[highfrequency]

Hi, this is very informative. To clarify a couple points: - By memory latency, do you mean the time to access an uncached portion of RAM? - RE clock speed advantage, are you referring to the fact that AMD turbo boost doesn't hit 5GHz?

[blattimwind]

IIRC L3 is slightly slower on Zen 2, main memory as mentioned much slower.

Clock speed advantage -- Most Zen 2 CPUs don't overclock to 4.5 GHz on any core, let alone all-core. The boost numbers are reached with current firmware, but only for tiniest fractions of a second and never under any real load. Sustained single-core boost frequencies are 200-400 MHz lower than the specified boost frequency. On the other hand, Intel CPUs consistently reach their boost frequencies under load, and most CPUs can do their single-core boost as an all-core overclock under load (with much greater power consumption of course).

In practice this means that for equivalently priced parts (e.g. 3900X vs 10900K) the AMD part will have about a GHz lower clock for lightly threaded workloads, which are most workloads. With Intel settings, the Intel and AMD parts have about the same sustained clocks (3.8-4 GHz) under all-core load, but with the defaults of many motherboards the Intel part will run at 4.8-5 GHz, depending on the cooling.

[gruez]

>In practice this means that for equivalently priced parts (e.g. 3900X vs 10900K) the AMD part will have about a GHz lower clock for lightly threaded workloads

They're only "equivalently priced" when you're talking about MSRP. Right now the 3900X sells for $413 and is in stock, whereas the i9-10900k sells for $530 and is out of stock.