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Results: Workstation
Let's take a look at several common workstation productivity applications.
The AutoCAD results remind us of what we reported on the previous page when we looked at output devices. AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X ends up exactly where you’d think, based on those findings. There’s no real parallelization, but there’s plenty of system memory and cache usage, which turns out to be a combination that puts its performance squarely in the middling category.
Ryzen’s 3D performance is okay, especially in light of the number of cores not being the priority here. Consequently, the results aren’t surprising.
The Cinebench R15 OpenGL benchmark gives us a preview of what we’re in for if an application has not been optimized for Ryzen. It brings up the rear in spite of noticeable multithreading. Then again, it’s also often more than 30% faster than its predecessor, which is running at 5GHz.
Important NoteMany of the professional applications in the development field have been optimized and compiled for Intel CPUs. This is reflected in the performance numbers. Still, we want to provide a complete performance picture, so we won’t skip them. The results might motivate the application developers to focus more of their efforts on AMD’s Ryzen and Naples so that their users have two options.
One of these professional applications is Solidworks by Dassault Systemès. It’s clear to see across the two composites’ performance numbers that both single- and multithreaded scenarios are affected to varying degrees, in spite of the rendering results having an influence on the overall results as well.
The same general principle applies to Creo 3.0 by PTC. Just like Solidworks, this application’s an important and de-facto standard tool for professional development.
Catia’s older, and it’s not optimized for multithreaded performance. This means that the CPUs are left with using just one single core, which results in a lack of performance for AMD’s newest offering.
Autodesk’s Maya 2013 has the same problem, since graphics output in real time isn’t among the tasks that lend themselves well to parallelization.
Parallelization vs. Single-Core Performance
We start with AMD’s very own favorite example that the company kept showing during the presentations: Cinebench R15. First, we need to note that the only way to get the following numbers is by disabling the AVX instruction set completely. This is to say that Cinebench might be a good example, but it can’t necessarily stand in for all that many other applications when it comes to the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X’s real-world performance. Nevertheless, these results provide us with a good basis of comparison for what’s to come later. Note: For all 3.8 GHz benchmarks we turned XFR off (AMD) and Turbo Core off (Intel). For the single core benchmark we also disabled SMT.
Using just one core at stock clocks, AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X leads Intel’s Core i7-6900K. Looking at them at the same clock frequency, which we set at 3.8GHz for all tests, provides the best comparison, and here Ryzen 7 1800X @3.8 GHz is a tick slower than the Core i7-6900K @3.8 GHz.
Rendering
Next up, we have two different Blender benchmarks. First, all we do is generate a picture output with a sample size of 200 pixels. AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X beats Intel’s Core i7-6900K at the same clock frequency, but falls behind at stock clock frequencies.
Then again, this type of rendering is just the final step in a daily workload, so we run the preceding steps in addition to the final rendering for our second benchmark. This includes preview pictures and content creation-related processes.
AMD’s Ryzen is unbeatable at pure rendering tasks, and it does a solid job otherwise.
It’s a neck-and-neck race between AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X and Intel’s Core i7-6900K once again. At the same clock frequency, Ryzen pulls ahead when using the console version, which doesn’t include any workflow-related tasks, but just the graphics output.
As was the case with Blender, the 3ds Max benchmark distinguishes between several different areas, which don’t just include CPU rendering and, consequently, provide a good idea of what the work processes would feel like to the user. AMD’s Ryzen 7 is at a disadvantage when there’s real-time graphics output via the GPU or when only a few cores are used.
Bottom Line
There might have been a few hiccups here and there, which were usually due to the specific software, but, overall, AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X seems surprisingly mature and offers solid performance. It’s questionable if it’s a good investment if the application in question has been heavily optimized for Intel processors, but there’s no real drawback to its use as a general-purpose CPU.
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