PC World - USA 2020-07)

JULY 2020 PCWorld 55

pointing out that some software will heavily
penalize Ryzen’s microarchitecture. Intel has
fielded software support to companies for
much longer than AMD, and it shows.

The gap closes with the much more
popular (and free) 7Zip. We set the built-in
benchmark to use the number of threads
available to the CPU—in this case, 24 for
Ryzen 9 and 20 for Core i9. The first result is
multi-core.

Decompressing performance, according

to the developer, leans heavily on integer

performance, branch prediction, and

instruction latency. Compressing

performance leans more on memory latency,

cache performance, and out-of-order

performance. It doesn’t matter either way, as

the Core i9 falls to the Ryzen 9 in both areas.

The Ryzen 9 is about 21 percent faster in

decompression, and a whopping 44 percent

faster in compression.

Moving to single-threaded performance,

we see the Core i9’s fortunes reverse, with

about 7 percent faster decompression and 17

percent faster compression.

GAMING PERFORMANCE

Intel didn’t call the Core i9-10900K “the best

CPU for multi-threaded performance”

because it likely knew it wasn’t going to

squeeze out the Ryzen 9 3900X. On the other

hand, Intel’s chips have long led in gaming

performance, ever since the first Ryzen was

introduced.

Rather than have you scroll through 16

charts, we combined 16 results into one

megachart, from a list of games run at varying

resolutions and settings. We’ll run through it

from top to bottom.

In Far Cry New Dawn we see the Core i9

vary from about 9 percent to about 14

percent over the Ryzen 9, depending on the

resolution and game setting. As you jack up

the resolution or the game setting, the test is

The multi-core performance of the Core i9 can’t
keep up with the Ryzen 9 in 7-Zip.

7-Zip NT Decompressing

7-Zip NT Compressing

7-Zip 19.00

Multi-core Performance

108,072

137,626

Ryzen 9 3900x Zen 2 (12/24) Core i9-10900K Comet Lake S (10/20)

57,671

83,940

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Single-threaded 7Zip performance is a solid win
for the Core i9.

7-Zip 1T Decompressing

7-Zip 1T Compressing

7-Zip 19.00

Single-core Performance

8,909

8,278

Ryzen 9 3900x Zen 2 (12/24) Core i9-10900K Comet Lake S (10/20)

7, 4 0 3

6,297

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE