Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%

Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?

I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.

That is all true but I will defend the FX series a little. Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now, they haven't aged as terribly as others have. They aren't great but not terrible considering.

Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now

That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless.

Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era:

  Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware.

  AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds(a-la Intel Pentium 4) but the IPC was so bad that an FX core was often slower clock-for-clock than AMD’s previous-generation Phenom II chips and also their power consumption exploded. 

  FX processors were plagued by high cache latencies and an inefficient memory subsystem as another bottleneck.

So unless you're into collecting vintage CPUs as display pieces, this one definitely belongs in the e-waste pile instead of burning electricity, because it did not age like wine with the adoption of SW multi threading like people were hoping.

AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds

It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.

Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads. What makes that such a win while Bulldozer's implementation of "two integer units sharing a front-end, cache and FPU" is supposedly so bad? Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.

Hyperthreading/SMT is a significant boon for heavily threaded workloads.

That's hugely debatable and depends on SW workloads and the SMT implementation + CPU pipeline design.

In SMT the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared. When one thread stalls waiting for RAM, the second thread sneaks into the idle execution units. At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.

Because that description makes the 8 core Bulldozers sound exactly like a 4 core with SMT.

It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.

At best, SMT yields a ~10% to 20% throughput boost over a single thread.

Exactly, which is a significant benefit for how marginal the costs are.

It's not the same thing. Bulldozer arch sits between a true 8-core and 4-core + SMT implementation.

Then surely it should be even better than 4 cores with SMT?

If you're going to argue that the problem with Bulldozer was it's weird semi-SMT solution, you need to explain how it would've been better without it (aka as a regular quad core). Because even if it just gets the 10-20% performance improvements from being a form of SMT it would be better to have it than to not. And if you have lots of integer unit-bound threads, it should be even better than that.

Then surely it should be even better than 4 cores with SMT? If you're going to argue that the problem with Bulldozer was it's weird semi-SMT solution, you need to explain how it would've been better without it

I explained all the bottlenecks of the architecture in a comment above, that the issue was more than 4-core +SMT instead of true 8 cores. Please read it.

I did read it. It's not clear from it why you think having 2 integer units per core in a SMT-like configuration makes it worse. If you have <=4 threads it doesn't matter, just schedule the threads on different proper cores. If you have >4 memory/FPU/front-end heavy threads you should see the same benefit as SMT. If you have >4 integer arithmetic-bound cores, you should see a significant benefit beyond what SMT would give.

Now the very long pipeline and high memory latency are obviously significant issues with the architecture but those seem disconnected from the 4-core+SMT issue? I'm not questioning those issues at all, it's just not the part of your comment which interested me

EDIT: okay so in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49809017, you explain that there's actually a fairly large part of a core that's duplicated, not just two integer units. If each "core" gets its own integer unit, register file and L1 cache, you're actually paying a ton of die space for it, unlike SMT which is "free". I can totally get how that can be a terrible trade-off for most workloads if it all ends up mostly starved due to front-end/FPU/memory throughput.

Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each...

Yeah that's hyper-threading intel was doing it as well and all modern CPUs do it as well. Where AMD dropped the ball, was they did not disclose that in their marketing as clearly as they should.

All CPUs today are marketed as x cores 2x threads, back then some AMD marketing genius in their infinite wisdom put 8 cores on the box, instead of the honest 4 cores with hyperthreading.

No, AMD's FX "fake" 8-core was more than just 4-cores + hyperthreading. In SMT(hyperthreading) the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared, whereas on FX design, they built two completely separate integer pipelines (schedulers, register files, ALUs, and L1 data caches) inside one module. Only the instruction fetch/decode front-end, the FPU, and the L2 cache were shared. So the FX design would be an in-between a 4-core + SMT and a true 8-core.

Fair, I had not delved into the details, but still they were not full cores and the marketing did not make a real distinction.

I had a pilledriver one, it was a perfectly good cpu, I would buy it again. If I remember back then it was the best overall performance per dollar, the alternatives if I remember correctly were i7-39.. and i7-38.. and were at best 50% more expensive for 10-15% more performance.

Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware.

They did just fine in parallel workloads, so I think this is not accurate. The design scaled just fine. The problem was that each core was weak.

They never shipped the zen 5 epyc big cache chip (e.g. 9685X). :( I'd hoped they pulled it to produce a HBM integrated chip instead, but they didn't do that either.

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D / EPYC 4585PX is a beast for 99% of compute workloads.

It has the highest base clock of any modern AMD chip (4.3 GHz), plus 16-cores, which is already more than most workloads need.

Can’t wait to see what Zen 6 brings early next year. Rumors say 24-cores and another big jump in single-core performance.

I looked at game benchmarks, and sometimes 5600 or 5600X were fastest. With all X3D processors so fast that I would not decide to upgrade above 5700X3D or anything cheaper. Now, with current RAM pricing, getting a X3D CPU with 90+ MB L3 Cache seams the way to go instead of doing a DDR4 -> DDR5 leap.

All stated for gaming, that is.

Is this what's helping drive their stock price to the moon?

Serious question with 1GB L3 isn't it theoretically possible to boot a full Linux without ram?

Edit: dug in it, no, because cache isn't addressable and it's directly managed by the cpu.

I'm not sure focusing on just 3 processors is enough to claim that Ryzen got 50% faster. There were already other, faster Ryzen processors available without the additional cache. The extra cache was a very new thing (and very temperature sensitive), so it makes sense that they start carefully and then get a lot of improvement quickly). And the 5800x3d was for an older chipset, with all the limitations that come with that.

It's not that temperature sensitive, 90C is plenty. If you can't keep the non-x3d processors underneath that you're just throwing away performance anyways

Are you? I'm pretty sure when I bought my 7800x3d, everybody was saying you had to be very careful about heat, because these damage more easily from high temperatures than regular CPUs. I just checked, and they do throttle at a lower temperature than others: 89 vs 95 degrees C.

The x86 architecture still going strong. I've always though Ryzen was a fitting name, AMD had Ryzen from the ashes and struck a blow to the long dominant Intel.

Single core performance still worse than an iPhone.

The x86 folks lost the ball completely. For workstation/ mobile needs you go to arm. For matmul at scale you go to gpus.

I guess windows gaming with separate gpu is the only remaining market for them.

Unless Nvidia releases a motherboard with an arm cpu on top of their RTX cards, and then that market is gone too.

It's impressive and yet it surely depends what you're doing with it? 50% better performance isn't going to make a local LLM feel quick and yet so many other aspects of computing are quite fast anyhow. I can browse the web fairly comfortably on a Raspberry Pi and it's a bit slow but manageable.

If your goal is web browsing you will want faster single core performance. Unfortunately that means Apple M series. If your goal is local LLM, I’m afraid a several-year-old GPU will smoke the fastest CPU available today.

I Picked a threadripper for a box that needed a lot of IO and figured that with that many PCI lanes I couldn't go wrong. But I have to admit I've been more than pleasantly surprised by the performance of the CPU as well, it - easily - outperforms all of the XEON and I7 based boxes that I have. The only thing I wished I would have done different is to max it out with 256G DIMMs when they weren't the price of a car.