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

AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

wccftech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 209 posts

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#161

Post by [deleted] »

mcbits wrote: post #135
dpark wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. If someone can't afford the machine necessary to process the images that they got from the camera they spent thousands to rent, the problem isn't actually money. It's that they're an idiot. You don't buy/rent a camera you can't afford to process images from just like you don't buy a car you can't afford to service and you don't buy a house you can't afford taxes for. Or if you do, I have little to no sy…

Having >64GB is far from necessary to edit any kind of multimedia, but it would be helpful to have. If your goal is to capture high-quality imagery on a $2,500 budget, the camera is more import than the RAM. It's just that you might end up with $500 unspent if you can't afford a $500 RAM upgrade and a whole new computer to use it. There are far more photographers and indy filmmakers in a situation where they have to…

[deleted]

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#162

Post by m_mueller »

erik wrote: post #157
m_mueller wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only matters for applications that are fully vectorized however. Most real world HPC applications depend much more on memory bandwidth and/or multicore performance and how well the compilers can optimize for the vector units (typically not very well). If I can choose two cores with 128 bit vectors for the same money as one core with 256bit, I'll choose the two core system any day of the week.

I certainly agree that vector performance is overrated. But it seems to dominate HPC spending. At least on the top500. But maybe AMD can pick up some HPC spending for smaller clusters designed to run less specialized code? I don't know how big that market is.

I do think it's big. What you see on top500 is the high end of the market, the big bulk is in small to medium sized clusters or in cloud infrastructure where people rather care for benchmarks like requests per second of some specific servers. There again memory throughput, non-vectorized performance and cores per dollar are probably the most relevant characteristics of a processor. And those who chase to have the highest flop numbers have switched to accelerators and custom chips anyways.

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#163

Post by seabrookmx »

fgonzag wrote: post #116
actuator wrote: post #27

I just hope this lives up to the hype. I built my last machine using Phenom II X6 1090T but I always regretted it after; as the 6 core advantage that I thought future games will use, never materialized and per core performance of that was not as good as the Intel CPUs of the same generation. Most of the benchmark leaks have focussed on top of the line Ryzens, I would be interested in seeing how the mid level Ryzens a…

The phenom lineup was very competitive (even slightly better than Intel's) for most of its lifetime. It wasn't really until a couple of generation into the Core 2 Duos that Intel started taking the lead.

> (even slightly better than Intel's)

Competitive on price, sure. But it never held the performance crown. AMD hasn't held that since the Athlon 64 era.

The first gen Phenoms were outpaced by the Core 2 lineup, and the second gen Phenoms that became quite popular were handily beaten by the first gen i7's. The Phenom II was a great bang-for-the-buck chip though, no doubt.

I've owned all the relative players here: the Phenom 9500, Core2 Quad Q6600, Phenom II 955BE, and a core i7-920 (which is still in my main work machine that I'm typing this from right now).

The Q6600 and 955 were comparable in performance (955 much better at stock, slightly better when both chips OC'd), but the i7-920 was out at the 955's release, essentially leaving AMD a generation behind in performance. The 9500 was a dog and well known for an errata that hampered performance after a microcode update, and the i7 was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else at the time, and is still pretty usable today. My little brother has the 955 and it's showing its age in games (KotK being the worst offender).

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#165

Post by m_mueller »

geezerjay wrote: post #156
m_mueller wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For performance / $ in HPC systems this will be a field day though.

For performance/$ in HPC systems, nowadays anyone can buy used Opteron 61XX processors for less than 20$/each, and even Opteron 62XX for around 50$.

I think this is a bit too simplistic for HPC. Yes, you can go really low cost if all you care is theoretical performance / $. In practice, the cost efficiency of the system should be seen as 1 / (time to solution for typical applications) / (cost of ownership per year).

Even 20% higher memory bandwidth or computational performance per socket matters for the time to solution, since a higher number of nodes is uncertain to replace that due to the communication overhead. As does the performance per watt (costs of cooling).

Furthermore, the biggest news for me regarding Ryzen is what they're doing with APUs. Affordable APUs with unified memory supporting HBM (stacked memory) could be a game changer. HBM means an order of magnitude higher memory bandwidth than what we're used to from CPUs, matching what the high end Nvidia Pascal cards are currently offering. By coupling this to a capable multicore X86 CPU with fat cores (as opposed to Knights landing with a higher number of slow cores), could mean tremendous speedups without any programming work for bandwidth bound applications - which includes pretty much any stencil application, e.g. atmospheric models, ocean models, earthquake prediction etc. By 'tremendous' I mean 5-10x per Socket, which is a big deal in these fields.

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#166

Post by untoreh »

jdietrich wrote: post #143
tzakrajs wrote: post #138

Micro Center is selling Intel i7 7700k for $299 Those 4 cores are stronger than the first 4 cores of the 1700X or the 1800X. If you are a gamer, then most if not all of your games will use 4 or less cores. Why pay more money for worse gaming performance? https://www.techpowerup.com/230638/amd-ryzen-benchmarks-leak...

FTA: “With our overclocked 1800X sample cooled by the Noctua unit AMD provided in the reviewer’s kit we managed to surpass the 7700K in single threaded performance and the temperatures were great." The 7700k might be a reasonable value choice for gaming today, but I have little doubt that the extra four cores of the 1800X will come into play quite soon. Not so long ago, the same argument applied to dual vs quad core…

Core count seems also to be partially fall into the classic chickenegg problem. Intel has shown no interest in increasing core count below enthusiast grade segment. Most people buy max quad cores because that's what Intel offers, games keep whatever they can split into more cores below 4

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#167

Post by geezerjay »

m_mueller wrote: post #165
geezerjay wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For performance/$ in HPC systems, nowadays anyone can buy used Opteron 61XX processors for less than 20$/each, and even Opteron 62XX for around 50$.

I think this is a bit too simplistic for HPC. Yes, you can go really low cost if all you care is theoretical performance / $. In practice, the cost efficiency of the system should be seen as 1 / (time to solution for typical applications) / (cost of ownership per year). Even 20% higher memory bandwidth or computational performance per socket matters for the time to solution, since a higher number of nodes is uncertai…

> Yes, you can go really low cost if all you care is theoretical performance / $.

Yes that's a fact, and if you're trying to evaluate a solution based on performance/$ then the comparison is made with regards to this factor, and not others.

> In practice, the cost efficiency of the system should be seen as 1 / (time to solution for typical applications) / (cost of ownership per year).

If you believe that criteria is relevant then you should know that Ryzen's advertised TDP is around 95W while some Opteron 61XX processors have a TDP of 85W.

> Furthermore, the biggest news for me regarding Ryzen is what they're doing with APUs. Affordable APUs with unified memory supporting HBM (stacked memory) could be a game changer.

For 40$ you can buy 4 opterons with 12 cores each. This means that for less than 1000$ you can put together a 48-core system that supports up to 512 GB of RAM. For around 500$, anyone can put together a 24-core system that also supports a couple of GPUs.

Anyone that cares about HPC on a budget knows quite well that used Opterons is where the optimal price/performance ratio can be found, particularly as Opterons already out-perform Xeons in BLAS-based work.

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#168

Post by sjwright »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #79
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 24-bit (...) uncompressed audio Do you really need this much headroom, e.g. for producing music professionally? (If so, why are you arguing over the $50-100 extra for a Xeon?) Because for listening, it's proven fact that even professional musicians and mixing engineers using equipment costing >$100k can't tell 24 bit from 16 bit in a proper double-blind A/B test. Presumably you use a high sample rate as well (maybe…

Most people who believe this is a proven fact have never worked in pro audio and know a lot less about it than they assume. While people here like to quote that infamous looks-like-science-but-isn't Xiph video, the reality is that a lot of professional engineers absolutely can hear the difference. If you have good studio monitors and you know what to listen for the difference between a 24-bit master and a downsampled…

> Dither was developed precisely because naively interpolated or truncated 16-bit audio is audibly inferior to a 24-bit source.

Dither was developed because it's technically better. Audibly inferior though? Perhaps, with utterly exceptional source material (e.g. test tones) and when the output gain is high enough for peaks levels to be uncomfortably loud.

In reality, many recording studios have a higher ambient noise level than the dither, making it redundant in practice — the lower bits are already noise, so audible quantisation artefacts weren't going to happen anyway. That said, dithering is pretty much never worse than not dithering, and almost all tools offer it, so everyone does it.

24 bits is important because it gives the recording engineer ample headroom, and it gives the mixing and mastering engineers confidence that every last significant bit caught by the microphone will survive numerous transformation stages intact. Once the final master is decimated to 16 bits per sample, you know that your 16 bits will be as good as they could have been.

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#169

Post by sjwright »

gtani wrote: post #136
spamizbad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are professional audio "engineers" who claim they can hear the difference in the types of audio cables used. And when when challenge them on it, rather than defend it, or demonstrate it, they'll just name-drop musicians they've worked with... most of which are producing albums these days that sound like garbage because of the loudness war. Their words mean very little. I totally get going for 24 bit over 16 for…

I knew some audio engineers who had different cables (cardas copper, pure silver, some others i can't remember) on identical headphones (Beyerdynamic) and everybody agreed you could hear not insignificant differences that they would describe as sharper transients, tubelike saturation etc. I consider that they were pro "engineers", they designed hardware and software for Avid.

Undoubtedly. Such obvious delusions are commonplace and don't necessarily correlate to one's scientific literacy or electrical engineering skills.

Such audible differences constitute a testable claim. So far, the number of claims that have withstood reasonable test conditions is zero.

Re: AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Click OC on Air Cooling

#170

Post by markiniotome »

Intel reported that they will not invest any money to new technologies and will use 14nm technology even in 2017... MANY YEARS after it was introduced... Meanwhile, many companies are now AHEAD of Intel and GlobalFoundries announced trial production of 7nm processors in the second half of 2017.
Post reply on HN