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I was somewhat taken aback by this complete focus on gaming. Gaming this, gaming that, FPS this and that. Buying a 3900X was one of the best purchases I ever m
by ckastner 6y ago
I was somewhat taken aback by this complete focus on gaming. Gaming this, gaming that, FPS this and that.
Buying a 3900X was one of the best purchases I ever made, but from the video, as a non-gamer, it's not entirely clear to me why I should consider upgrading to the 5900X. A non-gaming benchmark would have been helpful.
Perhaps I just misunderstood the target demographic of the Ryzen 9, and maybe what I'm thinking of (and should be looking at) is Threadripper after all.
- pier25 6y ago> A non-gaming benchmark would have been helpful. Like Cinebench?
- ckastner 6y agoFair enough, on that point.
- azeirah 6y agoI personally love their cpu's for development, can run a solid IDE, have 3 browsers open, compile huge programs with many threads, run 40 docker containers next to each other, have discord, YouTube, Thunderbird etc.. open And it keeps running smoothly! I don't know what the market share of developers is vs gamers :x
- skrtskrt 6y ago40 docker containers?? My fully spec-d out Macbook Pro could only dream of running 8 without a hiccup
- distances 6y agoEvery time I code with the MBP from work I dream of using my home desktop computer instead. There's just no comparison. I have just the 3700X CPU but already that on Linux runs circles around my work laptop.
- alderz 6y agoKeep in mind that Docker for Mac runs in a virtual machine, so it is much heavier than running it on Linux.
- skrtskrt 6y agoGood point. I have yet to take the dive into buying or building a Linux workstation for development. Probably very worth it, but I have found the endless fiddling you can do with Linux to really distract me from doing the actual work I turned on the computer to do.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoIt’s not only endless fiddling you can do but occasinally you have to do as well.
- raegis 6y agoThis may not be true at all, depending on the distribution you use. You should ask a Linux user who does work similar to yours. I haven't had to "fiddle" for years, though I probably subconsciously avoid using software/hardware which I suspect may cause trouble.
- raegis 6y agoDebian stable has been my solution to the endless fiddling for over a decade. But it won't work for you if there's some very specific difficult-to-use-with-Linux thingamajig you need.
- whatch 6y agoWhich macbook do you use? Thinking about replacing my thinkpad e590 with macbook pro 16
- skrtskrt 6y agoI had (before switching jobs) the 2018 MBP with all the options maxed out. Was running a Docker stack of about 8 containers, plus PyCharm. It worked okay-ish, but everything was maxed out all the time and the fans were always spinning. Battery was being drained even when on the charger. Pycharm would lag for a second or two here and there. Now switched jobs and was issued a 2018 MBP with only 16GB RAM and the 2.2GHz i7. I have gone to the trouble to run everything locally (A single 200MB Python repo + Spark). I don't see the same power drain but Pycharm lags VERY hard on its indexing and code insight... sometimes 5-10 seconds.
- whatch 6y agoThere is a high chance you tried it, but have you adjusted memory heap? https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/increasing-memory-heap.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/increasing-memory-hea... Using pycharm (although with a couple of the smaller projects and the number of containers) just fine on i5-8265U (1.6 GHz base) and 16 GB of RAM. There are always tons of tabs opened in Firefox at the same time and 3440x1440 monitor. No discrete GPU. It was painful to use Pycharm with default values.
- skrtskrt 6y agoYeah, I gave it 8 GB and I watch the memory indicator and it rarely uses a full 2 GB. Makes it seem like it's not a memory limitation, which I didn't really expect it to be.
- intricatedetail 6y agoMac these days is a fashion statement rather than a serious tool, plus company shady practices e.g. making devices difficult to repair, questionable design decisions e.g. running high voltage rails right next to low voltage signals to increase the likelihood of failure and then making it difficult to recover data and forcing you to use their cloud so they can analyse your data. No thanks.
- hackerfromthefu 6y agoWell if you look at the ancestry and lineage, they evolved from the class of single button tools .. more related to a toaster than a two button or three button work machine ;)
- azeirah 6y agoHyperbole, meant that I never had any issues with how many containers I was running haha I think I ran like 15 at most on my desktop
- numpad0 6y agoWhat kind of intensive tasks even exist today, apart from gaming? And on top of that, I’m slowly realizing that regular people don’t appreciate snappy computers. They don’t want to wait, but don’t want quick moves either. So things happening instantly demo might not work anyway IMO.
- ckastner 6y agoSoftware development, machine learning, general number crunching, etc. But, as I mentioned above, perhaps I'm just looking at the wrong product, and maybe I should be looking at Threadripper instead.
- greggyb 6y agoCompiling large programs. All sorts of data analytics use cases. Rendering - covers still and video. HPC. Real-time data processing.
- leetcrew 6y ago> And on top of that, I’m slowly realizing that regular people don’t appreciate snappy computers. I don't think this is true. my 70yo father who couldn't care less about tech is always asking me why webpages don't load instantly even when he pays for the highest tier of internet service. I think most people just don't have the knowledge to make hardware/software choices that reflect their desire for "snappiness". a lot of people don't understand that a laptop is inherently less powerful than a desktop, let alone how to allocate money towards cpu/ram/storage to get the best bang for their buck.
- zargon 6y agoIt doesn't help that many retail computers have imbalanced specs, trying to sell to people looking for the highest number on a specific component (and sacrificing every other component for cost) rather than offering a well-balanced system.
- arvinsim 6y ago> I think most people just don't have the knowledge to make hardware/software choices that reflect their desire for "snappiness". It's funny how an average PC will feel snappier on a 144hz monitor compared to a top of the line PC on a 60hz monitor.
- AshWolfy 6y agoFor consumer chips, gaming is where the money is, wait until it comes out and see what the benchmarks are then
- xfalcox 6y agoThere was at least 5 non gaming benchmarks, like GCC, Cinebench, VRay, CAD...
- akmittal 6y agoThey did show cinebench and content creation benchmark https://youtu.be/iuiO6rqYV4o?t=1237 https://youtu.be/iuiO6rqYV4o?t=1237
- greggyb 6y agoGamers appear to be the most avid and most vocal fans of any given computer technology (except maybe networking?). They're probably trying to ride the hype train. That said, you should always wait for third party benchmarks from a source you trust, with benchmarks that relate to your production workloads. I like Anandtech, Phoronix, and Gamers Nexus for such reviews. The last, despite the name, includes a decent swath of non-gaming benchmarks, and they are incredibly transparent about benchmarking methodology, which I appreciate. With the necessary caveat out of the way, some observations: If the IPC gains are there, and we're seeing similar or higher clocks (which seems to be the case), then you should expect a pretty good uplift to non-gaming performance. The cache architecture optimization should also be a boon to many workloads outside of gaming.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago> Gamers appear to be the most avid and most vocal fans of any given computer technology (except maybe networking?). Gaming is very sensitive with network latency. Bandwidth is less important, but helps for downloading and installing games.
- greggyb 6y agoI absolutely understand the importance of network performance in gaming. My observation was on how vocal gamers tend to be in their excitement about hardware. I see gaming media go nuts over CPU and GPU releases. There's excitement and detailed analysis of motherboards. I've seen in depth content on storage, and there's been a lot of hype over the PS5's new storage architecture. RAM gets attention. Obviously displays get lots of attention, both from a visual quality and refresh frequency perspective. There are endless buying guides for peripherals such as mice, keyboards, and headsets. I don't tend to see much content on networking, nor anything approaching the excitement I've seen for any of the categories above. These observations do not diminish the importance of the network in online gaming. I merely noted that networking hardware tends to generate less vocal excitement among gamers. Beyond networking equipment, I believe gamers lead in hardware excitement.
- 6y ago
- leetcrew 6y agothe single thread performance is the meat of the story here. that was the main caveat that stood in the way of an unconditional recommendation of amd over intel in the last generation. it makes sense to primarily target people (like me, incidentally) who would have bought amd last time around but for the deficit in gaming performance.
- f311a 6y agoGamers are the biggest audience when it comes to high-end consumer CPUs. You don't need $550 CPU for your laptop or PC if you don't play games. Many professionals, including developers, don't need such CPUs too. When I need a lot of CPU power, I just ask my company to provide me servers.
- cma 6y agoIf you compile large c++ codebases they are a godsend. A slide showed 5950x was only 9% better at a compiler benchmark than the 3950x though. A deeper pipeline based IPC increase may suffer with missed branch prediction in the type of parsing and optimizing workloads of compilers and not get the full benefit.
- f311a 6y agoDo C++ developers prefer desktop computers at work? I think a lot of them use laptops.
- gambiting 6y agoWe are a company that only does development in C++ and everyone has a desktop workstation. Laptops are simply too slow unless absolutely huge and besides my minimum requirement in a workstation nowadays is 64GB of ram with 128GB preferred. Hard to find a laptop that can support that much.
- gameswithgo 6y agoAMD was already ahead of intel on every other use case so they finally got gaming too.
- andrewstuart2 6y agoAssuming that your workloads are standard non-gaming workloads, they will probably also benefit substantially when gaming benefits. My reasoning being that a common bottleneck for gaming workloads is single thread performance, and unless this is highly focused on a single core clock boost, I'd expect that single-threaded performance increases would be multiplied appropriately by core count, though perhaps not perfectly linearly. When you see marketing reaching for "non-gaming" metrics, it's often for highly parallelizable workloads, which benefits non-gaming disproportionately, but e.g. for compiling/linking there are still tasks that have to be done serially, which is where that single-threaded performance boost is critical. I'm definitely excited at this point to see what a Zen 3 threadripper can bring to the table.
- zamalek 6y agoGaming workloads are strict superset of almost any other workload (because they are extremely taxing on almost any metric a platform can have). Game benchmarks are abundant and reproducible. They are a good indicator of how a platform will deal with almost any other software. AMD did have a CAD benchmark thrown in. > Threadripper Not a bad choice at all (wait for that 5000 TR announcement), however, a *950X comes close to TR for much less. My 3950X has made a striking difference for Rust compilation times and I'm strongly considering a 5950X.
- pdimitar 6y agoDid it improve the final step though? That seems to be single core and I still can't pinpoint how to accelerate it (written a down-thread comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739796)
- dvdplm 6y agoIndeed. And for rust compilation, good single threaded performance can have a significant impact on that last annoyingly slow linking step (at least when building executables).
- pdimitar 6y agoHave you noticed an actual improvement? I couldn't pinpoint what was the bottleneck in the last Rust program compilation step at all. I have two machines with extremely fast NVMe SSDs and an incremental compilation improvement from i7-8565U (laptop, 24s) to Xeon W-2150B (iMac Pro, 12s) was extremely disappointing. I'm pondering a Threadripper workstation but I'm very worried if I'll gain any actual incremental compilation speed at all. Do you have any observations?
- steffan 6y agoI've noticed the same thing on EC2 instances, compiling, e.g. Alacritty, there wasn't a lot of difference between 8 vs 16 vCPUs since the last step took a significant portion of time and was single-threaded. It's fun watching 16 (or 32) CPUs maxed out though.
- 6y ago
- znpy 6y agoAs far as I see/understand it: Gaming is a single-thread use case that resonates with a lot of people and is generally easy to understand / relate to. AMD could have used some other single-core use case like high frequency trading, but that would not have been grasped by so many people like the gaming use case. Now add the huge success of youtube channels like LinusTechTips and similar and you get the point: the gaming use case helps deliver the message to a wider audience.
- x87678r 6y agoI'm wondering how many non-gamers actually buy desktops. Either they use laptops or their company chooses one. I'm a non-gamer who likes desktops but am happy with my old PC and am thinking of getting a laptop for next box.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI built a small form factor PC for fun, but it's pretty much deadweight. Having to sit down in the same chair at the same desk for an entire work session is a self-inflicted dealbreaker for me. It made more sense when laptops were so underpowered with such bad battery life. But now, gaming and exotic workloads are the only thing that really justify being tethered to a machine. If I could go back in time, I'd save that $1000 towards a maxed out Macbook Pro and dual-boot Windows.
- x87678r 6y agoLol I sit at the same chair at the same desk every day. Perhaps you just persuaded me what I should do next.
- protomyth 6y agoBusiness PCs are determined by the company building the PC. The consumer market that actually builds their PCs is mostly gaming. They did mention content creators a couple of times.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- XCSme 6y agoAlso because Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, Visual Studio Code and Slack don't have an FPS meter, and you rarely notice a few dropped frames, compared to games were you can easily tell performance differences.
- nwallin 6y agoThe primary goal of this announcement isn't that Zen 3 is better than Zen 2, the goal is to show that AMD/Zen 3 is better than Intel. Zen 2 is already better at nearly all workloads, with the only exception being gaming. They could focus on compilation benchmarks, content creation benchmarks, etc. But the people who care about those benchmarks are already going to be buying whatever the latest AMD CPU is in their segment. The only people who are going to sit down and say, "hmm, should I buy an AMD or Intel CPU?" are gamers. So that's where they're focusing their marketing budget.