AMD vs Intel Single threading?

[Ice Tea]

How well is AMD currently doing for single threading compared to intel as some people seem to feel it's got better but still not as good as Intel?

 

[4K8KW10]

How well is AMD currently doing for single threading compared to intel as some people seem to feel it's got better but still not as good as Intel?

Very well, so well that AMD tops the charts.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_3700x_ryzen_9_3900x_review,9.html

 

[Ice Tea]

A bottom end 200GE beating a I7 Haswell is pretty amazing.

Thanks for posting that.

 

[Grim5]

How well is AMD currently doing for single threading compared to intel as some people seem to feel it's got better but still not as good as Intel?

Depends on your definition of single thread.

If you mean IPC? Yes AMD is winning in the IPC race.
If you mean real world performance for a single core? Intel is still slightly in the lead due to it's high clock speeds.

 

[Journey]

Work carried out in X amount of time is what makes the difference. It's not a single variable that this is attributed too, be that clock speed or anything else.

If one processor can use a single thread/process and produce more work in the same time, it is faster regardless of the frequency it is running at.

 

[Grim5]

Work carried out in X amount of time is what makes the difference. It's not a single variable that this is attributed too, be that clock speed or anything else.

If one processor can use a single thread/process and produce more work in the same time, it is faster regardless of the frequency it is running at.

AMD wins in Cinebench single core tests because it finishes first, but it only tests IPC. Outside of Cinebench Intel performs single core tasks faster.

 

[sandys]

If you mean real world performance for a single core? Intel is still slightly in the lead due to it's high clock speeds.

Yup if you don' have a big multithread need there is still more performance on offer from Intel today due to higher clocks and if you are an overclocker there is no competition.

Work carried out in X amount of time is what makes the difference. It's not a single variable that this is attributed too, be that clock speed or anything else.

If one processor can use a single thread/process and produce more work in the same time, it is faster regardless of the frequency it is running at.

On a technical level yes a Ryzen does more per clock but the same process running on a 5Ghz 9900 vs a slower clocked Ryzen is going to be quicker on the Intel regardless.

 

[Journey]

On a technical level yes a Ryzen does more per clock but the same process running on a 5Ghz 9900 vs a slower clocked Ryzen is going to be quicker on the Intel regardless.

AMD wins in Cinebench single core tests because it finishes first, but it only tests IPC. Outside of Cinebench Intel performs single core tasks faster.

If I designed and made a CPU that runs at 100Hz, and it completes a task or continuously runs a task faster/in less time than a CPU that runs at 10GHz which one is faster?

The number of per-seconds (Hz) makes no difference if your design isn't as good, you compensate for a worse design with more Hz.

You guys must not have been around during the Pentium 4 days.

 

[Ice Tea]

The reason i asked is because i'm considering jumping over to AMD and had concerns with Linux as multithreading can still be flakey or non-existent with legacy apps.I've noticed Gnome-Boxes can do some freaky thing like suddenly using 1 core.

Slightly different single threading between the two i can live with.

 

[sandys]

If you are running Linux than multithreading should working just fine, most stuff I run on Unix is much better than windows variants as using resources. Single thread loads can still loose out by upto 20% but that is an outlier, it is just a few % in Intels favor in general.

If I designed and made a CPU that runs at 100Hz, and it completes a task or continuously runs a task faster/in less time than a CPU that runs at 10GHz which one is faster?

The number of per-seconds (Hz) makes no difference if your design isn't as good, you compensate for a worse design with more Hz.

You guys must not have been around during the Pentium 4 days.

Take gaming as an example if you want to feed a 2080Ti an Intels poor performing architecture is still better than Ryzen because it has higher clocks, so which CPU is better depends entirely on use case. There is a reason why Intel is top of nearly all gaming bench marks with their ancient architecture, it is because its runs at a high clock speed and it still bloody good.

If Ryzen ran at 5Ghz, it would absolutely dominate everything but it doesn't, so it doesn't.

 

[4K8KW10]

Take gaming as an example if you want to feed a 2080Ti an Intels poor performing architecture is still better than Ryzen because it has higher clocks, so which CPU is better depends entirely on use case. There is a reason why Intel is top of nearly all gaming bench marks with their ancient architecture, it is because its runs at a high clock speed and it still bloody good.

If Ryzen ran at 5Ghz, it would absolutely dominate everything but it doesn't, so it doesn't.

It isn't that the intel's architecture is better. It's that the game engines are optimised around intel's architecture.

Take for example the MT Framework engine developed by Capcom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MT_Framework
The 12-core/24-thread Ryzen 9 3900X is clearly better than the 8-core/16-thread i9-9900K.
As much as 13% faster both at stock and OCed.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1877-core-i9-9900k-vs-ryzen-9-3900x/


Game engines should change once PlayStation 5 is released in 2020.

 

[sandys]

Things don't happen overnight unfortunately as we discovered with muli threading, so in 10 years at the end of the next console cycle when engines have had iterations and optimizations that might be the case.

Lets face it you are unlikely to be unhappy with any of them, I am rocking gen1 Ryzen and it still does the business, Ryzen at least has some platform advantages and an upgrade path.

 

[4K8KW10]

Things don't happen overnight unfortunately as we discovered with muli threading, so in 10 years at the end of the next console cycle when engines have had iterations and optimizations that might be the case.

Lets face it you are unlikely to be unhappy with any of them, I am rocking gen1 Ryzen and it still does the business, Ryzen at least has some platform advantages and an upgrade path.

If the game engines don't change, that would mean the console would not run optimally and the performance would be lower than what's allowed by the maximum potential of the Zen architecture.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

Outside of Cinebench Intel performs single core tasks faster.

Oh you

 

[sandys]

If the game engines don't change, that would mean the console would not run optimally and the performance would be lower than what's allowed by the maximum potential of the Zen architecture.

That has always been the case engines are continually developed but often extensions on top of pre existing stuff, rarely ground up builds, so what works well enough will be left as is, as they are often bought in and of course time is better spent developing the games than the engine unless your business is game engines, so unless something is broken it is unlikely to change drastically, unless the company developing an engine for a game is forced to use an architecture and really have to optimise their own engines for performance as was the case in the days of cell.

Consoles running Ryzen will allow you to brute force almost anything such is the leap over what is in current gen, it's more power than they will know what to do with and of course the Gpu will never be fast enough so Cpu will be sat waiting, doubt any optimizations to a specific arch will be needed.

 

[4K8KW10]

That has always been the case engines are continually developed but often extensions on top of pre existing stuff, rarely ground up builds, so what works well enough will be left as is, as they are often bought in and of course time is better spent developing the games than the engine unless your business is game engines, so unless something is broken it is unlikely to change drastically, unless the company developing an engine for a game is forced to use an architecture and really have to optimise their own engines for performance as was the case in the days of cell.

Consoles running Ryzen will allow you to brute force almost anything such is the leap over what is in current gen, it's more power than they will know what to do with and of course the Gpu will never be fast enough so Cpu will be sat waiting, doubt any optimizations to a specific arch will be needed.

You need engines which utilise the CPU and which do not allow it to sit idle - there are enough computation problems which can be accelerated by the CPU.
We should not allow all the work to be done on the GPU solely, this is wasting of silicon.

 

[kitfit1]

AMD wins in Cinebench single core tests because it finishes first, but it only tests IPC. Outside of Cinebench Intel performs single core tasks faster.

You do realize the contradiction in that post ? Or maybe you don't ?

 

[Perfect_Chaos]

AMD still has higher latency as well. If you take notice of Digital Foundry benchmarks they show 10-30% behind Intel worst case in some games.

I guess that gap where they are still behind should just about disappear if Zen 3 gets the rumoured 17% boost. It is strange how AMD are faster or just as fast in everything else except gaming though.

 

[kitfit1]

AMD still has higher latency as well. If you take notice of Digital Foundry benchmarks they show 10-30% behind Intel worst case in some games.

I guess that gap where they are still behind should just about disappear if Zen 3 gets the rumoured 17% boost. It is strange how AMD are faster or just as fast in everything else except gaming though.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that AMD is behind in gaming. When you think about it, i bet the vast majority of games are compiled using an Intel compiler..................no way are they going to help AMD in gaming. What is a surprise though is just how close AMD is to Intel considering that handicap, plus off course Windows Scheduler still dosn't help matters a lot.
What i am looking forward to is next years new Microsoft flight Sim, AMD have had a huge input into it from both a software and hardware point. If it's released alongside a benchmark, then we can really see what the future has in store.

 

[Panos]

The reason i asked is because i'm considering jumping over to AMD and had concerns with Linux as multithreading can still be flakey or non-existent with legacy apps.I've noticed Gnome-Boxes can do some freaky thing like suddenly using 1 core.

Slightly different single threading between the two i can live with.

Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 works fine with Linux, better than Intel these days after all the mitigation are in place on the Linux platform. Something on Windows and review benchmarks isn't reflected, as windows still missing quite a few security patches, especially the last few months worth ones.

Make sure the distro you are using has 5.4 kernel and upgrade to 5.5 as soon as is available. As it includes tonnes of optimizations for AMD Zen 2 cpus, especially in relation to I/O die and subsystems that we won't see on windows until the 2nd 2020 edition next October.