Phoronix article – CPU comparison (2018-06-08)
Phoronix posted an article comparing 28 desktop CPUs. This post reviews some of the workloads that were used.
The CPUs were all x86 with a range of older and newer AMD and Intel processors. All were tested with Ubuntu 18.04. The core counts of these processors vary and the benchmarks were also a variety of single and multi-threaded programs.
In table below is a quick summary of major conclusions and my characterization of the benchmarks. Overall Intel does slightly better on single-threaded and most dominated by large ratios across generations of systems. OpenSSL interesting outlier with AMD slower than Intel and also lower IPC.
| Benchmark | Phoronix observations | My observations | Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|
| rodinia: CFD solver | i9-7980 fastest with threadripper close. E350 slowest. | CFD solver: parallel, On_CPU 97%. IPC of 0.64 with a large number of memory stalls. L2 miss rate 62% and L3 miss rate 69% so cache/memory plays big part in overall performance. | Analysis |
| rodinia: LavaMD | i9-7980 fastest with threadripper close. E350 slowest. | LavaMD: parallel, On_CPU 98%, IPC of 1.46 with roughly equal levels of frontend/backend stalls at 15%/12% | Analysis |
| build-linux-kernel | Same top two systems, with also a ~70x performance improvement from slowest to fastest. | On_CPU 88%, mostly parallel compiles with a sequential period at end. High frontend stalls. # processes less in subsequent runs so might not do thorough "clean". | Analysis |
| build-php | Intel i9-7980 and i9-7900 fastest with threadripper behind. Likely sequential parts make core count not as important as build-linux-kernel | On_CPU 82% so less parallel times than build-linux-kernel. Frontend stalls high. Many small short-lived processes. | Analysis |
| ttsiod-renderer | Similar scoring i9-7980, threadripper fastest and E350 slowest. Overall ratio 40x | On_CPU 98%. IPC 0.85. Frontend/backend stalls similar at 21%/22%. L2 miss rate 67% and L3 miss rate of 10% so cache sizes likely play a factor. Frontend seems to be more inefficiencies in allocating (uop cache 44%) than icache or itlb misses. | Analysis |
| asmfish | Similar scoring i9-7980, threadripper fastest and E350 slowest. Overall ratio 50x | On_CPU 100% with IPC 0.96. Frontend stalls of 27% and speculation of 19% (all branch misses) | Analysis |
| openssl | Intel i9-7980 and i9-7900 are fastests edging out threadripper. Comment on benchmark favoring Intel. | On_CPU 100% with IPC 1.66 (Intel) vs 1.12 (AMD). High retirement rate of 90%. | Analysis |
| compress-p7zip | Similar scoring i9-7980, threadripper fastest and E350 slowest. Overall ratio 20x | On_CPU 88% with some I/O to limit scaling. IPC 0.83 with 27% speculation misses (branch prediction). | Analysis |
| aobench | Intel fastest in top 4 spots and Ryzen 7 2700 next. | Single threaded, On_Core 100%. IPC 1.87 with 12%/29%/11% frontend/backend/speculation. Some I/O. | Analysis |
| encode-flac | Intel fastest in top 4 spots and Ryzen 7 1800 next. | Single threaded with On_Core 90%. Some I/O more writes than reads. IPC 2.43 with 27% backend stalls. L2 miss ratio 20% and L3 6%. | Analysis |
| encode-mp3 | Ryzen 7 2700 fastest with i7-8700k next (some processors missing?) | Single threaded with On_core of 100%. IPC of 1.90. 35% backend stalls with L2 miss ratio 47% and L3 miss ratio 6%. | Analysis |
| stockfish | i9-7980 fastest with threadripper close. E350 slowest. Overall ratio 60x | On_CPU 100%, IPC of 1.0 with frontend stalls and bad speculation. | Analysis |
| compress-zstd | Intel fastest five with E350 slowest. | Single-threaded benchmark (compress-zstd seems to use multiple threads), with a high level of backend stalls. | Analysis |
| m-queens | Threadripper fastest, but i9 not measured. | Benchmark is On_CPU 99%. The IPC is 1.19 with a high level of speculation misses. | Analysis |
| scimark2 | Intel fastest systems but also some missing. | Single-threaded with On_Core 100%. IPC of 1.95 with 41% backend stalls. L2 miss ratio of 56% and L3 miss ratio of 41%. | Analysis |
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