How is Zen performance looking?

[SaltyNuts]

I've been checking these forums on and off, looking for Zen updates. It seemed that Zen was looking like it might be another disappointment from AMD. But then I saw in another thread someone said "wow Zen is turning out to be a beast."

Can someone just summarize how the Zen is looking, and if we are still waiting on true/validated performance numbers? Just curious.

Thanks!

 

[witeken]

AMD showed a benchmark they did themselves that showed that at the same clock speed, Zen is 2% faster than Broadwell. So IPC wise, it will be comparable to what Intel has, which is not surprising given AMD said from that start IPC would be 40% higher than Excavator; so if anyone has Excavator benchmarks we could also compare. Clock speed is unknown. Power consumption also.

 

[SaltyNuts]

Thanks so much witeken! Hmmm, interesting. Was this benchmark AMD did only a single, limited benchmark? Or was it a suite of different tests so it might be more representative of actual performance? Also, at what clock speed did they run the benchmark at? If they downclocked the Boardwell to 1ghz so they could compare it with Zen it would give me good reason to worry.

Thanks!

 

[IllogicalGlory]

The short, boring, and unfortunately most correct is answer is that no one knows.

The only official Zen benchmark seen so far was the Blender demo and all we know is that a Summit Ridge system beat a "similarly configured" 6900K system both at 3GHz in that particular demo.

 

[witeken]

Thanks so much witeken! Hmmm, interesting. Was this benchmark AMD did only a single, limited benchmark? Or was it a suite of different tests so it might be more representative of actual performance? Also, at what clock speed did they run the benchmark at? If they downclocked the Boardwell to 1ghz so they could compare it with Zen it would give me good reason to worry.

Thanks!

You can read AnandTech's take for yourself here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10585...hmark-is-zen-actually-2-faster-than-broadwell.

In short, it was 1 test and Broadwell (8-core, I've heard people speculate they did this so they could avoid the comparison with Skylake) was slightly downclocked to 3GHz. To me, this suggests maybe Zen won't be able to clock that much, but I won't read much into it since it's an engineering sample.

 

[SaltyNuts]

Thanks IllogicalGlory. So if the benchmark AMD ran had Zen running at 3ghz, that sounds like there is reason to hope!

 

[SaltyNuts]

Will take a look witeken. But even at 3ghz, isn't that room to hope? Aren't Intel's fastest processors not clocked that much higher?

Thanks!

 

[witeken]

Will take a look witeken. But even at 3ghz, isn't that room to hope? Aren't Intel's fastest processors not clocked that much higher?

Thanks!

Kaby Lake's best CPU, i7 7700K, will have a base clock of 4.2GHz, so we'll have to see if AMD can beat that, which I doubt. So they're not going to reclaim the (single core) performance crown, but of course they don't have to. For instance they could compete on price or release an i3 priced quadcore.

We'll just have to wait for the reviews . According to recent rumor, they are delayed from December to February.

 

[SaltyNuts]

Ah, I didn't realize Intel's new CPUs were going to have such a high clock (I seem to remember AMD marketing materials saying they had the highest clocked CPU out there at 4.0ghz). But AMD is almost surely going to get at least somewhat higher than 3.0ghz since it was an engineering sample. If performance-per-clock is in the same ballpark as Intel's best, and AMD can get materially beyond 3.0 ghz, wouldn't they still likely be a feasible alternative to Intel, particularly if they offer a reasonably priced chip? I'm just hoping they might return as somewhat competitive in the performance area, but a true bang-for-the-buck champ.

But like you say, bring on the benchmarks!!!

 

[superstition]

This thread is a duplicate of an existing topic.

 

[sm625]

It would be nice to have a thread dedicated to non-obscure benchmarks. The Blender results really dont tell us anything. 50 pages of absolutely nothing. Not that any results are really going to tell us anything difinitive at this point. But I have to believe that if Zen was in any way capable of producing a google Octane v2 score of 40000+, we'd be hearing about it. The fact that we are not... well that is rather telling. There are plenty of Kaby Lake Octane scores around so its not like its a big deal to run the test. I would surmise that everyone who holds an AMD engineering sample is either extrmely loyal and would never leak anything, or extremely uninterested in the product since it is obviously a total flop, or maybe they havent unloaded their shares of AMD yet.

 

[superstition]

So, the idea is to create a topic to discuss "non-obscure" benchmark results that don't exist?

There is a Zen design topic already and a Zen benchmark results topic, too. One can easily go into one of those and ask about non-obscure benchmarks, how Zen's design will impact its performance, or anything else that comes to mind — without asking everyone to re-invent the wheel by reposting the same arguments that have already been had.

 

[Joepublic2]

IPC looks competitive with broadwell at least. So whether or not Zen is a competitive design will really come down to price, clocks and power usage in that order (all unknown at this point).

 

[MajinCry]

Keep in mind that +40% over Excavator is around Ivybridge-Haswell. Don't go getting your hopes too high, as it's likely the Blender thing was to put it in a rather good light.

That being said, Skylake is only around 20% faster than Sandybridge, so even if it is not as fast as Broadwell, it's still going to be pretty dang good.