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First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

extremetech.com

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Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#21

Post by mumblemumble »

_joel wrote: post #9
wingmanjd wrote: post #4

"One big disparity between the three machines was the Zen 4 machine was outfitted with 512GB of memory, while its competition had just 128GB each" This feels like cheating to me.

They're testing CPU performance, not memory capacity. They need that much for the channels.

If the benchmark has any cache misses at all then you also want to make sure everything about the memory configuration is the same, too, for a fair CPU benchmark, right? Number of channels, latency, etc.

No, the actual amount of RAM isn't directly relevant, but it seems like a possible brown m&m to me.

(https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/)

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#22

Post by coder543 »

tedunangst wrote: post #13
coder543 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single threaded tasks should never run at the base clock. The base clock can pretty much be thought of as the minimum clock speed you should see when all cores are maxed out and the thermal solution is only just meeting the spec.

I still want my computer to remain responsive even when I'm rendering in the background.

>> and the thermal solution is only just meeting the spec.

Ok, so, as I alluded to earlier... make sure to have better-than-minimum-spec cooling to let the processor indefinitely run all cores at the boost clock (or very close to it).

It's been a long time since I've seen a desktop/workstation processor limit itself to the base clock for any reason.

Also, I agree with dralley. Clock speeds are unlikely to be the issue there anyways.

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#23

Post by xcv123 »

ahahahahah wrote: post #20
_joel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're testing CPU performance, not memory capacity. They need that much for the channels.

It just seems so incredibly sloppy to not have that be consistent. Do they expect all of their readers to then audit the code of the benchmarking that they are doing to ensure that it cannot possibly be bound by this?

They used Cinebench. You can download this and verify that it uses less than 4GB of RAM. It is a CPU bound benchmark. Adding 384GB of RAM makes no difference whatsoever.

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#24

Post by [deleted] »

Racing0461 wrote: post #2

Single core performance? All i'm seeing is the confirmation that independently parallalizable tasks finish twice as fast on a cpu with twice the cores. cool, amdahl's law is proven. The handbrake one, all the times seems similar indicating similar single core perf. This matters for me since single core perf is pretty important for visual studio/other software with alot going on feeling "snappy" even tho the actual co…

[deleted]

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#27

Post by coder543 »

kijin wrote: post #19
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These chips have 8 channel ram, so you need at least 8 sticks to get full ram bandwidth.

Aren't there 16GB DDR5 sticks? With smaller sticks, they could populate all the channels while keeping total memory capacity the same as other setups. I don't see why they had to splurge all the way up to 512GB.

> I don't see why they had to splurge all the way up to 512GB.

Quoting the article:

"To celebrate the much-hyped launch, our sister site PCMag put the flagship CPU through its paces (remotely) in several popular benchmarks."

The people who did the benchmarks didn't splurge... they had no physical access to the remote machine at all. Certainly, it would have been ideal to talk to their remote contact and see if there were any 16GB sticks sitting around to test with instead, but I agree with the other comments that the memory capacity is unlikely to make a significant difference in these benchmarks.

There will certainly be plenty of other benchmarks soon enough, once people get hands on with these processors.

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#28

Post by stn8188 »

mrichman wrote: post #25

What use cases is this CPU ideal for? It's not a GPU, so gaming, ML model training, and crypto mining are out.

I use my Threadripper for massive electromagnetic simulations for printed circuit boards and packages - I love it!

Re: First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel

#30

Post by serf »

mrichman wrote: post #25

What use cases is this CPU ideal for? It's not a GPU, so gaming, ML model training, and crypto mining are out.

I like to use my lots-of-cores Xeons for media conversion and 3d rendering, it's nice to see that many cores spin up for SMP workloads.
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