
The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising the Bar - neogodless
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14605/the-ryzen-3700x-3900x-review-amd-done-did-it
======
ChuckNorris89
Aww yisss, finally, tangible performance gains and huge value increases for
consumers in the CPU space. Intel getting curb stomped is just a bonus.

I'm worried about AMD since AFAIK, the enthusiast PC builder/Gamer for who
these chips are addressed is a niche market and most volumes are in OEMs
laptops (Dell, HP, Lenovo) that companies buy in bulk for their workforce and
that's where AMD has zero presence while intel has a deathgrip on those OEMs.

Can AMD still recover in this market?

~~~
chrisan
Where are you getting "curb stomped" from?

From the conclusion:

"When it comes to gaming performance, the 9700K and 9900K remain the best
performing CPUs on the market"

"Ultimately, while AMD still lags behind Intel in gaming performance, the gap
has narrowed immensely, to the point that Ryzen CPUs are no longer something
to be dismissed if you want to have a high-end gaming machine. Intel's
performance advantage is rather limited here – and for the power-
conscientious, AMD is delivering better efficiency at this point – so while
they may not always win out as the very best choice for absolute peak gaming
performance, the 3rd gen Ryzens are still very much a very viable option worth
considering."

This isnt to take anything away from AMD and people will finally consider them
now as a serious alternative, but I would not call this a "curb stomping"

A curb stomp would be Intel vs pre-Ryzen AMD

~~~
madeofpalk
AMD processors are reasonably cheaper, draw less power and get less hot for
extremely competitive performance (especially in multi-core where they
exceed).

I guess it depends on where you're defining 'curb stomped'. As a whole, I
think AMD is besting Intel here.

------
aristophenes
The new Ryzens perform very well, it's even more impressive considering that
the Intel chips did not have the Fallout/Zombieload mitigations applied[1],
that come with significant performance degradations.

LinusTechTips, that used to somewhat favor Intel, did their benchmarks with
current patches to everything:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3aEv3EzMyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3aEv3EzMyQ)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1147867180282699782](https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1147867180282699782)

~~~
jchw
Hah, LTT is really milking the hype in that one. Good show.

I can't say they're wrong to be excited, though. When's the last time a
processor launch _really_ mattered to anyone? The improvements to compile time
alone have me sold, though it will be tough to pick between 12c/16c.

The biggest component missing in these reviews is where and when I can find
these things on shelves. Especially as someone not terribly concerned with
gaming performance.

~~~
aristophenes
You can buy them in most MicroCenters today, if they did not all sell out.
Amazon has a 3600 and Newegg has 3600 and 3700 but not 3800 and 3900 (don't
know if they sold out or if they just don't have them yet).

The short answer is they are available now, if they don't get sold out from
your preferred retailer.

~~~
ksec
>You can buy them in most MicroCenters today

Off Topic, do people still buy components in Retail store and not online? I
could understand people want to shop clothes, food, thing that you need to
take a look first in Real. But Electronics, especially components, don't
matter.

~~~
jchw
You can get things same day, returns/replacements are much easier, price
matching is often an option, you don’t have to worry about trickery with
Amazon sellers or ambiguous listings (like laptops with similar yearly models)
and sometimes outright lying listings, mixups, shipping problems (I had an
entire computer go to the wrong apartment,) package theft (had a Unifi USG
stolen even though it had been sitting for under a couple hours!) and honestly
more.

Heavy stuff through shipping can be expensive if you can’t get it through
Amazon Prime. Shipping with Li-ion batteries is restricted to ground shipping.

I _still_ ship many of my electronics, but yeah actually it’s not a wash.
Especially if you are buying used stuff, I find eBay is often a ripoff.

------
ucha
I'm very impressed by the performance of the 3700X given its extremely low
power consumption. AMD has historically delivered subpar mobile processors
that had a higher power consumption that Intel counterparts. A processor with
a TDP of half the 3700X's will be very competitive if the graphics module
consumption can be contained. I'm looking forward to Zen 2 mobile CPUs
although I do not know when they will be announced.

~~~
washadjeffmad
Agreed. And Bulldozer was an ultimately underwhelming run, but AMD still set
the stage during that time for many technologies and practices that continue
to raise the tide for consumers. Mantle API was opened to Khronos and became
Vulkan, and opening their hardware has allowed open driver development to keep
parity with the proprietary, negating the GPU vendor as middleman problem.

And not all of the A-series were awful, but it seems those were the favored
ones for OEMs to put in the very popular $300 Ultrabook competitors. I'd also
hazard to say that if we went back and benchmarked the Intel CPUs of that time
with the mitigations of today, they wouldn't have fared better than AMD's.

We've come a long way from the world before smartphones, parallelism, SoC, and
affordable flash, and I'm just glad we're finally here.

~~~
ohithereyou
>opening their hardware has allowed open driver development to keep parity
with the proprietary, negating the GPU vendor as middleman problem

Except until recently, AMD GPU performance was a bag of wet farts for both
industry and gaming.

~~~
onli
That's not accurate. AMD only recently lost the ability to compete with Nvidia
in the high end for a while. But they still had cards like the RX 580, that
are the best option for their budget, and Fury, Vega and the Radeon VII all
were not slow. They just were not better than Nvidia's cards. See
[https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/gpu](https://www.pc-
kombo.com/benchmark/games/gpu) (I run a meta benchmark that includes those
cards).

------
0xcde4c3db
The improvement in the Dolphin benchmark (which probably indicates
improvements in other JIT-based emulators/runtimes) is pretty impressive,
especially compared to first-generation Ryzen. For a while that benchmark had
every AMD processor performing worse than every Intel processor in a given
review.

If the Chromium compilation benchmark (which reportedly was screwed up and
will be added later) shows similar improvements, I think this generation will
finally convince me to replace my Ivy Bridge box.

edit: I just saw the Phoronix benchmarks, which show LLVM compilation going
from 547 seconds on 2700X to 406 seconds on 3700X. I'm not sure whether those
were run with the same chipset/RAM/storage versus the 2700X result being an
older one pulled out of the database, though.

~~~
phire
Dolphin is probably very happy with the improvements to branch prediction.

As for compiling, Gamers Nexus' review of the six core 3600 had it absolutely
trashing other CPUs (33% faster than the 9900k, 11% faster than the 2700x) in
their GCC self compilation test.

------
lettergram
The AMD subreddit has a megathread with all the comparisons on it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c9ncvh/3rd_generation_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c9ncvh/3rd_generation_ryzen_reviews_megathread/)

------
lettergram
It doesn't appear to work well with Linux, aka wont boot. At least current /
new distributions of Linux... (at least ones utilizing systemd)

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-37...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-3700x-3900x-linux&num=2)

~~~
shmerl
I suspect this will be fixed soon, since chips just came out, and a lot more
people will look at it, besides AMD themselves.

------
arithma
Terribly tangential, but is there a possibility at all that the higher core
counts will converge with GPU core counts in the future, in a large CPU, many
smaller medium cores, and hundreds/thousands of micro cores.

Programming those would require a new paradigm possibly.

~~~
mantap
In that case it would make more sense to move the smaller cores to a PCI card
a la Xeon Phi.

The programming paradigm to enable this exists, it's just pure functional
programming. But people are intimidated by Haskell.

We need more investment in functional programming before the dream of a 1000
core computer can be realized.

~~~
yvdriess
On paper.

Parallel programming in Haskell is hard. GHC's style of by-demand lazy
evaluation and the ubiquitous use of monads impose a lot of sequential
execution.

There has been good research around parallel FP programming languages, but
that was mostly around the 90s (Sisal, pH)

------
ksec
A lot of the software still has optimisation with Intel specific in mind, and
for AMD to score close or equal to Intel in most single threaded benchmarks is
an amazing achievement.

The Radeon 5700 is also amazing and seems to be better than the new / Price
Reduced 2060 Super.

I am wondering what are the chances of Apple choosing AMD in near future.

------
passive
What's most exciting to me is how the new processors seem to do particularly
well in less optimized benchmarks. From my experience these are more
representative of day-to-day PC use, and I feel like the last decade of CPU
releases has focused more on identifying which well optimized applications
perform well i on which processors.

Ryzen 3 seems like a very strong improvement to general computing.

------
p1mrx
Why didn't they measure system idle power consumption? That is a key metric
for energy efficiency, since home computers spend a lot of time doing nothing.

~~~
jccalhoun
pc perspective rand idle power consumption benchmarks:
[https://pcper.com/2019/07/amd-
ryzen-7-3700x-ryzen-9-3900x-re...](https://pcper.com/2019/07/amd-
ryzen-7-3700x-ryzen-9-3900x-review/#ftoc-heading-16)

~~~
p1mrx
So they're about 10 watts better than last-gen Ryzen, but still 10 watts worse
than Intel.

------
snvzz
The radeon 5700/xt is also amazing.

That really was unexpected, unlike the CPUs which we already knew would be
good.

~~~
bobcostas55
The 5700 costs almost $100 more than the Vega 56 while being just a few %
faster. The price:performance ratio on the new lineup of graphic cards is
worse than the previous generation...

~~~
jagger27
And according to Gamer's Nexus the reference blower cooler is abysmal.

~~~
m0zg
"Abysmal" in what way? Enthusiast sites often confuse sufficient cooling with
under-cooling. Cooling becomes more efficient when there's a high temperature
differential. So engineers set up fan control so it only _really_ begins to
kick in when the chip reaches 80C or thereabouts. Enthusiasts often confuse
this with insufficient cooling. The chips themselves, however, don't really
mind.

~~~
ben-schaaf
IIRC it was 95C under load with 52db. So loud and hot. Normalising fan speed
to 40db made it throttle. I'd certainly call that abismal.

~~~
m0zg
That does sound pretty bad, if true, but more on the noise front rather than
temp, assuming 95C is Tjunction and not Tcase.

------
imagetic
Well, they sold out instantly! Good for AMD. I'll be excited if I have the
opportunity to build a workstation using a 3900X. That's such a sweet spot for
a 12 core to price for media work. Unless someone buys me a Mac Pro, I'll
probably be crawling back to Windows / AMD with this release now that they
have motherboards with TB3 and 10GbE on them.

------
kyriakos
3700X looks like a great CPU for an all around work station at 65W and 16
threads.

------
polskibus
It seems that 9700K still beats AMD in many workloads. I wonder if the
comparison is with spectre et. al. mitigations on Intel turned on or off?

~~~
neogodless
It probably is, though they didn't explicitly state that. Windows 1903 is
used, and AMD's latest strategy to improve Windows performance is in place.

Basically, if the higher clock of the 9700K can be put to use in a single-
threaded application, then that chip can still come out on top. But in enough
scenarios, the Ryzen 3700X and 3900X are quite competitive.

~~~
beatgammit
Single threaded performance isn't really that interesting anymore except for
some specific gaming benchmarks, and even in gaming, you're unlikely to be
bottlenecked by single threaded performance (though memory latency could be an
issue).

~~~
MikusR
Web browsing is still single threaded. Games still have a very busy main
thread.

~~~
hajile
1 UI thread !== only 1 thread

Firefox and chrome use a half-dozen or so threads parsing and compiling JS
code so it loads quickly. Firefox's Quantum work adds a lot of threads for
rendering as well. In addition, service workers, web workers, and Wasm all
spawn additional processes which serve the same purpose if you aren't sharing
memory directly.

That said, the Phoronix Selenium tests show AMD ahead by quite a bit.
(source)[[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-37...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-3700x-3900x-linux&num=6)]

~~~
MikusR
So Servo is just snake-oil?

~~~
hajile
Firefox's quantum work comes from their servo work, so I'd say it's been
valuable.

------
FpUser
Not to worry. Dev community will quickly release new and shiny interpreter of
interpreter. That'll take care of performance gains ;)

------
madengr
Are these actually on sale yet? I don’t seem them listed an Amazon.

I’ll be using this soon to build a MAME arcade cabinet, probably along with
the new GPU.

One thing Intel has the advantage is in the engineering desktop. I use a
couple of programs that are compiled with Intel compilers. Also one that uses
AVX 512. Will Intel compilers optimize for AMD?

~~~
sbov
Newegg seems to have the 3600x and 3700x for sale, but the 3800x and 3900x
currently say out of stock.

------
gigatexal
Anyone know when 3950x reviews are due out and better yet when the chip might
hit stock here in the EU?

~~~
neogodless
The launch date is in September.

------
jnordwick
Can anybody explain the poor memory latency numbers? Is this due to the new L3
and chiplet design or is it from the larger L3? Intel chunks their LL cache
out too, so I wasnt expecting such a big difference.

Also AMD got stomped on the system performance testing (those tests seem like
they might be difficult to unpack into individual reasons given their
breadth). Why would that be the case.

And WOW. Any vectorised workloads written for AVX-512... Besides the larger
operand sizes, the instruction set changed seem to matter hugely. I did a
small not using avx512 too effectively scan hash table for the keys, and it
made a huge difference too.

Still considering the top Ryzen chip for a sorely need new desktop, but I
don't play games so it would mostly be a cost thing.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
If I understand correctly, the higher memory latency is a between-chiplet
problem for the most part, with the highest latencies being between CCX's.

If you _don 't_ game, I see absolutely no reason not to buy Ryzen, but you
might not need to buy an X570 mobo.

~~~
jnordwick
Intel's L3 is sharded out into 2mb chunks on a ring bus too so I would have
expected more comparable numbers. Is Intel's QPI link and cache coherency
implemention that much better?

------
ajross
So... not to sound like a naysayer here.. I mean, I do work for Intel, but I'm
genuinely interested in the product.

Are these really, y'know, _launched_ launched? I can't find any 3000 series
CPUs for sale on either Amazon or Newegg... Who's stocking them?

~~~
demilicious
Already sold out most places, it seems.

~~~
ajross
But who stocks it? Amazon and Newegg don't (i.e. you can't look the products
up at all as of right now, even just to see that it's out of stock), which
implies that they're filling the channel only with exclusive retailers or
OEMs. Or, less charitably, that this is a paper launch with product to demo
but not to actually sell...

~~~
onli
The less broadly reviewed 3600X (which should completely beat the i5-9600K) is
still in stock on Amazon.com, [https://www.amazon.com/AMD-
Ryzen-3600X-12-Thread-Processor/d...](https://www.amazon.com/AMD-
Ryzen-3600X-12-Thread-Processor/dp/B07SQBFN2D). 3600, 3700X and 3900X are
completely missing there though. But Newegg and B&H list those (Newegg also
has the 3600X in stock), so the others will be in stock at one point. In
Germany alternate.de has them listed as being shipped in a few days (it's
already possible to buy them now), with the Ryzen 5 3600 being in stock
currently. So while there is limited supply, the hype and demand around those
processors is big and they are somewhat available, this is no paper launch.

------
dmix
> Incorporating a significantly upgraded CPU architecture and built using
> TSMC's latest generation manufacturing process

How much of their innovation is due to TSMC vs AMDs in house research?

~~~
gumby
Interesting that they didn't choose Global Foundries. I guess splitting that
off really was worth it.

One of Intel's big strength is their fabs. But perhaps that's becoming another
drag on execution?

~~~
wmf
Global Foundries will never have 7 nm and Intel has failed to deliver 10 nm
for years, so yeah, being tied to one fab looks like a bad idea.

~~~
0x64
Intel's 10 nm was delivered early last year in the form of one U-series CPU
with a broken iGPU - not that it were a great chip, but they did deliver. Ice
Lake mobile CPUs, built on the 10 nm+ process, are shipping as we speak, with
Dell's XPS lineup already being available with said chips in them.

~~~
wtallis
Got a source for Ice Lake products that are actually available? Dell's XPS
7390 was supposed to be one of the first, and it's still "coming soon":
[https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-
xps-13-2-in...](https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-
xps-13-2-in-1/spd/xps-13-7390-2-in-1-laptop)

------
spitfire
I'd like to see a comparison running different speeds of memory, different CAS
latencies, etc. Can you run this thing safely with 3200mhz? or do you really
need 3600mhz?

~~~
onli
There is one from a german magazine,
[https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/artikel/hardware/proze...](https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/artikel/hardware/prozessoren/50163-amds-
ryzen-7-3700x-und-ryzen-9-3900x-im-test.html?start=13). You can use DDR4-3200
(that's also shown by most other benchmarks using that speed), but you get a
performance increase from using DDR4-3600.

------
polskibus
According to [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14605/the-and-
ryzen-3700x-390...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14605/the-and-
ryzen-3700x-3900x-review-raising-the-bar/5)

They are rerunning all tests due to a mobo firmware upgrade showing non
trivial improvements in turbo/boost mode.

There is still a chance that Intel with be beaten, even without taking
ZombieLoad etc. patches into consideration on Intel.

------
tyingq
Curious why the TDP is the same for the 8, 12, and 16 core. I assume it's
binned parts, but the switched off cores still consume power? Or some other
reason?

~~~
AdrianB1
The reported TDP is the designed TDP for the motherboard power delivery, not
the measured consumption of each processor. To keep the number of TDP values
low and to allow motherboard makers design a small number of variants, TDP
values are rounded up to 65W, 95W and 105W. That means everything that goes
above 65W in real life will be classified as 95W, even if the real consumption
is 70 or 75W.

~~~
rasz
Not really. Intel made TDP numbers meaningless long time ago, AMD finally
joined Intel with Zen2. While Zen1 180W TDP Threadrippers actually did consume
180W from the power supply, Zen2 take x1.5 the rated power similar to intel
counterparts like "95W" 9900K consuming 150-200W.

~~~
makomk
Actual power cap for Zen2 seems to be 1.35x TDP, but the speculation about
them choosing a small number of TDP categories and sticking all their
processors into them sounds right aside from that.

------
harry8
What's the inter-thread latency on these things?

~~~
snvzz
If you mean context switch latency, Phoronix's review has measurements. It's
an order of magnitude lower than Intel's.

~~~
harry8
No. Two threads, each running on its own core. Send an int64 from one to
another (and usually back)

~~~
snvzz
So, inter-process communication? There's this:
[https://i.redd.it/2z5580uugja31.jpg](https://i.redd.it/2z5580uugja31.jpg)

AMD does much better than intel, as long as the peer is in the same CCX.

For the case where it is not, zen2 has improved considerably relative to
zen/zen+.

------
shmerl
What's the story with the chipset fan noise? Is it a big issue on new
motherboards?

------
myrandomcomment
I plan to build a new gaming machine on AMD. Civ6 with a huge world might even
work well. Fingers crossed :)

