AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 5, 2020 9:01 AM ESTCPU Tests: Synthetic
Most of the people in our industry have a love/hate relationship when it comes to synthetic tests. On the one hand, they’re often good for quick summaries of performance and are easy to use, but most of the time the tests aren’t related to any real software. Synthetic tests are often very good at burrowing down to a specific set of instructions and maximizing the performance out of those. Due to requests from a number of our readers, we have the following synthetic tests.
Linux OpenSSL Speed: SHA256
One of our readers reached out in early 2020 and stated that he was interested in looking at OpenSSL hashing rates in Linux. Luckily OpenSSL in Linux has a function called ‘speed’ that allows the user to determine how fast the system is for any given hashing algorithm, as well as signing and verifying messages.
OpenSSL offers a lot of algorithms to choose from, and based on a quick Twitter poll, we narrowed it down to the following:
- rsa2048 sign and rsa2048 verify
- sha256 at 8K block size
- md5 at 8K block size
For each of these tests, we run them in single thread and multithreaded mode. All the graphs are in our benchmark database, Bench, and we use the sha256 and md5 results in published reviews.
GeekBench 5: Link
As a common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We have both GB5 and GB4 results in our benchmark database. GB5 was introduced to our test suite after already having tested ~25 CPUs, and so the results are a little sporadic by comparison. These spots will be filled in when we retest any of the CPUs.
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lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
A great dane weighs twice as much as a bulldog so...Xyler94 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Even if Intel could... I highly doubt they'd be able to legally speaking, since that would literally be burning out competition in terms of CPU, and even Silicon productions...Morawka - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
Intel would be better served luring TSMC's process engineers over. Most of the good ones have already been scooped up by China though.bmacsys - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
Really dude. I suppose you know this firsthand?lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
China's mainland fab efforts would not be as far as they are otherwise.Qasar - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
and you have proof of this ? or is it just your opinion ?ze_banned_because_at - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link
Not that hard to google for "tsmc engineers poached by china".RogerAndOut - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Well before any bid premium, TSMC has a market value of over $400B and so is far larger than Intel's total worth of around $240B. It would be somewhat cheaper for Intel to just buy up all of the TSMC production capacity that it can for a few years. This would allow Intel to limit the production of other players, while also giving them a chance to produce some chips that are worth buying.Thanny - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
TMSC would never allow that while Intel was a competitor. Buy up all their capacity, getting rid of their customers? Then what happens when Intel stops buying their capacity? Unless Intel spun off its fabs (which is extremely unlikely), TSMC will treat them as a competitor. Intel can make some things at TSMC, but not to the extent that it erodes TSMC's customer base.Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
Exactly this. Amazing how fee pro-Intel commenters can do big picture thinking.