French magazine publishes benchmarks of engineering sample AMD Ryzen CPU

The French magazine Canard PC has conducted a test comparing an AMD Ryzen processor with various Intel CPUs. It concerns an engineering sample for hardware manufacturers, which runs at a speed of 3.15GHz.

A screenshot of the benchmarks has appeared on the AnandTech forum. Hardware.info purchased the magazine and shared the content of the article. The benchmarks were performed by Samuel Demeulemeester of Canard PC, who is also known by the alias Doc Teraboule. He managed to obtain and test an AMD K8 processor in 2003, months before its official release. He has also worked on programs such as MemTest86+.

In the article, Demeulemeester writes that AMD has distributed four different copies to manufacturers that make hardware based on the processors. It concerns two quadcores and two octacores. The quad cores run at 2.8GHz and 2.9GHz and the octacores at 2.8GHz and 3.15GHz. Canard PC has managed to get hold of the fastest octacore, which can run at a maximum of 3.3GHz with four cores and theoretically reach a turbo speed of 3.5GHz with one core. During the tests, however, the speed did not exceed 3.4GHz.

The test pits the processor against several processors from Intel and AMD, including the Intel Core i7-6700K, -6800K and -6900K, as well as AMD’s older octa-core processor, the FX-8370K. The tests were conducted on an AM4 motherboard that is not yet available. Also, the bios does not yet offer official support for the processor. The Ryzen CPU codenamed 2D3151A2M88E4 is a test sample that runs at a relatively low clock speed and probably still suffers from a lack of optimizations. AMD has already promised that a model will be released with a base clock speed of at least 3.4GHz. Presumably, the final version of the processor will outperform the tested one.

The CPU test consists of a combination of several processor benchmarks, such as encoding a 4k h.265 video, a wPrime benchmark and a Blender 3D test. The Ryzen processor managed to outperform other processors with fewer cores, but had to recognize its superiority in the Core i7-6900K, which has the same number of cores, but maintains a higher clock speed. The score of the 6900K is about fifteen percent higher than that of the Zen test sample. Furthermore, the test shows a sixty percent increase in performance compared to AMD’s FX-8370 octacore.

In the game benchmarks, just like in the CPU test, an average was taken of the performance of various games, such as Arma III and Battlefield 4. The Zen processor scores a lot lower here and falls between the Intel Core i5-6500 and -6600. However, games rely heavily on high clock speeds and rarely make efficient use of eight cores, which largely negates the advantage of the eight cores in the Ryzen processor. The comparison with the Core i5-6500 is striking, which, like the Zen processor with four cores, can achieve a maximum turbo speed of 3.3GHz. The benchmarks were performed in combination with an AMD Fury X video card.

To test the power consumption, Canard PC measured the power consumption at the eps plug on the motherboard. This method clearly shows how much power is consumed by the processor alone, as opposed to measuring the entire system, which is done in many other tests. The Ryzen processor’s power consumption under load has been measured at 93 watts, which is in line with the 95 watts AMD previously promised. The consumption of the Intel Core i7-6900K is comparable to 96 watts.

The tests show that the new AMD processor seems to be able to compete with recent processors from Intel and that the new Zen architecture is significantly faster than AMD’s previous Bulldozer architecture. Clock speed seems to be the only barrier to performance. However, AMD has already announced a model that can run at at least 3.4GHz and dynamically overclock itself based on the quality of the cooling.

The Summit Ridge processors are expected to be officially announced at CES in January. It is unknown when they will be available and at what price. According to previous rumors, the first processors will appear in February, along with the first publicly available Bristol Ridge APUs. This would only concern the top models with eight cores, for which the code name ‘SR7’ is used internally. The SR5 and SR3 processors, which presumably have fewer cores, will appear later.

The edition of Canard PC in which the Ryzen benchmarks were published