Strictly technical: Matisse (Not really)
First and foremost, a word of warning. When reading ANY of the AMD Ryzen 3000-series "Matisse" launch-day reviews, the first thing you should do is navigate to the page which lists the hardware setups.
AMD supplied four different motherboards to the media, one from ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI. In case of the ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi motherboard, the media was instructed to use 0066 bios build,
which had been vetted and approved by AMD. However, newer bios builds were available and ASUS has also (allegedly) told the media to use those versions. What exactly has transpired here is still under investigation,
but regardless of the actual reasons behind it, the consequences might be rather significant. In practical terms, all reviews which were done on ASUS Crosshair VIII Formula or Hero motherboards using other than 0066 bios build must
be considered invalid, at least partially. Reviews using other ASUS motherboard models (not provided by AMD) are under suspicion as well.
Few days ago, I noticed certain anomalies, while measuring the power consumption of the different Matisse SKUs. Inspection of the power management parameters revealed no issues, which could have explained those anomalies.
The external power measurements (VRM DCR) revealed that the CPU was consuming significantly more power, than its power management should have allowed it to. I initially suspected that this was AMDs own doing, in an effort trying
to boost the performance of the new CPUs even further, but further investigation indicated otherwise.
AMD had no part in it, and the actions by ASUS are the sole reason behind it. The investigation revealed that ASUS is altering one or more power
management parameters of the CPU, causing it believe it consumes less power than it actually does. As a result, the frequencies will be higher than the actual power budget would normally allow to. Tricks like this are pretty much a common (mal)practice these
days however, there is a good reason why this must be considered worse than the others: this "thing" is completely undetectable without external measurements and rather deep knowledge, but also there is no way to disable it either.
Even a person such as myself, who can control most things on these platforms cannot disable this "thing". As you may notice, at the moment I call this issue the "thing", since I'm giving ASUS the benefit of a doubt.
The release schedule of Ryzen 3000-series CPUs was rather ridiculous to begin with for two reasons. The retail (or PR, production ready) silicon has been available for at least two months, and relatively finished motherboard designs even longer than that.
Yet AMD had decided to enforce EXTREMELY strict control (NLTR, nothing leaves the room) over the silicon samples. I could have had several different X570 motherboard models months ago, but I managed to lay my hands on the first CPUs just three weeks ago (give or take). The actual CPU samples were distributed to the media just six days prior to the launch date.
Due to the extremely tight schedule, I have worked around 16 hours per day, for the last couple of days. There is nothing I hate more in this world than seeing my work being wasted.
This time a substantial part of it was wasted because of something I had no control over. Unless ASUS can clearly prove that this "thing" happened due to a human error and wasn't intentional, I have to reconsider my relations with them.
Mistakes do happen, but regardless of the actual reasons behind it definitely shouldn't have happened.
Despite AMD instructed the media to use the approved 0066 bios build with Crosshair VII Hero, at the moment I have no idea how many of the reviewers ended up following those instructions and how many thought it would be a good idea to use the latest build (which in case of a new platform, most often is). Potentially this "thing" might have caused significant financial losses as well, in terms of additional salaries required to get the products re-tested with proper settings.
So then, what is affected? Technically every scenario on every Ryzen 3000-series SKU, which might be power limited. Purely single threaded workloads are fine, as well as at least most of the pure gaming tests.
However, every multithreaded CPU workload / benchmark must be considered invalid, if ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero with any other than 0066 bios version was used as the platform.
I used Crosshair VIII Formula for my tests, and since this model wasn't supplied to the media by AMD, there was no "official" (i.e vetted and approved) bios build for it either.
In my case I ended up discarding all of my multithreaded results. Since the Ryzen 3000-series multithreaded results were invalid, there was no point in keeping the multithreaded results for the other platforms either.
Since single threaded workloads are never power limited, these results were fine. In case of testing the SMT-yield on different architectures, the power limits were disabled anyway to avoid any potential biasing, so these results are included as well.
I originally intended to provide a lot more, but unfortunately the reality is that there was never enough time to do it all. The various different issues on several platforms and the "thing" (which was confirmed only yesterday) didn't help things either.
Also the issues with AGESA cross-compability also prevented testing the SMT-yield on Pinnacle Ridge. Because of that, I only provide the figures for Matisse, Coffee Lake Refresh and Skylake-X.
