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Last calendar month, news broke that AMD had secured a new semi-custom deal for itself — this time in the Chinese homegrown console market. Part of what makes the ZhongShan Subor Z such an interesting system is that it'south based on much newer CPU technology than the hardware inside the PS4 and Xbox One, or even the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. The organization CPU is based on Ryzen, not Jaguar, and the GPU is a Vega-derived function backed up past 8GB of GDDR5.

Digital Foundry managed to get their hands on an actual Subor Z system and put it to the exam against its closest competitors in the PC space, including a Kaby Lake G (AMD GPU, Intel CPU), and Ryzen 5 2400GSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce. Unfortunately, the drivers for the system are still early — and so early on that debug counters still load in many games and the story'south writer, Richard Leadbetter, ultimately decided to confine his testing to just iii bones tests and some gameplay sessions.

There are a few things we can see immediately. Cinebench'due south operation tends to scale roughly linearly — the 2400G'due south maximum clock of 3.9GHz is 8 percentage above the 2200G's 3.7GHz max boost clock, while it's single-threaded performance is 5.iv percent higher. That'south a little low, just information technology gives u.s.a. a place to start when it comes to the Subor-Z. The Subor-Z'south 3GHz clock is listed equally its meridian clock according to Eurogamer, and the chip appears to hit that frequency in single-threaded testing, based on its relative performance to the 2200G and 2400G. Like those cores, the Subor Z-Plus' SoC is built on 14nm technology, likely at GlobalFoundries.

Multi-threaded functioning, however, is a scrap of a different story. The 2200G's scaling gene — the total amount of improvement between unmarried-threaded and multi-threaded performance — is iv.03x, exactly what you lot'd look for a quad-core chip without SMT. The 2400G is a quad-cadre bit with SMT, and its scaling gene is correspondingly college — five.41x. The Subor-Z has SMT enabled, but it gains less performance than the 2400G, with a scaling factor of just 5.1x. It's not a huge difference, but it implies something may exist property the Ryzen core dorsum a bit.

For the curious — an AMD A6-5200 (Jaguar, quad-core, 2GHz) scores roughly 159 in the multi-core test, which means a hypothetical PS4 ProSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce clocked at ii.13GHz that could run this awarding should turn in a score of ~339, compared with 586 on a quad-core Ryzen CPU. Nosotros've said earlier that a hypothetical PS5 or XboxSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce Next based on Ryzen would have considerably more CPU horsepower than its predecessor; results similar this are why.

The Time Spy results are in line with what we'd expect based on the relative difference between Kaby Lake G's congenital-in GPU and the Vega-based core on the Subor-Z. The gap isn't enormous because Kaby Lake G's GPU has the same 24 CUs clocked at a lower speed, with somewhat less memory bandwidth (205GB/due south versus 256GB/due south). Leadbetter took the console for a spin in games like Battlefield 1 and noted that the organization offers experiences that console players were denied, including the ability to play at a locked 1080p60 frame rate. There are some bug with dropped performance when the CPU is heavily stressed, but Leadbetter believes this could exist solved by better software optimizations. Recall, we're seeing the console at a very early development stage.

We haven't said annihilation about the build quality or overall blueprint of the panel — the Eurogamer piece is worth reading for these details — but the overall impression hither is quite positive. Zen conspicuously has the chops to bulldoze console gaming. Once ported to 7nm for any hereafter console pattern from Sony or MS, it should gain further performance, along with whatsoever benefits Navi brings.

At present Read: More Details Revealed on AMD-Powered Chinese Console, AMD Working With Both Sony and Microsoft on Next-Gen Consoles, and AMD Built Navi For Sony, Delayed Vega to Do It