[demilicious]

As far as I know, these processors are not yet released. What's the confidence level that this user benchmark will be indicative of real life expected performance?

It seems implausible that this user benchmark is a good indicator. The Zen 1 architecture exhibited nothing of the sort[0] -- it would be an order of magnitude performance regression.

I expect we'll start to see more accurate tests once the processors are actually released into the wild.

[0]https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-2700x-revie...

[CarVac]

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14525/TravisK_DonW-Next_Ho...

>69 ns at 3600C16

[snvzz]

>67ns at 3733C17

I'd go for that.

[jchw]

Well, to be devil's advocate: just because AMD improved their memory latency does not mean it was state-of-the-art. Indeed, looking at some random user benchmarks of Zen 1, it looks like the memory latency is similar with Zen 1. (See my reply to parent for a couple links, but I think you could also just find random Ryzen 2700X benches and see the same.)

Of course, the effects of ~20ns more latency on system memory accesses may not be as easy to observe in practice, especially if throughput is excellent. But we'll see, I guess; 'gaming' benchmarks should be a good test. (Meanwhile, I'm just going to be happy with Zen 2 if it provides a large speedup in compile times.)

[vbezhenar]

But Zen 2 has HUGE L3 cache. I think that this cache would compensate for that latency.

[demilicious]

That makes sense. I was mostly looking at one of the Tom's Hardware benchmarks in particular; I don't know what the userbenchmark is actually _doing_. So it's probably more fair to compare userbenchmark to userbenchmark like you did.

However, I think it's still true that the actual release of the Zen 2 processors will make userbenchmark scores much more reliable as the scores regress to the mean.