The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review: 16 Cores on 7nm with PCIe 4.0
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 14, 2019 9:00 AM ESTTest Bed and Setup
As per our processor testing policy, we take a premium category motherboard suitable for the socket, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the manufacturer's maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.
| Test Setup | |
| AMD Ryzen 3000 | AMD Ryzen 9 3950X AMD Ryzen 9 3900X |
| Motherboard | ASRock X570 Taichi 2.50 (AGESA 1004B) |
| CPU Cooler | Kraken X62 |
| DRAM | Corsair Vengeance RGB 4x8 GB DDR4-3200 |
| GPU | Sapphire RX 460 2GB (CPU Tests) MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G (Gaming Tests) |
| PSU | Corsair AX860i |
| SSD | Crucial MX500 2TB |
| OS | Windows 10 1909 |
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our multiple test beds. Some of this hardware is not in this test bed specifically, but is used in other testing.
| Hardware Providers | |||
| Sapphire RX 460 Nitro | MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC | Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs |
Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs |
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| G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX |
Crucial Ballistix DDR4 |
Silverstone Coolers |
Silverstone Fans |
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Drazick - Sunday, November 17, 2019 - link
The DDR Technology is orthogonal.I want Quad and the latest memory available.
guyr - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
Anything is possible, of course. 5 years ago, who would have predicted 16 cores in a consumer-oriented CPU? However, neither Intel nor AMD has made any moves beyond 2 memory channels in the consumer space. The demand is simply not there to justify the increase in complexity and price. In the professional space, more channels are easily justified and the target market doesn't hesitate to pay the higher prices. So, it's all driven by what the market will bear.alufan - Saturday, November 16, 2019 - link
weird intel launches its chip a couple of weeks ago and it stayed upfront and main story for over a week, AMD launches what is in effect the best CPU ever tested by this site and it lasts a few Days before being pushed aside for another intel article am sure the intention by the reporters is to be fair and unbiased however I can see how the commercial motives of the site are being manipulated looks like intels up to its old tricks again, the thread ripper article lasted even less time but no chips have been tested(or at least released) yet which I guess makes sensepenev91 - Sunday, November 17, 2019 - link
Just ignore everything Intel/AMD related on Anandtech. There's been an obvious bias for years.Atom2 - Saturday, November 16, 2019 - link
There has never been a situation as big as this one, where the bench software was benchmarked more than the hardware. Comprehensive overview of historic software development? Whatever the reason, it seems that keeping back AVX512 to only select few CPUs, was an unfortunate decision by Intel, which only contributed to the situation. Yes, you know, if you compile your code with compiler from 1998 and ignore all the guidelines how to write fast code ... Voila... For some reason however, nobody tries to run 20 year old CPU code on GPU though.chrkv - Monday, November 18, 2019 - link
Second page "On the Ryzen High Performance power plan, our sustained single core frequency dropped to 4450 MHz" - I believe just "the High Performance" should be here.Page 4 "Despite 5.0 GHz all-core turbo being on the 9900K" - should be "9900KS".
Irata - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
Quick question: Are any of your benchmarks affected by the Mathlab issue (Ryzen are crippled because a poor code path is used due to a vendor ID check for "genuine Intel" )?twotwotwo - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
Intel's had these consumer-platform-based "entry-level Xeons" (once E3, now E) for a while. Despite some obvious limits, and that there are other low-end server options, enough folks want 'em to seed an ecosystem of rackmount and blade servers from Supermicro, Dell, etc.Anyway, the "pro" (ECC/management enabled) variant of Ryzen seems like a great fit for that. 16 cores and 24 PCIe 4 lanes are probably more useful for little servers than for most desktop users. It's also more balanced than the 8/16C EPYCs; it's cool they have 128 lanes and tons of memory channels, but it takes very specific applications to use them all with that few cores (caching?). Ideally the lesser I/O and lower TDPs also help make denser/cheaper boxes, and the consumer-ish clocks pay off for some things.
The biggest argument against is that the entry-level server market is probably shrinking anyway as users rent tiny slices of huge boxes from cloud providers instead. It also probably doesn't have the best margins. So maybe you could release a competitive product there and still not make all that much off it.
halfflat - Thursday, November 21, 2019 - link
Very curious about the AVX512 vs AVX2 results for 3dPM. It's really unusual to see even a 2x performance increase going from AVX2 to AVX512 on the same architecture, given that running AVX512 instructions will lower the clock.The non-AVX versions, I'm presuming, are utilizing SSE2.
The i9-9900K gets a factor of 2 increase going from SSE2 to AVX2, which is pretty much what one would expect with twice as many fp operations per instruction. But the i9-7960X performance with AVX512 is *ten times* improved over SSE2, when the vector is only four times as wide and the cores will be running at a lower clock speed.
Is there some particular AVX512-only operation that is determining this huge performance gap? Some further analysis of these results would be very interesting.
AIV - Wednesday, November 27, 2019 - link
Somebody posted that it's caused by 64 bit integer multiplies, which are supported in AVX512, but not in AVX2 and thus fallback to scalar operations.