Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, JustAnEngineer
Igor_Kavinski wrote:Yeah, I guess that's the difference. Most users, including me, aren't really using software that pushes the CPU's to their limits. Just out of curiosity, I ran a countif() formula in Excel on an office i7-4770 and an 8th Gen laptop i5. The 8th gen i5 saved about 9 seconds when the formula worked on 5000 rows. So I estimated that for a million rows, the i5 would save around half an hour but the total execution time would still be more than five hours. Why would I want to buy a new PC just to save half an hour on something that I do occasionally? Don't know about Ryzen though. Maybe it will make a bigger difference with countif() on a million rows?
Concupiscence wrote:At some point I'll probably grab a 3900x to throw into my Ryzen's motherboard...
Concupiscence wrote:You aren't wrong about day to day work being pretty comparable.But I dunno... I've been struck by the speed gap between my Ryzen 1700 and the 8 core Sandy Bridge EP Xeon E5-4640 I just built. For well-threaded jobs the clock speed gap isn't gigantic - 2.5 GHz all core turbo on the Sandy, 3.15 GHz on Zen 1 - and the 1700 still walks away from it. In a Handbrake 1080p30 Fast encode the Xeon managed 35.8 fps, the Ryzen 59.1; in Cinebench R20, the Ryzen produced 3190, the Xeon 1750. And this is with the Ryzen running dual-channel DDR4-2400 versus the Xeon's quad-channel DDR3-1600. If I normalize those back, compensating for the Ryzen's 26% speed advantage, the Handbrake number would be 46.9 fps and 2532 for Cinebench R20. That's still an observed difference of ~30% and 44% to the aggregate IPC respectively.
The Xeon doesn't make me unhappy, but it hasn't put up the fight I expected. For weakly threaded apps there would be a full 1 GHz speed gap, so I'm not even going there, but there's more to the per-thread performance advantage than the clock speed delta alone makes up. I might manually underclock the Ryzen 1700 to a constant 2.5 GHz and re-run the benchmarks just for a closer apples to apples comparison... I'd grab an upgrade kit to nudge it to a matching 32 gigs of DDR4-3200 while I'm at it, but it's not hurting for that right now anyway.
Props to Starfalcon, by the way, for building a hyper rig. I'm planning to assemble a 3900x for a friend early next year to replace his iMac for multimedia work because he can't rationalize dropping six grand for an "entry-level" Mac Pro that would be beaten by a system costing about half as much. Every year Apple snorts more powdered money, I swear.