Testing a Chinese x86 CPU: A Deep Dive into Zen-based Hygon Dhyana Processors
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Wendell Wilson on February 27, 2020 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarks: Windows
For both systems, we installed Windows: Windows 10 Pro on the small 8-core Dhyana system, and Windows 10 Enterprise on the big dual 32-core Dhyana Plus server. With AVX/AVX2 not working properly, our range of testing was limited. As mentioned previously, some software didn’t even want to run on one system or the other, such as CPU-Z on the server.
From the numbers we can see that our 8-core Dhyana processor falls somewhere between the 6-core Ryzen 5 1600X and the 8-core Ryzen 6 1800X, due to clock speeds, but on particular tests it gets hammered by even the Athlon 200GE. The dual 32-core Dhyana Plus server seems to be in all sorts of a mess, often beaten by the Ryzen 7 1800X, or can now be easily beaten by the Ryzen 9 3950X. The one benchmark where it did really well was Corona – a memory/NUMA agnostic integer based renderer – it seems like a match made in heaven.
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Rudde - Saturday, February 29, 2020 - link
"Interestingly enough, the same delays for RDSEED for the server chips are also seen on Ryzen Mobile and Ryzen Desktop APUs."Not only that, the L2 cache has the same latency as Ryzen APUs, while Ryzen 1000 series had a longer latency.
It is clear that Dhyana branched out of the more optimised Zen.
WaltC - Sunday, March 1, 2020 - link
Did Wendell write "the charismatic Wendell" line?.....;) One of the reasons I enjoy Wendell so much is that he's such a ham--he's entertaining, rather than "charismatic", I think. A definite win for Wendell!Actually, it never crossed my mind that AMD would have been so foolish as to sell Zen1 to China--it's nice to see I was right. Good write-up!
TheRuchika - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
Doesn't sound bad for a starthispeeding - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
good news,Anandtech in the china GFW list because the paperTheJian - Sunday, March 8, 2020 - link
"What AMD did was license a single core design to HMC, along with an SoC layout. From this point on, AMD is officially ‘hands-off’,""The final product out of this spider web of arrangements is the Hygon Dhyana x86 core, an ‘updated Zen core for China’"
I'm confused. If it's x86, Intel needs to SUE immediately and report this to US govt. Can it run x86 code or not? If so, they should be sued. I don't get what you're saying here, how is it NOT illegal?
stoatwblr - Monday, April 27, 2020 - link
That "second battery" looks like a 1-wire license key of some type.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire
They're used a lot to enable features in systems or disable systems if missing (things like enabling raid5/6 on intel server boards etc)