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AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

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71–80 of 139 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#71
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.

There are a few obvious possibilities: - AMD have optimized for die size, at 44mm^2 vs Broadwell-E at 246mm^2. This will result in an order of magnitude better yields and margin improvements. - Intel prices high in the >= 8-core space because: they can; there is no current competition; and the aforementioned yield/margin issue. - The Intel parts have more advanced and expensive features aimed at professional markets;…

The Ryzen die is more like >100 mm^2; a single CCX is 44 mm^2.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#72
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but what should they benchmark GEMM with? MKL? I don't think so, it takes the worst codepath if the chip isn't GenuineIntel. OpenBLAS? Doesn't have Ryzen support. Doesn't even recognize some AMD cores. ACML? Wasn't updated since 2013 or so. This is a serious question. What are you supposed to do if you need a GEMM kernel for Ryzen? I sure hope AMD puts out updated ACML libraries real soon .

I'd like to see benchmarks with OpenBLAS. Unlike ACML it's under active development, unlike MKL it won't deliberately screw AMD performance, and it offers "pretty good" performance across every environment I've tried it in. Good enough that it's not worth paying for MKL, not worth going through ATLAS's self-tuning routine, not worth changing my build scripts to use vecLib under OS X. If OpenBLAS currently runs poorly…

Word! I think AMD should focus on OpenBLAS and add support for their new CPUs there. OpenBLAS is part of the foss toolchain for the easybuild easyconfig. So for the HPC field adding support to OpenBLAS would be great.

I would also need to update this benchmark (if I can get hold of the new AMD CPUs) ;-) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5260068/multithreaded-bla...

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#74
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Because they get exploded in single-threaded performances, so they have to pit their 8-core parts against Intel's 4 cores. The 1700X will be competing against the $350 7700K more than the $1100 6900K (which incidentally is a Broadwell-E part not a Skylake part despite de 6 prefix)

The linked benchmarks are putting the $350 1700X about on par with the $1100 6900K when it comes to both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. Both of those processors are 8-core/16-thread chips. Also the 1700K is a 95W TDP compared to the 6900K's 140W TDP.

Again, the 6900K is a two years old µarch, and not one which was considered a great release in the first place. The 1700X will not be competing against the 6900K because nobody gives a rat's ass about the 6900K, the 1700X will be competing against the 7700K and its ilk.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#75
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you skipped over the FX series (Bulldozer, I believe). I got a FX-8320 a few years back, and my brother got a FX-6300. Both are capable processors and are MUCH cheaper than their counterparts (i5 and i3, respectively). Heck, if I built a PC in the past year, I would have gone with a FX-8350 just because it's so damned cheap yet very performant. Once Zen is out, it's really a no-brainer for me.

The biggest problem with the FX series, IMO, was the deceptive marketing. The FX-8000 CPUs were marketed as being 8-core, when in reality every pair of cores shared an FPU and cache, so real-world performance was much closer to that of a quad-core for many workloads. Add on top of that the abysmal IPC (compared to Intel's offerings) and high power consumption, and there was very little reason to get an FX-8350 or sim…

I have to disagree with that. Most workloads (H.264 decoding/encoding, gaming, typical desktop software, etc) are ALU-bound not FPU-bound. So the FX series is generally beating Intel on the perf/$ metric, just because it is so darn inexpensive. In my experience a $100 FX CPU is as good as a $200 Intel CPU when doing H.264 encoding:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972

(However the FX series perf/watt is worse than Intel, I give you that.)

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#76
post #58
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the delta in price hardly mattered when I looked for how long I kept these systems running.

It matters a lot when you are on a very tight budget. I can either get a Kaby Lake i3 for $119.99, or a FX-8320 for $129.99. It's really a no-brainer. Another way to look at it: instead of putting an extra ~$100 on an i5, which has performance most people don't really take advantage of anyways, you could get a better graphics card.

True and only you can make the choice on how to balance your system for your workload.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feature parity and market penetration. FP and AVX are middling, no iGPU, fewer PCIe lanes, and they've got keep firm hold of that budget build bracket. In case you were also wondering why Intel's pricing has been so obscene, it's to do with AMD's underwhelming pre-Zen microarchitectures and having had no serious competition in the past decade until now.

do we think Intel will drastically drop prices on middle and high end chips?

My guess: Not right away. It's going to take a while for AMD to gain trust; and if intel massively drops prices that will if anything accelerate that effect. A dramatic price drop would tell your clients that you indeed gouged them and that AMD's chip is a serious competitor.

I'd expect them to make token gestures in MSRP and quietly make larger drops in practice; and to accelerate new models so it appears as if those new models are better price/perf wise due to their great new design.

Oh and of course, intel's 7700k is still quite a bit faster per-core, and there's AVX, so intel can play those cards loudly. I'd argue that even today almost all people are best served by a few fast cores than many slightly slower ones; there;s just so much poorly scaling software around. And where multicore works really well trivial the GPU is often just around the corner...

For servers the story may be different.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#79
post #65
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.

"Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part?" 1. Because Intel is about to significantly drop their prices in response to Ryzen. 2. Because AMD really wants to immediately hurt Intel's revenues as badly as possible. 3. Because AMD has such an uphill battle to regain mind share that it really needs to release a product that makes people realize that AMD now has the superior perf/$ product, beyond any doubt…

3bis now Intel looks like a customer milking company with mild progress posturing as 'best effort'.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#80
post #10

First (amateur) third-party benchmarks confirm a ~$350 Ryzen beats $1000 Intel processors in CPUMARK, 3DMark Fire Strike Physics, Cinebench: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html AMD had said for years their Zen goal was a 40% IPC gain over their previous microarchitecture, but they ended up with a 52% gain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch-ryzen-52-more... Today's launch event by AMD's CEO:…

just be aware that Ryzen is probably operating much closer to it's limit than the Intel counterparts, so overclocking could be limited. If that is not interesting for you anyway, then god speed.

Also in terms of gaming performance, Intel will probably remain king, due to single threaded performance and OC potential.

Personally, i'd always take 8 cores vs 4 for the same price even if they are 10-20% slower.

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