Intro
Contents
The highly anticipated Zen 3 processor is finally launched today on the 5 Nov 2020. Today, we are going to examine this new Zen 3 processor and see if it really can achieve better better performance with higher instructions per clock (IPC) over the previous Zen 2 processors.
The Zen 3 focuses on performance, delivering increase in IPC. It improves latency by unifying cores and cache in a contiguous 8 core complex as compared to the previous generation which shares 2 x 4 core complex with 16 MB L3 cache.
If you recall, the first ZEN/ZEN+ at 14nm and supports up to 4.35GHz and has an IPC improvement of 50% over the previous generation. it has a 4 core complex and 8 MB L2 per complex. That changed in ZEN 2 which was built at 7nm and can boost up to 4.7 GHz and boosted a 15% IPC over the earlier generation. It increases the L3 cache to 16 MB per complex.
In the ZEN 3 architecture, it improves it’s max boost to 4.9 GHz and has an average of 19% boost in IPC performance over the previous generation. This is done by having a 8 Core complex instead of 4. The L3 cache is now unified into a contiguous 32 MB. This greatly reduces core and cache latency, improving core to core and core to cache speeds.
With an improved IPC performance, content creation and games which usually do not take much advantage of multi-core will benefit. Applications that make use of multicore will see a boost as the single core performance is improved.
In our test, we will be testing the Ryzen 7 5800X processor (Codename Vermeer) against the Ryzen 7 3800X. The 5800X processor is a processor with 8 cores 16 threads. It has a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a max boost speed of 4.7 GHz. It comes with 4 MB L2 cache and 32 MB L3 cache. It is of 7nm FinFET and has a TDP of 105W. The official supported memory spec is 3200 MHz.
The Ryzen 7 5800X didn’t come with a heatink. So, you will have to purchase your own compatible cooler for it.
In the next few pages, we will investigate it’s performance against other processors using the Gigabyte X570 AORUS MASTER motherboard.