RYZEN ON THE CHEAP
Ryzen 5 1400 spells doom for Intel’s Core i5
BE CAREFUL what you wish for. One moment, we’re begging Intel to stop with the sandbagging; the next, it’s slinging a bewildering array of new CPUs into the market, measuring everything from 4 to 18 cores. Strange and exciting times indeed.
But with the fallout from Computex still in the air, it’s easy to lose sight of the less spectacular versions of the chip that started it all. We speak of AMD’s Ryzen—in particular, the Ryzen 5 1400. Currently, it’s the lowliest Ryzen of all. But considered in context, it’s also the most relevant.
That context is delivering four proper CPU cores and support for eight software threads at a significantly lower price than Intel. The Ryzen 5 1400 clocks in at $170. The cheapest quad-core Intel chip, the Core i5-7400, doesn’t look too distant at $185, but it only packs four threads. If you want eight threads from Intel, it’s a huge leap up to the $305 Core i7-7700.
Of course, one can debate the value of the simultaneous multithreading technology that allows a CPU core process more than one thread in parallel, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, we'll cover some speeds and feeds. Along with those four cores and eight threads, the Ryzen 5 1400 weighs in with a 3.2GHz base clock and a 3.4 maximum Turbo speed. Like its quad-core sibling, it’s rated at 65W, and slots into AMD’s new AM4 mainstream CPU socket.
It also packs a total of 384KB of L1 cache and 2MB of L2 cache. Again, that’s a dead heat with the 1500X. Where things diverge and the comparison becomes rather intriguing involves L3 cache. The 1400 sports just 8MB to the 1500X’s 16MB.
That’s intriguing, not simply because the 1500X has double the cache, and more cache normally means more performance. It’s intriguing because of what it may indicate about the internal structure of the two chips. After all, the Ryzen CPU die is composed of two quad-core complexes, each with 8MB of L3 cache. So you might think the L3 cache count indicates the 1500X operates in a 2+2 configuration with both complexes enabled, but each with just two cores switched on, while the 1400 runs a single-core complex, with all four cores firing away.
For now, it appears that isn’t the case. The 1400 runs the same basic 2+2 configuration, just with some of the L3 cache fused off in each complex. However, AMD isn’t being hugely forthcoming, so it wouldn’t surprise us if it turned out that it was taking both approaches in order to use as many dies as possible.
Ultimately, of course, all that matters is performance, and here the news is mostly very good. The 1400 delivers the kind of numbers you’d expect on the whole, based on core and thread count, and clock speed.
This means that in the most scalable workloads, such as Cinebench, it has the edge over much more expensive quadcore, quad-thread chips, such as the Core i5-7600K, but falls a little short when it comes to software that leans a little more heavily on individual core performance. Like every Ryzen CPU thus far, the 1400 is also fully unlocked, and comfortably achieves 4GHz with the most rudimentary of tweaks, at which speed it’s overtaken the 1500X model running at stock clocks, closed some of the single-thread gap to the Core i5, and positively obliterated the latter for outright multithreading throughput.
All of which makes the 1400 a pretty compelling package at its specific price. If there is a problem, it’s that the lower down the Ryzen range you go, the more tightly things are packed. Moreover, given you’re going to need a new motherboard, and probably some memory, too, an extra $45 for the cheapest six-core Ryzen looks like an awfully good deal. –JEREMY LAIRD