AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Benchmarked

Today, AMD finally unveiled their new Ryzen Threadripper processors. Based on the successful Zen architecture, the designs aim to challenge Intel in the high-end desktop market. The HEDT market has not seen very much competition in the past couple of years. With the new competition, however, core counts are nearly doubling in just one cycle. The Ryzen 1950X just got some comprehensive benchmarking in the latest round of leaks to come out.

The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is the flagship chip of the Threadripper X399 family. It comes with 16 cores and 32 threads with 32 MB of L3 cache and 8 MB of L2 cache. Furthermore, the chip clocks in at 3.4 GHz base and a boost to 4.0 GHz. XFR pushes the 180W chip to 4.2 GHz if cooling allows for it. Due to the MXM design, Threadripper uses 2 Ryzen dies linked with Infinity Fabric, lowering costs. This allows AMD to offer the chip at just $999.

AMD Fares Well in Cinebench R15 and CPU-Z

One of the most popular benchmarks still is the Cinebench R15. Luckily for us, we have two results for the 1950X. In both runs, the 1950X managed to score about 2905. That is 30% faster than the similarly priced  Intel Core i9-7900X. That Intel chip only offers up 10 cores which is why AMD is doing so well against it. For workloads requiring many cores, it looks like AMD is the better option by far.

Finally, we also have a CPU-Z benchmark where the 1950x fared well against the competition. Its single threaded boost manages to equal regular Ryzen while multithreaded performance scales well. Ryzen and Threadripper shine well when it is a true multithreaded task with non-dependant tasks for each core. As we’ve seen with other workloads however, when there is a lot of inter-core communication, Infinity Fabric isn’t up to the task all the time. The real question that remains is if this is an issue of optimising for the new MXM design or a fundamental limitation.