We can expect an official full deep dive fairly soon I think.
Well, then we have another problem, if in fact, IO bottle necks the load/store improvements - that and mem bandwidth didn't change. Like I said, I look forward to Ian's deep dive. Realworld thread on Zen 3 release (not the current thread) should be pretty epic.
Noticeable points: Geekbench is a HORRIFICLY TRASH benchmark, has been for years, I don't really care how unpopular am I going to be with this opinion of mine. They should team up with userbenchmark, since they are both consistent in being confidently representative of everything but real world performance.
Is geekbench trash or are tests simply not conducted in controlled conditions? Since anyone can post their results, you will find weird numbers in the database. Some launch geekbench while other tasks are running, for instance.
The same analysis points out correlation between GB and SPEC is not an inherent property and can break under a number of scenarios. It essentially reinforces what many object when it comes to GB performance estimates across platforms - controlled testing is mandatory to ensure correlation between GB and established industry benchmarks. And yet "controlled testing" is essentially the opposite of what GB offers: testing for ALL!
That is true for any piece of software that can be obtained by anyone, even SPEC (provided you have the money).
You claimed that analysis proves corellation between GB and SPEC. The same analysis offers proof to the contrary.
Using SPEC on mobile platforms (has Nuvia wanted to include Apple's and qualcomm's) is significantly harder.
A minute ago you were willing to submit Nuvia's analysis as proof, now you place the burden of proof on the opposing side.
They're trying to convince the world they're about to shake the entire computing industry. "Significantly harder" should be the norm for them.
I questioned the claim about geekbench being trash. Isn't my nor anyone's job to provide proof that geekbench is not trash. No one can, as it is impossible to exclude the existence of some defect, however small. IOW, geekbench being trash is not a workable null hypothesis that can/must be disproven. One should instead provide evidence contradicting the null hypothesis that geekbench is not trash. Individual geekbench results found on the web do not constitute convincing evidence, nor do contradictions with results from particular apps. At best, these may show that some tests are poorly conducted and that geekbench algorithms are not representative of a unique use case. Since primate labs never claimed that geekbench should correct for user errors or be representative of any particular workload, I'm not yet convinced that their tool is trash.
From the document itself:
While this observation is interesting from a benchmarking standpoint, Geekbench is generally less demanding of the micro-architecture than SPEC CPU is. For a subset of the micro-architectural features, Figure 3 shows the relative metric value for CPU2006 and CPU2017 normalized to a baseline of 1.0 for Geekbench 5. These were generated from detailed performance simulations of a modern CPU. It shows that the branch mispredicts and data cache (D-Cache), data TLB (D-TLB) misses are 1.1x — 2x higher in SPEC CPU compared to that seen in Geekbench 5. For this reason, chip architects tend to study a wide variety of benchmarks including SPEC CPU and Geekbench (among many others) to optimize the architecture for performance.
It is important to note that the observed correlation is not a fundamental property and can break under several scenarios.
One example is thermal effects. Geekbench typically runs quickly (in minutes) and especially so in our testing where the default workload gaps are removed, whereas SPEC CPU typically runs for hours. The net effect of this is that Geekbench 5 may achieve a higher average frequency because it is able to exploit the system’s thermal mass due to its short runtime. However SPEC CPU will be governed by the long term power dissipation capability of the system due to its long run-time. This is something to watch out for when applying such correlation techniques to systems that see significant thermal throttling or power-capping while running these benchmarks.
Another scenario where the correlation can break is non-linear jumps in performance that one benchmark suite sees but not the other. The interplay between the active data foot-print of a test and the CPU caches is a classic source of such non-linearities. For example, a future CPU’s cache may be large enough that many sub-tests of one benchmark suite may fully fit in cache boosting performance many fold. However, the other benchmark suite may not see such a benefit if none of its tests fit in cache. In such cases, the correlation will not hold.
What is that horrible memory /if clock... Yuk
That's your average wannabe influencer, errr....I mean your average tech tuber in action right there.
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