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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

• vxxzy 10y ago
  Wow. AMD has really pulled through on this one. They are really giving Intel a run for their money. This is going to be great for consumers. What is interesting is the HUGE jump in multi-threaded performance on AMD. Very interesting.
  • yread 10y ago
    But it's still losing in every web and office single threaded benchmark. EDIT: compared to 7700k that costs about the same
    • M_Grey 10y ago
      Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but so what? You don't buy a high-end graphics card because office or websites are chugging...
    • Analemma_ 10y ago
      They're coming in at half the price of equivalent Intel chips. They don't need to win, necessarily (which I didn't think was going to happen), they need to be competitive for a lot less money. EDIT, in response to the other edit: sorry about that, I wasn't sure which comparison you were making. Still, the difference is slim enough that if I were in the market, I'd go with this one just to put the heat on Intel.
      • Vanayad 10y ago
        You do have to consider that this is an 8 core, and more and more applications are being developed with this in mind. Whoever still thinks that Single threaded performance is the most important, lives in the past.
        • anthonybsd 10y ago
          Consumer applications? Doubt it. Not a whole lot of consumer-oriented applications parallelize that well to be honest.
          • qaq 10y ago
            look at how many threads your Chrome is running
            • yborg 10y ago
              All but one set (for the active tab) of which are probably idle or effectively so most of the time.
            • whyever 10y ago
              Only Servo parallelizes single-page rendering as far as I know.
              • anentropic 10y ago
                but they're moving in that direction
            • MLR 10y ago
              This review has a CPU web test section, you can see performance is mostly a function of IPC and clock speed.
          • deleted 10y ago
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          • caf 10y ago
            Even crusty old Microsoft Excel parallelises worksheet recalculation.
            • smitherfield 10y ago
              Sure, but Excel is presumably one of the most optimized (in terms of the amount of money and brainpower devoted to optimizing it) applications in existence.
      • RUG3Y 10y ago
        I'm definitely going to be building a PC with one of these CPUs some time this year. I've been holding off on an upgrade because I couldn't justify the cost. This is a lot more reasonable.
    • O5vYtytb 10y ago
      Who buys a $350+ processor with 8C/16T for web/office?
      • washadjeffmad 10y ago
        Universities and government institutions that haven't spent all of their funding by year-end, for one.
      • toss1941 10y ago
        Quad cores are the absolute minimum I would want for a standard office machine, unless it's only for a handful of basic applications. My latest work laptop is a quad core with 32 GB of RAM for running multiple VM's, but they couldn't give me an SSD which ends up wasting at least a few hours of productivity a week.
        • O5vYtytb 10y ago
          Right, I guess that's my point. The minimal gains in CPU are widely offset by upgrading other components like a SSD. So what if Ryzen is a few percent slower on a javascript benchmark? Does this actually noticeably affect any apps that people actually use?
      • flukus 10y ago
        It's 2017, we need that just to read a website these days.
    • simias 10y ago
      By a pretty small margin compared to equivalent Intel CPUs from what I've seen[1]. And the ryzen chips are a whole lot cheaper and beat Intel for parallel tasks. I'm about to buy a beefy machine for FPGA development, I'm definitely considering AMD. Seems like I'd get better performance for a much lower price. I'm still waiting for more in-depth reviews though. [1] http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2017/03/ryzen_cinebench_r15_037_single_threaded-100711469-orig.jpg http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2017/03/ryzen_ci...
      • FullyFunctional 10y ago
        It's interesting that you'd mention that workload as it's traditionally been completely single threaded (where it matters), and exceedingly memory intensive. Do you have first hand experience with how well it scales with cores?
    • geezerjay 10y ago
      > But it's still losing in every web and office single threaded benchmark. Web and office? Single-threaded? Why are these benchmarks, specially in 2018?
      • matthewmacleod 10y ago
        Because people still buy new computers and use those applications on them – that's why single-thread performance is (for the moment at least) still important. I do understand where you're coming from, but real-world performance is important, especially when that world is imperfect.
        • floatboth 10y ago
          For these applications, any modern desktop CPU is enough, and enough is all you need for them. People browse the web and do office tasks just fine on tiny 10W "Ultrabook" CPUs.
          • contingencies 10y ago
            Just this week I bought three systems for PXE-boot office use at http://infinite-food.com/ http://infinite-food.com/ and settled on Kaby Lake G3950 dual core Celerons with integrated Intel HD graphics. Here in China a whole mini-ITX system (including case, 180W power supply, 8GB DDR4 2133 RAM, G3950 CPU, motherboard, keyboard and mouse but not screen) is ~USD$174 (inc. parts shipping). I think Intel's integrated GPUs are still very attractive at the lower end of the market.
        • geezerjay 10y ago
          > Because people still buy new computers and use those applications on them – that's why single-thread performance is (for the moment at least) still important. That's a load of bullshit. No one ever complained that the web is unbrowsable or an excel spreadsheet is unworkable without a high-end boutique processor. Those benchmarks are simply a load of bullshit that evaluate something that is utterly irrelevant.
    • raverbashing 10y ago
      Yeah, like I'm going to buy a new computer to open PDF files, not to play games, render graphics or do complex simulations
      • yread 10y ago
        games you say? It's up to 30% slower here https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-Review-Now-and-Zen/Gaming-Performance https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
        • snovv_crash 10y ago
          It's also up to 30% faster. That's how variance works.
          • Asooka 10y ago
            Well yeah but will you buy an alternate CPU that might be faster or might be slower in some games, or will you buy standard Intel, for which every game was definitely tested and will run with standard performance?
            • phamilton 10y ago
              Frame of reference fallacy going on here. One could just as easily say the Intel is 30% faster or slower.
            • raverbashing 10y ago
              It's been more than 10 years since I've read such an uninformed comment
            • nottorp 10y ago
              Your standard Intel is running a 64 bit instruction set designed by umm... AMD. Perhaps you'd like to restrict yourself to 32 bit software just to be standards conformant?
          • 10y ago
    • reitzensteinm 10y ago
      But so does a 6900K, and that costs a fortune. The Ryzen quads will come. I'm not at all sure what your point is here.
    • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > But it's still losing in every web and office single threaded benchmark. By ~15% compared to >160% for Bulldozer. And this is day zero before any applications have been optimized for the new microarchitecture, compared with Core which everything has been targeting for more than a decade. They did good.
      • Tom1971 10y ago
        I don't think spending time and effort to optimize code for Ryzen will be time well spent. Would you do it if you had the choice between that or adding new money making features/fixing bugs?
        • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
          > Would you do it if you had the choice between that or adding new money making features/fixing bugs? Of course I would, because people are going to benchmark my software against my competitor's software and choose the one that runs faster on their hardware. Especially if my software is a compiler and people are benchmarking the programs it produces against other compilers, which is where most of the optimizing actually happens these days.
        • phamilton 10y ago
          This is a compiler optimization, not an application optimization. I'd certainly add -march=zen as a compiler flag for my application. As for the priorities of the compiler devs, I think it will get some love.
          • clarry 10y ago
            Maybe it is time to run Gentoo again.
        • JamesMcMinn 10y ago
          Give compilers some time and the optimizations will be "free" to developers. Besides, if your application is one where performance is a serious issue, then you are going to spend some time optimizing rather than adding features. For some applications, performance is a feature.
    • olegkikin 10y ago
      But it wins in every case where performance truly matters: multi-threaded calculations, archiving, encoding. You know, the things that actually do take up time. Do you really care if your webpage renders for half a second longer?
      • teilo 10y ago
        No, it doesn't. Their hyperthreading model is clearly not as good as Intel's. Take a look at the Handbrake tests, which take full advantage of hyperthreading. The 7700K, with half the cores, is only a few frames/sec. behind. If I was after encoding performance, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen. If I was after rendering performance, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen. Throw an mid-range nVidia on there for OpenCL, and the only CPU that makes sense for that price range is the 7700K.
        • slantyyz 10y ago
          From everything I've seen, the Ryzen's main appeal is bang for the buck. If you're after pure performance, then you simply go with the best for your use case, whether it is Ryzen or not. If you're on a tight budget, however, things get interesting.
          • deleted 10y ago
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          • Geee 10y ago
            It's not so clear, because 7700K offers more bang for the buck in single-threading cases, which is more important in typical computer use.
            • slantyyz 10y ago
              > It's not so clear, because 7700K offers more bang for the buck in single-threading cases hence, "things get interesting"
        • cynic_ 10y ago
    • jdietrich 10y ago
      The R7 1700 is within shouting distance of the 6900k in most serious tasks - rendering, encoding, compilation etc. A $330 65w CPU is a credible alternative to an $1100 140w CPU. That is absolutely remarkable. The cherry on the cake is that the cheapest AM4 motherboards are half the price of the cheapest 2011-v3 boards. For the first time in a decade, AMD are seriously competing at the high end. That's great news for everyone except Intel.
      • slantyyz 10y ago
        I'm hoping things get more interesting when the Ryzen Mobile chips come out later in the year.
        • MLR 10y ago
          The Zen based APU platform is going to cause real problems for Intel in the laptop/ultrabook market, Ryzen's power consumption looks very low and their iGPU technology is years ahead of Intel's.
          • slantyyz 10y ago
            >> The Zen based APU platform is going to cause real problems for Intel in the laptop/ultrabook market Technically this is true, but unlike the desktop market where you can buy stuff in pieces, it really depends on how the laptop manufacturers adopt them. As in how fast they show up in product lines, and in which laptop segments they show up in. If, for example, Intel gives laptop manufacturers pricing incentives (legally or not) to stick with their chips, it may not cause any problems at all with respect to actual customer purchases.
      • karpodiem 10y ago
        and this is exactly why I'm getting one. Cheap, power efficient, eight cores. It may not win everything, but it works for me.
        • lostmsu 10y ago
    • mrb 10y ago
      Or, seen another way (better representation of the overall reality): The 7700k is losing in all aspects below w.r.t. the Ryzen 7 1800X, except absolute single-threaded perf. Intel is losing in: - absolute multi-threaded performance - relative multi-threaded performance per $ - memory bandwidth - L3-cache bound workloads (AMD has twice more L3) - price of motherboards
      • dfrey 10y ago
        You left out the tiny detail that the 7700k is $150USD cheaper than the 1800X.
        • mrb 10y ago
          True. But IMHO justified and worth it because AMD beats Intel in all these areas.
        • r00fus 10y ago
          What about when you factor in mobo costs?
      • keldaris 10y ago
        I'll have to disagree on a few of the points on that list: > - relative multi-threaded performance per $ Highly depends on the particular workload. Given the few benchmarks we have right now, it seems to go 50-50 once you factor in the lower price of the 7700k. At the very least, this one is close. > - memory bandwidth Seems about equal from the measurements I've seen (the theoretical numbers are irrelevant). > - L3-cache bound workloads (AMD has twice more L3) Cache-size bound workloads to be precise. Cache latency still seems higher, even on L3. Overall, the 1800X seems to make the entire Broadwell-E series redundant on price/performance (at least at current price), no argument there. Against the 7700k, however, it's a very interesting decision, entirely based on the distribution of your workloads. And if Intel drops the prices on Kaby Lake, the value equation can change very quickly indeed.
        • mrb 10y ago
          Ryzen 7 1800X unambiguously beats the 7700k on memory bandwidth: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_processor_review,13.html http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_proce...
    • tomku 10y ago
      And? Intel's $1,600 6950X loses to their own $170 i3-7350K in single-threaded benchmarks. When you pay extra for a CPU with more cores, you almost always get less single-threaded compute because of power/heat/design constraints forcing the clock speed down. Dual cores will often beat quad-cores, which will almost always beat hex/octo-cores. What's happening here is that AMD has priced Ryzen so inexpensively that it actually broke the usual market segmentation by driving high-thread-count workstation CPUs (usually $1k+) into the same price range as high-end gaming CPUs (~$300-400). Think of it as being able to buy an industrial dump truck for the same price as a pickup truck. The dump truck is clearly a better value in terms of hauling capacity, but most people would be far better off with a pickup truck for their daily traveling. AMD's pickup truck (the 1400X) doesn't launch until later this year. The 7700K will probably still beat it on single-threaded workloads due to the difference in clock speed, but it should get you most of the way there for substantially less money, around $200 if the leaks are accurate.
      • jrockway 10y ago
        I think Intel severely underclocks the 6950X by default, so that it fits within the stated TDP of 140W with all 10 cores at full load. If you have adequate cooling, it is very easy to overclock. I think I ended up at 4.2GHz for 10 core loads, 4.4GHz for 4 cores.
    • lallysingh 10y ago
      I think people run enough browser tabs (+ their office suite + background OS tasks) where the core difference will outshine the single-core speed. It's not hard to overwhelm 4 real cores.
    • ascendantlogic 10y ago
      Ryzen 7 chips focus on heavily multithreaded work. When you are dealing with every day apps and games you are more concerned with IPC (instructions per cycle) and I'm sure we'll see better performance in that arena with Ryzen 3 and 5
  • rbanffy 10y ago
    > What is interesting is the HUGE jump in multi-threaded performance on AMD. Very interesting. Indeed. Single threaded performance, however, seems bad. Virtual cores most likely share less of the actual core than on Intel parts, allowing one to compete less with the other and get more done. On my i7 laptop, on anything more demanding, I see half the "cores" idling, probably because one is using the actual underlying core while the other is waiting. Still, while AMD obviously did a good job, it will not make the Intel guys lose any sleep for now. The server parts are another story. If they manage to reliably outperform Xeons (even if it's only on a per watt basis), it'll be fun to watch.
    • pmalynin 10y ago
      >"half the "cores" idling" Right, thats exactly what happens with Hyper-Threading. If you can fully utilize the physical core, Hyper-Threading can't do much.
      • rbanffy 10y ago
        It seems the AMD parts can squeeze a little more work from the two threads, judging by the multi-threeaded benchmarks, than competing Intel parts.
    • deepnotderp 10y ago
      Server supplies ~60% of Intel's total profits.
    • michaelmrose 10y ago
      Hyperthreading is not a virtual core and as it doesn't exist as a separate core its hard for it to be idling. Bad analogies make for less than adequate understanding.
      • rbanffy 10y ago
        They are also called "logical cores" (I think Intel documents prefers "logical" and Sun - they invented the concept - prefers "virtual"). One logical core can appear to be idling to the OS if the parts of the physical core are in use by another (SPARC and POWER go up to 8) logical core (as it's resource starved). It seems, from the benchmarks, the AMD parts have less shared resources between logical cores (or a finer granularity for allocating) than the i7 in my laptop.
• bike4beer 10y ago
  Still Waiting for a real person that has a 'real chip' that has tested this thing and bench marked it for 'real'. In so many years, I have never seen so much marketing where nothing actually exists in peoples hands, well since the introduction of 'segway', that took months of hype before we found out what it really was. If it be true that this chip is what they say, then when will we see real benchmarks by real people? They're saying "March 5", yet the marketing stuff makes it appears that AMD already won, hell they're not even at the starting gate, hey I'm rooting for AMD, I wish this all to be true, but I'm not spending +$1,000 bucks for a new MB & Ryzen, until I know for a fact this thing is real.
• timdafweak 10y ago
  Impressive! While it doesn’t utterly destroy Intel, AMD does offer a MUCH better price/performance ratio. Things have gotten much more interesting indeed. Intel’s dominance is being called into question. As a result, we all profit.
  • api 10y ago
    On the other end ARM is also nibbling at Intel with AARCH64 chips that are closing on lower-end Core performance and building in server and high-end workstation grade features like virtualization.
    • arcanus 10y ago
      Yep. And nvidia and amd are hurting Intel in terms of servers which are moving in many cases towards GPU for acceleration. Very interesting times in Silicon.
      • tutanchamun 10y ago
        Yeah, and AMD is the only company who can offer a high performance GPU together with a high performance x86 CPU. And APU's with HBM of course. Looking forward to what they can achieve now that they seem to be back (although most of the financial success probably lies with the server CPU Naples).
        • Symmetry 10y ago
          One can hope that in the long run we'll see more things with a SPRI-V back end and more libraries in that space to put AMD and NVidia GPUs on more equal footing.
        • jabl 10y ago
          They seem to be planning something like http://www.computermachines.org/joe/publications/pdfs/hpca2017_exascale_apu.pdf http://www.computermachines.org/joe/publications/pdfs/hpca20... Something like that could be a monster for HPC & ML type tasks. Provided AMD gets their software and tooling up to par; Nvidia doesn't rule HPC/ML because their GPU's are leaps and bounds ahead of AMD, but because CUDA is.. If so, might explain why they went with a (relatively) gimped vector FPU for Zen compared to Intel offerings (particularly the soon arriving Skylake Xeons with 512-bit wide SIMD).
• dmm 10y ago
  > ... this means that the base memory controller in the silicon should be able to support ECC. We know that it is disabled for the consumer parts, but nothing has been said regarding the Pro parts. ECC should be a standard feature. If you don't want it you don't have to use it but to disable simply for market segmentation is lame.
  • octoploid 10y ago
    Anandtech is wrong and ECC is not disabled at all. For example all ASRock AM4 boards support ECC memory.
    • detaro 10y ago
      Source? Has Asrock explicitly stated that it works with all CPUs, or just that all their boards can do it (IF the CPU also supports it)?
    • Asooka 10y ago
      Is that buffered ECC or unbuffured ECC? Because last time I checked, my AM3 board had support only for unbuffured, which is really hard to find and I just didn't bother.
      • Qantourisc 10y ago
        unbuffured Example: http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLI/index.asp#Specification http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLI/index.asp#S...
      • throwawayish 10y ago
        I don't know why you're being downvoted, your comment is accurate. Consumer hardware traditionally does not support registered memory, which is (reg ECC) the standard for server hardware hence cheap, while unbuf, unreg ECC is rather rare. AM4/Zen is no exception, no DDR4R for consumers.
        • Tsagadai 10y ago
• robotmay 10y ago
  The 1700 is really well placed, often seems to beat the i7 7700k in benchmarks whilst drawing less power and costing roughly the same/cheaper. Probably even better value if the stock coolers are as solid as they sound. Definitely going to be a popular chip with gamers (I'm very tempted myself). Hopefully more software starts to make use of multiple cores more effectively. It's not like it's a new feature of chips any more.
  • MikusR 10y ago
    Which review has power usage comparison?
    • jhasse 10y ago
      computerbase.de has here: https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-1700-test/6/ https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-17... R7 1700 i7 7700K Cinebench 120 W 112 W Prime 95 128 W 145 W
      • tutanchamun 10y ago
        Doesn't Prime95 use AVX2 and FMA3 since version 28.5, which pushes Intel's power consumption higher? Can that be disabled?
        • jhasse 10y ago
          Yes, that's probably the reason for the increased power consumption. But Ryzen also supports AVX2, doesn't it?
          • tutanchamun 10y ago
            Ah yeah, remembered it false. I thought Ryzen had no AVX2, but actually it has it, but at half the speed.
• daxfohl 10y ago
  Do they ever do compiler speed tests or boot speed tests? Which of the existing ones would be most similar?
  • simias 10y ago
    Boot speed in my experience is mostly i/o bound so I doubt it makes a significant difference over a similar Intel chip. Is boot performance still an issue nowadays anyway? Since I've switched to SSDs all my computers boot up in a few seconds (Linux or Windows). And if you hibernate instead of shutting down it's even faster. Compiler tests sound more interesting to me, I'm looking forward to those benchmarks.
    • baq 10y ago
      yeah kernel compilation, .net compilation, js linting, babeling etc. - those would be quite interesting.
    • majewsky 10y ago
      Boot speed is not even IO-bound for me, it's crappy-firmware-bound. `systemd-analyze plot` shows a total boot time of ~15 seconds, of which ~10 seconds is spent on the firmware, ~3 seconds on the kernel and hardware initialization, and 1-2 seconds on the entire userland including desktop session.
    • daxfohl 10y ago
      I'm interested in boot just for curiosity's sake. With the new PCIe SSDs, I wonder if CPU may actually be the bottleneck.
  • __voidptr__ 10y ago
    Hardware.fr just published some compiler benchmarks: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/956-12/compilation-visual-studio-mingw-w64-gcc.html http://www.hardware.fr/articles/956-12/compilation-visual-st...
  • dvdgsng 10y ago
    Regarding boot speed, here is quote from Computerbase: Boards initialization takes forever For the last weeks Computerbase had access to different mainboards [...]. They had an extremely long init process in common: even with the latest BIOS it took up to 30s to get to the POST screen. Obviously this needs optimization. ----- German: Die Boards initialisieren ewig ComputerBase konnte die letzte Woche auf drei verschiedene Mainboards zugreifen, neben den X370-Varianten von Asus und MSI auch auf das Gigabyte GA-AB350-Gaming 3 mit Chipsatz B350. Allen gemein war auch mit dem letzten BIOS der extrem langwierige Initialisierungsprozess: Bis der Post-Screen erscheint, vergeht über eine halbe Minute. Auch hier gibt es offensichtlich noch deutlichen Optimierungsbedarf. ---- https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-1700-test/2/ https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-17...
• tcoppi 10y ago
  They did what they needed to do, get close enough performance and undercut on price. Should be a winner until Intel makes their next move.
• noipv4 10y ago
  The proof is in the pudding. Competition is back. Intel has started slashing prices of its latest CPUs left right and center.
  • sounds 10y ago
    I'm actually curious which prices have changed. A quick google turned up an article claiming prices were being cut [1] but looking at the full price history tells a different story: http://imgur.com/a/vDHAv http://imgur.com/a/vDHAv It looks like Intel's retail channel partners have a lot of inventory still in the pipeline. Prices are still within the bounds of the second half 2016. My best guess is the retail channel partners will be the most hurt by any slowdown of Intel CPU sales. [1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-cpu-prices-drop-ryzen-launch/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-cpu-prices-drop...
    • noipv4 10y ago
      http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-is-dropping-processor-prices.html http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-is-dropping-processor... http://www.microcenter.com/product/472529/Core_i7-7700K_Kaby_Lake_42_GHz_LGA_1151_Boxed_Processor http://www.microcenter.com/product/472529/Core_i7-7700K_Kaby...
      • sounds 10y ago
        Ok, I added the i7-7700K, but I only see a $10 price drop: http://imgur.com/a/vDHAv http://imgur.com/a/vDHAv
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• kayoone 10y ago
  Seems like gamers in general are a little disappointed, for everyone else this CPU is amazing at that pricepoint though.
  • mtgx 10y ago
    And it's mainly because games aren't optimized to take advantage of 16 threads - yet. That's partially Intel's fault for keeping 8+ core processors so expensive. AMD is trying to change that. Of course 16t games won't be available from day one of Ryzen launch.
    • Orangeair 10y ago
      As a lot of other people online are pointing out, this is pretty much the exact same thing people said when Bulldozer came out, but it never materialized. AMD has always won in terms of core count, and people have been saying for years that games capable of taking advantage of 8+ threads/cores are right around the corner, but it never really happened. We shouldn't be basing purchase decisions today on what might theoretically happen at some point in the future.
      • MLR 10y ago
        It's much more true today to be fair, and with DX12/Vulkan it should become much more common over the next few years. Ryzen is much better positioned anyway because it has almost comparable IPC (Broadwell levels), that means even when you get a dual core/single core optimised game you'll get good performance rather than the horrible situation with older AMD CPUs.
      • tormeh 10y ago
        They are here now. Almost no modern AAA game recommends less than 4 cores. Many won't start with less than 4 threads. And they do scale to 8 cores. This is because of the consoles, which both have 6-7 cores.
        • brandmeyer 10y ago
• gigatexal 10y ago
  Since I'm not much of a gamer I'm looking at these chips. I wonder what an optimized (packages compiled with flags specific to the chip) Linux system around ryzen would be like.
  • antouank 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13774293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13774293
    • gigatexal 10y ago
      Thanks for this.
    • floatboth 10y ago
      Would be nice to also see how long a FreeBSD buildworld takes :)
      • gigatexal 10y ago
        That'd be a fun test, too. One would need to control for disk io but definitely useful. I wonder how many HN readers run FBSD
        • floatboth 10y ago
          RAM disk possibly? Would be nice to make a simple one-click benchmark: download a VirtualBox VM and click Start — it boots mfsbsd and starts compiling to a RAM disk, measuring the time.
          • gigatexal 10y ago
            Too complicated. I was thinking just have some baseline numbers on a clean SSD and run the buildworld a bunch of times. Either would work tho the latter I'm confident I could do.
        • 10y ago
• tutanchamun 10y ago
  The power consumption is really nice compared to Bulldozer: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-11.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,49... https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerbase.de%2F2017-03%2Famd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-1700-test%2F6%2F&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...
• izacus 10y ago
  If I read the specs correctly, Ryzens don't have GPUs integrated. Are there any motherboards out there with GPUs on board? Or do you always have to add a 150EUR+ graphics card to it (assuming I want at least 2x 4K display support)? The 1800X does seem like a killer value for the money for us C++ people :)
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • olegkikin 10y ago
    Why do you have to add a 150+EUR GPU? There are many cheap options. You can get Radeon R7 250 under $50, which absolutely destroys i7-6700k's integrated HD530.
    • jsheard 10y ago
      The R7 250 doesn't have a single 4K output, nevermind the two he needs. For 4K you need Displayport 1.2 or HDMI 2.0. (Technically HDMI 1.4 also supports 4K but only at 24hz, which is fine for TVs but a miserable experience on a PC desktop)
    • izacus 10y ago
      As other commenter said, none of the cheap GPUs come with DisplayPort I need to drive my current 34" UWD display or future 4K displays :/
    • jdietrich 10y ago
      Low-end GPUs are a very poor value proposition. For $89 you could have an RX 460 with nearly 3x the performance of the R7 250 plus HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4.
      • std_throwaway 10y ago
        What is the added value of 5 times more than enough compared to 2 times more than enough?
• msimpson 10y ago
  AMD Ryzen 1800X (Summit Ridge): 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) over 16 threads 15,812 Passmark for ~$500 ----- Intel i7-7700K (Kaby Lake): 4.2 GHz (4.5 GHz Turbo) over 8 threads 12,321 Passmark for ~$350 ----- Intel Core i7-6850K (Broadwell E): 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) over 12 threads 14,500 Passmark for ~$575 ----- Competition is back. Ya!
  • floatboth 10y ago
    And that's only CPU prices, don't forget mainboards, which are overpriced on the Intel X99 side!
    • msimpson 10y ago
      Good point.
    • tracker1 10y ago
      No kidding, especially considering I'd like to stay in mAtx form factor...
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway132791 10y ago
  Rather strange that AMD's stock is down ~ 2.5 %
  • bryanlarsen 10y ago
    "buy on rumours, sell on news".
  • Symmetry 10y ago
    There were rumors of slightly better single threaded performance. Stock movements are always relative to expectations, investors knew roughly what was coming but not the exact details.
  • Smushman 10y ago
    A normal affect of stock price during a major announcement. It even has a name '"buy the rumor, sell the news" http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/news-trader.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/news-trader.asp The idea behind this, simply put, is that if you are in a trade for whatever reason with a stock that has a major announcement coming; you are pretty much at the potential peak at announcement time so it is a good time to get out.
    • dabadoo 10y ago
      Its not really true. Half the time it goes down half the time it goes up.
  • em500 10y ago
    The stock is down 7% compared to yesterday, but up 500% compared to one year ago.
• bdz 10y ago
  Looking at those gaming benchmarks. Turns out the single core performance is still more important than having more cores. https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_amd_ryzen_r7_1800x_dobra_zmiana https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_am...
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • dijit 10y ago
    main thread has to go somewhere. :\ Maybe knowing consumers will probably have more than 2 cores will make games optimise better for parellelism, it's not like the engine programmers _cant_ do it, they do it all the time with GPUs.
    • gcp 10y ago
      GPU parallelism is very different from main-core parallelism. The GPU is an entirely different architecture than the CPU. The stuff that's still on the CPU are things that don't trivially parallelize to begin with.
      • dijit 10y ago
        I can give you an example in my actual work; When making AI bots it's quite common to have all of the work of processing the AI it's own thread, so each rendered frame will do all calculations for all bots. That in of itself would be cheap, except it has to share it's core with a bunch of other crap. With 2 cores you can have a main thread for updating the screen and then an "everything else" thread. If you can't be sure people will be playing with >2 cores then you have to keep your budgets down to 2 cores when developing and that's quite limiting. it's not that it's "hard" to parralellise(?), it's that you run out of resources super quick if you make assumptions about CPU topology.
  • tutanchamun 10y ago
    what's up with some of the tests? For example this one: https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_amd_ryzen_r7_1800x_dobra_zmiana?page=0,20 https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_am... A Broadwell with 3300 Mhz (3700 Mhz boost) beats a Kaby Lake (Skylake...) with 4200 Mhz (4500 Mhz boost)? Can the Broadwell use the 128MB EDRRAM from the iGPU as a L4 cache if the iGPU is not used? Would that actually make such a difference?
• anonymousDan 10y ago
  Does anyone know if the Zen 1800 desktops support their new Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) extensions or are they only for server class machines (Naples)?
• djrogers 10y ago
  I'm really interested in these from a virtualization standpoint, especially with 8 cores for so little $$. I'd love to see a good set of tests/benchmarks with a completely virtualized workload.
  • mtgx 10y ago
    Speaking of which, Zen/Ryzen was supposed to come with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), but I don't know if any of these reviews have covered it yet: https://www.techpowerup.com/226719/amds-zen-to-implement-advanced-security-features-not-found-in-intels-solutions https://www.techpowerup.com/226719/amds-zen-to-implement-adv... It's possible only Naples will support it.
• bitL 10y ago
  I'll definitely consider 1800X for my movie rendering/machine learning rig, especially if they confirm ECC functionality. 40 PCI-E lanes would be better, but I can live with 2x x8 GPUs and only one x4 SSD for machine learning. Interesting would be 4C/8T parts - if they can run them cool (given 8C/16T 1700 uses 65W I think it's not unreasonable), they probably can clock them to get to 7700k parity at 95W.
• pmoriarty 10y ago
  Do high-end Ryzen chips need liquid cooling?
  • brianwawok 10y ago
    No? They make under 100w.
  • sp332 10y ago
    No, but if they have thermal and power headroom, the X chips will add 100MHz above the "boost" clock. They call it XFR (eXtended Frequency Range). So having a water cooler will make it more likely to get that last 100MHz, but I don't think it's going to make a big difference if you're not overclocking.
• aesthetics1 10y ago
  What is the deal with 16 PCIe lanes? With the move to PCIe storage, this is disappointing. I am happy to see the price/performance is good (which is surely going to force Intel to be competitive again), but if this is targeting the high-end, I can not understand 16 PCIe lanes.
  • slizard 10y ago
    The CPU has 24 lanes and the chipset can add up to 8 additional lanes, see [1] first table. It's a pity that they did not include at least 32 lanes on-chip to allow two full x16 GPUs at least on the 1800X, but I hope there is a 1900X in the pipeline with more lanes. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/
    • aesthetics1 10y ago
      This table (in the linked article) shows that each CPU has 16 lanes: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-review-a-deep-dive-on-1800x-1700x-and-1700/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-...
• fcanesin 10y ago
  From the reddit AMA today with Lisa Su (CEO): 7th) Will all Zen products have all of the instruction sets and platform extensions, or could lower end chips lose features like virtualization? A7: In the consumer client space we have no plans to turn off virtualization or features. 9th) Does AM4 / consumer ZEN support ECC memory? A9: ECC is enabled on Ryzen and AM4. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...] edit: added link
  • simplemath 10y ago
    my homelab is ready.
    • chx 10y ago
      Really not wanting to poop on anyone's parade but an off lease Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation used from eBay will beat the pants off anything else for homelab. You can get an E3-1240 V2 with 8Gb RAM for the kingly sum of ... $200. Including motherboard, chassis and PSU.
      • aroch 10y ago
        And you're also stuck with a $200/month power bill and the full home heater.... Don't get me wrong, I have a bunch of rack pull servers and they're great for the price but I colo mine for less/server than the power bill/server would be at home and have them ona faster connection. I stick with low power options for light in-home usage
        • simplemath 10y ago
          ding ding ding
        • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
          The single-socket Xeon E3 that GP mentioned is 69W TDP. The Ryzen 1700 is 65W, while the 1700x and 1800x are 95W. Why do you think the Ryzen box will be a lot less power hungry?
• BuckRogers 10y ago
  Looks great, coup successful by AMD. Takeaways after a few of the reviews on this list[0][1]: - If you're buying a desktop quadcore processor in 2017, you're doing it wrong. May as well buy a laptop. - Kabylake sucks as a workstation chip but is ok for gaming if your PC is solely a glorified Xbox. - Vast majority (90%+) of gaming rigs are GPU-bound. Think very carefully before giving up 8 cores and 16 threads at the same price. - Intel's margins and lineup are utterly destroyed especially once you consider how expensive Intel HEDT boards are on top of it all. - AMD made CPUs Great Again. Bravo AMD! [0]https://videocardz.com/66826/amd-ryzen-7-review-roundup https://videocardz.com/66826/amd-ryzen-7-review-roundup [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJQEHNYE7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJQEHNYE7M
  • mee_too 10y ago
    >> If you're buying a desktop quadcore processor in 2017, you're doing it wrong. May as well buy a laptop. Not true, IDEs, web browsers, office tools need single core performance and not 4+ cores. A laptop is more expensive, will make more noise when loaded, is harder to upgrade, is less customizable, has less ports, is more expensive to expand (ThunderBolt devices are not cheap at all). What are you talking about? >> Intel's margins and lineup are utterly destroyed especially once you consider how expensive Intel HEDT boards are on top of it all. There are few people who build workstations for themselves(even among software developers). HP and Dell haven't announced any Ryzen systems as far as I'm aware. Right now AMD's new chip will have minimal impact on Intel profits. Only if AMD can remain competitive on stability, performance and price for a few years will Intel start loosing major chunks of income and market share. >> Kabylake sucks as a workstation chip but is ok for gaming if your PC is solely a glorified Xbox. PCs are universal machines, you can play games AND do work on the the SAME PC ;-) >> Vast majority (90%+) of gaming rigs are GPU-bound. Think very carefully before giving up 8 cores and 16 threads at the same price. GPU-bound does not mean all CPUs produce the same framerates on a given GPU. I personally do hate Intel and nVidia monopoly and hope AMD can increase their market share, but your points are very weak.
    • srssays 10y ago
      IDEs are very very easy to parallelise, since most of the hard work is done in background tasks, which can run simultaneously. Compilation also parallelises very nicely.
• vladimir-y 10y ago
  I'm exited that competition returns, no more Intel's monopoly.
• jtl999 10y ago
  So we know AM4 supports ECC RAM but will any motherboards come out with IPMI? SuperMicro has spoiled me.
• MaysonL 10y ago
  I wonder: is there any possibility that Ryzen is what Apple has been waiting for for new desktops?
  • scott_karana 10y ago
    I doubt it. Their big switch to x86 had their laptops shipping with the new Core Duos before any other manufacturer, and I suspect they'd have a similarly dramatic launch if it was true.
• lightedman 10y ago
  Barely half of the PCI-E lanes than my FX-9350. Nooooooooooooope. Was looking forward to a nice SLI rig but looks like Ryzen just died for my choice on upgrade. Guess I'll stick with the power-hungry beast.
  • mee_too 10y ago
    8 lanes per GPU is plenty, the performance diff with 16 is ~3%. Games will run faster with SLI setup on Ryzen. Why do you even need SLI, 1080 Ti will be good enough for 5K gaming.
    • lightedman 10y ago
      Your piddly 5K doesn't stand up to my 8K professional video setup. To boot, I have multiple drives, and PCI-E/M.2 based networking and storage as well. Please try again when you need to juggle 1,000+ video feeds simultaneously and truly understand what REAL power requires.
      • Keyframe 10y ago
        You ought to check out this new computer Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster. It can do all the amazing video effects you're doing AND play games.
      • unethical_ban 10y ago
        I don't know if it was attempted, but you can turn down the condescension.
        • lightedman 10y ago
          Condescension is warranted towards those who assume they know anything about one's needs.
          • dabadoo 10y ago
            No it isn't you fuck twat.
• gravelc 10y ago
  I'm still trying to work out whether only dual channel RAM means 64GB RAM is the limit, or do different mobo chipsets support actually support quad-channel? Kind of a deal breaker (for bioinformatics work) if I can't go over 100GB RAM, which is really annoying given those cheap threads.
  • yuhong 10y ago
    AM4 only has pins for dual channel I think.
• rl3 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, why aren't CPUs with asymmetrical core designs a thing? For example: a single, large primary core with a high clock speed supported by many lower-clocked smaller cores. Theoretically that would allow for the best of both worlds. I imagine if such a design existed, it would disincentivize proper multi-core utilization in software to some degree. It would likely further complicate parallel programming as well. At the same time, multi-core computing has been a thing for well over a decade now, and the reality is that a CPU's single-core performance still matters. Are the efficiency advantages inherent in symmetrical core designs simply too great? Would asymmetrical designs not be suited for use with existing OS schedulers? Is operating a chip at multiple frequencies simultaneously somehow insane from a design perspective?
  • xigency 10y ago
    You can look up IBM's Cell design and try to gain some understanding from former PlayStation 3 game developers if you want to get a background on this. The major difference is that the PPE and SPE's have the same clock speed, but it is definitely a heterogenous architecture.
  • ClassyJacket 10y ago
    They do exist, but on ARM, not x86. Most high end phones on the market today have that.
  • innocenat 10y ago
    Wouldn't the SpeedStep or whatever it is called be that? They dynamically disable cores and boost clock speed.
• sengork 10y ago
  Here is another review link which is a good complement to the Anandtech's hardware: http://techreport.com/review/31366/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-ryzen-7-1700x-and-ryzen-7-1700-cpus-reviewed http://techreport.com/review/31366/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-ryzen-7...
• laughfactory 10y ago
  Man this is great news! I can't wait to build a new overly powerful rig with these new chips from AMD. Sweet!
• seoseokho 10y ago
  Finally!
• keldaris 10y ago
  I'm someone who's still running an ancient (2007, IIRC) Nehalem i7-920 based workstation for daily use and was eagerly waiting for this launch to finally decide on a new build. After reviewing all the day one benchmark data, I've come to the odd decision that I'm probably going for an i7-7700k, especially if Intel drops the prices by even a tiny amount. I say "odd" because, apart from basic daily tasks and occasional gaming, my workload mostly consists of scientific computing. Ryzen's performance on AVX2 is precisely as bad as I expected from the architecture (effectively, a 50% penalty) and given the thermal constraints on 6900k's, a lightly overclocked 7700k (usually easy to get to 4.8-5 Ghz after delidding) seems to deliver by far the best price/performance ratio even on multithreaded workloads as long as vectorization is a significant component of the workload. Not to mention the added benefit of delivering the undisputed best single threaded performance money can buy. Ryzen also seems to have issues with memory bandwidth that may or may not be solved by future microcode or MB firmware upgrades, and very limited overclocking headroom. It's still nice to see AMD bring competition back to the CPU marketplace, and I'm looking forward to their server CPUs in Q2. I'd also love to be proven wrong on anything I said above and reconsider my build options, so please point out any oversights on my part.
  • BuckRogers 10y ago
    You're right about the AVX2 part. If that's important to you. Otherwise I'd have to disagree, waiting all those years and going to a quadcore is sad. This is a monumental shift to see $330 8C/16T chips start to be mainstream. I also hate that Intel went with that cheap TIM that requires delidding. You're in a tough spot given the focus on AVX2 IMO. My thoughts on Ryzen in general though is that the base 1700 is the chip for everyone building completely from scratch in 2017 and beyond. I personally won't be building another quadcore from this point onward. Just feel too much like a sucker to do so and I do think it's foolish (even for gaming! ... where almost everyone's system is going to be GPU bound at 1080P or higher anyway) unless you have some specific need like what you're describing with a massive 50% penalty affecting you.
    • keldaris 10y ago
      Ultimately, the number of cores doesn't mean anything by itself, it's the aggregate performance that matters. We'd all happily take a 16 Ghz single core CPU over a 4 Ghz quad core any day, if such a thing was possible. It's true that I'm in a very niche spot in that most of my workloads are vectorization-heavy, but I don't think it's quite as niche as people think. If you look at the benchmarks, quite a few workloads (check out x265 performance on ffmpeg, or audio encoding, or compression...) are sufficiently vectorized for the 7700k to be more cost efficient than the 1800X. Realizing that does feel a bit sad, though, I agree. For pure gaming, I'd still get the fastest Kaby Lake i5 and be done with it. It doesn't matter what happens with DX12, etc., games are still going to be GPU bound for the foreseeable future and the cheap i5 won't significantly bottleneck you for many years to come.
• BlytheSchuma 10y ago
  I'll never buy an AMD processor, but I'm glad they are giving Intel some competition.
• hvidgaard 10y ago
  I'm optimistic, but I'd like to see benchmarks for compiling code. Right now I buy really expensive 8 core cpus, because multiple threads do speed up encoding quite a bit. If Ryzen can match that at half the price, it will be much welcome.
  • stefantalpalaru 10y ago
    There you go: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-1800x-linux&num=5 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-180...
• caf 10y ago
  Did anyone else find the "Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT)" section of the article to be long on hand-waving and short on detail? It seems like all the actual information there is conveyed in the diagram, the text is full of nearly content-free sentences like "With each thread, AMD performs internal analysis on the data stream for each to see which thread has algorithmic priority.".