The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X Review: Flagship Zen 5 Soars - and Stalls
by Gavin Bonshor on August 14, 2024 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Desktop
- Zen 5
- AM5
- Ryzen 9000
- Ryzen 9 9950X
- Ryzen 9 9900X
CPU Benchmark Performance: AI Performance
As technology progresses at a breakneck pace, so do the demands of modern applications and workloads. As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become increasingly intertwined with our daily computational tasks, it's paramount that our reviews evolve in tandem. To this end, we have AI and inferencing benchmarks in our CPU test suite for 2024.
Traditionally, CPU benchmarks have focused on various tasks, from arithmetic calculations to multimedia processing. However, with AI algorithms now driving features within some applications, from voice recognition to real-time data analysis, it's crucial to understand how modern processors handle these specific workloads. This is where our newly incorporated benchmarks come into play.
Given makers such as AMD with Ryzen AI, with multiple iterations including the XDNA 2 NPU within the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and Intel with their Meteor Lake mobile platform featuring AI-driven hardware, aptly named Intel AI Boost within the silicon, AI, and inferencing benchmarks will be a mainstay in our test suite as we go further into 2024 and beyond. While there's currently no defacto benchmark for AI at the moment, we've compiled a couple of different benchmarks to gauge performance.
It's also worth noting that desktop processors don't really utilize NPUs, so all of the grunt in the below benchmarks is done using the CPU.
In our AI-based benchmarks, which leverage TensorFlow, and even in DeepSpeech, both the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900 comfortably beat the competition when using the CPU cores. This puts Zen 5 in a good light, but graphics compute in AI is where the performance is at. Still, comparing Zen 5 to Zen 4 and Intel's Raptor Lake, the Zen 5 chips comfortably beat out the competition here.
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Khanan - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
“AMD has doubled the amount of L2 cache per core on Zen 5 to 1 MB, which is up from 512KB per Zen 4 core.”This isn’t right. L2 cache was already doubled from Zen 3 to Zen 4 to 1 MB, you already did this mistake a few times now.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
You are correct! That has been fixed. Thank you.eva02langley - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
I saw Steve and Steve still going strong with their nonsense. They were complaining again so I came here to have a REAL CPU review.Good old Anandtech is still setting the bar for what I should expect in a CPU review.
Khanan - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
I mean the chief reason for these architectures, as AMD uses Zen 5 chiplets also in the server, is the server or data center not desktops - that’s where the big money is. And after that laptops. So AMD doesn’t worry too much about those gaming YouTubers that hype everything as YouTubers always do despite it not making too much sense or having low relevance. What those want is the X3D processors anyway, those are for the gamers specifically, these aren’t as much, these are general architectures reused for the desktop (just not 1:1 in the laptop anymore).eva02langley - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
You don't teach me anything, I know that already.My point is that they are complaining because they are focusing on games while a CPU IPC is NOT limited to gaming, on the contrary, it is a really small portion of it.
Phoronix came out with a 17.5% geomean over the 7950x, well inline or even better than AMD's 16% IPC uplift.
thestryker - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
Keep in mind the only reason Phoronix saw that much uplift is the AVX512 change not because they're actually that much improved. They mentioned at the end of the review that they'll be doing further testing without AVX512 for comparisons.Oxford Guy - Friday, August 16, 2024 - link
Greatly improved AVX-512 is more of an improvement than we've seen from some CPU releases.coburn_c - Wednesday, August 14, 2024 - link
Not true at all, GN repeatedly said don't buy these chips for gaming. YOU are complaining without focusing, and you look like a clown.Gothmoth - Saturday, August 24, 2024 - link
indeed he looks like a very dumb clown.....Lonyo - Thursday, August 15, 2024 - link
GAMERS Nexus is focusing on GAME performance?