AMD Ryzen 9 5980HS Cezanne Review: Ryzen 5000 Mobile Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 26, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Vega
- Ryzen
- Zen 3
- Renoir
- Notebook
- Ryzen 9 5980HS
- Ryzen 5000 Mobile
- Cezanne
CPU Tests: Simulation
Simulation and Science have a lot of overlap in the benchmarking world, however for this distinction we’re separating into two segments mostly based on the utility of the resulting data. The benchmarks that fall under Science have a distinct use for the data they output – in our Simulation section, these act more like synthetics but at some level are still trying to simulate a given environment.
DigiCortex v1.35: link
DigiCortex is a pet project for the visualization of neuron and synapse activity in the brain. The software comes with a variety of benchmark modes, and we take the small benchmark which runs a 32k neuron/1.8B synapse simulation, similar to a small slug.
The results on the output are given as a fraction of whether the system can simulate in real-time, so anything above a value of one is suitable for real-time work. The benchmark offers a 'no firing synapse' mode, which in essence detects DRAM and bus speed, however we take the firing mode which adds CPU work with every firing.
The software originally shipped with a benchmark that recorded the first few cycles and output a result. So while fast multi-threaded processors this made the benchmark last less than a few seconds, slow dual-core processors could be running for almost an hour. There is also the issue of DigiCortex starting with a base neuron/synapse map in ‘off mode’, giving a high result in the first few cycles as none of the nodes are currently active. We found that the performance settles down into a steady state after a while (when the model is actively in use), so we asked the author to allow for a ‘warm-up’ phase and for the benchmark to be the average over a second sample time.
For our test, we give the benchmark 20000 cycles to warm up and then take the data over the next 10000 cycles seconds for the test – on a modern processor this takes 30 seconds and 150 seconds respectively. This is then repeated a minimum of 10 times, with the first three results rejected. Results are shown as a multiple of real-time calculation.
DigiCortex seems to have taken a shine to Zen 3, especially processors with a single chiplet of cores. Intel can't seem to compete here.
Dwarf Fortress 0.44.12: Link
Another long standing request for our benchmark suite has been Dwarf Fortress, a popular management/roguelike indie video game, first launched in 2006 and still being regularly updated today, aiming for a Steam launch sometime in the future.
Emulating the ASCII interfaces of old, this title is a rather complex beast, which can generate environments subject to millennia of rule, famous faces, peasants, and key historical figures and events. The further you get into the game, depending on the size of the world, the slower it becomes as it has to simulate more famous people, more world events, and the natural way that humanoid creatures take over an environment. Like some kind of virus.
For our test we’re using DFMark. DFMark is a benchmark built by vorsgren on the Bay12Forums that gives two different modes built on DFHack: world generation and embark. These tests can be configured, but range anywhere from 3 minutes to several hours. After analyzing the test, we ended up going for three different world generation sizes:
- Small, a 65x65 world with 250 years, 10 civilizations and 4 megabeasts
- Medium, a 127x127 world with 550 years, 10 civilizations and 4 megabeasts
- Large, a 257x257 world with 550 years, 40 civilizations and 10 megabeasts
DFMark outputs the time to run any given test, so this is what we use for the output. We loop the small test for as many times possible in 10 minutes, the medium test for as many times in 30 minutes, and the large test for as many times in an hour.
DF has historically been an Intel favorite, and we're not seeing much of a speedup for mobile Zen 3 over mobile Zen 2 here.
Dolphin v5.0 Emulation: Link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that ray traces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in seconds, where the Wii itself scores 1051 seconds.
The 35W variant of Cezanne pushes through here, matching the desktop processor, and a sizeable performance jump over the previous generation Renoir.
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Meteor2 - Thursday, February 4, 2021 - link
Great point.ikjadoon - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
It's great to see AMD kicking Intel's butt in a much larger market (i.e., laptops vastly outsell desktops): AMD really should be alongside, or simply replacing, Intel in most premium notebooks. Gaming notebooks are not my cup of tea, but glad to see for upcoming 15W Zen3 parts.Will we see actual, high-end Zen3 notebooks? Lenovo, HP, ASUS, Dell: for shame if you keep ramming toasty Tiger Lake down customers' throats. Lenovo's done some great offerings with both AMD & Intel; that means some compromises with notebook design (just go all AMD, man; if/when Intel is on top, switch back!), but beefier cooling for Intel will also help AMD.
Still, overall, I don't see anything convincing me that x86 is really right for notebooks, either. So much waste heat...for what? The M1 has rightly rejiggered expectations: 20 hours on 150 nits should be ordinary, not miraculous. Limited to no fan spin-up and max CPU load should yield a chassis maximum of 40C (slightly warmer than body temperature). And, all the while with class-leading 1T performance.
As this is a gaming laptop, it's not too relevant to compare web benchmarks (what most laptops do), but this is peak Zen3 mobile and it still falls quite short:
Speedometer 2.0
35W Ryzen 5980HS: 102 points (-57%)
125W i9-10900K: 119 points (-49%)
35W i7-1185G7: 128 points (-46%)
105W Ryzen 5950X: 140 points (-40%)
30W Apple M1: 234 points
You can double / triple x86 wattage and still be miles behind M1. I almost feel silly buying an x86 laptop again: just kilowatts of waste heat over time. Why? Electrons that never get used, just exhausted and thrown out as soon as possible because it'll throttle even worse otherwise.
undervolted_dc - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
because you here are benchmarking javascript engine in the browserbut not being enough you are comparing those in single thread so here you are comparing 1/16 of the 5950hs vs 1/4 of the m1
a 128core epyc or a 64core threadripper probably will be even worse in this single threaded benchmark ( because those are levaring threads and are less efficient in single threaded app )
if you like wrong calculations then 1 core of the 15w version use less tha 1w for what result ? ~ 100 points ? so who is wasting electrons here ?
( btw 1 core doesn't use 1/16 because there are boosts , but it's even less wrong than your comparison )
ZoZo - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
128-core EPYC? Where?His comparison is indeed misleading in terms of energy efficiency, but it's sad that no x86 is able to come even close to that single-threaded performance.
WaltC - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
Doubly sad for the M1 that we are living in the multicore/multithread era...;)ikjadoon - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
The energy efficient comparisons are pretty clear: the best x86 (Zen3) has stunningly lower IPC than M1, which barely cracks 3 GHz. The only way to make up for such a gulf in IPC is faster clocks. Faster clocks require the 100+W TDPs so common in high-performance desktop CPUs. It's why Zen3 mobile clocks so much lower than Zen3 desktop (3-4 GHz instead of 4-5 GHz)A CPU that needs 3x power to do the same work (and do it slower in most cases) must exhaust an enormous amount of heat, when considering nT or 1T benchmarks (Zen3 requires ~20W for 5 GHz boost on a *single* core). Look at those boost power consumption measurements.
Specifically in desktops (noted in my comparison about tripling TDP...), the CPU *alone* eats up an extra 60 to 90 watts during peak usage. Call it +20W average continuously, so we can do the math.
20W x 8 hours x 7 days a week = +1.1 kWh excess exhaust heat per week. x86 had two corporate giants to do better. It's been severely litigated, but that's Intel's comeuppance. If Intel can't put out high-perf, high-efficiency x86 architectures, then people will start to feel less attached to x86 as an ISA. x86 had billions and billions and billions of R&D.
I see no reason for consumers to religiously follow x86 Wintel or Wintel-clones in laptops especially, but desktops, too: where is the efficiency going to be coming from? Even if Apple *had flat 1T* for the next three years, I'd still feel more optimistic about M1-based CPUs in the long-term than x86.
Dug - Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - link
"I see no reason for consumers to religiously follow x86 Wintel or Wintel-clones in laptops especially, but desktops, too: where is the efficiency going to be coming from?"Software, and getting work done. M1 is great and all, but just need to convince the boss that Apple or 3rd party has software available for our company....... Nope, oh well.
Other negatives-
For personal use, people aren't going to spend thousands of dollars to get new software on new platform.
They can't play games (or should I say they can't play a majority), which is probably the largest market.
They can't change anything about their software
They can't customize anything.
They can't upgrade any piece of their hardware.
They don't have options for same accessories.
So I'll go ahead and spend the extra $15 a year on energy to keep Windows.
Spunjji - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
"A CPU that needs 3x power to do the same work"It doesn't. It's been demonstrated a few times now that if you scale back Zen 3 cores to similar performance levels to M1, M1's perf/watt advantage drops to about 30%. It's still better than the node advantage alone, but it's not crippling, and M1 is simply not capable of scaling up to the clock speeds required to match x86 on desktop / HPC workloads.
They're different core designs matched to different purposes (ultra-mobile first vs. server first) and show different strengths as a result.
M1 is a significant achievement - no doubt about it - but you're *massively* overstating the case in its favour.
GeoffreyA - Friday, January 29, 2021 - link
Thank you for this.Meteor2 - Thursday, February 4, 2021 - link
"M1 is simply not capable of scaling up to the clock speeds required to match x86 on desktop / HPC workloads" ...Yet. In a couple of years x86 will be behind ARM across the board.Fastest HPC in the world is ARM *right now*. Only the fifth fastest is x86.