The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X Review: Flagship Zen 5 Soars - and Stalls
by Gavin Bonshor on August 14, 2024 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Desktop
- Zen 5
- AM5
- Ryzen 9000
- Ryzen 9 9950X
- Ryzen 9 9900X
CPU Benchmark Performance: AI Performance
As technology progresses at a breakneck pace, so do the demands of modern applications and workloads. As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become increasingly intertwined with our daily computational tasks, it's paramount that our reviews evolve in tandem. To this end, we have AI and inferencing benchmarks in our CPU test suite for 2024.
Traditionally, CPU benchmarks have focused on various tasks, from arithmetic calculations to multimedia processing. However, with AI algorithms now driving features within some applications, from voice recognition to real-time data analysis, it's crucial to understand how modern processors handle these specific workloads. This is where our newly incorporated benchmarks come into play.
Given makers such as AMD with Ryzen AI, with multiple iterations including the XDNA 2 NPU within the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and Intel with their Meteor Lake mobile platform featuring AI-driven hardware, aptly named Intel AI Boost within the silicon, AI, and inferencing benchmarks will be a mainstay in our test suite as we go further into 2024 and beyond. While there's currently no defacto benchmark for AI at the moment, we've compiled a couple of different benchmarks to gauge performance.
It's also worth noting that desktop processors don't really utilize NPUs, so all of the grunt in the below benchmarks is done using the CPU.
In our AI-based benchmarks, which leverage TensorFlow, and even in DeepSpeech, both the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900 comfortably beat the competition when using the CPU cores. This puts Zen 5 in a good light, but graphics compute in AI is where the performance is at. Still, comparing Zen 5 to Zen 4 and Intel's Raptor Lake, the Zen 5 chips comfortably beat out the competition here.
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Silver5urfer - Saturday, August 24, 2024 - link
So looking at the response, seems like a Windows OS dependent update. That is ok but it's not going to save the Zen 5 flaws. Plus more over what about Windows 10 ? I honestly have no idea why the damn reviewers do not even care as if Win10 vanished. That OS is far more robust over the garbage Win11 which did regression in CPU performance due (VBS) to some Kernel level changes and the Shell32 / Win32 downgrades plus explorer.exe downgrades AND QA went into sewage. Microsoft is already pathetic in Windows ever since they sacked Terry, Chief of Windows for 20+ years and they dissolved Windows dept exclusivity to some Cloud department and that Panos Panay ruined whatever left of it and left the company. The mismanagement at Microsoft is astounding and these HW companies still lick the boot of the company so badly so do the dummy users who are braindead.GeoffreyA - Saturday, August 24, 2024 - link
I think AMD's tone in that blog isn't right. Sure, mistakes are made: that's no problem. Apologise and fix it. Here, they've spun it in such a way that no fault lies with them. AMD of early Zen would apologise and take accountability. Seems they're changing as their coffers get loaded.Regarding Windows 10, who knows if it'll get the update. Maybe not. Windows 10, in itself, works well. I've never had an issue in the five years of using it. But it is slowly on the way out. There are no more feature updates, it's stuck at Build 19045, and all the development effort is going into 11.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, August 24, 2024 - link
AMD is no better than Intel, which is to be expected since it's a corporation.Remember the FX 9000 series (leaky, too demanding for most AM3+ boards, and massively overpriced on the basis of the deceptive 8-core claim*)? The Radeon VII (unnecessarily small die clocked way too high)?
*Deceptive, not because it didn't have 8 cores but mainly because its cores were weak, even without considering that there were only 4 FPU units, although that definitely did not help.
These companies will milk people for all they can, like Intel is with the ongoing scam vis-à-vis its time bomb high-voltage CPUs.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, August 24, 2024 - link
Another favourite AMD anecdote is how Su gave a presentation in which she unveiled the roadmap for Polaris and Vega. Oh, Vega will come out shortly. But, it did not. Instead, AMD milked customers with its "Polaris Forever" campaign. When Vega did arrive it had inadequate cooling and the same IPC as Fury X. All that time waiting for a part that only had a higher clock (thanks to the process shrink) and more VRAM to provide the illusion of significant progress.GeoffreyA - Sunday, August 25, 2024 - link
In the Bulldozer era, AMD was well known for promising and not delivering, and even when there were improvements, such as across Bulldozer's four iterations, one was sceptical, and the Radeon story was little better. From Zen, they fulfilled their promises or over-delivered. Slowly, they earned our trust, and one could believe the general picture of AMD's marketing. Making mistakes, they took accountability and fixed it. So, it was somewhat surprising to see the tone of that blog, when there are clear issues with Zen 5. If they go on like this, the trust they've earned will be lost. As a plus, they've become greedier since the early days of Zen.jcc5169 - Sunday, August 25, 2024 - link
What's interesting is the difference between performance on Windows and Linux.jcc5169 - Sunday, August 25, 2024 - link
Described here ...https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-promises-windows-1...
cryosx - Monday, August 26, 2024 - link
Might need to retest with 24h2 windows update, cause gaming is seeing an average 10% uplift for both zen4 and zen5evanh - Monday, August 26, 2024 - link
And apparently Intel parts too. That now begs the question as to what M$ has done to Windoze to allow branch prediction to magically get better?GeoffreyA - Tuesday, August 27, 2024 - link
Possibly, it's some mitigation related to speculative execution or indirect branch prediction being enabled on these CPUs, slowing down performance. As can be seen, there are many settings in Win32 concerning speculative execution.https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/ap...