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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

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.
  - BuckRogers 10y ago
    Your info is a little outdated, checkout Digital Foundry's videos on i5s vs i7s in current gen games. The day of the quadcore being a great choice for gaming is already over if you play the "wrong" games. No longer a slamdunk recommendation. At this point I'd recommend gamers step up to the i7 or R7. Anything "will work", people are using G4560s. I'm suggesting what's ideal at this point in time. The aggregate performance of an 8C/16T machine from any vendor is astonishing, of course.
hajile 10y ago
Are there any benchmarks that show Ryzen at 50% slower on AVX2? Intel does AVX in one clock cycle, but drastically cuts clockspeeds when AVX instructions are executing. You'll overclock a lot, but it will then reduce the multiplier/clock the second AVX appears to keep from killing the chip. If we assume a similar AVX IPC (and Ryzen 1/2 with AVX2), you'll double your cores with Ryzen, so the AVX2 throughput per clock would be about the same. 7700 clocks higher, but then downclocks again when AVX are encountered. It seems like in practice, they are about the same for performance with AVX, but Ryzen is ahead in every other multi-threaded bench. http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/performance-xeon-e5-v3-advanced-vector-extensions-paper.pdf http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...
- keldaris 10y ago
  There's already a few benchmarks that are directly relevant, take a look at the FFTW performance, for instance [1] (sourced from [2]), which consists mostly of single precision AVX instructions. The 1800X is handily beaten even by a deliberately downclocked 7700k, which costs a bit over half the price. But that's only half the story. The thing is, a decent 7700k (after fixing the thermal interface via delidding and using high end air or low to mid end water cooling) is actually capable of running at 4.8-5 Ghz without downclocking for AVX. You might get an unlucky sample and only do 4.6 Ghz, but it's still cost effective. A 6900k, on the other hand, doesn't have the thermal headroom to go much past its stock frequencies on AVX-heavy workloads, unless you go full crazy with sub-ambient cooling. So, in the end, it looks like the 7700k has at least double the price/performance ratio of a 1800X in AVX-heavy workloads along with vastly superior single thread performance. It looks to me like Ryzen is a great leap in price/performance only insofar as your workloads are highly multithreaded, yet don't make much use of vectorization at all. [1] http://media.bestofmicro.com/ext/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1pY3JvLmNvbS8zL0QvNjU3MTkzL29yaWdpbmFsLzAxLUZGVFctMUQucG5n/r_600x450.png http://media.bestofmicro.com/ext/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1... [2] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,49...

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.
- BuckRogers 10y ago
  Your info is a little outdated, checkout Digital Foundry's videos on i5s vs i7s in current gen games. The day of the quadcore being a great choice for gaming is already over if you play the "wrong" games. No longer a slamdunk recommendation. At this point I'd recommend gamers step up to the i7 or R7. Anything "will work", people are using G4560s. I'm suggesting what's ideal at this point in time. The aggregate performance of an 8C/16T machine from any vendor is astonishing, of course.

hajile 10y ago

Are there any benchmarks that show Ryzen at 50% slower on AVX2? Intel does AVX in one clock cycle, but drastically cuts clockspeeds when AVX instructions are executing. You'll overclock a lot, but it will then reduce the multiplier/clock the second AVX appears to keep from killing the chip. If we assume a similar AVX IPC (and Ryzen 1/2 with AVX2), you'll double your cores with Ryzen, so the AVX2 throughput per clock would be about the same. 7700 clocks higher, but then downclocks again when AVX are encountered. It seems like in practice, they are about the same for performance with AVX, but Ryzen is ahead in every other multi-threaded bench. http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/performance-xeon-e5-v3-advanced-vector-extensions-paper.pdf http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...

keldaris 10y ago
There's already a few benchmarks that are directly relevant, take a look at the FFTW performance, for instance [1] (sourced from [2]), which consists mostly of single precision AVX instructions. The 1800X is handily beaten even by a deliberately downclocked 7700k, which costs a bit over half the price. But that's only half the story. The thing is, a decent 7700k (after fixing the thermal interface via delidding and using high end air or low to mid end water cooling) is actually capable of running at 4.8-5 Ghz without downclocking for AVX. You might get an unlucky sample and only do 4.6 Ghz, but it's still cost effective. A 6900k, on the other hand, doesn't have the thermal headroom to go much past its stock frequencies on AVX-heavy workloads, unless you go full crazy with sub-ambient cooling. So, in the end, it looks like the 7700k has at least double the price/performance ratio of a 1800X in AVX-heavy workloads along with vastly superior single thread performance. It looks to me like Ryzen is a great leap in price/performance only insofar as your workloads are highly multithreaded, yet don't make much use of vectorization at all. [1] http://media.bestofmicro.com/ext/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1pY3JvLmNvbS8zL0QvNjU3MTkzL29yaWdpbmFsLzAxLUZGVFctMUQucG5n/r_600x450.png http://media.bestofmicro.com/ext/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1... [2] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,49...