Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

pcworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 139 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#81

Post by mrb »

masklinn wrote: post #74
dstaley wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The IPC difference between Broadwell (6900K) and Kaby Lake (7700K) isn't that big. 5-10%.

The only redeeming quality of the 7700K is that Intel was able to raise the turbo freq to 4.5 GHz, while the 1700X only boosts to 3.8 GHz. So yeah single-threaded perf will be higher with Intel.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#82

Post by emn13 »

tyingq wrote: post #30
officelineback wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of it is going to be whether major cloud providers adopt these.

I would guess at least some meaningful purchases, if only to keep Intel honest.

These chips look better suited to servers than clients as is. Most software still scales poorly with additional cores (or rather: most workloads still have a few single-core bottlenecks). E.g webbrowsers, compilers, video de and en-coders, all kinds of stuff. So even if you have twice the cores, catching up given the handicap of a single-core perf disadvantage is a pretty harsh battle.

E.g. see http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1826?vs=1729 (6900k vs. 7700k) - there are quite a few relevant workloads where the 8 core loses significantly to the 4-core. Even stuff where you'd think more cores are really natural (such as POV-ray), the perf advantage of the 8-core over the 4-core is less than 50% (!). For an example where fewer faster cores obviously win, consider web-browsers: the 4-core is 36% faster in google octane v2.

Servers that have lots of independant tasks, on the other hand, will love this cheap many-cores. And coincidentally, servers often don't use AVX all that much anyhow.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#83

Post by hajile »

cat199 wrote: post #26
mtgx wrote: post #21

Jim Keller deserves a frigging statue in front of the AMD HQ, if he doesn't have one there already. I'm not even kidding. His efforts shouldn't be easily forgotten, and it could serve to inspire new generations of AMD engineers. Beyond the product quality itself, I think AMD has had a pretty smart launch strategy by releasing the CPU chips first to show that it can beat "Intel's best". But they really need to start f…

From what I recall of their recent marketing material, it seemed like like they are looking to corner the market on 64bit ARM servers and also have some hybrid amd64/ARM chip plans to help people wanting to take advantage of ARM in datacenters migrate.. but I'm no expert and this is based on a recollection of marketing materials from a few months back - 64bit arm could be a huge thing in large scale light-duty comput…

Project Skybridge was cancelled in 2015 (supposedly something to do with GF 20nm). Maybe they'll look at it again once current plans are proven to be executing well.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#84

Post by tracker1 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #38
tracker1 wrote: post #27

I just have to say, I really hope that this is real. AMD has burned a lot of trust a few times in overzealously stating performance marks in their prior generations of CPUs. I ran AMD for several years until the Core-2 came out from Intel (currently very happy with an i7-4790K). If these comparisons are real, my next build may be AMD again.

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.

I had a home server that used an FX-8350, but it used a LOT of power... and the performance wasn't that great, I mean for the price sure, but in less than the cpu lifetime, you've already paid more for the extra electricity than a higher end i7.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#85

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

tyingq wrote: post #24
youdontknowtho wrote: post #6

Really looking forward to this, and I'm glad that AMD's management no longer seems to be on the pipe. Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.

I think the server chip (Naples, up to 32 cores!) based on Zen may have more impact than the desktop chip. The servers chips are a smaller market, but it's growing faster than desktop, and I assume has larger margins. Depends, I suppose, on how much AMD chooses to undercut on pricing.

The server chip business is essential to Intel's revenues these days. If they do well, it could really hurt Intel.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#86

Post by deepnotderp »

jsheard wrote: post #35
deepnotderp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, who uses 256-bit floats?

It doesn't handle 256-bit floats, in this context 256-bit means it can operate on eight 32-bit floats or four 64-bit floats at the same time.

Ah, that's what I thought, I was so surprised when i thought you said they had a 256 bit fpu XD

I'm dumb.

It's interesting that power consumption increases with avx instructions. Do you happen to have a link?

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#87

Post by RussianCow »

mrb wrote: post #75
RussianCow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wors…

Video encoding/decoding is definitely a niche for which the FX series had great value when it came out, so I agree with you on that. However, for gaming and most "typical desktop software", having higher single-core performance is much more important than having more cores, and the FX series was a huge letdown there. Then you factor in the extra energy you're using, and all of a sudden there are very few cases in which it makes sense to buy an AMD CPU over an Intel one.

(They're much cheaper now, so it might make a lot more sense to buy one today, but I'm sticking with my Intel CPU until AMD can prove themselves.)

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#88

Post by RussianCow »

kayoone wrote: post #80
mrb wrote: 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.

In my experience, most modern games aren't CPU-bound anymore; more and more work is being pushed onto the GPU with every generation. My brother has a quad-core AMD CPU (don't remember which) with a powerful GPU, and his CPU is very rarely the bottleneck—there are few games he can't max out at 1080. Also, according to AMD's benchmarks, the Ryzen CPUs are very close to Intel's in single-threaded performance.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#89

Post by tyingq »

emn13 wrote: post #82
tyingq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess at least some meaningful purchases, if only to keep Intel honest.

These chips look better suited to servers than clients as is. Most software still scales poorly with additional cores (or rather: most workloads still have a few single-core bottlenecks). E.g webbrowsers, compilers, video de and en-coders, all kinds of stuff. So even if you have twice the cores, catching up given the handicap of a single-core perf disadvantage is a pretty harsh battle. E.g. see http://www.anandtech.c…

In the comparison you linked, the 4 core CPU is clocked at 4.2GHz, and the the 8 core at 3.2GHz.

If you pick a comparison where the clock speed isn't so far apart, things look different: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1832?vs=1729

Of course, fewer cores usually means a higher available clock speed. Just pointing out it's not just "code isn't parallel enough" that drives the disparity.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#90

Post by IAmGraydon »

RussianCow wrote: post #88
kayoone wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, most modern games aren't CPU-bound anymore; more and more work is being pushed onto the GPU with every generation. My brother has a quad-core AMD CPU (don't remember which) with a powerful GPU, and his CPU is very rarely the bottleneck—there are few games he can't max out at 1080. Also, according to AMD's benchmarks, the Ryzen CPUs are very close to Intel's in single-threaded performance.

This. Gaming hasn't been bottlenecked by the CPU in a long time. Anything from an i5 up performs pretty much the same with the same GPU.
Post reply on HN