Discussion Speculation: Zen 4 (EPYC 4 "Genoa", Ryzen 7000, etc.)

[Vattila]

Except for the details about the improvements in the microarchitecture, we now know pretty well what to expect with Zen 3.

The leaked presentation by AMD Senior Manager Martin Hilgeman shows that EPYC 3 "Milan" will, as promised and expected, reuse the current platform (SP3), and the system architecture and packaging looks to be the same, with the same 9-die chiplet design and the same maximum core and thread-count (no SMT-4, contrary to rumour). The biggest change revealed so far is the enlargement of the compute complex from 4 cores to 8 cores, all sharing a larger L3 cache ("32+ MB", likely to double to 64 MB, I think).

Hilgeman's slides did also show that EPYC 4 "Genoa" is in the definition phase (or was at the time of the presentation in September, at least), and will come with a new platform (SP5), with new memory support (likely DDR5).

What else do you think we will see with Zen 4? PCI-Express 5 support? Increased core-count? 4-way SMT? New packaging (interposer, 2.5D, 3D)? Integrated memory on package (HBM)?

Vote in the poll and share your thoughts!

 

[A///]

This must be a language barrier issue. Those are not cheap budget solutions for gaming, not by a long shot.

Nope. English is my first language.

It is the budget solution. Either processor paired with a Z690 and DDR4 is cheaper than going with AM5 and DDR5. There's some terrific Z690 boards in the $170-200 range. These are full fledged boards with decent OC ability. There's a gap in game FPS when this combo is paired with a 4090 where DDR5 aids in higher FPS per some reviews from yesterday. B650 and B650 exist, but their current pricing doesn't make them palatable. Most people who are budget conscious are going to realize they will get more with a 13600K and a Z690 motherboard, a motherboard chipset that's mature. They're not missing out on much apart from the differences on the board.

They would be looking at the following:

13600K $330
Z690 $180
16-32 GB DDR4 $? Take your pick.

For less than $650 you're looking at a terrific build assuming you score a 32 GB DDR4 kit for sub $100. For $500 on the AMD side you're getting the 7600X and a $200 B650 motherboard that will likely have one or two features that put it ahead of the Z690 but is a wash. A 32 GB DDR5 kit for that is going to be at least another $200 for a decent Hynix kit.

And posted in a Zen4 thread is trolling at best.

Except it isn't trolling. You can ask @Markfw if I'm a troll or not since we talk in private quite a lot about AMD. If you are budget conscious, the Intel solutions are more affordable than AMD's unless you spend a long time waiting and hunting for a deal. I am aware Microcenter did or still is offering free DDR5 with applicable Zen 4 purchases, but Microcenter only has about 26 locations and isn't present in every state. That deal they offered on their own accord doesn't help most people who don't have one close by or in the same state.


The issue is AMD seems to be banking on Raptor Lake sales being as poor as Alder Lake. Whether this was due to everyone buying a computer in 2020 and early 2021 that Alder Lake didn't make sense to them or Zen 3 was that popular it stole sales from Intel.

Longevity wise, AM5 is the winner. 13th gen is straight trash when it comes to thermals and power consumption. It's a tippy-toe situation of whether the end consumer wants marginally better performance for a cheaper cost via the above setup while dealing with higher power usage or the higher upfront cost of going with AM5 and upgrading later with Zen 4 3D, Zen 5, Zen 5 3D or Zen 6 and Zen 6 3D.

 

[Carfax83]

He said if you take out BF5 the 7600X s still 4% faster overall. It's at 9:55 in the video.

I know, and he also said he would look into it more because it was anomalous. But it's not just BF5. HZD is also anomalous.

Whenever games show such a large swing you have to question why. It makes no sense. In his original comparison in October during the Raptor Lake launch, the 5950x is ahead of the 13900K with DDR5-6400!

Now if that doesn't raise flags, what will? The game is likely leaning on the E cores. No other explanation makes sense. It's too bad I don't own the game as I would run some tests on it.

The 13600K gets steamrolled in Horizon Zero Dawn by a 28% margin in favor of the 7600X, it's bizarre how well the Zen 4 CPUs perform in this game, it's certainly an outlier in our limited 12 game testing, but a strong result for AMD all the same.

So you prefer the reviews where they cherry pick the titles to show Intel as superior? Got it

Don't be ridiculous. There's a thing called confirmation bias and another thing called critical thinking. You are displaying the former and I the latter. Think about it, a 5950x is beating a 13900K......

 

[Carfax83]

AMD uArch performs really good in title X or Y = ANOMALOUS! Must disregard result/investigate/tweak Intel uArch so it's "fair"!

Got it. lol

Where were you when Hardware Unboxed started benching The Riftbreaker (a game barely anyone knows or paid attention to) during Alder Lake's launch? A game OFFICIALLY optimized for Intel CPUs, by the developer's direct admission.

That's not anomalous, right? 🤣

I don't even know why you brought up the Riftbreaker as they are in no way comparable.

The Riftbreaker isn't displaying the same kind of performance gap that BF5 and HZD are displaying in the latest HWU review. This is the Riftbreaker benchmark from the 13900K review. Do you see anything weird?

The game seems well optimized for both Intel and AMD and is actually being bottlenecked by the RTX 4090 at 1080p as it's both CPU and GPU intensive.

Compared to HZD:

 

[Carfax83]

Were did I say The Riftbreaker was about today's CPU lineup? I specifically said during ADL launch window. Reading comprehension?

You know... this

So you're mad because Alder Lake was significantly faster than Zen 3 in Riftbreaker? Newsflash, Alder Lake was newer than Zen 3 (which had already been out for a year) and possessed the advantages of DDR5, higher clock speeds and higher IPC. You would have to be firmly in zealot territory to see anything wrong with that.

It's clear that Riftbreaker loves cache, clock speed and bandwidth and Alder Lake provided all three in healthy amounts which is why it performed so well on 12th gen. The 5800x 3D clawed back a lot of performance due to its humongous cache and is a whopping 35% faster than the 5800x in Riftbreaker for instance.

They (EXOR Studios) had a blog on Intel's website saying how they're optimizing for Intel (read: Golden Cove). The fact that Zen4 caught up in that game (kudos to AMD) has nothing to do with what I initially said.

Optimizing in this case likely meant making sure the E cores weren't being used by the game, or using them for background tasks. Hitman 3 did the same thing. It had nothing to do with optimizing specifically for Intel architectures. As I said before, PC developers don't target particular CPUs because the PC is an open platform with tens of thousands of permutations, or millions if you count non gaming PCs.

And this is shown by how much better Zen 4 did compared to Zen 3 without any specific optimization on the developer's part for Zen 4, because Zen 4 has higher IPC, clock speeds, more cache and more bandwidth; all the things that the game loves.

Don't think you were white knight-ing for AMD back then, were you? You just took The Riftbreaker results as-is: A great result for Intel (optimizations aside).

I've been PC gaming for over 20 years now and I know a decent amount about how 3D engines work and how they leverage hardware. When I first saw Riftbreaker benchmarks, I did some research to see why it performed so well on Alder Lake in comparison to not just Zen 3, but other CPUs.

Seeing the game in action told me most of what I needed to know. The game is actually very technically sophisticated and supports RT shadows and ambient occlusion, as well as a sophisticated physics engine for destruction, particle effects and vegetation deformation. The game also features thousands of entities on screen at once.

All these things together makes the game very CPU demanding, so CPUs that can process and dispatch more instructions have the advantage. Alder Lake possessed these qualities in greater measure comparative to Zen 3, as it's a much wider architecture with more instruction throughput and bandwidth. These qualities were sustained for Raptor Lake, as Raptor Lake is also faster than Zen 4 in Riftbreaker for the same reasons.

In fact, the 13900K is still being GPU bottlenecked by an RTX 4090 at 1080p in this game.

And for crying out loud, Horizon ZD performed great on Ryzen 5000 as well, it was one of the arguably few games were Zen3 bested Golden Cove.

Yes, and I always found that strange. I expect things like that to happen with graphics cards but not with CPUs because developers target x86-64 for CPUs and the CPUs using their internal OoO logic and microarchitecture determine how fast those instructions are processed. On paper, Alder Lake has a distinct advantage over Zen 3 in all the performance categories ie clock speed, IPC, instruction throughput, bandwidth etcetera.

It should theoretically blow the doors off of Zen 3 in HZD. It's also weird that in their 12900KS review, Alder Lake is in front of Zen 3, but in the 13900K review, it's behind Zen 3.

Try explaining that one:

This is just ridiculous nitpicking TBH.

What you call nitpicking I call asking questions. Can you explain the above graph, where the 12900KS is in front of the 5950x, but in the 13900K review (a faster CPU than the 12900KS), it's behind the 5950x?

Perhaps there are sections in the game that perform better on Intel or on AMD.

 

[Carfax83]

Right, so when the game favors Intel it's because the game really taxes the CPU, but when it favors AMD it has to be a glitch.

Didn't we just spend the last few pages debating this very thing from the other side's perspective? See how easy it flips when the shoe is on the other foot and now CapFrameX is being accused of bias for just pointing out a discrepancy with the performance of Zen 4 compared to Raptor Lake in one of the most CPU bound areas in the game.

But at least this one has an explanation of sort, unlike with HZD.

 

[Carfax83]

Alright here is the Expreview's composite ST index :https://topic.expreview.com/CPU/# (they used a wide range of desktop workloads)

That looks like mostly canned benchmarks, and it's hard for me to interpret even after using the translation function in the Edge browser. At any rate, this is a tough subject and there's going to be disagreements.

I tend to prefer Phoronix as they have one of the most exhaustive test batteries on the net for workloads that involve lots of compute power.

13900K @ 5.8Ghz is 4.7% faster than 7950X @ 5.7Ghz. (which equates to ~3% IPC difference and confirms what the SPEC shows : neck and neck integer performance and slightly higher fp performance for Raptor Cove). This confirms what Geekbench and SPEC show, almost to the percentage point. Sure, you will find outliers for both chips, when the difference can be double digit for specific workloads, but it all evens out in the end.

But the thing is that Raptor Lake uses a hybrid configuration. which has to be taken into account That automatically sets it at a disadvantage against a full bore CPU like Zen 4 in any heavy multithreaded workloads like rendering, code compilation etcetera, but Raptor Lake is still either highly competitive in those workloads or slightly beating the 7950x.

Let that sink in. A hybrid configuration with half the big cores of the 7950x is beating it in many of those types of workloads. I find that to be highly impressive, even after the higher power consumption because Raptor Lake to me is heavily disadvantaged and not really geared towards those workloads. The HEDT for Raptor Cove would be a much better comparison point when it launches.

We cannot ignore the elephant in the room : from a perf/mm^2, even when adjusting for process node disadvantage, Zen 4 is way more efficiently built chip with less imbalances overall. AMD will have a HUGE headroom once they expand the frontend with Zen 5, and potentially double the L/S subsystem, along with more execution ports. That's why the 40-50% higher IPC target versus Zen 3 is most likely spot on (just like SR->Zen 1 and Zen 1-> Zen 3).

Remember how disappointed this forum was when the grand proclamations about Zen 4's IPC was found to be false? I hope Zen 5 is a badass CPU, but 40-50% higher IPC seems outlandish.

The only true advantage intel has is the lower latency due to monolithic design of its current products. This will become a non issue in time as AMD will utilize better/faster memory and incorporate new caches to mask the latency hit that chiplets bring.

A strong AMD that can produce worthy competing products is necessary for the health of the tech industry and the betterment of consumers like us so I'm all for AMD bringing it to Intel. They need to step up in the GPU department though and nail Nvidia's ass to the wall.

 

[Carfax83]

That's insane. The 7600X is very much a match in gaming for the 13900K, if The 5800X3D is a virtual match(1.3% with 4090) so is the 7600X who is actually a bit faster than the 5800X3D

According to the launch review meta analysis conducted by 3D center, the 13900K is 15% faster than the 7600x, which is substantial.

Also, you're not giving the full picture. At 1080p, the least GPU bound resolution that TPU tested, the 13900K was 6.2% faster than the 5800X3D, not 1.3%. And when you remove the massive, anomalous outlier of Devil May Cry 5 (either a bug or a configuration problem), then the gap widens even more.

These outliers are becoming a problem. There is no reason I can think of for DMC 5 to have a 40% lead on the 5800X3D compared to the 13900K other than a bug with the game using E cores when it's not supposed to, or a configuration problem.

 

[Just Benching]

Holy Mother of God...! 115K points.. AVX512, 12ch, Intel Dead?

Intel is offering 64 lanes for 350€. It's far from dead. The only thing amd is killing lately is their buyers pockets

 

[scineram]

If Zen 4 goes above 4.5 gigahurtz I will be very disappointed in AMD.

 

[MadRat]

Haven't been around here much for ten years. I see the general tone of the forum has changed.

I see people keep bringing up bits and pieces that make it more apparent they are not talking HBM2 but rather the extended HBM2 standard that was first being pushed by Samsung. HBM2E > HBM2. I should have realized you were talking the extended HBM2 standard by looking up the pathways in the architecture. As with comparisons between SDR and DDR, unless all of the information was similar any comparison was apples versus oranges.

 

[MadRat]

You do realize people are laughing at you, right? So your complaint is that HBM, which was explicitly designed for a wider bus, has a wider bus than GDDR so its unfair to compare it, whilst you tried comparing HBM (or HBM2) to GDDR6, which did not exist at the time? Do you understand why people are laughing at you and your pointlessly silly arguments?

Everyone needs a laugh so that's not a bad thing.

Now show that part where I compared HBM straight up to GDDR6 in any direct comparison. Also, you may want to check your facts about the dates on GDDR6 being demonstrated and the JEDEC standard being finalized. Your historical accuracy is questionable.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Another reason why AMD would release Zen 4 earlier. Not just as a response to Alder Lake. If Intel is planning to quickly follow up with another Alder Lake revision in rapid succession. It would make Zen 4 underwhelming and return AMD to a value play CPU company. By releasing Zen 4 earlier. It would be on the market before Intel has a follow up to the current Alder Lake processors. Keeping Zen 4 relevant (market leading performance) for several months and protecting their margins.

People forget that Intel is on the 10nm process that was delayed for years. They are moving to 7nm silicon by next year if not late 2022. Intel was on 14nm and still is on the CPU's previous to Alder lake. That has been 6 years on 14nm.

We all know Zen 4 will be significantly better than Alder Lake. Zen 3 should have been on 5nm TSMC silicon. AMD has a silicon cushion because they have not been on the cutting edge of nodes offered by TSMC.

All is not lost for AMD. They simply have to adjust their product release dates on Zen 4.

 

[Hans Gruber]

You post makes no sense. The only place you actually answer mine (that you quoted) is there :



And it all hangs oin a IF you used your self. We DO NOT know the limitation, it has to be some. It should be less limitred than the 5800X3d, sure, AMd stated so, mind you.
The rest is unkown.
You almost sound like Nosta now, throwing whatever at the wall and see what sticks.

Feel free to throw insults around here. I notice you list a 5600x and a B-450F motherboard. Pick the benchmark and I will smoke your build. Someone needs to put your in your place.

 

[shady28]

Intel rate the 12900K max ram speed at 4800MT, yet AMD used 6000MT for this CPU in their comparisons, so they outspecced the 12900K by much more than the 7950X wich is rated at 5200MT.

Anyway we ll have benches from Computerbase, they use max specced RAM, guess that the result will be more fair than AMD s own comparisons.

Their entire presentation is polluted by the fact that they effectively ran overclocked systems, arbitrarily stopping at DDR5-6000 using AMD specific performance enhancing timings.

To be blunt I thought that was plainly obvious once the system specs were revealed.

Intel could just as well present Alder Lake at DDR5-7800. They could say, "This is optimal for Alder Lake. Good Luck!"

 

[Just Benching]

At what cost though? It's not going to beat it on performance metric.

But the zen 4 will beat raptor lake in both performance and efficiency?

I mean we already know the 13600k will be 80%+ faster than the 7600x in MT, and unless its going to consume twice as much power (which most probably won't), it will be both much faster and more efficient. So I guess klingons are attacking australia soon

 

[nicalandia]

In Linux at least, turning off AVX-512 actually increases thermals!

That's Linux. Like 5% of these forums care about that OS... We want Windows Performance numbers

 

[poke01]

where on earth do you get that ? It says power left is best., thats the 7950x !!!

I said most people. The 7950X is expensive compared to the 12700K. Your avg PC buyer buys the i7 or i5. But in this case the i7 has a healthy lead to the i5. I know the 7950X is the best. Not everyone can afford the best.

 

[poke01]

They have been the market leader for 4 -5 years... Again, where do you get this crap ?

I meant during the Sandy Bridge-Haswell days.

 

[nicalandia]

Except when he is giving false info to discredit him? Like he intentionally puts out fake info to soil his own reputation?

Are you kidding me? I guess kids now a days prefer this type of "Tech Tips" right?

 

[remsplease]

-New AM5 socket for desktop. More rectangular than AM4. I expect (most) current AM4 coolers will work on AM5 in lower core-count scenarios.

-Sockets SP3 and TR4 EPYC/Threadripper remain the same.

-New chipsets supporting DDR5, pcie5, etc.

Zen4 (Ryzen, TR/EPYC) is a 5nm die-shrink of Zen 3 with an updated memory controller and other minor design changes for IO.

TR/EPYC substrate changes to accept 5nm chips. No pin count changes required.

Everything else is pretty much the same.

 

[Zucker2k]

Now we have the 7600X winning in game performance against the 12900K, both using DDR5-6000C30. 32MB L3 versus 30MB L3. Chiplet vs. monolithic with better latency. Early firmware versus matured firmware.

Sure we can argue Alder & Raptor may be able to scale further with even faster memory, but that was never the major point of contention. The simple fact that Zen 4 beat Golden Cove in (some) games while using the same DDR5 memory should raise a huge red flag for you, maybe a more reserved position would be in order until we're able to understand the sources of improved performance and properly evaluate DDR5 scaling in the context of Zen vs. Cove matchup.

Please do you know the settings that Ram run in the ADL system? Do you know if it ran at CL30? What about the other timings? It's not far fetched for any enthusiast worth their salt to understand that putting an AMD EXPO tuned RAM into a non EXPO rated bios, much more a non AMD system, isn't going to run optimally. This is not so hard to understand. The 7600x run optimally. The ADL didn't. Add the cherry-picked games on top and you should understand why your "winning in games" comment is not only laughable but smacks of gullibility since these are not even third-party reviews but AMD slides. If nothing at all, history should teach us to exercise some patience until we get reviews from other sources since this isn't the first time AMD has pulled this sort of stunt with their gaming numbers.

 

[yuri69]

Fact is, this is a real weakness in Zen CPUs compared to Golden/Raptor Cove.

Zen 4 is basically an overclocked Zen 3. It has very little resources even vs Alder Lake. It shows from time to time.

We have to wait to 2024 for some Zen 5 goodies to match Alder Lake.

 

[Henry swagger]

Would you rather have AMD on the same Intel 7 node with higher power consumption at low clocks but improved dynamic scaling and possibly even higher clocks when power is cranked to the max?

Neither of the companies have get a free luch, both nodes have their perks and disadvantages.

Nah.. if intel was on tsmc 5nm they would be way infront in efficiency

 

[Henry swagger]

And Intel has a massive Watts disadvantage.
Seems balanced to me.

Huh ? What do you mean .. are you trolling?

 

[poke01]

Zen 4 is brand new and it will take AMD 2 or 3 months to iron out the bios. In the past, AMD has always listened to their customers. Whereas Intel says, who cares or we will address it in the next CPU iteration and/or motherboard.

What a load of horse poop. AMD "always listens". Yeah no...

They do better than Intel because they weren't the market leader.