6 ms·

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.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Do not overestimate how heavy most CRUD is. What really matters is not exposing CPU heavy hitters directly (caching) and not hitting disk (also caching). And obviously network performance. Modern "desktops" ate stronger than most older "server" hardware. What you don't get is warranty, redundancy so you have to handle it on your own, preferably multiple machines, power supplies and network connections. Or complete collocation if you can afford it. Intel, unlike AMD, is hiking price for server market by disabling more important features like high RAM capacity support, ECC and remote management.
breul99 9y ago
I still don't really see the pro to Ryzen in this case. It would be cheaper/better to get a couple used sandy bridge era (or newer in some cases) xeons off ebay with a dual socket motherboard in the multithreaded case, or get an i7-7700 for single threaded performance while still having a reasonable amount of cores+threads to play with.
- hhandoko 9y ago
  For me it brings a lot of benefits: easier to find parts, consumer-level parts pricing, and lower TDP. I'm running a dual Xeon as you mentioned, through buying ex-fleet parts at less than half price of new ones. Several issues I experienced: - Lack of motherboard options. I had to purchase new motherboard at a high price since the ones that support dual Xeons are either in an incompatible form factor or simply out-of-stock. I settled with Asus Z9PE-D8 WS with an SSI-EEB form factor. - Outdated BIOS. I had to order a new, pre-flashed, BIOS chip since the BIOS that came with the motherboard refused to boot with the CPU and memory combo. - Hard to find suitable ECC RAM. The motherboard only supports limited RAM (speed + latency) configs, and finding those is becoming harder. Availability looks seasonal at times. - Needs capable power supply. One thing that people often look past is the need of a proper PSU. I had to upgrade to one which support two CPU power connectors.
  - dom0 9y ago
    Proper cases can be hard to come up with (new they are rather expensive), e.g. I can't do anything with a 85 cm deep pizza box in my rack (because that pizza box is like 15 cm longer than the whole thing), so I needed a bit more special case, which has space for a standard 2S board but is short as well. Only Supermicro had one of those.
    - hhandoko 9y ago
      Yeah, this is another problem that I had. Plenty of full-tower cases these days support EATX, but SSI-EEB not so much (at least, the ones that can support it out-of-the-box). In the end, I went with one of the Phanteks Enthoo [1] cases. Decent quality without breaking the bank :) Notes: [1] - http://www.phanteks.com/enthoo-pro.html http://www.phanteks.com/enthoo-pro.html
runeks 9y ago
2x the number of cores at roughly half the speed per core: 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
- vondur 9y ago
  The score you linked to showed the Ryzen as 26% faster than the i7. The Ryzen 1800x has a CPU mark of 15403 vs 12242 for the i7. I do remember reading that the Ryzen IPC is about 5% lower vs an i7, so I'm assuming whatever metric CPU mark is using takes into account the extra cores.
- kinghajj 9y ago
  Looks quite different when you use a benchmark that scales more effectively with additional cores: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85882.png http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85882.png
  - codinghorror 9y ago
    yeah this is the one! A $1100 chip for $500, by Intel's math anyway.
- Sanddancer 9y ago
  There's something screwy with how that benchmark is done on an 8 core processor. Comparing a quad core Ryzen 5 1500X at 3.5Ghz to a quad core i7 7700 at 3.6Ghz, the difference is 10423/10843, or a difference of 4%. The biggest difference comes down to AMD seems very conservative about their base clock speeds for Ryzen. Against each other at similar clocks, the single core performance is near identical. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+1500X&id=3001 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+1500X&id... http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700+%40+3.60GHz&id=2905 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700+%...
fulafel 9y ago
IME many programmers think having to parallelise your code by hand is a tedious and error-prone part of programming that increases complexity for silly reasons and distracts you from the application domain, and a failure of programming language / compiler technology.
- dom0 9y ago
  I admit I don't have a big problem with parallel coding often being considered something for experts/consultants/wizards. Keeps the prices up :)
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    It doesn't matter how much of an expert you are if your algorithm fundamentally isn't parallel though. We just don't know how to parallelise some things.
    - dom0 9y ago
      Fully agreed, but often these can be solved by reviewing the overall (business) problem. E.g. maybe it's hard / not worth it to process a file in parallel, but maybe the most frequent use case needs to process more than one file and files can be processed in parallel with much less work.
jokr004 9y ago
If that's the case then you should just go buy a sparc server off of ebay. I bought a Sun t1000 for $80 with shipping that has a 6 core sparc t1 with 24 threads.. and for a few hundred more you can get 128 threads in one 2u server! I suppose not everyone wants to write code for sparc (or keep a noisy server in your home office), but if all you're doing is web dev like the guy in this post then it doesn't really make much of a difference.
gens 9y ago
I have an fx 8320. 8 cores and much cheaper then ryzen or intel. 4 cores is enough for (almost) any kind of multi-core dillydallying, so any "old" 4 core cpu is fine. (sidenote: firefox has "dillydallying" in its dictionary:) It's probably the ryzen hype that got this post so high. I like AMD as well, but really.

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.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Do not overestimate how heavy most CRUD is. What really matters is not exposing CPU heavy hitters directly (caching) and not hitting disk (also caching). And obviously network performance. Modern "desktops" ate stronger than most older "server" hardware. What you don't get is warranty, redundancy so you have to handle it on your own, preferably multiple machines, power supplies and network connections. Or complete collocation if you can afford it. Intel, unlike AMD, is hiking price for server market by disabling more important features like high RAM capacity support, ECC and remote management.

breul99 9y ago

I still don't really see the pro to Ryzen in this case. It would be cheaper/better to get a couple used sandy bridge era (or newer in some cases) xeons off ebay with a dual socket motherboard in the multithreaded case, or get an i7-7700 for single threaded performance while still having a reasonable amount of cores+threads to play with.

hhandoko 9y ago
For me it brings a lot of benefits: easier to find parts, consumer-level parts pricing, and lower TDP. I'm running a dual Xeon as you mentioned, through buying ex-fleet parts at less than half price of new ones. Several issues I experienced: - Lack of motherboard options. I had to purchase new motherboard at a high price since the ones that support dual Xeons are either in an incompatible form factor or simply out-of-stock. I settled with Asus Z9PE-D8 WS with an SSI-EEB form factor. - Outdated BIOS. I had to order a new, pre-flashed, BIOS chip since the BIOS that came with the motherboard refused to boot with the CPU and memory combo. - Hard to find suitable ECC RAM. The motherboard only supports limited RAM (speed + latency) configs, and finding those is becoming harder. Availability looks seasonal at times. - Needs capable power supply. One thing that people often look past is the need of a proper PSU. I had to upgrade to one which support two CPU power connectors.
- dom0 9y ago
  Proper cases can be hard to come up with (new they are rather expensive), e.g. I can't do anything with a 85 cm deep pizza box in my rack (because that pizza box is like 15 cm longer than the whole thing), so I needed a bit more special case, which has space for a standard 2S board but is short as well. Only Supermicro had one of those.
  - hhandoko 9y ago
    Yeah, this is another problem that I had. Plenty of full-tower cases these days support EATX, but SSI-EEB not so much (at least, the ones that can support it out-of-the-box). In the end, I went with one of the Phanteks Enthoo [1] cases. Decent quality without breaking the bank :) Notes: [1] - http://www.phanteks.com/enthoo-pro.html http://www.phanteks.com/enthoo-pro.html

runeks 9y ago

2x the number of cores at roughly half the speed per core: 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

vondur 9y ago
The score you linked to showed the Ryzen as 26% faster than the i7. The Ryzen 1800x has a CPU mark of 15403 vs 12242 for the i7. I do remember reading that the Ryzen IPC is about 5% lower vs an i7, so I'm assuming whatever metric CPU mark is using takes into account the extra cores.
kinghajj 9y ago
Looks quite different when you use a benchmark that scales more effectively with additional cores: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85882.png http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85882.png
- codinghorror 9y ago
  yeah this is the one! A $1100 chip for $500, by Intel's math anyway.
Sanddancer 9y ago
There's something screwy with how that benchmark is done on an 8 core processor. Comparing a quad core Ryzen 5 1500X at 3.5Ghz to a quad core i7 7700 at 3.6Ghz, the difference is 10423/10843, or a difference of 4%. The biggest difference comes down to AMD seems very conservative about their base clock speeds for Ryzen. Against each other at similar clocks, the single core performance is near identical. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+1500X&id=3001 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+1500X&id... http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700+%40+3.60GHz&id=2905 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700+%...

fulafel 9y ago

IME many programmers think having to parallelise your code by hand is a tedious and error-prone part of programming that increases complexity for silly reasons and distracts you from the application domain, and a failure of programming language / compiler technology.

dom0 9y ago
I admit I don't have a big problem with parallel coding often being considered something for experts/consultants/wizards. Keeps the prices up :)
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  It doesn't matter how much of an expert you are if your algorithm fundamentally isn't parallel though. We just don't know how to parallelise some things.
  - dom0 9y ago
    Fully agreed, but often these can be solved by reviewing the overall (business) problem. E.g. maybe it's hard / not worth it to process a file in parallel, but maybe the most frequent use case needs to process more than one file and files can be processed in parallel with much less work.

jokr004 9y ago

If that's the case then you should just go buy a sparc server off of ebay. I bought a Sun t1000 for $80 with shipping that has a 6 core sparc t1 with 24 threads.. and for a few hundred more you can get 128 threads in one 2u server! I suppose not everyone wants to write code for sparc (or keep a noisy server in your home office), but if all you're doing is web dev like the guy in this post then it doesn't really make much of a difference.

gens 9y ago

I have an fx 8320. 8 cores and much cheaper then ryzen or intel. 4 cores is enough for (almost) any kind of multi-core dillydallying, so any "old" 4 core cpu is fine. (sidenote: firefox has "dillydallying" in its dictionary:) It's probably the ryzen hype that got this post so high. I like AMD as well, but really.