[News] AMD's Ryzen Cache Analyzed - Improvements; Improveable; CCX Compromises

[StyM]

https://www.techpowerup.com/231268/a...cx-compromises

AMD's Ryzen 7 lower than expected performance in some applications seems to stem from a particular problem: memory. Before AMD's Ryzen chips were even out, reports pegged AMD as having confirmed that most of the tweaks and programming for the new architecture had been done in order to improve core performance to its max - at the expense of memory compatibility and performance. Apparently, and until AMD's entire Ryzen line-up is completed with the upcoming Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 processors, the company will be hard at work on improving Ryzen's cache handling and memory latency.

Hardware.fr has done a pretty good job in exploring Ryzen's cache and memory subsystem deficiencies through the use of AIDA 64, in what would otherwise be an exceptional processor design. Namely, the fact that there seems to be some problem with Ryzen's L3 implementation, in that it produces latency results that are up to 30 ms higher than the average, at 90 ms, than the L3 latency found on Intel's i7 6900K or even AMD's FX 8350 (both with latency around 60 ms).

AMD's Zen architecture is surely an interesting beast, and these kinds of results really go to show the amount of work, of give-and-take design that AMD had to go through in order to achieve a cost-effective, scalable, and at the same time performant architecture through its CCX modules. However, this kind of behavior may even go so far as to give us some answers with regards to Ryzen's lower than expected gaming performance, since games are well-known to be sensitive to a processor's cache performance profile.

[qcmadness]

Zen+ improvements cited?