Hammering The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X With An Intense, Threaded Workload

Today I got around to running a very heavy/demanding, very real-world workload on the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X that I've been meaning to test with this Zen CPU.

The workload I've been running on the Ryzen 7 1800X the past few hours is that of Open Porous Media, the open-source OPM project is a growing initiative around research and simulators for modeling and simulation of porous media processes, including a reservoir simulator and permeability upscaling. This sort of workload has relevance in areas like oil and natural gas industries.

While it's certainly a real-world workload, running it can take quite some time depending upon the thread configuration, and thus isn't tested as part of all our Linux hardware reviews at Phoronix (as well as having a long dependency chain), but figured it would be fun seeing how it performs with Ryzen.

I compared the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X performance to a few ouf our systems in the test farm including the Xeon E3-1270 v5, E3-1231 v3, and Core i7 5960X.

First up was trying OPM's Flow simulator, "Flow is a reservoir simulator for three-phase black-oil problems using a fully-implicit formulation. There are also specialized variants for solvent and polymer problems."

With just one thread, the Ryzen 7 1800X was running behind the Xeon E3-1270 v5. The E3-1270 v5 has a 3.6GHz base frequency with 4.0GHz turbo boost and has four cores plus Hyper Threading. These clock frequencies match that of the Ryzen 7 1800X with its base and turbo frequencies, but the E3-1270 v5 sells for around $300 USD while the 1800X is around $500. At least clock-for-clock, the Ryzen 7 1800X is right near the E3-1270 v5 Skylake.

When running the Flow MPI Norne test with two threads, the Ryzen 7 1800X was able to come out ahead of the E3-1270 v5 as well as the Core i7 5960X (and obviously, the E3-1231 v5 too).

But when hitting four threads is when the Core i7 5960X began pulling out ahead.

And at eight threads, the Core i7 5960X was remaining faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X by a noticeable margin. Unfortunately I don't have Open Porous Media results to share today from more systems due to the lengthy dependency requirements for these simulators as well as the significant amount of time needed to execute.

Lastly for this simulator was the 16 thread run, between the Core i7 5960X and Ryzen 7 1800X for both sporting 16 threads. The i7-5960X was significantly faster than the Ryzen 7 CPU tested.

Next was OPM's Upscaling test, "The Upscaling module contains programs that can do flow-based permeability upscaling as well as upscaling of relative permeability and capillary curves, using a steady-state approach."

At one thread, the upscaling test showed similar single-core performance between the Ryzen 7 1800X and Xeon E3 1270 v5 that are clocked the same, but with this Xeon E3 part retailing for almost $200 less for this quad-core + HT workstation CPU.

And with two threads is where the Ryzen 7 strikes a win over the tested Intel CPUs.


But with more than two threads is when the Core i7 5960X showed its strength.

And 16 threads showed the Core i7 5960X continuing to lead.

Those wanting to try running the OPM benchmark on their systems can install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1703160-RI-AMDRYZENO41.