Unofficial benchmarks and prices for Ryzen processors

On February 5-9, 2017, several interesting presentations were held at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). First, Intel engineers presented the most complete technical description of the low-cost 2.5D-layout alternative for the Stratix X FPGA (report "A 14nm 1GHz FPGA with 2.5D Transceiver Integration" ).

But even more interesting was the report of engineers from AMD, who spoke at a plenary session of Digital Processors directly in front of colleagues from Intel. They introduced Zen - the next-generation high-performance CPU x86 core, which by some characteristics surpasses the current generation of Intel processors, made with a 14nm process. The AMD report is called "Zen: A Next-Generation High-Performance x86 Core"

Judging by the technical characteristics of the report, the Zen x86 core is about 10% smaller in size than the core of the current generation of Intel processors, which are commercially available (the second generation of 14 nm processors). The Zen core area is 44 mm², and the Intel x86 14 nm core area is 49 mm². For some other characteristics, Zen is also not inferior to Intel.


Zen microarchitecture differs from Intel microarchitecture in more unified second-level cache (512 KB per core).
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Experts who were present at the plenary meeting, including Intel engineers themselves, recognized that the Zen core was clearly competitive, although due to the secrecy of some key characteristics, it was impossible to say for sure whether the chip size advantage would result in lower costs and, as a result, decrease in retail Zen processors.

In their report, AMD employees described a number of methods, due to which they managed to reduce the capacitance resistance of Zen by 15% compared to existing chips. For example, at Zen, AMD first used a metal-dielectric-metal capacitor (MDM capacitor), which helped reduce the operating voltage and provided a higher value for each core (per-core voltage) and frequency control.

Engineers told that for more than a year, the power consumption was monitored weekly in the zones of maximum activity of the chip in order to reduce the capacitance. Now the company has two eight-core types of architecture capable of operating with simultaneous multithreading at a frequency of 3.4 GHz.

The first official release of microprocessors on the Zen microarchitecture for socket AM4 will take place over the coming weeks - most likely in March 2017. In the meantime, individual hardware sites report a leak of information about the entire line of Ryzen processors and their prices. It is said that 17 CPU models will be released: five 8-core, four 6-core and eight 4-core processors.

Black Edition series processors (two 8-, four 6- and two 4-core) support Extended Frequency Range (XFR) technology, which automatically accelerates the processors beyond the standard clock frequency. The degree of acceleration depends on the efficiency of cooling. The better the crystal cools, the more it can be accelerated.

Informal information on the specifications and prices of some future processors is given in the table.

AMD Ryzen CPU	Kernels / Threads	L3	Tdp	Base	Turbo	Xfr	Price
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X	8/16	16MB	95 W	3.6 GHz	4.0 GHz	4.0 GHz +	$ 499
AMD Ryzen 7 1800 Pro	8/16	16 MB	65 W	Tba	Tba	N / A	Tba
AMD Ryzen 7 1700X	8/16	16 MB	95 W	3.4 GHz	3.8 GHz	3.8 GHz +	$ 389
AMD Ryzen 7 1700	8/16	16 MB	65 W	3.0 GHz	3.7 GHz	N / A	$ 319
AMD Ryzen 5 1600X	6/12	16 MB	95 W	3.3 GHz	3.7 GHz	3.7 GHz +	$ 259
AMD Ryzen 5 1600	6/12	16 MB	65 W	Tba	Tba	N / A	Tba
AMD Ryzen 5 1500	6/12	16 MB	65 W	3.2 GHz	3.5 GHz	N / A	$ 229
AMD Ryzen 5 1400X	4/8	8 MB	65 W	3.5 GHz	3.9 GHz	3.9 GHz +	$ 199
AMD Ryzen 5 1400	4/8	8 MB	65 W	Tba	Tba	N / A	Tba
AMD Ryzen 5 1300	4/8	8 MB	65 W	3.2 GHz	3.5 GHz	N / A	$ 175
AMD Ryzen 3 1200X	4/4	8 MB	65 W	Tba	3.4 GHz	3.8 GHz	$ 149
AMD Ryzen 3 1200	4/4	8 MB	65 W	Tba	Tba	N / A	Tba
AMD Ryzen 3 1100	4/4	8 MB	65 W	3.2 GHz	3.5 GHz	N / A	$ 129

On the VideoCardz website laid out the benchmarks of the Ryzen processor . On the graph, the ZD3406BAM88F4_38 / 34_Y is an eight-core CPU, the ZD3301BBM6IF4_37 / 33_Y is a six-core CPU, the ZD3201BBM4KF4_34 / 32_Y is a quad core.



Here is another table with benchmarks from the Futuremark database. It should be added that the 3DMark Fire Strike Physics test evaluates CPU performance in the simulation of the physical world. The load on the GPU is reduced to a minimum.

New achievements of modern microprocessor industry are not limited to AMD. At the ISSCC conference, representatives from Mediatek also spoke on the 10-nuclear system-on-a-chip, made according to the 10 nm process technology ( "A 10nm FinFET 2.8GHz Tri-Gear" " ). The Mediatek chip is based around a new cluster of three ARM Cortex A-35 cores that perform ultra-low power tasks, such as playing videos or decoding MP3s. This SoC will compete in the market with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835.