I Picked a threadripper for a box that needed a lot of IO and figured that with that many PCI lanes I couldn't go wrong. But I have to admit I've been more than pleasantly surprised by the performance of the CPU as well, it - easily - outperforms all of the XEON and I7 based boxes that I have. The only thing I wished I would have done different is to max it out with 256G DIMMs when they weren't the price of a car.
louthy 1 minutes ago [-]
I’ve been running the 64 core (128 logical cores) Threadripper PRO 3995WX as my dev machine for 4 years now (with 256gb ram).
Not sure I’ll need to upgrade my computer ever again :D
Gracana 28 minutes ago [-]
Zen 5 really is nice. I swapped my RAM from a Xeon W Sapphire Rapids machine into a Threadripper Pro 9000 series machine and I get almost double the memory read performance, plus it's a heck of a lot faster in single and multi core performance, and it runs cooler and quieter. Huge win all around. Aside from the price... (I went from Xeon W5-3435X to TR Pro 9985WX, eep.)
Yokolos 4 days ago [-]
I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.
phire 47 minutes ago [-]
Part of the reason we didn't see much in the way of YoY improvements for Bulldozer, is that AMD almost immediately abandoned it and threw resources at Zen after it launched.
Steamroller did see 30% IPC improvements over Bulldozer (all the design work would have been done before they switched to Zen), but AMD canceled the full FX version, and only ever shipped the APU version of Steamroller (with only 2 modules, aka 4 threads).
If they had shipped a Steamroller FX cpu, the generational improvements would have looked similar to many of the generational improvements that Zen received... but didn't really matter as Bulldozer started so far behind.
FlowingRiver 3 hours ago [-]
That is all true but I will defend the FX series a little. Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now, they haven't aged as terribly as others have. They aren't great but not terrible considering.
PorciiVorbesc 2 hours ago [-]
>Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now
That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era:
Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware.
AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds(a-la Intel Pentium 4) but the IPC was so bad that an FX core was often slower clock-for-clock than AMD’s previous-generation Phenom II chips and also their power consumption exploded.
FX processors were plagued by high cache latencies and an inefficient memory subsystem as another bottleneck.
So unless you're into collecting vintage CPUs as display pieces, this one definitely belongs in the e-waste pile instead of burning electricity, because it did not age like wine with the adoption of SW multi threading like people were hoping.
throwawayffffas 2 hours ago [-]
> Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each...
Yeah that's hyper-threading intel was doing it as well and all modern CPUs do it as well. Where AMD dropped the ball, was they did not disclose that in their marketing as clearly as they should.
All CPUs today are marketed as x cores 2x threads, back then some AMD marketing genius in their infinite wisdom put 8 cores on the box, instead of the honest 4 cores with hyperthreading.
PorciiVorbesc 2 hours ago [-]
No, AMD's FX "fake" 8-core was more than just 4-cores + hyperthreading. In SMT(hyperthreading) the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared, whereas on FX design, they built two completely separate integer pipelines (schedulers, register files, ALUs, and L1 data caches) inside one module. Only the instruction fetch/decode front-end, the FPU, and the L2 cache were shared. So the FX design would be an in-between a 4-core + SMT and a true 8-core.
throwawayffffas 44 minutes ago [-]
Fair, I had not delved into the details, but still they were not full cores and the marketing did not make a real distinction.
I had a pilledriver one, it was a perfectly good cpu, I would buy it again. If I remember back then it was the best overall performance per dollar, the alternatives if I remember correctly were i7-39.. and i7-38.. and were at best 50% more expensive for 10-15% more performance.
PorciiVorbesc 29 minutes ago [-]
Depends what you were doing with it. The piledriver only beat the Intels in heavily multi threaded workloads like media encoding which is why it was popular with media creator workstations on a budget, but for most consumer real world tasks at the time, like video games, Intel was way ahead in performance even though it was more expensive.
The piledriver would win the bang/buck competition back then because of the 6-core part was reasonably priced and unlocked for overclocking, so people would overclock them to beat the more expensive (locked?) 4-c/8-t Intels at a lower price, but that ignored the costs of massive extra power draw over the Intel, the need for beefier more expensive coolers, and the more expensive AMD motherboards with beefier MOSFET power delivery stages built to withstand the higher power draws of the Piledriver, so in the end the real bang/buck wasn't as huge as people were making it out to be.
to11mtm 2 hours ago [-]
AFAIR Steamroller was a big 'correction' of the Shared resource issues in the arch (I can't remember if other revisions had other improvements).
AMD was also having to deal with the fact GloFo split off and was relying more on general 'bulk' lithography, which kneecapped them for some time especially due to yield issues on the FX series and overall cost of that deal.
Intel also very quickly after, released Sandy Bridge and aggressively scaled it up and down; the 2500K was so cheap yet powerful I know of at least one setup that ran for a decade an only got replaced because they needed to upgrade to windows 11 for compliance-esque reasons. My own 2500K I replaced in 2017-2018-ish, only because either the motherboard took an unfortunate dive and it was easier to replace both at once.
FWIW, I did do a cheapie FX build in 2015ish for my then-girlfriend as a DVR and light gaming/emulation 'under the TV box', and it did the job well for the price, but it definitely wasn't anything amazing.
It was a tough time for AMD for sure. I think the 'split' between the Cat cores (Bobcat/Jaguar) also hurt them from a resource standpoint, although one could argue that it also kept them alive to recover (i.e. Jaguar in XBox One and PS4 being a volume contract part) [0]. They did a lot of moves that caused short term pain (that glofo spinnoff helped pay off the ATI Acquisition AFAIR) but helped them become the company that is still surviving today.
[0] - One odd side note, I still find it odd that they never did a dual channel Jaguar laptop part. I still ask whether it was because it would have made the FX look that bad...
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads. What makes that such a win while Bulldozer's implementation of "two integer units sharing a front-end, cache and FPU" is supposedly so bad? Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.
PorciiVorbesc 2 hours ago [-]
>Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads.
That's hugely debatable and depends on SW workloads and the SMT implementation + CPU pipeline design.
In SMT the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared. When one thread stalls waiting for RAM, the second thread sneaks into the idle execution units. At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.
>Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.
It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
> At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.
Exactly, which is a significant benefit for how marginal the costs are.
> It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
Then surely it should be even better than 4 cores with SMT?
If you're going to argue that the problem with Bulldozer was it's weird semi-SMT solution, you need to explain how it would've been better without it (aka as a regular quad core). Because even if it just gets the 10-20% performance improvements from being a form of SMT it would be better to have it than to not. And if you have lots of integer unit-bound threads, it should be even better than that.
PorciiVorbesc 2 hours ago [-]
>Then surely it should be even better than 4 cores with SMT? If you're going to argue that the problem with Bulldozer was it's weird semi-SMT solution, you need to explain how it would've been better without it
I explained all the bottlenecks of the architecture in a comment above, that the issue was more than 4-core +SMT instead of true 8 cores. Please read it.
mort96 1 hours ago [-]
I did read it. It's not clear from it why you think having 2 integer units per core in a SMT-like configuration makes it worse. If you have <=4 threads it doesn't matter, just schedule the threads on different proper cores. If you have >4 memory/FPU/front-end heavy threads you should see the same benefit as SMT. If you have >4 integer arithmetic-bound cores, you should see a significant benefit beyond what SMT would give.
Now the very long pipeline and high memory latency are obviously significant issues with the architecture but those seem disconnected from the 4-core+SMT issue? I'm not questioning those issues at all, it's just not the part of your comment which interested me
EDIT: okay so in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49809017, you explain that there's actually a fairly large part of a core that's duplicated, not just two integer units. If each "core" gets its own integer unit, register file and L1 cache, you're actually paying a ton of die space for it, unlike SMT which is "free". I can totally get how that can be a terrible trade-off for most workloads if it all ends up mostly starved due to front-end/FPU/memory throughput.
to11mtm 1 hours ago [-]
Well, 'core' gets weird when we talk about Dozer. And where everything else had problems making it work.
AFAIR, a bulldozer 'module' has what is exposed to a core as two CPUs, but, per everything above, is two integer cores, one shared FPU core, and depending on the version of the arch, possibly shared fetch/decode/other resources between all of that. Also AFAIR the decoder sucked as far as being able to feed both the integer cores, and the integer cores were more anemic compared to what was in, say, a K10H Phenom.
mort96 1 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I edited my comment while you were writing. I had missed that it's more than just "one core with two ALUs". The more silicon you dedicate to this almost-but-not-quite-SMT solution, the worse of a trade-off it becomes in situations which don't benefit from it, and it sounds like quite a lot of silicon was dedicated.
PorciiVorbesc 1 hours ago [-]
Your theory that "1 shared FPU per module should equal 1 shared FPU per SMT core" makes sense on paper, but Bulldozer lost to Intel’s Sandy Bridge 4C/8T in floating-point and memory-heavy workloads because Intel's individual FPU, cache hierarchy, and front-end pipelines were vastly wider and faster than Bulldozer's shared components.
Having the same count of units (4 FPUs on the chip) did not mean having the same throughput. It's a HW bottleneck, not something AMD could fix via the OS's kernel allocation and scheduling of resources to the CPU to be able match Intel.
In strictly integer 4-8 thread benchmarks, yeah, AMD was often tied to Intel's 4C+SMT.
Bulldozer’s design didn't lose because the concept of sharing an FPU between two threads is worse than SMT. It lost because:
Intel's FPU was natively twice as wide (256-bit vs. split 128-bit).
AMD's write-through L1 cache caused catastrophic write contention in L2.
AMD's L2 and L3 caches had double to triple the access latency of Intel's.
A single shared 4-wide decoder couldn't feed an FPU and two integer units simultaneously.
adfghopmnoi 39 minutes ago [-]
>Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware.
They did just fine in parallel workloads, so I think this is not accurate. The design scaled just fine. The problem was that each core was weak.
PorciiVorbesc 32 minutes ago [-]
>They did just fine in parallel workloads, so I think this is not accurate
Depends how you define "doing just fine in parallel workloads". The contemporary competition from Intel that was 4-core + SMT was beating AMD's 8-core FX CPUs in most real-world tasks and benchmarks at the time. The 8-core AMD broke even and rarely won only in >4-thread strictly integer benchmarks and some >4-thread media encoding tasks/benchmarks. So if you wanted a pro-sumer media encoding workstation a budget yeah, the AMD was better, but for most real world task, it wasn't.
>The design scaled just fine. The problem was that each core was weak.
Can you elaborate and be more exact? What you wrote is technically vague and doesn't mean anything in technical dissection/terms.
MrDOS 2 hours ago [-]
> AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds
It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.
to11mtm 1 hours ago [-]
I remember rumblings a decade-ish ago that basically their hand was possibly forced to release the thing to avoid a full on revolt about abandoning all of their work; after all, Intel had been investing in deep pipelines for a while before, they were strapped for cash after the ATI Acquisition, and other 'server-ish' CPUs had done CMT type things in the past (keeping in mind that AMD was seeing a huge surge in server market share due to Hammer.)
robotnikman 3 hours ago [-]
The x86 architecture still going strong. I've always though Ryzen was a fitting name, AMD had Ryzen from the ashes and struck a blow to the long dominant Intel.
theandrewbailey 27 minutes ago [-]
When I built my Ryzen 1800X desktop, I named it "AMD Ryzing". My optimism turned out well placed.
I recently upgraded from that to a Core Ultra 7 that I got from work (e-waste recycling). It was not my intended upgrade path, and I hope Lisa isn't too mad lol (I kept my Radeon though).
PorciiVorbesc 3 minutes ago [-]
>a Core Ultra 7 that I got from work (e-waste recycling)
How the hell does a high end CPU that's barely 2 years old end up in e-waste recycling? Was Richie Rich using them or something?
sieabahlpark 3 hours ago [-]
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kristianp 4 days ago [-]
2 years sounds very fast. It seems to be because the 3d cache SKUs of each generation were released at different stages. The Zen 3 one was a later variant.
First zen 3 November 5, 2020 with desktop processors. First desktop Ryzen 9000 processors on August 8, 2024. So the generations were about 4 years apart.
tiffanyh 4 hours ago [-]
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D / EPYC 4585PX is a beast for 99% of compute workloads.
It has the highest base clock of any modern AMD chip (4.3 GHz), plus 16-cores, which is already more than most workloads need.
Can’t wait to see what Zen 6 brings early next year. Rumors say 24-cores and another big jump in single-core performance.
a3w 4 hours ago [-]
I looked at game benchmarks, and sometimes 5600 or 5600X were fastest. With all X3D processors so fast that I would not decide to upgrade above 5700X3D or anything cheaper. Now, with current RAM pricing, getting a X3D CPU with 90+ MB L3 Cache seams the way to go instead of doing a DDR4 -> DDR5 leap.
All stated for gaming, that is.
Grombobulous 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like most benchmarks don’t really capture CPU benefits to gaming.
It’s even difficult to find CPU benchmarks that don’t overemphasize 1080p and eSports scenarios.
My upgrade from 5600x3D to 9850x3D felt kind of dumb at the time, but I decided to do it because Micro Center’s bundle deals are so far below market pricing.
I was shocked at how much better it is. Benchmarks and FPS don’t really show things like micro stutters and little performance wrinkles like that. I’m not even sure 1% low FPS counts capture it.
A great example game for this is Oblivion Remastered. Upgrading my CPU alone with the same GPU took away the environment loading slowdown almost entirely.
The benchmark will tell you that I didn’t gain any FPS during gameplay but every time I open a door into the new environment my CPU is positively impacting the experience.
I would have said the exact same thing you are saying until I actually experienced upgrading to the best on the market. For the record, this is the first time in my life I’ve actually owned the best CPU on the market for gaming.
My old advice would have been to buy one of those sweet spot cheaper mid-range gaming CPUs, but my newer advice is really if you’ve already spent all that you’re willing to spend on a GPU (I have a 9070XT, my only upgrade paths are insanely expensive), buy the highest gaming CPU on the list for gaming benchmarks (e.g., I wouldn’t go crazy with a 9950X3D2 since it doesn’t have any gaming improvements above the 9850X3D).
And the thing about CPUs is they’re not insanely expensive like GPUs. We are talking a price delta of $200 between this beast of a CPU and something way more middling.
SchemaLoad 12 minutes ago [-]
Oblivion remastered is an absolute dumpster fire for performance in general.
Given the massive increase in hardware prices lately, we are going to have to get by with mid range or even low end hardware for a lot longer. Studios will be forced to actually optimise games to not run like shit on a sub $8000 PC.
Every game should be targeting the switch 2 and steam deck in terms of power.
creaturemachine 3 hours ago [-]
I still love my 5800X3D. Drop-in upgrade from a 3700X so I kept my board, RAM, cooler, everything.
Hikikomori 1 hours ago [-]
Most benchmarks use singleplayer games with built it benchmark, you'll not see the biggest difference there. If you play online games like shooters, MMO, anything really with multiple players or entities, theres usually a much bigger difference. Also in rts games and such with many units.
mcv 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure focusing on just 3 processors is enough to claim that Ryzen got 50% faster. There were already other, faster Ryzen processors available without the additional cache. The extra cache was a very new thing (and very temperature sensitive), so it makes sense that they start carefully and then get a lot of improvement quickly). And the 5800x3d was for an older chipset, with all the limitations that come with that.
monster_truck 3 hours ago [-]
It's not that temperature sensitive, 90C is plenty. If you can't keep the non-x3d processors underneath that you're just throwing away performance anyways
mcv 2 hours ago [-]
Are you? I'm pretty sure when I bought my 7800x3d, everybody was saying you had to be very careful about heat, because these damage more easily from high temperatures than regular CPUs. I just checked, and they do throttle at a lower temperature than others: 89 vs 95 degrees C.
Hikikomori 1 hours ago [-]
It will still throttle itself so no real danger.
nullc 4 days ago [-]
They never shipped the zen 5 epyc big cache chip (e.g. 9685X). :( I'd hoped they pulled it to produce a HBM integrated chip instead, but they didn't do that either.
HappySweeney 3 hours ago [-]
I imagine they didn't want to cannibalize upcoming Zen 6 which will have the 3d cache
This only goes back one year, to Linux 6.18. Wins would be even bigger if we go back another year. Also, this isn't tracking any of the rest of the improvements in userland: it's just the kernel. Some newer GCC, and upcoming new x86-64v3 targets will all have some pretty nice wins too.
Great days to be on open source. And it only ever gets better.
t1234s 3 hours ago [-]
Is this what's helping drive their stock price to the moon?
2 hours ago [-]
pstuart 1 hours ago [-]
They're starting to catch up with NVIDIA. Because AI.
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
Serious question with 1GB L3 isn't it theoretically possible to boot a full Linux without ram?
Edit: dug in it, no, because cache isn't addressable and it's directly managed by the cpu.
stevefan1999 3 hours ago [-]
Intel has a cache-as-ram (CAR) mode / Non-Eviction Mode, which is what you wanted but it is only available before DRAM is brought up via core initialization. Not sure about AMD.
floxy 3 hours ago [-]
I used to use a full Slackware Linux distribution with X-Windows on a 486 clone with 4 Megabytes of RAM.
christkv 3 hours ago [-]
I love my frameworks strix halo box. 16 zen 5 cores with way more memory bandwidth than they should have for a desktop. Only missing the x3d cache
nly 4 days ago [-]
Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%
Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?
ProllyInfamous 4 days ago [-]
>>Better thermals maybe?
One of the biggest improvements to the Ryzen 7 X3D series (e.g. 9800) is that the caches have been moved from one side of the die (to the other), which places the major heat source closer to the heat sinks.
SO yes, less heat throttling.
qball 4 days ago [-]
Smaller node size means less voltage.
Power is heat, and the amount dissipated is the square of the voltage- a processor that is reliable at less voltage means you can get a lot more frequency in the same heat envelope.
Yet reliability decreases as frequency goes up, and that can only be stabilized by adding more voltage- so the faster you run the processor, the more voltage you ultimately have to give it, so the power/heat produced grows exponentially until you can't get rid of the heat fast enough (at which point your only option is to actively cool the chip).
This is overclocking 101.
Note that classic overclocking was viable because of arbitrage- buying a processor, pushing it to the point it got too hot, and stress-testing it at that temperature to ensure reliable operation. Processor manufacturers all do that formal verification at the factory now as they'd be uncompetitive otherwise, especially in laptops.
ChoGGi 4 days ago [-]
As ProllyInfamous mentioned; bringing the cores to the top helped reduce heat, which allows them to boost higher for longer periods then the 7800x3d.
kasabali 4 days ago [-]
its manufactured on a smaller node so probably has more leeway for higher freq on all core loads.
I’d also be weary of single core scores,Geekbench is known to be favoring specialized instruction sets like AVX or encryption extensions more and more as the version number progresses. Though I don’t know if GB6 is also like this I wouldn’t be surprised it it was caused by it.
paulkrush 4 days ago [-]
2022 to 2024
chasil 30 minutes ago [-]
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stefantalpalaru 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
goodpoint 3 hours ago [-]
By being more expensive?
kgwgk 4 days ago [-]
It would have been funny if the "how" had been dropped to end with "Did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?"
t43562 3 hours ago [-]
It's impressive and yet it surely depends what you're doing with it? 50% better performance isn't going to make a local LLM feel quick and yet so many other aspects of computing are quite fast anyhow. I can browse the web fairly comfortably on a Raspberry Pi and it's a bit slow but manageable.
kccqzy 1 hours ago [-]
If your goal is web browsing you will want faster single core performance. Unfortunately that means Apple M series. If your goal is local LLM, I’m afraid a several-year-old GPU will smoke the fastest CPU available today.
LoganDark 34 minutes ago [-]
IIRC, compared to GPUs, M-series is currently still stuck in memory bandwidths from around 2016. M7 might catch up to 2019 or so. So GPUs will be better for LLMs for a pretty decent while.
whatever1 3 hours ago [-]
Single core performance still worse than an iPhone.
The x86 folks lost the ball completely. For workstation/ mobile needs you go to arm. For matmul at scale you go to gpus.
I guess windows gaming with separate gpu is the only remaining market for them.
Unless Nvidia releases a motherboard with an arm cpu on top of their RTX cards, and then that market is gone too.
chlorion 2 hours ago [-]
The IPhone runs on a battery, with no active cooling.
There is no chance the sustained single core perf is better than a 150=200+w ryzen with a big noctua cooler on it. The power draw alone would kill the battery in a few minutes(?), and the heat would make it catch fire. lol
Not sure I’ll need to upgrade my computer ever again :D
Steamroller did see 30% IPC improvements over Bulldozer (all the design work would have been done before they switched to Zen), but AMD canceled the full FX version, and only ever shipped the APU version of Steamroller (with only 2 modules, aka 4 threads).
If they had shipped a Steamroller FX cpu, the generational improvements would have looked similar to many of the generational improvements that Zen received... but didn't really matter as Bulldozer started so far behind.
That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era:
So unless you're into collecting vintage CPUs as display pieces, this one definitely belongs in the e-waste pile instead of burning electricity, because it did not age like wine with the adoption of SW multi threading like people were hoping.Yeah that's hyper-threading intel was doing it as well and all modern CPUs do it as well. Where AMD dropped the ball, was they did not disclose that in their marketing as clearly as they should.
All CPUs today are marketed as x cores 2x threads, back then some AMD marketing genius in their infinite wisdom put 8 cores on the box, instead of the honest 4 cores with hyperthreading.
I had a pilledriver one, it was a perfectly good cpu, I would buy it again. If I remember back then it was the best overall performance per dollar, the alternatives if I remember correctly were i7-39.. and i7-38.. and were at best 50% more expensive for 10-15% more performance.
The piledriver would win the bang/buck competition back then because of the 6-core part was reasonably priced and unlocked for overclocking, so people would overclock them to beat the more expensive (locked?) 4-c/8-t Intels at a lower price, but that ignored the costs of massive extra power draw over the Intel, the need for beefier more expensive coolers, and the more expensive AMD motherboards with beefier MOSFET power delivery stages built to withstand the higher power draws of the Piledriver, so in the end the real bang/buck wasn't as huge as people were making it out to be.
AMD was also having to deal with the fact GloFo split off and was relying more on general 'bulk' lithography, which kneecapped them for some time especially due to yield issues on the FX series and overall cost of that deal.
Intel also very quickly after, released Sandy Bridge and aggressively scaled it up and down; the 2500K was so cheap yet powerful I know of at least one setup that ran for a decade an only got replaced because they needed to upgrade to windows 11 for compliance-esque reasons. My own 2500K I replaced in 2017-2018-ish, only because either the motherboard took an unfortunate dive and it was easier to replace both at once.
FWIW, I did do a cheapie FX build in 2015ish for my then-girlfriend as a DVR and light gaming/emulation 'under the TV box', and it did the job well for the price, but it definitely wasn't anything amazing.
It was a tough time for AMD for sure. I think the 'split' between the Cat cores (Bobcat/Jaguar) also hurt them from a resource standpoint, although one could argue that it also kept them alive to recover (i.e. Jaguar in XBox One and PS4 being a volume contract part) [0]. They did a lot of moves that caused short term pain (that glofo spinnoff helped pay off the ATI Acquisition AFAIR) but helped them become the company that is still surviving today.
[0] - One odd side note, I still find it odd that they never did a dual channel Jaguar laptop part. I still ask whether it was because it would have made the FX look that bad...
That's hugely debatable and depends on SW workloads and the SMT implementation + CPU pipeline design.
In SMT the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared. When one thread stalls waiting for RAM, the second thread sneaks into the idle execution units. At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.
>Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.
It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
Exactly, which is a significant benefit for how marginal the costs are.
> It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
Then surely it should be even better than 4 cores with SMT?
If you're going to argue that the problem with Bulldozer was it's weird semi-SMT solution, you need to explain how it would've been better without it (aka as a regular quad core). Because even if it just gets the 10-20% performance improvements from being a form of SMT it would be better to have it than to not. And if you have lots of integer unit-bound threads, it should be even better than that.
I explained all the bottlenecks of the architecture in a comment above, that the issue was more than 4-core +SMT instead of true 8 cores. Please read it.
Now the very long pipeline and high memory latency are obviously significant issues with the architecture but those seem disconnected from the 4-core+SMT issue? I'm not questioning those issues at all, it's just not the part of your comment which interested me
EDIT: okay so in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49809017, you explain that there's actually a fairly large part of a core that's duplicated, not just two integer units. If each "core" gets its own integer unit, register file and L1 cache, you're actually paying a ton of die space for it, unlike SMT which is "free". I can totally get how that can be a terrible trade-off for most workloads if it all ends up mostly starved due to front-end/FPU/memory throughput.
AFAIR, a bulldozer 'module' has what is exposed to a core as two CPUs, but, per everything above, is two integer cores, one shared FPU core, and depending on the version of the arch, possibly shared fetch/decode/other resources between all of that. Also AFAIR the decoder sucked as far as being able to feed both the integer cores, and the integer cores were more anemic compared to what was in, say, a K10H Phenom.
Having the same count of units (4 FPUs on the chip) did not mean having the same throughput. It's a HW bottleneck, not something AMD could fix via the OS's kernel allocation and scheduling of resources to the CPU to be able match Intel.
In strictly integer 4-8 thread benchmarks, yeah, AMD was often tied to Intel's 4C+SMT.
Bulldozer’s design didn't lose because the concept of sharing an FPU between two threads is worse than SMT. It lost because:
They did just fine in parallel workloads, so I think this is not accurate. The design scaled just fine. The problem was that each core was weak.
Depends how you define "doing just fine in parallel workloads". The contemporary competition from Intel that was 4-core + SMT was beating AMD's 8-core FX CPUs in most real-world tasks and benchmarks at the time. The 8-core AMD broke even and rarely won only in >4-thread strictly integer benchmarks and some >4-thread media encoding tasks/benchmarks. So if you wanted a pro-sumer media encoding workstation a budget yeah, the AMD was better, but for most real world task, it wasn't.
>The design scaled just fine. The problem was that each core was weak.
Can you elaborate and be more exact? What you wrote is technically vague and doesn't mean anything in technical dissection/terms.
It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.
I recently upgraded from that to a Core Ultra 7 that I got from work (e-waste recycling). It was not my intended upgrade path, and I hope Lisa isn't too mad lol (I kept my Radeon though).
How the hell does a high end CPU that's barely 2 years old end up in e-waste recycling? Was Richie Rich using them or something?
First zen 3 November 5, 2020 with desktop processors. First desktop Ryzen 9000 processors on August 8, 2024. So the generations were about 4 years apart.
It has the highest base clock of any modern AMD chip (4.3 GHz), plus 16-cores, which is already more than most workloads need.
Can’t wait to see what Zen 6 brings early next year. Rumors say 24-cores and another big jump in single-core performance.
All stated for gaming, that is.
It’s even difficult to find CPU benchmarks that don’t overemphasize 1080p and eSports scenarios.
My upgrade from 5600x3D to 9850x3D felt kind of dumb at the time, but I decided to do it because Micro Center’s bundle deals are so far below market pricing.
I was shocked at how much better it is. Benchmarks and FPS don’t really show things like micro stutters and little performance wrinkles like that. I’m not even sure 1% low FPS counts capture it.
A great example game for this is Oblivion Remastered. Upgrading my CPU alone with the same GPU took away the environment loading slowdown almost entirely.
The benchmark will tell you that I didn’t gain any FPS during gameplay but every time I open a door into the new environment my CPU is positively impacting the experience.
I would have said the exact same thing you are saying until I actually experienced upgrading to the best on the market. For the record, this is the first time in my life I’ve actually owned the best CPU on the market for gaming.
My old advice would have been to buy one of those sweet spot cheaper mid-range gaming CPUs, but my newer advice is really if you’ve already spent all that you’re willing to spend on a GPU (I have a 9070XT, my only upgrade paths are insanely expensive), buy the highest gaming CPU on the list for gaming benchmarks (e.g., I wouldn’t go crazy with a 9950X3D2 since it doesn’t have any gaming improvements above the 9850X3D).
And the thing about CPUs is they’re not insanely expensive like GPUs. We are talking a price delta of $200 between this beast of a CPU and something way more middling.
Given the massive increase in hardware prices lately, we are going to have to get by with mid range or even low end hardware for a lot longer. Studios will be forced to actually optimise games to not run like shit on a sub $8000 PC.
Every game should be targeting the switch 2 and steam deck in terms of power.
This only goes back one year, to Linux 6.18. Wins would be even bigger if we go back another year. Also, this isn't tracking any of the rest of the improvements in userland: it's just the kernel. Some newer GCC, and upcoming new x86-64v3 targets will all have some pretty nice wins too.
Great days to be on open source. And it only ever gets better.
Edit: dug in it, no, because cache isn't addressable and it's directly managed by the cpu.
Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?
One of the biggest improvements to the Ryzen 7 X3D series (e.g. 9800) is that the caches have been moved from one side of the die (to the other), which places the major heat source closer to the heat sinks.
SO yes, less heat throttling.
Power is heat, and the amount dissipated is the square of the voltage- a processor that is reliable at less voltage means you can get a lot more frequency in the same heat envelope.
Yet reliability decreases as frequency goes up, and that can only be stabilized by adding more voltage- so the faster you run the processor, the more voltage you ultimately have to give it, so the power/heat produced grows exponentially until you can't get rid of the heat fast enough (at which point your only option is to actively cool the chip).
This is overclocking 101.
Note that classic overclocking was viable because of arbitrage- buying a processor, pushing it to the point it got too hot, and stress-testing it at that temperature to ensure reliable operation. Processor manufacturers all do that formal verification at the factory now as they'd be uncompetitive otherwise, especially in laptops.
I’d also be weary of single core scores,Geekbench is known to be favoring specialized instruction sets like AVX or encryption extensions more and more as the version number progresses. Though I don’t know if GB6 is also like this I wouldn’t be surprised it it was caused by it.
The x86 folks lost the ball completely. For workstation/ mobile needs you go to arm. For matmul at scale you go to gpus.
I guess windows gaming with separate gpu is the only remaining market for them.
Unless Nvidia releases a motherboard with an arm cpu on top of their RTX cards, and then that market is gone too.
There is no chance the sustained single core perf is better than a 150=200+w ryzen with a big noctua cooler on it. The power draw alone would kill the battery in a few minutes(?), and the heat would make it catch fire. lol