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AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

anandtech.com

121–130 of 290 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#121
post #72

As a developer I am keen to see some compilation benchmarks. Unfortunately those kinds of benchmarks are almost never included in such reviews. Instead there are many gaming benchmarks which purpose is not exactly clear for me, after obviously gaming is not the primary target market for R9 3950X.

GCC at least goes very fast on the new Ryzens, due to the huge l3 cache. That may translate to many compilers. Rust (which uses llvm on the backend) also compiles very quick.

For the 4000 series, they're planning on sharing the L3 caches between CCD's/ chiplets rather than per CCX. It will be interesting to see if the more cache availible per core, and more cores being able to access the same cache will improve the performance.

The speed AMD has raised caches & core-count lately is insane. When the max for mainstream CPUs was 8MB (and 4 cores) until only a few years ago. (Things seem to have stopped when quad-core launched, the Intel Q6600 was an amazing CPU at the time.)

I've been a computer enthusiast for over 20 years and didn't expect to see advancements to return like the good ol' days (Moore's law) to ever return. (I don't think Intel did either, halving their prices pre-launch is unprecidented!)

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#122
post #72

As a developer I am keen to see some compilation benchmarks. Unfortunately those kinds of benchmarks are almost never included in such reviews. Instead there are many gaming benchmarks which purpose is not exactly clear for me, after obviously gaming is not the primary target market for R9 3950X.

Agreed. At least it's part of the phoronix benchmark, and openbench has some results:

https://openbenchmarking.org/showdown/pts/build-linux-kernel

I'd love to hear of a more richly supplied crowd sourced database.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#123
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you can get a good price for the CPU, the mainboards are very pricey compared to the consumer CPU boards.

Last time I checked, motherboard's for thread ripper cpus were around 200~300$, is that still the case? The motherboard cost really erases the budget for entry, as that's the price of a decent ryzen cpu.

Exactly, and there's not a lot of used DDR4 (w/ or w/o ECC) on the market.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you want unnecessary lighting and gaping, EMI releasing, windowed cases.

LEDs on RAM: for when you absolutely positively must have the most fabulous rig at the LAN party. I guess.

It's so your VTEC will kick in, yo.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#125
post #95
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah indeed chromium is a more efficient 2D rendering engine than what's available natively and performance of JS is comparable to Java. Electron apps being slow is mostly a developer laziness problem, not a technology problem. Making a fast electron app is actually easier than making a fast C++ app IMO, when you take into account the libraries and tooling available.

I think the difficulty is in making a lightweight Electron app, not a fast one. Games run fast too, but they can get away with hogging resources because they're typically the only app you're using at the time.

This is a good article on the technical reasons Finda uses electron to make a portable, yet fast & lightweight desktop search app: https://keminglabs.com/blog/building-a-fast-electron-app-wit...

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#126

I noticed yesterday's articles about Intel's upcoming unusually large release of security mitigations. Under serious competitive threat for the first time in a while, I'm curious if Intel may have slowed the release of some mitigations to land after this round of comparison benchmarks.

Probably, since they have known it for 6 months ( according to the researchers)

I suppose, if you get this bad in the news and excepting it.

This is kinda weird: https://twitter.com/gchip/status/1187519015544967168

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#127

I noticed yesterday's articles about Intel's upcoming unusually large release of security mitigations. Under serious competitive threat for the first time in a while, I'm curious if Intel may have slowed the release of some mitigations to land after this round of comparison benchmarks.

In a similar vein, some local supermarket catalog showed half laptops based on ryzen, the only intel I saw were ultra cheap atom x5.

Wow, I didn't expect that. Laptops were the only market Intel was still strong, still dominated. Having brought an rx5700 XT recently, the power usage has been just as impressive as the performance. AMD will have some very nice products when they start putting mini RX5000s in their CPUs. Decent performance without discrete GPUs is a real possibility. (Just need add some HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) to the mix and things will get rather interesting!)

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you want unnecessary lighting and gaping, EMI releasing, windowed cases.

LEDs on RAM: for when you absolutely positively must have the most fabulous rig at the LAN party. I guess.

I don't find it fabulous at all. MacBook aluminium, SGI cases, old Mac Pro case though...

For a gaming rig, I would take pride in it being silent and cold without spending too much (I know, those Noctua fans are still pricey but that is my upper limit).

I decided to update my Intel 4770k to an AMD 3900X. I had to upgrade to DDR4 as well. One of the things I specifically did not have to upgrade is the case. Just a couple of new fans really.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#129

Slight meta, and part of a larger 'rant,' but when are we going to get away from reviews that might as well have been printed on glossy pages in PC Magazine in 1986? Anandtech has been at it since the 90s and hasn't changed their format at all. This is a serious decades-long stagnation of the web. The graphs should be dynamic (able to choose what scenarios and components to compare, and able to search within them), a…

User contributed is not a good idea.

One of the sad realities is that even in the enthusiast market a lot of people don’t know/don’t care to tune and test their system, and there’s a lot of traps that would make the results useless.

There’s some of it that you can check and verify, but things like watercooling or chosing the appropriate RAM configuration and timing will have a big impact.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#130

Slight meta, and part of a larger 'rant,' but when are we going to get away from reviews that might as well have been printed on glossy pages in PC Magazine in 1986? Anandtech has been at it since the 90s and hasn't changed their format at all. This is a serious decades-long stagnation of the web. The graphs should be dynamic (able to choose what scenarios and components to compare, and able to search within them), a…

Not trying to be snarky, but: If you think that it’s be better - why don’t you make it? I suspect the current format is the way it is because it’s easier and “good enough”. I feel if you reach out to Phoronix you might get a response.

> If you think that it’s be better - why don’t you make it?

Because I am already quite busy on other projects.

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