A simple, but thorough, performance review of the AMD Ryzen 7 CPU.
UPDATE: Dec 2, 2017

Despite my every intention, I have been unable to finish this article. Pinnacle Ridge is already around the corner...
I have the data, just no time (or will) to put it together. I will probably revisit this after a Pinnacle Ridge upgrade.
At last, the time has come!

By now you have probably read several reviews of AMD's new Ryzen CPUs... possibly some even written by professionals... so what makes this one any different? Simply put: this is not a review. It is an architectural investigation.
Mercurial Considerations

During the course of examining Ryzen it became clear that this would not be as easy of a task as the Excavator interrogation which serves as the foundation of this article.

For starters, Ryzen 7 has twice as many cores and just as many new capabilities and quirks. But, on top of that, it exists on a brand new, and immature, platform where every BIOS or program update changes the performance results... and we all know about the confusing results with gaming...

As such, I've found it necessary to choose my battles carefully and narrow my focus immensely. I've performed five or six times as many benchmarks as you will see demonstrated here. I've tested numerous configurations, various core provisonings, numerous memory speeds, two motherboards, three sets of memory, four Windows versions, three Linux versions (on Linux Mint 18.1), three cooling systems, two video cards, four games, and much more.
You will see barely any of that here.
To be clear: my focus is to find the architectural improvement the Zen 1.0 architecture has given us. This is not meant to help you choose what CPU to buy. I'll make that choice for you: if you do anything other than pure enthusaist-level gaming: buy Ryzen and don't look back - it's unbelievable performance for the money.
Methodology
  • All testing performed with AGESA 1.0.0.4.
  • Three clock bins: 3.0Ghz, 3.4Ghz, 3.8Ghz - no more, no less.
  • Ryzen quad core results average of 2+2 and 4+0 configurations.
  • Each test performed a minimum of three times per config.
  • Single threaded results are with SMT disabled.
  • Raw results can be found here in OpenOffice Document Format.
  • No games included - they are routinely misinterpreted.
  • HPET is always enabled.
CPUs Tested:
  • AMD Ryzen 7 1700X
  • AMD Ryzen 5 1400
  • Intel i5-2500k & i7-2600k
  • AMD Phenom II 955
  • AMD Athlon X4 845
More to come...
Benchmarks (locked to match the Excavator Interrogation)
CPU-z 1.75.0 x64
Pass Mark Performance Test 9.0
GeekBench 3
AIDA64 Extreme (5.90.4200) (Excavator results updated)
7-Zip 9.20
3dPM
Dolphin 4.0-652
Cinebench R10, R11.5 32-bit & R15 64-bit

Browser
  • Firefox 44.0.2, 32-bit (to match former results)
  • JetStream 1.1
  • WebXPRT V2
Not all tests are performed in all configurations.
Continue...