How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years? (lemire.me)

Article summary

The article discusses how AMD Ryzen processors achieved a 50% performance increase in two years. However, commenters argue that this timeframe is misleading, as the actual improvement occurred over a longer period. The discussion focuses on the architectural changes and improvements in AMD's Ryzen series. Commenters analyze the effects of these changes on performance, power consumption, and heat management.

Main themes

• AMD Ryzen performance
• Bulldozer architecture
• Manufacturing process improvements
• Heat management and power consumption
• Multithreading and parallel workloads
• CPU architecture and design trade-offs

What commenters say

• AMD's Ryzen performance increase is due to improvements in manufacturing process and architecture.
• The claimed two-year timeframe for the performance increase is misleading and actually spans a longer period.
• The Bulldozer architecture's use of shared resources between cores was a significant bottleneck and contributed to its poor performance.
• The FX series, despite its limitations, was still a good value for certain workloads and use cases, such as media encoding and multithreaded tasks.
• The design of the FX series, with its shared FPU and front-end, was not scalable and led to poor performance in many real-world tasks.
• The abandonment of the Bulldozer architecture and shift to Zen was a key factor in AMD's subsequent performance improvements.
• The FX series was not as bad as commonly perceived, and its performance was acceptable for certain tasks and workloads.