In just under 3 weeks, AMD will release their new Ryzen 5 processors. So far, we’ve seen what 8 Zen cores can do with Ryzen 7 and we soon will have 6 core models with Ryzen 5. However, Ryzen 3, the 4 core models, have largely remained secretive. In a surprising turn of events, Raven Ridge, the Zen based APUs have actually been leaked before Ryzen 3. Even more interesting is that we have some performance numbers from the leak.
Accidently published by Chinese CPU firm Zhaoxin, we have a 4 core 8 thread Raven Ridge APU running the Fritz Chess benchmark against several other AMD, Intel and Zhaoxin CPUs. As expected, Raven Ridge performs about as well as we would expect from a quad-core Zen based APU. Despite featuring a total of 8 threads, Raven Ridge was only on par with the base Intel Core i5 on the Skylake architecture. Raven Ridge scored 11000 while the i5 6600 scores 11333 and the i5 7500 scores 14000. The FX 8370 scores 9360, the A10 7890 scores 7943 and the i3 6300 manages 7796.
Of course, it’s important that we don’t read too much into this leak. Even if the results are representative, this is but a single data point. We also don’t know the clock speeds for the Raven Ridge APU so we can’t judge it based on that. There are also questions that remain about how well the Zen SMT works in highly threaded tasks. The key take away is that with Zen, AMD’s APUs will not only dominate the iGPU side, but also the CPU side at last. In fact, we might even see 2 core 4 thread Raven Ridge being the perfectly balanced budget APU for gaming if such a model were to exist.
Last of all, we also see a glimpse of the Zhaoxin CPU offerings. Clocking in at 3 GHz with 8 cores, these x86 chips built in partnership with VIA are looking pretty good. In fact, they look almost comparable to the latest Intel and AMD offerings. Of course, Zhaoxin is bringing more cores to the table perhaps their own multi-threading technology but for first-time entrant, it is nothing short of amazing.
I dream of a day when our pc market is saturated with dosen of cpu companies.
How the fuck are Zha_something cores looking “pretty good” ?
8 cores on 3Gig against 4 Zen cores ( One Zeppelin module) on engineeering sample ( which should also contain pretty awesome iGPU) and which are probably meant for mobile market ?!?
What if the Zhaoxin chips cost $42?
don’t be angry m8o, every single company making Cpu’s is better for the industry as a whole and the entire human race, power to the people!
Then they aren’t in the same class within which they could be compared.
Also VIA’s commitment to open documentation which is crucial for good open source drivers is “legendary”. Even if hell froze and they managed to beat AMD 100% speedwise, I’d still go for AMD gladly.
Open source matters to me. I’m writing this on 25W TDP Athlon 5370 dual-monitor setup, running Gentoo Linux, with latest open-source OpenGL drivers (MESA). Fuck VIA and their crappy binary blobs that randomly leak from the digestive system of their SW development team…
Fair enough, It seemed like you were just angry that some Chinese manufacturer was making an attempt but I see now it’s the flaky comparison that chafed your nips.
Mad respect, I too am an open source fan but I have no soul because i’m running a Xeon e5450 on Windows </3
Considering that their ZX-E outperforms an FX 8370 with same core count and 75% clock speed, Zhaoxin seems to be much closer than I thought (although a bit late).
The utopia of three competitive x86 makers has just come an inch closer in my mind.
VIA back in the game??
Hopefully that’s a very poor example, by that I mean engineering sample with low clocks, low memory speeds etc.
I’ve been expecting a lot more from the Zen APU’s. When you look at the last gen and how much a high ram speed improved performance I was hoping for more of the same, I was hopng to see comfortable 1080p gaming when paired with high speed DDR4 memory, Infact I was fantasizing about being abe to make a nuc sized gaming machine.