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AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

anandtech.com

131–140 of 290 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#131

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…

On the content side, it isn't financially beneficial to invest in higher quality content or presentation. Most websites that aren't outsourcing their content to $10 writers on UpWork are already running on razor thin margins. Outside of a handful of big name publishers (the NYTs and Economists of the world), paid subscriptions are unviable for most.

The lack of innovation on the web can be directly attributed to the lack of advertising money on the web - outside of Google and FB, of course.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#132
GamersNexus really hammering AMD's deceptive marketing around boost clocks. The only time it can hit its advertised boost clocks in when it's in the menu and you have near-zero load, and it barely touches it for an instant. Under even a single-core load it's failing to meet its advertised spec.

There was a lot of hubbub around this with the initial release, AMD released a BIOS which they claimed fixed this, looks like it still has not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3sNUFjV7p4

The performance is good enough as it is, no need to lie about it being 200 MHz higher than it can actually do. But here we are again 6 months later and AMD does it again...

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#133

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.

I think this is solve-able through user reputation.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#134
post #46

Looking at some benchmarks done by PC Games Hardware it appears that games are still not capable of taking advantage of 16 cores and 32 threads. It's not surprising - why would developers optimize for something that's not yet widely used. But I wonder when we'll get there...

Consoles determines how many cores game engines will be coded to use, and consoles are staying with 8C processors for another generation.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#135
post #132

GamersNexus really hammering AMD's deceptive marketing around boost clocks. The only time it can hit its advertised boost clocks in when it's in the menu and you have near-zero load, and it barely touches it for an instant. Under even a single-core load it's failing to meet its advertised spec. There was a lot of hubbub around this with the initial release, AMD released a BIOS which they claimed fixed this, looks lik…

Which is weird because they have the performance.

Showing the perf of the processor does all the marketing it needs, no matter what clock it's running at, and with normal/turbo clocks customers don't even get it anymore anyway, so I don't understand why AMD is handicapping itself like this in the marketing department.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#136

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.

Intel is part of the deep state.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

You will probably still see mostly intel in expensive (>1000€) gaming laptop but everything else the power consumption of AMD new chips alone should give them the reign until intel can react.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Yes I look forward to the better cache system in the next generation!

Do remember that part of how AMD can get so much L3 on there, is due to the chiplet design, which also adds a LOT of latency to ram accesses. Almost all of the time, it seems to be a net win though, and with the next generation it will only get better.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had 24 core workstation 5 years ago for price of this single chip. Refurbished server...

The problem with this strategy is that they often have much lower clock speeds/ IPC, plus they are often quite power-hungry and lose the ability to overclock (that one's subjective). So you do often get bitten by Amdahl's law. However, if it is purely a rendering machine and single-threaded performance isn't an issue, you can get a lot of processing power for the money.

It was good complement for light laptop.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#140
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.

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