I am surprised at how much this thing is just straight up crushing it with just 8 cores.
I think it topping the machine learning benchmarks has to do with having only 8 cores to share the 96MB of L3 cache, which ends up having a ratio of 1core having 1MBL2 + 12MB L3 which is huge, that means EACH THREAD has more cache than i.e the entire nvidia 3090 (6mb l2 total), and this ends up taking FULL advantage of the extra silicon of various avx extensions.
While true, also keep in mind that the iPad Pro (M4) which has no active cooling, and uses only 1/4th the power ... is still faster (single & multicore) than this 9800X3D - and it's also been on the market for 1/2 year now already.
Yup I just looked at the clang score in geekbench, for single threaded 9800x3d scored about 3200, whilst m4 had 4400... The m4 is so far above the rest it's ridiculous. Wish Apple made an x86 equivalent so that it can play Windows games lol.
I'm curious to see if AMD will release a 9950X3D this time around. I can foresee that kind of CPU dominating everything else across most workloads given how good this 8-core is holding up against CPUs with double or more cores.
I have a 5950x that is now a few years old and I planned to upgrade to a 9950x.
I have never had one of the 3D V-Cache processors and am curious how it would improve the benchmarks for my multi-threaded data management system that does many operations against a set of 4K blocks of data.
I heard rumors that a 9950x3D version will be available in January. I am trying to figure out if I should wait.
I think the current rumor is that only one of the chiplets will have the extra cache though, so you'll have 8 cores with the big cache and 8 cores with the normal cache.
The efficiency is only worse because the CPU can use the power without burning itself up unlike the last generation's X3D. And efficiency is always better at lower clocks. You can get this generation's efficiency uplift by limiting its power to the levels where last generation's CPU started throttling to keep its 89C Tjmax, but that will inevitably also limit the frequency that's the main performance uplift for the CPU
For comparison on how limited last gen's X3D was wrt power, tom's hardware has it on 71W with all core AVX, while my 7600X with 2 fewer cores consumes up to 130W
If I can summarize what you wrote: Same IPC gain as normal Zen5 but more power can be drawn to increase performance due to moving the cache chiplet to the bottom.
Bad arch decision are punishing. AMD was absolutely dwarfed in the early core iX days and never really came back until Ryzen. The whole bulldozer linage was DoA to the point Opteron just never factored in.
Hopefully Intel pull something out again but they look asleep a the wheel.
Just seen the figures, it's ridiculously good. The gap over it's competition is staggering. I hope the Intel hubris doesn't set in at Amd, especially with the ARM pack snapping at their heels.
Hardware Unboxed has the interesting theory that the I/O die, which is unchanged between Zen4 and Zen5, is a significant bottleneck especially for the latter. The 3D v-cache would then ease the pressure there, and so see the cpu get an extra boost beyond that expected from increased cache.
To cut Intel some slack, this latest version overhauls their old architecture, and they were fairly upfront about the lack of development in performance in this generation.
The idea is the new platform will allow for better development in future, while improving efficiency fairly significantly.
From a consumer standpoint - this doesn't matter. You can't buy that future product that may exist. You can only choose whether to buy the current product or not. And right now, that product is bad.
I certainly hope the next generation is a massive bump for Intel, but we'll see if that's the case.
I think the new T-equivalent CPU could be very interesting if Intel releases one. Those variants are optimized for 35W TDP, and they can be used for building high-performance fanless systems that can sustain their performance for quite some time. The lower power requirements for Arrow Lake might be a really good match there.
Also nice to be able to boast a bigger uplift in the following gen due to regressing this one! But they definitely did need to get their efficiency under control since their parts were turning into fairly decent personal heating units.
> To cut Intel some slack, this latest version overhauls their old architecture...
... and their 13th/14th generation processors had serious problems with overvoltage-induced failures - they clearly needed to step back and focus on reliability over performance.
The last Intel machine I will ever build was my 13900K, primarily because I liked the fact that I could use cheaper DDR4 memory.
Next rig and everything for the forseeable future will be AMD. I've been a fanboy since the Athlon XP days - took a detour for a bit - but can't wait to get back.
The results for decompression, but no compression, are all surprisingly bad compared to other benchmarks, how comes? For example 7-zip decompression performs worse than 7700X (84 K mips vs 93 K mips on my 7700X). Other decompression benchs are equally depressing. But compression performs as expected.
In theory, yes. But in the real world the bottleneck of the same 128 bit wide memory, interface that's been popular way back since the time of dual core chips.
Less cache misses (on popular workloads) helps decrease power and increase performance enough that few things benefit from 12-16 cores.
Thus the M3 max (with a 512 bit wide memory system) has a class leading single core and multi-core scores.
I'm not so sure about memory actually being the bottleneck for these 8 core parts.
If memory bandwidth is the bottleneck this should show up in benchmarks with higher dram clocks. I can't find any good application benchmarks, but computerbase.de did it for gaming with 7800MHz vs 6000MHz and didn't find much of a difference [1]
The apple chips are APUs and need a lot of their memory bandwidth for the gpu. Are there any good resources on how much of this bandwidth is actually used in common cpu workloads? Can the CPU even max out half of the 512bit bus?
Well there's much more to memory performance than bandwidth. Generally applications are relatively cache friendly, thus the X3D helps a fair bit, especially with more intensive games (ones that barely hit 60 fps, not the silly game benchmarks that hit 500 fps).
Generally CPUs have relatively small reorder windows, so a cache miss hurts bad, 80ns latency @ 5 GHz is 400 clock cycles, and something north of 1600 instructions that could have been executed. If one in 20 operations is a cache miss that's a serious impediment to getting any decent fraction of peak performance. The pain of those cache misses is part of why the X3D does so well, even a few less cache misses can increase performance a fair bit.
With 8c/16 threads having only 2 (DDR4) or 4 (DDR5) cache misses pending with a 128 bit wide system means that in any given 80-100ns window only 2 or 4 cores can continue resume after a cache miss. DDR-6000 vs DDR-7800 doesn't change that much, you still wait the 80-100ns, you just get the cache line in 8 (16 for ddr5) cycles @ 7800MT/sec instead of 8 (16 for DDR5) cycles @ 6000MT/sec. So the faster DDR5 means more bandwidth (good for GPUs), but not more cache transactions in flight (good for CPUs).
With better memory systems (like the Apple m3 max) you could have 32 cache misses per 80-100ns. I believe about half of those are reserved for the GPU, but even 16 would mean that all of the 9800X3Ds 16 threads could resolve a cache miss per 80-100ns instead of just 2 or 4.
That's part of why a M4 max does so well on multithreaded code. M4 max does better on geekbench 6 multithread than not only the 9800x3d (with 16 threads) but also a 9950x (with 16c/32 threads). Pretty impressive for a low TDP chip that fits in thin/light laptop with great battery life and competes well against Zen 5 chips with a 170 watt TDP that often use water cooling.
For AMD I think Infinity Fabric is the bottleneck so increasing memory clock without increasing IF clock does nothing. And it's also possible that 8 cores with massive cache simply don't need more bandwidth.
My understanding is the single CCD chips (like the 9800x3d) have 2 IF links, while the dual CCD chips (like the 9950x) have 1. Keep in mind these CCDs are shared with turin (12 channel), threadripper pro (8 channel), siena (6 channel), threadripper (4 channel).
The higher CCD configurations have 1 IF link per chip, the lower have 2 IF links per chip. Presumably AMD would bother with the 2 IF link chips unless it helped.
As a C++ programmer, I just bought a 9900X for my first PC build. Sure, it won't game as well, but I like fast compile times, and the 9900X is on sale for $380 right now. That's $100 cheaper than the 9800X3D launch price.
Yeah, these Zen 5 are killer for that kind of workload. I also replaced my workstation with a 9900-series CPU since my Intel 14900K fried itself, and I am very pleased with every aspect, except idle power consumption which is a minor drawback.
It looks like the X3D is no better than the 9900X for non-game single-threaded workloads like browsers, and it's much worse than the 12 or 16 core parts in terms of overall throughput, so for a non-gamer the plain X seems much better than the X3D.
What's your idle power consumption for AMD vs Intel if you don't mind me asking? I'm getting avg 125W for my 13900k build, measured at the wall and it mildly bugs me when I think of it, I thought it'd be closer to 80. And power is very expensive where I live now.
If you are getting 125W at the wall on a PC at idle, your machine or operating system is extremely broken, or you are running atmosphere physics simulations all the time. The SoC on my Intel box typically drew < 1W as measured by RAPL. The 9950X draws about 18W measured the same way. Because of platform overhead the difference in terms of ratio is not that large but the Ryzen system is drawing about 40W at the wall when it's just sitting there.
Intel can still be kind of faster for "productivity" stuff? At least if you are willing to pay for the >8000 MHz CUDIMMs
(which i don't think AMD even supports at full speed?) which can result in pretty impressive performance. Of course the value/price is probably not great...
Sharing links from websites with intrusive video advertisements should be prohibited. The websites should be banned, and those who share links to them should receive a paddling.
Had also seen how he had editorialized some of my mailing list posts and I felt that I would be guilty of Gell-Mann amnesia if I carried on reading the site.
I am surprised at how much this thing is just straight up crushing it with just 8 cores.
I think it topping the machine learning benchmarks has to do with having only 8 cores to share the 96MB of L3 cache, which ends up having a ratio of 1core having 1MBL2 + 12MB L3 which is huge, that means EACH THREAD has more cache than i.e the entire nvidia 3090 (6mb l2 total), and this ends up taking FULL advantage of the extra silicon of various avx extensions.
While true, also keep in mind that the iPad Pro (M4) which has no active cooling, and uses only 1/4th the power ... is still faster (single & multicore) than this 9800X3D - and it's also been on the market for 1/2 year now already.
For an apples to apples comparison, you'll need to compare Zen 5 with M3, or whatever Zen 6 is going to be with M4.
Apple is paying for exclusive access to TSMC's next node. That improves their final products, but doesn't make their architecture inherently better.
Yup I just looked at the clang score in geekbench, for single threaded 9800x3d scored about 3200, whilst m4 had 4400... The m4 is so far above the rest it's ridiculous. Wish Apple made an x86 equivalent so that it can play Windows games lol.
I'm curious to see if AMD will release a 9950X3D this time around. I can foresee that kind of CPU dominating everything else across most workloads given how good this 8-core is holding up against CPUs with double or more cores.
I have a 5950x that is now a few years old and I planned to upgrade to a 9950x.
I have never had one of the 3D V-Cache processors and am curious how it would improve the benchmarks for my multi-threaded data management system that does many operations against a set of 4K blocks of data.
I heard rumors that a 9950x3D version will be available in January. I am trying to figure out if I should wait.
Yes, it's supposedly coming early next year.
I think the current rumor is that only one of the chiplets will have the extra cache though, so you'll have 8 cores with the big cache and 8 cores with the normal cache.
> I am surprised at how much this thing is just straight up crushing it with just 8 cores.
♫ Cache rules everything around me ♫
https://tpucdn.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/images/efficie...
Raw gaming performance increase is good but its gaming efficiency seems to have taken a dip compared to 7800X3D.
So AMD chose to decrease efficiency to get more performance this generation.
Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/23.ht...
The efficiency is only worse because the CPU can use the power without burning itself up unlike the last generation's X3D. And efficiency is always better at lower clocks. You can get this generation's efficiency uplift by limiting its power to the levels where last generation's CPU started throttling to keep its 89C Tjmax, but that will inevitably also limit the frequency that's the main performance uplift for the CPU
For comparison on how limited last gen's X3D was wrt power, tom's hardware has it on 71W with all core AVX, while my 7600X with 2 fewer cores consumes up to 130W
If I can summarize what you wrote: Same IPC gain as normal Zen5 but more power can be drawn to increase performance due to moving the cache chiplet to the bottom.
Man Intel is so far behind on that list.
Bad arch decision are punishing. AMD was absolutely dwarfed in the early core iX days and never really came back until Ryzen. The whole bulldozer linage was DoA to the point Opteron just never factored in.
Hopefully Intel pull something out again but they look asleep a the wheel.
Just seen the figures, it's ridiculously good. The gap over it's competition is staggering. I hope the Intel hubris doesn't set in at Amd, especially with the ARM pack snapping at their heels.
Nice to actually have a decent release this generation of CPUs.
The rest of Zen5 was maybe a 5% bump on average, and Intel's new series actually regressed in performance compared to 14th gen.
Seems like the Zen5X3D's will be the only good parts this time around.
Hardware Unboxed has the interesting theory that the I/O die, which is unchanged between Zen4 and Zen5, is a significant bottleneck especially for the latter. The 3D v-cache would then ease the pressure there, and so see the cpu get an extra boost beyond that expected from increased cache.
To cut Intel some slack, this latest version overhauls their old architecture, and they were fairly upfront about the lack of development in performance in this generation.
The idea is the new platform will allow for better development in future, while improving efficiency fairly significantly.
From a consumer standpoint - this doesn't matter. You can't buy that future product that may exist. You can only choose whether to buy the current product or not. And right now, that product is bad.
I certainly hope the next generation is a massive bump for Intel, but we'll see if that's the case.
I think the new T-equivalent CPU could be very interesting if Intel releases one. Those variants are optimized for 35W TDP, and they can be used for building high-performance fanless systems that can sustain their performance for quite some time. The lower power requirements for Arrow Lake might be a really good match there.
Also nice to be able to boast a bigger uplift in the following gen due to regressing this one! But they definitely did need to get their efficiency under control since their parts were turning into fairly decent personal heating units.
> To cut Intel some slack, this latest version overhauls their old architecture...
... and their 13th/14th generation processors had serious problems with overvoltage-induced failures - they clearly needed to step back and focus on reliability over performance.
The last Intel machine I will ever build was my 13900K, primarily because I liked the fact that I could use cheaper DDR4 memory.
Next rig and everything for the forseeable future will be AMD. I've been a fanboy since the Athlon XP days - took a detour for a bit - but can't wait to get back.
The results for decompression, but no compression, are all surprisingly bad compared to other benchmarks, how comes? For example 7-zip decompression performs worse than 7700X (84 K mips vs 93 K mips on my 7700X). Other decompression benchs are equally depressing. But compression performs as expected.
What can explain those disappointing results?
9800X3D looks like an all-around winner, so if you don't mind spending $500 on just the CPU, I don't see why anyone would get anything else.
All-around winner in what? For $500 you can get a lot more cores.
All-around winning, $500, 8 cores makes no sense.
This thing has a premium gaming price tag because there is nothing close to it other than their own 7800X3D.
In theory, yes. But in the real world the bottleneck of the same 128 bit wide memory, interface that's been popular way back since the time of dual core chips.
Less cache misses (on popular workloads) helps decrease power and increase performance enough that few things benefit from 12-16 cores.
Thus the M3 max (with a 512 bit wide memory system) has a class leading single core and multi-core scores.
I'm not so sure about memory actually being the bottleneck for these 8 core parts. If memory bandwidth is the bottleneck this should show up in benchmarks with higher dram clocks. I can't find any good application benchmarks, but computerbase.de did it for gaming with 7800MHz vs 6000MHz and didn't find much of a difference [1]
The apple chips are APUs and need a lot of their memory bandwidth for the gpu. Are there any good resources on how much of this bandwidth is actually used in common cpu workloads? Can the CPU even max out half of the 512bit bus?
[1] https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/amd-ryzen-7-...
Well there's much more to memory performance than bandwidth. Generally applications are relatively cache friendly, thus the X3D helps a fair bit, especially with more intensive games (ones that barely hit 60 fps, not the silly game benchmarks that hit 500 fps).
Generally CPUs have relatively small reorder windows, so a cache miss hurts bad, 80ns latency @ 5 GHz is 400 clock cycles, and something north of 1600 instructions that could have been executed. If one in 20 operations is a cache miss that's a serious impediment to getting any decent fraction of peak performance. The pain of those cache misses is part of why the X3D does so well, even a few less cache misses can increase performance a fair bit.
With 8c/16 threads having only 2 (DDR4) or 4 (DDR5) cache misses pending with a 128 bit wide system means that in any given 80-100ns window only 2 or 4 cores can continue resume after a cache miss. DDR-6000 vs DDR-7800 doesn't change that much, you still wait the 80-100ns, you just get the cache line in 8 (16 for ddr5) cycles @ 7800MT/sec instead of 8 (16 for DDR5) cycles @ 6000MT/sec. So the faster DDR5 means more bandwidth (good for GPUs), but not more cache transactions in flight (good for CPUs).
With better memory systems (like the Apple m3 max) you could have 32 cache misses per 80-100ns. I believe about half of those are reserved for the GPU, but even 16 would mean that all of the 9800X3Ds 16 threads could resolve a cache miss per 80-100ns instead of just 2 or 4.
That's part of why a M4 max does so well on multithreaded code. M4 max does better on geekbench 6 multithread than not only the 9800x3d (with 16 threads) but also a 9950x (with 16c/32 threads). Pretty impressive for a low TDP chip that fits in thin/light laptop with great battery life and competes well against Zen 5 chips with a 170 watt TDP that often use water cooling.
For AMD I think Infinity Fabric is the bottleneck so increasing memory clock without increasing IF clock does nothing. And it's also possible that 8 cores with massive cache simply don't need more bandwidth.
My understanding is the single CCD chips (like the 9800x3d) have 2 IF links, while the dual CCD chips (like the 9950x) have 1. Keep in mind these CCDs are shared with turin (12 channel), threadripper pro (8 channel), siena (6 channel), threadripper (4 channel).
The higher CCD configurations have 1 IF link per chip, the lower have 2 IF links per chip. Presumably AMD would bother with the 2 IF link chips unless it helped.
What would you suggest instead?
It is pretty competitive on the Multi-Core rating: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8633320 compared to other CPUs: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
The benchmarks in the article suggest that more cores are largely wasted on real world applications.
Yes so buy according to your needs? 8 cores do not cost $500.
They do when those cores are 2 to 4 times faster than the rest.
Cores or "cores"?
As a C++ programmer, I just bought a 9900X for my first PC build. Sure, it won't game as well, but I like fast compile times, and the 9900X is on sale for $380 right now. That's $100 cheaper than the 9800X3D launch price.
Yeah, these Zen 5 are killer for that kind of workload. I also replaced my workstation with a 9900-series CPU since my Intel 14900K fried itself, and I am very pleased with every aspect, except idle power consumption which is a minor drawback.
It looks like the X3D is no better than the 9900X for non-game single-threaded workloads like browsers, and it's much worse than the 12 or 16 core parts in terms of overall throughput, so for a non-gamer the plain X seems much better than the X3D.
What's your idle power consumption for AMD vs Intel if you don't mind me asking? I'm getting avg 125W for my 13900k build, measured at the wall and it mildly bugs me when I think of it, I thought it'd be closer to 80. And power is very expensive where I live now.
If you are getting 125W at the wall on a PC at idle, your machine or operating system is extremely broken, or you are running atmosphere physics simulations all the time. The SoC on my Intel box typically drew < 1W as measured by RAPL. The 9950X draws about 18W measured the same way. Because of platform overhead the difference in terms of ratio is not that large but the Ryzen system is drawing about 40W at the wall when it's just sitting there.
Intel can still be kind of faster for "productivity" stuff? At least if you are willing to pay for the >8000 MHz CUDIMMs (which i don't think AMD even supports at full speed?) which can result in pretty impressive performance. Of course the value/price is probably not great...
Sharing links from websites with intrusive video advertisements should be prohibited. The websites should be banned, and those who share links to them should receive a paddling.
Or maybe you should follow the recommendations of various government agencies (including the FBI) and install an ad blocker.
The last time I viewed this particular website it detected the adblocker and complained that I was depriving the owner of income.
I do wish I could pay $25 a month for my web content to be ad free. Portioned out to websites I actually spent time reading.
This is precisely what Scroll (1) used to do. It seems it didn't end up well, unfortunately.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service)
ublock origin and annoyance filters works fine for me
I was using uBlock origin.
Had also seen how he had editorialized some of my mailing list posts and I felt that I would be guilty of Gell-Mann amnesia if I carried on reading the site.