Optimized Compiler Builds Are Well Worth It For Intel Tiger Lake

[AdrianBc]

TGL has a much higher single-threaded performance than Ryzen 4000 APUs (Zen 2 cores) and absolute most people don't use more than a few cores, so "a real huge performance gain" is BS, sorry, unless you encode, render, compile or run other massively multi-threaded tasks which again is not what absolute most people do.

I wonder why even the article about Intel/TGL is hijacked by rabid AMD fans. Don't you have better things in life to do, than peddle the products of the company which doesn't pay you a single cent for your efforts? Damn, AMD's cult following has become simply disgusting recently.

You are right that Tiger Lake has a much higher single-threaded performance than the Ryzen 4000 APUs with Zen 2 cores.

The new Zen 3 has a slightly higher single-threaded performance than Tiger Lake, but it will become available in low-power processors only in 2021.

So you are right that for some applications Tiger Lake is better than AMD Renoir.

However, I do not agree that most people don't use more than a few cores, at least among those who use Linux.
Of those who use Linux, a large part are either software developers (who compile their projects all the time) or they are people who prefer to install packages compiled from sources or they use some professional applications or they use virtual machines.

All these people use fully all available cores and all of them will get a much better performance from AMD Renoir.

A better reason to choose Tiger Lake instead of AMD Renoir is if you want a better GPU, which you can get if you buy something with an i7 Tiger Lake.

While some years ago you should have bought either a laptop with Intel for a better CPU or a laptop with AMD for a better GPU, now the situation is reversed.

Tiger Lake has faster CPU cores, but they are not fast enough to match the double number of CPU cores provided by AMD Renoir.
AMD Renoir has faster GPU cores, but they are not fast enough to match the 1.5 times more GPU cores provided by Tiger Lake.

[Templar82]

That boiled my blood, sorry, but I'll try to be calmer next time, you're right

Don't you have better things in life to do, than defend the products of the company which doesn't pay you a single cent for your efforts? Damn, Intel's cult following has become simply disgusting recently.

[ms178]

Do any existing package managers include a way to have 'tuned' sub-arches for packages? It would be nice to be able to tell APT that you want 'the Haswell' or 'the AVX-512' or 'the Cortex-A72' set of packages for your distro.

I always thought these target specific repos (or whole distributions) would be the next step for performance oriented distributions, but as far as I know only openMandriva does it in limited form with a Zen target next to their standard target. But I guess to maintain so many repos for different CPU architectures is the main problem while the gains were not as great as I hoped for (there was some testing on Phoronix last year).

The good news is that things are moving slowly into this direction, albeit in a more generic way - we recently got new x86-64 feature levels (therer are four, v1 is classic, v2 is Nehalem-like, v3 is Haswell-like and v4 is around AVX-512) and the idea was that some distribution could start to target the newer feature levels.

[jrch2k8]

Damn, AMD's cult following has become simply disgusting recently.

Says the guy nitpicking single thread performance on a compilation article for Linux trying to justify Intel and is whining on every thread possible about Zen3 50$ increase.

Must be hard be an Intel fanboi this year

For reference i don't give a flying F**K about Intel or AMD, i care about my money and this iteration around my money says it likes RED team best but that doesn't mean i'm going to change my current Ryzen 5 2600 and Xeon e5-2678-v3 because they still do their job perfectly.

Also life has teach me that Single Thread performance is a very bad concept to base hardware acquisitions decisions unless it affects MT performance substantially(like Bulldozer did) because outside few cases(like Gaming with caveats or very light office work where most people won't notice any difference to begin with) the ST advantage get heavily diluted on your work day. which is why i got a E5-2678-v3 instead of an I7 for example.

[ms178]

Don't you have better things in life to do, than defend the products of the company which doesn't pay you a single cent for your efforts? Damn, Intel's cult following has become simply disgusting recently.

I just need to point at both Zen 3 threads from a couple of days ago to show you that AMD just got their cult followers of their own which cannot stand any fact-based criticism. My own cult is price/performance, I worship that before I make any buying decision.

[jrch2k8]

I just need to point at both Zen 3 threads from a couple of days ago to show you that AMD just got their cult followers of their own which cannot stand any fact-based criticism. My own cult is price/performance, I worship that before I make any buying decision.

Well your claims on some of those threads were very counter intuitive because of your local situation with those crazy prices in Europe but most people were using dollar MSRP which made you look a bit crazy even though in your regional case you were right

[ms178]

For reference i don't give a flying F**K about Intel or AMD, i care about my money and this iteration around my money says it likes RED team best but that doesn't mean i'm going to change my current Ryzen 5 2600 and Xeon e5-2678-v3 because they still do their job perfectly.

It is interesting that you kept your Ryzen 5 2600. I sold mine after getting the exact same Xeon SKU like you, the 2678V3. Hence I have first hand experience with both and found the value of that Xeon to be incredible! The gaming performance is comparable to the Ryzen 2600 and the multi-core performance is significantly better (with the Turbo Boost Unlock applied). I got the CPU and mainboard for the same price which I sold my Ryzen and MSI B450 Tomahawk for and factoring in the used DDR3-ECC-RAM I run it with, the price/performance for the X99 combo is even better.

Hence I can share birdie's criticism of the 5600X which I also think is a terrible value part if compared to the non-X 3600 which was available for 160 EUR a couple of months ago, but even for a current street price 180 EUR it is still the better buy considering the price/performance metric. You might have read my discussions with the other dudes in these two Zen 3 threads where I also mentioned the 2678V3 as an alternative for tech-savvy people which would be okay with -10% performance of a 3600 for 74% reduction in price (CPU+Mobo+RAM), but some people just couldn't accept that or would take such an option into consideration (to be fair, this is not something I would recommend for everyone, but it is no voodoo-art either but you need to be comfortable to take some risks)...

Update: Yes, I've explained there why I don't think that MSRP's are a good way to assess all of your options. After all it is about what you can buy today in the markets available to you, not some artificial price these companies come up with which you can't realize when you want to buy the parts in your region at that time.

[jrch2k8]

It is interesting that you kept your Ryzen 5 2600. I sold mine after getting the exact same Xeon SKU like you, the 2678V3. Hence I have first hand experience with both and found the value of that Xeon to be incredible! The gaming performance is comparable to the Ryzen 2600 and the multi-core performance is significantly better (with the Turbo Boost Unlock applied). I got the CPU and mainboard for the same price which I sold my Ryzen and MSI B450 Tomahawk for and factoring in the used DDR3-ECC-RAM I run it with, the price/performance for the X99 combo is even better.

Hence I can share birdie's criticism of the 5600X which I also think is a terrible value part if compared to the non-X 3600 which was available for 160 EUR a couple of months ago, but even for a current street price 180 EUR it is still the better buy considering the price/performance metric. You might have read my discussions with the other dudes in these two Zen 3 threads where I also mentioned the 2678V3 as an alternative for tech-savvy people which would be okay with -10% performance of a 3600 for 74% reduction in price (CPU+Mobo+RAM), but some people just couldn't accept that or would take such an option into consideration (to be fair, this is not something I would recommend for everyone, but it is no voodoo-art either but you need to be comfortable to take some risks)...

Yeah, i love my E5-2678-V3 and with DDR3-ECC(my ZFS approves) as well but long story short it replaced my brother's old FX-6100 since his job is as accountant it kinda more than enough with some light gaming.

Well, it depends because for certain people guarantees and buy new are more important than bang for buck and for those people i think the 5600X is a killer CPU since it destroy the 2678v3 on ST and matches it on MT, so performance wise all is squared.

But i do agree with you, if you have no problems going into the used markets or aliexpress and you want the best performance per dollar possible, the E5 V3/V4 Xeons are an outstanding option hands down.

Another problem is people take benchmarks too literally and they don't realize those scenarios are impossible on real life because no one only ever uses only one single application on 1 thread and in the few fringe cases that is true then is pointless to buy an 16 cores CPU anyway and gaming benchmark can be very deceptive as well because most benchmark are done on absolute pristine stripped down windows that most users won't have due to lack of technical skills.

So, most people see reviews on youtube and hear old, low ST performance will kill gaming eventually(even tho had no problem reaching 60+ fps in all titles with a 1500$ GPU) and no overclocking because Xeon, etc while pushing hard the latest and greatest of either brand make people afraid of going bargain hunter but when you know your stuff you are in for a treat.

My only regret with my 2678V3 is that i went cheap and didn't buy a dual socket 2678V3 instead

[brad0]

The benchmarks show otherwise. What a waste. This reminds me of stupid Gentoo users that constantly waste CPU cycles rebuilding all the time for less than 1% gain in performance.

[muncrief]

Is there an equivalent -march option for my Ryzen R7 3700X? I've heard of various individual optimization flags, but when reading about them most articles claim they don't really make a difference so I haven't tried them. I would love to find out I've been wrong though!