I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.
That is all true but I will defend the FX series a little. Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now, they haven't aged as terribly as others have. They aren't great but not terrible considering.
>Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now
That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era:
Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware.
AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds(a-la Intel Pentium 4) but the IPC was so bad that an FX core was often slower clock-for-clock than AMD’s previous-generation Phenom II chips and also their power consumption exploded.
FX processors were plagued by high cache latencies and an inefficient memory subsystem as another bottleneck.
So yeah, modern multi-threading SW and kernels can't work around all those arch bottlenecks. Performance will still be shit. Like a budget Android phone from 2023 (Snapdragon 7s Gen 2) will absolutely destroy it while using 30x less power, that's how bad the situation is.
Last year I picked up an e-wasted FX PC for nostalgia tinkering and boy, it definitely feels veeery slow today(just like Core 2 Duo/Quad), even on lightweight modern Linux regardless of having as many cores as modern CPUs, the arch is just that bottlenecked, and when you add the missing modern instruction sets such as AVX2, FMA3 and SHA-NI, they only contribute to the slowness in modern use cases compared to today's CPUs that beat it while using much less power. It's fine as WindowsXP era PC for retro gaming I guess, but even then you can do much better with and Intel PC from the same era(i5-2500k for example) that's gonna be way less power hungry to boot. So unless you're into collecting pieces of history as display pieces, it definitely belongs in the e-waste pile instead of burning electricity.
AFAIR Steamroller was a big 'correction' of the Shared resource issues in the arch (I can't remember if other revisions had other improvements).
AMD was also having to deal with the fact GloFo split off and was relying more on general 'bulk' lithography, which kneecapped them for some time especially due to yield issues on the FX series and overall cost of that deal.
Intel also very quickly after, released Sandy Bridge and aggressively scaled it up and down; the 2500K was so cheap yet powerful I know of at least one setup that ran for a decade an only got replaced because they needed to upgrade to windows 11 for compliance-esque reasons. My own 2500K I replaced in 2017-2018-ish, only because either the motherboard took an unfortunate dive and it was easier to replace both at once.
FWIW, I did do a cheapie FX build in 2015ish for my then-girlfriend as a DVR and light gaming/emulation 'under the TV box', and it did the job well for the price, but it definitely wasn't anything amazing.
It was a tough time for AMD for sure. I think the 'split' between the Cat cores (Bobcat/Jaguar) also hurt them from a resource standpoint, although one could argue that it also kept them alive to recover (i.e. Jaguar in XBox One and PS4 being a volume contract part) [0]. They did a lot of moves that caused short term pain (that glofo spinnoff helped pay off the ATI Acquisition AFAIR) but helped them become the company that is still surviving today.
[0] - One odd side note, I still find it odd that they never did a dual channel Jaguar laptop part. I still ask whether it was because it would have made the FX look that bad...
> Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each...
Yeah that's hyper-threading intel was doing it as well and all modern CPUs do it as well. Where AMD dropped the ball, was they did not disclose that in their marketing as clearly as they should.
All CPUs today are marketed as x cores 2x threads, back then some AMD marketing genius in their infinite wisdom put 8 cores on the box, instead of the honest 4 cores with hyperthreading.
No, AMD's FX was more than just hyperthreading. In SMT(hyperthreading) the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared, whereas on FX design, they built two completely separate integer pipelines (schedulers, register files, ALUs, and L1 data caches) inside one module. Only the instruction fetch/decode front-end, the FPU, and the L2 cache were shared.
Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads. What makes that such a win while Bulldozer's implementation of "two integer units sharing a front-end, cache and FPU" is supposedly so bad? Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.
>Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads.
That's hugely debatable and depends on SW workloads and the SMT implementation + CPU pipeline design.
In SMT the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared. When one thread stalls waiting for RAM, the second thread sneaks into the idle execution units. At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.
>Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.
It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
> At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.
Exactly, which is a significant benefit for how marginal the costs are.
> It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
Then surely it should be even better than 4 cores with SMT?
If you're going to argue that the problem with Bulldozer was it's weird semi-SMT solution, you need to explain how it would've been better without it (aka as a regular quad core). Because even if it just gets the 10-20% performance improvements from being a form of SMT it would be better to have it than to not. And if you have lots of integer unit-bound threads, it should be even better than that.
> AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds
It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.
The x86 architecture still going strong. I've always though Ryzen was a fitting name, AMD had Ryzen from the ashes and struck a blow to the long dominant Intel.
I looked at game benchmarks, and sometimes 5600 or 5600X were fastest. With all X3D processors so fast that I would not decide to upgrade above 5700X3D or anything cheaper. Now, with current RAM pricing, getting a X3D CPU with 90+ MB L3 Cache seams the way to go instead of doing a DDR4 -> DDR5 leap.
I feel like most benchmarks don’t really capture CPU benefits to gaming.
It’s even difficult to find CPU benchmarks that don’t overemphasize 1080p and eSports scenarios.
My upgrade from 5600x3D to 9850x3D felt kind of dumb at the time, but I decided to do it because Micro Center’s bundle deals are so far below market pricing.
I was shocked at how much better it is. Benchmarks and FPS don’t really show things like micro stutters and little issues like that. I’m not even sure 1% lows capture it.
A great example game for this is Oblivion Remastered. Upgrading my CPU alone with the same GPU took away the loading lag/stutters almost entirely.
People who run benchmarks don’t really account for this stuff.
2 years sounds very fast. It seems to be because the 3d cache SKUs of each generation were released at different stages. The Zen 3 one was a later variant.
First zen 3 November 5, 2020 with desktop processors. First desktop Ryzen 9000 processors on August 8, 2024. So the generations were about 4 years apart.
They never shipped the zen 5 epyc big cache chip (e.g. 9685X). :( I'd hoped they pulled it to produce a HBM integrated chip instead, but they didn't do that either.
I'm not sure focusing on just 3 processors is enough to claim that Ryzen got 50% faster. There were already other, faster Ryzen processors available without the additional cache. The extra cache was a very new thing (and very temperature sensitive), so it makes sense that they start carefully and then get a lot of improvement quickly). And the 5800x3d was for an older chipset, with all the limitations that come with that.
It's not that temperature sensitive, 90C is plenty. If you can't keep the non-x3d processors underneath that you're just throwing away performance anyways
Are you? I'm pretty sure when I bought my 7800x3d, everybody was saying you had to be very careful about heat, because these damage more easily from high temperatures than regular CPUs. I just checked, and they do throttle at a lower temperature than others: 89 vs 95 degrees C.
It's impressive and yet it surely depends what you're doing with it? 50% better performance isn't going to make a local LLM feel quick and yet so many other aspects of computing are quite fast anyhow. I can browse the web fairly comfortably on a Raspberry Pi and it's a bit slow but manageable.
This only goes back one year, to Linux 6.18. Wins would be even bigger if we go back another year. Also, this isn't tracking any of the rest of the improvements in userland: it's just the kernel. Some newer GCC, and upcoming new x86-64v3 targets will all have some pretty nice wins too.
Great days to be on open source. And it only ever gets better.
Intel has a cache-as-ram (CAR) mode / Non-Eviction Mode, which is what you wanted but it is only available before DRAM is brought up via core initialization. Not sure about AMD.
One of the biggest improvements to the Ryzen 7 X3D series (e.g. 9800) is that the caches have been moved from one side of the die (to the other), which places the major heat source closer to the heat sinks.
Power is heat, and the amount dissipated is the square of the voltage- a processor that is reliable at less voltage means you can get a lot more frequency in the same heat envelope.
Yet reliability decreases as frequency goes up, and that can only be stabilized by adding more voltage- so the faster you run the processor, the more voltage you ultimately have to give it, so the power/heat produced grows exponentially until you can't get rid of the heat fast enough (at which point your only option is to actively cool the chip).
This is overclocking 101.
Note that classic overclocking was viable because of arbitrage- buying a processor, pushing it to the point it got too hot, and stress-testing it at that temperature to ensure reliable operation. Processor manufacturers all do that formal verification at the factory now as they'd be uncompetitive otherwise, especially in laptops.
its manufactured on a smaller node so probably has more leeway for higher freq on all core loads.
I’d also be weary of single core scores,Geekbench is known to be favoring specialized instruction sets like AVX or encryption extensions more and more as the version number progresses. Though I don’t know if GB6 is also like this I wouldn’t be surprised it it was caused by it.
The IPhone runs on a battery, with no active cooling.
There is no chance the sustained single core perf is better than a 150=200+w ryzen with a big noctua cooler on it. The power draw alone would kill the battery in a few minutes(?), and the heat would make it catch fire. lol
I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.
That is all true but I will defend the FX series a little. Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now, they haven't aged as terribly as others have. They aren't great but not terrible considering.
>Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now
That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era:
So yeah, modern multi-threading SW and kernels can't work around all those arch bottlenecks. Performance will still be shit. Like a budget Android phone from 2023 (Snapdragon 7s Gen 2) will absolutely destroy it while using 30x less power, that's how bad the situation is.Last year I picked up an e-wasted FX PC for nostalgia tinkering and boy, it definitely feels veeery slow today(just like Core 2 Duo/Quad), even on lightweight modern Linux regardless of having as many cores as modern CPUs, the arch is just that bottlenecked, and when you add the missing modern instruction sets such as AVX2, FMA3 and SHA-NI, they only contribute to the slowness in modern use cases compared to today's CPUs that beat it while using much less power. It's fine as WindowsXP era PC for retro gaming I guess, but even then you can do much better with and Intel PC from the same era(i5-2500k for example) that's gonna be way less power hungry to boot. So unless you're into collecting pieces of history as display pieces, it definitely belongs in the e-waste pile instead of burning electricity.
AFAIR Steamroller was a big 'correction' of the Shared resource issues in the arch (I can't remember if other revisions had other improvements).
AMD was also having to deal with the fact GloFo split off and was relying more on general 'bulk' lithography, which kneecapped them for some time especially due to yield issues on the FX series and overall cost of that deal.
Intel also very quickly after, released Sandy Bridge and aggressively scaled it up and down; the 2500K was so cheap yet powerful I know of at least one setup that ran for a decade an only got replaced because they needed to upgrade to windows 11 for compliance-esque reasons. My own 2500K I replaced in 2017-2018-ish, only because either the motherboard took an unfortunate dive and it was easier to replace both at once.
FWIW, I did do a cheapie FX build in 2015ish for my then-girlfriend as a DVR and light gaming/emulation 'under the TV box', and it did the job well for the price, but it definitely wasn't anything amazing.
It was a tough time for AMD for sure. I think the 'split' between the Cat cores (Bobcat/Jaguar) also hurt them from a resource standpoint, although one could argue that it also kept them alive to recover (i.e. Jaguar in XBox One and PS4 being a volume contract part) [0]. They did a lot of moves that caused short term pain (that glofo spinnoff helped pay off the ATI Acquisition AFAIR) but helped them become the company that is still surviving today.
[0] - One odd side note, I still find it odd that they never did a dual channel Jaguar laptop part. I still ask whether it was because it would have made the FX look that bad...
> Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each...
Yeah that's hyper-threading intel was doing it as well and all modern CPUs do it as well. Where AMD dropped the ball, was they did not disclose that in their marketing as clearly as they should.
All CPUs today are marketed as x cores 2x threads, back then some AMD marketing genius in their infinite wisdom put 8 cores on the box, instead of the honest 4 cores with hyperthreading.
No, AMD's FX was more than just hyperthreading. In SMT(hyperthreading) the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared, whereas on FX design, they built two completely separate integer pipelines (schedulers, register files, ALUs, and L1 data caches) inside one module. Only the instruction fetch/decode front-end, the FPU, and the L2 cache were shared.
Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads. What makes that such a win while Bulldozer's implementation of "two integer units sharing a front-end, cache and FPU" is supposedly so bad? Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.
>Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads.
That's hugely debatable and depends on SW workloads and the SMT implementation + CPU pipeline design.
In SMT the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared. When one thread stalls waiting for RAM, the second thread sneaks into the idle execution units. At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.
>Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.
It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
> At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.
Exactly, which is a significant benefit for how marginal the costs are.
> It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.
Then surely it should be even better than 4 cores with SMT?
If you're going to argue that the problem with Bulldozer was it's weird semi-SMT solution, you need to explain how it would've been better without it (aka as a regular quad core). Because even if it just gets the 10-20% performance improvements from being a form of SMT it would be better to have it than to not. And if you have lots of integer unit-bound threads, it should be even better than that.
> AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds
It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.
The x86 architecture still going strong. I've always though Ryzen was a fitting name, AMD had Ryzen from the ashes and struck a blow to the long dominant Intel.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D / EPYC 4585PX is a beast for 99% of compute workloads.
It has the highest base clock of any modern AMD chip (4.3 GHz), plus 16-cores, which is already more than most workloads need.
Can’t wait to see what Zen 6 brings early next year. Rumors say 24-cores and another big jump in single-core performance.
I looked at game benchmarks, and sometimes 5600 or 5600X were fastest. With all X3D processors so fast that I would not decide to upgrade above 5700X3D or anything cheaper. Now, with current RAM pricing, getting a X3D CPU with 90+ MB L3 Cache seams the way to go instead of doing a DDR4 -> DDR5 leap.
All stated for gaming, that is.
I feel like most benchmarks don’t really capture CPU benefits to gaming.
It’s even difficult to find CPU benchmarks that don’t overemphasize 1080p and eSports scenarios.
My upgrade from 5600x3D to 9850x3D felt kind of dumb at the time, but I decided to do it because Micro Center’s bundle deals are so far below market pricing.
I was shocked at how much better it is. Benchmarks and FPS don’t really show things like micro stutters and little issues like that. I’m not even sure 1% lows capture it.
A great example game for this is Oblivion Remastered. Upgrading my CPU alone with the same GPU took away the loading lag/stutters almost entirely.
People who run benchmarks don’t really account for this stuff.
I still love my 5800X3D. Drop-in upgrade from a 3700X so I kept my board, RAM, cooler, everything.
2 years sounds very fast. It seems to be because the 3d cache SKUs of each generation were released at different stages. The Zen 3 one was a later variant.
First zen 3 November 5, 2020 with desktop processors. First desktop Ryzen 9000 processors on August 8, 2024. So the generations were about 4 years apart.
They never shipped the zen 5 epyc big cache chip (e.g. 9685X). :( I'd hoped they pulled it to produce a HBM integrated chip instead, but they didn't do that either.
I imagine they didn't want to cannibalize upcoming Zen 6 which will have the 3d cache
I'm not sure focusing on just 3 processors is enough to claim that Ryzen got 50% faster. There were already other, faster Ryzen processors available without the additional cache. The extra cache was a very new thing (and very temperature sensitive), so it makes sense that they start carefully and then get a lot of improvement quickly). And the 5800x3d was for an older chipset, with all the limitations that come with that.
It's not that temperature sensitive, 90C is plenty. If you can't keep the non-x3d processors underneath that you're just throwing away performance anyways
Are you? I'm pretty sure when I bought my 7800x3d, everybody was saying you had to be very careful about heat, because these damage more easily from high temperatures than regular CPUs. I just checked, and they do throttle at a lower temperature than others: 89 vs 95 degrees C.
It's impressive and yet it surely depends what you're doing with it? 50% better performance isn't going to make a local LLM feel quick and yet so many other aspects of computing are quite fast anyhow. I can browse the web fairly comfortably on a Raspberry Pi and it's a bit slow but manageable.
Compound this with Linux users seeing a ~8% gain (and some very big gains here and there) on performance from ongoing kernel improvements too! https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-73-amd-epyc
This only goes back one year, to Linux 6.18. Wins would be even bigger if we go back another year. Also, this isn't tracking any of the rest of the improvements in userland: it's just the kernel. Some newer GCC, and upcoming new x86-64v3 targets will all have some pretty nice wins too.
Great days to be on open source. And it only ever gets better.
Is this what's helping drive their stock price to the moon?
Serious question with 1GB L3 isn't it theoretically possible to boot a full Linux without ram?
Edit: dug in it, no, because cache isn't addressable and it's directly managed by the cpu.
Intel has a cache-as-ram (CAR) mode / Non-Eviction Mode, which is what you wanted but it is only available before DRAM is brought up via core initialization. Not sure about AMD.
I used to use a full Slackware Linux distribution with X-Windows on a 486 clone with 4 Megabytes of RAM.
Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%
Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?
>>Better thermals maybe?
One of the biggest improvements to the Ryzen 7 X3D series (e.g. 9800) is that the caches have been moved from one side of the die (to the other), which places the major heat source closer to the heat sinks.
SO yes, less heat throttling.
Smaller node size means less voltage.
Power is heat, and the amount dissipated is the square of the voltage- a processor that is reliable at less voltage means you can get a lot more frequency in the same heat envelope.
Yet reliability decreases as frequency goes up, and that can only be stabilized by adding more voltage- so the faster you run the processor, the more voltage you ultimately have to give it, so the power/heat produced grows exponentially until you can't get rid of the heat fast enough (at which point your only option is to actively cool the chip).
This is overclocking 101.
Note that classic overclocking was viable because of arbitrage- buying a processor, pushing it to the point it got too hot, and stress-testing it at that temperature to ensure reliable operation. Processor manufacturers all do that formal verification at the factory now as they'd be uncompetitive otherwise, especially in laptops.
As ProllyInfamous mentioned; bringing the cores to the top helped reduce heat, which allows them to boost higher for longer periods then the 7800x3d.
its manufactured on a smaller node so probably has more leeway for higher freq on all core loads.
I’d also be weary of single core scores,Geekbench is known to be favoring specialized instruction sets like AVX or encryption extensions more and more as the version number progresses. Though I don’t know if GB6 is also like this I wouldn’t be surprised it it was caused by it.
I love my frameworks strix halo box. 16 zen 5 cores with way more memory bandwidth than they should have for a desktop. Only missing the x3d cache
2022 to 2024
It would have been funny if the "how" had been dropped to end with "Did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?"
By being more expensive?
Single core performance still worse than an iPhone.
The x86 folks lost the ball completely. For workstation/ mobile needs you go to arm. For matmul at scale you go to gpus.
I guess windows gaming with separate gpu is the only remaining market for them.
Unless Nvidia releases a motherboard with an arm cpu on top of their RTX cards, and then that market is gone too.
The IPhone runs on a battery, with no active cooling.
There is no chance the sustained single core perf is better than a 150=200+w ryzen with a big noctua cooler on it. The power draw alone would kill the battery in a few minutes(?), and the heat would make it catch fire. lol