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Posted by ibobev 4 days ago

How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?(lemire.me)
145 points | 30 comments
Yokolos 3 days ago|
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 54 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 35 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 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:

  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(a-la Intel Pentium 4) 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.
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. So unless you're into collecting pieces of history, it definitely belongs in the e-waste pile.

MrDOS 18 minutes ago||
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robotnikman 1 hour 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 54 minutes ago|
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tiffanyh 1 hour 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 hour 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 hour ago||
I still love my 5800X3D. Drop-in upgrade from a 3700X so I kept my board, RAM, cooler, everything.
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.

nullc 3 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 1 hour ago|
I imagine they didn't want to cannibalize upcoming Zen 6 which will have the 3d cache
t43562 1 hour 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.
mcv 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 31 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 hour ago||
Is this what's helping drive their stock price to the moon?
epolanski 1 hour 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 57 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 59 minutes ago||
I used to use a full Slackware Linux distribution with X-Windows on a 486 clone with 4 Megabytes of RAM.
jauntywundrkind 1 hour ago|
Compound this with Linux users seeing a ~8% gain (and some very big gains here and there) on performance from ongoing kernel improvements too! https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-73-amd-epyc

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.

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