Comment by w0z_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w0z_ | Hacker News Reader

"They should run typical desktop applications"

This by itself is a terrible benchmark. What "typical desktop application" 1) does not slaughter your RAM usage, 2) does not require a high-end spec computer to run without hiccuping constantly, 3) does not open 10 processes for 1 application.

I have Adobe Creative cloud, I still use Photoshop CS6 because of how bad new Adobe products use resources. Same with Google Chrome - I only QA with it because it's a TERRIBLE daily browser resource-wise. Excel? F*ck I hate opening large data-sets with that.

Now if you steer away from business applications and look at gaming (what most CPU-Z users benchmark for) - look at the game engines or the games. 99% of games are absolute trash at utilizing resources correctly.

Valve and some Blizzard titles were the only companies that really cared and put forth effort behind optimizing their games so lower end PC's can play them, hence their explosive popularity world-wide.

"They should run typical desktop applications and monitor performance counters to see what typical branch and memory footprints look like. These types of data should be used to inform benchmark design for future CPU-Z versions."

You selectively quoted them to rant about something they weren't talking about.

The entire article was about how the design of their benchmark doesn't reflect how applications people use work.

~100% of games don't fit into the L1 cache of a CPU.

~100% of games don't fit into the L1 cache of a CPU.

It's the weekend, so I am just gonna say that a Ryzen 7800x3d has 512KB of L1 cache. Plenty of games would fit. Not even talking about those tiny games that generate everything.

L1 cache isn’t shared between cores. One core in the 7800X3D only has 64k L1 cache.

Of the 64 kB L1 cache, only 32 kB is available for data.

Despite the fact that AMD writes "512 kB" in its spec sheet, this number does not matter, because it multiplies the cache size with the number of cores.

The Ryzen 7000 CPUs have 32 kB of L1 instruction cache, 32 kB of L1 data cache and 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and 7800X3D also has 96 MB of L3 cache shared by the 8 cores.

These numbers determine at which cache level the data used by an execution thread can fit.

No modern game uses data that fits in the 32 kB of L1 data cache, and the game code also does not fit in the 32 kB instruction cache.

Games and desktop applications are what people actually use.

Thus there's strong practical sense in benchmarking them.

Games and applications get updates that change the performance, not to mention other effects an performance by drivers etc.

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