Visualizing three generations of Ryzen performance
Posted Aug 27, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC
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This is great! Do you have one for ST as well? I'd love to see the singlethread improvements from 1st gen to 3rd gen.
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Yep! Here is the 1T performance. Some of them look a little weird, so I'll cross-check them with old Hardware Unboxed reviews this afternoon to verify.
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Those graphs are a great way of showing the ST performance jump from 2000 to 3000 series..... all new on the right, and by quite a distance.
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You are missing the XT skus.
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I bring this up because chips like the 3600XT end up scoring 535-545 ST while not really changing the price much ($40 or so difference).
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Awesome, thanks!
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What I find interesting is that Zen 3 will push ST scores above 600.
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Hopefully Zen 3 brings in about 20-25% more IPC and refines memory latency.
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10-15% seems more likely from what we've heard. 25% feels highly optimistic.
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Agreed.
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25% ? I think you are dreaming ...
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Do you have a source for that? I'm pretty sure CB is heavily floating point dependent. Most of the rumors I've seen say most of the gains on Zen 3 are for integer performance.
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Not one I can share without getting someone in a shitload of trouble. Don't bother downvoting (or do, I actually don't care). save my post and come back later.
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It will? Or you hope?
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It will.
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RemindMe! 90 days
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Yeah no.
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I wonder if price per core would make a more interesting visual similar to the nT one?
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That graph puts the 3300x as faster than the 3700x. That can't be right.
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These guys have the 3300X at a score of 499 and the 3700X at a score of 494, just a hair slower.
HWUB has them basically tied at 504 for the 3300X and 510 for the 3700X, so a hair faster.
I think it's fair to say that all the Zen2 CPUs are in the same ballpark for single-threaded performance, which makes sense, because they're the same silicon. Differences in results across reviewers could include stock vs PBO clocks and cooling solution.
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Please do both of them (well at least 1T :)) where axes start from 0
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They're both logarithmic scales, they can't start at 0.
They are both pretty poorly chosen though, they should probably use 10^x major ticks and appropriate minor ticks to make the log scales obvious (e.g. 100, 1 000, 10 000 major for price). But microsoft excel and other spreadsheet software makes terrible plots by default and you need to fight with them to get something usable.
Using logarithmic for price seems a little strange particularly if you're trying to suggest 'value for money'. It implies there's been a constant increase in price when there hasn't. Performance would normally be on the y axis as well for this type of plot.
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Graphing involves making a dozen little decisions. I appreciate the feedback.
It's impossible to put the Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs on the same graph if you use a level scale. You can zoom in on the Ryzens and lower-end Threadrippers and get something reasonable. Perhaps I should have used that? But then you miss out on the heavy TRs. It's a balance.
One substantive reason to go with logs is that they make "100% performance jumps" linear. Cinebench is a timed rendering program, then converts times to scores. Going from a score of 2000 to 4000 means that your render time fell by 50%. Going from 4000 to 8000 means your render time fell by 50% again, or 75% overall. I wish they'd just report "time to completion" so I could slap that on a graph, but I can't change how Cinebench reports its scores.
On which axis goes where, it's ultimately somewhat arbitrary. I made an Nvidia GPU graph yesterday with the axes flipped. (See thread here; my graph, but not my data.) As an economist, I'm perhaps too conditioned by my training, and my natural instinct is to put price on the vertical axis.
On the tick marks, I lean towards Tufte: every tick mark should be quantitatively meaningful. For the price axis, that means leaning towards ticks that correspond to actual price points, hence my use of (200, 330, 500, 800, 1400, 2000, 4000). For the performance axis I didn't bother much, but one could tighten it up by replacing the first and last tick with the scores of the 1600 and 3990X respectively.
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3700X under 500?
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Yeah, mine barely reaches 490, but could be a cooling problem right now, still need a new case
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Cries in 1700.
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Damn, the difference between a Ryzen 7 1700/1700x and 3700X is huge. A few months back I was still doubting whether to buy a used 2700X on the cheap or get a 3700X. I'm glad I chose the 3700X, certainly as I'm taking up gaming more recently.
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Damn, the difference between a Ryzen 7 1700/1700x and 3700X is huge
In real life it isn't.
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It is if you game a lot.
The 1700 is up to ~70 average FPS slower than the 3700X in some games.
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Yes it is, although it's not as huge as in the graph posted above. But in gaming, getting around 10-20% higher FPS just from another CPU is a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHw67eaT32U
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I love how the 3600/X is basically identical to the 2700/X in performance but cheaper because it's a tier down. That's progress. Here's hoping the 4600/X do the same with the 3600/X. Also crazy to see a mainstream processor (3900X) going toe to toe with last gen HEDT. Madness.
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Shows what an insane value a 3900x is, even at launch pricing. Now only $400. Incredible.
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Yep. It was CRAZY the level of workstation I was able to build for around 1000 bucks (I already had a graphics card) with a 3900X...
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With desktop Ryzen 4000 on the horizon, I thought it would be interesting to compare price-to-performance for the first three generations of Ryzen CPUs. For performance, I'm using AMD's favorite benchmark: the Cinebench nT score.
To zoom in on the sub-$1,000 segment, see here.
Reading the graphs
Price is on the vertical axis and Cinebench R20 nT score is on the horizontal axis. Lower prices are better, and higher scores are better, so moving "down" and "right" is unambiguously better. Moving "up" and "right" means paying more for more performance; the opposite is true for "down" and "left." Moving "up" and "left" means paying more for less performance.
Both axes are in logarithms to enhance readability at the low end.
Data
Cinebench data is taken from here and I cross-checked a few scores with reputable reviewers to verify accuracy. Cinebench nT represents performance in highly parallelized workloads. It does not translate directly into gaming performance. In the future, I may produce a version of this graph that focuses on gaming.
Launch price data is taken from Wikipedia.
Using launch price data is a compromise. On the one hand, it is objective and can be verified. On the other hand, Ryzen CPUs often sell for less than their launch price. The 1600, 2600, and 3600 often sold for $170, rather than their launch price in the low-$200s. The 3700X currently sells for $290, not its launch price of $330. The Threadripper 1950X could be had for as little as $450 during parts of its run, not the launch price of $1,000. However, each chip fell to different prices during different parts of their run, and it would be somewhat unfair to cherrypick the lowest price ever seen on CamelCamelCamel. As such, I decided to use launch price.
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Nice graph, but I just have one problem with it, the price axis having irregular "steps". I'm not saying it's not logarithm, just that having marks at launch price of some cpus instead of doing 100, 200, 400, 800 ect is kinda disturbing when reading
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I plan to post an updated version when Ryzen 4000 launches. It'll look closer to this. Linear scale, even tick marks, zoomed in on the consumer market. I'm used to working in log scales, but from the comments here it appears that this isn't as common as I thought.
There have been requests to add Intel CPUs to the graph; I'll do so if it doesn't clutter things too much.
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it's a fuckin masterpiece
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Thanks!
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Why log? Too cramped and separated if it isn't? People, incl. me, have a hard time with log to get a proper image/sense of scale.
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Here is a level scale, zooming in on the sub-$1000 price range. Including the heavy Threadrippers makes it too cramped.
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I think linear sub-1000 is the best. If only it had dots like the main graph, it would be perfect.
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Thank you for the graph. I would give you cookies, karma or w/e if I could. IF things scaled lineraly it would be nice to see R5 4600 to be close to the 3700x mark (5000 points) and the R7 4700(x) to have around 6000 points. That would be some serious work performance on the cheap - I'm also assuming they'll cost the same as previous versions.
As for the 3990X successor, it'd be funny and insane at the same time if we saw another 3x screens needed in order for AMD to make the graph comparison.
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Just for fun, here is the data on a pure level scale. 3990X looking lonely at the top!
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Sad times when your 1500x is not acknowledged
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It has a multithreaded score of 1811 according to CPU Monkey: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_5_1500x-709
It would be off the side of the chart. It was (and still is) a good CPU though so you shouldn't feel bad.
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Tell me again why the 3800X exists?
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To separate you from your money ;)
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I wish this wasn't logarithmic but with an x that goes 100 by 100, so we can see clearly which is the real bang for the bucks
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Well done. Very interesting to see the 3800x position.
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Nice
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AMD killing it! Here's to hoping they can keep innovating since Intel isn't.
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Intel is innovating plenty.
The problem is that they aren't executing EVERYWHERE.
AMD has done a "good enough" job at innovating and they and their partners have executed everywhere.
I wouldn't be surprised if Intel is ahead on innovation... that they can't commercialize just yet.
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I guess I should be more specific, I was referring to CPUs. You can easily see what Intel is working on due to press releases and it is not really innovative, not even close to AMD. 10nm is delayed for years due to a defect, so upcoming CPUs will be hot and not much better. The big.LITTLE technology is good for notebooks/tablets, but even that idea was taken from ARM. AMD is far outpacing Intel in terms of desktop and server innovations with a much, much smaller budget. TSMC is already planning all the way up 2nm process mode, which will also be available to AMD.
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You essentially restated what I did.
Intel has had huge issues with execution. Good ideas don't matter if there's nothing to show for it. Intel has had relatively little to show for nearly 5 years now.
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bad scale
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nice to see that AMD goes same price for higher performance.
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This is an awesome visualization!!
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Now do intel 2013 to 2017 smh
edit: I love how back in 2017 in order to get 2x the performance you had to pay 5x more with intel, such as 7700k 4 core to the 6950x 10-core with lower clocks.
Now with AMD for ~2.5x the price you get ~2x the performance the curve has really flattened and they are giving great deals on the high-end.
I'm not sure the 6950X was unreasonably priced for what it was in 2016 (a 10-core / 20-thread chip with 25MB L3 cache, quad-channel memory support and 40 PCI-E lanes).
In 2017 you got 80% more performance at a similar price as the 6950X.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/x-series/i9-7980xe.html
It was the 7960X that was priced similarly to the original cost of the 6950X, not the 7980XE.
OK, 70% more performance.
The 7980XE was 2000 USD at launch, the 6950X was ~~1550 USD at launch.
That said, it's still way more price increase compared to the performance increase when comparing it to their high end consumer line, the 6700K and 7700K, respectively. Intel improved a lot on price to performance in general with the 8700K (50% more multithread performance for roughly the same price of the part it was replacing) and now with the 10700K (a further ~30% better nT performance and slight sT improvements), but please don't try to frame the 7980XE as a good value proposition at the time, even by Intel standards.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/94456/intel-core-i7-6950x-processor-extreme-edition-25m-cache-up-to-3-50-ghz.html
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/126699/intel-core-i9-7980xe-extreme-edition-processor-24-75m-cache-up-to-4-20-ghz.html
It was a good value compared to the 6950X.
If you actually made money using the machine, it could've doubled your productivity during CPU bound periods. If it's race to first (rendering a video for publication) this could've given superlinear returns.
If you were playing CS 1.6 and bragging about getting EXTREME frame rates, you were a moron.
Because the 5960x was $1k, they added 2 cores and charged $1.7k
It was peak Intel lol
Yeah, I mean people like to bag on Intel for sticking with quad cores, ignoring the fact that their HEDT had quite a bit more (and AMD wasn't even in that market at all). It's not like they didn't have the cores and performance, they just had no competition so could charge quite a bit for them and segment the market while still easily beating AMD. Even then, that cpu was a good buy as it's still a fast cpu by today's standards. What's telling is they had 10 cores 4 years ago and have only made it to 28 now (and those are not easy to get)...Where AMD had 8 and has gone to 64 with widespread availability. I'd argue that those claiming Intel force stagnated the market are wrong - they didn't have more in the bag, they were putting out the best they could (and charging a lot for it), segmenting the market in a way to maximize what they could make, which we see now that they can't keep up with AMD once they got a new arch out.
They have them up to 56, actually.
They have them...But nobody can buy them, so not really sure it counts.
Yeah, that's because Intel was so into scalping people that they thought it was impossible to get better. AMD proved that it was a fuckin awful deal
the 5960x was the real MVP for 2014
The 8-core model had the same PCIe lanes AFAIK and it was $700 cheaper.
The price of the 6950X in comparison to the 6900K might have been a bit high, yeah. Did also have more cache though.
That said, I do think Intel's pricing of each given chip has always factored in the relative difficulty of manufacturing it with their monolithic process at an acceptable level of quality to a larger extent than people think, in general, also.
It is far more expensive to make chips the way Intel has historically made them than it is to make them with the chiplet method AMD currently uses.
bUt ciNeBenCh iS biaSed ToWardS AMD ProcEssorS...
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The tick marks are 2000-4000-8000-16000, they are not linear
3950x is about 95% faster multi threaded for 2.5x the price.
So 3950x is 2.5x price 1.95x score of 3700x 6950x is 5x price for 2.1x score of 7700k
Oh man, I'd love to see the Intel equivalent
Closest I know of, doesn't show generationally as clearly but you can mouse over and see the CPU.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_scatter_graph
I’d love to see Intel equivalent but also for Battlefield V too. Well, for most benchmarks to be fair. Would be super interesting.
It's a logarithmic scale
The X and Y in that graph are both raising non-linearly. Sometimes graphs have only one axis non-linear while the other one is linear, which can make straight lines become curves. For example, if the X and Y axis both went 1-2-4-8-16, and you plotted the line y = x, it would be a straight line.
If you plotted y = x on a graph where the Y axis went 1-2-3-4-5 and the X axis went 1-2-4-8-16, then the line would be curved.
Cinebench R15 multi core scores:
i7-7700K score = 995, 350$
6950x score = 1819, 1700$
3700x score = 2114 , 330$
3950x score = 3897, 750$
In 2017 Intel offered 1.83x performance for 4.83x price
In 2020 AMD offered 1.84x price for 2.26x price