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.
All stated for gaming, that is.
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.
Edit: dug in it, no, because cache isn't addressable and it's directly managed by the cpu.
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.
Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?
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.
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.
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 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.
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, 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 modern security extensions, 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 that's gonna be way less power hungry.