Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCPU Web Tests
One of the issues when running web-based tests is the nature of modern browsers to automatically install updates. This means any sustained period of benchmarking will invariably fall foul of the 'it's updated beyond the state of comparison' rule, especially when browsers will update if you give them half a second to think about it. Despite this, we were able to find a series of commands to create an un-updatable version of Chrome 56 for our 2017 test suite. While this means we might not be on the bleeding edge of the latest browser, it makes the scores between CPUs comparable.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
SunSpider 1.0.2: link
The oldest web-based benchmark in this portion of our test is SunSpider. This is a very basic javascript algorithm tool, and ends up being more a measure of IPC and latency than anything else, with most high-performance CPUs scoring around about the same. The basic test is looped 10 times and the average taken. We run the basic test 4 times.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: link
Kraken is another Javascript based benchmark, using the same test harness as SunSpider, but focusing on more stringent real-world use cases and libraries, such as audio processing and image filters. Again, the basic test is looped ten times, and we run the basic test four times.
Google Octane 2.0: link
Along with Mozilla, as Google is a major browser developer, having peak JS performance is typically a critical asset when comparing against the other OS developers. In the same way that SunSpider is a very early JS benchmark, and Kraken is a bit newer, Octane aims to be more relevant to real workloads, especially in power constrained devices such as smartphones and tablets.
WebXPRT 2015: link
While the previous three benchmarks do calculations in the background and represent a score, WebXPRT is designed to be a better interpretation of visual workloads that a professional user might have, such as browser based applications, graphing, image editing, sort/analysis, scientific analysis and financial tools.
Overall, all of our web benchmarks show a similar trend. Very few web frameworks offer multi-threading – the browsers themselves are barely multi-threaded at times – so Threadripper's vast thread count is underutilized. What wins the day on the web are a handful of fast cores with high single-threaded performance, and it becomes a balance between cores and cross-core communication.
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WoWFishmonger - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I thought it was "The proof is in the PUDDING"All this time I've been eating pudding, looking for proof..... explains why I haven't found any yet. :|
Nice write up, its good to see that even if people won't use this new mode, they do have the choice to enable it.
Nothing wrong with choice IMO.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Heh, wow. That's a bad typo. Fixed, thanks :)edzieba - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
"I thought it was "The proof is in the PUDDING""The phrase is: "the proof of the pudding is in the eating".
boozed - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
ThisAlexvrb - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
I've always heard "the proof is in the pudding". The shorter version's meaning is still pretty apparent. Plus it rolls off the tongue better, so to speak. Mmmm..... pudding.sprockincat - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
While we're on the topic, I think it's "Game Mode as originally envisioned by AMD."NikosD - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
So, you read my comment regarding your mistake at the first TR review of assuming a 16C/16T CPU after enabling Game Mode instead of a 8C/16T and you corrected that in your new review.Now, you only have to repeat your tests with DDR4-3200 and select a different, more "workstation" kind of benchmarks in order to test monsters of 32 threads and not PDF opening of course !
Mercy !
Aisalem - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
For the average person reading most of tech sites the more workstation benchmarks doesn't really makes sense.What I would like to see if you can enable game mode and disable SMT. That will leave 1950X with 8 cores available to the system which still should be enough for gaming but might present even better results.
Zstream - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
For the love of all things... no one buys TR to just play games, or open .PDF's.Gothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
well noobs do.but i think websites like anandtech should know better.. but well anand is gone and.
the new generation is obviously no adequat replacement.