AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16C/32T Up to 5.7 / 4.5 GHZ 80MB Gen 5 170W $699
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12C/24T Up to 5.6 / 4.7 GHZ 76MB Gen 5 170W $549
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8C/16T Up to 5.4 / 4.5 GHZ 40MB Gen 5 105W $399
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 6C/12T Up to 5.3 / 4.7 GHZ 38MB Gen 5 105W $299
Ideally, portage would take memory (including ramdisk) requirements of packages into account when scheduling builds (some packages do check for free memory) and ask as a make jobserver [0] (with patches for non-make build systems to support jobservers) to always fully use the available resources.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Job-Slots...
So there is definitely a use case, it’s just maybe not for you
> very few use cases
The average person is not compiling programs or dealing with Kubernetes.
Don't get me wrong, they still work amazingly well for games. It's just that they sacrificed some performance in those chips for the higher core count so it only makes sense they'd want to push that further.
But my guess is they don't want to compete with their threadripper line. Unfortunately those come much later in the product cycle so we'll probably be waiting some time for a Zen 4 threadripper.
There is also little doubt that AMD Raphael will be better than Intel Raptor Lake at multi-threaded tasks, even if they now have the same number of threads. The reason is that AMD is made with the much more efficient TSMC process and the consequence is that at equal power consumption the AMD CPUs will reach much higher clock frequencies.
This is the essential difference between single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks, during the former the performance is limited by the maximum turbo clock frequency, while during the latter the performance is limited by the clock frequency at a fixed power consumption, which depends more on the manufacturing process than on the microarchitecture of the CPU.
* Zen 4 is more efficient (up to 74% more efficient at 65W)
* Zen 4 will be used for desktop, server and mobile chips
* Ryzen 7000 is clocked a good bit higher than Ryzen 5000
* On the desktop, higher maximum clock speeds for single and multi-core workloads are desired
* The higher TDP is to allow for higher clock speeds for single and multi-core workloads on the desktop
So the TDP doesn't scale linearly?
> TDP stands for Thermal Design Power, in watts, and refers to the power consumption under the maximum theoretical load. [0]
It's basically a ceiling.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
Since you mentioned "up to 74% more efficient at 65W" what I meant is if the perf per watt (and hence the temp) doesn't scale linearly with the amount of work.
The 7700X has about double the TDP of the 3700X but about a 50% increase in perf.
When you're comparing 7700X to 3700X, are you talking about performance at the same TDP limits, the same clock speed, or maximum performance?
Note that the total power a CPU draws is proportional to its capacitance (fixed) * its frequency * the square of its voltage + some other stuff that's generally the same across CPUs of the same generation.
But that doesn't quite tell the whole story, either; as you increase the frequency you also have to feed more voltage to the CPU to keep it stable for signal-processing reasons (a higher voltage means more difference between 0 and 1, and when you're right on the edge of it not working that will make the difference between a successful compute and a crash).
As such, when you're trying to make a CPU and want to chase clocks, you get bit twice: first by the increased frequency due to physics, and twice by the (square of the) increased voltage requirements for stability. So running at 6 GHz and requiring 1.2V to get there is significantly more expensive power-wise than running that same processor at 4 GHz and only needing 0.8V.
The only real way to fix that is microarchitecture, of course; the trick with Intel in particular is that they've been milking the same architecture they came up with in 2007 and aside from adding some Atom cores to its latest models have done basically nothing but shrink the die so it's natural that they're falling behind now.
Perf/watt has substantially improved, as have capability (like double the memory speed, double the memory channels, and double the PCIe bandwidth).
Sure if power and cooling are available it clocks up higher, but you don't have to. Most BIOS will let you control the clock speed if you want.
Even more, you can cap the 7600X at 65W. All AMD cpus have configurable TDP, the advertised number is the default. Going above is overclocking, but dropping it is within spec. If you do it, your cpu will just use less power under load and be a bit slower.
The 7700X is about 20% faster than Apple's M2 in SC perf in Cinebench R23.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r23_si...
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r23_mu...
Personally I think the trade-off in cross-CCD computation is worse than the slightly lower all-core clock for the kind of workloads that benefit most from 16 threads, but I could see the benefits of higher all-core clocks for desktop use cases like gaming.