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AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

anandtech.com

261–270 of 290 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#261

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…

I had a side job as a tech reviewer ~15 years ago and I can tell you why this is never going to happen. It's a classic case of "works in theory, but impossible in practice." What you're actually asking for is a database of every permutation of hardware, hardware revision, firmware/BIOS, benchmarking software, benchmarking software version, driver version, OS, OS patch, user selectable feature state, etc. is tracked and tested. It's a nearly infinite data set size, and you'll still miss things like ambient room temperature/humidity for CPU thottling, that one finicky USB device you spilled water on that sometimes disconnects randomly, and specific workflow quirks.

"Objective" benchmarks were an almost tractable problem 15-20 years ago, but with the way modern OSes run background tasks, access network resources, and perform self-maintenance, it's even more difficult to bridge the synthetic-to-real world divide.

So, you select a point of reference (e.g. - new GPU), you choose the most common system components and a selection of components that tell a story (usually "if you're building a new PC now, here are the options"), you assemble the current versions of all software/drivers, and run your tests x times. The good sites will have "sub-stories," like specific workflows or new/changed features, but once you get to around 4 of these, you start hitting too many permutations to clearly communicate the significance of your choices.

Even if you crowdsourced it, it's A) extremely difficult to verify the integrity of results and prevent manipulation from marketing departments or brigading, and B) an unrewarding, tedious process where the best practice is to leave the machine untouched for hours. Most of the crowdsourced benchmarking sites are set up to be little competitions and sanity checks when overclocking. For a pure review of shipping hardware/software, you run the benchmark and you're done. It isn't particularly fun, requires invasive cataloguing of system specs, and isn't very new-user/first time builder friendly.

Dynamic graphs would be nice (I love them), but I suspect many review sites have run the numbers and found they reduce overall web metrics. Many (I would argue most) people don't notice interactive page components, aren't interested enough to turn their quick article skim into a deep dive, or are reading in less optimal settings (e.g. - on phone on the toilet). Instead of getting 7 page views for 1 minute each with separate graphs, you're getting 1 page view for either 1 minute (probably 70%) or 10 minutes (probably 30%) with a dynamic graph.

I'm a total data junkie and I WISH there was a good solution to these problems, but there isn't a practical implementation that I've seen or dreamt up that doesn't have enough variance to render the point of having such fine-grained data moot.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#262

I don't really get how they reached their conclusion. It seems like on most of the tests this new part gets beat by a cheaper one from Intel. It seems like a kinda unfair approach to use handbrake without AVX-512 support? Also not sure why they include the 3-d particle thing without AVX ... I guess because Intel is just too fast on that? If you look through the results, the things most people want to do with a comput…

AVX-512 severely downclocks all cores of a processor.

If I'm using some of my cores to run AVX-512 code in the background, it's going to drastically slow down everything else I'm doing.

This can be a significant issue even if you are only running the one task. If you have intermittent AVX-512 code, any time any one of the cores starts running that code, everything else also slows down too which can result in a net loss in performance. Even if you only ran a single core and it used AVX-512, this could still be the case because it takes precious time before and after to lower and raise the clocks that much and everything else runs slower that whole time in addition to running slowly while the AVX stuff executes.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if we moved back to the final layer of cache being off-core, likely within the IO die or attached as additional chips within the package. That should decrease the core size, improve yields, and allow for differentiation in L3 size as well.

but it would add latency :( but maybe an L4 cache, off core, as additional chips!

At some point both higher latencies and deeper cache hierarchies seem inevitable: http://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html

Though, perhaps 3D integration can stave that off for many more generations.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189126/... Seems like it should be $1979 to match Intel's suggested pricing. (Retail looks like it's $1949 on sale, and typically even higher.)

Intel has announced the Cascade Lake-X i9-10980XE coming out later this month for $979. It's slightly higher in frequency,

Right - I didn't notice a footnote. I just saw your comment / reply on the article. It's a fair label, just wasn't clear to me!

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer, other benchmarks I would like to see: * compile benchmarks for different mainstream languages (Java, C#, etc.) * IDE related benchmarks (i.e. how long does it take to index a large solution/workspace) * source control conversion tests (svn to git). Obviously not something that happens everyday, but I've done it at two different jobs, and generally when it happens you are often converting many repos as…

Got any standardized methods that could be automated/scripted under a clean Windows environment and doesn't require internet access / licensing? Give me a shout - ian@anandtech.com

> Got any standardized methods that could be automated/scripted

I'm sorry, I wish I did! Interest in hardware performance is only a relatively recent interest of mine. I especially think the IDE tests would be a bit challenging as I'm not even sure how to instrument or measure those. I might reach out to the Intellij folks to see if they have any ideas..

> under a clean Windows environment

Ah, shucks. I haven't touched Windows in years :). That's the tricky thing: according to Stack Overflow's surveys, only about half of software developers use Windows. The other half are split evenly between Mac and Linux. Covering all three platforms would likely be a challenge.

> Give me a shout

Thanks! I'll do some research, and if I have something more concrete I'll be sure to pass it along.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#266
post #262

I don't really get how they reached their conclusion. It seems like on most of the tests this new part gets beat by a cheaper one from Intel. It seems like a kinda unfair approach to use handbrake without AVX-512 support? Also not sure why they include the 3-d particle thing without AVX ... I guess because Intel is just too fast on that? If you look through the results, the things most people want to do with a comput…

AVX-512 severely downclocks all cores of a processor. If I'm using some of my cores to run AVX-512 code in the background, it's going to drastically slow down everything else I'm doing. This can be a significant issue even if you are only running the one task. If you have intermittent AVX-512 code, any time any one of the cores starts running that code, everything else also slows down too which can result in a net lo…

None of your statements are correct.

1) Intel has per-core frequency and voltage control. To the extent that AVX-512 inhibits higher clock speeds that effect is local to the core or cores on which AVX-512 is active, and only those cores.

2) Not all AVX-512 instructions have this effect. `vpermb` for example does not.

3) Some other AVX instructions that are not AVX-512 have this effect. Also anything else that makes a core hot has this effect.

4) Most importantly, Cannon Lake microarch and later don't have this effect.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#267
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As already said by others, Phoronix has some compilation benchmarks. I have recently bought a 3900X. Some things about compilation I would note is that it heavily depends on your programming language and tooling. And that you would note is that you get most benefits on clean builds of big projects, which scale very well per core. On incremental builds or smaller projects it is however not uncommon to see It's all nic…

Beside clean builds is Git branch checkouts. I hit this at least twice a week. Finish a feature branch and push it. Check out master. Pull master. Make new feature branch. Get an urgent bug fix request, switch to release branch, make a bugfix branch. Now go back to the new feature. During this I may end up doing large rebuilds because Git changes modification times even if you end up back with the same header file yo…

ccache solves this fairly well if you're on *nix.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#268
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Vulkan, there were more bottlenecks on multithreaded rendering. Most games pushed everything to a single drawing thread. Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption 2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck. Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with process…

Factorio is also limited by single core performance, with the developers saying they have no plans to implement multithreading.

This is unfortunate, and I'm saying this as an AMD owner and factorio player. Do you have a source for this?

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally we at AnandTech run a Chrome compile benchmark, but for whatever reason it wasn't running properly on Win 10 1909. When I get a chance to debug (55k miles of travel over the next four weeks), I'm going to see if I can fix it and expand that bit of our testing.

"Failed to compile Chrome" is a pretty huge caveat in which, I guess, your readers might take an interest.

Chrome has its own Windows builders as well on each platform.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I bought an RX 5700 XT almost immediately after launch, and I can't say that I've had had much luck with RDNA/Navi. I experienced freezes/crashes in Windows 10 while gaming, and the card's hot, loud, and still unsupported by ROCm for compute on Linux. There are rumours that ROCm won't ever support this generation of Navi and is waiting on Arcturus[1]. The drivers still aren't there and support is limited outside of s…

> There are rumours that ROCm won't ever support this generation of Navi and is waiting on Arcturus[1].

I think you're misinterpreting that bit. Arcturus refers to an upcoming product based on their older, pre-Navi Vega microarchitecture. It seems Vega may be a more compute-oriented microarchitecture while Navi is more graphics/gaming-oriented and thus in the near term they are still developing more compute-oriented products based on the Vega microarchitecture. But that doesn't mean they have no plans to ever bring Navi support to ROCm, it just means that it takes less work and has more short-term payoff to add support for another Vega-based product.

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