Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)

[DisEnchantment]

Speculate at will

 

[PJVol]

That graph shows improvement of only 1.5% with SMT disabled... Which isn't exactly massive.

I'd say +2.6% and +3.3% for the 1080p and 1440p gaming respectively is not that small.

Seems like either windows 11 or nvidia drivers needs to update the thread scheduling for Zen5

I don't get, is this behavior W11 specific or is W10 also affected?
Curious, if he tried disabling cppc2 preferred cores.

It's also unclear how he ended up with the "game efficiency" results remained unchanged?

 

[Tup3x]

Starting to think that SMT causes more issues in normal use than improvements.

 

[StefanR5R]

All you armchair experts saying Zen5 stinks at gaming, explain the .1% lows away

superb .1% lows, sign of a superior CPU

I am not interested in video games myself, hence never pay attention to that part of CPU reviews. What strikes me as odd is that most reviewers still focus on average FPS a lot. If average FPS were the most important thing to immersion into a game, then the conclusion of all of these reviews should be that all desktop CPUs perform alike: Average FPS are always good enough if screen resolution and game details are chosen according to GPU performance. — From what I understand, what matters additionally, and very much, to the experience of playing a video game are things like low percentiles of FPS, and frame time variance. Yet hardly any reviewer seems to put these prominently into the center of the video game part of CPU reviews.

(Especially ridiculous is when reviewers produce huge diagrams with a dozen of CPUs all giving absurdly high FPS. They should shrink those graphs into a one-line summary that all tested CPUs were good for more FPS than necessary.)

 

[poke01]

These gains in browser are impressive. I just wish that Windows wasn’t a piece of crap. Linux can actually take advantage of the Zen5 architecture.

 

[JustViewing]

Updated screenshots
Its 1.5% at 4k res, higher at lower res

Some more screens

New dual decoder in action? Maybe if SMT is disabled, single core gets both decoders ? Not just decodes, I think dual OP cache also behave the same.

 

[Geddagod]

Well, here's David Huang's graph for perf/watt for specint, core power. Not bad.
I'm also very curious how desktop vs desktop platforms are going to compare for Zen 5 vs Zen 4.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I really want AMD to pull some miracle with an updated IOD that allows the X3D chips to use DDR5-8000 in 1:1 mode.

Other than the observations already made related to GMI links, you're looking at the current limitations of AMD's implementation of IF. There are likely good reasons why 1:1 beyond DDR4-6400/6600 becomes impossible.

This is the very thing I've been railing against chatting with others. Your opinion of the launch doesn't matter if you never intended to buy.

Does this also apply to people parroting negative reviews of Granite Ridge? Nobody said this until people started praising Zen5.

 

[Fjodor2001]

I am not familiar with video transcoding. Are there transcoders which scale to very high core counts?

Source code compilation however: Software build jobs are not scaling well with core count. There are significant single- and lowly threaded sections during a build. The compilation stage scales well if there are respectively many files. But most of the time, developers build incrementally, so there is no good scaling there either.

Regarding video transcoding, just check out the Handbrake perf tests, which are quite common in CPU reviews.

Regarding source code compilation, do you have any reviews / perf tests showing that Zen5 would be bottle necked due to memory bandwidth beyond 16C?

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Does this also apply to people parroting negative reviews of Granite Ridge? Nobody said this until people started praising Zen5.

I added obvious context just to avoid responses like this, and you left that out of the quote.

It's like piracy. The company didn't lose money from someone pirating the game if the person would have never otherwise paid for it.

It doesn't matter to AMD's bottom line what your opinion is of the product or release if you were never going to buy it no matter how well it was received.

Yes, I was 100% set on buying a 9950X until release rolled around and the reality set in. Now I am not buying one. It doesn't make my opinion more valid, but the fact that AMD lost a sale is what matters, not my opinion of the release.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I added obvious context just to avoid responses like this, and you left that out of the quote.

I reread that and . . . okay?

Fact still remains that someone chose to wait to say this until after others stepped in and said "no wait, Zen5 is actually kinda good, here's why". Nothing you said explains why anyone would wait for that. HUB has been laying into AMD with both barrels.

 

[Philste]

Prices at Mindfactory are starting to drop, around 3% (13€ for 9700X, 11€ for 9600X)

 

[Hitman928]

Starting to think that SMT causes more issues in normal use than improvements.

I don’t think this is an issue with Zen 5 and SMT. @Det0x has a 16 core Zen 5 and isn’t seeing the same behavior/issues. I think it’s more likely an issue with a particular Windows build or driver that’s causing improper scheduling between physical and logical cores.

 

[StefanR5R]

[more cores in tiny desktop PCs, for applications which apparently just don't exist]

I am not familiar with video transcoding. Are there transcoders which scale to very high core counts?

Regarding video transcoding, just check out the Handbrake perf tests, which are quite common in CPU reviews.

Well, Handbrake does not scale with core count. This is well known.
Example: AnandTech's Threadripper 3000 review

Source code compilation however: Software build jobs are not scaling well with core count. There are significant single- and lowly threaded sections during a build. The compilation stage scales well if there are respectively many files. But most of the time, developers build incrementally, so there is no good scaling there either.

Regarding source code compilation, do you have any reviews / perf tests showing that Zen5 would be bottle necked due to memory bandwidth beyond 16C?

I said there is no high parallelism in common software build jobs.
The pure compilation stage scales well if an entire source tree has to be rebuilt, but that's a rare task in practice.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Well, Handbrake does not scale with core count. This is well known.
Example: AnandTech's Threadripper 3000 review

DDR4. And not Zen5.

Also, depends on the encoder used. Check for x265 which is most commonly used nowadays, which scales more or less linearly to 32C and quite well even to 64C:

Testing x265 encoder scaling on a 128 core Azure VM for 4K HDR

Video encoding has always been a fairly compute intensive task. With every new generation of video encoders, more computational power has been required to achieve the compression benefits. HEVC/H.265 is the latest state of the art video compression standard with x265 being the most popular...

singhkays.com

I said there is no high parallelism in common software build jobs.
The pure compilation stage scales well if an entire source tree has to be rebuilt, but that's a rare task in practice.

You said. I asked for reviews / tests showing this for Zen5 beyond 16C. Still waiting.

Also, rebuild is the most important of course as it takes the longest time.

 

[Mahboi]

I am not interested in video games myself, hence never pay attention to that part of CPU reviews. What strikes me as odd is that most reviewers still focus on average FPS a lot. If average FPS were the most important thing to immersion into a game, then the conclusion of all of these reviews should be that all desktop CPUs perform alike: Average FPS are always good enough if screen resolution and game details are chosen according to GPU performance. — From what I understand, what matters additionally, and very much, to the experience of playing a video game are things like low percentiles of FPS, and frame time variance. Yet hardly any reviewer seems to put these prominently into the center of the video game part of CPU reviews.

(Especially ridiculous is when reviewers produce huge diagrams with a dozen of CPUs all giving absurdly high FPS. They should shrink those graphs into a one-line summary that all tested CPUs were good for more FPS than necessary.)

Yesn't. Speaking as a formerly more active gheymer myself, there's really 3 metrics:
- 30-60 fps average
- dips below 30
- actual high framerate for some games

You want the average at 60 for 90% of games, but actually a ton of people will never notice it dipping in the 50s, and a minority in the 40s. 30 FPS is basically the hard limit, below that almost everyone will notice stuttering and a lack of smoothness. The problem ofc is that if it's only about 30 fps, the game channels all lose their biggest talking point, so they all collectively started pretending that 60 fps was the hard limit. If it became reachable by the slowest CPUs, it would become 144fps, and so on.

Actual high framerate with minimal dips is very important in very reflex intensive games, like multiplayer FPS. The problem is that a hundred percent of the game devs know that fully well, and optimise their high FPS games a lot.

We found the Missing Performance: Zen 5 Tested with SMT Disabled

Reviews of AMD’s Zen 5 processors this week surprised many, with lower-than-expected results. After some investigation, we discovered that turning off Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) can yield notable performance gains, particularly in gaming. This article presents our findings, including...

www.techpowerup.com

Just check any review having something like Counter Strike or Call of Duty or even Rocket League: suddenly the CPU that couldn't get above 150/180 FPS in ideal conditions runs at 450.

So yes most gheymeeeing reviews are nowadays fundamentally silly for CPUs. Any ADL/Zen 3 and beyond CPU is way enough for 99% of cases and enough for the 1% (the 1% being Starfield).
Frametime variance is also a bad metric because any game can randomly load assets and have lag spikes that will basically never ever be compressed. As long as your non-multiplayer game has 60 FPS and doesn't dip below 30-40 or your multiplayer game doesn't dip below 144/240, it's done, the rest is just GN Steve moaning.

 

[Jayzen]

It's 5-10% in most benchmarks, besides AMD's cherry-picked tests. And 5.1 is far closer to what these chips will actually run at in real-world conditions than people's delirious 6 GHz fantasies.

I was right, by the way. Actually, 5.1 was optimistic, looks like it's closer to 4.8 for real-world workloads.

 

[Hitman928]

I was right, by the way. Actually, 5.1 was optimistic, looks like it's closer to 4.8 for real-world workloads.

9700x has no problem hitting 5.5 GHz and the 9950x has the highest Fmax anyway. . .

 

[gdansk]

I was right, by the way. Actually, 5.1 was optimistic, looks like it's closer to 4.8 for real-world workloads.

You put it in the fmax column, you absolute clown.

https://tpucdn.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9700x/images/boost-clock-analysis.png

 

[CouncilorIrissa]

No need to feed someone who's clearly not arguing in good faith.

 

[Josh128]

I added obvious context just to avoid responses like this, and you left that out of the quote.

It's like piracy. The company didn't lose money from someone pirating the game if the person would have never otherwise paid for it.

It doesn't matter to AMD's bottom line what your opinion is of the product or release if you were never going to buy it no matter how well it was received.

Yes, I was 100% set on buying a 9950X until release rolled around and the reality set in. Now I am not buying one. It doesn't make my opinion more valid, but the fact that AMD lost a sale is what matters, not my opinion of the release.

Already decided that without official reviews? Im still on the fence. I had previously said that if Zen 5s perf claims at Computex held up, I was getting one. Either 9700X or 9950X. Reviews of 9700X DID NOT hold up AMDs Computex claims at all, but Im waiting on 9950X reviews. Pricing matters more than ever now, and they are not priced correctly, IMO.

 

[igor_kavinski]

This "word of mouth" thing about 9700X/9600X not being that much faster than their Zen 4 counterparts is what's killing their sales mojo. Very few people are realizing that the new contenders are doing that while remaining essentially "ice cold". Remaining under 70C while going full tilt with just an air cooler is an amazing accomplishment.

I personally wouldn't engage PBO on these parts because then more power is wasted for extra performance that isn't comparably high. Why bother? It's good for those times when you absolutely need every last bit of performance for a short period of time but for the majority of cases, the stock performance and temps are excellent. Zen 4 stocks will eventually dwindle and the parts replacing them will only make AM5 more attractive in the long run.

 

[jpiniero]

Already decided that without official reviews? Im still on the fence. I had previously said that if Zen 5s perf claims at Computex held up, I was getting one. Either 9700X or 9950X. Reviews of 9700X DID NOT hold up AMDs Computex claims at all, but Im waiting on 9950X reviews. Pricing matters more than ever now, and they are not priced correctly, IMO.

Just wait for the X3D parts. It won't be too long of a wait.

 

[linkgoron]

Already decided that without official reviews? Im still on the fence. I had previously said that if Zen 5s perf claims at Computex held up, I was getting one. Either 9700X or 9950X. Reviews of 9700X DID NOT hold up AMDs Computex claims at all, but Im waiting on 9950X reviews. Pricing matters more than ever now, and they are not priced correctly, IMO.

9950x won't save Zen5. I think the 7950x3d will look like the best option after the 9950x releases.

This "word of mouth" thing about 9700X/9600X not being that much faster than their Zen 4 counterparts is what's killing their sales mojo.

Consumers won't upgrade to a newer CPU in-order to save a few watts. We're not talking about laptops here. IMO If you can get almost identical performance, and pay less, but at the cost of somewhat more power and more noise, and you already have fan noise and power - it doesn't matter really. If you want to compare with lower power usage, compare the 9700x to the lower TDP 7700... The 9700x is ~10% faster, but also ~10% more power efficient at best.

Remaining under 70C while going full tilt with just an air cooler is an amazing accomplishment.

I really think that nobody cares, as long as Zen4 isn't melting any houses. Let's face it, As a consumer, I want to buy the best value, I don't care about this amazing accomplishment. It reminds me of people saying how RDNA3 is a great accomplishment because it's the first consumer GPU to use chiplets, or buying Fury or Vega because the have HBM. Who cares? I care about performance. Comparing temps with the 7700... I don't see how Zen4 isn't great as well and also an amazing accomplishment.

 

[poke01]

Remaining under 70C while going full tilt with just an air cooler is an amazing accomplishment.

Zen4 non-X parts were already under 70C on air cooling.

 

[Joe NYC]

Got ya. Again going simply on memory I think TSMC/AMD said they could go up to 4 layers. I don't think that is realistic for a gaming SKU but there may come a time when we see perhaps 2 layers. There will almost certainly be diminishing results.

As for one layer, SRAM scaling isn't great anymore. Could they put more? Probably, but I don't think it would be much.

TSMC once said they can go up to 12 layers, but that was a while ago, and I have not heard TSMC repeat that.

There was an AMD Zen 3 reference motherboard, which, in BIOS, had options up to 4 layers, but that CPU was apparently never built.

AMD could go to 128 MB just by covering the entire CPU, if they figured some way to conduct the heat through the V-Cache, which seems like it could be worth researching. Something like heat transfer TSVs which would then all connect to a plate on top of the chip, which would attach to IHS...

Hopefully, we will get some leak about V-Cache in Zen 5, because we are starting to sound like broken records on the Zen 5 V-Cache possibilities...