17 ms·

Ryzen is for Programmers

311 points by old-gregg 9y ago

cagenut 9y ago
As much as this isn't for me (it was during the celeron 300a era), I really appreciate the detailed writeup and specific workflow example benchmarking.
codinghorror 9y ago
True! Basically 2x the cores Intel will sell you, at the same price. IPC is "only" at broadwell levels but that's still pretty solid.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
> Cooling $100 Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280 99% of programmers don't need a machine with liquid cooling. Even if they are targeting high performance hardware, development work can be run from a more modest machine.
- lysp 9y ago
  It also means the machine runs quieter.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  He appears to be trying to build a fairly silent machine as well, so the liquid cooling will help. Does he need that much power, though? I certainly wouldn't, but for what he is doing I can see it. He's running 12 containers in VirtualBox. Avoiding VirtualBox would help a lot, but depending on what he's doing, he may not be able to (and on Mac, I think you have no choice -- he may not realise that he'll get tons better performance without it). On top of that he's doing Closure (presumably with power hungry development toys) and lots of video conferencing. I often pair program remotely with video conferencing and it can eat half of your CPU(s). Mumble and Tmux is a much better way to go, but again setting up and getting used to the tooling is not trivial. $2K and building your own machine vs doing some pretty serious work trying to lighten the development environment -- I can see an argument for it, even if it's not the way I would choose to go.
  - ferongr 9y ago
    All-in-one watercooling systems are not more silent. The pump is audible and the lack of radiator surface means you'll hear the fans when they ramp up.
    - egeozcan 9y ago
      My motherboard has a liquid cooling setting for managing fans. I can rarely hear the pump and fans are very silent. It's an AIO system from corsair with 2 fans (I'm outside & can't remember the name now).
      - glenneroo 9y ago
        Is it anecdotal evidence time? I have NOCTUA CPU coolers in multiple Fractal R4/R5 cases and all 4 of these machines run at 100% CPU for weeks on end and you also can't hear anything. I considered going the water cooling route, but from what I could gather from various reviewers, is that like the parent you replied to, the pump makes noise as well as the fans when going overtime (not to mention a lot more expensive and time-consuming to install). Maybe it has something to do with the case? What case do you have? Did you do anything extra to silence it?
        egeozcan 9y ago
        I have a mid-range Cooler Master case, don't have the model name in mind but I don't remember it having anything specific for sound isolation. When it comes to these things, I can't find anything but anecdotal evidence. Even the most respected reviewers usually have a sample size of one.
      - floatboth 9y ago
        Yep I have the NZXT Kraken X61 and I can only hear the pump when I put my ear very very close to the tower.
  - sb057 9y ago
    >He appears to be trying to build a fairly silent machine as well, so the liquid cooling will help. One fan is a lot quieter than 2-3 fans + pump.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  This. The stock cooler (that is included in the price of the Ryzen) is good enough for most stuff. Even if you want to "splurge" on a cooler, you can buy a monster cooler for ~40 bucks that is barely audible and can cool even an overclocked i7-7700K without any issues.
- kaosjester 9y ago
  He also didn't need to blow $500 on an SSD when he could have gotten a $100 SSD and a $100 hybrid drive and double his storage space.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    I would rather have 1 fast HD than deal with which mounts go which speed.
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    The nvme ssd drives are several times faster than the best sata ssd (sometimes 10x). Although I'm not sure you would be able to tell much difference. But loading up large virtual machines frequently might be a use case where a difference would be noted. There are quite a few benchmarks and real world comparisons on YouTube that seem to indicate significant improvement in some workloads.
    - kaosjester 9y ago
      I'm not saying it isn't faster, I'm merely pointing out that it was a pretty serious investment in comparison to the other points of the build, and attempting to defend the idea that liquid cooling isn't insane if you're going all-out with other aspects, too.
- mirekrusin 9y ago
  Liquid cooling is almost at the same price, doesn't make the build more expensive and Ryzen is great for overclocking - I think more than 1% of programmers - especially those who made decision to get Ryzen - will benefit from liquid cooling.
  - sundvor 9y ago
    Totally. For me the main benefit is that it makes for a far more clean build. High performance air coolers make for a very crowded solution.
nxc18 9y ago
I just recently completed a build myself. It was pre-Ryzen so AMD wasn't an option at the time. I went with the Intel i7-7700 (quad core) at 3.6 GHz. I was surprised by two big things: high-performance devices are extremely affordable nowadays and processors have gotten a lot better despite minimal changes in clock speed. I went on PC Part Picker and built my 'budget' device and my 'fantasy' device. It turned out they were just about the same. I couldn't really spend more than $1500 for anything better without jumping to server-grade parts. Yesterday I played Halo Wars 2, listened to Spotify, kept Word, Excel, Edge, Chrome, & WEKA open, and was running an embarrassingly inefficient data mining program in Python via WSL, while running a Jenkins build server in an Ubuntu Server VM, and running TeamCity in a Windows Server VM. Even on the Intel chip, which is presumably less good at multitasking than Ryzen, I just can't throw enough at it to experience anything resembling slowdown. 8 logical cores still seems to be plenty for most users, but I could see with even more VMs that one might need more. As an aside, it is incredibly nice to be able to run VMs without even thinking about their resource consumption - it's like having my own little cloud. I wonder if maybe Intel's marketing for their chips could use improvement. On paper, my MacBook Pro with 16Gb RAM and 3GHz i7 shouldn't be that much worse than my desktop with 32Gb RAM (most of which is unused) and 3.6GHz i7. The difference in practice is night and day. I'm losing faith in the concept of a laptop as a developer's primary device (especially with SSH & Remote Desktop being so good these days).
- givemefive 9y ago
  Look at synthetic benchmarks of your chip and the MBP. It's night and day difference. I won't use a laptop to develop on either. It's too slow. (And the ergonomics are terrible anyways so a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc are all necessary anyways)
- mastazi 9y ago
  Just like you, I completed my build recently. Before that, for a few years I had used laptops exclusively. I was blown away by how even a modest desktop [1] is so much faster than even a high end laptop [2]. I believe it's because any laptop will end up throttling because of thermals, unless you get one of those very heavy gaming or workstation laptops with huge cooling systems. Oh and I had to throw away my laptop because the motherboard failed, all I could salvage was the SSD. Not going to happen with a desktop. [1] (I have a non-overclockable i5-6500, 16GB DDR4, SSD with SATA3 interface, a GTX 1060 with 6GB VRAM) [2] My laptop was an i7 quad-core, 16GB DDR4, SSD SATA3, GT840 GPU. Everything except the GPU was better than or equal to my desktop.
dman 9y ago
Am waiting for Naples to ship before assembling my workstation. Hope it shows up soon.
- KSS42 9y ago
  32 cores / 64 threads?
  - dman 9y ago
    Yes - plan to do a dual socket build. So 64 cores - 128 threads.
  - maksimum 9y ago
    8 memory lanes too, just over 150GB/s with 2400MHz RAM.
- nickpeterson 9y ago
  You are correct, Naples will be the right choice for a workstation because I doubt Intel will lower Xeon prices much.
dis-sys 9y ago
Bought my Q6600 quad core processor 10 years ago. 10 years on, Intel still refuses to make 8 core processors mainstream to PC. Lucky enough, I don't have to listen to Intel's stories on why 8 cores are not useful for PC, I can pay AMD $300 and get Ryzen. Just bought Intel Optane memory this morning, installed it in my AMD Ryzen DEV machine and it works perfectly without any issue. Interestingly, according to Intel, this is not suppose to happen - you are expected to use both of their latest processor/chipset to run Optane memory! Now you tell can me who is preventing people from accessing the best techs at reasonable prices.
- runeks 9y ago
  Intel doesn't make 8-core consumers CPUs because their 4 cores are roughly as fast as 8 AMD cores. So doubling the core count would produce too much heat. https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+1800X&id=2966 https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+1800X&id=29... https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700 https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700
  - kinghajj 9y ago
    cpubenchmark's multithreaded results tend not to scale well with additional cores; comparing results between the two on other better-scaling workloads shows the 1800x blowing the pants off of the 7700k.
  - flamedoge 9y ago
    Well Intel didn't have to because they had peak performing chips for a long time. But now AMD will give Intel run for the money again. Intel focused more on getting better yields(margin) and power related features like much lower idle power and more C, P states, which makes sense if you're at the top. They focused on other loose ends than performance.
- arcanus 9y ago
  Funny enough, I also have had a Q6600 quad, it just turned 9 a week ago. Great chipset. ...And I also just jumped on the Ryzen train. Finally a good time to be a consumer in CPU-land.
danielparks 9y ago
It's ridiculous how well the 2013 MBP does. Of course, the last four years have had much less focus on core performance, or even on putting more cores into pro-sumer machines. Apple in particular is all about thinness, battery life, and passive cooling. That's not a complaint. For most people, including me, those are good trade-offs.
- old-gregg 9y ago
  Hm... Not sure I agree. I have a 2015 MBP and I was blown away by nearly 2x difference vs a comparable desktop with identical amount of RAM and CPU cores. My workload is compiling Golang code. The desktop is twice as fast and without the heat + fan noise drama. The laptops, or at least the MBP, seem to be built to mostly run on idle IMO.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >The laptops, or at least the MBP, seem to be built to mostly run on idle IMO. This is very much my experience when switching from my previous MBP Retina to my power workhorse desktop. Even my newer XPS 15 is mostly optimized around idle I'm pretty sure.
  - look_lookatme 9y ago
    I use Chrome, JetBrains IDEs and emacs all day and recently made the switch to a beefy Linux desktop after 13 years of Apple laptops and I'm blown away by how much faster everything is. I guess I was living in denial about the performance differences.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
As someone who's been near server space, seriously fuck Intel. Blocking ECC memory from consumer CPUs is monopolistic bullshit, my next PC will be AMD even if it's a bit slower. At least AMD doesn't switch socket every 6 months and cripple my hardware on purpose
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  Have you actually experienced enough memory errors that you need ECC?
  - slackingoff2017 9y ago
    You can't run a production database without ECC. Well, you could, but you probably wouldn't have a job very long. Memory gets less reliable with each process shrink. They keep raising the DRAM refresh rate with various tricks but we're always right on the edge of having memory with so many errors that it's unusable. The size of memory cells has decreased to the point that a stray subatomic particle could cause multiple bit errors. Just wait for the next big solar storm. We don't know how often they strike the Earth but it seems to happen every 20 years or so. When it does we're going to have a massive flash of corrupt data from machines not using ECC. Probably worst than y2k issues
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      > Just wait for the next big solar storm. So when that happens, it will be important to have the option. Until then, since I have no reason to run a "production database" on my workstation, why would I want ECC? > we're always right on the edge of having memory with so many errors that it's unusable. That's fine by me. Living here on "the edge", even with overclocked memory, my system is the most stable system I have ever owned. I really can't see any reason to use ECC on my desktop apart from fear of hand-wavy potential issues. Is my personal experience so unique? Are any of you actually experiencing instability that you are sure is caused by physical memory errors that are fixed by using ECC memory?
kaosjester 9y ago
This article reads like a rewrite of the wiki over at /r/buildapc, and I'm not sure I see how much of it leads to his conclusion---any modern, $1500 desktop is going to outperform a two-generation-old laptop with a quarter as much ram. That doesn't make the Ryzen `for programmers.` I came in expected some crazy assembly insights, but instead this is just a PC build log. Nothing really supports the title of this article: it's just clickbait without any real support. And, at this point, most people reading hackernews know it's cheaper to build a PC than buy another PC / laptop---and those that still don't are doing it because a thousand dollars usually buys you a lot of warranty and convenience.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  The multi-core angle is the main "programmer" bit of Ryzen. If you are writing heavily multithreaded code you will get 2x the cores for your $.
  - kaosjester 9y ago
    I agree that Ryzen is a great chip! I am looking forward to getting one because, yeah, it makes for a great developer platform: it's got a bunch of cores, it's got a fantastic virtualization model that isn't randomly crippled on half the chips, it supports ECC ram easily, and it's a killer price-point. The article doesn't really get into any of that, though.
    - codinghorror 9y ago
      not mentioning ECC is pretty sloppy, granted. And virtualization.
  - panzer_wyrm 9y ago
    4 cores are enough to write multithreaded code and catch the majority race conditions. You would not run it in production on your desktop though no matter the core count.
    - 9y ago
sundvor 9y ago
Interesting article, and nothing surprising. With an 8 core CPU - and NVME storage, the more interesting test would be to run docker compose whilst profiling a page or whatever. The author hints at it, but hard numbers would be even more fun. I would fully expect the laptop to grind to a halt in scenarios where the Ryzen just chugs on as if nothing special was going on. I built my own 6850k system last June (4.2ghz +32gb ram + samsung 950 pro nvme), and find it great for programming - well, everything, really.
mirekrusin 9y ago
Funny, I just finished building mine - same Ryzen 7 1800X, switching from MacBook Pro/iMac to Ubuntu as well, got 3200MHz RAM also, which booted into 2333MHz as well (will need to wait for motherboard update to get full speed I guess), M.2 SSD... I wonder if it's becoming a trend (to move from macOS to Linux)?
- RowanH 9y ago
  Gave up waiting for a Mac Pro option April last year, built a monster Win 10 machine - run all my dev work in VMs and get to play the odd game in Ultra settings at astonishing frame rates on an Ultrawide. Can't see ever going back to Mac's ... in fact ordering parts for an 1800x machine at the moment.
  - maksimum 9y ago
    Are you running Linux VMs or were you able to get a OS X VM running?
    - ryan-allen 9y ago
      Not OP, but Windows 10 has a Linux Subsystem which is in beta. I use it for bits and pieces for work and I haven't had any issues, I'm not pushing it much though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux
      - Stubb 9y ago
        I'm pushing WSL fairly hard doing OpenMP development. I/O is slow, but it's totally credible for numerics.
    - egeozcan 9y ago
      As you'd have WSL and Linux VMs, you probably wouldn't need an OSX VM if I'm not missing anything? Unless you're building something for OSX, that is. I know, btw, that it's possible to run OSX in VMware.
Cieplak 9y ago
I was a bit disappointed to hear that Libreboot will likely never support AMD hardware :( https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd
- sb057 9y ago
  There's still hope! https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5xvn4i/update_corebootlibreboot_on_amd_has_ceo_level/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5xvn4i/update_corebo...
shmerl 9y ago
8 core / 16 threads CPUs for sane prices are tempting. Building big projects in less time is useful.
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xuejie 9y ago
While the solution here works, the alternative is you can find a used Intel S2600CP from some random data center together with one or two E5 CPUs. You can get much more possibilities of upgrading the rig this way. I recently built such a PC with roughly $950, it includes one used E5-2650c2, used S2600CP board, 750W power supply, 32GB DDR3 ECC memory(I'm buying CPU, motherboard, power supply and memory from one vendor so I didn't know if the memory is new), brand new GTX 1070 and a brand new 128GB SSD. The good part is the board has 2 CPU slots, 16 memory slots and 6 PCIE slots, so if I feel the need, I can easily by another E5-2650 CPU, or 12 8GB memory sticks to make the total memory 128GB(or more if I choose to upgrade current 4*8GB memory sticks as well), or add more graphics cards for machine learning purposes. Of course this won't cover all use cases since server CPUs tend to have more cores than high frequencies(mine has 8 cores, and 16 threads after HT, but only at 2.00GHz), which might be bad for high end games, but for programming tasks as described by the article here, this might be a better choice
- luca_ing 9y ago
  Nice build. I've been considering something similar every now and then. The argument that makes me pull back though is my fear that its power draw would be considerable. How much power does your system draw? Idle, and/or under load?
  - ihattendorf 9y ago
    Not the person you're responding to, but I have the S2600CP2J w/ dual E5-2670, 128gb ram, 8 2-3tb drives + an ssd and I draw ~120 watts at idle (~3% cpu usage). 100% load is around 300-350 watts. No external video card. Great budget server, motherboard + 2xCPUs + ram were just under $500 from NATEX, intel server case + PSU was $100 from ebay.
    - luca_ing 9y ago
      100W idle is quite a lot in absolute terms, and more than I'd like because my boxes tend to run 24/7 (as do yours, I assume), but I suppose for the sheer amount of hardware you're running it's actually pretty reasonable. So energy cost would be about €240/year where I live, assuming permanent idling. Not exactly cheap, but you get what you pay for I guess :-) Thanks a lot for the info, and congrats on the sweet rig :-)
natch 9y ago
What is the video card in this setup? I missed it if he mentioned it. I suppose he's just using something that was built in to the motherboard? Yes I understand he's using it for editing text.
- sb057 9y ago
  Ryzen doesn't have iGPU, so he had to be using a dedicated GPU of some sort.
  - mrmidnite 9y ago
    The ryzen may have no apu(igpu) no, but if the mobo has graphics (as many ryzen mobos do) there is no need for a pci-e gpu unless a heavy one is needed. Indeed not for editors and compiling.
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kondbg 9y ago
I also built a Ryzen machine for development. It's great when it works, but I've found that Ryzen is unstable on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04). Every once in a while, I get kernel errors like NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#9 stuck for 23s! which requires a hard reset. This behavior doesn't occur on Windows, though, so if you use Windows for development, you should be good.
- Pengwin 9y ago
  Did you try a later kernel? out of the box ubuntu 16.04 is on the longterm 4.4 kernel. It looks like some ryzen features and patches have been added to 4.10, and they probably were not back-ported to the longterm kernels.
  - look_lookatme 9y ago
    Not OP, but just built at Ryzen 1600 box. I've had _more_ instability when running 17.04 and settled on 16.04 which has been mostly fine, but hard crashes occasionally.
    - bdcravens 9y ago
      > hard crashes occasionally This sounds disturbingly unacceptable yet accepted
      - dom0 9y ago
        Nothing out of the ordinary with a new platform. While Linux often takes longer to work this stuff out, Windows often has had similar issues in the past as well.
        shady-lady 9y ago
        Not sure if intent but this is AMD issue. Having experienced first hand AMD driver instability on both Windows & Linux, AMD have lost my custom for the next 10 years.. Multiple re-occurring driver crashes using their main graphics card product line(RX380) on Windows 10.. So, pretty mainstream and yet having driver crashing (even when doing non-intensive tasks e.g. web browsing) For the record, I'm not so sure Nvidia is any more stable either. The only (constantly) stable graphics provider over the years has been Intel's on-board graphics.
partycoder 9y ago
Building a PC is fun but there's stuff that can go wrong. In case you are not familiar with what can go wrong, here there is a vastly incomplete list: - You can damage the PSU by selecting the wrong voltage, you might have a PSU doesn't supply enough wattage. - You can buy incompatible components that won't work with each other. - You could have static electricity, and you won't notice until you turn the computer on and you hear a little spark sound... that means something died. - Causing a short circuit by leaving a metallic object lying around (e.g: a screw) - Getting a thermal problem by applying the thermal paste wrong or connecting a fan spinning to the other side. - Crushing the processor by installing the heatsink with too much muscle. - Connecting light cables to pins that are not for lights causing unintended behavior. In short, there's a lot you can get from building your own system but it can also go wrong... and when it does: no warranty, you are on your own.
- maksimum 9y ago
  Sure those things are potential mis-haps, but they're pretty easily covered by watching a few guide videos. You could apply your argument to the operating system ... sure you could pay someone to administer it for you under warranty, or you could just learn things as you go and you'll be fine 99.9% of the time.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    Sure. Also a good idea to get an anti-static wrist band, and not use a wool sweater or something while assembling.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  A fair point, though most of those are very low risk. But I want to point out that PSU voltage selection is a thing of the past. Really you should have no PSU problems if you go with a real brand.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Perhaps this is my age showing, but I came up building my own computers. Like many I've enjoyed the convenience of running just MBPs for years, but I've easily built a dozen plus machines, and never had any of the disastrous situations you described occur.
cyrusaf 9y ago
I don't see this as a comparison between Ryzen and Intel. He compares a custom built PC with a 2017 3.6 GHz 8 core Ryzen to an older 2013 2.3 GHz 4 core i7. He could have replaced his Ryzen CPU with a similar priced intel processor and seen the same performance.
- Sorreah 9y ago
  Not really, as 8 core intel chips cost significantly more.
- quickben 9y ago
  But not the price. If you go the Intel's way, both the cpu and the motherboard are more costly.
bdcravens 9y ago
My understanding is that the workload was more memory bound than CPU bound? Since the author only went with 32GB, wouldn't a laptop with 32 GB result in comparable gains?
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  No, most laptops will throttle down or reduce boosting quickly under a real workload. This also reduces effective memory bandwidth.
- paulmd 9y ago
  No, laptops almost always use weaker processors and/or lack the cooling for sustained work at boost clocks. In a primarily memory-bound workload, the obviously correct answer is a HEDT i7 or a Xeon anyway, since they have quad-channel RAM (doubling your RAM performance right upfront) and don't have the silliness of Ryzen's memory controller.
anorphirith 9y ago
I'm pretty sure the read write speeds of the newer ssd make a much greater difference in the performance than the CPU, a pci ssd would make an even greater difference
intrasight 9y ago
My new build has the same case, PSU, and SSD. I went with Xeon and ECC however. My final price was very close as well. That case is HUGE - but I do like having room to maneuver in there. And it's quiet and has air filters. For reasons of stability, my "desktop" is a Windows 10 VM. Moved all my dev VMs on from my now retired machine, which I'll keep as a backup for a year.
throwit2mewillU 9y ago
My learning with tuning computers in several companies with a lot of money for faster turn around speeds: 1. IO is not as important as your gut feeling tells you (e.g. 5x faster IO often led to <2x faster compiles) 2. Programming languages tout the parallelism horn, but their compilers and tools are really not optimized for many cores.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  For #1, why would it be? Programs are a bunch of text files, read from beginning to end, that almost always fit in a small part of RAM. 2x faster compiles is still too big an improvement, something there is badly optimized.
faragon 9y ago
I would love a laptop with 8-core Ryzen with a decent integrated GPU in the SoC :-)
peeyek 9y ago
I second this. I build PC with Ryzen 1500X + GTX1070 and it works flawlessly with TensorFflow and Torch7.
MichaelBurge 9y ago
My only worry is they don't seem to have very many PCIe lanes. But they're cheap enough that you might be able to get a motherboard that supports multiple CPUs, and still save money compared to going 1 high-end Intel CPU. And it might perform better too, if the workload has mixed computation & IO. Web development like the article mentions is probably the perfect fit there. Analytics is probably good too(R, Python, SQL). Careful if you need a video card in there, though.
- floatboth 9y ago
  Having a fuckton of PCIe lanes only really matters for multi-GPU setups. You can run two GPUs completely fine on an X370 board though.
minhajuddin 9y ago
I have a Lenovo y510p with 3rd generation core i7. I wish I could get a new laptop/desktop, but my laptop performs just so damn well. The only changes I made are the addition of a good ssd, putting in more RAM and replacing the cd drive with the 1TB hard drive. For my workloads (typical web dev stuff) it performs quite well.
- tgb 9y ago
  I have the same laptop. In the future I'd never buy one like it again - I think it's at a bad point in the power-mobility trade-off for me. But like you it's just too good to warrant replacing anytime soon. Everything is extremely fast since I put in an ssd and I get super confused by the posts we see all the time saying that as computers get faster software gets proportionally more bloated. Using this machine is way smoother than anything I grew up. But in the future I want a desktop and a highly mobile laptop, not an awkwardly immobile laptop. These large laptops were nice for LAN gaming in college but I just don't do that anymore.
  - minhajuddin 9y ago
    Yeah, I've had the same experience mobility wise. It is a pretty heavy laptop. I always have it plugged and on a table, Never in my lap :)
philliphaydon 9y ago
The author states he runs his docker images as if they were production. But in production the load of those images is larger than in development. Isn't there more insentive to run lower spec images in development to find noticible performance issues?? I've always thought that dev/test should be smaller env to prod
- PetahNZ 9y ago
  You don't really wanna limit your daily grind. When you need to performance test you spin up a staging environment and throw benches at it.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Absolutely this, I want to throw as many resources at the development machines as I can fit onto a single machine. I hate any kind of latency between "this should work" -> "does it work?". I've even considered buying beefy server hardware at home but electricity is expensive and it's a rented place so I can't exactly start install server racks.
  - philliphaydon 9y ago
    Fair enough. I don't feel limited.
JepZ 9y ago
I am wondering if the benchmarks were made Linux vs. OSX... I mean the author writes that "The Ryzen remains fully responsive and completely usable." and some years ago there was this magical patch that greatly improved the responsiveness of Linux systems: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=128979084506774&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=128979084506774&w=2
floatboth 9y ago
The 1800X is bad value though. It's the "I'm rich and afraid of overclocking for some silly reason" option. It's only slightly better binned. Most 1700s will reach 3.9 GHz easily (77% of them, according to siliconlottery.com). The R7 1700 is the real deal.
- hvidgaard 9y ago
  That's fine if you want to overclock. I need performance for work and I'm not going to dick around with overclocking - one work day lost to overclocking or an error caused by overclocking means that it's less value that just buying top-of-the-line from the beginning.
  - mrmidnite 9y ago
    Guys, the x-ryzens are not overclocking stuff, sure good for it, but what they do is increase the speed as much as possible on the fly meaning if you cool them, they run faster (read liquid cooling). This is true also at stock clocking/speed. So yes ryzen 1700 is great with it's 65 tdp, but 1700x is even greater also WITHOUT overclocking, but well cooled. No picking, just wanted to make this obvious.
Warp__ 9y ago
Interesting. I have a 1700X/16GB/SSD build and a Dell XPS 15 9560, both of which are very fast, but the Ryzen just flies!
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Is the XPS 15 good? I went on Amazon to buy one, but the reviews are 50% 1-star, and I got scared.
  - _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
    I have an $3000 XPS13 and it's the worst computer I ever had. Very bad build quality. Too hot so glue dissolves. Makes weird noises with load (or browser scrolling). Fan broken in no time. Performance not what I had hoped for.
  - Warp__ 9y ago
    I have had 0 issues with it except some Audio stuttering due to DPS Latency issues. I'm getting a replacement (Model Up actually, Dell did a 12% off offer) so we'll see how it is. I look forward to UHD Touch & Fingerprint Reader.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      Thank you, I got the smaller (not base) model but added the fingerprint reader, as it was only $20ish and it might prove useful. I'm glad you had no issues.
      - Warp__ 9y ago
        Have fun! They are really nice tbh.
mamon 9y ago
What really blows my mind is that we seem to be stuck in terms of single-core performance. Passmark score of Ryzen 1800X is only 25% higher than middle-class, low power i5-6260U[1], despite over 1GHz difference in maximum frequency. Given that, it is really suprising that 8 core processors didn't become popular earlier [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2966&cmp[]=2671 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2966&cmp[]=26...

311 points by old-gregg 9y ago

As much as this isn't for me (it was during the celeron 300a era), I really appreciate the detailed writeup and specific workflow example benchmarking.

codinghorror 9y ago

True! Basically 2x the cores Intel will sell you, at the same price. IPC is "only" at broadwell levels but that's still pretty solid.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

> Cooling $100 Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280 99% of programmers don't need a machine with liquid cooling. Even if they are targeting high performance hardware, development work can be run from a more modest machine.

lysp 9y ago
It also means the machine runs quieter.
mikekchar 9y ago
He appears to be trying to build a fairly silent machine as well, so the liquid cooling will help. Does he need that much power, though? I certainly wouldn't, but for what he is doing I can see it. He's running 12 containers in VirtualBox. Avoiding VirtualBox would help a lot, but depending on what he's doing, he may not be able to (and on Mac, I think you have no choice -- he may not realise that he'll get tons better performance without it). On top of that he's doing Closure (presumably with power hungry development toys) and lots of video conferencing. I often pair program remotely with video conferencing and it can eat half of your CPU(s). Mumble and Tmux is a much better way to go, but again setting up and getting used to the tooling is not trivial. $2K and building your own machine vs doing some pretty serious work trying to lighten the development environment -- I can see an argument for it, even if it's not the way I would choose to go.
- ferongr 9y ago
  All-in-one watercooling systems are not more silent. The pump is audible and the lack of radiator surface means you'll hear the fans when they ramp up.
  - egeozcan 9y ago
    My motherboard has a liquid cooling setting for managing fans. I can rarely hear the pump and fans are very silent. It's an AIO system from corsair with 2 fans (I'm outside & can't remember the name now).
    - glenneroo 9y ago
      Is it anecdotal evidence time? I have NOCTUA CPU coolers in multiple Fractal R4/R5 cases and all 4 of these machines run at 100% CPU for weeks on end and you also can't hear anything. I considered going the water cooling route, but from what I could gather from various reviewers, is that like the parent you replied to, the pump makes noise as well as the fans when going overtime (not to mention a lot more expensive and time-consuming to install). Maybe it has something to do with the case? What case do you have? Did you do anything extra to silence it?
      - egeozcan 9y ago
        I have a mid-range Cooler Master case, don't have the model name in mind but I don't remember it having anything specific for sound isolation. When it comes to these things, I can't find anything but anecdotal evidence. Even the most respected reviewers usually have a sample size of one.
    - floatboth 9y ago
      Yep I have the NZXT Kraken X61 and I can only hear the pump when I put my ear very very close to the tower.
- sb057 9y ago
  >He appears to be trying to build a fairly silent machine as well, so the liquid cooling will help. One fan is a lot quieter than 2-3 fans + pump.
dguaraglia 9y ago
This. The stock cooler (that is included in the price of the Ryzen) is good enough for most stuff. Even if you want to "splurge" on a cooler, you can buy a monster cooler for ~40 bucks that is barely audible and can cool even an overclocked i7-7700K without any issues.
kaosjester 9y ago
He also didn't need to blow $500 on an SSD when he could have gotten a $100 SSD and a $100 hybrid drive and double his storage space.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  I would rather have 1 fast HD than deal with which mounts go which speed.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  The nvme ssd drives are several times faster than the best sata ssd (sometimes 10x). Although I'm not sure you would be able to tell much difference. But loading up large virtual machines frequently might be a use case where a difference would be noted. There are quite a few benchmarks and real world comparisons on YouTube that seem to indicate significant improvement in some workloads.
  - kaosjester 9y ago
    I'm not saying it isn't faster, I'm merely pointing out that it was a pretty serious investment in comparison to the other points of the build, and attempting to defend the idea that liquid cooling isn't insane if you're going all-out with other aspects, too.
mirekrusin 9y ago
Liquid cooling is almost at the same price, doesn't make the build more expensive and Ryzen is great for overclocking - I think more than 1% of programmers - especially those who made decision to get Ryzen - will benefit from liquid cooling.
- sundvor 9y ago
  Totally. For me the main benefit is that it makes for a far more clean build. High performance air coolers make for a very crowded solution.

nxc18 9y ago

I just recently completed a build myself. It was pre-Ryzen so AMD wasn't an option at the time. I went with the Intel i7-7700 (quad core) at 3.6 GHz. I was surprised by two big things: high-performance devices are extremely affordable nowadays and processors have gotten a lot better despite minimal changes in clock speed. I went on PC Part Picker and built my 'budget' device and my 'fantasy' device. It turned out they were just about the same. I couldn't really spend more than $1500 for anything better without jumping to server-grade parts. Yesterday I played Halo Wars 2, listened to Spotify, kept Word, Excel, Edge, Chrome, & WEKA open, and was running an embarrassingly inefficient data mining program in Python via WSL, while running a Jenkins build server in an Ubuntu Server VM, and running TeamCity in a Windows Server VM. Even on the Intel chip, which is presumably less good at multitasking than Ryzen, I just can't throw enough at it to experience anything resembling slowdown. 8 logical cores still seems to be plenty for most users, but I could see with even more VMs that one might need more. As an aside, it is incredibly nice to be able to run VMs without even thinking about their resource consumption - it's like having my own little cloud. I wonder if maybe Intel's marketing for their chips could use improvement. On paper, my MacBook Pro with 16Gb RAM and 3GHz i7 shouldn't be that much worse than my desktop with 32Gb RAM (most of which is unused) and 3.6GHz i7. The difference in practice is night and day. I'm losing faith in the concept of a laptop as a developer's primary device (especially with SSH & Remote Desktop being so good these days).

givemefive 9y ago
Look at synthetic benchmarks of your chip and the MBP. It's night and day difference. I won't use a laptop to develop on either. It's too slow. (And the ergonomics are terrible anyways so a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc are all necessary anyways)
mastazi 9y ago
Just like you, I completed my build recently. Before that, for a few years I had used laptops exclusively. I was blown away by how even a modest desktop [1] is so much faster than even a high end laptop [2]. I believe it's because any laptop will end up throttling because of thermals, unless you get one of those very heavy gaming or workstation laptops with huge cooling systems. Oh and I had to throw away my laptop because the motherboard failed, all I could salvage was the SSD. Not going to happen with a desktop. [1] (I have a non-overclockable i5-6500, 16GB DDR4, SSD with SATA3 interface, a GTX 1060 with 6GB VRAM) [2] My laptop was an i7 quad-core, 16GB DDR4, SSD SATA3, GT840 GPU. Everything except the GPU was better than or equal to my desktop.

dman 9y ago

Am waiting for Naples to ship before assembling my workstation. Hope it shows up soon.

KSS42 9y ago
32 cores / 64 threads?
- dman 9y ago
  Yes - plan to do a dual socket build. So 64 cores - 128 threads.
- maksimum 9y ago
  8 memory lanes too, just over 150GB/s with 2400MHz RAM.
nickpeterson 9y ago
You are correct, Naples will be the right choice for a workstation because I doubt Intel will lower Xeon prices much.

dis-sys 9y ago

Bought my Q6600 quad core processor 10 years ago. 10 years on, Intel still refuses to make 8 core processors mainstream to PC. Lucky enough, I don't have to listen to Intel's stories on why 8 cores are not useful for PC, I can pay AMD $300 and get Ryzen. Just bought Intel Optane memory this morning, installed it in my AMD Ryzen DEV machine and it works perfectly without any issue. Interestingly, according to Intel, this is not suppose to happen - you are expected to use both of their latest processor/chipset to run Optane memory! Now you tell can me who is preventing people from accessing the best techs at reasonable prices.

runeks 9y ago
Intel doesn't make 8-core consumers CPUs because their 4 cores are roughly as fast as 8 AMD cores. So doubling the core count would produce too much heat. https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+1800X&id=2966 https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+1800X&id=29... https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700 https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700
- kinghajj 9y ago
  cpubenchmark's multithreaded results tend not to scale well with additional cores; comparing results between the two on other better-scaling workloads shows the 1800x blowing the pants off of the 7700k.
- flamedoge 9y ago
  Well Intel didn't have to because they had peak performing chips for a long time. But now AMD will give Intel run for the money again. Intel focused more on getting better yields(margin) and power related features like much lower idle power and more C, P states, which makes sense if you're at the top. They focused on other loose ends than performance.
arcanus 9y ago
Funny enough, I also have had a Q6600 quad, it just turned 9 a week ago. Great chipset. ...And I also just jumped on the Ryzen train. Finally a good time to be a consumer in CPU-land.

danielparks 9y ago

It's ridiculous how well the 2013 MBP does. Of course, the last four years have had much less focus on core performance, or even on putting more cores into pro-sumer machines. Apple in particular is all about thinness, battery life, and passive cooling. That's not a complaint. For most people, including me, those are good trade-offs.

old-gregg 9y ago
Hm... Not sure I agree. I have a 2015 MBP and I was blown away by nearly 2x difference vs a comparable desktop with identical amount of RAM and CPU cores. My workload is compiling Golang code. The desktop is twice as fast and without the heat + fan noise drama. The laptops, or at least the MBP, seem to be built to mostly run on idle IMO.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >The laptops, or at least the MBP, seem to be built to mostly run on idle IMO. This is very much my experience when switching from my previous MBP Retina to my power workhorse desktop. Even my newer XPS 15 is mostly optimized around idle I'm pretty sure.
- look_lookatme 9y ago
  I use Chrome, JetBrains IDEs and emacs all day and recently made the switch to a beefy Linux desktop after 13 years of Apple laptops and I'm blown away by how much faster everything is. I guess I was living in denial about the performance differences.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

As someone who's been near server space, seriously fuck Intel. Blocking ECC memory from consumer CPUs is monopolistic bullshit, my next PC will be AMD even if it's a bit slower. At least AMD doesn't switch socket every 6 months and cripple my hardware on purpose

thomastjeffery 9y ago
Have you actually experienced enough memory errors that you need ECC?
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  You can't run a production database without ECC. Well, you could, but you probably wouldn't have a job very long. Memory gets less reliable with each process shrink. They keep raising the DRAM refresh rate with various tricks but we're always right on the edge of having memory with so many errors that it's unusable. The size of memory cells has decreased to the point that a stray subatomic particle could cause multiple bit errors. Just wait for the next big solar storm. We don't know how often they strike the Earth but it seems to happen every 20 years or so. When it does we're going to have a massive flash of corrupt data from machines not using ECC. Probably worst than y2k issues
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    > Just wait for the next big solar storm. So when that happens, it will be important to have the option. Until then, since I have no reason to run a "production database" on my workstation, why would I want ECC? > we're always right on the edge of having memory with so many errors that it's unusable. That's fine by me. Living here on "the edge", even with overclocked memory, my system is the most stable system I have ever owned. I really can't see any reason to use ECC on my desktop apart from fear of hand-wavy potential issues. Is my personal experience so unique? Are any of you actually experiencing instability that you are sure is caused by physical memory errors that are fixed by using ECC memory?

kaosjester 9y ago

This article reads like a rewrite of the wiki over at /r/buildapc, and I'm not sure I see how much of it leads to his conclusion---any modern, $1500 desktop is going to outperform a two-generation-old laptop with a quarter as much ram. That doesn't make the Ryzen `for programmers.` I came in expected some crazy assembly insights, but instead this is just a PC build log. Nothing really supports the title of this article: it's just clickbait without any real support. And, at this point, most people reading hackernews know it's cheaper to build a PC than buy another PC / laptop---and those that still don't are doing it because a thousand dollars usually buys you a lot of warranty and convenience.

codinghorror 9y ago
The multi-core angle is the main "programmer" bit of Ryzen. If you are writing heavily multithreaded code you will get 2x the cores for your $.
- kaosjester 9y ago
  I agree that Ryzen is a great chip! I am looking forward to getting one because, yeah, it makes for a great developer platform: it's got a bunch of cores, it's got a fantastic virtualization model that isn't randomly crippled on half the chips, it supports ECC ram easily, and it's a killer price-point. The article doesn't really get into any of that, though.
  - codinghorror 9y ago
    not mentioning ECC is pretty sloppy, granted. And virtualization.
- panzer_wyrm 9y ago
  4 cores are enough to write multithreaded code and catch the majority race conditions. You would not run it in production on your desktop though no matter the core count.
  - 9y ago

sundvor 9y ago

Interesting article, and nothing surprising. With an 8 core CPU - and NVME storage, the more interesting test would be to run docker compose whilst profiling a page or whatever. The author hints at it, but hard numbers would be even more fun. I would fully expect the laptop to grind to a halt in scenarios where the Ryzen just chugs on as if nothing special was going on. I built my own 6850k system last June (4.2ghz +32gb ram + samsung 950 pro nvme), and find it great for programming - well, everything, really.

mirekrusin 9y ago

Funny, I just finished building mine - same Ryzen 7 1800X, switching from MacBook Pro/iMac to Ubuntu as well, got 3200MHz RAM also, which booted into 2333MHz as well (will need to wait for motherboard update to get full speed I guess), M.2 SSD... I wonder if it's becoming a trend (to move from macOS to Linux)?

RowanH 9y ago
Gave up waiting for a Mac Pro option April last year, built a monster Win 10 machine - run all my dev work in VMs and get to play the odd game in Ultra settings at astonishing frame rates on an Ultrawide. Can't see ever going back to Mac's ... in fact ordering parts for an 1800x machine at the moment.
- maksimum 9y ago
  Are you running Linux VMs or were you able to get a OS X VM running?
  - ryan-allen 9y ago
    Not OP, but Windows 10 has a Linux Subsystem which is in beta. I use it for bits and pieces for work and I haven't had any issues, I'm not pushing it much though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux
    - Stubb 9y ago
      I'm pushing WSL fairly hard doing OpenMP development. I/O is slow, but it's totally credible for numerics.
  - egeozcan 9y ago
    As you'd have WSL and Linux VMs, you probably wouldn't need an OSX VM if I'm not missing anything? Unless you're building something for OSX, that is. I know, btw, that it's possible to run OSX in VMware.

Cieplak 9y ago

I was a bit disappointed to hear that Libreboot will likely never support AMD hardware :( https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd

sb057 9y ago
There's still hope! https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5xvn4i/update_corebootlibreboot_on_amd_has_ceo_level/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5xvn4i/update_corebo...

shmerl 9y ago

8 core / 16 threads CPUs for sane prices are tempting. Building big projects in less time is useful.

deleted 9y ago

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xuejie 9y ago

While the solution here works, the alternative is you can find a used Intel S2600CP from some random data center together with one or two E5 CPUs. You can get much more possibilities of upgrading the rig this way. I recently built such a PC with roughly $950, it includes one used E5-2650c2, used S2600CP board, 750W power supply, 32GB DDR3 ECC memory(I'm buying CPU, motherboard, power supply and memory from one vendor so I didn't know if the memory is new), brand new GTX 1070 and a brand new 128GB SSD. The good part is the board has 2 CPU slots, 16 memory slots and 6 PCIE slots, so if I feel the need, I can easily by another E5-2650 CPU, or 12 8GB memory sticks to make the total memory 128GB(or more if I choose to upgrade current 4*8GB memory sticks as well), or add more graphics cards for machine learning purposes. Of course this won't cover all use cases since server CPUs tend to have more cores than high frequencies(mine has 8 cores, and 16 threads after HT, but only at 2.00GHz), which might be bad for high end games, but for programming tasks as described by the article here, this might be a better choice

luca_ing 9y ago
Nice build. I've been considering something similar every now and then. The argument that makes me pull back though is my fear that its power draw would be considerable. How much power does your system draw? Idle, and/or under load?
- ihattendorf 9y ago
  Not the person you're responding to, but I have the S2600CP2J w/ dual E5-2670, 128gb ram, 8 2-3tb drives + an ssd and I draw ~120 watts at idle (~3% cpu usage). 100% load is around 300-350 watts. No external video card. Great budget server, motherboard + 2xCPUs + ram were just under $500 from NATEX, intel server case + PSU was $100 from ebay.
  - luca_ing 9y ago
    100W idle is quite a lot in absolute terms, and more than I'd like because my boxes tend to run 24/7 (as do yours, I assume), but I suppose for the sheer amount of hardware you're running it's actually pretty reasonable. So energy cost would be about €240/year where I live, assuming permanent idling. Not exactly cheap, but you get what you pay for I guess :-) Thanks a lot for the info, and congrats on the sweet rig :-)

natch 9y ago

What is the video card in this setup? I missed it if he mentioned it. I suppose he's just using something that was built in to the motherboard? Yes I understand he's using it for editing text.

sb057 9y ago
Ryzen doesn't have iGPU, so he had to be using a dedicated GPU of some sort.
- mrmidnite 9y ago
  The ryzen may have no apu(igpu) no, but if the mobo has graphics (as many ryzen mobos do) there is no need for a pci-e gpu unless a heavy one is needed. Indeed not for editors and compiling.

deleted 9y ago

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kondbg 9y ago

I also built a Ryzen machine for development. It's great when it works, but I've found that Ryzen is unstable on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04). Every once in a while, I get kernel errors like NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#9 stuck for 23s! which requires a hard reset. This behavior doesn't occur on Windows, though, so if you use Windows for development, you should be good.

Pengwin 9y ago
Did you try a later kernel? out of the box ubuntu 16.04 is on the longterm 4.4 kernel. It looks like some ryzen features and patches have been added to 4.10, and they probably were not back-ported to the longterm kernels.
- look_lookatme 9y ago
  Not OP, but just built at Ryzen 1600 box. I've had _more_ instability when running 17.04 and settled on 16.04 which has been mostly fine, but hard crashes occasionally.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    > hard crashes occasionally This sounds disturbingly unacceptable yet accepted
    - dom0 9y ago
      Nothing out of the ordinary with a new platform. While Linux often takes longer to work this stuff out, Windows often has had similar issues in the past as well.
      - shady-lady 9y ago
        Not sure if intent but this is AMD issue. Having experienced first hand AMD driver instability on both Windows & Linux, AMD have lost my custom for the next 10 years.. Multiple re-occurring driver crashes using their main graphics card product line(RX380) on Windows 10.. So, pretty mainstream and yet having driver crashing (even when doing non-intensive tasks e.g. web browsing) For the record, I'm not so sure Nvidia is any more stable either. The only (constantly) stable graphics provider over the years has been Intel's on-board graphics.

partycoder 9y ago

Building a PC is fun but there's stuff that can go wrong. In case you are not familiar with what can go wrong, here there is a vastly incomplete list: - You can damage the PSU by selecting the wrong voltage, you might have a PSU doesn't supply enough wattage. - You can buy incompatible components that won't work with each other. - You could have static electricity, and you won't notice until you turn the computer on and you hear a little spark sound... that means something died. - Causing a short circuit by leaving a metallic object lying around (e.g: a screw) - Getting a thermal problem by applying the thermal paste wrong or connecting a fan spinning to the other side. - Crushing the processor by installing the heatsink with too much muscle. - Connecting light cables to pins that are not for lights causing unintended behavior. In short, there's a lot you can get from building your own system but it can also go wrong... and when it does: no warranty, you are on your own.

maksimum 9y ago
Sure those things are potential mis-haps, but they're pretty easily covered by watching a few guide videos. You could apply your argument to the operating system ... sure you could pay someone to administer it for you under warranty, or you could just learn things as you go and you'll be fine 99.9% of the time.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Sure. Also a good idea to get an anti-static wrist band, and not use a wool sweater or something while assembling.
Dylan16807 9y ago
A fair point, though most of those are very low risk. But I want to point out that PSU voltage selection is a thing of the past. Really you should have no PSU problems if you go with a real brand.
bdcravens 9y ago
Perhaps this is my age showing, but I came up building my own computers. Like many I've enjoyed the convenience of running just MBPs for years, but I've easily built a dozen plus machines, and never had any of the disastrous situations you described occur.

cyrusaf 9y ago

I don't see this as a comparison between Ryzen and Intel. He compares a custom built PC with a 2017 3.6 GHz 8 core Ryzen to an older 2013 2.3 GHz 4 core i7. He could have replaced his Ryzen CPU with a similar priced intel processor and seen the same performance.

Sorreah 9y ago
Not really, as 8 core intel chips cost significantly more.
quickben 9y ago
But not the price. If you go the Intel's way, both the cpu and the motherboard are more costly.

bdcravens 9y ago

My understanding is that the workload was more memory bound than CPU bound? Since the author only went with 32GB, wouldn't a laptop with 32 GB result in comparable gains?

AstralStorm 9y ago
No, most laptops will throttle down or reduce boosting quickly under a real workload. This also reduces effective memory bandwidth.
paulmd 9y ago
No, laptops almost always use weaker processors and/or lack the cooling for sustained work at boost clocks. In a primarily memory-bound workload, the obviously correct answer is a HEDT i7 or a Xeon anyway, since they have quad-channel RAM (doubling your RAM performance right upfront) and don't have the silliness of Ryzen's memory controller.

anorphirith 9y ago

I'm pretty sure the read write speeds of the newer ssd make a much greater difference in the performance than the CPU, a pci ssd would make an even greater difference

intrasight 9y ago

My new build has the same case, PSU, and SSD. I went with Xeon and ECC however. My final price was very close as well. That case is HUGE - but I do like having room to maneuver in there. And it's quiet and has air filters. For reasons of stability, my "desktop" is a Windows 10 VM. Moved all my dev VMs on from my now retired machine, which I'll keep as a backup for a year.

throwit2mewillU 9y ago

My learning with tuning computers in several companies with a lot of money for faster turn around speeds: 1. IO is not as important as your gut feeling tells you (e.g. 5x faster IO often led to <2x faster compiles) 2. Programming languages tout the parallelism horn, but their compilers and tools are really not optimized for many cores.

marcosdumay 9y ago
For #1, why would it be? Programs are a bunch of text files, read from beginning to end, that almost always fit in a small part of RAM. 2x faster compiles is still too big an improvement, something there is badly optimized.

faragon 9y ago

I would love a laptop with 8-core Ryzen with a decent integrated GPU in the SoC :-)

peeyek 9y ago

I second this. I build PC with Ryzen 1500X + GTX1070 and it works flawlessly with TensorFflow and Torch7.

MichaelBurge 9y ago

My only worry is they don't seem to have very many PCIe lanes. But they're cheap enough that you might be able to get a motherboard that supports multiple CPUs, and still save money compared to going 1 high-end Intel CPU. And it might perform better too, if the workload has mixed computation & IO. Web development like the article mentions is probably the perfect fit there. Analytics is probably good too(R, Python, SQL). Careful if you need a video card in there, though.

floatboth 9y ago
Having a fuckton of PCIe lanes only really matters for multi-GPU setups. You can run two GPUs completely fine on an X370 board though.

minhajuddin 9y ago

I have a Lenovo y510p with 3rd generation core i7. I wish I could get a new laptop/desktop, but my laptop performs just so damn well. The only changes I made are the addition of a good ssd, putting in more RAM and replacing the cd drive with the 1TB hard drive. For my workloads (typical web dev stuff) it performs quite well.

tgb 9y ago
I have the same laptop. In the future I'd never buy one like it again - I think it's at a bad point in the power-mobility trade-off for me. But like you it's just too good to warrant replacing anytime soon. Everything is extremely fast since I put in an ssd and I get super confused by the posts we see all the time saying that as computers get faster software gets proportionally more bloated. Using this machine is way smoother than anything I grew up. But in the future I want a desktop and a highly mobile laptop, not an awkwardly immobile laptop. These large laptops were nice for LAN gaming in college but I just don't do that anymore.
- minhajuddin 9y ago
  Yeah, I've had the same experience mobility wise. It is a pretty heavy laptop. I always have it plugged and on a table, Never in my lap :)

philliphaydon 9y ago

The author states he runs his docker images as if they were production. But in production the load of those images is larger than in development. Isn't there more insentive to run lower spec images in development to find noticible performance issues?? I've always thought that dev/test should be smaller env to prod

PetahNZ 9y ago
You don't really wanna limit your daily grind. When you need to performance test you spin up a staging environment and throw benches at it.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Absolutely this, I want to throw as many resources at the development machines as I can fit onto a single machine. I hate any kind of latency between "this should work" -> "does it work?". I've even considered buying beefy server hardware at home but electricity is expensive and it's a rented place so I can't exactly start install server racks.
- philliphaydon 9y ago
  Fair enough. I don't feel limited.

JepZ 9y ago

I am wondering if the benchmarks were made Linux vs. OSX... I mean the author writes that "The Ryzen remains fully responsive and completely usable." and some years ago there was this magical patch that greatly improved the responsiveness of Linux systems: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=128979084506774&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=128979084506774&w=2

floatboth 9y ago

The 1800X is bad value though. It's the "I'm rich and afraid of overclocking for some silly reason" option. It's only slightly better binned. Most 1700s will reach 3.9 GHz easily (77% of them, according to siliconlottery.com). The R7 1700 is the real deal.

hvidgaard 9y ago
That's fine if you want to overclock. I need performance for work and I'm not going to dick around with overclocking - one work day lost to overclocking or an error caused by overclocking means that it's less value that just buying top-of-the-line from the beginning.
- mrmidnite 9y ago
  Guys, the x-ryzens are not overclocking stuff, sure good for it, but what they do is increase the speed as much as possible on the fly meaning if you cool them, they run faster (read liquid cooling). This is true also at stock clocking/speed. So yes ryzen 1700 is great with it's 65 tdp, but 1700x is even greater also WITHOUT overclocking, but well cooled. No picking, just wanted to make this obvious.

Warp__ 9y ago

Interesting. I have a 1700X/16GB/SSD build and a Dell XPS 15 9560, both of which are very fast, but the Ryzen just flies!

StavrosK 9y ago
Is the XPS 15 good? I went on Amazon to buy one, but the reviews are 50% 1-star, and I got scared.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  I have an $3000 XPS13 and it's the worst computer I ever had. Very bad build quality. Too hot so glue dissolves. Makes weird noises with load (or browser scrolling). Fan broken in no time. Performance not what I had hoped for.
- Warp__ 9y ago
  I have had 0 issues with it except some Audio stuttering due to DPS Latency issues. I'm getting a replacement (Model Up actually, Dell did a 12% off offer) so we'll see how it is. I look forward to UHD Touch & Fingerprint Reader.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Thank you, I got the smaller (not base) model but added the fingerprint reader, as it was only $20ish and it might prove useful. I'm glad you had no issues.
    - Warp__ 9y ago
      Have fun! They are really nice tbh.

mamon 9y ago

What really blows my mind is that we seem to be stuck in terms of single-core performance. Passmark score of Ryzen 1800X is only 25% higher than middle-class, low power i5-6260U[1], despite over 1GHz difference in maximum frequency. Given that, it is really suprising that 8 core processors didn't become popular earlier [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2966&cmp[]=2671 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2966&cmp[]=26...