6 ms·

Given the price and the feature comparison to Intel, Ryzen sounds awesome. Hopefully it will spark new innovation between AMD and Intel. And hopefully AMD will

Given the price and the feature comparison to Intel, Ryzen sounds awesome. Hopefully it will spark new innovation between AMD and Intel. And hopefully AMD will life up to where it was once when they gave name to the AMD64 architecture.

chrisseaton 10y ago
> feature comparison Are there interesting features that differentiate them from Intel beyond performance/cost? As in new instructions or things like that?
- dogma1138 10y ago
  No, and as far as high end instructions then only 128bit AVX is natively supported on Zen, with 256bit AVX possible with half the throughput and no 512bit AVX support at all. That said because Intel disables AVX2 in half its SKU's at least that will likely not to be a major impact. As far as other features it's still TBD, virtualization works better on Intel currently, some other platform dependant issues would also probably still favor intel. Intel makes their storage, networking and USB in house, AMD doesn't, AM3 storage and USB performance were considerably slower than Intel's solution and it's yet to be seen what AM4 will provide. AM4 will come with USB3.0/3.1 from ASMEDIA and will only support a single NVME drive, so if you are looking for a professional workstation, need high speed storage, ECC, and can utilize quad channel low latency memory then Intel is still likely the way to go even with blue team tax. If you need multi GPU support and NVME at the same time, as well as other peripherals that use PCIE then you also might need to look at intel still since Zen will only come with 28 PCIE lanes. Hopefully they've sorted their PCIE performance issues at least, AM3 not only had bandwidth limitation due to PCIE 2.0 support but also had a much higher PCIE latency for unexplained reasons.
  - mcbain 10y ago
    Which Intel processors have AVX2 disabled?
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Core based Pentium/Celeron and some of the ULV CPUs have had AVX disabled since Ivy Bridge.
      - mcbain 10y ago
        A little overstated to say that's half their SKUs, but I see your point.
        nickpeterson 10y ago
        There is even more nuanced though, because Intel runs avx instructions at a different clockspeed than the main chip. So certain SKUs have avx support but have differences that don't reflect the CPU clock difference.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        There is even more nuance to this as AVX low level instruction support isn't going to be universal as different CPUs will support different instruction subsets of AVX-512 and Extended AVX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 There is also a mess in FMA support for both Intel and AMD cpus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA_instruction_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA_instruction_set This entire deal pretty much turned AVX into cancer outside of very specific circles, especially considering the wierd support for AVX and SSE in OpenCL.
  - pooloo1 10y ago
    I think what AMD is really trying to do, or what they should do, is place emphasis on the gaming community and drop any/all enterprise related features, and let Intel keep doing that part.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Kinda, but then they should've released a 4C/8T with very high clock rate CPU at around the 200-250$ mark for that. Intel's 7700Ks can easily hit the 5ghz mark on aftermarket air and AIO water cooling. Games aren't optimized well beyond 2 cores, with games that are optimized for more than 4 cores being particularly unheard off. Games aren't an application that supports parallelism that well since your sound, physics, AI and graphics threads all have to be synced within a single frame otherwise everything falls apart. The worst case for Zen is going to be the not here and not there CPU, with price slashed 7700K mopping the floor with 8C Zen CPUs in gaming because they can clock to 5ghz and higher while it's unclear if AMD can even hit 4ghz reliably on all cores and on the other hand the Zen ecosystem not being mature enough for the prosumer and professional types due to subpar support/performance of storage, peripherals and memory. The biggest mistake I made is getting a 2nd 5820K for my gaming rig, I got it cheap so I don't mind but performance wise I would be better off with a 6700/7700K. And I'm lucky as my 5820K hits 4.5-4.6ghz with an AIO cooler.
      - dijit 10y ago
        Anecdatum, but the game I worked on (Tom Clancys The Division) will perform much better on a quad core than a dual core. We're CPU bound long before GPU bound.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Yeah the Division, AC, FC (all ubisoft games ;) and a few other games are pretty CPU demanding and will eat as much as you can give them but even those usually fizzle after 4 cores or so. I find it hard to find a game that will use all 6c/12t on my 5820K, most of them will use 2-4 with usually 1-2 being pushed fully and 2 more between 10-25%.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    > and will only support a single NVME drive, What does this mean? That it will only support booting from a NVMe device if it is plugged in to one particular PCIe port?
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Summit Ridge only supports 1 M.2 NVME drive, Z270 supports 3 w/ RAID. You can add additional NVME drives through the expansion slots but these are not natively supported by the platform.
      - wtallis 10y ago
        > You can add additional NVME drives through the expansion slots but these are not natively supported by the platform. It's still completely unclear what the hell you mean by that. I've yet to encounter a platform that cares which PCIe lanes a NVMe SSD uses when it comes to boot support. Nobody really cares about whether the software RAID supports NVMe, and I'd count it as a benefit of AMD's platform if they don't implement Intel's obscene hacks that make their NVMe software RAID work. Do you mean that the chipsets for Ryzen will only have enough PCIe lanes or ports to provide one PCIe x4 slot?
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Ryzen supports upto 28 PCIE lanes. Depending on the chipset you get 1 NVME slot which is either X2 or X4 depending on the SKU that comes from the chipset those are the lanes dedicated for NVME. This is what the motherboards will come with if they do not want to add additional controllers and PCIE bridges. If you want to use the PCIE lanes that are dedicated for expansion slots for NVME by buying NVME PCIE cards or using PCIE class storage you can. Booting from those will be dependant on the UEFI and on the specific solution you buy. Z270 comes with upto 3 NVME x4 slots (over a built in bridge in the PCH) which support IRST and the rest of the intel crap, meaning for a motherboard manufacturer to support upto 3 of them they don't need need to add anything but the physical connectors.
- nattmat 10y ago
  Zen should feature instructions for full memory encryption using a ARM co-prosessor. I find that pretty interesting, considering the limitations of Intel SGX.
- zamalek 10y ago
  They are still somewhat in the domain of performance. * ML is used for branch prediction,[1] as well as [implied] pre-fetch. * Automatic clock and power tuning.[2] This is not per-die, but granular across the chip. * eXtended Frequency Range,[3] unlocks the ranges that [2] is allowed to use. Essentially, the chip overclocks itself when you provide it with more cooling headroom. [1]: https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=13m53s https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=13m53s [2]: https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=14m38s https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=14m38s [3]: https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=15m22s https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=15m22s
tyingq 10y ago
Assuming similarly low pricing, AMD's Naples chip for the servers might spark even more competition. Since it can do up to 32 cores / 64 threads in a single socket, it would compete with dual socket Xeon systems that have much higher motherboard costs, plus the cost of 2 chips.

chrisseaton 10y ago

> feature comparison Are there interesting features that differentiate them from Intel beyond performance/cost? As in new instructions or things like that?

dogma1138 10y ago
No, and as far as high end instructions then only 128bit AVX is natively supported on Zen, with 256bit AVX possible with half the throughput and no 512bit AVX support at all. That said because Intel disables AVX2 in half its SKU's at least that will likely not to be a major impact. As far as other features it's still TBD, virtualization works better on Intel currently, some other platform dependant issues would also probably still favor intel. Intel makes their storage, networking and USB in house, AMD doesn't, AM3 storage and USB performance were considerably slower than Intel's solution and it's yet to be seen what AM4 will provide. AM4 will come with USB3.0/3.1 from ASMEDIA and will only support a single NVME drive, so if you are looking for a professional workstation, need high speed storage, ECC, and can utilize quad channel low latency memory then Intel is still likely the way to go even with blue team tax. If you need multi GPU support and NVME at the same time, as well as other peripherals that use PCIE then you also might need to look at intel still since Zen will only come with 28 PCIE lanes. Hopefully they've sorted their PCIE performance issues at least, AM3 not only had bandwidth limitation due to PCIE 2.0 support but also had a much higher PCIE latency for unexplained reasons.
- mcbain 10y ago
  Which Intel processors have AVX2 disabled?
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Core based Pentium/Celeron and some of the ULV CPUs have had AVX disabled since Ivy Bridge.
    - mcbain 10y ago
      A little overstated to say that's half their SKUs, but I see your point.
      - nickpeterson 10y ago
        There is even more nuanced though, because Intel runs avx instructions at a different clockspeed than the main chip. So certain SKUs have avx support but have differences that don't reflect the CPU clock difference.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        There is even more nuance to this as AVX low level instruction support isn't going to be universal as different CPUs will support different instruction subsets of AVX-512 and Extended AVX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 There is also a mess in FMA support for both Intel and AMD cpus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA_instruction_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA_instruction_set This entire deal pretty much turned AVX into cancer outside of very specific circles, especially considering the wierd support for AVX and SSE in OpenCL.
- pooloo1 10y ago
  I think what AMD is really trying to do, or what they should do, is place emphasis on the gaming community and drop any/all enterprise related features, and let Intel keep doing that part.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Kinda, but then they should've released a 4C/8T with very high clock rate CPU at around the 200-250$ mark for that. Intel's 7700Ks can easily hit the 5ghz mark on aftermarket air and AIO water cooling. Games aren't optimized well beyond 2 cores, with games that are optimized for more than 4 cores being particularly unheard off. Games aren't an application that supports parallelism that well since your sound, physics, AI and graphics threads all have to be synced within a single frame otherwise everything falls apart. The worst case for Zen is going to be the not here and not there CPU, with price slashed 7700K mopping the floor with 8C Zen CPUs in gaming because they can clock to 5ghz and higher while it's unclear if AMD can even hit 4ghz reliably on all cores and on the other hand the Zen ecosystem not being mature enough for the prosumer and professional types due to subpar support/performance of storage, peripherals and memory. The biggest mistake I made is getting a 2nd 5820K for my gaming rig, I got it cheap so I don't mind but performance wise I would be better off with a 6700/7700K. And I'm lucky as my 5820K hits 4.5-4.6ghz with an AIO cooler.
    - dijit 10y ago
      Anecdatum, but the game I worked on (Tom Clancys The Division) will perform much better on a quad core than a dual core. We're CPU bound long before GPU bound.
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        Yeah the Division, AC, FC (all ubisoft games ;) and a few other games are pretty CPU demanding and will eat as much as you can give them but even those usually fizzle after 4 cores or so. I find it hard to find a game that will use all 6c/12t on my 5820K, most of them will use 2-4 with usually 1-2 being pushed fully and 2 more between 10-25%.
- wtallis 10y ago
  > and will only support a single NVME drive, What does this mean? That it will only support booting from a NVMe device if it is plugged in to one particular PCIe port?
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Summit Ridge only supports 1 M.2 NVME drive, Z270 supports 3 w/ RAID. You can add additional NVME drives through the expansion slots but these are not natively supported by the platform.
    - wtallis 10y ago
      > You can add additional NVME drives through the expansion slots but these are not natively supported by the platform. It's still completely unclear what the hell you mean by that. I've yet to encounter a platform that cares which PCIe lanes a NVMe SSD uses when it comes to boot support. Nobody really cares about whether the software RAID supports NVMe, and I'd count it as a benefit of AMD's platform if they don't implement Intel's obscene hacks that make their NVMe software RAID work. Do you mean that the chipsets for Ryzen will only have enough PCIe lanes or ports to provide one PCIe x4 slot?
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        Ryzen supports upto 28 PCIE lanes. Depending on the chipset you get 1 NVME slot which is either X2 or X4 depending on the SKU that comes from the chipset those are the lanes dedicated for NVME. This is what the motherboards will come with if they do not want to add additional controllers and PCIE bridges. If you want to use the PCIE lanes that are dedicated for expansion slots for NVME by buying NVME PCIE cards or using PCIE class storage you can. Booting from those will be dependant on the UEFI and on the specific solution you buy. Z270 comes with upto 3 NVME x4 slots (over a built in bridge in the PCH) which support IRST and the rest of the intel crap, meaning for a motherboard manufacturer to support upto 3 of them they don't need need to add anything but the physical connectors.
nattmat 10y ago
Zen should feature instructions for full memory encryption using a ARM co-prosessor. I find that pretty interesting, considering the limitations of Intel SGX.
zamalek 10y ago
They are still somewhat in the domain of performance. * ML is used for branch prediction,[1] as well as [implied] pre-fetch. * Automatic clock and power tuning.[2] This is not per-die, but granular across the chip. * eXtended Frequency Range,[3] unlocks the ranges that [2] is allowed to use. Essentially, the chip overclocks itself when you provide it with more cooling headroom. [1]: https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=13m53s https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=13m53s [2]: https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=14m38s https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=14m38s [3]: https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=15m22s https://youtu.be/X9NNOqzTbKI?t=15m22s

tyingq 10y ago

Assuming similarly low pricing, AMD's Naples chip for the servers might spark even more competition. Since it can do up to 32 cores / 64 threads in a single socket, it would compete with dual socket Xeon systems that have much higher motherboard costs, plus the cost of 2 chips.