
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Beats Intel’s Core i7-9700K in Cinebench - areejs
https://www.techquila.co.in/amd-ryzen-5-3600-vs-intel/
======
mrb
Since 2000, AMD has often beaten Intel on _multi-threaded_ workloads, but
never _single-threaded_ (at comparable clocks). This bench shows AMD beating
Intel on _both_! That's what's incredibly notable here. The last time it
happened was 20 years ago with the AMD K7.

Now Zen 2 seems to overall beat Intel on every metric: single-threaded perf,
multi-threaded perf, perf/dollar, perf/watt. No matter how you look at it, Zen
2 comes out on top.¹ Very impressive.

Man the folks at Intel must feel the heat.

¹ Except perf/socket when competing with the Xeon 9200, but that's just a PR
stunt no one cares about:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/113576693566724096...](https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1135766935667240960)

~~~
nolok
You want notable ? AMD is currently beating Intel on price, single threaded
perf, multi threaded perf, TDP/power usage at equivalent performance AND on
many of the "little pluses on the side" (more PCI-e lanes, ECC supports, ...).

When Zen first came is was a huge deal, but it merely put them as a real
competitors, with a decent advantage on many cases, reinforced with Zen+. But
Zen 2 put them ahead in almost every category, and in all markets;
threadripper and EPYC are just as strong in their areas.

Either Intel has something strong about to appear, or they're going to face a
truly difficult few years with customers going AMD now that it's not merely
"one generation of chip" that was good. It feels like getting their 10nm
working will not be enough by itself.

~~~
derefr
> Either Intel has something strong about to appear

People are hypothesizing this to be true given that Apple is putting Intel
rather than AMD chips in the Mac Pro, and Apple doesn’t _usually_ make dumb
purchasing decisions, but _does_ sometimes have private access to product
roadmaps.

~~~
hajile
There are a lot of reasons for Apple to choose Intel.

Apple has a lot of optimizations for Intel at the moment from the instruction
set down to the motherboards and chipsets. A great example is all the work
they do in undervolting mobile chips so they perform better (when the latest
MBPs shipped with this disabled, everyone really complained). Re-writing all
that software definitely has non-trivial R&D costs.

When making a new motherboard design, a ton of stuff simply gets reused and
moved around. Switch to a different chipset and you start all over for a lot
of stuff. Even if AMD were 10-20% faster overall, their current "fast enough"
Intel chips would still win out.

AMD's zen+ 3000 mobile chips don't compete with Intel in single-clock
performance, clockspeeds, or total power draw. With the exception of the mac
pro, Apple's entire lineup uses mobile processors. In addition, Intel probably
gives amazing discounts to Apple. Zen serves them best as a way to squeeze out
an even better deal.

A final consideration is ARM. Given the performance characteristics of A12,
Apple most certainly has their sights set on using some variant in their
laptops in the not-too-distant future. They already run their phone chips in
their macbooks as the T2 chip. They are probably working on the timing to
allow those chips to run more than the touchbar and IO.

~~~
pmjordan
Pretty good analysis overall, although this part is not true:

> With the exception of the mac pro, Apple's entire lineup uses mobile
> processors.

In fact their entire desktop lineup now uses desktop-grade CPUs. (except
possibly some entry-level iMacs that weren't subject to the recent refresh)

    
    
      * iMac Pro: Workstation processor (Xeon)
      * iMac 27": Socketed desktop processor (e.g. Core i9-9900KF in top config)
      * iMac 21": Socketed desktop processor (e.g. Core i7-8700)
      * Mac Mini: Soldered embedded desktop processor (e.g. Core i7-8700B)

~~~
hajile
Yeah, it looks like they switched over to desktop chips around 2017 (they
still use laptop memory though -- except for imac pro).

An i9-9900K has a 95w TDP, but Anandtech puts the real load number at around
170w TDP. I've seen people undervolt these down to around 110-120w in the
4.7GHz range. I imagine Apple's dynamic undervolting and custom motherboard
can shave 10% or so off that total while their dynamic undervolting can go
much lower with fewer cores and lower frequencies. While even that isn't going
to make their tiny cooler keep sustained loads from throttling, it could get
much closer.

~~~
pmjordan
By "laptop memory" you mean SO-DIMMs; the only significant difference to full-
size DIMMs is, well, size. Voltage and frequency tends to be the same, leaving
aside extreme overclocker's RAM.

In c't magazine's review of the current iMac, they found that the whole
machine appears to have a power limit which is shared by CPU and GPU, so yeah,
Apple are definitely doing something fancy in that regard.

------
criley2
I'm happy that AMD really seems to be surging again. It was finally time for
the ol' mobo+cpu+ram rebuild for me recently, and I ended up replacing my
second generation core i5 2500k with a new Ryzen 5 and I could not be happier.
The price was spot on compared to how much more I would have paid for an intel
chip and board. I believe I got the Ryzen 5 2600, so one generation back from
this 3600 I assume.

~~~
Sileni
Did a 2600x / Vega 56 build recently, and I'm honestly impressed with the
value. Total under $1k after tax. I would have spent that before getting a GPU
if I had gone Intel.

------
127
Since nobody yet mentioned it, just going to remind everyone that a 16 core,
32 thread desktop chip for Zen 2 will exist, and be priced under 800 dollars.

~~~
teolandon
Source on that <800 dollar figure? Is it all just leaks?

~~~
neogodless
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/14516/amd-16-core-
ryzen-9-395...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14516/amd-16-core-
ryzen-9-3950x-up-to-4-7-ghz-105w-coming-september)

Announced and priced at $749.

------
wil421
Anyone have any experience with AMD and ECC memory? I was going to do an AMD
build for a NAS but the support for ecc was kinda like:

“We enabled it but didn’t test it and we don’t guarantee it will work.”

~~~
starman100
That's our impression, too. There are AMD Motherboards that take ECC memory,
but we've never seen them act on ECC errors that were uncorrectable (the
correctably errors are handled, but uncorrectable errors aren't reported!).

We will only use Intel Xeon for our work because of this. You'll get about 1
bit flip/GB/year. With 128 GB or more in our standard builds, this would be
more than 2/week. We just can't have that uncertainty in the data we provide.

And while Cinebench is a useful benchmark, all our heavy number crunching is
done on NVidia 2080 architecture so the fact that AMD may have an advantage on
some cases isn't that interesting for us. Perhaps if you're a gamer, who
doesn't care about an occasional bitflip, looking to squeeze the last drop of
value out for his dollar....

~~~
fabian2k
If you want to compare to Xeons, the comparison aren't the consumer CPUs this
is about, the AMD equivalent are the Epyc CPUs.

AMD doesn't disable ECC support entirely on consumer CPUs like Intel does, but
as far as I know it's also not officially supported and guaranteed to work,
it's up to the mainboard vendor how to handle this. In the Intel case you
simply can't get ECC with non-Xeon CPUs.

~~~
paol
> can't get ECC with non-Xeon CPUs

Not quite. There are some Core branded CPUs that support ECC, including
funnily enough the i3's.

~~~
snuxoll
> There are some Core branded CPUs that support ECC, including funnily enough
> the i3's.

Hell, there are Celeron and Pentium chips that they have it enabled on. Not
because they expect desktop users to buy them, but because it allows them to
keep their Xeon brand premium while letting OEM's like Dell advertise the T140
"starting at $549" (in a configuration nobody would ever want to buy).

~~~
paulmd
It depends on the use. For a home server or even a small office fileserver,
you don't need massive threading capability, and in fact some of those low-
core-count parts are fairly highly clocked, which makes them faster.

For example in the 7000 series, the i3 7100 has a 3.9 GHz base clock and you
have to go almost to the top Xeon (the equivalent of an i7) to get anything
equivalent. And even then it's a turbo, not a base clock, so in principle the
motherboard should not let you turbo forever (PL2 time limit may actually be
enforced on a server chipset).

Also depending on workload you may not even be able to exploit an increased
threading capability anyway, without 10 GbE on the box, or link aggregation
capability.

~~~
snuxoll
Oh, the i3's are fine for a general small business workload - compared to the
socket-compatible Xeon's all they're really lacking is extra PCIe lanes if you
need them. That's ultimately what Intel uses to segregate the Xeon and HEDT
chips from their mainstream platform, after all.

The Celeron and Pentium chips that have infiltrated entry-level servers are
absolute trash though.

------
koolba
Any plans for AMD to release first party NUC form factor devices with Ryder
chips? I bet I’m not the only one that both loves that form factor and also
amazed at the perf numbers and core counts of these CPUs.

~~~
bizarref00l
Not sure if mini-itx fits your taste but epyc 3000 may be an option.
[https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-8ct-
ln4f-revi...](https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-8ct-ln4f-review-
with-amd-epyc-3201-in-mitx/)

~~~
officialchicken
M-itx cases are about 7.5 liters at the smallest (XBox size) although some
specialty cases exist in the 5-6 liter range; a NUC is typically about 1
liter.

~~~
kllrnohj
Those cases tend to have full-size GPU support. You can find smaller cases for
APU usages, like this one: [https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/Mini-
ITX/101/SC1...](https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/Mini-
ITX/101/SC101i)

But you can also find Mini-STX boards like this one:
[https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/amd-fs-
fp5v](https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/amd-fs-fp5v) which should
then fit in something like this:
[https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=708&area=en](https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=708&area=en)

You can also find some very small Mini-ITX cases on things like aliexpress:
[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32994653418.html?spm=2114.se...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32994653418.html?spm=2114.search0204.3.8.265f7ce7NU5hDB&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0%2Csearchweb201602_10_10065_10130_10068_10547_319_10546_317_10548_10545_10696_10084_453_454_10083_10618_10307_537_536_10059_10884_10887_321_322_10103%2Csearchweb201603_52%2CppcSwitch_0&algo_expid=ddd3c89e-1b65-4477-a472-c2048af69af2-4&algo_pvid=ddd3c89e-1b65-4477-a472-c2048af69af2)

------
std_throwaway
I'll wait till the embargo is lifted and detailed benchmarking will be
available.

The date is rumored to be the 7th of July.

~~~
neogodless
It's not even a rumor. They announced the date.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
Calling it a rumor makes the knowledge sound more exciting.

Similar to how product details are no longer "announced" or "released", but
rather "leaked".

------
flyinghamster
I must say, I've been quite happy with my now "old" 7/1700\. Between it and
the NVMe SSD, it's been quite a snappy machine. Even before Zen, I preferred
AMD for my builds just for the bang-for-the-buck. It's great to see that
they're cranking up the performance per dollar to new heights.

------
pingec
Are the Intel scores from these benchmarks with meltdown, spectre etc.
mitigations enabled or disabled?

------
akbT
Is it known yet whether the 32-core Threadripper will be discontinued or
whether a potential 32-core 7nm Epyc will run at higher clock rates?

I'm searching for the fastest C++ compile machine, that includes linking
(which is single core).

~~~
wmf
AMD said Threadripper 3000 is coming; I speculate there will be
24/32/48/64-core SKUs.

~~~
tracker1
That'd be my guess as well... I wouldn't that be surprised to see a 16 core
entry too (get onto TR platform and upgrade later option). Though the $750 for
a 3950X is already pushing my budget, I might consider a 24-32 core for under
$1200 if that's where it lands. System budget around $3500.

------
ivl
Seeing that screenshot and how high well the i7-6900k hangs with much more
recent hardware impresses me. I'm quite glad I went with Broadwell E. Probably
means I'll be looking to upgrade around Zen 2+.

~~~
jcelerier
as the owner of a 4.3ghz 6900k which I already find way too slow... _cries_

~~~
ivl
I've had my 6850k stable at 4.2ghz and I'm not finding it too slow, but I've
also got a pair of servers I offload anything I can to, so that has definitely
had an impact on my perception of how fast it is.

But I'd say it's far from being too slow. The boot times and load times for
most software is fine for my use cases.

It was just too expensive of a build to justify an upgrade so soon.

------
xupybd
This is good news but how many daily tasks come close to being represented by
Cinebench?

Is Ryzen a better choice for a daily driver?

~~~
theon144
Depends on your daily driving :)

For web browsing and playing video (i.e. 99% of all users' "daily driving"), I
don't think it even matters to consider these sorts of benchmarks.

I do edit video and work with 3D graphics almost daily though, so this is sort
of comparison is very relevant.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Not worth considering these benchmarks because there’s no effect, or because
the system requirements for browsing the web are too low overall for there to
be a perceptible difference?

In other words, of you were to actually measure page load speed, are you
saying the measirements would correlate with the benchmarks?

~~~
lunchables
My guess is that a 10ms difference in network latency would be a bigger impact
on page load times than the latest Zen2 vs Intel CPU.

In reality I think for general web browsing the difference, if it exists at
all, in either direction, would not be perceptible.

I know that's not EXACTLY what you're asking, but I think it's worth
mentioning the practical aspect as well.

~~~
jxcl
That seems to have been the "common wisdom" for a while now, but I'm not so
sure that it holds so much today. With everybody coming out with bloated SPAs
is it possible that faster processors will start to be required for normal web
work?

------
studmuffin650
Jim Keller strikes again. I swear every place this guy goes, groundbreaking
chip architecture work is done.

~~~
Wheaties466
It looks like he left AMD in 2015 and as of last year works for intel...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_\(engineer\))

~~~
eatbitseveryday
Yes, he’s head of our architecture group now.

Source: I work at Intel currently.

------
Nursie
So it looks like the 3700X should be reasonably expected to be on a par with
or better than the i9-9900K?

And that's very much in the middle of the zen 2 offerings... and at a
significantly lower price.

~~~
Ratiofarmings
Yes. The only question left is single thread perf. Over a range of
applications. That's what everyone is waiting to see. Part of that will
include how well it handles fast memory. Currently intel is in a different
league when it comes to that.

~~~
imtringued
The IPC is almost identical. The biggest difference will be the maximum
clockspeed. Overclocked Intel CPUs can easily reach 5GHz but AMD CPUs usually
are between 4.4 to 4.7.Ghz which still is a 10% difference.

~~~
Nursie
Overclocked CPUs are not exactly a mass-market thing are they? I mean, outside
of a few niches, does anyone bother?

~~~
vbezhenar
9900K has 5GHz turbo boost out of box, you just need to have enough cooling. I
would say that best CPUs are not a mass market anyway and if you're talking
about mass market, you should think about performance per buck and AMD beats
Intel there since Zen introduction.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> 9900K has 5GHz turbo boost out of box, you just need to have enough cooling.

Anecdata here, but...

Depending on your type of workload, you don't need anything more than your
typical heat sink and fan. Using Prime95 as a torture test, my 9900K will
clock to 5 Ghz just fine on just air cooling without thermal throttling unless
I'm doing the small FFT test, which creates a workload that fits entirely
within CPU cache. I'm not sure if I'd consider that much of a real-world
benchmark though.

~~~
vbezhenar
For example on iMac you won't have 5 GHz. Video:
[https://youtu.be/f_TTGYC4tmo](https://youtu.be/f_TTGYC4tmo) it runs around
3.9 GHz for prolonged test, while keeping (IMO) dangerous temperature of 93C.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
Ridiculous that the person who posted that video is insisting that it's not
undergoing thermal throttling. Apple is deliberately underclocking it to
reduce the heat it generates.

------
andy_ppp
I want to see performance between Zen 2 and Intel with security mitigations
enabled on Intel (AMD don't need any with Zen 2).

Should be interesting and I suspect on even games AMD will be 10%+ ahead.

------
vkaku
I'm quite excited with what AMD has pushed on socket AM4 over the last three
years.

Come September they're going to release the 3950x,and if folks can wait a bit,
you get 16 cores/32 threads on one socket.

But even on a budget, the 3600G looks like a great buy with Navi 20+3600 on
chip.

The deal is that they have reasonable spectre mitigations working since last
few gens, and Intel has to fix this if they need to be competitive. Not to
mention standardizing a chipset.

~~~
BorRagnarok
I haven't seen that 3600G. I've seen announcements for a 3400G and a 3200G,
and although I'd love a APU with 20 Navi cores in it, I don't think it'll
happen this time around. Maybe in a year or so.

~~~
tracker1
IIRC the 3000 G series is 12nm Zen+ with some extra tweaks, not Zen2... same
for the 3000 mobile series.

~~~
BorRagnarok
That's true. Same amount of cores, same amount of Navi cores. Clock speeds are
better and iirc cache is bigger. I'm curious as to what AMD will put in their
APU's once they move them to 7nm.

------
kitchenkarma
I need single core performance and I am maxing out 9900K @ 5.1. If AMD proves
to be faster than that, show me where to pay.

~~~
iaml
If your priority is single-threaded performance, why did you choose 9900k? I
was under impression 9700k is single-thread king.

~~~
DiabloD3
9600k, 9700k, and 9900k are all single threaded king, effectively, at least
until Zen 2 launches on 7/7.

9600k has a 3.7ghz stock base clock, 9700k and 9900k have identical base
clocks of 3.6; in order, their stock single core turbos are 4.6, 4.9, and 5.0.

Now, you could be asking yourself "but Diablo, in single threaded, the 9900k
is 8.6% faster, and the 9700k is 6.5% faster than the 9600k, respectively".
They're all k parts, just overclock it the tiny bit of the way for a fraction
of the price ($230 vs $410 vs $490), and the 9600k has far more thermal and
power budget per-core to play with than the other two do.

I almost built a new desktop with a 9600k, the $230 6/6 part that shames (in
both single and multithreaded) the highest end $340 or $350 4/8 parts from the
previous four generations (4770k, 4790k, 6700k, 7700k); vs the $360 8700k
(6/12), it performs identically in single threaded, and illustrates that
hyperthreading only gains you about 25% extra performance _if_ you can
saturate all 12 threads.

Remember, these are desktop chips, you are very unlikely to ever need more
than 8 threads (and use them effectively), even if you game. If you happen to
have a use case where you can easily saturate >8 threads, anything LGA115x is
probably inappropriate for you anyways.

However, with the 9000 series release, Intel admitted AMD scared the fuck out
of them, and re-released Coffee Lake at a lower price with some tweaks in
speed and core/thread count because they were afraid of Zen 2 being a success;
their fears were warranted.

The $250 3600x (a 6/12 part) beats the 9600k in single threaded, widely beats
it in multithreaded, and has PCI-E 4.0, with an extra 4 CPU-bound PCI-E lanes
(20 vs 16 on AM4 vs LGA115x), and uses a higher DDR4 clock (stock 3200 vs
2666, with an effective maximum of possibly over 5000 vs around 4133; AMD's
IMC seems to continue to be effective at lower CAS latency than Intel's is).

Side note: 4790k, a Devil's Canyon part, is Intel's stand-in for the non-
existent 5700k.

Devil's Canyon is a Haswell Refresh part that got a second set of 4000 series
model numbers instead of 5000 series. Haswell Refresh was a Broadwell core
paired with a DDR3 controller, fabbed at Haswell's node size; there are no
architectural changes between Broadwell and Haswell in the core, only major
changes was the decrease in node size and the swap to DDR4, the core design
remained nearly identical. Broadwell largely ignored the desktop, focusing on
LGA2011 and mobile parts instead, leaving Haswell Refresh to fill in the gap
with the desktop and Xeon E3s, and the only notable exceptions being a small
set of Iris Pro GPU parts.

~~~
BeeOnRope
> there are no architectural changes between Broadwell and Haswell in the core

There were certainly _some_ changes. The gather instructions were dramatically
improved, taking ~5 uops instead of ~30 and with much better throughput.

Conditional moves only take 1 uop in Broadwell, down from 2.

Some other changes listed here:

[http://users.atw.hu/instlatx64/HaswellvsBroadwell.txt](http://users.atw.hu/instlatx64/HaswellvsBroadwell.txt)

Intel's tick-tock model was never black and white: even the "ticks" (node
shrinks) received some changes and even new instructions.

~~~
DiabloD3
Sorry, I should have written major changes. In practice, benchmarking
identical Haswell vs Haswell Refresh (that, again, are effectively DDR3
Broadwells), such as with an E3-1230v3 vs a E3-1231v3, I did not see anything
that wasn't within a reasonable margin of error.

------
harry8
Anyone know where to find an inter-thread latency benchmark comparison?

------
fibers
does this mean they broke the embargo for 7/7??

~~~
trynumber9
The source, Videocardz, deals in leaks. Someone broke the NDA but I don't see
anything in the picture that would reveal who.

