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$499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

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Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#101

Post by vbezhenar »

pella wrote: post #42
vbezhenar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm considering Intel for my next workstation because I want to be able to run macOS at least in VirtualBox (or just run Hackintosh, did not decide yet). For some reason macOS does not like AMD CPUs.

> For some reason macOS does not like AMD CPUs. Reddit:"Mojave, now on Ryzen!" https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/a95xlo/mojave_n...

Installing custom built kernel on a proprietary OS sounds like a recipe for disaster. It's likely to break on the first update. More like a proof of concept rather than stable solution.

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#102

Post by holy_city »

MegaButts wrote: post #91
holy_city wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the confusion, I meant "single benchmark" as in "single run of Geekbench." As in comparing one measurement versus an aggregate of measurements isn't particularly meaningful, you need to compare aggregate to aggregate to get something valid. It's still a sample size of 1, even if the sample has 25 dimensions. (I don't know if Geekbench uses an average or what they're weighting is e.g. with memory speeds and…

I'm all for reproducing results, but given the relatively deterministic nature of computers (especially for new hardware) I feel this is an unwarranted criticism. How often do people get significantly different results when running identical tests on identical hardware?

Just looking at the first page of results for the 9980xe, it's pretty common, especially for multithreaded benchmarks:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?q=9980xe

But the big qualifier is "on identical hardware." The geekbench score in the article is not a measurement on the same hardware, it's an aggregate of measurements across lots of hardware (different memory clocks, motherboards, etc). That's why a single run is not particularly useful, it just tells us what that user got on that day with that hardware. We need lots of data points to tell us more or less how it will compare on most builds.

Again, not to diminish how promising the score is for the product. Hats off to AMD. I'm just waiting until there are more data points to be confident.

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#103

Post by vbezhenar »

walshemj wrote: post #56
holy_city wrote: post #51

Take with a grain of salt. Comparing a single benchmark against an aggregate isn't particularly meaningful (although getting within a stone's throw definitely is). You can go through and cherry pick benchmarks and find plenty that obliterate that measurement. Better article title would be, "3900x appears comparable to 9980XE in single threaded workloads."

But single treaded was really the only area Intel used to have a lead in - which is interesting

Those nanometers are not just numbers. TSMC 7nm is ahead of Intel's 14nm. It's not really surprising. Even if AMD can't catch up with frequencies, they have more transistors, so they can increase many things. Better comparison would be with 10nm Intel, but Intel failed there, so I expect AMD to lead until Intel will release mainstream 7nm CPUs.

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#104

Post by pkaye »

mrb wrote: post #87

This was expected because the 3900X is optimized for fewer faster cores (12 at 3.8GHz) while the 9980XE is optimized for more slower cores (18 at 3.0GHz.) A better and far more impressive comparison would be the 3950X vs 9980XE which have comparable number of cores (16 vs 18). And in that instance AMD still beats Intel in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads! And by wide margins! And with AMD being 62% c…

Also doesn't Intel have a lot more known security flaws?

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#105

Post by MegaButts »

holy_city wrote: post #102
MegaButts wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for reproducing results, but given the relatively deterministic nature of computers (especially for new hardware) I feel this is an unwarranted criticism. How often do people get significantly different results when running identical tests on identical hardware?

Just looking at the first page of results for the 9980xe, it's pretty common, especially for multithreaded benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?q=9980xe But the big qualifier is "on identical hardware." The geekbench score in the article is not a measurement on the same hardware, it's an aggregate of measurements across lots of hardware (different memory clocks, motherboards, etc). That's why a sin…

Fair enough. Thank you for taking the time to explain that to me when it was my fault for not understanding the tests (or really the test conditions).

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#106

Post by devonkim »

squarefoot wrote: post #100
devonkim wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSDs were held up in prices artificially for a while related to the memory price inflation that happened throughout 2018 and some of 2017. QLC was mentioned but prices are down across the board and everything in consumer land is down sharply YoY from that period (50%+ discount is fair). I’d expect some price increases coming up due to investor pressure for revenue.

What about SSD reliability? Did it improve in the last year or so?

QLC literally drops write endurance by an order of magnitude but most consumers won’t be hit by it. Most of the performance is from the SLC cache and it tanks once it gets full or with sustained usage. The bet is that won’t matter for 99% of users but most of HN is not that 99% so caution must be exercised when buying these SSDs.

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#107

Post by toast0 »

miller_joe wrote: post #85
molticrystal wrote: post #27

Out of curiosity, has anybody had anything in the AMD Ryzen instruction set missing that required you to purchase an Intel 9xxx instead? Any significant differences in regards to scientific applications or machine learning?

There might be meaningful differences in the hardware encode/decode for video. In the Plex community for example it seems like Intel CPUs are the best bet. They support a lot of codecs and can service multiple transcode streams. Consumer Nvidia GPUs are limited to 2. I don't think Plex supports hardware transcoding on AMD Ryzen or discrete GPUs at all right now. I haven't really looked into why yet, and could likely…

The Zen2 chips being released and discussed here don't have a GPU. The Ryzen 3000 series APUs being released soon are using last year's Zen+ CPU architecture; and are only 4 cores, so not super comparable to a $2000 Intel CPU :)

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#108

Post by knolan »

wmf wrote: post #19
knolan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1999 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189126/... The XE is something a vanity chip however. The HK maintains the same single core performance but obviously only achieves about half the multicore score. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2585 Still very good value for money.

Read the thread again; MacBook Pros don't use XEs.

Apologies, for some reason I misread the hierarchy of your post.

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#109

Post by yeukhon »

mrb wrote: post #87

This was expected because the 3900X is optimized for fewer faster cores (12 at 3.8GHz) while the 9980XE is optimized for more slower cores (18 at 3.0GHz.) A better and far more impressive comparison would be the 3950X vs 9980XE which have comparable number of cores (16 vs 18). And in that instance AMD still beats Intel in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads! And by wide margins! And with AMD being 62% c…

Does the old “there are more software written with Intel in mind than AMD” still hold? Just like Nvida.

Re: $499 AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Almost as Fast as $2000 Intel Core I9-9980XE

#110

Post by numpad0 »

ryacko wrote: post #6
boyadjian wrote: post #2

My next CPU will be an AMD.

Is the socket really zero insertion force? I've always been planning on buying an AMD CPU after dealing with an Intel processor.

Can’t recall a CPU socket that isn’t lever locked ZIF since Coppermine...
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