
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review - neogodless
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15043/the-amd-ryzen-9-3950x-review-16-cores-on-7nm-with-pcie-40
======
mrandish
I noticed yesterday's articles about Intel's upcoming unusually large release
of security mitigations. Under serious competitive threat for the first time
in a while, I'm curious if Intel may have slowed the release of some
mitigations to land after this round of comparison benchmarks.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Intel has been cheating their single core performance against AMD for many
years, thanks to predictive and insecure algorithms.

Reality is just catching up, AMD is already number one for a long time.
Intell's cheating just didn't make it clear.

I've waited for a year to express my opinion, before I could see any evidence.

The time has come that AMD is even beating Intell's fake single core
performance, so slowly we will see all of Intell's shit appear. There is no
point in hiding it anymore for the consumer/gaming market, if they are not nr
1 in single core. Not if they lose trust of their business clients and
profitable server market.

All those gamers that bought Intel for single core performance and OEM's that
stick to Intell because of monopolies betted on the wrong horse.

[https://twitter.com/damageboy/status/1194751035136450560?s=1...](https://twitter.com/damageboy/status/1194751035136450560?s=19)

This feels "nice", although I'm affected to :(

Waiting for decent AMD laptops...

Ps. Long AMD, ever since Spectre and meltdown.

~~~
paulmd
Do remember that Meltdown and Spectre affected literally everyone else in the
industry (including POWER, ARM, and SPARC) and it's only by chance that AMD's
branch predictor happens to be relatively difficult to train to follow a
predictable path (which is a necessary condition for some of these exploits).
Intel isn't cheating any more than anyone else, AMD got lucky.

Cascade Lake and the latest Coffee Lake (and Comet Lake) steppings have
hardware mitigations for all the previously known exploits (although there is
a new batch) including some for which AMD still requires software mitigations
themselves (Spectre V2).

~~~
NicoJuicy
So, AMD got lucky 218 times?

[https://windowsreport.com/amd-intel-security-
vulnerabilities...](https://windowsreport.com/amd-intel-security-
vulnerabilities/)

~~~
paulmd
Most of those exploits are software/driver vulnerabilities, and AMD has plenty
of their own. Like when Threadripper drivers installed an out-of-date web
server running with SYSTEM privileges, or when a series of PSP and BIOS bugs
let an attacker escalate from VM guest to control of the PSP and BIOS
persistence. If you're not finding vulnerabilities in your software, you're
not looking.

Intel is in a lot more verticals than AMD is - networking, storage, etc - and
all of those get their own CVE number. But that's a more nuanced approach than
"big number bad" isn't it?

Specifically, Intel is finding a lot because they're doing an enterprise-wide
initiative to lock down their IPs. Is AMD making the same effort, or are there
more vulnerabilities in those GPU drivers or in the chipset drivers that
they're not looking for? After all, a year ago they were at the stage where
they were installing an out-of-date Apache instance along with your
motherboard drivers... doesn't sound like security is priority #1 for them.

Again, low number sounds good. But if you're not looking, it's actually not
good.

And researchers are not looking on AMD much either. AMD is less than 5% of the
server market right now, you get the big headlines from finding
vulnerabilities in Intel now, not AMD. Give it another 5 years and there will
be more scrutiny on AMD's hardware/software.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
> Specifically, Intel is finding a lot because they're doing an enterprise-
> wide initiative to lock down their IPs.

Do they now? Why may that be? Not voluntarily i guess, with all the mess,
others have found _first_ , they fear losing ground, and shareholders blood
thirst.

------
ibobev
As a developer I am keen to see some compilation benchmarks. Unfortunately
those kinds of benchmarks are almost never included in such reviews. Instead
there are many gaming benchmarks which purpose is not exactly clear for me,
after obviously gaming is not the primary target market for R9 3950X.

~~~
mmastrac
I believe that some of the YouTube channels have started including compilation
benchmarks. GamersNexus [1] and Linus Tech Tips [2] both do!

[1] [https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3460-new-cpu-bench-
method...](https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3460-new-cpu-bench-methodology-
workstation-program-compile-tests-premiere)

[2]
[https://youtu.be/stM2CPF9YAY?t=4m49s](https://youtu.be/stM2CPF9YAY?t=4m49s)

~~~
simplyinfinity
In addition, Level1Techs is more developer/sysadmin oriented than consumer
oriented :
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4w1YQAJMWOz4qtxinq55LQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4w1YQAJMWOz4qtxinq55LQ)

~~~
polivka2
And in addition to that, we have Open benchmarking and Phoronix for that. :)

------
zamubafoo
I find it interesting how desktop CPUs are essentially coming down to two
enthusiast markets, developers/content creators/workstations and gaming.

While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock
speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware.
Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by
these multi-core behemoths.

Intel really has their work cutout for them with performance to cost for
consumer desktops.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Before Vulkan, there were more bottlenecks on multithreaded rendering. Most
games pushed everything to a single drawing thread.

Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption
2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this
processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck.

Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with processor count however.

~~~
swebs
Factorio is also limited by single core performance, with the developers
saying they have no plans to implement multithreading.

~~~
kuzko_topia
This is unfortunate, and I'm saying this as an AMD owner and factorio player.
Do you have a source for this?

------
paulmd
GamersNexus really hammering AMD's deceptive marketing around boost clocks.
The only time it can hit its advertised boost clocks in when it's in the menu
and you have near-zero load, and it barely touches it for an instant. Under
even a single-core load it's failing to meet its advertised spec.

There was a lot of hubbub around this with the initial release, AMD released a
BIOS which they claimed fixed this, looks like it still has not.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3sNUFjV7p4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3sNUFjV7p4)

The performance is good enough as it is, no need to lie about it being 200 MHz
higher than it can actually do. But here we are again 6 months later and AMD
does it again...

~~~
nolok
Which is weird because they have the performance.

Showing the perf of the processor does all the marketing it needs, no matter
what clock it's running at, and with normal/turbo clocks customers don't even
get it anymore anyway, so I don't understand why AMD is handicapping itself
like this in the marketing department.

------
NKosmatos
Way to go AMD! One of the benefits of competition between the duopoly. AMD has
cornered Intel these last couple of years and I don’t see this trend changing
soon, not with all these vulnerabilities that chipzilla is having ;-)

One thing I’d like to note, is that with all this computing power being
available to users at a relatively affordable price, software developers
(games - commercial software) won’t optimize their code. I’ve seen it
happening where a loop/scanning/sorting algorithm won’t be optimized since the
user will anyhow have a few cores and GHz to spare.

------
oouiterud
I read that all these new AMD CPUs support ECC, but it’s been hard finding
verification. Can any one recommended a motherboard that both supports and
uses ECC RAM with this new CPU?

~~~
neogodless
Some useful links within:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cb8tyr/asus_pro_ws_x57...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cb8tyr/asus_pro_ws_x570ace_paired_with_ryzen_9_3900x/)

ASUS Pro WS X570-Ace seems like the top dog here.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/14161/the-
amd-x570-motherboar...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14161/the-
amd-x570-motherboard-overview/39)

The conclusion doesn't point out ECC-compatible boards, but the comments
mention the same Asus.

~~~
boris
Anyone hopping to have ECC with Ryzen should really read the reddit thread.
Wow, what a mess.

------
neogodless
This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip
you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set.
Still, $750 for all that power!

Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core
Threadripper?

Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a
matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?

~~~
chaosbutters
I'm waiting for 64 core CPU. 32 is nice but still not enough.

~~~
qzw
64 cores ought to be enough for anybody...

~~~
neogodless
Yeah, that's what... 10kb of RAM per core?

~~~
dragontamer
Funny story. The Vega64 has 8GB of RAM and 4MB of L2 cache (last-level cache)
across 4096 SIMD-cores. That's 1kB of L2 cache and 2MB RAM per core.

It gets worse: although there are 4096 cores, the Vega64 isn't fully loaded
until you stick 4-threads-per-core (Or more precisely, 16-wavefronts per
Compute Unit (256-SIMD-cores)). That means you will actually need to run 16384
SIMD-threads before the Vega64 is fully utilized.

That's less than 512kB main-RAM per core, and less than 256 bytes of L2 cache
per core. Better hope your threads are sharing a lot of memory...

\--------

AMD addresses this problem with NAVI / RDNA: NAVI is fully utilized at
1-thread per core. So you only need 2816 threads on the 5700 XT to fully
utilize the system.

------
wayneftw
Any problems with AMD cpus and containers or virtualization?

 _(Really? Wow. Sorry for asking a question!)_

~~~
neogodless
I only have limited experience so far, but I was able to enable virtualization
and run WSL on Windows 10 with a Ryzen 7 2700X with no obvious issues. I'm
sure more in-depth, longer term container testing would be more useful to you,
though!

~~~
jmkni
Same with a 3700x. Running an Android Emulator, Docker, and WSL2 on Hyper-V
simultaneously with no obvious issues.

------
tracker1
Been waiting for this for about a year now... pulled the trigger early on an
X570 build as my old system (i7-4790K) was acting up and bought early. Been
running an r5 3600, but replacing cpu with a 3950X.

------
fock
Can anyone comment on the IOMMU-grouping on typical boards? From what I've
just googled, the CPU "lanes" seem to support ACS so it could indeed be
working to replace my IGP+GPU-for-the-gaming-VN-Haswell system with a dual-
GPU-Ryzen one (contrary to what I believed previously).

Have been eyeing TR for that reason, but as I don't really need this amount of
I/O (and cores), I might be well served by AM4.

~~~
bootloop
I am finally running a Ryzen 1700 + dual GPU system so I could get rid of
dual-booting:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700

Mainboard: GA-AX370-Gaming K5 (Bios: F25)

GPU (Host): Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970

GPU (Guest): Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060

OS (Host): Arch Linux

OS (Guest): Win 10

As said it appears to me IOMMU grouping depends a lot on the board used. For
mine it looks like all the chipset external PCIes are in one group and the CPU
PCIes (basically the 16x for GPUs) are in two seperat groups. So I run two
GPUs on 8x on each slot now. I was also able to pass through an USB 3.0 on-
board controller as it was also in it's own group.

But there is the ACS patch so you are able to pass through single devices
which are in a physical IOMMU group (not only cpu lanes). I don't have
personal exp with it tho.

Warning: There are issues with the latest Ryzen gen and bios updates and they
break vifo.

~~~
gravypod
Have you experimented with things like lookingglass? Is that stuff more
streamlined now?

~~~
bootloop
Personally I have no use for lookingglass. To make it work you need anyway a
display connected (or something simulating a connected display) otherwise it
will not render to the shared memory.

In addition to that I use the VM mostly for fullscreen application, either
games or some windows only software so I don't get any advantage out of the
windowing.

Instead I decided to take an auto-switching approach via CDD and some shortcut
menus to switch GPU outputs on my main display, see in action here:
[https://gfycat.com/tepidliquidcero](https://gfycat.com/tepidliquidcero)

------
LatteLazy
7nm is about 35 times the diameter of a silicon atom.

~~~
lm28469
It sure is, but 7nm in cpu lithography doesn't mean anything, it's pure
marketing.

[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process)

> The term "7 nm" is simply a commercial name for a generation of a certain
> size and its technology and does not represent any geometry of a transistor.

~~~
api
Yeah, since about 14nm the nanometer number has become kind of like CPU speed
(mhz/ghz) became in the early-mid 1990s and for the same reason.

Long ago you could say e.g. a 600mhz CPU was faster than a 500mhz CPU. Then
things like instruction level parallelism and other significant optimizations
started and you had lower-core-speed CPUs that would in practice be quite a
bit faster than higher-core-speed CPUs. Today a 1.6ghz mobile chip is far
faster than a 2.4ghz earlier generation Pentium-4 for example, at least for
most workloads.

My understanding is that chip fab processes have developed similar numbers of
devils in details. It's not just about the smallest feature size but lots of
other things like materials, transistor types, layout, power density, etc.
I've heard that Intel's 14nm processes are comparable to other fabs' 10nm
processes for instance.

Still this 7nm node is better than what Intel is currently shipping.

------
Tepix
Looking at some benchmarks done by PC Games Hardware it appears that games are
still not capable of taking advantage of 16 cores and 32 threads. It's not
surprising - why would developers optimize for something that's not yet widely
used. But I wonder when we'll get there...

~~~
paulmd
Consoles determines how many cores game engines will be coded to use, and
consoles are staying with 8C processors for another generation.

------
rafaelvasco
Went with AMD with my latest build. Last time I went with AMD was back in 1999
with an AMD K6-2 500mhz.

~~~
ArlenBales
I think the last time consumers were swarming AMD for their CPUs was Athlon 64
X2 around 2005.

------
piinbinary
When GPUs became vastly more powerful over the last ~10 years, it made big
neural nets practical. I wonder what an equivalent jump in CPU power will
unlock.

~~~
Scarbutt
More electron apps.

~~~
Filligree
Sadly, I'm afraid you're right.

I love my 1920X for making a modern desktop snappy. I hate Discord, chrome et.
al for needing one.

~~~
udhbeeui
Max spec KDE with ALL batteries included on a 12 year old laptop computer with
a new cheap Crucial SSD even with the old UDMA-6 is ultra low latency and very
snappy.

KDE is an excellent Mac replacement for power users.

------
th-miracle-257
Why did Apple not release their new MBP 16 with the 3950X? [1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21523780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21523780)

~~~
HHad3
In addition to the points already mentioned, a good bit of Apple's software
depends on Intel-proprietary features, e.g. QuickSync for video encoding. So
far, no macOS system ever shipped with an AMD CPU, and porting the OS and
user-mode application stack is not trivial.

~~~
wmf
There must be Macs like the iMac Pro and Mac Pro that don't have Quick Sync.

------
mtarnovan
I'm very curious how this CPU performs for Elixir compilation.

~~~
Bayart
Compilation should profit pretty linearly from more cores thrown at it.
Considering the Erlang VM is very concurrency-conscious it should be a pretty
natural fit.

But I'm not at all in on the intricacies of it, are there any particular CPU
features (instruction set or module) it's known to take advantage of ?

~~~
mtarnovan
You mean like vectorized instructions and such? I don't know, but if I had to
guess I'd say no.

Anyway, I'm sure there are some compilation phases that won't benefit from
more cores, but the bulk of the compilation seems to do so. Even though Elixir
has incremental compilation, due to use of metaprogramming in the Phoenix
framework sometimes even changes to a single file will trigger recompilation
of hundreds of others, so I was thinking these new AMD CPUs with lots of cores
could be very helpful here.

~~~
Bayart
Try to ask around Stack Exchange or whatever, I'm certain some people have
been running the BEAM on the second generation Threadripper chips (this one
being pretty much just a better 16c Threadripper on a consummer socket) since
they've been so popular for productivity/compilation.

------
seminatl
I don't really get how they reached their conclusion. It seems like on most of
the tests this new part gets beat by a cheaper one from Intel. It seems like a
kinda unfair approach to use handbrake without AVX-512 support? Also not sure
why they include the 3-d particle thing without AVX ... I guess because Intel
is just too fast on that?

If you look through the results, the things most people want to do with a
computer, like browse the web and start their applications, are noticeably
faster with the Intel i9-9900K at half the price. And the only game where the
CPU makes a difference in these benchmarks is also a lot faster with the Intel
part.

~~~
linkgoron
You could just buy a CPU for a third or fourth of the price if you want to
just browse. You don't need a $750 16-core CPU. You can buy a $200 9600KF or a
$240 3600x or something even cheaper. For anything multi-core the 3950X blows
the 9900k out of the water, and for 1440p gaming the 3950x trades blows with
the 9900k. If you want 1080p gaming, or web-browsing, this is not the CPU for
you. That said, even for 1080p gaming and single-threaded benchmarks the 3950
is usually within a few percent of the 9900K.

~~~
seminatl
Ok but if it’s “trading blows with” and “within a few percent of” a CPU
costing half the money, why is it rational to prefer it?

I know why _I_ want AMD parts and that is because of ECC memory support but
this article doesn’t even mention it.

~~~
linkgoron
First of all, the 9900k doesn't cost half the money. Second, you can also buy
a 3900x if you want 12 threads with similar ST characteristics and pricing
closer to the 9900k. There are other options.

If you want to game @ 1080p and do mostly single threaded work (without
parallelism), this CPU is not for you. If do a lot of single-threaded jobs in
parallel (for example, gaming + being a server or gaming and streaming) or
anything multi-threaded, this CPU destroys the 9900k, while being just a bit
weaker when doing just one or two single-threaded tasks.

~~~
seminatl
Look I'm not arguing about which CPU is better. I'm arguing that taking the
geometric mean of a bunch of completely unrelated benchmarks doesn't make any
sense. There are clearly workloads in this very article where a cheaper part
is better, sometimes even a cheaper AMD part.

~~~
linkgoron
And the article states clearly: "[the Core i9-9900KS] does pull out ahead in a
number of ST tests as well as in low resolution (CPU-bound) gaming."

Regarding the geomean, they clearly state that their benchmarks prioritize
multi-core benchmarks: "This metric also puts the 3900X above the 9900KS,
because despite the 5.0 GHz all-core on 8-cores, moving to 12-core and 16-core
at almost the same performance per core gives more of an advantage in our test
suite's MT-heavy workloads."

They're not hiding behind anything. Everything is clearly stated.

------
cracker_jacks
Where is the 9980XE @ $979 coming from in the price vs performance chart?
Where can I get a 9980XE for $979??

~~~
neogodless
[https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189126/...](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189126/intel-
core-i9-9980xe-extreme-edition-processor-24-75m-cache-up-to-4-50-ghz.html)

Seems like it should be $1979 to match Intel's suggested pricing. (Retail
looks like it's $1949 on sale, and typically even higher.)

~~~
IanCutress
Intel has announced the Cascade Lake-X i9-10980XE coming out later this month
for $979. It's slightly higher in frequency,

~~~
neogodless
Right - I didn't notice a footnote. I just saw your comment / reply on the
article. It's a fair label, just wasn't clear to me!

------
ArlenBales
I wish the reviews that included gaming benchmarks would have included Monster
Hunter World. Capcom's MT Framework game engine is extremely multi-threading
capable.

------
davidy123
Slight meta, and part of a larger 'rant,' but when are we going to get away
from reviews that might as well have been printed on glossy pages in PC
Magazine in 1986? Anandtech has been at it since the 90s and hasn't changed
their format at all. This is a serious decades-long stagnation of the web. The
graphs should be dynamic (able to choose what scenarios and components to
compare, and able to search within them), and user contributed. Instead we get
feeble excuses like "it doesn't make sense to compare a two-year-old-
generation to this one," well yes it does if I'm considering an upgrade.

Only a few sites support these options. Storage Review was an early leader but
hasn't much moved much, Notebookcheck is another, and of course Phoronix.

~~~
bransonf
I mean, there are plenty of options to compare new cpus to old ones.

0\. CPUBoss 1\. CPUBenchmark 2\. UserBenchmark

And if you’re considering an upgrade, it’s almost always the case that you
should be comparing latest generation offerings to arrive at a purchase
decision.

Don’t call the web stagnant because they decide not to flood the page with JS
libraries.

~~~
ihattendorf
But if you're deciding whether or not to upgrade, a comparison between your
current hardware and newer hardware is relevant.

~~~
bransonf
That’s why I suggested the first three websites.

The role of Anandtech/TomsHardware and the like is not to do this. It’s to
give news about new CPUs and where the fit in current offerings. They are news
sites after all.

