Two Chinese Zen-based CPUs beat AMD Ryzen 5 5600X in multi-threaded test

China's EJ Hardware video blog tested a duo of Chinese Hygon C86 3185 processors that are little known outside the country. The Zen architecture chips are produced as part of a joint project between AMD and Hygon the Chinese company has been licensed to produce the processors domestically.

Hygon C86 processors are manufactured using 14nm technology, and the line includes mainstream and server models from 4 to 32 Zen cores. Externally Hygon C86 are almost indistinguishable from AMD Ryzen and EPYC. What's more, they should fit AM4 and SP3, though in most cases they come soldered to the motherboard. Last year's Hygon C86 3185 chip has 8 Zen cores with multi-threading support (SMT), base clock speed is 2.0 GHz, peak & ; 3.4 GHz. The L2 cache capacity is 4 Mbytes, L3 & ; 16 Mbytes. In fact, the C86 3185 is an analogue of the Ryzen 7 1700X with a lower clock speed & ; they even have the same TDP (95W). In the comparison tests a motherboard with two C86 3185 processors soldered, that is 16 cores Zen was used. The server motherboard had some limitations: in particular, the memory frequency was locked to DDR4-1866 and there was no option to increase it. In the other corner of the ring» was the Ryzen 5 5600X processor: 6 cores Zen 3, the base clock speed 3.7 GHz and peak 4.6 GHz. This processor is made on 7nm technology, and its TDP is lower by 30W.

In single-core performance Ryzen 5 5600X was the clear leader & ; first generation Zen cores simply didn't stand a chance against Zen 3. In single-core Cinebench R20 and R23 tests American chip was 97% and 135% ahead. But in multi-core tests Cinebench R20 and R23 the leader was Hygon with the results 12 % and 13 % higher accordingly. In Blender and x264 HD Benchmark, C86 3185 was also better & ; it showed 23 % and 33 % less performance than Ryzen 5 5600X. But in PCMark 10 American chip was ahead by 59 %. Decent results Hygon C86 3185 showed in gaming test, the role of which went to Cyberpunk 2077. Combined with GeForce RTX 3080 Ti the processors provided adequate frame rates in both 1080p and 4K. The reviewers concluded that the undoubted advantage of the American processor is the newer Zen 3 architecture, although in multi-threaded tasks the opponents behave almost equally & ; in any case, the difference is not significant. Although China in this joint project aims not to break performance records, but to gain at least relative independence from foreign technologies.

AMD Ryzen of all generations compared in games and applications: Zen 3 chip is over 70% faster than Zen

The AMD Ryzen processor family debuted in 2016 with the Ryzen 7 1800X as the flagship 8-core and 16-threaded solution. That processor's maximum Turbo frequency was only 4.1GHz, a far cry from the numbers now available on some Ryzen processors. Then AMD updated its processor architecture more than once, and German website Golem decided to compare four Ryzen CPUs from different generations.

AMD head Lisa Su in front of the Zen 3 logo (Golem)

The journalists tested four CPUs with the same configuration of 8 cores and 16 threads, but different architectures. All of them were tested on X470 and X570 motherboards (depending on the supported CPU). It's worth to keep in mind that journalists set memory frequency to support respective AMD Zen architectures. The first generation only supported 2666MHz memory by default, Zen+ & ; 2933MHz, and the last two generations (Zen 2 and Zen 3) & ; DDR4 up to 3200MHz. Memory frequency can have a big impact on the performance of AMD Ryzen processors.

Performance of AMD Ryzen 8-core processors of 1000–5000 families (Golem, VideoCardz)

According to Golem's tests, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X on Zen 3 offers on average 80.9 % better performance than Ryzen 7 1800X in seven games & ; testing was done in Anno 1800 (Anno Engine), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Source Engine), Microsoft Flight Simulator (Asobo Engine), Grand Theft Auto V (RAGE), Kingdom Come Deliverance (Cry Engine), Planet Zoo (Cobra Engine) and A Total War Saga: Troy (TWW2 Engine).

Game performance of different generations of AMD Ryzen (Golem)

Zen 3 processor was also 72 % faster than Ryzen 7 1800X in common applications & ;  Tests are done with 7-Zip (Archive Reading), Adobe Premiere Pro (Video rendering), Blender (Cycles, 3D rendering), Cinebench R15/R20 (3D rendering), Faststone Image Viewer (Image Processing), Unreal Engine 4 (3D rendering) and y-Cruncher (AVX-512).

Application performance of different generations of AMD Ryzen (Golem)

A more detailed table was compiled by 3DCenter journalists, who took into account individual results. By their estimates based on the same tests, Zen 3 gain over Zen is 89 % in applications testing, and up to 84 % in games. And every new generation of Zen including even Zen+ brought 16 % to 27 % performance boost:

Performance of different generations of AMD Ryzen (Golem, 3DCenter, VideoCardz)

AMD is expected to release new desktop processors based on the Zen 3+ architecture, codenamed Warhol, sometime next year. They could still be part of the 5000 series or get the new name Ryzen 6000. Meanwhile, the first Zen 4-based processor should be released when AMD is ready to provide DDR5 memory support on desktop systems. Processors codenamed Raphael are expected to support the new memory technology and also move to the new AM5 socket.