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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khanikun - Monday, March 2, 2020 - link
lol, dead on copy.All they can do is try to copy the look, while everything underneath is garbage. The X5 clone with an inline-4 barely producing 110 hp or the real X5 with an inline-6 (230 hp) or V8 (340 hp). Of course, that's only power, you still have handling. If that's what you call a dead on copy, then this Hygon must be a dead on copy of Zen.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, March 8, 2020 - link
@ khanikun - I didn't stop the driver in the middle of Shanghai to ask him to show my under the hood. But, as a (then) X5 owner, I was looking at the same care, by my eyes.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, February 28, 2020 - link
It not like China is known to struggle with producing counterfiet products of any type of technological complexity.bigvlada - Saturday, February 29, 2020 - link
Depends on the type of industry. They still struggle to build domestic equivalent of Russian Sukhoi jet fighter engines.s.yu - Sunday, March 1, 2020 - link
That's a bit too specific.Dolda2000 - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
Given that they were only given complete floorplans, it would take an awful lot of reverse engineering to get the core into any form that could be meaningfully improved upon.d0x360 - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
Even if such a thing happened who outside of china would ever use it? Surely it has hardware based spyware. There's no way I'd use this for anythingRetycint - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
That's a rather bold assumption to make, given that these CPUs haven't even been released yet.Lord of the Bored - Friday, February 28, 2020 - link
Well, people seem willing to use Intel processors with the Management Engine subcomputer embedded, so... integrated spyware in hardware doesn't seem that far.Notmyusualid - Sunday, March 8, 2020 - link
@ Lord - excellent point, and not me. You even made me re-check mine.