Testing a Chinese x86 CPU: A Deep Dive into Zen-based Hygon Dhyana Processors
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Wendell Wilson on February 27, 2020 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarks: Windows
For both systems, we installed Windows: Windows 10 Pro on the small 8-core Dhyana system, and Windows 10 Enterprise on the big dual 32-core Dhyana Plus server. With AVX/AVX2 not working properly, our range of testing was limited. As mentioned previously, some software didn’t even want to run on one system or the other, such as CPU-Z on the server.
From the numbers we can see that our 8-core Dhyana processor falls somewhere between the 6-core Ryzen 5 1600X and the 8-core Ryzen 6 1800X, due to clock speeds, but on particular tests it gets hammered by even the Athlon 200GE. The dual 32-core Dhyana Plus server seems to be in all sorts of a mess, often beaten by the Ryzen 7 1800X, or can now be easily beaten by the Ryzen 9 3950X. The one benchmark where it did really well was Corona – a memory/NUMA agnostic integer based renderer – it seems like a match made in heaven.
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ingwe - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
Interesting and cool that you were able to test it! This is definitely one of the reasons why I come to anandtech.sandtitz - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
"if you find anything out, we may confirm it"Ian, did you ask AMD for confirmation then?
romrunning - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
I'm sure Marvel regrets selling rights to the X-Men & Spiderman to the various studios for the cash infusion. I wonder if AMD will similarly regret this, when more cash & resources come from "outside" sources to THATIC & the Hygon CPUs significantly improves over their initial Zen "licensing" deal.ArcadeEngineer - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
How? The IP they got is for a GloFo manufacturing process, and GloFo are no longer able to deal with them. These weren't being produced in China, at least at the die level.romrunning - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
I was thinking if Hygon begins to improve and then eclipses AMD's own Ryzen/EPYC CPUs. Basically, you may have enabled a future competitor to jump over years/decades of in-house design with an initial starting design that would has a lot of advancements from the beginning. I'm sure it would still take years, but you would think that having one main competitor (Intel) is better than having 3-4.FreckledTrout - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
Possible but very unlikely. Especially seeing who this IP went to and there lack of innovation and creativity.Stuka87 - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
I am sure there is some pretty specific text in the agreement that very much limits what Hygon can and cannot do with the design.Holliday75 - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
Yeah its not like China is known for IP theft and producing counterfeit products the world over.Retycint - Thursday, February 27, 2020 - link
This is the x86 IP we're talking about here, and I wager this agreement is going to be taken a lot more seriously than some random startup's patentNotmyusualid - Sunday, March 1, 2020 - link
@Retycint - Explain to me how you sue a Chinese company in the USA...should they fall foul of any 'agreements'. Remember the copied X5? I saw one with my own eyes - and have owned one - it was dead on copy. BMW lost that one in a Chinese court.