Amd zen 3 review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested

5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested

When AMD announced that its new Zen 3 core was a ground-up redesign and offered complete performance leadership, we had to ask them to confirm if that’s exactly what they said. Despite being less than 10% the size of Intel, and very close to folding as a company in 2015, the bets that AMD made in that timeframe with its next generation Zen microarchitecture and Ryzen designs are now coming to fruition. Zen 3 and the new Ryzen 5000 processors, for the desktop market, are the realization of those goals: not only performance per watt and performance per dollar leaders, but absolute performance leadership in every segment. We’ve gone into the new microarchitecture and tested the new processors. AMD is the new king, and we have the data to show it.

New Core, Same 7nm, Over 5.0 GHz!

The new Ryzen 5000 processors are drop-in replacements for the Ryzen 3000 series. Anyone with an AMD X570 or B550 motherboard today, with the latest BIOS (AGESA 1081 or above), should be able to buy and use one of the new processors without a fuss. Anyone with an X470/B450 board will have to wait until Q1 2021 as those boards are updated.

As we’ve previously covered, AMD is launching four processors today for retail, ranging from six cores up to sixteen cores.

AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Processors Zen 3 Microarchitecture
AnandTech	Cores Threads	Base Freq	Turbo Freq	L3 Cache	TDP	MSRP
Ryzen 9 5950X	16c/32t	3400	4900	64 MB	105 W	$799
Ryzen 9 5900X	12c/24t	3700	4800	64 MB	105 W	$549
Ryzen 7 5800X	8c/16t	3800	4700	32 MB	105 W	$449
Ryzen 5 5600X	6c/12t	3700	4600	32 MB	65 W	$299*

*Comes with Bundled CPU Cooler

All the processors have native support for DDR4-3200 memory as per JEDEC standards, although AMD recommends something slightly faster for optimum performance. All the processors also have 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0 for add-in devices.

The Ryzen 9 5950X: 16 Cores at $799

The top processor is the Ryzen 9 5950X, with 16 cores and 32 threads, offering a base frequency of 3400 MHz and a turbo frequency of 4900 MHz – on our retail processor, we actually detected a single core frequency of 5050 MHz, indicating that this processor will turbo above 5.0 GHz with sufficient thermal headroom and cooling!

This processor is enabled through two eight core chiplets (more on chiplets below), each with 32 MB of L3 cache (total 64 MB). The Ryzen 9 5950X is rated at the same TDP as the Ryzen 9 3950X, at 105 W. The peak power will be ~142 W, as per AMD’s socket design, on motherboards that can support it.

For those that don’t read the rest of the review, the short conclusion for the Ryzen 9 5950X is that even at $799 suggested retail price, it enables a new level of consumer grade performance across the board. The single thread frequency is crazy high, and when combined with the new core design with its higher IPC, pushes workloads that are single-core limited above and beyond Intel’s best Tiger Lake processors. When it comes to multi-threaded workloads, we have new records for a consumer processor across the board.

The Ryzen 9 5900X: 12 Cores at $549

Squaring off against Intel’s best consumer grade processor is the Ryzen 9 5900X, with 12 cores and 24 threads, offering a base frequency of 3700 MHz and a turbo frequency of 4800 MHz (4950 MHz was observed). This processor is enabled through two six-core chiplets, but all the cache is still enabled at 32 MB per chiplet (64 MB total). The 5900X also has the same TDP as the 3900X/3900XT it replaces at 105 W.

At $549, it is priced $50 higher than the processor it replaces, which means that for the extra 10% cost it will have to showcase that it can perform at least 10% better.

The Ryzen 7 5800X: 8 Cores at $449

After AMD showcased a quad core processor under $100 in the last generation, it takes a lot of chutzpah to offer an eight core processor for $449 – AMD stands by its claims that this processor offers substantial generational performance improvements. The new AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, with eight cores and sixteen threads, is set to go up against Intel’s Core i7-10700K, also an eight core / sixteen thread processor.

The Ryzen 7 5800X has a base frequency of 3800 MHz and a rated turbo frequency of 4700 MHz (we detected 4825 MHz), and uses a single eight-core chiplet with a total 32 MB of L3 cache. The single core chiplet has some small benefits over a dual chiplet design where some cross-CPU communication is needed, and that comes across in some of our very CPU-limited gaming benchmarks. This processor also has 105 W TDP (~142 W peak).

The Ryzen 5 5600X: 6 Cores for $299

The cheapest processor that AMD is releasing today is the Ryzen 5 5600X, but it is also the only one that comes with a CPU cooler in box. The Ryzen 5 5600X has six cores and twelve threads, running at a base frequency of 3700 MHz and a peak turbo of 4600 MHz (4650 MHz measured), and is the only CPU to be given a TDP of 65 W (~88 W peak).

The single chiplet design means 32 MB of L3 cache total (technically it’s still the same that a single core can access as the Ryzen 9 parts, more on that later), and will be put up against Intel’s six-core Core i5-10600K, which also retails in a similar ballpark.

Despite being the cheapest and technically the slowest processor of the bunch, I was mightily surprised by the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X: similar to the Ryzen 9 5950X, in single threaded benchmarks, it completely knocks the socks off of anything Intel has to offer – even Tiger Lake.

Why Ryzen 5000 Works: Chiplets

At a high level, the new Ryzen 5000 ‘Vermeer’ series seem oddly familiar to the last generation Ryzen 3000 ‘Matisse’ series. This is actually by design, as AMD is fully leveraging their chiplet design methodology in the new processors.

To introduce some terminology, AMD creates two types of chiplets. One of them has the main processing cores, and is called a core complex die or CCD. This is the one that is built on TSMC’s 7nm process. The other chiplet is an interconnect die with I/O, known as an IO die or IOD — this one has the PCIe lanes, the memory controllers, the SATA ports, the connection to the chipset, and helps control power delivery as well as security. In both the previous generation and the new generation, AMD pairs one of its IO dies with up to two 8-core chiplets.

Ryzen 3000 processor without heatspreader, showing two core chiplets and one IO die.

This is possible because the new core chiplets contain the same protocols for interconnect, physical design, and power constraints. AMD is able to leverage the execution of the previous platform and generation such that when the core connections are identical, despite the different internal structures (Zen 3 vs Zen 2), they can still be put together and executed in a known and successful fashion.

As with the previous generation, the new Zen 3 chiplet is designed with eight cores

Zen 3 is a New Core Design

By keeping the new 8-core Zen 3 chiplet the same size and same power, this obviously means that AMD had to build a core that fits within those constraints but also affords a performance and performance efficiency uplift in order to make a more compelling design. Typically when designing a CPU core, the easiest thing to do is to take the previous design and upgrade certain parts of it – or what engineers call tackling ‘the low hanging fruit’ which enables the most speed-up for the least effort. Because CPU core designs are built to a deadline, there are always ideas that never make it into the final design, but those become the easiest targets for the next generation. This is what we saw with Zen 1/Zen+ moving on to Zen 2. So naturally, the easiest thing for AMD to do would be the same again, but with Zen 3.

However, AMD did not do this. In our interviews with AMD’s senior staff, we have known that AMD has two independent CPU core design teams that aim to leapfrog each other as they build newer, high performance cores. Zen 1 and Zen 2 were products from the first core design team, and now Zen 3 is the product from the second design team. Naturally we then expect Zen 4 to be the next generation of Zen 3, with ‘the low hanging fruit’ taken care of.

In our recent interview with AMD’s Chief Technology Officer, Mark Papermaster, we were told that if you were to look at the core from a 100,000 foot level, you might easily mistake that the Zen 3 core design to be similar to that of Zen 2. However, we were told that because this is a new team, every segment of the core has been redesigned, or at the very least, updated. Users who follow this space closely will remember that the branch predictor used in Zen 2 wasn’t meant to come until Zen 3, showing that even the core designs have an element of portability to them. The fact that both Zen 2 and Zen 3 are built on the same TSMC N7 process node (the same PDK, although Zen 3 has the latest yield/consistency manufacturing updates from TMSC) also helps in that design portability.

AMD has already announced the major change that will be obvious to most of the techies that are interested in this space: the base core chiplet, rather than having two four-core complexes, has a single eight-core complex. This enables each core to access the whole 32 MB of L3 cache of a die, rather than 16 MB, which reduces latency of memory accesses in that 16-to-32 MB window. It also simplifies core-to-core communication within a chiplet. There are a couple of trade-offs to do this, but overall it is a good win.

In fact there are a significant number of differences throughout the core. AMD has improved:

branch prediction bandwidth
faster switching from the decode pipes to the micro-op cache,
faster recoveries from mispredicts,
enhanced decode skip detection for some NOPs/zeroing idioms
larger buffers and execution windows up and down the core,
dedicated branch pipes,
better balancing of logic and address generation,
wider INT/FP dispatch,
higher load bandwidth,
higher store bandwidth,
better flexibility in load/store ops
faster FMACs
A wide variety of faster operations (including x87?)
more TLB table walkers
better prediction of store-to-load forward dependencies
faster copy of short strings
more AVX2 support (VAES, VPCLMULQD)
substantially faster DIV/IDIV support
hardware acceleration of PDEP/PEXT

Many of these will be explained and expanded upon over the next few pages, and observed in the benchmark results. Simply put, this is something more than just a core update – these are genuinely new cores and new designs that required new sheets of paper to be built upon.

A number of these features, such as wider buffers and increased bandwidth, naturally come with the question about how AMD has kept the power the same for Zen 3 compared to Zen 2. Normally when a core gets wider, that means more silicon has to be turned on all the time, and this influences static power, or if it all gets used simultaneously, then there is higher active power.

When speaking with Mark Papermaster, he pointed to AMD’s prowess in physical implementation as a key factor in this. By leveraging their knowledge of TSMC’s 7nm (N7) process, as well as updates to their own tools to get the best out of these designs, AMD was able to remain power neutral, despite all this updates and upgrades. Part of this also comes from AMD’s long standing premium partner relationship with TMSC, being able to enable better design technology co-optimization (DTCO) between floorplan, manufacturing, and product.

AMD’s Claims

The CPU marketing teams from AMD, since the launch of first generation Zen, have been very accurate in their performance claims, even to the point of understating performance from time to time. Aside from promoting performance leadership in single thread, multi-thread, and gaming, AMD promoted several metrics for generation-on-generation improvement.

+19% IPC

The key metric offered by AMD was a +19% IPC uplift from Zen 2 to Zen 3, or rather a +19% uplift from Ryzen 5 3800XT to Ryzen 5 5800X when both CPUs are at 4.0 GHz and using DDR4-3600 memory.

In fact, using our industry benchmarks, for single threaded performance, we observed a +19% increase in CPU performance per clock. We have to offer kudos to AMD here, this is the second or third time they’ve quoted IPC figures which we’ve matched.

In multithreaded SPECrate, the absolute gain was only around 10% or so, given that faster cores also require more bandwidth to main memory, which hasn’t been provided in this generation. This means that there are some bottlenecks to which a higher IPC won’t help if more cores require the same resources.

For real-world tests, across our whole suite, we saw an average +24% uplift. For explicitly multithreaded tests, we saw ranges from even performance up to +35%, while for explicitly single threaded tests, this ranged from even performance up to +57%. This comes down to execution/compute bound tests getting bigger speedups over memory bound workloads.

Best Gaming

For gaming, the number was given as a +5 to +50% uplift in 1920×1080 gaming at the high preset, comparing a Ryzen 9 5900X against the Ryzen 9 3900XT, depending on the benchmark.

In our tests at CPU limited settings, such as 720p or 480p minimum, we saw an average +44% frames-per-second performance uplift comparing the Ryzen 9 5950X to the Ryzen 9 3950X. Depending on the test, this ranged from +10% to +80% performance uplift, with key gains in Chernobylite, Borderlands 3, Gears Tactics, and F1 2019.

For our more mainstream gaming tests, run at 1920×1080 with all the quality settings on maximum, the performance gain averaged around +10%. This spanned the gamut from an equal score (World of Tanks, Strange Brigade, Red Dead Redemption), up to +36% (Civilization 6, Far Cry 5).

Perhaps the most important comparison is the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X against the Intel Core i9-10900K. In our CPU limited tests, we get a +21% average FPS win for the AMD at CPU-limited scenarios, ranging from +2% to +52%. But in our 1080p Maximum settings tests, the results were on average neck-and-neck, swaying from -4% to +6%. (That result doesn’t include the one anomaly in our tests, as Civilization 6 shows a +43% win for AMD.)

Head-to-Head Performance Matchups

Based on core counts and pricing, the new Ryzen 5000 series processors closely align with some of Intel’s most popular Comet Lake processors, as well as the previous generation AMD hardware.

Q4 2020 Matchups
AMD Ryzen 5000	Cores	SEP		Tray 1ku	Cores	Intel Core 10th Gen
Ryzen 9 5950X	16C	$799	vs.	$999	18C	Core i9-10980XE*
Ryzen 9 5900X	12C	$549	vs.	$488	10C	Core i9-10900K
Ryzen 7 5800X	8C	$449	vs.	$453	10C	Core i9-10850K
Ryzen 7 5800X	8C	$449	vs.	$374	8C	Core i7-10700K
Ryzen 5 5600X	6C	$299	vs.	$262	6C	Core i5-10600K

*Technically a high-end desktop platform processor, almost unavailable at MSRP.

Throughout this review we will be referencing these comparisons, and will eventually break-out each processor into its own analysis breakdown.

More In This Review

As this is our Deep Dive coverage into Zen 3, we are going to go into some nitty-gritty details. Over the next few pages, we will go over:

Improvements to the core design (prefetchers, buffers, execution units, etc)
Our microbenchmark tests (core-to-core latency, cache hierarchy, turbo ramping)
New Instructions, Improved instructions
SoC Power and Per-Core Power
SPEC2006 and SPEC2017 results
CPU Benchmarks (Office, Science, Simulation, Rendering, Encoding, Web, Legacy)
Gaming Benchmarks (11 tests, 4 settings per test, with RTX 2080 Ti)
Conclusions and Final Remarks

Zen 3 At A Glance: Behind The +19% IPC Increase
AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive ReviewZen 3 At A Glance: Behind The +19% IPC IncreaseZen 3: Front-End Updates & Execution Unit RedesignsZen 3: Load/Store and a Massive L3 CacheCore-to-Core Latency and Cache PerformanceNew and Improved InstructionsFrequency: Going Above 5.0 GHzTDP and Per-Core Power DrawSPEC2006 and SPEC2017 Single-Threaded ResultsSPEC2017 Multi-Threaded ResultsTest Setup and #CPUOverload BenchmarksCPU Tests: Office and ScienceCPU Tests: SimulationCPU Tests: RenderingCPU Tests: EncodingCPU Tests: Legacy and WebCPU Tests: SyntheticGaming Tests: ChernobyliteGaming Tests: Civilization 6Gaming Tests: Deus Ex Mankind DividedGaming Tests: Final Fantasy XIVGaming Tests: Final Fantasy XVGaming Tests: World of TanksGaming Tests: Borderlands 3Gaming Tests: F1 2019Gaming Tests: Far Cry 5Gaming Tests: Gears TacticsGaming Tests: GTA 5Gaming Tests: Red Dead Redemption 2Gaming Tests: Strange BrigadeConclusion: AMD Has Ryzen To The Top

Zen 3 At A Glance: Behind The +19% IPC Increase

by Dr. Ian Cutresson November 5, 2020 9:01 AM EST

Posted in
CPUs
AMD
AM4
Zen 3
X570
B550
Ryzen 5000
Ryzen 9 5950X
Ryzen 9 5900X
Ryzen 7 5800X
Ryzen 5 5600X

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AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive ReviewZen 3 At A Glance: Behind The +19% IPC IncreaseZen 3: Front-End Updates & Execution Unit RedesignsZen 3: Load/Store and a Massive L3 CacheCore-to-Core Latency and Cache PerformanceNew and Improved InstructionsFrequency: Going Above 5.0 GHzTDP and Per-Core Power DrawSPEC2006 and SPEC2017 Single-Threaded ResultsSPEC2017 Multi-Threaded ResultsTest Setup and #CPUOverload BenchmarksCPU Tests: Office and ScienceCPU Tests: SimulationCPU Tests: RenderingCPU Tests: EncodingCPU Tests: Legacy and WebCPU Tests: SyntheticGaming Tests: ChernobyliteGaming Tests: Civilization 6Gaming Tests: Deus Ex Mankind DividedGaming Tests: Final Fantasy XIVGaming Tests: Final Fantasy XVGaming Tests: World of TanksGaming Tests: Borderlands 3Gaming Tests: F1 2019Gaming Tests: Far Cry 5Gaming Tests: Gears TacticsGaming Tests: GTA 5Gaming Tests: Red Dead Redemption 2Gaming Tests: Strange BrigadeConclusion: AMD Has Ryzen To The Top

Section by Andrei Frumusanu

As we dive into the Zen3 microarchitecture, AMD made a note of their journey of the last couple of years, a success-story that’s been started off in 2017 with the revolutionary Zen architecture that helped bring AMD back to the competitive landscape after several sombre years of ailing products.

The original Zen architecture brought a massive 52% IPC uplift thanks to a new clean-sheet microarchitecture which brought at lot of new features to the table for AMD, introducing features such as a µOP cache and SMT for the first time into the company’s designs, as well as introducing the notion of CPU core-complexes with large (8MB at the time) L3 caches. Features on a 14nm FinFET process node, it was the culmination and the start-off point of a new roadmap of microarchitectures which leads into today’s Zen3 design.

Following a minor refresh in the form of Zen+, last year’s 2019 Zen2 microarchitecture was deployed into the Ryzen 3000 products, which furthered AMD’s success in the competitive landscape. Zen2 was what AMD calls a derivative of the original Zen designs, however it contained historically more changes than what you’d expect from such a design, bringing more IPC increases than what you’d typically see. AMD saw Zen2 as a follow-up to what they had learned with the original Zen microarchitecture, fixing and rolling out design goal changes that they had initially intended for the first design, but weren’t able to deploy in time for the planned product launch window. AMD also stated that it enabled an opportunity to bring some of the future Zen3 specific changes were moved forward into the Zen2 design.

This was also the point at which AMD moved to the new chiplet design, leveraging the transition to TSMC’s new 7nm process node to increase the transistor budget for things like doubling the L3 cache size, increasing clock speeds, and vastly reducing the power consumption of the product to enable aggressive ramp in total core counts both in the consumer space (16-core Ryzen 9 3950X), as well as in the enterprise space (64-core EPYC2 Rome).

Tying a cutting-edge high-performance 7nm core-complex-die (CCD) with a lower cost 12/14nm I/O die (IOD) in such a heterogenous package allowed AMD to maximise the advantages and minimise the disadvantages of both respective technologies – all whilst AMD’s main competitor, Intel, was, and still is, struggling to bring out 10nm products to the market. It was a technological gamble that AMD many times has said was made years in advance, and has since paid off plenty.

Zen 3 At A Glance

This brings us to today’s Zen3 microarchitecture and the new Ryzen 5000 series. As noted earlier, Mark Papermaster had mentioned that if you were to actually look at the new design from a 100,000-foot level, you’d notice that it does look extremely similar to previous generation Zen microarchitectures. In truth, while Zen3 does share similarities to its predecessors, AMD’s architects started off with a clean-sheet design, or as they call it – “a ground-up redesign”. This is actually quite a large claim as this is a quite enormous endeavour to venture in for any company. Arm’s Cortex-A76 is the most recent other industry design that is said to have been designed from scratch, leveraging years of learning of the different design teams and solving inherent issues that require more invasive and large changes to the design.

Because the new Zen3 core still exhibits quite a few defining characteristics of the previous generation designs, I think that AMD’s take on a “complete redesign” is more akin to a deconstruction and reconstruction of the core’s building blocks, much like you’d dismantle a LEGO set and rebuild it anew. In this case, Zen3 seems to be a set-piece both with new building blocks, but also leveraging set pieces and RTL that they’ve used before in Zen2.

Whatever the interpretation of a “clean-sheet” or “complete redesign” might be, the important take is that Zen3 is a major overhaul in terms of its complete microarchitecture, with AMD paying attention to every piece of the puzzle and trying to bring balance to the whole resulting end-design, which comes in contrast to a more traditional “derivative design” which might only touch and see changes in a couple of the microarchitecture’s building blocks.

AMD’s main design goals for Zen3 hovered around three main points:

— Delivering another significant generational single-threaded performance increase. AMD did not want to be relegated to top performance only in scenarios where workloads would be spread across all the cores. The company wanted to catch up and be an undisputed leader in this area to be able to claim an uncontested position in the market.

— Latency improvements, both in terms of memory latency, achieved through a reduction in effective memory latency through more cache-hits thanks to the doubled 32MB L3 that an individual core can take advantage of, as well as core-to-core latency which again thanks to the consolidated single L3 cache on the die is able to reduce long travel times across the dies.

— Continuing a power efficiency leadership: Although the new Zen3 cores still use the same base N7 process node from TSMC (although with incremental design improvements), AMD had a constraint of not increasing power consumption for the platform. This means that any new performance increases would have to come through simultaneous power efficiency improvements of the microarchitecture.

The culmination of all the design changes AMD has made with the Zen3 micro-architecture results in what the company claims as a 19% average performance uplift over a variety of workloads. We’ll be breaking down this number further into the review, but internal figures show we are matching the 19% average uplift across all SPEC workloads, with a median figure of 21%. That is indeed a tremendous achievement, considering the fact that the new Ryzen 5000 chips clock slightly higher than their predecessors, further amplifying the total performance increase of the new design.

AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review
Zen 3: Front-End Updates & Execution Unit Redesigns
AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive ReviewZen 3 At A Glance: Behind The +19% IPC IncreaseZen 3: Front-End Updates & Execution Unit RedesignsZen 3: Load/Store and a Massive L3 CacheCore-to-Core Latency and Cache PerformanceNew and Improved InstructionsFrequency: Going Above 5.0 GHzTDP and Per-Core Power DrawSPEC2006 and SPEC2017 Single-Threaded ResultsSPEC2017 Multi-Threaded ResultsTest Setup and #CPUOverload BenchmarksCPU Tests: Office and ScienceCPU Tests: SimulationCPU Tests: RenderingCPU Tests: EncodingCPU Tests: Legacy and WebCPU Tests: SyntheticGaming Tests: ChernobyliteGaming Tests: Civilization 6Gaming Tests: Deus Ex Mankind DividedGaming Tests: Final Fantasy XIVGaming Tests: Final Fantasy XVGaming Tests: World of TanksGaming Tests: Borderlands 3Gaming Tests: F1 2019Gaming Tests: Far Cry 5Gaming Tests: Gears TacticsGaming Tests: GTA 5Gaming Tests: Red Dead Redemption 2Gaming Tests: Strange BrigadeConclusion: AMD Has Ryzen To The Top

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We talk about the AMD Ryzen 3 4300U processor — Maibenben

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Maibenben in 02 March 2021 02 March 2021

Today we will introduce you to the Medication Middle AMD RYZEN 3 4300U in the AMD in AMD in AMD in AMD in AMD early 2020. In the article: an analysis of the main characteristics, information about laptops based on this chip and a comparison with the main competitors.

Specifications

The AMD Ryzen 3 4300U is equipped with 4 cores clocked at 2.7GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 3.7GHz with 4 threads. The chip is built on the Zen 2 architecture and, like other members of the AMD processor family of this generation, is manufactured using the 7nm process technology. Its nominal TDP is 15W.

The video chip Radeon RX Vega 5 is responsible for the graphics in the processor, operating at a maximum frequency of 1400 MHz. It should also be noted that the AMD Ryzen 3 4300U supports DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4-4266 RAM types (the manufacturer does not disclose the maximum possible amount of connected memory). nine0011

Which MAIBENBEN laptops are equipped with AMD Ryzen 3 4300U

This processor is equipped with a novelty in 2021 — a modern laptop MAIBENBEN M543, which is perfect for entertainment (watching movies, chatting with friends) and performing work tasks of medium intensity. Thanks to the energy-efficient AMD Ryzen 3 4300U chip and the absence of a discrete graphics card, the battery life of the laptop is 6-8 hours on a single charge.

You can buy MAIBENBEN M543 in the official MAIBENBEN online store at a very competitive price with fast delivery. nine0011

Benchmarks and Comparisons

The PassMark CPU Benchmark scores 7697 points in the overall performance score, with single-core and multi-core scores of 2337 and 11563 respectively.

To evaluate the power of the processor, let’s compare it with the closest competitor from Intel — in this case, this is a mobile chip for Intel Core i5-9300HF laptops. It is slightly inferior to the AMD model in terms of overall performance, although it is equipped with 8 threads and was released a quarter later:

AMD Ryzen 3 4300U — 7697 points

Intel Core i5-9300HF — 7687 points

It should also be noted that the Intel processor has a much higher power consumption compared to the Ryzen 3 4300U (45 W vs. 15 W).

Summary

The AMD Ryzen 3 4300U is a fairly capable mid-range processor that offers the user enough power to complete work tasks and comfortably use a laptop.

This model gives a worthy rebuff to its closest competitors in the face of modern 9th generation Intel mobile chips, which is an excellent indicator.

We remind you that in the official MAIBENBEN online store you can buy a modern laptop with a long battery life MAIBENBEN M543 based on AMD Ryzen 3 4300U processor.

Official MAIBENBEN channel in Yandex.Zen

Headings: Reviews0056

An overview of the main events of 2020. Processors and platforms / Overclockers.ua

Of course, the events of the outgoing year will remain in memory for a long time, and often not in the most positive way. If we consider only the hardware market, then the second half of 2020 turned out to be very fruitful. Both GPU makers have launched high-end graphics cards, next-gen gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft have been released, and AMD has unveiled the first Ryzen 5000 CPUs that outperform the competition in both raw processing power and gaming performance. nine0011

On the other hand, the release of new products was overshadowed by the situation with their availability. Most of the «iron» novelties belong to the category of scarce goods, so you won’t be able to buy a PlayStation 5 game console or a Radeon RX 6800 XT video card in the first electronics store that comes across. What can we say about retail prices, or rather, about their weak correlation with the recommended ones.

But let’s not dwell on the negative aspects of 2020 and try to remember how the computer hardware market has developed over the past 12 months. Summing up the results of the outgoing year, we will begin with processor innovations. As usual, the author takes responsibility for choosing the most interesting topics, and you, dear readers, can express your opinion in the comments under this article. nine0011

Zen 2 enters laptops

Advanced Micro Devices began the year with the launch of the Ryzen 4000 series of mobile processors. AMD hybrid chips lag behind their counterparts without a graphics unit, so they migrated to the Zen 2 microarchitecture only in the Renoir generation. In them, the company decided to abandon the chiplet layout characteristic of the desktop Ryzen 3000 (Matisse / Zen 2), explaining this with energy efficiency considerations.

On a single 7nm Renoir die, the company combined two CCX blocks with four x86 cores each and a graphics module based on the improved Vega architecture. The processor component, if we discard the third-level cache reduced to 8 MB, is identical to the Zen 2 desktop CPUs. At the same time, the iGPU was cut to 8 Compute Units, but received an increase in frequencies. Together with support for LPDDR4X-4266 memory, this significantly increased the performance of the integrated graphics. nine0011

Representatives of the chipmaker call the release of mobile Ryzen 4000 processors «a game changer for AMD.» Which is not surprising, because the new APUs are able to impose a fight on Intel Core in all market segments, and the U-series solutions offer twice as many x86 cores as their direct counterparts from Intel.

AMD Ryzen 4000 APUs for desktops were released this summer. To be more precise, the new APUs became available to the OEM partners of the “red” chipmaker and, according to his plans, should not have gone to retail. Despite this, the Renoir APU for the AM4 platform can be easily purchased from retailers around the world. As for the differences from mobile counterparts, they come down to increased frequencies and, as a result, a nominal heat pack. nine0011

The world’s most powerful

February was marked by the release of AMD’s 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor for the high-end Socket sTRX4 platform. Like other 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper, it is based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture and is supported by motherboards based on the TRX40 chipset. In terms of raw processing power, it is the most powerful x86-compatible processor to date, and to own a unique «stone» will have to part with at least $ 4,000. nine0011

AMD decided not to stop there and in the middle of summer released the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3000 family of chips. These CPUs are a cross between previously released HEDT processors and server EPYC processors based on the Zen 2 architecture. high frequencies, and from the latter — an 8-channel memory controller and 128 PCI Express 4.0 interface lines.

The sWRX8 platform debuted with the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3000. Neither the processors themselves nor the motherboards for them have been sold in retail and are available only to AMD OEM partners who produce workstations based on them. One of the first such a system was released by Lenovo. nine0011

Eternal Skylake

In the second half of May, the Intel LGA1200 platform and 10th generation Core processors, codenamed Comet Lake-S, were released. This is already the fifth family of mass desktop CPUs based on the Skylake microarchitecture, which was released five years ago. Pressure from AMD forced the chipmaker to once again increase the number of physical cores. The catch is that within the framework of the 14-nm process technology, this is not an easy task and passes, so to speak, with a creak. nine0011

To temper the «hot temper» of overclocking 9th generation Core processors, Intel abandoned the plastic thermal interface in favor of solder. Please note that these CPUs had a maximum of 8 cores. At the same time, the Comet Lake-S family is led by the 10-core Core i9-10900K, and to ensure efficient heat dissipation, the chipmaker went even further by reducing the thickness of the processor die from 800 to 500 micrometers. To maintain compatibility with LGA115x CPU coolers, the thickness of the heat-spreading cover had to be increased. nine0011

In the end, the corporation still managed to release a new «world’s best gaming processor», albeit not without its drawbacks. Perhaps the main one is high power consumption. Those wishing to purchase the Core i9-10900K will also have to fork out for a powerful cooling system designed to remove two to three hundred watts of thermal power. Well, you can’t count on serious overclocking — the maximum that can most often be squeezed out of a 10-core Intel CPU without extreme cooling is equal to the Turbo Boost 2. 0 frequency, i.e. 5.1 GHz. nine0011

The 10th generation Core desktop processors debuted motherboards with Intel 400-series chipsets. These chipsets did not bring any special innovations, which cannot be said about the motherboards themselves. Solutions of the middle and upper price categories have significantly increased the power system of the CPU socket and other equipment, for example, you can increasingly see a 2.5-gigabit network interface or a Wi-Fi 6 module. In addition, some LGA1200/Z490 boards are equipped with an element base for the PCI Express interface 4.0, support for which will be one of the «chips» of the 11th generation Core chips (Rocket Lake-S). nine0011

Highlights of the Intel Rocket Lake-S processors

Core i7-7700 at an affordable price

Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors have long been limited to models with 6 to 16 cores. In the spring, AMD corrected this injustice by releasing inexpensive Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X CPUs. Both processors have four Zen 2 cores with SMT support and 16 MB of cache memory, while the differences between them come down not only to operating frequencies, but also to the internal layout. nine0011

If the junior CPU has half of the cores active in each CCX block, then the older «stone» has four cores represented by one complex. This had a positive effect on the delays in inter-core communication and access to the third level cache. All things being equal, the Ryzen 3 3300X easily outperforms its sibling in most tasks. Compared to Intel counterparts, the new CPUs perform quite well, offering 4-core Core i7 performance on the Skylake architecture at a recommended price of $9.9 and $120 for the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X, respectively.

It’s fair to say that Intel’s product range also has inexpensive analogues of the Core i7 processors of the Skylake-S/Kaby Lake-S generations. The Core i3 chips for the LGA1200 platform also operate at 4 cores/8 threads, although they require a new motherboard, while Ryzen 3 also works on older AM4 boards. For more effective competition in this segment, Intel released the Core i3-10100F model with a deactivated video core in the fall. In foreign stores it can be purchased at a price of 79dollars.

These aren’t the Ryzens you’re looking for

The release of 10th Gen Intel Core processors hasn’t gone unnoticed by AMD. The Ryzen 3000 CPU lineup already includes products for every taste and wallet size, but the company felt that there was room for three more “stones”. In mid-summer, a trio of Matisse Refresh chips entered the market: Ryzen 5 3600XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 9 3900XT. These processors differ from the previously released relatives only by slightly increased operating frequencies. nine0011

The maturity of the 7nm process technology helped improve the frequency characteristics of the Zen 2 CPU: more «successful» crystals come off the TSMC pipelines. However, only enthusiasts will be able to reveal their potential with proper tweaking. Without this, the superiority over the old Ryzen 3000 turns out to be purely symbolic. In addition, 8- and 12-core models come without a standard cooling system, which for some users will be another disadvantage. Ultimately, the Ryzen 3000XT is more of a warm-up for Zen 3 than a full refresh of the CPU lineup. nine0011

In addition to the updated Zen 2 CPUs, AMD introduced the B550 and A520 chipsets to the market this summer. Both chipsets are developed by ASMedia Technology and are content with passive cooling, unlike the flagship X570. Motherboards based on the B550 hub can boast partial support for PCI Express 4.0: for the PCI-E x16 slot and the M.2 connector, which are provided by the processor itself. The chipset lines support a maximum of PCI Express 3.0.

AMD B550 chipset

Intel made a 10nm sandwich

Throughout the year, Intel has steadily expanded its range of mobile processors. In the spring, 10th generation Core solutions for gaming laptops debuted, which, in general, did not bring any innovations other than slightly increased frequencies. But in the summer, the formal release of single-chip Lakefield systems with extremely low power consumption and a three-dimensional layout took place.

In a 12x12x1mm chip, Intel combined a 22nm system logic, a 10nm die with five x86 cores, 4MB of L3 cache and a Gen11-LP graphics unit, and 8GB of LPDDR4X-4266 RAM. The declared TDP level of this “sandwich” is only 7 watts. SoC performance, as shown by independent tests, is fully consistent with power consumption and often turns out to be at the level of 2-core Y-series solutions, for example, Core i7-8500Y with a similar TDP. nine0011

In autumn, the first 11th generation Intel Core processors were released in the Tiger Lake mobile family. This CPU line boasts new x86 core and graphics architectures, as well as improved 10nm SuperFin process technology. Against the background of competitor solutions, Tiger Lake chips look quite decent and bypass them in most tasks that are sensitive to single-threaded performance. In terms of raw processing power, the advantage is still with AMD, whose 7nm Ryzen 4000 processors operate with twice as many cores. nine0011

Apple’s big migration

Looking at how Intel has been doing in recent years with the development of new technological norms, Apple has begun to prepare a reserve foothold. In June, Cupertino announced their intention to transfer Mac computers to processors of their own design. Migration from x86 to ARM will take place over the next two years. By the way, in early autumn, the developers of the ARM microarchitecture came under the wing of Nvidia, with which Apple is at odds.

In November, the Apple M1 single-chip system was released, which served as the basis for the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. It contains eight ARM cores (four FireStorms with 12 MB L2 cache and four IceStorms with 4 MB L2 cache), a 2.6 Tflops graphics unit and a 128-bit LPDDR4X-4266 memory controller.

As independent reviews have shown, Apple’s decision to abandon x86 Intel processors in favor of its own SoC fully justified itself. For example, the 13-inch MacBook Pro 2020 easily outperforms its predecessor on a 4-core Intel processor in both ARM-optimized applications and programs launched through the Rosetta 2 layer. In addition, the device’s autonomy has increased by more than one and a half times, and the integrated graphics are quite copes with the limited list of games available on macOS. nine0011

The insides of the new Apple MacBook Pro 13 and MacBook Air. Photo iFixit

AMD knows Zen 3

While Intel is marking time, continuing to use the 5-year-old Skylake microarchitecture in desktop processors, AMD does not stop improving Zen. Last year, she showed how well her architecture lends itself to scaling, and this year she consolidated her success by increasing single-threaded performance. According to AMD, when moving from Zen 2 to Zen 3, IPC (the number of instructions executed per clock) increased by 19%. And this is true, as can be judged by the results of tests in our test laboratory.

Ryzen 5000 processors for the AM4 platform, codenamed Vermeer, hit the market in November. Structurally, they are similar to the Ryzen 3000 CPU. Moreover, the I / O chip is completely inherited from the processors released a year earlier. All architectural innovations are covered in 7-nm chiplets. AMD has finally moved from 4- to 8-core CCX modules, which has a positive effect on inter-core communication delays and work with the third level cache. More detailed information about the architectural features of CPU Zen 3 is available here. nine0011

AMD’s first wave Ryzen 5000 lineup is represented by four solutions with Zen 3 cores ranging from six to sixteen. Given the market situation, Lisa Su’s team decided to increase the recommended prices by $50 for each of the processors, however, this had little effect on their attractiveness to the end user. Without exaggeration, we have before us the fastest CPUs for the mainstream platform, which are great for both work and play.