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Intel's Marketing Department Latches Onto AMD Boost Clock Issue

posted by janrinok on Sunday September 08 2019, @08:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the going-for-the-weak-point dept.

takyon writes:

Too Hot to Last? Investigating Intel's Claims About Ryzen Reliability

AMD's Ryzen 3000-Series processors landed two months ago, bringing with them an incredible increase in real-world performance and upsetting the pricing paradigm with an impressive increase in performance-per-dollar, but the launch has been marred by reports that many users aren't receiving the rated boost speeds. AMD announced this week that it had identified an issue with its firmware that reduces performance in some situations and that it would update the community on an incoming fix on September 10.

As we often see in marketing, Intel has chosen to attack during AMD's perceived time of weakness. At the IFA tradeshow this week, Intel presented a slide deck to members of the press that includes information from a recent survey conducted by YouTuber Der8auer in which a surprising number of respondents reported they have been unable to reach the rated boost frequencies with their Ryzen 3000 processors.

Interestingly, Intel then drove further on the issue, citing a report that claims reliability is behind AMD's apparent, but not proven, reasons for reducing its chips' frequencies.

We were already investigating the claims Intel cited in regards to the relationship between Ryzen's clock frequencies and longevity, and we had secured comment from AMD before its admission that there was an issue with its firmware. Today we'll present some of the testing we conducted to investigate those claims.

Also at CRN.

Previously: Survey Says Many Ryzen 3900X CPUs Can't Hit Rated Boost Clock Speeds, BIOS Fix on Sept. 10th

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:38PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:38PM (#891305) Journal

    0.28 MHz/mW, surely?

    See my naive calculation (I just picked 3.5 GHz as an average, didn't try to work backward):

    3.5 GHz * 8 cores = 28 GHz
    28 GHz / 100 Watts = 0.28 GHz / Watt
    0.28 GHz / Watt = 280 MHz / Watt = 0.28 MHz / mW

    Green500 top 10 systems [top500.org] have 10-15 gigaflops per Watt.

    Zen 2 has 16-32 FLOPS per cycle [wikichip.org]. Multiply 16 by 0.28 GHz / Watt and you get about 4.48 gigaflops per Watt for double precision. Which is probably not a real world number but may be in the ballpark.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:46PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:46PM (#891308)

    I meant GHz/kW.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:58PM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:58PM (#891313) Journal

      Looks good.

      Seeing the "aggregate GHz" go up over time as core counts increase is nice. For the Ryzen 9 3950X, 3.5 GHz base clock * 16 cores. It doesn't take into account IPC improvements though.

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