Zen3 or Rocketlake?

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zer0sum

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Mar 8, 2013
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Seems like we're getting really close to release date for the new Rocket Lake cpu's and the 11900K is rumored to be under $600 :)
That's still a crazy amount of money for an 8 core part, but if they are widely available at retail prices they will fly off the shelves.

Lots of early "leaked" benchmarks showing that it's providing some real competition to Zen3, except for the multithreaded heavy ones of course.
And as much as I nearly jumped on the Zen3's when they were released, I still can't find a 5800/5900/5950 at any sort of sane pricing, so hopefully this will give AMD a push

An overclocked 11700K should make for a fun new build to replace my solid old 5Ghz 8700k.
But, at the same time, both platforms sort of seem like a bit of a dead end :(

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Styp

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Aug 1, 2018
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I am kind of in the same boat. Want to replace my E5v4 with a little more single-core performance.

As far as I see it, AMD and Intel are kind of a 'dead end' but at the same time it's probably the pinnacle of maturity of the current plattforms. I have the 10nm Intel Sunny Cove in my MacBookPro-13, its an impressive chip. The sunny cove architecture is a good step towards the right direction, AMDs performance is also very impressive. 8 core 5000 vs 12 core 3000 ;)

For me it comes down to multiple aspects:

Intel:
- Maybe not the latest or greatest
- Many libraries are DEEP optimized for Intel (Numpy, etc.)
- Overall, lower memory latency (if this is important)
- GPU inside
- AVX512 - probably more a 'gimmick, than a feature'

AMD:
- Probably better performance per USD
- 8-core+ available
- Sensitive to DDR4 memory - ECC is difficult, as latency is important!
- I have my reservations when running linux on Ryzen, not sure if everything works out of the box. (Bad experience)

Go with the Ryzen if performance is important, you can later upgrade a 5800. Go for Intel if the eco-system and trouble-free-out-of-the-box is of utmost importance.

For me, I still don't know - 11700 fancies me, but is it reasonable?
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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Sit on your money and wait for benchmarks for your use case - it's all guesswork based on marketing wonks so far. Pricing and availability may go a long way in your purchasing decision - I was lucky enough to snag a 5950X at regular price in december but TTBOMK they've been out of stock here in the UK since then.

Personally, it looks like the power draw of rocket lake will make in unattractive to people like me who care about that sort of thing.

Linux on ryzen is excellent IMHO, most things you'll be running on linux won't ever have been heavily optimised for intel and AMDs performance lead on linux has typically larger on nix than it is on windows for a while now (at least if phoronix is to be believed).
 
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Styp

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11700 was already sold in germany, by accident. So benchmarks are around - probably with 'early' bios.
 

111alan

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Mar 11, 2019
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Haerbing Institution of Technology
There isn't much factors to look at. About architecture, Rocket Lake is based on Sunny Cove Arch, which is the template AMD followed when they designed Zen3. There's roughly 3 major improvements: Better branch prediction bw and failure recovery, slightly less latency for some operations on int/fp units and more LS bandwidth. These 3 can all be found in Sunny Cove's improvement list. The off-list thing is the improvement of sequential DRAM read latency, but the memory latencies are still expectedly no match for on-die IMC.

Plus Rocket lake also eliminates the bottleneck of insufficient uOP cache and L1, improves the overall memory latency(about 10ns idle-latency) and brought the components disabled by specter/meltdown patches back to life. And it's not risen in price, not over-binned frequency wise and do not have low front-end bandwidth(5-way vs 4-way) or bad memory/SSD performance. The only notable advantage of Zen3 is higher L3 capacity and speed. I really don't know why people need to get Zen3 at this point, unless the application specifically calls for L3 performance(and from my testing, gaming, actual 3d-rendering, video coding/decoding, actual zip-unzip aren't in this category).

So in my opinion Rocket Lake is far superior, both in performance and in price per dollar.

Speaking about Cache, I collected quite a few data from different apps. The benchmarks, especially Cinebench and CPU-Z, are barely touching system memory, with the latter has a stunning 0% DRAM bound, while more realistic workloads have relatively high dram bound compared to cache bound. I don't know what those benchmarks are testing but they definitely have nothing to do with what most peoples are doing with those CPUs. People should think twice when making conclusions from benchmarks.

Oh, and don't trust any reviews from China ;)There's just too much nonsense people made up, like unreasonable temperature and power consumption. For example I measured 116W for 9900K stock and 137W for 5800X running the same render scene, and people just claim 50%more for 9900K and 50% less for 5800X for no good reason.
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josh

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Oct 21, 2013
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Biggest problem with Intel is the lack of ECC support. If they haven't added it back on the 11th Gen they'll still be losing out on the home lab/server target group.
 

JediAcolyte

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right now Newegg has a $10 off promo: 93XQL38

@josh I get your point. But it speaks to OPs complaint about lack of availability, which mentioned the 5800 specifically. I'm looking to move up from a 6 core to maybe 8, and its available. I just want to look at some comparisons to the 3900x.

Personally, there's a guy on Craigslist near me offering a i9-9900k and Z390 mobo for $350 that's kinda tugging at me right now too. Just to, you know, mine some Monero or something.
 
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zer0sum

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Biggest problem with Intel is the lack of ECC support. If they haven't added it back on the 11th Gen they'll still be losing out on the home lab/server target group.
What sort of a madman runs even a home server without IPMI? :p
 
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Wasmachineman_NL

Wittgenstein the Supercomputer FTW!
Aug 7, 2019
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Zen 3 if you don't need mission critical reliablity, Rocket Lake if you like to burn your house down.
 
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Styp

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Maybe it's a stupid idea, but for all those server at home guys, Ice Lake on Socket P5 might be out soon too... Who knows what the 8 core SKU will be priced at. :p
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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Anand seemingly have a review of an 11700K up early.

The official launch date for these processors, and full reviews, is March 30th. We are currently under NDA with Intel for the information that has been provided by Intel, and will publish that information in due course. However, as noted in a number of press outlets, some units have already been sold at retail before that sales date. Units obtained by that method are not under NDA by definition, and we obtained the Core i7-11700K for this review at retail, and as such we are not under NDA for any information we have obtained through using this processor.

Before publishing this review, we gave Intel advance notice to respond to us having a full review ahead of the formal release. Our email seemingly generated some excitement inside (and to our surprise, outside) Intel, but we received a response from Intel stating that they had no comment to offer.
With the above disclaimer, it still loses to the 5800X in the majority of benches and with a markedly higher power draw. The conclusion is well worth a thorough read.
 
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111alan

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Anand seemingly have a review of an 11700K up early.


With the above disclaimer, it still loses to the 5800X in the majority of benches and with a markedly higher power draw. The conclusion is well worth a thorough read.
Not only that, it's even no match for 10700K or 9900KS in gaming. Yeah, take us a fool again.

Blame all that to the 5-7ns inter-core latency increase? Where did this theory go when they review AMD things, which has 3-4 times the latency? I nearly believed that.

Add a tool to test the inter-core latency here.
 

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KarelG

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If your workload is AVX512 enabled and really using it, then go with Rocket, otherwise go with Zen3. E.g. although AVX512 power consumption on Rocket attacks 300W it still is able to very much wipe the floor with Zen3 and if counted, then is also very power efficient for the performance provided. But that's *only* if you use AVX512 heavily.
 
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Patriot

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Not only that, it's even no match for 10700K or 9900KS in gaming. Yeah, take us a fool again.

Blame all that to the 5-7ns inter-core latency increase? Where did this theory go when they review AMD things, which has 3-4 times the latency? I nearly believed that.

Add a tool to test the inter-core latency here.
I trust that Ian's findings are true to the current state of things.
However, there could be other issues with the release roms and scheduler that could be causing performance hits.
I would give intel a few weeks to sort things out before calling it DOA, that said... I am going to go tune my 5950x now.
 
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