This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

AMD-Zen-Feature

There's a new leaked benchmark for AMD's Ryzen (née Zen), and it shows a CPU cadre that's capable of slugging it out with the upper-end of Intel's product line in a mode that no AMD chip has in nearly five years. This is the closest we've come to third-party metrics for how Zen volition perform — past leaks have either focused on single tests similar Ashes of the Singularity or have been official, carefully controlled demos of the flake past AMD itself.

This data comes from French tech magazine Canard PC, which managed to test an engineering sample CPU with a base of operations clock of 3.15GHz and a boost clock of three.3GHz. That's below the 3.4GHz base of operations clock that AMD has promised for top-terminate Ryzen cores, so if nosotros assume a minor heave clock of iii.6GHz information technology ways final test results should be somewhat higher than what we meet below.

ZenTests

Since the text is in French, we asked our (non-native) French speaker Jessica Hall to help with the translation, with one paragraph for each event. The first graph is based on 3D rendering and video encoding performance in a number of applications. The ES Ryzen bit with all eight cores active wins past Intel's six-core Cadre i7-6800K and is bested just past the eight-cadre Core i7-6900K, with its much higher boost clock of iii.7GHz. The French reads:

Performance – brute/forepart-facing/dumb calculations. [this is a directly-up number crunching examination]. With its eight true cores, Zen achieves prowess despite its limited frequency ["clock speed?"] of 3.3gHz. Information technology'southward getting dangerously shut – for intel – to the Core i7 6900K by offer performances comparable to the Core i7 5960X at the same frequency. AMD's story from a few months ago seems to exist well verified in practise, and this is first-class news. Compared to the FX-8370, at that place'south a functioning proceeds of about 35% at the same frequency, which is also in line with the manufacturer's forecasts.

Next up, we've got an overview of game performance, equally calculated using Far Weep iv, Grid: Autosport, BF4, Arma III, X3: TC, The Witcher 3, and Anno 2070. Game performance isn't literally a single-thread examination anymore — nearly games can take advantage of 4 or so cores — just just a scattering of titles tin can reliably benefit from more than that. This is particularly true where Intel chips are concerned, since Intel CPUs have offered vastly better single-thread performance than their AMD counterparts. Of the two sets of benchmarks, this is going to be less friendly to AMD than its counterpart above. The French translation is: "If the results seem much more disappointing across the average of video games tested, keep in mind that the prototype tested was an 8-core with a adequately low frequency (peculiarly in Turbo mode). However, the games remain very sensitive to frequency and still struggle to exploit more than 4 cores. Difficult in these weather condition to compare it with a core i7 whose frequency exceeds 4GHz. Nonetheless, the Zen architecture shows an efficiency that nosotros have not seen in AMD for a long time."

Closing to within 3% of the Core i5-6500K is a significant achievement for Ryzen, since we wait clock speeds to be at least modestly higher on shipping hardware. It'southward too a vast improvement over previous generation cores based on Excavator or Piledriver. For the outset time, if these leaks are accurate, AMD can credibly say it'south offering some competition to Intel in gaming.

Finally, there's ability consumption. The text states: "The power consumption measurement of the Zen CPU was taken from the amperemeter[multimeter? voltmeter/ammeter?] clench on the ATX 12V connector at total load. Although it is less accurate than the oscilloscope we ordinarily apply, it gives a good idea of the performance of the 14nm LPP process of Global Foundries. Later removing the VRM losses from the motherboard, it can be estimated that the CPU consumes just nether 90W, a value very close to that of a 6900K. Auspicious results for the future."

Again, very strong results here from AMD. Ryzen at 93W is significantly below the FX-8370, yet much faster than that cadre. In absolute terms, Intel's performance-per-watt is probable higher, though this will demand to be checked criterion-by-benchmark. What's changed is that AMD can, once once more, credibly claim to exist offer competitive performance. It's a huge leap forrad for the smaller CPU business firm.

As always, these test results should exist taken with a grain of salt. They aren't official, they aren't run on final hardware, and they can't be verified at this signal. But, importantly, these test results do by and large lucifer what I've personally been expecting Zen would offering. Information technology's never been reasonable to think AMD would, in one fell swoop, leap from farther behind Intel than it always was during the Bad Old Days when the P4 was cleaning the Athlon XP's clock. What AMD needs Zen / Ryzen to practice is prove that it tin can build a chip that's competitive with Intel, at solid price points, with a core it tin calibration and improve over the adjacent few years. If these benchmarks are accurate, with a little more than oomph from clock speed and a little adjustment for the whims of whatsoever specific single examination, it's washed that overall.