1st Gen AMD Ryzen - The beginning of a new era
There was a dark time, not that long ago when one tech company held the world in it's fist. They were the only choice for a high performance CPU, and that safety led them to grow stagnant. Their name? Intel. There wasn't much reason to push forward and make better chips, so they didn't. They just sold refreshes and chips with slight tweaks to make a profit. But then, one day in 2017, the opposition unleashed a weapon that they had been hiding. It was the beginning of the end for Intel. Their weapon? The Zen architecture. AMD stood up to Intel when no one else could. This marked the beginning of a huge arms race, a fight were each team would fight tooth and nail to gain the performance crown and the support of the community. Eventually AMD came out on top, but even now they're not safe. Both teams are currently waiting, busy thinking up a new plan of attack.
In all seriousness, AMD's Zen architecture, and their first Ryzen CPUs began to bring competition back to the CPU market. They are an important piece of history, and so we'll have a closer look at them here, and what made them so special.
Architecture
The failure of AMD's FX series processors, and their 'Bulldozer' architecture left a lot to be desired. Bulldozer had a very low IPC, and the CPUs had to be run at extremely high clock speeds to achieve near acceptable performance. This used an exceptional amount of power, and generated a bucket-load of heat too. When AMDs designers made the Zen architecture, they started completely afresh. They ditched the failing Bulldozer architecture, and made Zen. Zen had a much higher IPC*, was built on a newer, smaller, more power efficient process, and didn't have to run as fast, reducing power draw and heat dissipation, and was generally better in every way.
The new Ryzen lineup consisted of CPUs with 4, 6 and 8 Zen cores. Although there were a fair few different skews released, but they all share a lot in common. Let's see exactly what!
Release Date: 02.03.17 - 27.07.17
Architecture: Zen Core Architecture
Core name: Summit ridge
Socket: AM4
Size: 40mm x 40mm
PCIe lanes: 24 (3.0) - 1x16 or 2x8 (GPU) + 1x4 (GPP) +1x4 (PCH)
Memory Support: Dual channel DDR4-2666 (128GB ECC)
Manufacturing process: 14nm
Core stepping at launch: B1
Max temperature: 95 degrees Celsius
Bus: Infinity fabric (100MHz)
L1+L2 Cache per core: L1I-64KB, L1D-32KB, L2 512MB
And now some less traditional metrics that I've calculated, that are useful for analysing performance, and different changes:
Average rIPC (R15/R20): 39.87/95.34
Average SMT effectivity (R15/R20): 30.80%/26.37%
Transistor density (transistors/mm squared): ~22.5 million
Improvements over predecessor: Vastly improved IPC and power efficiency
Supported chipsets: A320, B350, X370, B450, X470
Skews
Now lets take a look at the individual parts!
Ryzen 3 1200
Cores/Threads: 4/4
Base Clock: 3.1 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 3.4 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.1 GHz
TDP: 65W
Retail Price: £109
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 129/447
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 333/1191
Cinebench Conclusion: 1331.90
rIPC (R15/R20): 37.94/97.94
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): None
Gaming score: 65
Ryzen 3 1300X
Cores/Threads: 4/4
Base Clock: 3.5 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 3.7 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.6 GHz
TDP: 65W
Retail Price: £129
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 146/553
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 360/1357
Cinebench Conclusion: 1489.09
rIPC (R15/R20): 39.46/97.30
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): None
Gaming score: 68
Ryzen 5 1400
Cores/Threads: 4/8
Base Clock: 3.2 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 3.4 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.4 GHz
TDP: 65W
Retail Price: £169
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 134/705
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 333/1559
Cinebench Conclusion: 1486.54
rIPC (R15/R20): 39.41/96.76
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): 31.53%/18.47%
Gaming score: 69
Ryzen 5 1500X
Cores/Threads: 4/8
Base Clock: 3.5 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 3.7 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.7 GHz
TDP: 65W
Retail Price: £189
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 152/799
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 341/1811
Cinebench Conclusion: 1627.34
rIPC (R15/R20): 41.08/92.16
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): 31.40%/32.77%
Gaming score: 71
Ryzen 5 1600
Cores/Threads: 6/12
Base Clock: 3.2 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 3.6 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.4 GHz
TDP: 65W
Retail Price: £219
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 147/1094
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 357/2487
Cinebench Conclusion: 1802.87
rIPC (R15/R20): 40.83/99.16
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): 31.33%/22.94%
Gaming score: 73
Ryzen 5 1600X
Cores/Threads: 6/12
Base Clock: 3.6 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 4.0GHz
All Core Boost: 3.8 GHz
TDP: 95W
Retail Price: £249
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 151/1126
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 371/2728
Cinebench Conclusion: 1940.37
rIPC (R15/R20): 37.75/92.75
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): None
Gaming score: 75
Ryzen 7 1700
Cores/Threads: 8/16
Base Clock: 3.0 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 3.7 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.3 GHz
TDP: 65W
Retail Price: £329
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 151/1403
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 331/3189
Cinebench Conclusion: 1969.68
rIPC (R15/R20): 40.81/89.40
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): 30.22%/35.03%
Gaming score: 77
Ryzen 7 1700X
Cores/Threads: 8/16
Base Clock: 3.4 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 3.8 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.6 GHz
TDP: 95W
Retail Price: £399
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 155/1532
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 378/3455
Cinebench Conclusion: 2163.10
rIPC (R15/R20): 40.79/99.47
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): 30.41%/20.60%
Gaming score: 80
Ryzen 7 1800X
Cores/Threads: 8/16
Base Clock: 3.6 GHz
Single Core Boost Clock: 4.0 GHz
All Core Boost: 3.8 GHz
TDP: 95W
Retail Price: £499
Cinebench R15 (1T/nT): 163/1617
Cinebench R20 (1T/nT): 378/3614
Cinebench Conclusion: 2223.19
rIPC (R15/R20): 40.75/94.50
SMT Effectivity (R15/R20): 30.53%/25.80%
Gaming score: 85
Competition / Driving the future
One of the main advantages AMD had with it's Zen products was the number of CPU cores. AMD could make relatively cheap CPUs with lots of cores. Intel had previously only releases CPUs with that many cores on the HEDT market, but this forced them to add more cores to their processors to stay competitive. This was better for consumers, as they were able to get great computing power for a price they'd never had dreamed of. AMD are continuing to do that today, with their 12 and 16 core Ryzen 9 parts, driving the market forward, and forcing Intel to add more cores to their processors. Cheap Ryzen 3 and Core i3 parts now have the same number of cores as, and can outperform, older flagship CPUs from back when Intel were monopolising the market. This competition is good for the whole market, which is why I hope that Intel's Alder Lake processors, coming later this year, perform well enough to provide good competition for AMD, and continue to drive the market forward, rather than sit stagnant like it did before.
Gaming
One of the big markets for high performance CPUs is the PC gaming community. The latest and greatest titles with their superior graphics and gameplay come with the price of taxing hardware further, leading gamers to build and upgrade to newer, higher performing PCs. AMD's Ryzen CPUs, although not superior to Intel’s offerings (on average) at their time of release, did offer more competitive gaming performance than their previous FX CPUs, and when overclocked can offer more than acceptable performance. They even offer superior 1% lows to Intel’s chips in most cases, enabling a smoother playing experience.
As we can see, although the Ryzen parts aren't always providing higher average frame rates than their competitors, they do often have higher 1% lows, allowing for a smoother, superior performance. This, combined with being able to provide decent frame rates allowed gamers to choose AMD for their rigs, and it made even more sense if you did anything else on your system, such as video editing, or more CPU demanding workloads.
Due to the titles used in this testing, processors with more cores have generally been slightly favoured, promoting the Ryzen parts over the older Intel equivalents, so just keep in mind that in your games, the CPUs with more cores could perform worse compared to other parts shown here, although not significantly.
The lower end Ryzen 3 parts (Not shown here) often perform similarly to Intel's 7th Gen Ryzen 3 and lower end Ryzen 5 parts, especially when overclocked.
Workstation applications
Although AMD didn't generally have an overall performance win from the gaming side of things, their raw Compute power is superior to the competing Intel skews, due to the higher number of cores and threads. This was one of AMD's main selling points, as Intel's flagships at the time had only had 4 cores, half as many as AMD! Intel's following generation still only had 6 cores in their high end parts, allowing AMD to crush them in certain applications! Intel's only competing 8 core processors were on the HEDT market, were both CPUs and platforms were much more expensive, and Intel's hyper threading still wasn't as effective as AMD's anyway, giving them more of an advantage.
The Ryzen skews offer a huge edge in the right applications, offering the very best performance, sometimes for far cheaper than competitors! In some applications AMD are still a little behind, however the performance leap over the FX CPUs is huge, and continues to keep going with AMD's later Zen iterations. Overclocking only sweetens the deal, allowing the cheaper 1700X to perform superior to the 1800X at stock, and growing the lead over Intel's parts.
Power efficiency
Efficiency is also very important, and AMD's gains here are perhaps even more impressive! The use of TSMC's 12nm process node allowed AMD to substantially reduce their power draw, however the presence of more CPU cores did leave AMD drawing a fair bit of power, generally reducing their power efficiency below that of Intel’s 7th Gen Core Series. In more CPU intensive workloads however, AMD's performance was generally superior for only slightly higher power consumption, increasing the power efficiency.
The Ryzen 7 skews (at least at stock) draw less power than the FX 8370, whilst performing an awful lot better, demonstrating a huge breakthrough in efficiency. Whilst running Prime 95, a stock 1800X system managed to draw 13W less than an 8370 one, whilst performing around twice as well in a variety of application benchmarks! Wow! The higher IPC of Zen allows for lower clock speeds, further reducing power consumption, and allowing for this monster leap in performance, efficiency and value!
Temps + Cooling
The Ryzen CPUs run at a variety of different temperatures, but the highest performing 1800X only reaches ~60 degrees under load with a decent air cooler, and generally operates with idle temperatures of ~45 degrees. The other CPUs shouldn't therefore go over these temperatures with a decent cooler (slightly different if you're overclocking and running with the included cooler, or are using a lower grade 1700X). This is a nice change from the furnaces of the FX chips, and allows for easier use and overclocking.
Overclocking
AMD's Ryzen CPUs generally don't have too much overclocking headroom, but they are all unlocked, so that's a plus. For first Gen Ryzen it's definitely worth overclocking in most cases, as under the right circumstances impressive performance gains can be observed, more so than in later Ryzen releases. The cheaper parts especially, and even the 1700X, can all overclock a decent amount, but the 1800X doesn't have quite as much headroom, due to higher stock clocks, although the higher quality silicon can allow superior performance gains with many chips. Here are some quick stats for overclocking 1st Gen Ryzen parts.
Recommended VCORE (Air / Water Cooling): 1.36V - 1.4V
Maximum VCORE (Air / Water Cooling): 1.5V
Extra notes: Don't go above ~85 degrees Celsius under load
Examples:
Ryzen 7 1700X/1800X (1.32V - 3.9 GHz, 1.37V - 4.0 GHz, 1.45V - 4.1 GHz) - Needs a midrange cooler
Ryzen 5 1600X (1.4V - 4.1 GHz)
Ryzen 5 1600 (1.4V - 4.0 GHz)
Ryzen 3 1300X (1.4V - 4.0 GHz)
Ryzen 3 1200 (1.4V - 3.9 GHz)
- Not all chips will be able to achieve the above targets, due to the nature of the silicon lottery
Conclusion
Although not ideal for gaming use today, AMD's Ryzen 1st Gen marked the beginning of a new era in the CPU market. They can also still offer decent workstation performance second hand in the modern world. They can even power a cheaper gaming rig if you an find one for good value second hand! Hopefully you've been able to learn a little more about these important pieces of not so distant history, and I hope you found it interesting! Thank you, and goodbye!
Thank you to AMD and Amazon for their images, and Hardware Unboxed for the data they provided!
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