AMD Zen 4 CPUs To See Up To 20% Speedup In y-cruncher Benchmark Thanks To AVX-512

The popular y-cruncher benchmark for CPUs will soon be getting a major update which will allow AMD Zen 4 CPUs to deliver up to 20% higher performance thanks to AVX-512.

The author of the y-cruncher benchmark, Alexander Yee, announced in a tweet that the upcoming version of the benchmark will see a major boost for AVX-512 hardware, especially AMD's Zen 4 core which features support for AVX-512.

The CPU benchmarking community will hate me for this. But the next version of y-cruncher will see large performance changes (both up and down).

The #AVX2 -> #AVX512 speedup on #Zen4 will soon grow to 10+% - no wider EUs needed.https://t.co/FrnHGbMA0O pic.twitter.com/iePIEax6Mc

— Alexander Yee (@Mysticial) June 7, 2023

y-cruncher benchmark is a popular tool to evaluate the CPU's performance for how fast it can compute PI. It's a very scalable & multi-threaded benchmark that is being used by the industry for years now and has been available for more than a decade. We also use the same benchmark in our CPU reviews.

Alexander has issued a new changelog for the upcoming y-cruncher 0.8x which is expected to be available soon and is an attempt to clean & modernize the project. Over 400,000 lines of code will be modified and that actual work on this began three years ago but little progress was made until this year. In a performance chart showing the speedup over v0.7.10, you can see that almost all of the CPUs except the older Nehalem and Ivy Bridge chips see a gain in performance in the newer build.

The loss of performance is attributed to the removal of Hybrid NTT which was a big thing back in 2008 but isn't applicable to modern architectures. One of the biggest performance uplifts can be seen on the AMD Zen 4 CPUs with the Ryzen 9 7950X gaining up to 31% better performance. Yee states that we can expect Zen 4 to gain up to 20% speedup from the AVX-512 instruction set alone versus just AVX2 (no wider execution unit needed).

This is definitely going to be a major boost for AMD CPUs that feature AVX-512 whereas Intel's CPUs including the upcoming Meteor Lake chips won't be getting AVX-512 support on the client side. The Intel Alder Lake CPUs accidentally featured AVX-512 support at launch but Intel had to later remove it entirely from newer batches and 13th Gen Raptor Lake chips were void of any AVX-512 support.

Meanwhile, users running an AMD Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) CPU can enjoy AVX-512 and use them in a range of applications such as running gaming emulators with crisp visuals and lots of FPS as demonstrated here. There are reports that Intel may bring back AVX-512 in future client chips but we can't say for sure when that would happen.