Ryzen 1600X Vs i7-7700K for CAD/CAE (FEA in Solidworks & CFD)

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Amyrro

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Hello everyone

I would like to ask about about which processor is the most fit for CAD work. The i7-7700K offers unparalleled performance in single-threaded operations, which the widely found case in CAD/CAE. However, besides the extra cores which the Ryzen 1600X (or 1700X) offer, it offer significantly more cache. As far as I know, CFD is affected by the amount of cache and data transfer speed (between cache level and speed of the RAM). However, I do know how much that effect is, and I have no info on how multithreaded the simulation in Solidworks is.

Besides Solidworks, I will be running some CFD simulation in Ansys Fluent/CFX, and maybe MATLAB, Scilab & OpenFoam.

So, should I bet on high single-threaded performance, or on 16mb L3 & 3Kb L2 Cache in Ryzen (Vs 8mb L3 & 256Kb L2 Cache on i7-7700K) ?

A good overclock may improve the performance of both CPUs, but the difference will still be there. What do you think folks ?!
 
CAD4466HK said:
These benches are launch day performance for Ryzen, so their pretty old, but if anything expect better performance now.


https://hardforum.com/threads/ryzen-and-video-rendering.1927873/#post-1042894514

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-9.html
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Thanks for the benchmarks mate. I did not that Puget systems has released benchmarks on Ryzen. To be honest, I think the i7-7700K would still perform better after the software updates which Ryzen has received. For a close price, I think I should put my money on the i7-7700K. However, I still have not seen anything about CFD (which is my major point of work, as simulation take time), so I should wait for a few days. and search more. Someone in this forum may have seen something that he/she can post if I do not see those benchmarks until then before buying.
 
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Amyrro said:
Thanks for the benchmarks mate. I did not that Puget systems has released benchmarks on Ryzen. To be honest, I think the i7-7700K would still perform better after the software updates which Ryzen has received. For a close price, I think I should put my money on the i7-7700K. However, I still have not seen anything about CFD, so I should wait for a few days. and search more. Someone this forum may have seen something that he/she can post if I did not make see those benchmarks before buying.
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From what I've read, CAD is more optimized for Intel than AMD in this moment in time(of course), but there is no doubt that it could receive further optimizations for AMD if demands warrant it. Hopefully some one else with CAD experience can chime in to help you out like you said.
 
CAD is heavily optimized for Intel, and doesn't really benefit from 8 cores (or 6, in the case of the Ryzen 1600 and 1600X) all that much yet. So your best bet is the fastest quad you can buy, which is currently the 7700k. The only monkey in the wrench is if you are also doing an awful lot of 3D Rendering outside AutoCAD, which some folks do on their CAD workstations. If that's a factor, then Ryzen starts to look a lot better as an option, as it does much better than Intel quads in that area.

Verdict: 7700k, or wait to see what Coffeelake offers you, unless also doing heavy 3D rendering outside AutoCAD.
 
CAD4466HK said:
From what I've read, CAD is more optimized for Intel than AMD in this moment in time(of course), but there is no doubt that it could receive further optimizations for AMD if demands warrant it. Hopefully some one else with CAD experience can chime in to help you out like you said.
Click to expand...

DuronBurgerMan said:
CAD is heavily optimized for Intel, and doesn't really benefit from 8 cores (or 6, in the case of the Ryzen 1600 and 1600X) all that much yet. So your best bet is the fastest quad you can buy, which is currently the 7700k. The only monkey in the wrench is if you are also doing an awful lot of 3D Rendering outside AutoCAD, which some folks do on their CAD workstations. If that's a factor, then Ryzen starts to look a lot better as an option, as it does much better than Intel quads in that area.

Verdict: 7700k, or wait to see what Coffeelake offers you, unless also doing heavy 3D rendering outside AutoCAD.
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Thanks for the replies gentle men. I do not use AutCAD generally, and if I am going to use it anytime in the future, I may not do anything more than 2D drafting (which I can get done using cheaper software for my current needs). Let's just hope that someone around in this forum may have tried to optimize multi-thread CFD in Matlab/SciLab or OpenFoam, that would sound like good news. But until then, and until I pay for a piece of silicon, I will try to search more
 
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Amyrro said:
Thanks for the replies gentle men. I do not use AutCAD generally, and if I am going to using anytime the future, I may not do anything more than 2D drafting (which I can get it done using cheaper software for my current needs). Let's just hope that someone around in this forum may have tried to optimize multi-thread CFD in Matlab/SciLab or OpenFoam, that would sound like good news. But until then, and until I pay for a piece of silicon, I will try to search more
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No problem, good luck in your endeavors!
 
Amyrro said:
Hello everyone

I would like to ask about about which processor is the most fit for CAD work. The i7-7700K offers unparalleled performance in single-threaded operations, which the widely found case in CAD/CAE. However, besides the extra cores which the Ryzen 1600X (or 1700X) offer, it offer significantly more cache. As far as I know, CFD is affected by the amount of cache and data transfer speed (between cache level and speed of the RAM). However, I do know how much that effect is, and I have no info on how multithreaded the simulation in Solidworks is.

Besides Solidworks, I will be running some CFD simulation in Ansys Fluent/CFX, and maybe MATLAB, Scilab & OpenFoam.

So, should I bet on high single-threaded performance, or on 16mb L3 & 3Kb L2 Cache in Ryzen (Vs 8mb L3 & 256Kb L2 Cache on i7-7700K) ?

A good overclock may improve the performance of both CPUs, but the difference will still be there. What do you think folks ?!
Click to expand...

I am in a similar boat to you, and may I throw the added monkey wrench into your gears? That 7700k does not support ECC memory. I have been looking at the E3-12xx Xeon chips which do support ECC and has some decent micro atx motherboards.
 
Amyrro said:
Hello everyone

I would like to ask about about which processor is the most fit for CAD work. The i7-7700K offers unparalleled performance in single-threaded operations, which the widely found case in CAD/CAE. However, besides the extra cores which the Ryzen 1600X (or 1700X) offer, it offer significantly more cache. As far as I know, CFD is affected by the amount of cache and data transfer speed (between cache level and speed of the RAM). However, I do know how much that effect is, and I have no info on how multithreaded the simulation in Solidworks is.

Besides Solidworks, I will be running some CFD simulation in Ansys Fluent/CFX, and maybe MATLAB, Scilab & OpenFoam.

So, should I bet on high single-threaded performance, or on 16mb L3 & 3Kb L2 Cache in Ryzen (Vs 8mb L3 & 256Kb L2 Cache on i7-7700K) ?

A good overclock may improve the performance of both CPUs, but the difference will still be there. What do you think folks ?!
Click to expand...

Having used both SW simulation and Fluent before, I can tell you they are completely different beasts. Solidworks' FEA packages are dominated by single-threaded setup code, to the point where you'll see very little scaling past the first couple cores in your system. Fluent scales almost infinitely, up to tens of thousands of cores on the worlds' fastest clusters. Ditto for Openfoam; both packages have very robust MPI and OpenMP modes.

Matlab is a mixed bag; its dense linear algebra routines are linked against Intel's Math Kernel Library, so better AVX2 performance on the 7700K (2x the throughput) will make up for it's lack of cores. FFT's love bandwidth, so that's another point for the 7700K there. If you are doing a lot of Map/Reduce type operations using parfor, the Ryzen will win there; I haven't used it in a while but parfor scales well to at least a couple dozen threads.

If you do a lot of interactive modeling in Solidworks I would honestly go for the 7700K; the CPU portions of SW (file loading, rebuild, interactive manipulation) are almost entirely single-threaded. Believe me, you really notice when your model takes a minute to rebuild after every edit, whereas an extra hour every once in a while during a long simulation is not the end of the world. If your primary task is simulation in Fluent/Openfoam (and perhaps tuning your designs through repeated simulations) I would go for the Ryzem; the 70% boost in multithreaded performance will really show there.
 
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Amyrro said:
Thanks for the benchmarks mate. I did not that Puget systems has released benchmarks on Ryzen. To be honest, I think the i7-7700K would still perform better after the software updates which Ryzen has received. For a close price, I think I should put my money on the i7-7700K. However, I still have not seen anything about CFD (which is my major point of work, as simulation take time), so I should wait for a few days. and search more. Someone in this forum may have seen something that he/she can post if I do not see those benchmarks until then before buying.
Click to expand...

I won't dispute that the i7-7700k will be faster in most things overall, i mean it beats intels 6-8 core chips too -- i will say the ryzen will get better with time. In my gaming and photo editing tests i very rarely ever see over 50% cpu utilization, but its a really nice piece of mind knowing 3 years from now i wont regret having the extra 4 cores.
 
These days, buying a CPU isn't as easy of a decision as it once was. In the single core days, it was much more clear cut (though even then you had schizoid performance sometimes caused by a good integer unit, and a bad FPU, or vice versa).

You really have to look at what you're doing with it today, and what those same tasks are likely to look like tomorrow. For instance, games today can use 4 cores pretty well, mostly, but don't utilize more very well. So for today, a fast quad core is best. But will it be that way tomorrow? I don't really know. I *guess* that the future will use more than 4 cores effectively, based on the fact that we were once in the same place with duals, and singles before that. But you never know... I took a gamble and went Ryzen because I also do a fair amount of rendering, and Ryzen is good at that. I have mixed opinions about my decision. I'm glad I didn't go 7700k, but I half-regret not going 6900k. If Intel lowered the price of their HEDT parts about 20-30%, I'd have gone Intel, for sure.

The same decision has to be made for the OP regarding his use case. Today, obviously, the 7700k is the best for his use case. But will it be this way tomorrow? I don't personally do enough CAD work to know, or even make much of a guess. But if he's really worried about it, maybe he ought to wait for Coffee Lake 6 core chips. That would split the difference.

Still, Ryzen wouldn't be a *bad* buy for him. He'd just be leaving a chunk of performance in today's applications on the table vs. the 7700k.
 
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