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Results: Scientific & Engineering Computations And HPC
We’re using the SPECwpc benchmark suite, since it provides a good variety of workstation tasks that use very different types of mathematical computations. These are both highly parallelized and also make heavy use of memory bandwidth, cache, and latencies.
The pre-Euler3D CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics Benchmark) test did work, but the rest of Rodinia’s benchmarks (i.e., Accelerating Compute-Intensive Applications) didn’t. We’re still showing all of the results below, since the remaining CPU’s results might still be of interest.
LAMMPS stands for Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator, and it didn’t just run flawlessly, but also really showed off Ryzen’s capabilities. In the resulting head-to-head race, AMD got there first more often than not.
NAMD is a benchmark for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. All individual tests went Ryzen 7 1800X’s way.
The Fastest Fourier Transform in the West, or FFTW, is a popular open-source solution to compute one-, two- and three-dimensional DFTs (Discrete Fourier Transforms). The C library makes heavy use of single-precision AVX these days, which proves to be a terrible thing for the Ryzen 7 1800X.
Convolution is a benchmark for an area of functional analysis. Convolution stands for a mathematical operation on two functions (i.e., f and g) that produces a third function.
The CalculiX benchmark is based on a three-dimensional structural finite element program.
Poisson's Equation is a partial differential equation that allows the modeling of the number of incidences that occur at a constant medium rate independent of each other within a fixed time interval or area. It doesn’t prove to be a problem for AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X, but the older AMD FX-9590 doesn’t fare well.
Sequential Reweighted Message Passing, or SRMP for short, is an algorithm used to solve discrete energy minimization problems. AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X runs into trouble, which might be due to the specific benchmark application. It uses a total of eight threads.
The earth’s underground structure can be ascertained based on seismic processing. One of the four basic steps to do so is the Kirchhoff Migration, which is used to build a graphical representation out of the available data. AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X does well with it.
GNU Octave is a scientific programming language. Octave Forge is a toolbox that’s an important part of it, since it allows additional functions to be added and the application’s functionality to be extended. AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X does a solid job, but we do have to note that not all of the functions worked without problems and that we had to skip one chart graph altogether.
Bottom Line
Unfortunately, we just didn’t have time to try to find possible solutions to the problems that occurred with GNU Octave and some of the other benchmarks. Otherwise, we would have searched for the root of the problems or tested the software using a different operating system. Alas, two days just aren’t enough time to perform a comprehensive CPU test.
This is even more regrettable in light of the fact that AMD’s Ryzen generally does well with these types of tasks. It would have been nice to know the reasons behind the few times when it didn’t. Overall, we’re left with the impression that AMD’s boiled down a server CPU to the desktop level. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though, and it certainly makes us excited for Naples.
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