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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

anandtech.com

131–140 of 359 posts

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#131
post #17

The proof is in the pudding. Competition is back. Intel has started slashing prices of its latest CPUs left right and center.

I'm actually curious which prices have changed. A quick google turned up an article claiming prices were being cut [1] but looking at the full price history tells a different story:

http://imgur.com/a/vDHAv

It looks like Intel's retail channel partners have a lot of inventory still in the pipeline. Prices are still within the bounds of the second half 2016. My best guess is the retail channel partners will be the most hurt by any slowdown of Intel CPU sales.

[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-cpu-prices-drop...

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#132
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's still losing in every web and office single threaded benchmark. EDIT: compared to 7700k that costs about the same

The R7 1700 is within shouting distance of the 6900k in most serious tasks - rendering, encoding, compilation etc. A $330 65w CPU is a credible alternative to an $1100 140w CPU. That is absolutely remarkable. The cherry on the cake is that the cheapest AM4 motherboards are half the price of the cheapest 2011-v3 boards. For the first time in a decade, AMD are seriously competing at the high end. That's great news for…

and this is exactly why I'm getting one.

Cheap, power efficient, eight cores. It may not win everything, but it works for me.

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#133
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't. Their hyperthreading model is clearly not as good as Intel's. Take a look at the Handbrake tests, which take full advantage of hyperthreading. The 7700K, with half the cores, is only a few frames/sec. behind. If I was after encoding performance, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen. If I was after rendering performance, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen. Throw an mid-range nVidia on there for OpenCL, and the only CPU that mak…

From everything I've seen, the Ryzen's main appeal is bang for the buck. If you're after pure performance, then you simply go with the best for your use case, whether it is Ryzen or not. If you're on a tight budget, however, things get interesting.

It's not so clear, because 7700K offers more bang for the buck in single-threading cases, which is more important in typical computer use.

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#135

I'm really interested in these from a virtualization standpoint, especially with 8 cores for so little $$. I'd love to see a good set of tests/benchmarks with a completely virtualized workload.

Speaking of which, Zen/Ryzen was supposed to come with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), but I don't know if any of these reviews have covered it yet:

https://www.techpowerup.com/226719/amds-zen-to-implement-adv...

It's possible only Naples will support it.

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#136
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think spending time and effort to optimize code for Ryzen will be time well spent. Would you do it if you had the choice between that or adding new money making features/fixing bugs?

Give compilers some time and the optimizations will be "free" to developers. Besides, if your application is one where performance is a serious issue, then you are going to spend some time optimizing rather than adding features. For some applications, performance is a feature.

People always seem to forget this in terms of CPU optimizations. It's both good and bad, though. If you're pegged to a given version of a compiler, the point releases likely won't see any optimization while the major releases will likely include additional optimizations for newer chipsets. And I'd wager AMD will be working to get optimizations into both open source compilers as well as things like Visual Studio. One thing to note is that switching to a newer compilker will likely be easier for most of Linux-land as opposed to Windows land. Upping the compiler version with your code compiled in GCC is often much easier than switching to a newer version of Visual Studio due to both cost and dropping older operating systems (the latest won't support Windows XP and Vista for instance, which may matter to some specific business lines and consumer areas).

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#137
post #8

> ... this means that the base memory controller in the silicon should be able to support ECC. We know that it is disabled for the consumer parts, but nothing has been said regarding the Pro parts. ECC should be a standard feature. If you don't want it you don't have to use it but to disable simply for market segmentation is lame.

This is done so that whitebox system builders don't buy consumer level motherboards and CPUs, shove ECC in there, a cheap raid controller, and sell this setup as servers. Next thing you know all the AMD servers on the market are failing because of shoddy parts because consumer level QA is at a lower level than enterprise, not to mentioned the lowered performance of consumer level hardware. Now AMD has a bad reputation for reasons completely unrelated to its chip quality or performance and collapses in the market.

I don't like this situation, but I certainly understand it. AMD needs the server market to raise revenues. This means its server offerings, from soup to nuts, need to be rock solid. Letting whitebox resellers junk up their reputation is not within their interests.

Not to mention, enterprise sales often subsidize consumer sales. Those big enterprise markups go into the same pot of money that allows AMD to sell consumer chips at lower prices. Anything that threatens enterprise sales could affect the consumer space. AMD needs to be very careful here as, compared to intel, it needs to prove the value of its brand every chip generation. They also need to overcome a lot of bad mojo they've developed from questionable benchmarking and marketing of its previous two, or more, generations of chips. Bulldozer, I believe, had half the single core performance compared to the intel equivalant at the time, yet it benchmarked well due to its extra cores. The market doesn't forget shenanigans like these.

That said, the market allows 'workstation' level cpus and motherboards that support ECC. A little legwork can find you decent deals, but no, they're not going to be $59 NewEgg specials and you won't be able to use the consumer Ryzen on it. Consumer CPUs are almost always gimped anyway - smaller caches, disabled features, slower clocks, etc. The ECC limitation isn't too different from this, but it is annoying.

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#138
post #8

> ... this means that the base memory controller in the silicon should be able to support ECC. We know that it is disabled for the consumer parts, but nothing has been said regarding the Pro parts. ECC should be a standard feature. If you don't want it you don't have to use it but to disable simply for market segmentation is lame.

Anandtech is wrong and ECC is not disabled at all. For example all ASRock AM4 boards support ECC memory.

IIRC just because it boots with ECC ram doesn't mean it is actually error correcting. I'm under the impression Intel spends considerable amount of money to prove their memory controllers actually error correct & historically AMD hasn't spent the money on documenting theirs.

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The R7 1700 is within shouting distance of the 6900k in most serious tasks - rendering, encoding, compilation etc. A $330 65w CPU is a credible alternative to an $1100 140w CPU. That is absolutely remarkable. The cherry on the cake is that the cheapest AM4 motherboards are half the price of the cheapest 2011-v3 boards. For the first time in a decade, AMD are seriously competing at the high end. That's great news for…

and this is exactly why I'm getting one. Cheap, power efficient, eight cores. It may not win everything, but it works for me.

According to Web performance chart, it looses to 7700T, which has 1/2 TDP and 5% lower price.

Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

#140
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's still losing in every web and office single threaded benchmark. EDIT: compared to 7700k that costs about the same

> But it's still losing in every web and office single threaded benchmark. Web and office? Single-threaded? Why are these benchmarks, specially in 2018?

Because enterprise sales dwarf consumer sales? Enterprise is replacing servers and workstations every 3 years. Your 7 year old home beater will run until it dies.

With AMD's previous offerings, they benched well but ran like crap because so many applications are single-threaded. These single thread tests are important to know how these chips will work in real world scenarios.

This is the data enterprise buyers want to hear. If AMD can match Intel at a much lower cost, expect enterprise buyers to switch.

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