3 ms·

shrug I bought a Ryzen 7 2700X a few months before the release of the Zen 2 / 3700X. And yeah, it's faster for nearly the same price (though due to timing I pa

shrug I bought a Ryzen 7 2700X a few months before the release of the Zen 2 / 3700X. And yeah, it's faster for nearly the same price (though due to timing I paid ~$230 so it's not insignificant when compared to the launch day pricing.) There's "always" more, more, more performance for the dollar in tech, and there is no perfect price/performance product. The Ryzen 5 3600 was and still is a great price/performance product and that doesn't change because a more expensive, higher performing chip is released. You can make decisions at a point in time, or if time is irrelevant, you can keep waiting for new milestones... and then make a decision in that point of time instead. For me, I waited nearly 10 years to replace a 3+ Ghz quad-core CPU, so the 4+ Ghz octa-core was a nice upgrade (albeit still not earth shattering) and I am very glad to have it. I love the recent increase in performance growth over time, but it will likely be quite a few years before I upgrade my desktop again. Of course, I'm just one guy, and I'm glad many enthusiasts and computer-using professionals will benefit from all this advancement!

malkia 6y ago
Same here, but son was too excited about 5950x, and wanted birthday/xmas gift, so you go. I'm geeking out, for the first time since I did my own upgrade from Apple ][ -> PC 286 -> PC 386SX -> Cyrix 6x86 - I wanted to skip Threadripper, as he normally works in single app - whether it's game (Fortnite, COD, Roblox, etc.) or video editing (Premiere, After Effects, others). The only issue is that we have older motherboard B440, but were notified that BIOS would update would be coming!
- sidpatil 6y ago
  > I wanted to skip Threadripper, as he normally works in single app I thought those types of applications would actually be able to take good advantage of all those cores.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hnuser123456 6y ago
    16 cores ought to be plenty for the next few years.
  - malkia 6y ago
    We've hit a performance problem with multi-socket setups (NUMA) - basically one core talking to the other's core memory (different sockets), hence slowdowns. And it's amplified by the use of atomics (shared_ptr, etc.). What we did was simply to disable one core (it was two CPU sockets). I guess for servers, executing many (mostly) single threaded jobs (a.k.a "borg", "kubernetes", "docker") is okay, but when you have app using all threads (TBB-style) then it becomes bottlenecked. SysInternal's https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/coreinfo https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/core... actually captures this detail (probably there are better apps, but it was nice to inspect machines quickly). The tool measure some relative slowdown.
philsnow 6y ago
This has always been the case, too. In school I once read somewhere that if you knew you had a computation to do that was 100 MFLOPS (or whatever seemed like a large number at the time), and you had to complete it sometime in the next 18 months, a solid strategy is to wait 9 months and buy more-modern hardware. You'd end up with more 'residual' computing power (when your computation is done, you have the hardware lying around, and now it's more powerful than if you had bought on day 0), and it would probably cost less in energy as well.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  we probably used the same book haha, I also remember questions like this from my architecture class. I suspect the book was written at a time when inter-generational scaling was a bit more dramatic.
leetcrew 6y ago
in my experience the ideal time to buy is usually two or three months after the most recent launch. at this point any major kinks will be worked out in a new stepping, and you don't have to fight over the last few units in stock. plus you get to see if the competition responds with price cuts and/or new skus. of course at this point, the next launch is six months away, give or take. I find that having a deliberate strategy like this reduces buyer's remorse a lot.

malkia 6y ago

Same here, but son was too excited about 5950x, and wanted birthday/xmas gift, so you go. I'm geeking out, for the first time since I did my own upgrade from Apple ][ -> PC 286 -> PC 386SX -> Cyrix 6x86 - I wanted to skip Threadripper, as he normally works in single app - whether it's game (Fortnite, COD, Roblox, etc.) or video editing (Premiere, After Effects, others). The only issue is that we have older motherboard B440, but were notified that BIOS would update would be coming!

sidpatil 6y ago
> I wanted to skip Threadripper, as he normally works in single app I thought those types of applications would actually be able to take good advantage of all those cores.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hnuser123456 6y ago
  16 cores ought to be plenty for the next few years.
- malkia 6y ago
  We've hit a performance problem with multi-socket setups (NUMA) - basically one core talking to the other's core memory (different sockets), hence slowdowns. And it's amplified by the use of atomics (shared_ptr, etc.). What we did was simply to disable one core (it was two CPU sockets). I guess for servers, executing many (mostly) single threaded jobs (a.k.a "borg", "kubernetes", "docker") is okay, but when you have app using all threads (TBB-style) then it becomes bottlenecked. SysInternal's https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/coreinfo https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/core... actually captures this detail (probably there are better apps, but it was nice to inspect machines quickly). The tool measure some relative slowdown.

philsnow 6y ago

This has always been the case, too. In school I once read somewhere that if you knew you had a computation to do that was 100 MFLOPS (or whatever seemed like a large number at the time), and you had to complete it sometime in the next 18 months, a solid strategy is to wait 9 months and buy more-modern hardware. You'd end up with more 'residual' computing power (when your computation is done, you have the hardware lying around, and now it's more powerful than if you had bought on day 0), and it would probably cost less in energy as well.

leetcrew 6y ago
we probably used the same book haha, I also remember questions like this from my architecture class. I suspect the book was written at a time when inter-generational scaling was a bit more dramatic.

leetcrew 6y ago

in my experience the ideal time to buy is usually two or three months after the most recent launch. at this point any major kinks will be worked out in a new stepping, and you don't have to fight over the last few units in stock. plus you get to see if the competition responds with price cuts and/or new skus. of course at this point, the next launch is six months away, give or take. I find that having a deliberate strategy like this reduces buyer's remorse a lot.