7 ms·

What does this mean compared to say a 2011 i7? I'm frankly amazed my first post-college desktop is soldiering on as a high-end gaming system with gpu, ssd and

What does this mean compared to say a 2011 i7? I'm frankly amazed my first post-college desktop is soldiering on as a high-end gaming system with gpu, ssd and dram updates

JoeCoder_ 8y ago
I first read this as "a soldered-on GPU" :O
lev99 8y ago
Generally speaking gaming is single thread intensive on the CPU side, and all parallel task are offloaded to the GPU. This is really more of a workstation or server cpu than a gaming cpu. Edit: Tons of comments are pointing out exceptions. I was hoping to cover that with "generally speaking".
- p1necone 8y ago
  This is changing (very slowly), more and more games are scaling to higher thread counts (and having more capabilities as a result). Ashes of the Singularity is a good example of a recent game that actually benefits from higher end high core count CPUs. I imagine many genres will never be heavy CPU users though, like low player count competitive FPS and MOBA.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Game studios are already taking advantage of all the cores they can get. This guys go all the way up to 6 hardware ones, depending on availability. https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU
  - loeg 8y ago
    AAA studios, within the last couple years, yeah. But it was certainly the general trend until quite recently, and lower budget games may still be very single threaded on the CPU. Also, many games that do utilize multiple CPU cores do not scale well beyond about 4-6 cores (which makes a lot of sense given the CPUs most gamers have and the priorities of the studios).
    - tormeh 8y ago
      Even most indie titles use 2-4 cores now. Buying a threadripper is overkill, but a hexcore won't be wasted on games. Some rare AAA games will occasionally even use 8 cores. An easy way to see this is to underclock your CPU as far as it will go, and see how many percent CPU your favorite game will use.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Fun fact: A friend has a first-gen Ryzen with 8 cores (16 hyperthreads), and wondered why Civilization V was always crashing on his system. Turns out that Civ V runs into weird race conditions with that many threads. When he pinned the game to 8 or less hyperthreads, it started working properly.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      Writing code on top of legacy single threaded frameworks / content interfaces, under an insane holiday release deadline, while trying to enable multithreading... is pretty much my definition of hell. I feel bad for the poor programmers who got that job.
    - paulmd 8y ago
      Doubtful. Nobody's reporting issues with 5960Xs, and if it were really a race condition then you would occasionally get crashes even in 4- and 6-core processors. Civ5 is one of the games that can trigger Ryzen segfaults, guessing he has a faulty chip. He should run kill-ryzen and see if his chip is stable. Note that contrary to popular belief, the segfault bug does not "only" affect Linux or compiling workloads (it's a litho fault - these workloads just happen to trigger it) and there is no "safe" date range of first-gen Ryzen chips. Newer chips are more likely to work properly, but a smaller number are still faulty - even some RMA chips, since AMD stopped testing them after a few months. I went through the AMD support thread and pulled out some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074355 Looking through the latest posts in the AMD community thread, at least one user is reporting this even on a second-hand processor, although that's not really enough to make a definitive statement.
- Merad 8y ago
  "Gaming = single threaded" really hasn't been true for a while now, at least in the arena of AAA games. My gaming desktop has a Core i7-4790k (4 core/8 thread), and I can remember several games offhand that were loading all 8 HT cores at 75+%.
  - rf15 8y ago
    No, most games are single threaded, even AAA ones. You might get this impression from a vocal minority though, "vocal" in the sense that they're the ones landing on your radar, while the technical details of other games do not. (you could argue for ps3 of course, But there it's not a choice)
    - foepys 8y ago
      I don't know enough about games but if that's true, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One have 6 to 7 cores just idling most of the time? Why did Sony and Microsoft put 8 core CPUs in their consoles instead fewer cores with higher clockspeed if that's the case?
      - rf15 8y ago
        they use extra cores for live video recording and fun like that, also console games are usually run in a vm on the console these days so it's giving the OS some spare space too (contact lists/chat, achievements, etc.). Also it gives games the possibility to run on more cores if you're AAA and want to leverage them.
        rf15 8y ago
        if you are disagreeing with my broad-ish statements about two very different platforms please explain how I am wrong instead of just downvoting.
        daemin 8y ago
        You are wrong because games released in the past few years are heavily multithreaded. The only game recently that I've seen not be multithreaded is Battletech. The latest Total War series are heavily multithreaded. As far as the cores go on consoles, game developers try to use all of them all the time, and in general there's only one core that is half dedicated to doing OS / interaction / video recording tasks.
- rf15 8y ago
  As a game dev, I agree with you. Also: all the casual observers that say "just multithread/core it! would make it so much faster!" and don't understand one bit about parallelisation problems, as if it's just a bit you flip.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    To be fair of the criticism, game engines are way behind the stage of the art in concurrency and parallelism. It’s not as easy a flipping a switch, but it shouldn’t be as dire as it is either.
    - cogman10 8y ago
      I think the big problem is that games are hyper optimized for single threaded performance. ECS systems are basically big arrays of mutable data manipulated by multiple systems. To do threading well, you'd pretty much have to dump that. Not to say they aren't behind. I once saw a game talk about how awesome they are because they reinvented a thread pool. But their state of the art is in direct conflict with good threading practices.
      - auto 8y ago
        Unfortunately, we haven't seen the paradigm shift in game engine development that would be necessary to really get away from hyper optimized single threaded performance. Until someone figures out a way to efficiently utilize (highly) parallel execution in a deterministic game engine that has to run at at least 60fps, there isn't an incentive to move beyond the tried and true ways of doing things. At least, I don't think we have, I'm not in AAA and only keep a tangential pulse on that level of gamedev. That said, I'd be really interested to see how some of these Battle Royale engines tick (no pun intended). It seems like there's a ton of potential for "clustering" execution, essentially treating separate sections of maps as separate games, but considering it could come down to 100 people all being within the same 100 square meters, you can't necessarily rely on that model.
        8y ago
SECProto 8y ago
I've got an i7 from a similar time period (4700 maybe? something like that). It's been in a closet for a couple years cause I haven't had the time for it, but I'm considering upgrading to some more current components. Sorry, this isn't really the place to ask, but what sort of GPU and ram are you running?
- chrisper 8y ago
  The problem with GPU right now is that there is great uncertainty when the new Nvidia GPUs are coming out... the CEO of Nvidia said "not for a long time," but that doesn't have to mean anything. GPU and Ram prices are sadly also very high at the moment... probably the worst time to build a new high end PC.
  - SECProto 8y ago
    yeah for sure. I mean GPU/RAM prices have been trending up for 18 months, and don't show any sign of slacking, so it is what it is. I think I'll just have to bite the bullet and upgrade from the geforce 5xx or whatever it has right now. It sounds like Radeons are the more OSS-friendly option right now anyway? (I don't game on Linux, but "vote with your wallet" etc)
    - berti 8y ago
      AMD is the clear winner on Linux simply because the official drivers are in the mainline kernel. No more dealing with NVIDIA binary blobs, and DKMS + the breakage caused when NVIDIAs shim is out of step with the particular kernel you want to run. NVIDIA wins perf/price though, and availability depending on where you are. :(
      - sliken 8y ago
        I love the idea of opens source drivers in the mainline kernel. But from what I can tell linux + nvidia blob is still the more featureful, stable, and performant 3d stack for linux. I can stay logged in for weeks, watch bluray (with low CPU utilization), games, tinker with WebGL, and open a zillion terminals/tabs. AMD is getting better, but doesn't seem quit there yet. Steam and phoronix still seem to generally agree nvidia is still the #1 choice on linux. #2 (stability wise) seems to be Intel's GPU. AMD's working on it, but decent performance often requires a custom build stack not supported on any current Linux distro. I'd rather not have to recompile my own kernel, mesa, and related just to get reasonable stable and decent performance.
chrisper 8y ago
TDP is way too high for a gaming system. Unless you like to sit in hot room and needing a gigantic power supply?
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Gaming is irrelevant for this kind of CPU. Gaming is not the driving force for CPU in general. It is a niche market.
- x3sphere 8y ago
  No game out right now is going to leverage all those cores, while gaming it's not going to be pushing 250W. As far as heat, the Vega 64 GPU I've got draws way more power than that too. I don't think this product is really targeted towards gamers anyway, but I don't think they'd care much about the power draw.
  - thom 8y ago
    I realise your general point is correct, but Football Manager 2018 is pretty mainstream and will eat as many cores as you throw at it.
    - nomel 8y ago
      You assume there’s that much computation to perform. If they’re able to achieve anywhere close to 100%, there’s a pretty extreme bug in the game.
      - thom 8y ago
        I'm not sure how you see this as a bug - it runs a huge number of agent-based simulations to calculate match results, there are many matches to be played, and yes, it will use all your CPU power to do that. It doesn't do this 100% of the time, but the vast majority of computation in the game happens in a way that is very parallelisable.
        8y ago

What does this mean compared to say a 2011 i7? I'm frankly amazed my first post-college desktop is soldiering on as a high-end gaming system with gpu, ssd and dram updates

JoeCoder_ 8y ago

I first read this as "a soldered-on GPU" :O

lev99 8y ago

Generally speaking gaming is single thread intensive on the CPU side, and all parallel task are offloaded to the GPU. This is really more of a workstation or server cpu than a gaming cpu. Edit: Tons of comments are pointing out exceptions. I was hoping to cover that with "generally speaking".

p1necone 8y ago
This is changing (very slowly), more and more games are scaling to higher thread counts (and having more capabilities as a result). Ashes of the Singularity is a good example of a recent game that actually benefits from higher end high core count CPUs. I imagine many genres will never be heavy CPU users though, like low player count competitive FPS and MOBA.
pjmlp 8y ago
Game studios are already taking advantage of all the cores they can get. This guys go all the way up to 6 hardware ones, depending on availability. https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU https://youtu.be/ptakmFGcIRU
- loeg 8y ago
  AAA studios, within the last couple years, yeah. But it was certainly the general trend until quite recently, and lower budget games may still be very single threaded on the CPU. Also, many games that do utilize multiple CPU cores do not scale well beyond about 4-6 cores (which makes a lot of sense given the CPUs most gamers have and the priorities of the studios).
  - tormeh 8y ago
    Even most indie titles use 2-4 cores now. Buying a threadripper is overkill, but a hexcore won't be wasted on games. Some rare AAA games will occasionally even use 8 cores. An easy way to see this is to underclock your CPU as far as it will go, and see how many percent CPU your favorite game will use.
- majewsky 8y ago
  Fun fact: A friend has a first-gen Ryzen with 8 cores (16 hyperthreads), and wondered why Civilization V was always crashing on his system. Turns out that Civ V runs into weird race conditions with that many threads. When he pinned the game to 8 or less hyperthreads, it started working properly.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Writing code on top of legacy single threaded frameworks / content interfaces, under an insane holiday release deadline, while trying to enable multithreading... is pretty much my definition of hell. I feel bad for the poor programmers who got that job.
  - paulmd 8y ago
    Doubtful. Nobody's reporting issues with 5960Xs, and if it were really a race condition then you would occasionally get crashes even in 4- and 6-core processors. Civ5 is one of the games that can trigger Ryzen segfaults, guessing he has a faulty chip. He should run kill-ryzen and see if his chip is stable. Note that contrary to popular belief, the segfault bug does not "only" affect Linux or compiling workloads (it's a litho fault - these workloads just happen to trigger it) and there is no "safe" date range of first-gen Ryzen chips. Newer chips are more likely to work properly, but a smaller number are still faulty - even some RMA chips, since AMD stopped testing them after a few months. I went through the AMD support thread and pulled out some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074355 Looking through the latest posts in the AMD community thread, at least one user is reporting this even on a second-hand processor, although that's not really enough to make a definitive statement.
Merad 8y ago
"Gaming = single threaded" really hasn't been true for a while now, at least in the arena of AAA games. My gaming desktop has a Core i7-4790k (4 core/8 thread), and I can remember several games offhand that were loading all 8 HT cores at 75+%.
- rf15 8y ago
  No, most games are single threaded, even AAA ones. You might get this impression from a vocal minority though, "vocal" in the sense that they're the ones landing on your radar, while the technical details of other games do not. (you could argue for ps3 of course, But there it's not a choice)
  - foepys 8y ago
    I don't know enough about games but if that's true, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One have 6 to 7 cores just idling most of the time? Why did Sony and Microsoft put 8 core CPUs in their consoles instead fewer cores with higher clockspeed if that's the case?
    - rf15 8y ago
      they use extra cores for live video recording and fun like that, also console games are usually run in a vm on the console these days so it's giving the OS some spare space too (contact lists/chat, achievements, etc.). Also it gives games the possibility to run on more cores if you're AAA and want to leverage them.
      - rf15 8y ago
        if you are disagreeing with my broad-ish statements about two very different platforms please explain how I am wrong instead of just downvoting.
        daemin 8y ago
        You are wrong because games released in the past few years are heavily multithreaded. The only game recently that I've seen not be multithreaded is Battletech. The latest Total War series are heavily multithreaded. As far as the cores go on consoles, game developers try to use all of them all the time, and in general there's only one core that is half dedicated to doing OS / interaction / video recording tasks.
rf15 8y ago
As a game dev, I agree with you. Also: all the casual observers that say "just multithread/core it! would make it so much faster!" and don't understand one bit about parallelisation problems, as if it's just a bit you flip.
- garmaine 8y ago
  To be fair of the criticism, game engines are way behind the stage of the art in concurrency and parallelism. It’s not as easy a flipping a switch, but it shouldn’t be as dire as it is either.
  - cogman10 8y ago
    I think the big problem is that games are hyper optimized for single threaded performance. ECS systems are basically big arrays of mutable data manipulated by multiple systems. To do threading well, you'd pretty much have to dump that. Not to say they aren't behind. I once saw a game talk about how awesome they are because they reinvented a thread pool. But their state of the art is in direct conflict with good threading practices.
    - auto 8y ago
      Unfortunately, we haven't seen the paradigm shift in game engine development that would be necessary to really get away from hyper optimized single threaded performance. Until someone figures out a way to efficiently utilize (highly) parallel execution in a deterministic game engine that has to run at at least 60fps, there isn't an incentive to move beyond the tried and true ways of doing things. At least, I don't think we have, I'm not in AAA and only keep a tangential pulse on that level of gamedev. That said, I'd be really interested to see how some of these Battle Royale engines tick (no pun intended). It seems like there's a ton of potential for "clustering" execution, essentially treating separate sections of maps as separate games, but considering it could come down to 100 people all being within the same 100 square meters, you can't necessarily rely on that model.
      - 8y ago

SECProto 8y ago

I've got an i7 from a similar time period (4700 maybe? something like that). It's been in a closet for a couple years cause I haven't had the time for it, but I'm considering upgrading to some more current components. Sorry, this isn't really the place to ask, but what sort of GPU and ram are you running?

chrisper 8y ago
The problem with GPU right now is that there is great uncertainty when the new Nvidia GPUs are coming out... the CEO of Nvidia said "not for a long time," but that doesn't have to mean anything. GPU and Ram prices are sadly also very high at the moment... probably the worst time to build a new high end PC.
- SECProto 8y ago
  yeah for sure. I mean GPU/RAM prices have been trending up for 18 months, and don't show any sign of slacking, so it is what it is. I think I'll just have to bite the bullet and upgrade from the geforce 5xx or whatever it has right now. It sounds like Radeons are the more OSS-friendly option right now anyway? (I don't game on Linux, but "vote with your wallet" etc)
  - berti 8y ago
    AMD is the clear winner on Linux simply because the official drivers are in the mainline kernel. No more dealing with NVIDIA binary blobs, and DKMS + the breakage caused when NVIDIAs shim is out of step with the particular kernel you want to run. NVIDIA wins perf/price though, and availability depending on where you are. :(
    - sliken 8y ago
      I love the idea of opens source drivers in the mainline kernel. But from what I can tell linux + nvidia blob is still the more featureful, stable, and performant 3d stack for linux. I can stay logged in for weeks, watch bluray (with low CPU utilization), games, tinker with WebGL, and open a zillion terminals/tabs. AMD is getting better, but doesn't seem quit there yet. Steam and phoronix still seem to generally agree nvidia is still the #1 choice on linux. #2 (stability wise) seems to be Intel's GPU. AMD's working on it, but decent performance often requires a custom build stack not supported on any current Linux distro. I'd rather not have to recompile my own kernel, mesa, and related just to get reasonable stable and decent performance.

chrisper 8y ago

TDP is way too high for a gaming system. Unless you like to sit in hot room and needing a gigantic power supply?

paulie_a 8y ago
Gaming is irrelevant for this kind of CPU. Gaming is not the driving force for CPU in general. It is a niche market.
x3sphere 8y ago
No game out right now is going to leverage all those cores, while gaming it's not going to be pushing 250W. As far as heat, the Vega 64 GPU I've got draws way more power than that too. I don't think this product is really targeted towards gamers anyway, but I don't think they'd care much about the power draw.
- thom 8y ago
  I realise your general point is correct, but Football Manager 2018 is pretty mainstream and will eat as many cores as you throw at it.
  - nomel 8y ago
    You assume there’s that much computation to perform. If they’re able to achieve anywhere close to 100%, there’s a pretty extreme bug in the game.
    - thom 8y ago
      I'm not sure how you see this as a bug - it runs a huge number of agent-based simulations to calculate match results, there are many matches to be played, and yes, it will use all your CPU power to do that. It doesn't do this 100% of the time, but the vast majority of computation in the game happens in a way that is very parallelisable.
      - 8y ago