run the benchmark from the command line, reporting the compression, decompression, and a combined score.
It is noted in this benchmark that the latest multi-die processors have very bi-modal performance between compression and decompression, performing well in one and badly in the other. There are also discussions around how the Windows Scheduler is implementing every thread. As we get more results, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Please note, if you plan to share out the Compression graph, please include the Decompression one. Otherwise you’re only presenting half a picture.
Again, AMD's 16-core Zen 2 hardware is breezing past Intel's 18-core Skylake-Refresh family. Even with the added frequency that Cascade Lake will bring, it would be hard to see it able to topple AMD here.
WinRAR 5.60b3: Archiving Tool
My compression tool of choice is often WinRAR, having been one of the first tools a number of my generation used over two decades ago. The interface has not changed much, although the integration with Windows right click commands is always a plus. It has no in-built test, so we run a compression over a set directory containing over thirty 60-second video files and 2000 small web-based files at a normal compression rate.
WinRAR is variable threaded but also susceptible to caching, so in our test we run it 10 times and take the average of the last five, leaving the test purely for raw CPU compute performance.
As a variable threaded workload, WinRAR also probes memory performance. Both the 3700X and 3800X beat the 3950X here.
AES Encryption: File Security
A number of platforms, particularly mobile devices, are now offering encryption by default with file systems in order to protect the contents. Windows based devices have these options as well, often applied by BitLocker or third-party software. In our AES encryption test, we used the discontinued TrueCrypt for its built-in benchmark, which tests several encryption algorithms directly in memory.
The data we take for this test is the combined AES encrypt/decrypt performance, measured in gigabytes per second. The software does use AES commands for processors that offer hardware selection, however not AVX-512.
Our AES benchmark seemed a bit off - I would suggest we're being memory limited here but the Ryzen 9 3900X scores a lot higher over the 3950X. More investigation needed.
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Drazick - Sunday, November 17, 2019 - link
The DDR Technology is orthogonal.I want Quad and the latest memory available.
guyr - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
Anything is possible, of course. 5 years ago, who would have predicted 16 cores in a consumer-oriented CPU? However, neither Intel nor AMD has made any moves beyond 2 memory channels in the consumer space. The demand is simply not there to justify the increase in complexity and price. In the professional space, more channels are easily justified and the target market doesn't hesitate to pay the higher prices. So, it's all driven by what the market will bear.alufan - Saturday, November 16, 2019 - link
weird intel launches its chip a couple of weeks ago and it stayed upfront and main story for over a week, AMD launches what is in effect the best CPU ever tested by this site and it lasts a few Days before being pushed aside for another intel article am sure the intention by the reporters is to be fair and unbiased however I can see how the commercial motives of the site are being manipulated looks like intels up to its old tricks again, the thread ripper article lasted even less time but no chips have been tested(or at least released) yet which I guess makes sensepenev91 - Sunday, November 17, 2019 - link
Just ignore everything Intel/AMD related on Anandtech. There's been an obvious bias for years.Atom2 - Saturday, November 16, 2019 - link
There has never been a situation as big as this one, where the bench software was benchmarked more than the hardware. Comprehensive overview of historic software development? Whatever the reason, it seems that keeping back AVX512 to only select few CPUs, was an unfortunate decision by Intel, which only contributed to the situation. Yes, you know, if you compile your code with compiler from 1998 and ignore all the guidelines how to write fast code ... Voila... For some reason however, nobody tries to run 20 year old CPU code on GPU though.chrkv - Monday, November 18, 2019 - link
Second page "On the Ryzen High Performance power plan, our sustained single core frequency dropped to 4450 MHz" - I believe just "the High Performance" should be here.Page 4 "Despite 5.0 GHz all-core turbo being on the 9900K" - should be "9900KS".
Irata - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
Quick question: Are any of your benchmarks affected by the Mathlab issue (Ryzen are crippled because a poor code path is used due to a vendor ID check for "genuine Intel" )?twotwotwo - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
Intel's had these consumer-platform-based "entry-level Xeons" (once E3, now E) for a while. Despite some obvious limits, and that there are other low-end server options, enough folks want 'em to seed an ecosystem of rackmount and blade servers from Supermicro, Dell, etc.Anyway, the "pro" (ECC/management enabled) variant of Ryzen seems like a great fit for that. 16 cores and 24 PCIe 4 lanes are probably more useful for little servers than for most desktop users. It's also more balanced than the 8/16C EPYCs; it's cool they have 128 lanes and tons of memory channels, but it takes very specific applications to use them all with that few cores (caching?). Ideally the lesser I/O and lower TDPs also help make denser/cheaper boxes, and the consumer-ish clocks pay off for some things.
The biggest argument against is that the entry-level server market is probably shrinking anyway as users rent tiny slices of huge boxes from cloud providers instead. It also probably doesn't have the best margins. So maybe you could release a competitive product there and still not make all that much off it.
halfflat - Thursday, November 21, 2019 - link
Very curious about the AVX512 vs AVX2 results for 3dPM. It's really unusual to see even a 2x performance increase going from AVX2 to AVX512 on the same architecture, given that running AVX512 instructions will lower the clock.The non-AVX versions, I'm presuming, are utilizing SSE2.
The i9-9900K gets a factor of 2 increase going from SSE2 to AVX2, which is pretty much what one would expect with twice as many fp operations per instruction. But the i9-7960X performance with AVX512 is *ten times* improved over SSE2, when the vector is only four times as wide and the cores will be running at a lower clock speed.
Is there some particular AVX512-only operation that is determining this huge performance gap? Some further analysis of these results would be very interesting.
AIV - Wednesday, November 27, 2019 - link
Somebody posted that it's caused by 64 bit integer multiplies, which are supported in AVX512, but not in AVX2 and thus fallback to scalar operations.