Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCPU Office Tests
The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modeling, and so on and so forth.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to compile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.
For our test, we compile a version of v56 under MSVC and report the time in 'Compiles per Day', a more scalable metric to represent over time. Other publications might perfom this test differently (Ars Technica uses a clang-cl compiler with VC++ linking, for example).
One of the interesting data points in our test is the Compile. Because this test requires a lot of cross-core communication and DRAM, we get an interesting metric where the 1950X still comes out on top due to the core counts, but because the 1920X has fewer cores per CCX, it actually falls behind the 1950X in Game Mode and the 1800X despite having more cores.
PCMark8: link
Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.
Strangely, PCMark 8's Creative test seems to be failing across the board. We're trying to narrow down the issue.
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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.