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Surprisingly not that much to be excited about IMO. AMD isn't using TSMC's latest node and the CPUs only officially support DDR5 speeds up to 5600MHz (yes, I kn

Surprisingly not that much to be excited about IMO. AMD isn't using TSMC's latest node and the CPUs only officially support DDR5 speeds up to 5600MHz (yes, I know that you can use faster RAM). The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2.

aurareturn 2y ago
It's because x86 chips are no longer leading in the client. ARM chips are. Specifically, Apple chips. Though Qualcomm has huge potential leapfrog AMD/Intel chips in a few generations too.
- krasin 2y ago
  Until ARM has a proper UEFI support, it's not a practical desktop/server with a few notable exceptions (Mac, Raspberry Pi) and only because there's so much support from the respective vendors. I know that there's some work happening about UEFI+ARM (https://developer.arm.com/Architectures/Unified%20Extensible%20Firmware%20Interface https://developer.arm.com/Architectures/Unified%20Extensible...), but its support is very rare. The only example I can recall is Ampere Altra: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/ampere-altra-max-windows-gpus-and-gaming https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/ampere-altra-max-wind...
  - bitwize 2y ago
    It's like I keep saying: the first Chinese manufacturer to churn out cheap SBCs with ServerReady support will make a killing as a true Pi killer. Anyone? Anyone? Pine64? Pine64?
    - esskay 2y ago
      We dont really need a Pi killer anymore. They've done a fine job of killing it themselves. Their community has shrunk massively due to low cost mini pc's being leaps and bounds better value than a Pi now. Their two fingers being put up at the hacker/tinkerer hobbyist market over the last few years combined with the IPO and shift to B2B has made it very clear where their priorities lie. Unless you need the GPIO theres zero reason to overpay for a Pi 5 for example when you can pick up decent second hand mini pc's on ebay for a lower price. Case in point, a couple of months ago I was able to nab two brand new still in box Dell Optiplex 3050's (Core i7 6700T 4 Cores, 2.8Ghz, 16GB RAM Win 10 hardware license, 256gb ssd, with mouse & keyboard) for £55 each delivered. The base 4gb model Pi 5 comes in at £80-£100 once you add power, storage and a case. Sure, its not ARM but you're not likely to be doing anything that _needs_ ARM.
      - ZiiS 2y ago
        Try matching the size, power draw, and price of the Zero.
        esskay 2y ago
        Thats about the only area the Pi is superior at this point. For the usecases where a zero is all you need its a no brainer, but many are using them as home servers and such. Even a basic wireless camera feed can be a struggle for the zero so it's usecases are certainly limited, but its power to performance is great for its price.
        ZiiS 2y ago
        Yes, the Zero 2 W is well worth it for wireless streaming. With MediaMTX's WebRTC you get great quality and really low latency.
        moooo99 2y ago
        The zero is a cool device and I found some uses for it, but realistically it’s not at all comparable to the raspberry Pi people (used to) love
        ZiiS 2y ago
        Cheep, low power, same GPIO, same great software support? I rarely use none zero's now what is missing?
      - viraptor 2y ago
        > Unless you need the GPIO theres zero reason to overpay for a Pi 5 Even then, both usb-to-gpio and mini PCs with gpio exist. Unless you want something really small, then there's still pi zero and Arduino
  - walterbell 2y ago
    Thanks to ex-Apple Nuvia/Oryon ("Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite"), Arm laptops will launch in the next few months from Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and other OEMs, with UEFI support for Windows and in-progress support for Linux, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422286
  - craftkiller 2y ago
    ARM needs more than just proper UEFI support: Microsoft needs to lift the secureboot restrictions on ARM. x86: Microsoft requires that end-users are allowed to disable secure boot and control which keys are used. arm: Microsoft requires that end-users are not allowed to disable secure boot This isn't a hardware issue, but simply a policy issue that Microsoft could solve with a stroke of a pen, but since Microsoft is such a behemoth in the laptop space, their policies control the non-apple market. source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/23817.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/23817.html
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  [If you're a laptop user, scroll down the thread for laptop Rust compile times, M3 Pro looks great] You're misguided. Apple has excellent Notebook CPUs. Apple has great IPC. But AMD and Intel have easily faster CPUs. https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=CPU&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.1.0 https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=... Blender Benchmark AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (16 core) 560.8 Apple M2 Ultra (24 cores) 501.82 Apple M3 Max (12 cores) 408.27 Apple M3 Pro 226.46 Apple M3 160.58 It depends on what you're doing. I'm a software developer using a compiler that 100%s all cores. I like fast multicore. Apple Mac Pro, 64gb, M2 Ultra, $7000 Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Pro, 2TB SSD, $2600 [Edit2] Compare to: 7950x is $500 and a very fast SSD is $400, fast 64gb is $200, very good board is $400 so I get a very fast dev machine for ~$1700 (0,329 p/$ vs. mini 0,077 p/$) [Edit] Made a c&p mistake, the mini has no ultra.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    > Blender Benchmark Maybe use a benchmark that actually makes sense for CPUs, rather than something that's always much faster on a GPU (eg. M3 Pro as any sane user would use it for Blender is 2.7x the performance of a Ryzen 7950X, not 0.4x). > Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Ultra, 2TB SSD, $2600 Not a real thing. You meant M2 Pro, because the Max and Ultra chips aren't available in the Mac mini.
    - KingOfCoders 2y ago
      I would love to quote a compiler comparison, but I don't know a good and accepted compiler benchmark. What would you use as a compiler benchmark? (Preferably Go, but I assume Rust would be better, as it is much slower, so the differences are bigger) (corrected my c&p mistake with the mini, thanks)
      - codewithcheese 2y ago
        Think chromium compile is widely used
re-thc 2y ago
> The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2 Faster GPU is reserved for APUs. These graphics are just here for basic support.
arvinsim 2y ago
TBH, CPUs nowadays are mostly good enough for the consumer, even at mid or low tiers. It's the GPUs that are just getting increasing inaccessible, price wise.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Yes - with more and more users moving to laptops and wanting a longer battery life, raw peak performance hasn't moved much in a decade. A decade ago, Steam's hardware survey said 8GB was the most popular amount of RAM [1] and today, the latest $1600 Macbook Pro comes with.... 8GB of RAM. In some ways that's been a good thing - it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.stea...
  - CivBase 2y ago
    To be fair, a decade ago gaming PCs came with 2GB to 4GB of vRAM. Today's gaming PCs come with 12GB to 20GB of vRAM. Most games don't demand a lot of system memory, so it makes sense that PC gamers would invest in other components. You're also comparing Windows x86 gaming desktops from a decade ago with macOS AppleSilicon base-spec laptops today. Steam's recent hardware survey shows 16GB as the most popular amount of RAM [1]. Not the 5x increase we've seen in vRAM, but still substantial. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
    - ChoGGi 2y ago
      > Today's gaming PCs come with 12GB to 20GB of vRAM. 8-20 GB of VRAM
    - faeriechangling 2y ago
      Tons of gamers are on 8gb because of mobile GPUs and becuase the only affordable 12gb GPU Nvidia has ever released is the 3060 which is a desktop GPU. I don’t honestly expect 12gb+ to become mainstream until 6000 series.
doikor 2y ago
> The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2. The GPU on these parts is there mostly for being able to boot into BIOS or OS for debugging. Basically when things go wrong and you want to debug what is broken (remove GPU from machine and see if things work)
- ffsm8 2y ago
  I have to disagree. They work great for video playback and office work. So media server, and workstations are fine without a dedicated gpu
- matharmin 2y ago
  These are decent GPUs for anything other than heavy gaming. I'm driving two 4k screens with it, and even for some light gaming (such as factorio) it's completely fine.
  - 123yawaworht456 2y ago
    I'm under the impression that Factorio can run on any GPU capable of producing video output at all. years ago when I played it, it ran perfectly fine on whatever iGPU my 4790K had. 60 FPS/UPS with pretty big bases (although iirc I did disable all video effects like smoke to avoid cluttering the screen)
    - nolist_policy 2y ago
      The 'Ryzen 7000 iGPU" (Why is there no official codename?!) can even run GTA 5 at low/medium settings.
      - glimshe 2y ago
        I know it's hard to believe, but GTA V is now over 10 years old...
        Loudergood 2y ago
AlfeG 2y ago
> DDR5 speeds up to 56000MHz (yes, I know that you can use faster RAM) Not sure that I actually CAN. 56 GHz is already a lot.
- gautamcgoel 2y ago
  Fixed, thanks :)
  - orphea 2y ago
    5600 are MT/s (megatransfers/second), not MHz ;)
diffeomorphism 2y ago
Nah, you can get RDNA3.5 if you want to (not sure why you want that in a (home)server though) https://www.anandtech.com/show/21419/amd-announces-the-ryzen-ai-300-series-for-mobile-zen-5-with-rdna-35-and-xdna2-npu-with-50-tops https://www.anandtech.com/show/21419/amd-announces-the-ryzen...
Arrath 2y ago
Well perhaps I will stop holding out and just get the 7800x3d, if the 9000 generation won't be too terribly groundbreaking.
btgeekboy 2y ago
Yeah - I've been waiting to see what this release would entail as I kinda want to build a SFF PC. But now that I know what's in it, and since they didn't come out with anything really special chipset-wise, I'll probably just see if I can get some current-get stuff at discounted prices during the usual summer sales.
MenhirMike 2y ago
Given that there are only 2 CUs in the GPU (and fairly low clock speeds), does the architecture matter much? Benchmarks were kinda terrible, and it looks to me that the intent of the built-in GPU is for hardware video encoding or to run it in a home server system, or emergency BIOS and the like. Compared to the desktop CPUs, even the lowest end mobile 8440U has 4 CUs, going up to 12 CUs on the higher end. Or go with Strix Point, which does have an RDNA 3.5 GPU (with 12 or 16 CUs) in it. I guess you _can_ game on those 2 CU GPUs, but it really doesn't seem to be intended for that.
- cschneid 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm glad they started including built in gpu so there's something there, but beyond booting to a desktop I wouldn't use this graphics for anything else. But if you're just running a screen and compiling rust, that's all you need. Or in my case, running a home server / NAS.
  - philsnow 2y ago
    When building a non-APU ryzen machine for homelab use, I ended up buying the very cheapest graphics card I could find that was compatible, a "GeForce GT 710" that was not a beefy card when it was released in 2014. It's.. fine. After getting the system working I passed it through to a win10 VM and I can play non-FPS windows-only steam games over RDP. So yeah next time I build a machine I'll appreciate having this built in.
    - MenhirMike 2y ago
      Yeah, I have several GT 710's which also came in a PCIe x1 variant so I could keep the x16 slot free for something better. Glad that's no longer needed - the built-in GPU is a legit good thing.
- spixy 2y ago
  Better efficiency with three external 4K 120Hz monitors?
mrweasel 2y ago
> AMD isn't using TSMC's latest node Staying on an older node might ensure AMD the production capacity they need/want/expect. If they had aimed for the latest 3nm then they'd have get in line behind Apple and Nvidia. That would be my guess, why aim for 3nm, if you can't get fab time and you're still gaining a 15% speed increase.

aurareturn 2y ago

It's because x86 chips are no longer leading in the client. ARM chips are. Specifically, Apple chips. Though Qualcomm has huge potential leapfrog AMD/Intel chips in a few generations too.

krasin 2y ago
Until ARM has a proper UEFI support, it's not a practical desktop/server with a few notable exceptions (Mac, Raspberry Pi) and only because there's so much support from the respective vendors. I know that there's some work happening about UEFI+ARM (https://developer.arm.com/Architectures/Unified%20Extensible%20Firmware%20Interface https://developer.arm.com/Architectures/Unified%20Extensible...), but its support is very rare. The only example I can recall is Ampere Altra: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/ampere-altra-max-windows-gpus-and-gaming https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/ampere-altra-max-wind...
- bitwize 2y ago
  It's like I keep saying: the first Chinese manufacturer to churn out cheap SBCs with ServerReady support will make a killing as a true Pi killer. Anyone? Anyone? Pine64? Pine64?
  - esskay 2y ago
    We dont really need a Pi killer anymore. They've done a fine job of killing it themselves. Their community has shrunk massively due to low cost mini pc's being leaps and bounds better value than a Pi now. Their two fingers being put up at the hacker/tinkerer hobbyist market over the last few years combined with the IPO and shift to B2B has made it very clear where their priorities lie. Unless you need the GPIO theres zero reason to overpay for a Pi 5 for example when you can pick up decent second hand mini pc's on ebay for a lower price. Case in point, a couple of months ago I was able to nab two brand new still in box Dell Optiplex 3050's (Core i7 6700T 4 Cores, 2.8Ghz, 16GB RAM Win 10 hardware license, 256gb ssd, with mouse & keyboard) for £55 each delivered. The base 4gb model Pi 5 comes in at £80-£100 once you add power, storage and a case. Sure, its not ARM but you're not likely to be doing anything that _needs_ ARM.
    - ZiiS 2y ago
      Try matching the size, power draw, and price of the Zero.
      - esskay 2y ago
        Thats about the only area the Pi is superior at this point. For the usecases where a zero is all you need its a no brainer, but many are using them as home servers and such. Even a basic wireless camera feed can be a struggle for the zero so it's usecases are certainly limited, but its power to performance is great for its price.
        ZiiS 2y ago
        Yes, the Zero 2 W is well worth it for wireless streaming. With MediaMTX's WebRTC you get great quality and really low latency.
      - moooo99 2y ago
        The zero is a cool device and I found some uses for it, but realistically it’s not at all comparable to the raspberry Pi people (used to) love
        ZiiS 2y ago
        Cheep, low power, same GPIO, same great software support? I rarely use none zero's now what is missing?
    - viraptor 2y ago
      > Unless you need the GPIO theres zero reason to overpay for a Pi 5 Even then, both usb-to-gpio and mini PCs with gpio exist. Unless you want something really small, then there's still pi zero and Arduino
- walterbell 2y ago
  Thanks to ex-Apple Nuvia/Oryon ("Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite"), Arm laptops will launch in the next few months from Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and other OEMs, with UEFI support for Windows and in-progress support for Linux, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422286
- craftkiller 2y ago
  ARM needs more than just proper UEFI support: Microsoft needs to lift the secureboot restrictions on ARM. x86: Microsoft requires that end-users are allowed to disable secure boot and control which keys are used. arm: Microsoft requires that end-users are not allowed to disable secure boot This isn't a hardware issue, but simply a policy issue that Microsoft could solve with a stroke of a pen, but since Microsoft is such a behemoth in the laptop space, their policies control the non-apple market. source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/23817.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/23817.html
KingOfCoders 2y ago
[If you're a laptop user, scroll down the thread for laptop Rust compile times, M3 Pro looks great] You're misguided. Apple has excellent Notebook CPUs. Apple has great IPC. But AMD and Intel have easily faster CPUs. https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=CPU&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.1.0 https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=... Blender Benchmark AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (16 core) 560.8 Apple M2 Ultra (24 cores) 501.82 Apple M3 Max (12 cores) 408.27 Apple M3 Pro 226.46 Apple M3 160.58 It depends on what you're doing. I'm a software developer using a compiler that 100%s all cores. I like fast multicore. Apple Mac Pro, 64gb, M2 Ultra, $7000 Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Pro, 2TB SSD, $2600 [Edit2] Compare to: 7950x is $500 and a very fast SSD is $400, fast 64gb is $200, very good board is $400 so I get a very fast dev machine for ~$1700 (0,329 p/$ vs. mini 0,077 p/$) [Edit] Made a c&p mistake, the mini has no ultra.
- wtallis 2y ago
  > Blender Benchmark Maybe use a benchmark that actually makes sense for CPUs, rather than something that's always much faster on a GPU (eg. M3 Pro as any sane user would use it for Blender is 2.7x the performance of a Ryzen 7950X, not 0.4x). > Apple Mac mini, 32gb, M2 Ultra, 2TB SSD, $2600 Not a real thing. You meant M2 Pro, because the Max and Ultra chips aren't available in the Mac mini.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    I would love to quote a compiler comparison, but I don't know a good and accepted compiler benchmark. What would you use as a compiler benchmark? (Preferably Go, but I assume Rust would be better, as it is much slower, so the differences are bigger) (corrected my c&p mistake with the mini, thanks)
    - codewithcheese 2y ago
      Think chromium compile is widely used

re-thc 2y ago

> The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2 Faster GPU is reserved for APUs. These graphics are just here for basic support.

arvinsim 2y ago

TBH, CPUs nowadays are mostly good enough for the consumer, even at mid or low tiers. It's the GPUs that are just getting increasing inaccessible, price wise.

michaelt 2y ago
Yes - with more and more users moving to laptops and wanting a longer battery life, raw peak performance hasn't moved much in a decade. A decade ago, Steam's hardware survey said 8GB was the most popular amount of RAM [1] and today, the latest $1600 Macbook Pro comes with.... 8GB of RAM. In some ways that's been a good thing - it used to be that software got more and more featureful/bloated and you needed a new computer every 3-5 years just to keep up. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://web.archive.org/web/20140228170316/http://store.stea...
- CivBase 2y ago
  To be fair, a decade ago gaming PCs came with 2GB to 4GB of vRAM. Today's gaming PCs come with 12GB to 20GB of vRAM. Most games don't demand a lot of system memory, so it makes sense that PC gamers would invest in other components. You're also comparing Windows x86 gaming desktops from a decade ago with macOS AppleSilicon base-spec laptops today. Steam's recent hardware survey shows 16GB as the most popular amount of RAM [1]. Not the 5x increase we've seen in vRAM, but still substantial. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
  - ChoGGi 2y ago
    > Today's gaming PCs come with 12GB to 20GB of vRAM. 8-20 GB of VRAM
  - faeriechangling 2y ago
    Tons of gamers are on 8gb because of mobile GPUs and becuase the only affordable 12gb GPU Nvidia has ever released is the 3060 which is a desktop GPU. I don’t honestly expect 12gb+ to become mainstream until 6000 series.

doikor 2y ago

> The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2. The GPU on these parts is there mostly for being able to boot into BIOS or OS for debugging. Basically when things go wrong and you want to debug what is broken (remove GPU from machine and see if things work)

ffsm8 2y ago
I have to disagree. They work great for video playback and office work. So media server, and workstations are fine without a dedicated gpu
matharmin 2y ago
These are decent GPUs for anything other than heavy gaming. I'm driving two 4k screens with it, and even for some light gaming (such as factorio) it's completely fine.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
  I'm under the impression that Factorio can run on any GPU capable of producing video output at all. years ago when I played it, it ran perfectly fine on whatever iGPU my 4790K had. 60 FPS/UPS with pretty big bases (although iirc I did disable all video effects like smoke to avoid cluttering the screen)
  - nolist_policy 2y ago
    The 'Ryzen 7000 iGPU" (Why is there no official codename?!) can even run GTA 5 at low/medium settings.
    - glimshe 2y ago
      I know it's hard to believe, but GTA V is now over 10 years old...
      - Loudergood 2y ago

AlfeG 2y ago

> DDR5 speeds up to 56000MHz (yes, I know that you can use faster RAM) Not sure that I actually CAN. 56 GHz is already a lot.

gautamcgoel 2y ago
Fixed, thanks :)
- orphea 2y ago
  5600 are MT/s (megatransfers/second), not MHz ;)

diffeomorphism 2y ago

Nah, you can get RDNA3.5 if you want to (not sure why you want that in a (home)server though) https://www.anandtech.com/show/21419/amd-announces-the-ryzen-ai-300-series-for-mobile-zen-5-with-rdna-35-and-xdna2-npu-with-50-tops https://www.anandtech.com/show/21419/amd-announces-the-ryzen...

Arrath 2y ago

Well perhaps I will stop holding out and just get the 7800x3d, if the 9000 generation won't be too terribly groundbreaking.

btgeekboy 2y ago

Yeah - I've been waiting to see what this release would entail as I kinda want to build a SFF PC. But now that I know what's in it, and since they didn't come out with anything really special chipset-wise, I'll probably just see if I can get some current-get stuff at discounted prices during the usual summer sales.

MenhirMike 2y ago

Given that there are only 2 CUs in the GPU (and fairly low clock speeds), does the architecture matter much? Benchmarks were kinda terrible, and it looks to me that the intent of the built-in GPU is for hardware video encoding or to run it in a home server system, or emergency BIOS and the like. Compared to the desktop CPUs, even the lowest end mobile 8440U has 4 CUs, going up to 12 CUs on the higher end. Or go with Strix Point, which does have an RDNA 3.5 GPU (with 12 or 16 CUs) in it. I guess you _can_ game on those 2 CU GPUs, but it really doesn't seem to be intended for that.

cschneid 2y ago
Yeah, I'm glad they started including built in gpu so there's something there, but beyond booting to a desktop I wouldn't use this graphics for anything else. But if you're just running a screen and compiling rust, that's all you need. Or in my case, running a home server / NAS.
- philsnow 2y ago
  When building a non-APU ryzen machine for homelab use, I ended up buying the very cheapest graphics card I could find that was compatible, a "GeForce GT 710" that was not a beefy card when it was released in 2014. It's.. fine. After getting the system working I passed it through to a win10 VM and I can play non-FPS windows-only steam games over RDP. So yeah next time I build a machine I'll appreciate having this built in.
  - MenhirMike 2y ago
    Yeah, I have several GT 710's which also came in a PCIe x1 variant so I could keep the x16 slot free for something better. Glad that's no longer needed - the built-in GPU is a legit good thing.
spixy 2y ago
Better efficiency with three external 4K 120Hz monitors?

mrweasel 2y ago

> AMD isn't using TSMC's latest node Staying on an older node might ensure AMD the production capacity they need/want/expect. If they had aimed for the latest 3nm then they'd have get in line behind Apple and Nvidia. That would be my guess, why aim for 3nm, if you can't get fab time and you're still gaining a 15% speed increase.