Designcad Pro 7000 Crack
Argimiro Krishnamoorthy
With 13th Gen Intel Core and AMD Ryzen 7000, competition in workstation CPUs has never been so strong. Greg Corke explores the best CPUs for design-centric workflows from CAD to reality modelling and rendering
AMD has maintained a performance lead in extremely multi-threaded workflows like rendering, but the battle for supremacy in single-threaded applications like CAD and BIM, has been hard fought. To a certain extent, AMD and Intel have been playing leapfrog with each new generation since late 2020.
Autumn 2022 saw the launch schedules of both chip manufacturers align. The AMD Ryzen 7000 Series was announced in August while 13th Gen Intel Core got its first public airing in September. High on frequency, these mainstream workstation processors are ideal for CAD and BIM, but still offer plenty for multi-threaded workloads including rendering, simulation, point cloud processing, photogrammetry, CAM and more.
The top-end AMD Ryzen 9 7950X has 16-cores and a max boost frequency of up to 5.7 GHz. The lower end processors have slightly lower clock speeds and fewer cores but are considerably cheaper. The AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, for example, has six cores and a max boost of 5.3 GHz, but is less than half the price of the Ryzen 9 7950X.
Ryzen 7000 gets its performance uplift from a significant rise in base and boost frequency, a claimed 13% increase in Instructions Per Clock (IPC), double the Level 2 cache and support for DDR5 memory (up to 128 GB).
One trade-off with the new chips is a significant increase in Thermal Design Power (TDP), a measure of power consumption under the maximum theoretical load. The top two Ryzen 7000 Series models feature a TDP of 170W and a peak power of 230W, compared to 105W and 142W in the previous generation. However, the CPUs are only likely to draw such power when using multiple cores in combination with Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), a feature of Ryzen CPUs that increases voltages to allow the CPU to clock higher.
The big difference with 13th Gen Intel Core is that it has more E-cores than its predecessor. The flagship Intel Core i9-13900K, for example, has 16, double that of the Core i9-12900K. This can deliver a big performance boost in highly multi-threaded workflows like rendering.
Of course, the P-cores have also been enhanced and while their number remains the same (a total of eight with the Core i9-13900K), Intel says users can expect up to 15% better single-threaded performance compared to the previous generation with an IPC increase and a Max Turbo frequency of 5.8 GHz.
13th Gen Intel Core is even more power hungry than AMD Ryzen 7000. The top two models feature a TDP of 125W and a max turbo power of 253W. Power consumption of the Core i9-13900K is on par with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X in single threaded workflows but significantly higher in multi-threaded workflows (more on this later).
As with AMD, the other models trade off frequency and cores for a lower price. However, the drop in clock speed is more dramatic. The Intel Core i5-13600K, for example, has 6 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and Max Turbo frequency of 5.10 GHz.
Of course, in modern AEC workflows, multi-tasking is common, and architects and engineers often use multiple applications at the same time. Thread Director allows you to de-prioritise certain processes by simply minimising an application or moving it to the background by maximising another. This forces the calculations for the inactive application to run on the E-cores only, leaving the more powerful P-cores free for the active application.
Having this level of control can be useful if you often run concurrent compute intensive applications, such as rendering, point cloud processing, CAM, photogrammetry and others. It allows you to prioritise tasks quickly and easily, on the fly.
While our testing went no further, there may be other solutions, such as assigning applications to specific cores using Processor Affinity in Task Manager. However, this would only be temporary fix until reboot. Maybe a tool like Process lasso or Prio could give applications permanent priority.
While both 13th Gen Intel Core and AMD Ryzen 7000 Series workstations are available now from specialist manufacturers like Scan, BOXX, Armari and Workstation Specialists, we expect Intel to continue to dominate in mainstream workstations from the major global manufacturers.
Lenovo is currently the only one out of HP, Dell and Fujitsu to offer an AMD Ryzen desktop processor in a mainstream workstation, and that is with the AMD Ryzen Pro 5000 in the ThinkStation P358, which launched August 2022. Whether Ryzen 7000 (and the Ryzen Pro 7000 that will presumably follow) becomes the catalyst for others to follow suit remains to be seen.
Apart from the CPUs and motherboards, the other specifications were almost identical. This includes the 240mm Corsair H100i Pro XT hydrocooler. The other specs can be seen below. Windows Power plan was set to high-performance.
With the InvMark for Inventor benchmark by Cadac Group and TFI, Intel had a small lead in most sub tests, which are either single threaded, only use a few cores (threads) concurrently, or use a lot of cores, but only in short bursts. AMD fared better in the rendering sub test, which uses all available cores, and when opening files and saving to disk.
Both the Solidworks and Inventor benchmarks also test CAD-native simulation capabilities through Solidworks Simulate and Autodesk Inventor dynamic simulation / FEA. These tests use a few CPU cores, whereas some of the more advanced simulation tools, such as Ansys Mechanical, can take advantage of more.
Of course, the core code in many CAD tools is quite old and new generation tools, including nTopology for design for additive manufacturing, is built from the ground up for multi-core processors (and, more recently, GPU computation). For our nToplogy geometry optimisation test we solely focused on the CPU and, with all cores in use, the Intel workstation had the edge over AMD.
Agisoft Metashape is a photogrammetry tool that generates a mesh from multiple hi-res photos. It is multi-threaded, but uses CPU cores in fits and starts, and uses a combination of CPU and GPU processing.
In point cloud processing software, Leica Cyclone Register 360, which can run on up to five CPU threads on machines with 64 GB of memory, Intel had a 7-10% lead when registering both of our point cloud datasets. In practice, the lead over the 11th / 12th Gen Intel Core and Ryzen 5000 would be even higher, as those machines had 128 GB memory, so the software used 6 CPU cores.
The Ryzen 9 7950X starts to show real benefits when rendering, a process that can harness every single core, all the time. In V-Ray and KeyShot, two of the most popular tools for design visualisation, the Ryzen 9 7950X showed around a 10% lead over the Core i9-13900K.
We also did stress tests to see how CPU frequency dropped over time. When rendering in KeyShot, the Core i9-13900K started at 4.89 GHz, dropped to 4.63 GHz after a few minutes, but maintained that frequency for well over an hour. The Ryzen 9 7950X fared better here, starting at 5.5 GHz but then maintaining a solid 5.0 GHz.
Even with the lower-end 13th Gen Intel core and AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors, which have fewer cores, it will be possible to leave one or more multi-threaded tasks running in the background, and still leave resources free for bread-and-butter 3D modelling.
If done sequentially it would have taken the AMD machine 1,039 secs and the Intel 826 secs. However, running both jobs in parallel the AMD finished in 625 secs and the Intel in 646 secs. With more threads trying to run concurrently, clock speeds dropping, and some processes being pushed to slower E-Cores, the Intel workstation starts to slow down.
CPU speed has some influence over graphics performance, but the extent to which it does depends on the software. In Revit, an application renowned for being CPU limited, the Intel Core i9-13900K showed around a 7% performance lead over the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X when using the same Nvidia RTX A4500 GPU. This lead was smaller in Solidworks, which has a more modern graphics API that better harnesses the power of the GPU.
Compared to the previous generations, both processors use a lot of power. The Intel Core i9-13900K has a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 125W and a max turbo power of 253W. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X has a TDP of 170W and a peak power of 230W. But specs only tell part of the story.
But what you really want to know is how increased power usage might impact your electricity bill. Based on the current UK electricity rate of 0.34 per kWh for households (and 0.211 per kWh for businesses), rendering for eight hours a day, five days a week, would cost you 241 (150) per year with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X workstation and 319 (198) per year with the Intel Core i9-13900K workstation.
From our tests, the Intel Core i9-13000K demonstrates a clear lead over the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X in single threaded and lightly threaded workflows. And with more E-Cores than before, it has also closed the gap considerably in ray trace rendering.
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The latest version of BS 7000-4 was prepared in response to advances in Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the government announcement that BIM Level 2 would be required on all centrally-procured public projects from April 2016. Level 2 BIM requires fully-collaborative 3D BIM with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic.
The introduction of BIM places a new emphasis on collaboration during the design process and requires the incorporation of new economic and process considerations. This demands greater rigor in the design management.
BS 7000-4 applies to purpose-built constructions, equipment and components and is recommended for use by those who work in and with the construction industry, particularly designers and those managing design throughout the life-cycle of a construction project:
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