TO: Prof. Ellis
From: Angel Rojas
DATE: Feb 27 2021
Subject: 500-word Summary
The paper is a summary of a series of benchmark tests between two major processor companies putting their high-end chips to their test. Over the years Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have been on the leading edge of competition throughout the years while also collaborating. Although there are speculations on which side surfaced the new technology first the first breakthrough would be when Advanced Micro Devices settled with 64 bits computing on the x86 instruction set which was then purchased by Intel. Since then, each generation of processors have been researched and developed but have we reached a limit on microprocessors. It has been difficult to fit more transistors on a die as there is a physical limit, this is following Moore’s law as we noticed there will be a limit on transistors we can fit in a single integrated circuit. This is due to the material that these processors are made in which is silicon.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have been on the CPU market against Intel and in recent events AMD has released the Zen microcomputer architecture, in which the Ryzen processors have been established. AMD has reached the same number of physical cores they can fit in a package as Intel. They were tested each in benchmark programs to put the chips to the most output. Both chips utilize the same x86 instruction set and are manufactured with 14nm transistors. Ryzen has been equipped with more cache than its Intel counterpart. Ryzen processors are loaded with less output ports on the scheduler which is the creating a functioning system of setting processes in order of execution and priority. While the Intel chip has more outputs built in, its scheduler is unidentified and no information about it has been available. The Intel chip has a function called turbo-boost which increases the clock speed at a certain threshold unlike the Ryzen chip which is locked.
Software that was used was SPEC a benchmark testing program with multiple test scenarios that can exhibit real life stimulations of utilizing CPU power. The series of tests consists of how fast the CPU can process the instructions as if it were in a real-life simulation. Both test benches utilized the same Linux OS (Ubuntu) and had the same amount of DDR4 RAM which was 16GB. The test results show that both excel performance however the intel chip was consuming more energy than Ryzen. Multithreaded stimulations were difficult to properly exam due to synchronization. After tests it shows that Ryzen performs better in multi-threaded tasks than the Intel’s Core CPU and consumes more energy. In conclusion, Intel’s 8th gen i7 processor outperformed in tests but consumed more energy than Ryzen. Both chips performed the same but there are differences in the way they are manufactured
Reference: H. Oi, “Evaluation of Ryzen 5 and Core i7 Processors with SPEC CPU 2017,” 2019 IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon), Orlando, FL, USA, 2019, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/SYSCON.2019.8836790
