CPUs From 2004 Against AMD's New 64-Core Threadripper 3990X + Tests Against FX-9590

[microcode]

Fun comparison.

[onicsis]

Gains in single threaded performance for the past 10 years have still been minuscule in comparison to what we had from 1981 to the end of the 00's where performance increased 100 fold or maybe more.

It would be great if someone managed to compare the following CPUs:

• Intel 386
• Intel 486
• Pentium Pro
• Pentium 2
• Pentium III
• Pentium 4
• Core 2 Duo
• Sandy Bridge
• Sky Lake
• Ice Lake

Intel 8086 and 286 are out of the question since they lack 32bit support.

Make more sens bench-marking against AMD processors from around 2006. Original K8 against latest Zen

[DL9220]

Make more sens bench-marking against AMD processors from around 2006. Original K8 against latest Zen

Or even an 486 dx* from Intel against one from AMD. There were differences even at that time.

[muncrief]

I held on to my old FX 6300/990FX system all the way up until Zen2, when I purchased my current R7-3700X/X570 system.

Needless to say the performance difference is astounding

I'm so glad I stuck with AMD even though I had to live with lesser performance for quite awhile. But I knew that if AMD went under we'd be at the mercy of the predatory Intel corporation forever.

As an embedded systems engineer who designed a few simple custom microprocessors and microcontrollers back in the day I realized what a monumental error Bulldozer was. And a year or so after its release I also sadly realized that the architecture couldn't be salvaged, and it would be awhile before a new one could be developed. I didn't know it would be quite this long, but still the wait was worth it.

[Raka555]

It is probable that at least one of the measurements is invalid.

I repeated it several times.
Even my 4600u intel laptop is faster than the 3700x with this.

You can check for yourself:
Compile with "gcc -O3 prime.c -o prime_gcc"

#include <stdbool.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdio.h>

//
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37513311/prime-number-generator-in-c
//

bool IsPrime(int test)
{
    // i <= sqrt(test)
    // but to avoid sqrt you can do i * i <= test
    for(int i= 2; i * i <= test; i++){
        if(test%i==0){
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

int main()
{
        int count=0;
        for (int i=1;i<1000*1000*10;++i) {
                if (IsPrime(i)) {
                        count++;
                }
        }
        printf("%d\n",count);
}

Michael I am curious to know how fast the i9-9900k can do this

[mlau]

I repeated it several times.
Even my 4600u intel laptop is faster than the 3700x with this.

Yes, this performs over twice as fast on intel hardware. Run it with perf on Zen:

# perf stat ./rand
664580

 Performance counter stats for './rand':

          7.479,07 msec task-clock:u              #    0,999 CPUs utilized          
                 0      context-switches:u        #    0,000 K/sec                  
                 0      cpu-migrations:u          #    0,000 K/sec                  
                52      page-faults:u             #    0,007 K/sec                  
    35.198.688.120      cycles:u                  #    4,706 GHz                    
        15.034.444      stalled-cycles-frontend:u #    0,04% frontend cycles idle  
    [B]33.164.471.465      stalled-cycles-backend:u  #   94,22% backend cycles idle[/B]    
    17.446.305.050      instructions:u            #    0,50  insn per cycle        
                                                  #    1,90  stalled cycles per insn
     3.508.141.911      branches:u                #  469,061 M/sec                  
         4.877.261      branch-misses:u           #    0,14% of all branches

I guess integer division is not a strong point of Zen.

[onicsis]

That's not really necessary as you can install Windows 98 on even Intel 386, and there are quite a lot of 32bit benchmarks which support this OS including 7-Zip.

Yes. Best test: S3_Virge against Matrox Millennium against TNT NVIDIA Riva. And do not forget Voodoo2.

[tg--]

vs Raspberry PI ?

It is actually not that impressive that it is only 4x faster with compiling the kernel and only 2x faster encoding an mp3 than the AMD FX-9590 with its 64/128 against 8/8...

Man, you really need to learn to read. The 64 cores don't matter for mp3 encoding, since it is singlethreaded. This means that the Threadripper is more than twice as fast with 1 core, and if you were to encode 64 or more mp3s at a time, it would be more than 120 times faster.
The kernel compilation also does not scale linearly with CPU performance.

For me lots of cores only looks good in benchmarks designed for that purpose.
In the "real world" you still get bad diminishing returns ...

Yesterday I ran a program that calculates prime numbers and I was not impressed that my 2012 model i7-3770 (3.4GHz/3.9GHZ) did it in 4s versus my "shinny new" ryzen7-3700x (3.6Ghz/4.4GHz) which only managed 8s....

Funny, you mention benchmarks designed for that purpose and in the next breath mention a benchmark designed for that purpose to make the opposite point.
The prime calculator likely uses a special code path for Intel's AVX which the 3770 supports, and will fall back to a generic, slow, codepath for AMD (where the Ryzens now would support the same AVX that 3770 did).
The threadripper will outperform the old 3770 in any metric at any time, even intel-optimized AVX. It just can't outperform it if it can't use its accelerated paths, which is a decision of the software developer.

Running bloatware is where the ryzens shine with all their cache, but pure calculations intel seems to still be far ahead...

[/QUOTE]

Running anything is where the Ryzens shine, Intel just has nothing to compete.
Intel CPUs are far more expensive for less performance, while using more power. Even specially optimized AVX512 software, compiled with Intels compiler will in many cases be executed much more quickly on a cheaper Ryzen based design.

Of course the huge caches are also nice, since you get those for no extra charge, while you have to spend more than twice the money for half the cache on a much slower Intel CPU.
Intel only sells their large caches on Xeon CPUs for a Xeon price and, sadly, Xeon performance.

[Zan Lynx]

Be careful if you use that code on a 32-bit system. That

i * i

multiply would overflow because 1e7 (10,000,000) * 1e7 is 1e14, well over the 2.1e9 signed int32_t limit.

[birdie]

I repeated it several times.
Even my 4600u intel laptop is faster than the 3700x with this.

You can check for yourself:

What are your numbers? Here on Ryzen 7 3700X:

$ time ./prime_gcc
664580

real    0m8.030s
user    0m8.030s
sys     0m0.000s