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.
FlowingRiver 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
PorciiVorbesc 9 minutes ago [-]
>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 regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still sucks today in the multicore 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 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.
Last year I picked up an e-wasted FX PC for nostalgia tinkering and yeah, it's definitely feels veeery slow today, even on Linux regardless of having as many cores as modern CPUs, the arch is just that poor, and when you add the missing 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 use 20x less power. It's fine as WindowsXP era PC for retro gaming I guess, but even then you can do just as well with Intel PC from the same period that's way less power hungry.
kristianp 4 days ago [-]
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.
robotnikman 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
sieabahlpark 28 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
t43562 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
nullc 4 days ago [-]
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.
HappySweeney 55 minutes ago [-]
I imagine they didn't want to cannibalize upcoming Zen 6 which will have the 3d cache
tiffanyh 1 hours ago [-]
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.
a3w 1 hours ago [-]
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.
creaturemachine 1 hours ago [-]
I still love my 5800X3D. Drop-in upgrade from a 3700X so I kept my board, RAM, cooler, everything.
mcv 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
monster_truck 48 minutes ago [-]
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
mcv 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
t1234s 1 hours ago [-]
Is this what's helping drive their stock price to the moon?
epolanski 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
stevefan1999 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
floxy 32 minutes ago [-]
I used to use a full Slackware Linux distribution with X-Windows on a 486 clone with 4 Megabytes of RAM.
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.
goodpoint 41 minutes ago [-]
By being more expensive?
christkv 1 hours ago [-]
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
nly 4 days ago [-]
Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%
Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?
qball 4 days ago [-]
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.
ProllyInfamous 4 days ago [-]
>>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.
ChoGGi 4 days ago [-]
As ProllyInfamous mentioned; bringing the cores to the top helped reduce heat, which allows them to boost higher for longer periods then the 7800x3d.
kasabali 4 days ago [-]
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.
paulkrush 4 days ago [-]
2022 to 2024
stefantalpalaru 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
kgwgk 4 days ago [-]
It would have been funny if the "how" had been dropped to end with "Did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?"
whatever1 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
11 minutes ago [-]
Rendered at 21:37:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 regardless.
Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still sucks today in the multicore SW era:
Last year I picked up an e-wasted FX PC for nostalgia tinkering and yeah, it's definitely feels veeery slow today, even on Linux regardless of having as many cores as modern CPUs, the arch is just that poor, and when you add the missing 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 use 20x less power. It's fine as WindowsXP era PC for retro gaming I guess, but even then you can do just as well with Intel PC from the same period that's way less power hungry.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.
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.
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.