The French based CanardPC performed tests with an engineering sample AMD Ryzen-cpu, the publication entails a 3.15 GHz sample which was tested into detail and with many tests. They published the results.
Little can be said about how valid the actual tests are if you publish on an early ES sample and BETA motherboard, the author of the article (which is the guy behind CPU-Z) does warn that these are not to be considered final scores. The performance may have been limited by a number of bugs in the beta engineering sample CPU. Credit where credit is due first, our colleagues over at HWI here in the Netherlands got their hands on the magazine and posted the results. However a full page scan of the magazine already is posted everywhere on the web (you can find it in the thumbnails lower on this page).
 |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sample 1 | Sample 2 | Sample 3 | Sample 4 | |
| Cores | 4 | 4 | 8 | 8 |
| Clock | 2,8 GHz | 2,9 GHz | 2,8 GHz | 3,15 GHz |
| Turbo 1 core | 3,2 GHz | 3,3 GHz | 3,21 GHz | 3,5 GHz |
| Turbo all cores | 3,05 GHz | 3,1 GHz | 3,05 GHz | 3,3 GHz |
From the looks of it, AMD has distributed four different samples of Zen to some of their key partners, (motherboard manufacturers and OEMs like HP and Dell). The four samples are divided into two quad-cores and two eight-core models. The sample that got in posiession of Canard PC is labeled with product code 2D3151A2M88E4, this is an 8-core version with the aforementioned baseclock of 3.15 GHz. It seems that the boost clock was the biggest limiter as it never exceeded 3.4 GHz (whereas AMD recently announced that the final processors already will get a baseclock of 3.4 GHZ with higher turbos.
CanardPC posted several tests and segmented them into three benchmakrs: The first one is a normalized chart based on wPrime, PovRay, Blender and 3DSMax. At 3.15 / 3.4 GHz the processor seems to do quite well, faster then a 6-core i7 6800K but slower then a 6900K (8 cores), which makes sense at these ES clock frequencies. In the following chart we show the performance in games.
The Ryzen processor is at Core i5 6600 – level. This has to do with the ES sample lower clocks really, games do not take much advantage of the high number of cores on Zen but do like high frequencies. For the final test they had a peek at power consumption, which was roughly 93 watts making it as efficient as a i7 6900K.
And there you have it folks, this ES sample is clocked low, the fastest Boost clock will be the actual BASE clock on the final product. Also it had to be tested on beta motherboards so take this review (although official) with a grain of salt really. But it certainly is a nice indicative preliminary report.
