These two systems were as identical as possible (outside of the motherboard and processor), meaning identical 2666MHz memory, video card, and storage. The Intel system was running at stock clock speeds vs. an engineering sample Ryzen running at lower than final clock speeds. The Cinebench MT score for Intel was 2040, while the Cinebench MT score for the AMD Ryzen 2 was 2057. The Intel system was using 179.8 watts, while the AMD system was using 133.4 watts during benchmark. This benchmark pegs all of the cores in the system, so this is extremely significant!<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Su held up one of these Ryzen 2 processors, showing a 14nm I\/O die on the left and the 7nm 8C\/16T Zen 2 processor die on the top right. It was pretty obvious that there was room on the package for another identical Zen 2 processor die on the bottom right. During interviews over the next couple of days, Dr. Su basically confirmed that the Zen 2 family had room for an extra processor die and that we should expect a higher core count SKU. AMD purposely used an eight core CPU for the demo so that they would have the same core count as Intel\u2019s current top of the line processor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Processor Details<\/h2>\n

It appears that what AMD demonstrated was actually a mid-range Ryzen 5 class SKU, running with artificially slow memory, at a non-final lower clock speed that still had a slightly higher Cinebench MT score (with the same core\/thread count) as the current best mainstream desktop processor that Intel has available. Since the core\/thread counts were the same between the two systems, this means that the single-threaded performance should be about the same. If this is true, then this would be the first time in an extremely long time where AMD has better single-threaded performance than Intel. The final version of these Zen 2 processors should perform even better than this early sample.<\/span><\/p>\n