the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are smallMAXIMUMPC aug 2019 maximumpc.comquickstart
10
The red team launches new CPUs and GPUs
AMD Steals the
Show at Computex
is particularly handy for AMD,
which uses four PCIe lanes
as the internal interconnect
between processor and
motherboard chipset,
a notorious bottleneck,
particularly for fast storage.
It’s not going to make much
difference on the graphics card
side of things. You’ll need new
X570 chipset motherboards,
though, despite early hopes of
backward compatibility.
This is a solid step forward
for AMD: more efficient,
more cores, and particularly
strong in performance per
watt. Keeping competitive
in the world of processors
requires investment in depth;
you need to be working on
the replacement design,
and the replacement for the
replacement, and already
thinking beyond
that as youlaunch a new design. This is
where AMD has failed in the
past. It never really managed
to capitalize quickly enough
on its innovations. Zen has
changed that. The Ryzen 3000
range should be available now.
Zen 2 shifts to servers next,
with a new EPYC series before
the end of the year. News on
Threadripper versions was
notable by its absence.
Soon after Computex, AMD
added a cherry on the top:
the 16-core version. As soon
as people saw the first Ryzen
3000 chips, it was clear there
was room for two of the Core
Complex chiplets, so a 16-core
version was inevitable. The
Ryzen 9 3950X has a base clock
of 3.5GHz and a maximum
boost of 4.7GHz. Despite all
the horsepower, it manages a
TDP of 105W—commendably
low. The 16-core beast will
be available in September
for $749. That last bit is
the clincher; to match this
performance running Intel,
you can double that, and more.
We don’t have anything
official on performance yet,
but engineering samples have
been put through their paces.
One leak has it pitched against
Intel’s Core i9-9980XE, $1,
of 18-core Skylake-X, usingthe GeekBench benchmark.
The 3950X leaps ahead in
multicore, and tops the Intel
comfortably in single-thread,
too. It also trounces AMD’s
own Threadripper chips.
The huge amount of cache
helps—the 3950X carries a
whopping 72MB of L2 and L3.
Others have been playing with
overclocking, reaching 5GHz,
then breaking world records
in GeekBench, Cinebench R15,
and R20. Is this the CPU to
finally take the crown as the
world’s fastest gaming chip?
AMD’s graphics department
has also been busy with its own
7nm silicon: Navi, which also
made its debut at Computex- The architecture has the
official name of RDNA. The
$379 Radeon RX 5700 has 36
compute units, 2,304 stream
processors, and carries 8GB
of GDDR6 on a 256-bit memory
bus. It has a base clock of
1,465MHz, a boost of 1,725MHz,
and a game clock of 1,625MHz.
This equates to 7.95 Tflops of
processing power. Above this
is the $449 Radeon RX 5700XT,
which has 40 compute units
and 2,560 stream units. It runs
at a base clock of 1,605MHz,
a boost of 1,905MHz, and a
game clock of 1,755MHz. It
manages 9.75 Tflops. What’s a
game clock? It’s a new metric
AMD has coined to indicate
a more typical speed used in
games. Base and boost clocks
If It belonged to anybody,
Computex 2019 was AMD’s. It
picked the event to launch its
new 7nm Zen 2 Ryzen 3000
series processors and the first
Navi graphics cards. Zen 2
is no surprise—we’ve been
drip-fed details for months—
what we do have now are the
hard numbers for the initial
release. The five new chips
range run from a $199 Ryzen
3 3600 through to a 12-core
Ryzen 9 3900X for $499. Clock
speeds don’t vary much, with
300MHz between the fastest
and slowest base clocks, and
400MHz on the boost clocks.
We can’t expect miracles—as
the die process shrinks, you
have to lower voltages, which
makes it harder to run really
high frequencies. Chips are
struggling to reach 5GHz; it’s
as much about efficiency
and core count. The
thermal performance is
notable: The eight-core 3700X
manages on a thermal design
power of just 65W, 30W below
a comparable Intel i9-9700K.
Instructions per cycle show
an improvement of about 15
percent—handy, rather than
dazzling. The original Ryzen
managed about 50 percent
over the previous Bulldozer
family, but that was a huge
technology leap, which we
won’t see for the foreseeable
future. The Zen 2 core also
introduces us to PCIe 4.0. ThisExpect graphics card makers to
take Navi further than AMD’s initial
clock speed pretty soon. ©^
AMD/INTEL