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AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Benchmarked – Giving Intel’s $1000 Chips A Run For It

427 points by mrb 10y ago

std_throwaway 10y ago
What about ECC memory? Intels desktop processors fail hard on that feature.
- krzyk 10y ago
  Why do you need that in desktop env? What's the usecase when it can be beneficial to have expensive ECC RAM instead of the ordinary one? I was always thinking that ECC can prevent blue screens/kernel faults, but I haven't seen those in years on my laptop without ECC.
  - eliaspro 10y ago
    Besides many obvious reasons (preventing real bitrot), it's also a security factor acting against attacks like rowhammer.
  - mrb 10y ago
    The symptoms of memory corruption are much more varied (and can be much more stubtle) than BSODs. For example they can cause filesystem corruption, any random app crashes (SIGSEGV...), infinite loops, etc.
    - grndzro 10y ago
      That is why it is important after building/tweaking a system to do stability tests. If it runs full out without errors for 24h then you are fine.
      - deaddodo 10y ago
        That's.....not how non-ECC works. Even a little. RAM bitflips randomly, period. It's just how it works. A cosmic ray can hit the memory chip just right and flip it, there's no way to predict or control that no matter how "stable" your machine is. ECC still does the same, it just has a parity bit on each line to confirm against and flip it back, as needed.
        justincormack 10y ago
        It is how faulty RAM works, and it is sensible to do that.
        Rebelgecko 10y ago
        Not just faulty RAM. As far as I know, all modern RAM is going to have bitflips every once in a while (it even happens with ECC RAM)
        deaddodo 10y ago
        I urge you to educate yourself. All RAM works this way, it's the very reason ECC RAM exists and the exact issue it solves.
      - lisivka 10y ago
        I have no idea, why you downvoted. Stability test is important step of cluster building. If probability of something broken in new server is 10% then probability of something broken in new cluster of 10 servers is 1-(1-0.1)^10 = 65% .
        masklinn 10y ago
        Because they objection has nothing to do with the original comment. Bitflips are not a RAM stability issue.
        lisivka 10y ago
        Bitflips are not a RAM stability issue, they happen randomly due to radiation, but radiation is not random, especially in my area (I live not far from Chornobyl).
        masklinn 10y ago
        Sure, but you won't solve excessive ambient radiation by running a stress test on your RAM.
        lisivka 10y ago
        A small radioactive («hot») dust particle will not change average radiation level a lot, but may cause problems with memory/cpu. Simple cleaning, by blowing dust out, fixes it. Saw that dozen of times, but years ago.
        EdHominem 10y ago
        Did you use a geiger counter to verify the dust was hot? Would something large enough to cause problems with the ram be large enough to detect?
        flamedoge 10y ago
        er.. you should probably move. Bitflips aren't the only things radiation does. Bitflips in DNA for example.
  - kogepathic 10y ago
    > What's the usecase when it can be beneficial to have expensive ECC RAM instead of the ordinary one? Anyone using ZFS will (or should!) care about ECC support. [0] Lots of people build their own NAS/SAN boxes, so ECC support on a desktop CPU at a reasonable price point would be very appreciated. Currently you need to buy specific model CPUs (Celeron or Xeon, IIRC) to get ECC support from Intel. [1] [0] https://serverfault.com/questions/454736/non-ecc-memory-with-zfs-a-stupid-idea https://serverfault.com/questions/454736/non-ecc-memory-with... [1] https://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true&MarketSegment=DT https://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true&MarketS...
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      This is why I ultimately ended up buying an HP ML10 for my FreeNAS box, $300 for a Xeon E3-1220, board and iLO ended up being cheaper than buying a barebones + the CPU (which is just shy of $200 retail). I would like to have something that supports more memory, but to get anything with more sockets or support for larger DIMM's you start looking at the Broadwell-E or Xeon-E5 chips and those are considerably more expensive (my ThinkServer TD340 cost me $700 as an open box with a E5-2403v2 and 8GB of RAM installed). If Zen client chips have full ECC support and can handle 64GB of memory I'll be sold easily on an upgrade for my TrueNAS box, then I'll anxiously await some lower-cost (4/8c) dual-socket server CPU's and swap out my TD340 with some supermicro barebones build.
      - lultimouomo 10y ago
        Do you know how much power does it use? If so, could you add some details (number of HDDs, typical load - light, medium, heavy)? I'm looking into building a home server and would like something decently beefy, not too power hungry and possibly with ECC.
        snuxoll 10y ago
        I know the ML10 only has a 300W PSU, but I haven't bothered to take a kill-a-watt as the ML10 itself would be outshined by the rest of my lab gear. The E3-1220 is usually idle and frequency scaled back unless something like a ZFS scrub is running, I've got ~45W of PCIe cards (SAS HBA, 10GBe NIC and 4x1GBe NIC), 4x8GB sticks of DDR3 UDIMM's probably uses 12W. I'd say without drives it probably draws no more than 150W on average, unless I'm doing something CPU intensive. My drives all sit in an external SAS enclosure, since I wanted more than 4 drive bays that the LFF expansion bracket provided. Anyway, the ML10 is pretty decent for light-medium work. It's got 4 really fast cores and 32GB of RAM is adequate for most home server use (this was why I got the TD340 though, I've got 72GB in it) - just beware that the Gen1 units don't include the drive bracket so if you want more than a single HDD you have to purchase one or get an external SAS enclosure. EDIT: the ML10 is basically silent too, even under load - I can't hear the fans unless I try (though my SAS enclosure makes up for this by being the loudest bit of kit in my lab).
  - jpalomaki 10y ago
    It is kind of funny that we even accept non-ecc memory and say that it is perfectly OK that sometimes a 0 written to memory turns to 1. This would be more understandable if we treated the memory as unreliable but in most cases we don't.
    - dchest 10y ago
      ECC (error-correcting codes) don't completely eliminate errors — they reduce probability of them happening — so even with ECC memory you're still accepting that it's perfectly OK that 0 is sometimes 1, just a lot less likely. No absolutes here, unfortunately.
      - temac 10y ago
        This EXTREMELY reduces the probability that a bit flips happens. And consumer PCs (or mobile devices) are the only devices where there is no ECC memory, RAM is the only place in such devices where there is no error detection and/or correction.
        vegabook 10y ago
        100%. Everywhere else including spinning disk, SSD, ethernet, TCP/IP there is error correction.
  - vegabook 10y ago
    This question comes up constantly. Anybody doing anything with more than 16GB, especially data science (think all the R and Python people, all scientists), anybody running a memory cached data store (all server side people on mongo, redis, etc), and anybody doing finance or engineering, wants ECC. Basically anybody doing anything where data persistence is important, and/or where even the slightest chance of silent corruption is catastrophic. And with Intel you had to spend well north of 1k to get it on an 8/16 system. Hoping Ryzen does it.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      > Anybody doing anything with more than 16GB, especially data science (think all the R and Python people, all scientists) Not sure I agree. Most science datasets (both from simulations and experiments) are sufficiently noisy that if your scientific end results and conclusions change as a result of even thousands of bitflips in your 16 GB of data, you're Doing It Wrong and your article isn't worth the paper it's printed on. (There are probably exceptions, as always, but those working in those few specific subfields should be aware of it.)
      - vegabook 10y ago
        As soon as you are putting a noisy dataset through multiple iterative algos, though, if a bit error hits the control flow code or data structure delimiters, you face the possibility of massive silent, propogating corruption. Imagine your hash table getting a bit error in it (all R lists and Python dicts use them), or an incorrect branch in your code. Admittedly the risk is ultra low, but you have enough problems to worry about to have, in addition, a niggling sensation of RAM-risk as you work. More generally, it's not unreasonable to say that our entire computing paradigm rests on accurate RAM. Above 16GB, the risks just become too big for anybody doing serious work, and not just messing around with prototypes.
        semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        > Admittedly the risk is ultra low Exactly this. The size of your code is positively infinitesimal compared to your data. And unless you're writing your code and then running it exactly once, which is a) even more unlikely and b) bad practice, you'll catch any of those bit-flip errors in your code or data structures. This has been discussed a lot in the literature, especially for GPUs where ECC carries a performance penalty both on speed and available memory, e.g. in this paper where they've tested it on a GPU cluster: http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/papers/2014_03_ECC_AMBER_Paper_10.1002_cpe.3232.pdf http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/papers/2014_03_ECC_AMBER_Paper_1...
  - fulafel 10y ago
    Desktop computers are sometimes used for actual work where data integrity is important. Only a small minority of main memory data corruptions lead to OS crashes, mostly the in-memory application or filesystem data just silently gets corrupted.
  - std_throwaway 10y ago
    That is like asking: "Why do you wear a seatbelt if you don't even drive a racecar?" Because I care about my data. Data corruption may kill your main storage and the first backup, too.
  - abrookewood 10y ago
    There's no need to down vote him. ECC is extremely uncommon on desktops & laptops. Yes, it's always going to be preferential to have it, but it typically comes at a price point that excludes it from these platforms.
    - temac 10y ago
      That's a problem, not a manifesto to continue to live with it... And if the prices difference are large, they are largely artificial. That means if ECC is more widely uses, prices difference will decrease to reasonable levels (at the marginal level, price of RAM with ECC should be ~= 9/8 price of RAM without ECC, and the price of supporting platforms should be only very slightly higher than the price of non-supporting platforms)
      - abrookewood 10y ago
        Fair enough - I'd like to see it happen, just don't think it will.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    ECC RAM isn't that much more expensive despite being less common. It's a bigger premium to go from an i7 to Xeon than to equip the Xeon with ECC RAM. If ECC were manufactured in the volumes of non-ECC it would probably be almost exactly 12.5% more expensive (i.e. just the cost of the extra chip).
    - temac 10y ago
      > It's a bigger premium to go from an i7 to Xeon than to equip the Xeon with ECC RAM. Not exactly. The prices between comparable i7 to Xeon are nearly the same.
      - aidenn0 10y ago
        Wow, I just priced skylake Xeon's vs i7 and prices are very comparable (in some cases the Xeon is even cheaper). Current Xeon v. i7 was significantly different last year when I purchased. I did check and it is still true that with laptops you always pay a premium for Xeon v Core on an equal performance basis (even within the same model).
  - mtgx 10y ago
    I believe ECC RAM protects against RowHammer, doesn't it? That would be reason enough to get it.
    - temac 10y ago
      It mitigates. IIRC DDR4 also mitigates. With both at least I'm pretty sure RowHammer is not a security problem anymore, and maybe even the risk of crashing disappear completely (or have an extremely small probability)
  - chatterbeak 10y ago
    All of my desktops are Xeons with ECC. Maybe you or your customers don't care, or you just play games and browse the web. But if you're doing something critical, you want to be able to detect and repair a bit flip. Google estimated that 1 bit/GB/year flips. There's 128 GB in our standard desktop built. That would be 2 bit flips/week.
  - krzyk 10y ago
    Why the downvotes? It is a legitimate question, because ECC is very uncommon in desktops and laptops. Companies I worked for used those only on the servers where we run critical stuff, not a single developer laptop had ECC.
  - tilt_error 10y ago
    Some links that may give more background to the area: Coding Horror To ECC or Not To ECC [1], What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory [2], Memory Errors in Modern Systems [3], and an analysis of memory errors in the entire fleet of servers at Facebook over the course of fourteen months [4]. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ [2] https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf [3] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf [4] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/memory-errors-at-facebook_dsn15.pdf https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/memory-errors-at-faceb...
frik 10y ago
What about Win7 drivers? Even if the Redmond based company doesn't like marketing about it (an understatement) - please support it. (Recently AMD announced Win7 support only to remove the announcement after after a few days.) Even Intel supports Win7 with their most recent CPU as well, even if it's not officially marketed, and one has to search around for the driver.
- 3825 10y ago
  Call me selfish but I think it is more important for them to contribute to GNU/Linux and *bsd projects. I know Microsoft has a contractual obligation to support 7 for a while but I think there's next to zero chance they will reset Windows 10 and go back to Windows 7. You will need to get away from Windows 7 at some point. Better start making preparations now.
  - frik 10y ago
    At the moment Windows 7 is number one desktop/notebook OS, it dwarfs all other operating systems (all other Windows versions incl Win8 & Win10, macOS and Linux combined)! Win7 is superb, looks nice and works rock solid and is supported until 2020 or beyond (see XP). And then in 2020s Fuchsia/Android, or what ever OS is available and make sense for end consumer needs. (Of course *nix driver support is important too, AMD knows that)
    - viblo 10y ago
      It seems like your data is outdated. According to Statcounter win 7 have 47.5% of the total windows market, you have to go back almost one year for a point when 7 had more than 50%. Netmarketshare says win 7 have 47.2% of the total market.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      What is Windows 7 share on new devices? The total installed base numbers are meaningless here.
  - vedranm 10y ago
mindcrime 10y ago
Wow... I really hope this is true and that it's a sign that AMD have their mojo back. Partly because I have a sentimental favoritism towards AMD, and partly because Intel (and Nvidia) need competition.
- vegabook 10y ago
  An AMD 40Mhz 80486 was my first build so I also have a soft spot. At the time it was the fatest x86 one could buy. Gees I even remember lusting after the Ati 8514 Ultra, one of the earliest GPU accelerators, clone of IBM's high end workstation standard of the early 90s, as a teenager. Wow I'm getting old. Conversely, though I admire Intel for its central place in advancing computing itself, I cannot love the company because it has shamelessly monetized its monopoly over the past 7 years or so with vast overpricing on higher end lines. I for one am definitely doing a Ryzen 7 build as soon as I can get a chip, and the same goes for Vega. So happy to see AMD back in the game.
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    I remember those days and bought AMD then too. There was even a third competitor in those days, Cyrix.
    - makapuf 10y ago
      I remember cyrix being later in the game with its 686/166 Mhz proc which did wonders.
      - jcoffland 10y ago
        Cyrix had a 486.
        moogly 10y ago
        and 586 and 686: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_6x86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_6x86 They used a Performance Rating, so the "PR166" wasn't actually running at 166 MHz but 133 MHz. The performance rating was meant to show that it was "equivalent to a 166 MHz Pentium".
shmerl 10y ago
Looks like my next desktop build can be all AMD. With radeonsi/radv catching up and upcoming Vega and Ryzen, it looks quite attractive.
lostmsu 10y ago
That does not really make sense. Why would physics simulation and prime calculation be so much slower? I would not trust those benchmarks.
- wyager 10y ago
  My guess would be branching behavior. The Intel branch predictor could be better for that sort of stuff.
  - tmd83 10y ago
    I was weird out by some of those figure too. I thought Ryzen floating point units were smaller than intel so how come its so better in the floating point benchmark. The SSE performance being so out there compared to anyone also looks very interesting. It could be the benchmarks are very focused on some particular kind of operation where Ryzen is very suited/unsuited for. Definitely need real app and more sophisticated benchmark. It looks to be a good processor probably miles ahead of Bulldozer in many department but what in terms of current gen intel in popular workload has to wait for March 2nd.
  - Symmetry 10y ago
    That might be true of the physics simulation but I think that's more likely Intel's better vector processing resources. With a prime search the branches involved ought to be a combination of the trivially easy ones that any predictor should be able to handle and the super high entropy ones that no predictor can guess. So if anything doing badly on the prime test is an indication that it was AMD's good branch predictor that was bumping up its score on the other tests.
    - wyager 10y ago
      The test also said that AMD beat out intel on SSE stuff.
- kinghajj 10y ago
  If those benchmarks make use of AVX, that could be another explanation. Even without those instructions, Zen has less-powerfull FP units than Skylake. One advantage Zen might have is in mixed codes, since it has 10-issue segmented into 6 int and 4 float, while Skylake is 8-issue mixed between int and float.
sufiyan 10y ago
One must bear in mind that wccftech has always been one to leak stuff. Take what you might want to from that. More importantly though, Intel definitely needs competition. This is really good news and I hope it plays out well.
- astrodust 10y ago
  It'll put price pressure on Intel, that's for sure, but I don't know if it'll make Intel work any faster on boosting performance. They're having enough trouble with process and yield as it is. It's interesting that this time around, if these numbers are true, AMD is not only faster performing and less costly, but also lower power. In the past they've always run hot, noisy, but cheap and fast-enough. Maybe their experience in optimizing GPU production is paying dividends here.
elementalest 10y ago
There is so much hype with AMD atm. In particular sites like WCCFTech have gone almost rabid with hype. My experience is that AMD tend to over promise with their marketing and rumours. So whilst the hype may well be warranted this time, I'm going to wait for the actual reviews to come through and take these leaks with a grain of salt.
- qeternity 10y ago
  Fair enough, but this is a bit more concrete than marketing fluff.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- clarry 10y ago
  To be honest, Intel marketing overpromises too. A lot. I think people are just so used to it happening all the time that it's nothing out of ordinary, so it doesn't even look like hype.
wmf 10y ago
Ryzen leaks conspicuously don't mention gaming or the i7-7700K. AMD may win in a very small market yet lose the mainstream.
- anonymfus 10y ago
  Gaming performance is irrelevant for top CPUs, the difference appears only in low resolutions and old games.
  - crowbahr 10y ago
    I've been looking into a new CPU to play Overwatch because my is 4(670?)K is struggling with even high. Bottlenecks around the gpu pegging all 4 OCd cores out at 100% constantly without even hitting 144fps. It's not just old games that need good cpus these days, though I will admit I'm probably more than just the enthusiast market.
    - grogenaut 10y ago
      Something is wrong with your pc. I'm running ultra gpu settings constant 70fps at 2560x1440. I've got the same cpu, not overclocked at all, and a 980GTX. I'm also running 4 of those monitors off of the gpu, one with the game, one usually with netflix at the same time and I sit at 20% cpu the whole time.
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        Yeah, I'm running 1080@120hz on a GTX1080 with a 2500k@4.5ghz on all cores and the GPU maxes out before the CPU. Google around a bit for OW competitive settings and you should be able to achieve something similar :)
        nottorp 10y ago
        The guy you're replying to looks like he wants 144 fps on 4K. Which is prolly not doable with current hardware.
runeks 10y ago
Not a CPU expert here, but isn't this a comparison of AMD next gen to Intel current gen? Won't Intel have a new CPU out, too, when the Ryzen is actually released?
- wmf 10y ago
  Intel's new CPUs tend to be 5% faster at the same price so Ryzen should be competitive with Skylake-X.
- kijin 10y ago
  Ryzen is not "next gen" anymore. It will be released in less than two weeks. Not enough time for Intel to come up with anything groundbreaking.
- mrb 10y ago
  Ryzen becomes current gen in 11 days (March 2nd release.) Intel would need to update their "current gen" (Skylake, Kaby Lake) CPUs with 8-core models to be competitive but for some reason Skylake and Kaby Lake have been stuck with a max of 4 cores... which is why these benchmarks are compared to an 8 core Broadwell.
- grndzro 10y ago
  Not really. All Intel has are Ticks. Incremental upgrades for the next few years at least.
- deaddodo 10y ago
  These release in less than two weeks. Intel's "current" gen released less than a month ago. Seems pretty fair to me.
- ksec 10y ago
  The current roadmap suggest Intel will get YET another 14nm tweaks called Coffeelake on desktop, which is basically the same arch as Skylake. And Next year it will be Cannonlake, which is 10nm of Skylake. Intel has been pretty much milking the Desktop Market for as long as they could.
orliesaurus 10y ago
Execs at Intel ain't gonna be too worried, they probably have signed contracts that lock partners up for many years to come
- reitzensteinm 10y ago
  In a world where progress has slowed down, being two to three years behind Intel means you're practically interchangeable. This chip isn't an abnormality, it's a sign of things to come, and there's no way it isn't keeping Intel's execs up at night.
  - vegabook 10y ago
    Amd is prepping a 32 core server beast. Considering Intel just launched a 24 core chip costing 9000 dollars, and considering the AMD IPC is looking good, Intel execs must be gnawing down to their elbows at the prospect of AMD walking in to that market at 50% pricing deltas. Over to GloFo though on process. That appears to be the a possible achilles heel here for AMD.
    - deaddodo 10y ago
      AMD isn't limited to GloFo. There are rumors they're utilizing Samsung, as well, since it's also 14nm. And they could pivot to TSMC for 10nm, once Fab 15b is operational.
    - frou_dh 10y ago
      32 core beast makes me think of a chip the size of a drink mat. Presumably it does fit in the AM4 socket though.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - beagle3 10y ago
      > Intel execs must be gnawing down to their elbows at the prospect of AMD walking in to that market at 50% pricing deltas. That's not how it works. If they think AMD can make a dent, they'll mark their chips down to be competitive (for whatever definition of competitive they use, which is probably supported by data, though it might not be YOUR definition). Poor Intel will have to deal with only 100% profit instead of the 300% or so they've become accustomed to. Intel got a knock out from AMD some 15 years ago. Enough people working at Intel still remember it will enough. This aspect of history is very unlikely to repeat or even to rhyme.
illuminati1911 10y ago
Competition please! Intel/Nvidia monopoly has brought prices of CPUs and especially GPUs to insane levels.
- msimpson 10y ago
  Ditto. Here's hoping the Ryzen will pan out and force Intel's hand.
nottorp 10y ago
More importantly for some, it's a 95W AMD part vs a 140W Intel part. If the power delta stays the same even for mainstream parts, does this mean AMD will become a good quiet option too? By quiet I mean "I can't hear it at night" not "I can't hear it over the music". Edit: Also, I think data centers these days are limited in density by power delivery and cooling. Even a 25W delta adds up when you're talking about thousands of servers.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hocuspocus 10y ago
  The 65W versions should be trivial to cool silently, a $40 heatsink with a single low speed 12cm fan (500~600 rpm) does the job well with my CPUs. For a 95W TDP you might need to spend a little more (like on those big Noctua heatsinks with 14cm fans), but silent air-cooling is definitely possible. (Water is always trickier, AIO kits will typically be a little noisier due to the pump).
  - Lev1a 10y ago
    AFAIK the Ryzen 1700 (TDP 65W) is supposed to come with a "Wraith" cooler from AMD and those new ones are apparently better than their shitty older counterparts from the Vishera days (I had one and I'm glad I switched to a near silent Arctic cooler).
    - auxym 10y ago
      Same here, the Artic Cooler was 20$ and the difference is dramatic. Cooler temps all around and near silent at modest loads, where the stock cooler was annoyingly loud.
      - jandrese 10y ago
        Worse, loud fans seem to fail the most. I've always been annoyed when a $75 CPU comes with a $.25 fan that is going to crap out in a year or two.
kayoone 10y ago
Take everything WCCFTECH writes with a pinch of salt, all of this could still be fake. The Ryzen hype train is on full steam and i really hope they deliver, but i'll wait for official benchmarks. In the last few years, more often than not AMD hardware leaks have shown potential that in the end wasn't met. Things look good for Ryzen though, maybe they can finally make 6-8 Core CPUs mainstream.
- nindalf 10y ago
  Which website would you consider "official"? Anandtech?
  - chinhodado 10y ago
    By "official" I think he meant the benchmarks done by the websites themselves, using proper methodologies. In this article the benchmark was submitted by a user, using synthetic tests from a single application.
  - kayoone 10y ago
    this article is based on images some anonymous user posted on chinese forums, so by official i just mean placed like anandtech or techpowerup that do their own benchmarking in a professional environment.
- sharpercoder 10y ago
  My experience is they actually do deliver promises, yet always too late. It was the case with the 120Mhz 80486, the K6-2, the Athlon, the Opteron, and I'm just getting started. All about as fast as their marketing claimed, but simply too late so the nextgen Intel caught up for the most part.
  - digitalzombie 10y ago
    Uh... did you forget about Bulldozer? It did bad compare to what their marketing team was telling their users. The past two or so architecture underperform what the marketing them had in the slides.
ndesaulniers 10y ago
Any thoughts on the huge discrepancy in SSE performance? Something seems wrong there.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere, these chips only have a 128-bit SIMD unit (either for power or for space savings?) and so 256-bit SIMD executes half as fast as it would on Intel.
  - acqq 10y ago
    But if I read the picture properly, AMD appears to be 8 times(!) faster than anything else: http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-CPU-Mark-SSE-Benchmark-WM-840x370.jpg http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/AMD-Ryzen... That seems to be untypically good, in the market where the new generations brought typically 10-20%. I still wouldn't say it's impossible, as, for example, Intel had (apparently until Sandy Bridge) much slower NaN handling than AMD, at least without SSE2. So maybe AMD discovered some weak point like that. But until I read some explanation, it does seem to be too good...
    - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
      Ah. Yeah, that looks impossible.
Philipp__ 10y ago
I really want AMD to succeed! Intel's lack of progress and monopolistic behavior have become embarrassing. Competition is best for the consumer. I am really thinking of making all AMD rig after all chips are out.
ksec 10y ago
One of the best thing about Zen is that it "should" substantially changes the dynamic of Cloud / VPS hosting. High Memory Instances are Cheaper due to support of 8 Memory Channels. Lower End Instances could be cheaper due to Lower Cost per Core Count.
chx 10y ago
These last few years Intel was much working much more on bring power consumption down than ... anything else? The performance changed little: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review/4 http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs... 20%? But now the 15W U series mobile chips deliver the same performance as 35W M chips in the Sandy/Ivy Bridge era which is quite impressive. This, of course, leads to a tremendous advantage in server CPUs -- if you have capable cores at a lower wattage, you can add more of them. Hence the 14 core E5-2690V4 @ 135W at 2.6Ghz vs 8 core E5-2690 @ 135W at 2.9GHz. So in just four generations from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell, no TDP change, roughly the same or a bit better single thread execution but almost double the core count. If you are willing to drop a tiny bit your base clock further and your TDP higher, perhaps 10% less single thread performance, you can get a hulk of a 24 core E7-8890V4 at 165W. And that's where the big profit is -- currently. Now some unfounded nonsense: what if Intel is not pulling these crazy prices out of their sorry behind but there's in fact some reality behind them? It just bothers me that the price of the 24 core chip is so close to the 6*6 times of a 4 core chip. It could be a coincidence.
- Matthias247 10y ago
  I think you sum it up quite good: The thing that Intel did mostly was putting more cores on the chips. However that happenend only for the server lines. With Sandybridge and before the top desktop and server chips were nearly identical, now there's a huge difference. Which also means that during the last years the performance of desktop CPUs increased barely. That might be ok from the point of view that normal users would mostly not benefit from more than 4 cores. However assuming that developing and manufacturing the top-end model of each generation costs roughtly the same the new generation desktop models should probably be a lot cheapter than they are currently sold for.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    There's been a fork in CPU design goals. Before, the fastest chip was the goal. Now, we have fast single-threaded vs high parallel throughput - and while there's a spectrum between them, the extremes matter, it's not a case of a Goldilocks solution. Consumer loads are mostly limited by single threaded performance, though software is increasingly written for more cores. Best choice for a consumer used to be dual core, now it's probably quad core with thermal limited boosting on less parallel workloads. It's only prosumers doing lots of transcoding or rendering, or CPU intensive VMs, that typically benefit from increasing cores above 4. Whereas the server space prizes throughput and much of its workload is trivially parallelizable. On the server, higher single core speed mostly just decreases latency for small tasks; if you're happy with the latency, you can get more cores working on shared memory and potentially get big wins in perf. There are diminishing returns though, scaling up boxes is expensive and unless it's being forced by software licensing or architectural models, things like Hadoop and Spark for spreading the load across a whole cluster are increasingly attractive. This helps solve the I/O throughput problem too.
alanfranzoni 10y ago
I'd really like to see what AMD can do in the ultrabook and notebook segment. Good mobile CPUs with a good integrated GPU could really be a killer feature. I don't know whether the desktop segment is enough for AMD to reboot its cpu brand (although the server market is a more interesting beast).
arjie 10y ago
Would have been an interesting validation to put the i7-2700K in there. It was nearer the 8350 and would have provided a good baseline to see that the benchmark is actually useful. As it stands, I'm a little sceptical (but also very hopeful, since I'm buying desktop hardware soon).
vegabook 10y ago
AMD has been really smart. Freesync is a huge success. It's outperforming Nvidia by about 20% on Vulkan and DX12 on similar hardware because game makers can use their optimized code from the AMD-equipped consoles. On Ryzen, it appears strategically to have reduced the silicon usage from AVX in order to improve mainstream performance and increase cache, while maintaining a smaller (and therefore cheaper) die than Intel's increasingly bloated silicon. It all points to a company, back to the wall, really fighting its corner, optimizing its much smaller resources. If Ryzen and Vega work out as expected, I hope the people responsible at AMD are in for big rewards. BTW the stock has ramped 200% in the past year. To get an idea of how smart AMD people are, this video instructive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwcUMZLvjYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwcUMZLvjYw
- agumonkey 10y ago
  AMD last decade has been so stressful even from the public POV, I'm surprised they managed to survive up to Zen. If ryzen is enough of a success this will be heaven for the company. I wish them all the best.
jjm 10y ago
If I were Apple, I'd jump on this. Maybe then battery life will be better. And hopefully that famed form fitted battery comes out of the woods.
Nokinside 10y ago
I'm trying to put this into perspective. AMD having temporary edge over Intel has happened before. Remember when AMD had Athlon in 1999 and they made huge $1 billion in profits. Intel's response has always been the same. They cut their profit margins and start selling chips cheaper. They undercut AMD with volume and price and suddenly AMD is in the doghouse again struggling. AMD's best efforts can cut into Intel's profits, but Intel's response is to remove all profits from AMD until it's left behind. Just compare these two: Revenue/gross profit/gross profit margin (Sebtember 2016) AMD $1.1B/$930 mil/4.5% INEL $60B/$16B /60+% Even if you add $5.5B revenue from GLOBALFOUNDRIES (manufacturer of AMD chips) to make AMD camp comparison more relevant, there is large difference.
- tw04 10y ago
  >Intel's response has always been the same. They cut their profit margins and start selling chips cheaper. They undercut AMD with volume and price and suddenly AMD is in the doghouse again struggling. AMD's best efforts can cut into Intel's profits, but Intel's response is to remove all profits from AMD until it's left behind. The last time Intel did that it was through illegal tactics - unlikely they'll get away with it a second time. https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/intel-loses-eu-antitrust-appeal/?ncid=rss_truncated https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/intel-loses-eu-antitrust...
  - Nokinside 10y ago
    Doing illegal is just optimization. Intel can undercut AMD lawfully if it wants. Instead of hidden rebates, Intel can openly cut prices.
    - dman 10y ago
      That first line is amazingly brazen. If a movie is made about Intels monopolistic practices that fully belongs as a dialog spoken by the Intel CEO.
      - Nokinside 10y ago
angry_octet 10y ago
Looking forward to the day when reviews include HPCG (the replacement for LINPACK) as a benchmark, with a little animation showing how hot the different bits of the core run.
- arcanus 10y ago
  Should be soon. HPCG is a memory bound application so I doubt it runs the system as hot as HPL (high performance linpack)
asdads 10y ago
Sadly for those of us involved with floating point stuff, Intel is still king (and Nvidia is still the Queen).
ekr 10y ago
I don't know why I get the feeling that most of this advancement is the result of Jim Keller's contribution. Surely, AMD must have other engineers capable of similar achievements, right?
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
I can't help but feel AMD is shooting the puck where the goal was, but won't be in the next few years. We desparately need GPU-like devices for advanced ML/AI. Even intel knows this and is investing huge in that area to be competitive against NVIDIA[1]. I predict in the future that AMD will come to dominate the home/enthusiasts CPU market, and intel's low-power CPUs will dominate enterprise along with whoever comes out with a CUDA competitor. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2017/02/13/inside-intel-corporations-artificial-intelligence.aspx?client=safari https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2017...
- muyuu 10y ago
  AMD already do that, but no it's not like ML/AI is the main market right now. Nowhere near.
tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
not wasting a lot of silicon space on an integrated graphics solution seems to be a big win in terms of increasing the effective power of the CPU without increasing the price as much since in the end the die will likely be smaller. I am surprised Intel has never come up with some more gaming oriented i7s with more cores and no integrated graphics as pretty much no gamer would run without a discrete video card anyways, but then again without any competition from AMD it probably wasn't worth the engineering effort or the risk of cannibalizing their Xeon offerings.
xchaotic 10y ago
Fingers crossed that this is not a paper release. If AMD can deliver and I can actually buy, I will, to keep the x86 market competitive.

427 points by mrb 10y ago

std_throwaway 10y ago

What about ECC memory? Intels desktop processors fail hard on that feature.

krzyk 10y ago
Why do you need that in desktop env? What's the usecase when it can be beneficial to have expensive ECC RAM instead of the ordinary one? I was always thinking that ECC can prevent blue screens/kernel faults, but I haven't seen those in years on my laptop without ECC.
- eliaspro 10y ago
  Besides many obvious reasons (preventing real bitrot), it's also a security factor acting against attacks like rowhammer.
- mrb 10y ago
  The symptoms of memory corruption are much more varied (and can be much more stubtle) than BSODs. For example they can cause filesystem corruption, any random app crashes (SIGSEGV...), infinite loops, etc.
  - grndzro 10y ago
    That is why it is important after building/tweaking a system to do stability tests. If it runs full out without errors for 24h then you are fine.
    - deaddodo 10y ago
      That's.....not how non-ECC works. Even a little. RAM bitflips randomly, period. It's just how it works. A cosmic ray can hit the memory chip just right and flip it, there's no way to predict or control that no matter how "stable" your machine is. ECC still does the same, it just has a parity bit on each line to confirm against and flip it back, as needed.
      - justincormack 10y ago
        It is how faulty RAM works, and it is sensible to do that.
        Rebelgecko 10y ago
        Not just faulty RAM. As far as I know, all modern RAM is going to have bitflips every once in a while (it even happens with ECC RAM)
        deaddodo 10y ago
        I urge you to educate yourself. All RAM works this way, it's the very reason ECC RAM exists and the exact issue it solves.
    - lisivka 10y ago
      I have no idea, why you downvoted. Stability test is important step of cluster building. If probability of something broken in new server is 10% then probability of something broken in new cluster of 10 servers is 1-(1-0.1)^10 = 65% .
      - masklinn 10y ago
        Because they objection has nothing to do with the original comment. Bitflips are not a RAM stability issue.
        lisivka 10y ago
        Bitflips are not a RAM stability issue, they happen randomly due to radiation, but radiation is not random, especially in my area (I live not far from Chornobyl).
        masklinn 10y ago
        Sure, but you won't solve excessive ambient radiation by running a stress test on your RAM.
        lisivka 10y ago
        A small radioactive («hot») dust particle will not change average radiation level a lot, but may cause problems with memory/cpu. Simple cleaning, by blowing dust out, fixes it. Saw that dozen of times, but years ago.
        EdHominem 10y ago
        Did you use a geiger counter to verify the dust was hot? Would something large enough to cause problems with the ram be large enough to detect?
        flamedoge 10y ago
        er.. you should probably move. Bitflips aren't the only things radiation does. Bitflips in DNA for example.
- kogepathic 10y ago
  > What's the usecase when it can be beneficial to have expensive ECC RAM instead of the ordinary one? Anyone using ZFS will (or should!) care about ECC support. [0] Lots of people build their own NAS/SAN boxes, so ECC support on a desktop CPU at a reasonable price point would be very appreciated. Currently you need to buy specific model CPUs (Celeron or Xeon, IIRC) to get ECC support from Intel. [1] [0] https://serverfault.com/questions/454736/non-ecc-memory-with-zfs-a-stupid-idea https://serverfault.com/questions/454736/non-ecc-memory-with... [1] https://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true&MarketSegment=DT https://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true&MarketS...
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    This is why I ultimately ended up buying an HP ML10 for my FreeNAS box, $300 for a Xeon E3-1220, board and iLO ended up being cheaper than buying a barebones + the CPU (which is just shy of $200 retail). I would like to have something that supports more memory, but to get anything with more sockets or support for larger DIMM's you start looking at the Broadwell-E or Xeon-E5 chips and those are considerably more expensive (my ThinkServer TD340 cost me $700 as an open box with a E5-2403v2 and 8GB of RAM installed). If Zen client chips have full ECC support and can handle 64GB of memory I'll be sold easily on an upgrade for my TrueNAS box, then I'll anxiously await some lower-cost (4/8c) dual-socket server CPU's and swap out my TD340 with some supermicro barebones build.
    - lultimouomo 10y ago
      Do you know how much power does it use? If so, could you add some details (number of HDDs, typical load - light, medium, heavy)? I'm looking into building a home server and would like something decently beefy, not too power hungry and possibly with ECC.
      - snuxoll 10y ago
        I know the ML10 only has a 300W PSU, but I haven't bothered to take a kill-a-watt as the ML10 itself would be outshined by the rest of my lab gear. The E3-1220 is usually idle and frequency scaled back unless something like a ZFS scrub is running, I've got ~45W of PCIe cards (SAS HBA, 10GBe NIC and 4x1GBe NIC), 4x8GB sticks of DDR3 UDIMM's probably uses 12W. I'd say without drives it probably draws no more than 150W on average, unless I'm doing something CPU intensive. My drives all sit in an external SAS enclosure, since I wanted more than 4 drive bays that the LFF expansion bracket provided. Anyway, the ML10 is pretty decent for light-medium work. It's got 4 really fast cores and 32GB of RAM is adequate for most home server use (this was why I got the TD340 though, I've got 72GB in it) - just beware that the Gen1 units don't include the drive bracket so if you want more than a single HDD you have to purchase one or get an external SAS enclosure. EDIT: the ML10 is basically silent too, even under load - I can't hear the fans unless I try (though my SAS enclosure makes up for this by being the loudest bit of kit in my lab).
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  It is kind of funny that we even accept non-ecc memory and say that it is perfectly OK that sometimes a 0 written to memory turns to 1. This would be more understandable if we treated the memory as unreliable but in most cases we don't.
  - dchest 10y ago
    ECC (error-correcting codes) don't completely eliminate errors — they reduce probability of them happening — so even with ECC memory you're still accepting that it's perfectly OK that 0 is sometimes 1, just a lot less likely. No absolutes here, unfortunately.
    - temac 10y ago
      This EXTREMELY reduces the probability that a bit flips happens. And consumer PCs (or mobile devices) are the only devices where there is no ECC memory, RAM is the only place in such devices where there is no error detection and/or correction.
      - vegabook 10y ago
        100%. Everywhere else including spinning disk, SSD, ethernet, TCP/IP there is error correction.
- vegabook 10y ago
  This question comes up constantly. Anybody doing anything with more than 16GB, especially data science (think all the R and Python people, all scientists), anybody running a memory cached data store (all server side people on mongo, redis, etc), and anybody doing finance or engineering, wants ECC. Basically anybody doing anything where data persistence is important, and/or where even the slightest chance of silent corruption is catastrophic. And with Intel you had to spend well north of 1k to get it on an 8/16 system. Hoping Ryzen does it.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    > Anybody doing anything with more than 16GB, especially data science (think all the R and Python people, all scientists) Not sure I agree. Most science datasets (both from simulations and experiments) are sufficiently noisy that if your scientific end results and conclusions change as a result of even thousands of bitflips in your 16 GB of data, you're Doing It Wrong and your article isn't worth the paper it's printed on. (There are probably exceptions, as always, but those working in those few specific subfields should be aware of it.)
    - vegabook 10y ago
      As soon as you are putting a noisy dataset through multiple iterative algos, though, if a bit error hits the control flow code or data structure delimiters, you face the possibility of massive silent, propogating corruption. Imagine your hash table getting a bit error in it (all R lists and Python dicts use them), or an incorrect branch in your code. Admittedly the risk is ultra low, but you have enough problems to worry about to have, in addition, a niggling sensation of RAM-risk as you work. More generally, it's not unreasonable to say that our entire computing paradigm rests on accurate RAM. Above 16GB, the risks just become too big for anybody doing serious work, and not just messing around with prototypes.
      - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        > Admittedly the risk is ultra low Exactly this. The size of your code is positively infinitesimal compared to your data. And unless you're writing your code and then running it exactly once, which is a) even more unlikely and b) bad practice, you'll catch any of those bit-flip errors in your code or data structures. This has been discussed a lot in the literature, especially for GPUs where ECC carries a performance penalty both on speed and available memory, e.g. in this paper where they've tested it on a GPU cluster: http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/papers/2014_03_ECC_AMBER_Paper_10.1002_cpe.3232.pdf http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/papers/2014_03_ECC_AMBER_Paper_1...
- fulafel 10y ago
  Desktop computers are sometimes used for actual work where data integrity is important. Only a small minority of main memory data corruptions lead to OS crashes, mostly the in-memory application or filesystem data just silently gets corrupted.
- std_throwaway 10y ago
  That is like asking: "Why do you wear a seatbelt if you don't even drive a racecar?" Because I care about my data. Data corruption may kill your main storage and the first backup, too.
- abrookewood 10y ago
  There's no need to down vote him. ECC is extremely uncommon on desktops & laptops. Yes, it's always going to be preferential to have it, but it typically comes at a price point that excludes it from these platforms.
  - temac 10y ago
    That's a problem, not a manifesto to continue to live with it... And if the prices difference are large, they are largely artificial. That means if ECC is more widely uses, prices difference will decrease to reasonable levels (at the marginal level, price of RAM with ECC should be ~= 9/8 price of RAM without ECC, and the price of supporting platforms should be only very slightly higher than the price of non-supporting platforms)
    - abrookewood 10y ago
      Fair enough - I'd like to see it happen, just don't think it will.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  ECC RAM isn't that much more expensive despite being less common. It's a bigger premium to go from an i7 to Xeon than to equip the Xeon with ECC RAM. If ECC were manufactured in the volumes of non-ECC it would probably be almost exactly 12.5% more expensive (i.e. just the cost of the extra chip).
  - temac 10y ago
    > It's a bigger premium to go from an i7 to Xeon than to equip the Xeon with ECC RAM. Not exactly. The prices between comparable i7 to Xeon are nearly the same.
    - aidenn0 10y ago
      Wow, I just priced skylake Xeon's vs i7 and prices are very comparable (in some cases the Xeon is even cheaper). Current Xeon v. i7 was significantly different last year when I purchased. I did check and it is still true that with laptops you always pay a premium for Xeon v Core on an equal performance basis (even within the same model).
- mtgx 10y ago
  I believe ECC RAM protects against RowHammer, doesn't it? That would be reason enough to get it.
  - temac 10y ago
    It mitigates. IIRC DDR4 also mitigates. With both at least I'm pretty sure RowHammer is not a security problem anymore, and maybe even the risk of crashing disappear completely (or have an extremely small probability)
- chatterbeak 10y ago
  All of my desktops are Xeons with ECC. Maybe you or your customers don't care, or you just play games and browse the web. But if you're doing something critical, you want to be able to detect and repair a bit flip. Google estimated that 1 bit/GB/year flips. There's 128 GB in our standard desktop built. That would be 2 bit flips/week.
- krzyk 10y ago
  Why the downvotes? It is a legitimate question, because ECC is very uncommon in desktops and laptops. Companies I worked for used those only on the servers where we run critical stuff, not a single developer laptop had ECC.
- tilt_error 10y ago
  Some links that may give more background to the area: Coding Horror To ECC or Not To ECC [1], What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory [2], Memory Errors in Modern Systems [3], and an analysis of memory errors in the entire fleet of servers at Facebook over the course of fourteen months [4]. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ [2] https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf [3] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf [4] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/memory-errors-at-facebook_dsn15.pdf https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/memory-errors-at-faceb...

frik 10y ago

What about Win7 drivers? Even if the Redmond based company doesn't like marketing about it (an understatement) - please support it. (Recently AMD announced Win7 support only to remove the announcement after after a few days.) Even Intel supports Win7 with their most recent CPU as well, even if it's not officially marketed, and one has to search around for the driver.

3825 10y ago
Call me selfish but I think it is more important for them to contribute to GNU/Linux and *bsd projects. I know Microsoft has a contractual obligation to support 7 for a while but I think there's next to zero chance they will reset Windows 10 and go back to Windows 7. You will need to get away from Windows 7 at some point. Better start making preparations now.
- frik 10y ago
  At the moment Windows 7 is number one desktop/notebook OS, it dwarfs all other operating systems (all other Windows versions incl Win8 & Win10, macOS and Linux combined)! Win7 is superb, looks nice and works rock solid and is supported until 2020 or beyond (see XP). And then in 2020s Fuchsia/Android, or what ever OS is available and make sense for end consumer needs. (Of course *nix driver support is important too, AMD knows that)
  - viblo 10y ago
    It seems like your data is outdated. According to Statcounter win 7 have 47.5% of the total windows market, you have to go back almost one year for a point when 7 had more than 50%. Netmarketshare says win 7 have 47.2% of the total market.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    What is Windows 7 share on new devices? The total installed base numbers are meaningless here.
- vedranm 10y ago

mindcrime 10y ago

Wow... I really hope this is true and that it's a sign that AMD have their mojo back. Partly because I have a sentimental favoritism towards AMD, and partly because Intel (and Nvidia) need competition.

vegabook 10y ago
An AMD 40Mhz 80486 was my first build so I also have a soft spot. At the time it was the fatest x86 one could buy. Gees I even remember lusting after the Ati 8514 Ultra, one of the earliest GPU accelerators, clone of IBM's high end workstation standard of the early 90s, as a teenager. Wow I'm getting old. Conversely, though I admire Intel for its central place in advancing computing itself, I cannot love the company because it has shamelessly monetized its monopoly over the past 7 years or so with vast overpricing on higher end lines. I for one am definitely doing a Ryzen 7 build as soon as I can get a chip, and the same goes for Vega. So happy to see AMD back in the game.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  I remember those days and bought AMD then too. There was even a third competitor in those days, Cyrix.
  - makapuf 10y ago
    I remember cyrix being later in the game with its 686/166 Mhz proc which did wonders.
    - jcoffland 10y ago
      Cyrix had a 486.
      - moogly 10y ago
        and 586 and 686: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_6x86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_6x86 They used a Performance Rating, so the "PR166" wasn't actually running at 166 MHz but 133 MHz. The performance rating was meant to show that it was "equivalent to a 166 MHz Pentium".

shmerl 10y ago

Looks like my next desktop build can be all AMD. With radeonsi/radv catching up and upcoming Vega and Ryzen, it looks quite attractive.

lostmsu 10y ago

That does not really make sense. Why would physics simulation and prime calculation be so much slower? I would not trust those benchmarks.

wyager 10y ago
My guess would be branching behavior. The Intel branch predictor could be better for that sort of stuff.
- tmd83 10y ago
  I was weird out by some of those figure too. I thought Ryzen floating point units were smaller than intel so how come its so better in the floating point benchmark. The SSE performance being so out there compared to anyone also looks very interesting. It could be the benchmarks are very focused on some particular kind of operation where Ryzen is very suited/unsuited for. Definitely need real app and more sophisticated benchmark. It looks to be a good processor probably miles ahead of Bulldozer in many department but what in terms of current gen intel in popular workload has to wait for March 2nd.
- Symmetry 10y ago
  That might be true of the physics simulation but I think that's more likely Intel's better vector processing resources. With a prime search the branches involved ought to be a combination of the trivially easy ones that any predictor should be able to handle and the super high entropy ones that no predictor can guess. So if anything doing badly on the prime test is an indication that it was AMD's good branch predictor that was bumping up its score on the other tests.
  - wyager 10y ago
    The test also said that AMD beat out intel on SSE stuff.
kinghajj 10y ago
If those benchmarks make use of AVX, that could be another explanation. Even without those instructions, Zen has less-powerfull FP units than Skylake. One advantage Zen might have is in mixed codes, since it has 10-issue segmented into 6 int and 4 float, while Skylake is 8-issue mixed between int and float.

sufiyan 10y ago

One must bear in mind that wccftech has always been one to leak stuff. Take what you might want to from that. More importantly though, Intel definitely needs competition. This is really good news and I hope it plays out well.

astrodust 10y ago
It'll put price pressure on Intel, that's for sure, but I don't know if it'll make Intel work any faster on boosting performance. They're having enough trouble with process and yield as it is. It's interesting that this time around, if these numbers are true, AMD is not only faster performing and less costly, but also lower power. In the past they've always run hot, noisy, but cheap and fast-enough. Maybe their experience in optimizing GPU production is paying dividends here.

elementalest 10y ago

There is so much hype with AMD atm. In particular sites like WCCFTech have gone almost rabid with hype. My experience is that AMD tend to over promise with their marketing and rumours. So whilst the hype may well be warranted this time, I'm going to wait for the actual reviews to come through and take these leaks with a grain of salt.

qeternity 10y ago
Fair enough, but this is a bit more concrete than marketing fluff.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
clarry 10y ago
To be honest, Intel marketing overpromises too. A lot. I think people are just so used to it happening all the time that it's nothing out of ordinary, so it doesn't even look like hype.

wmf 10y ago

Ryzen leaks conspicuously don't mention gaming or the i7-7700K. AMD may win in a very small market yet lose the mainstream.

anonymfus 10y ago
Gaming performance is irrelevant for top CPUs, the difference appears only in low resolutions and old games.
- crowbahr 10y ago
  I've been looking into a new CPU to play Overwatch because my is 4(670?)K is struggling with even high. Bottlenecks around the gpu pegging all 4 OCd cores out at 100% constantly without even hitting 144fps. It's not just old games that need good cpus these days, though I will admit I'm probably more than just the enthusiast market.
  - grogenaut 10y ago
    Something is wrong with your pc. I'm running ultra gpu settings constant 70fps at 2560x1440. I've got the same cpu, not overclocked at all, and a 980GTX. I'm also running 4 of those monitors off of the gpu, one with the game, one usually with netflix at the same time and I sit at 20% cpu the whole time.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      Yeah, I'm running 1080@120hz on a GTX1080 with a 2500k@4.5ghz on all cores and the GPU maxes out before the CPU. Google around a bit for OW competitive settings and you should be able to achieve something similar :)
      - nottorp 10y ago
        The guy you're replying to looks like he wants 144 fps on 4K. Which is prolly not doable with current hardware.

runeks 10y ago

Not a CPU expert here, but isn't this a comparison of AMD next gen to Intel current gen? Won't Intel have a new CPU out, too, when the Ryzen is actually released?

wmf 10y ago
Intel's new CPUs tend to be 5% faster at the same price so Ryzen should be competitive with Skylake-X.
kijin 10y ago
Ryzen is not "next gen" anymore. It will be released in less than two weeks. Not enough time for Intel to come up with anything groundbreaking.
mrb 10y ago
Ryzen becomes current gen in 11 days (March 2nd release.) Intel would need to update their "current gen" (Skylake, Kaby Lake) CPUs with 8-core models to be competitive but for some reason Skylake and Kaby Lake have been stuck with a max of 4 cores... which is why these benchmarks are compared to an 8 core Broadwell.
grndzro 10y ago
Not really. All Intel has are Ticks. Incremental upgrades for the next few years at least.
deaddodo 10y ago
These release in less than two weeks. Intel's "current" gen released less than a month ago. Seems pretty fair to me.
ksec 10y ago
The current roadmap suggest Intel will get YET another 14nm tweaks called Coffeelake on desktop, which is basically the same arch as Skylake. And Next year it will be Cannonlake, which is 10nm of Skylake. Intel has been pretty much milking the Desktop Market for as long as they could.

orliesaurus 10y ago

Execs at Intel ain't gonna be too worried, they probably have signed contracts that lock partners up for many years to come

reitzensteinm 10y ago
In a world where progress has slowed down, being two to three years behind Intel means you're practically interchangeable. This chip isn't an abnormality, it's a sign of things to come, and there's no way it isn't keeping Intel's execs up at night.
- vegabook 10y ago
  Amd is prepping a 32 core server beast. Considering Intel just launched a 24 core chip costing 9000 dollars, and considering the AMD IPC is looking good, Intel execs must be gnawing down to their elbows at the prospect of AMD walking in to that market at 50% pricing deltas. Over to GloFo though on process. That appears to be the a possible achilles heel here for AMD.
  - deaddodo 10y ago
    AMD isn't limited to GloFo. There are rumors they're utilizing Samsung, as well, since it's also 14nm. And they could pivot to TSMC for 10nm, once Fab 15b is operational.
  - frou_dh 10y ago
    32 core beast makes me think of a chip the size of a drink mat. Presumably it does fit in the AM4 socket though.
    - deleted 10y ago
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  - beagle3 10y ago
    > Intel execs must be gnawing down to their elbows at the prospect of AMD walking in to that market at 50% pricing deltas. That's not how it works. If they think AMD can make a dent, they'll mark their chips down to be competitive (for whatever definition of competitive they use, which is probably supported by data, though it might not be YOUR definition). Poor Intel will have to deal with only 100% profit instead of the 300% or so they've become accustomed to. Intel got a knock out from AMD some 15 years ago. Enough people working at Intel still remember it will enough. This aspect of history is very unlikely to repeat or even to rhyme.

illuminati1911 10y ago

Competition please! Intel/Nvidia monopoly has brought prices of CPUs and especially GPUs to insane levels.

msimpson 10y ago
Ditto. Here's hoping the Ryzen will pan out and force Intel's hand.

nottorp 10y ago

More importantly for some, it's a 95W AMD part vs a 140W Intel part. If the power delta stays the same even for mainstream parts, does this mean AMD will become a good quiet option too? By quiet I mean "I can't hear it at night" not "I can't hear it over the music". Edit: Also, I think data centers these days are limited in density by power delivery and cooling. Even a 25W delta adds up when you're talking about thousands of servers.

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hocuspocus 10y ago
The 65W versions should be trivial to cool silently, a $40 heatsink with a single low speed 12cm fan (500~600 rpm) does the job well with my CPUs. For a 95W TDP you might need to spend a little more (like on those big Noctua heatsinks with 14cm fans), but silent air-cooling is definitely possible. (Water is always trickier, AIO kits will typically be a little noisier due to the pump).
- Lev1a 10y ago
  AFAIK the Ryzen 1700 (TDP 65W) is supposed to come with a "Wraith" cooler from AMD and those new ones are apparently better than their shitty older counterparts from the Vishera days (I had one and I'm glad I switched to a near silent Arctic cooler).
  - auxym 10y ago
    Same here, the Artic Cooler was 20$ and the difference is dramatic. Cooler temps all around and near silent at modest loads, where the stock cooler was annoyingly loud.
    - jandrese 10y ago
      Worse, loud fans seem to fail the most. I've always been annoyed when a $75 CPU comes with a $.25 fan that is going to crap out in a year or two.

kayoone 10y ago

Take everything WCCFTECH writes with a pinch of salt, all of this could still be fake. The Ryzen hype train is on full steam and i really hope they deliver, but i'll wait for official benchmarks. In the last few years, more often than not AMD hardware leaks have shown potential that in the end wasn't met. Things look good for Ryzen though, maybe they can finally make 6-8 Core CPUs mainstream.

nindalf 10y ago
Which website would you consider "official"? Anandtech?
- chinhodado 10y ago
  By "official" I think he meant the benchmarks done by the websites themselves, using proper methodologies. In this article the benchmark was submitted by a user, using synthetic tests from a single application.
- kayoone 10y ago
  this article is based on images some anonymous user posted on chinese forums, so by official i just mean placed like anandtech or techpowerup that do their own benchmarking in a professional environment.
sharpercoder 10y ago
My experience is they actually do deliver promises, yet always too late. It was the case with the 120Mhz 80486, the K6-2, the Athlon, the Opteron, and I'm just getting started. All about as fast as their marketing claimed, but simply too late so the nextgen Intel caught up for the most part.
- digitalzombie 10y ago
  Uh... did you forget about Bulldozer? It did bad compare to what their marketing team was telling their users. The past two or so architecture underperform what the marketing them had in the slides.

ndesaulniers 10y ago

Any thoughts on the huge discrepancy in SSE performance? Something seems wrong there.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, these chips only have a 128-bit SIMD unit (either for power or for space savings?) and so 256-bit SIMD executes half as fast as it would on Intel.
- acqq 10y ago
  But if I read the picture properly, AMD appears to be 8 times(!) faster than anything else: http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-CPU-Mark-SSE-Benchmark-WM-840x370.jpg http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/AMD-Ryzen... That seems to be untypically good, in the market where the new generations brought typically 10-20%. I still wouldn't say it's impossible, as, for example, Intel had (apparently until Sandy Bridge) much slower NaN handling than AMD, at least without SSE2. So maybe AMD discovered some weak point like that. But until I read some explanation, it does seem to be too good...
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    Ah. Yeah, that looks impossible.

Philipp__ 10y ago

I really want AMD to succeed! Intel's lack of progress and monopolistic behavior have become embarrassing. Competition is best for the consumer. I am really thinking of making all AMD rig after all chips are out.

ksec 10y ago

One of the best thing about Zen is that it "should" substantially changes the dynamic of Cloud / VPS hosting. High Memory Instances are Cheaper due to support of 8 Memory Channels. Lower End Instances could be cheaper due to Lower Cost per Core Count.

chx 10y ago

These last few years Intel was much working much more on bring power consumption down than ... anything else? The performance changed little: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review/4 http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs... 20%? But now the 15W U series mobile chips deliver the same performance as 35W M chips in the Sandy/Ivy Bridge era which is quite impressive. This, of course, leads to a tremendous advantage in server CPUs -- if you have capable cores at a lower wattage, you can add more of them. Hence the 14 core E5-2690V4 @ 135W at 2.6Ghz vs 8 core E5-2690 @ 135W at 2.9GHz. So in just four generations from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell, no TDP change, roughly the same or a bit better single thread execution but almost double the core count. If you are willing to drop a tiny bit your base clock further and your TDP higher, perhaps 10% less single thread performance, you can get a hulk of a 24 core E7-8890V4 at 165W. And that's where the big profit is -- currently. Now some unfounded nonsense: what if Intel is not pulling these crazy prices out of their sorry behind but there's in fact some reality behind them? It just bothers me that the price of the 24 core chip is so close to the 6*6 times of a 4 core chip. It could be a coincidence.

Matthias247 10y ago
I think you sum it up quite good: The thing that Intel did mostly was putting more cores on the chips. However that happenend only for the server lines. With Sandybridge and before the top desktop and server chips were nearly identical, now there's a huge difference. Which also means that during the last years the performance of desktop CPUs increased barely. That might be ok from the point of view that normal users would mostly not benefit from more than 4 cores. However assuming that developing and manufacturing the top-end model of each generation costs roughtly the same the new generation desktop models should probably be a lot cheapter than they are currently sold for.
- barrkel 10y ago
  There's been a fork in CPU design goals. Before, the fastest chip was the goal. Now, we have fast single-threaded vs high parallel throughput - and while there's a spectrum between them, the extremes matter, it's not a case of a Goldilocks solution. Consumer loads are mostly limited by single threaded performance, though software is increasingly written for more cores. Best choice for a consumer used to be dual core, now it's probably quad core with thermal limited boosting on less parallel workloads. It's only prosumers doing lots of transcoding or rendering, or CPU intensive VMs, that typically benefit from increasing cores above 4. Whereas the server space prizes throughput and much of its workload is trivially parallelizable. On the server, higher single core speed mostly just decreases latency for small tasks; if you're happy with the latency, you can get more cores working on shared memory and potentially get big wins in perf. There are diminishing returns though, scaling up boxes is expensive and unless it's being forced by software licensing or architectural models, things like Hadoop and Spark for spreading the load across a whole cluster are increasingly attractive. This helps solve the I/O throughput problem too.

alanfranzoni 10y ago

I'd really like to see what AMD can do in the ultrabook and notebook segment. Good mobile CPUs with a good integrated GPU could really be a killer feature. I don't know whether the desktop segment is enough for AMD to reboot its cpu brand (although the server market is a more interesting beast).

arjie 10y ago

Would have been an interesting validation to put the i7-2700K in there. It was nearer the 8350 and would have provided a good baseline to see that the benchmark is actually useful. As it stands, I'm a little sceptical (but also very hopeful, since I'm buying desktop hardware soon).

vegabook 10y ago

AMD has been really smart. Freesync is a huge success. It's outperforming Nvidia by about 20% on Vulkan and DX12 on similar hardware because game makers can use their optimized code from the AMD-equipped consoles. On Ryzen, it appears strategically to have reduced the silicon usage from AVX in order to improve mainstream performance and increase cache, while maintaining a smaller (and therefore cheaper) die than Intel's increasingly bloated silicon. It all points to a company, back to the wall, really fighting its corner, optimizing its much smaller resources. If Ryzen and Vega work out as expected, I hope the people responsible at AMD are in for big rewards. BTW the stock has ramped 200% in the past year. To get an idea of how smart AMD people are, this video instructive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwcUMZLvjYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwcUMZLvjYw

agumonkey 10y ago
AMD last decade has been so stressful even from the public POV, I'm surprised they managed to survive up to Zen. If ryzen is enough of a success this will be heaven for the company. I wish them all the best.

jjm 10y ago

If I were Apple, I'd jump on this. Maybe then battery life will be better. And hopefully that famed form fitted battery comes out of the woods.

Nokinside 10y ago

I'm trying to put this into perspective. AMD having temporary edge over Intel has happened before. Remember when AMD had Athlon in 1999 and they made huge $1 billion in profits. Intel's response has always been the same. They cut their profit margins and start selling chips cheaper. They undercut AMD with volume and price and suddenly AMD is in the doghouse again struggling. AMD's best efforts can cut into Intel's profits, but Intel's response is to remove all profits from AMD until it's left behind. Just compare these two: Revenue/gross profit/gross profit margin (Sebtember 2016) AMD $1.1B/$930 mil/4.5% INEL $60B/$16B /60+% Even if you add $5.5B revenue from GLOBALFOUNDRIES (manufacturer of AMD chips) to make AMD camp comparison more relevant, there is large difference.

tw04 10y ago
>Intel's response has always been the same. They cut their profit margins and start selling chips cheaper. They undercut AMD with volume and price and suddenly AMD is in the doghouse again struggling. AMD's best efforts can cut into Intel's profits, but Intel's response is to remove all profits from AMD until it's left behind. The last time Intel did that it was through illegal tactics - unlikely they'll get away with it a second time. https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/intel-loses-eu-antitrust-appeal/?ncid=rss_truncated https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/intel-loses-eu-antitrust...
- Nokinside 10y ago
  Doing illegal is just optimization. Intel can undercut AMD lawfully if it wants. Instead of hidden rebates, Intel can openly cut prices.
  - dman 10y ago
    That first line is amazingly brazen. If a movie is made about Intels monopolistic practices that fully belongs as a dialog spoken by the Intel CEO.
    - Nokinside 10y ago

angry_octet 10y ago

Looking forward to the day when reviews include HPCG (the replacement for LINPACK) as a benchmark, with a little animation showing how hot the different bits of the core run.

arcanus 10y ago
Should be soon. HPCG is a memory bound application so I doubt it runs the system as hot as HPL (high performance linpack)

asdads 10y ago

Sadly for those of us involved with floating point stuff, Intel is still king (and Nvidia is still the Queen).

ekr 10y ago

I don't know why I get the feeling that most of this advancement is the result of Jim Keller's contribution. Surely, AMD must have other engineers capable of similar achievements, right?

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

I can't help but feel AMD is shooting the puck where the goal was, but won't be in the next few years. We desparately need GPU-like devices for advanced ML/AI. Even intel knows this and is investing huge in that area to be competitive against NVIDIA[1]. I predict in the future that AMD will come to dominate the home/enthusiasts CPU market, and intel's low-power CPUs will dominate enterprise along with whoever comes out with a CUDA competitor. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2017/02/13/inside-intel-corporations-artificial-intelligence.aspx?client=safari https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2017...

muyuu 10y ago
AMD already do that, but no it's not like ML/AI is the main market right now. Nowhere near.

tetraodonpuffer 10y ago

not wasting a lot of silicon space on an integrated graphics solution seems to be a big win in terms of increasing the effective power of the CPU without increasing the price as much since in the end the die will likely be smaller. I am surprised Intel has never come up with some more gaming oriented i7s with more cores and no integrated graphics as pretty much no gamer would run without a discrete video card anyways, but then again without any competition from AMD it probably wasn't worth the engineering effort or the risk of cannibalizing their Xeon offerings.

xchaotic 10y ago

Fingers crossed that this is not a paper release. If AMD can deliver and I can actually buy, I will, to keep the x86 market competitive.