Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCPU Web Tests
One of the issues when running web-based tests is the nature of modern browsers to automatically install updates. This means any sustained period of benchmarking will invariably fall foul of the 'it's updated beyond the state of comparison' rule, especially when browsers will update if you give them half a second to think about it. Despite this, we were able to find a series of commands to create an un-updatable version of Chrome 56 for our 2017 test suite. While this means we might not be on the bleeding edge of the latest browser, it makes the scores between CPUs comparable.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
SunSpider 1.0.2: link
The oldest web-based benchmark in this portion of our test is SunSpider. This is a very basic javascript algorithm tool, and ends up being more a measure of IPC and latency than anything else, with most high-performance CPUs scoring around about the same. The basic test is looped 10 times and the average taken. We run the basic test 4 times.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: link
Kraken is another Javascript based benchmark, using the same test harness as SunSpider, but focusing on more stringent real-world use cases and libraries, such as audio processing and image filters. Again, the basic test is looped ten times, and we run the basic test four times.
Google Octane 2.0: link
Along with Mozilla, as Google is a major browser developer, having peak JS performance is typically a critical asset when comparing against the other OS developers. In the same way that SunSpider is a very early JS benchmark, and Kraken is a bit newer, Octane aims to be more relevant to real workloads, especially in power constrained devices such as smartphones and tablets.
WebXPRT 2015: link
While the previous three benchmarks do calculations in the background and represent a score, WebXPRT is designed to be a better interpretation of visual workloads that a professional user might have, such as browser based applications, graphing, image editing, sort/analysis, scientific analysis and financial tools.
Overall, all of our web benchmarks show a similar trend. Very few web frameworks offer multi-threading – the browsers themselves are barely multi-threaded at times – so Threadripper's vast thread count is underutilized. What wins the day on the web are a handful of fast cores with high single-threaded performance, and it becomes a balance between cores and cross-core communication.
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Ian Cutress - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
Visit https://myhacker.net For Latest Hacking & security updates.Glock24 - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
Ha your account bee hacked Ian? This seems like an out of place comment from a spam bot.zodiacfml - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
Useless. Why cripple an expensive chip? It is already mentioend that the value of high core counts is mega tasking, like rendering while gaming. I wouldn't be to tell a increase in of 10% or less in performance but I will do for multi-tasking.Greyscend - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
To summarize, I can pay $1000 for a new and crazy powerful CPU that gives me the option to turn $500 of it off so that I can sporadically gain performance in games at a level that is mostly equal to or below the level of standard testing deviations? Worth.Greyscend - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
I want competition in the CPU market so I feel like AMD should consider redistributing funds from what can only be described as the "Gimmicks Department" back to the actual processor R&D department. Although, the Gimmicks Department is getting pretty good at UI development. Look at the software they churned out that turns $500 of your CPU off! It's beautiful! They also seem to be getting bolder since they asked Anandtech to effectively re-write an entire article in order to more succinctly point out how consumers can effectively disable half of the CPU cores they paid for with almost no discernible real world effect. Pretty impressive considering the number of consumers who seem genuinely interested in this type of feature.Oxford Guy - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
"research is paramount"Yeah, like the common knowledge that Zen reviews shouldn't be handicapped by only testing them with slow RAM.
Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech tested Ryzen on day 1 with 3200 speed RAM. Tom's tested the latest batch of consumer Zen (Ryzen 3) with 3200.
And yet... this site has apparently just discovered why it's so important to not kneecap Zen with slow RAM — as if we're using ECC for enterprise stuff all the time.
Gastec - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
Why such abysmal performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider and GTA5 for Sapphire Nitro R9 and RX480 with Thradripper CPU's?Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 24, 2017 - link
I can't say I'm an expert on this subject but it looks like their tested games generally are a list of some of the poorer performers on AMD. Tomb Raider, GTA5, etc.Dirt 4, by contrast, shows Vega 56 beating a 1080 Ti at Tech Report.
dwade123 - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
Threadripper is a mess. There's always a compromise with AMD.mapesdhs - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
Because of course X299 doesn't involve aaany compromise at all. :D