Technologies: technical writing, hardware testing, performance analysis, data visualization
If you need to know whether your product is competitive, need that assertion backed up by data, and need to clearly communicate about it in any medium, I can help. I've spent over 10 years testing and writing about PC hardware, both in media and as a technical marketer for ASUS and most recently Intel. I'm also an obsessive editor who can help any team produce clean, well-structured, highly readable copy.
At Intel, I was responsible for full-stack competitive analysis of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs for desktop and mobile systems, from add-in boards and laptop hardware all the way up through drivers, supporting software, the quality/usefulness of functional units like hardware video encoders, and developer features like the XeSS and DLSS upscalers. I also helped build out a team for pre-release game testing to identify performance wins and to spot issues for our dev teams.
During my time at The Tech Report (RIP), I selected benchmarks and generated and analyzed performance data for the latest and greatest CPUs from Intel and AMD and GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA. Our testing methods were especially focused on quantifying a smooth and responsive gaming experience by using frame-time analysis. I also reviewed pretty much anything else that went into or around a PC, like motherboards, monitors, etc.
Outside of work, I'm an avid hobbyist photographer, videographer, and Twitch streamer, so I have well-developed eyes and ears for quality beyond the written word too.
This review is an object lesson about why there is so much more to shipping a decent processor than making a CPU core with reasonable performance (and decent is being polite given that we are talking about Bulldozer-class single-threaded perf, which most folks were beyond thrilled to abandon when Zen arrived eight years ago.)
The behavior of the memory controller is wild to see in this day and age. You really don't want to see latency that high in general, but especially not for a client processor. I'd really like to see how it behaves with a reasonably powerful GPU in a CPU-bound gaming workload relative to the competition (to simulate what one of these might see in an internet café setting, for instance).
Power efficiency also seems truly dismal according to PCWatch: https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/hothot/1626253.ht... . In Cinebench MT, it's consuming about the same power as a Ryzen 5 5600G while delivering about 1/3 the performance, and the idle power is much higher than the Core i3-8100/R5 5600G to boot. That's not a huge issue for desktops, but it would not make a good foundation for a mobile system.
Overall an improvement versus past Zhaoxin efforts but people shouldn't kid themselves about the quality of the overall package here. There is a long way to go.
It does clock ramp from 800 MHz idle to 3.2 GHz under load, with 900, 1000, 1100, 1300, 1500, 1800, 2200, and 2700 MHz steps in between until it hits 3.2 GHz after 71.6 ms. Article was getting long enough so I just left it at, it reaches 3.2 GHz and stays there even though the spec sheet says it should go higher.
I remoted into the system for testing (Cheese/George had it), and he said it took 3-4 cold reboots for it to come up, and suspected memory wasn't training correctly. So I did all the testing without ever rebooting the system, because it might not come back up if I tried.
Memory controllers are the biggest bottleneck (ha) to performant systems these days. The cores themselves are fine, but the memory controllers are slow and buggy.
Remote: Yes, travel/hybrid OK
Willing to relocate: No
Resumé: https://1drv.ms/b/c/af8180bdf0455d52/EWoQ5eBE7atDn7TSJvajzGc...
Email: see resumé
Technologies: technical writing, hardware testing, performance analysis, data visualization
If you need to know whether your product is competitive, need that assertion backed up by data, and need to clearly communicate about it in any medium, I can help. I've spent over 10 years testing and writing about PC hardware, both in media and as a technical marketer for ASUS and most recently Intel. I'm also an obsessive editor who can help any team produce clean, well-structured, highly readable copy.
At Intel, I was responsible for full-stack competitive analysis of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs for desktop and mobile systems, from add-in boards and laptop hardware all the way up through drivers, supporting software, the quality/usefulness of functional units like hardware video encoders, and developer features like the XeSS and DLSS upscalers. I also helped build out a team for pre-release game testing to identify performance wins and to spot issues for our dev teams.
During my time at The Tech Report (RIP), I selected benchmarks and generated and analyzed performance data for the latest and greatest CPUs from Intel and AMD and GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA. Our testing methods were especially focused on quantifying a smooth and responsive gaming experience by using frame-time analysis. I also reviewed pretty much anything else that went into or around a PC, like motherboards, monitors, etc.
Outside of work, I'm an avid hobbyist photographer, videographer, and Twitch streamer, so I have well-developed eyes and ears for quality beyond the written word too.