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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

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

#181

Post by gcp »

dijit wrote: post #84
bdz wrote: post #72

Looking at those gaming benchmarks. Turns out the single core performance is still more important than having more cores. https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_am...

main thread has to go somewhere. :\ Maybe knowing consumers will probably have more than 2 cores will make games optimise better for parellelism, it's not like the engine programmers _cant_ do it, they do it all the time with GPUs.

GPU parallelism is very different from main-core parallelism. The GPU is an entirely different architecture than the CPU. The stuff that's still on the CPU are things that don't trivially parallelize to begin with.

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

#182

Post by slizard »

Geee wrote: post #108
olegkikin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it wins in every case where performance truly matters: multi-threaded calculations, archiving, encoding. You know, the things that actually do take up time. Do you really care if your webpage renders for half a second longer?

Yes, I do care. A lot. Actually if it's just 50ms I care. Slow main thread is a huge annoyance, and that's 99% of my computer use. On the other hand, I don't care if asynchronous tasks (encoding etc.) take 30 or 40 seconds or whatever; I can get a cup of coffee or check my email. Also, major parallel workloads are done on the GPU anyway.

FTFY: some major parallel workloads are done on the GPU anyway, so parallel work on CPUs is often still relevant. ;)

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

#183

Post by tutanchamun »

morsch wrote: post #179
tutanchamun wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What means validated in this case? It's not certified by AMD to work, so depending on the memory and motherboard combination it could work, or if you are unlucky it doesn't work? btw: someone asked about coreboot: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

Validated means run it through server/workstation grade testing. For the first Ryzen processors, focused on the prosumer / gaming market, this feature is enabled and working but not validated by AMD. You should not have issues creating a whitebox homelab or NAS with ECC memory enabled. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

Thank you.

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

#184

Post by mrb »

kayoone wrote: post #24
robotmay wrote: post #11

The 1700 is really well placed, often seems to beat the i7 7700k in benchmarks whilst drawing less power and costing roughly the same/cheaper. Probably even better value if the stock coolers are as solid as they sound. Definitely going to be a popular chip with gamers (I'm very tempted myself). Hopefully more software starts to make use of multiple cores more effectively. It's not like it's a new feature of chips any…

Especially in games i think it's pretty clear that even the 1800X is not amazing, really good, but behind a 7700k while being more expensive. If you are not solely a gamer though, it's the better choice!

According to AMD CEO Lisa Su at https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea... : "there are some games that are using code optimized for our competitor... we are confident that we can work through these issues with the game developers who are actively engaging with our engineering teams."

Also, another AMD employee chimed in:

"But what's also clear is that there's a distribution of games that run well, and a distribution of games that run poorly. Call it a "bell curve" if you will. It's unfortunate that the outliers are some notable titles, but many of these game devs (e.g. Oxide, Sega, Bethesda) have already said there's significant improvement that can be gleaned. We have proven the Zen performance and IPC. Many reviewers today proved that, at 1080p in games. There is no architectural reason why the remaining titles should be performing as they are." Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

Unfortunately you can bet Intel is going to put all the spin they can into "AMD underperforms for gaming", while the software game developers are going to slowly optimize for Zen, up to the point where this perf discrepancy will be fully fixed but people will still have the mindset that "AMD unperforms for gaming"... sigh

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

#185

Post by mrb »

dfrey wrote: post #178
mrb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, seen another way (better representation of the overall reality): The 7700k is losing in all aspects below w.r.t. the Ryzen 7 1800X, except absolute single-threaded perf. Intel is losing in: - absolute multi-threaded performance - relative multi-threaded performance per $ - memory bandwidth - L3-cache bound workloads (AMD has twice more L3) - price of motherboards

You left out the tiny detail that the 7700k is $150USD cheaper than the 1800X.

True. But IMHO justified and worth it because AMD beats Intel in all these areas.

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

#186

Post by pmalynin »

rbanffy wrote: post #164
vxxzy wrote: post #2

Wow. AMD has really pulled through on this one. They are really giving Intel a run for their money. This is going to be great for consumers. What is interesting is the HUGE jump in multi-threaded performance on AMD. Very interesting.

> What is interesting is the HUGE jump in multi-threaded performance on AMD. Very interesting. Indeed. Single threaded performance, however, seems bad. Virtual cores most likely share less of the actual core than on Intel parts, allowing one to compete less with the other and get more done. On my i7 laptop, on anything more demanding, I see half the "cores" idling, probably because one is using the actual underlying…

>"half the "cores" idling"

Right, thats exactly what happens with Hyper-Threading. If you can fully utilize the physical core, Hyper-Threading can't do much.

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

#187

Post by slantyyz »

MLR wrote: post #156
slantyyz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping things get more interesting when the Ryzen Mobile chips come out later in the year.

The Zen based APU platform is going to cause real problems for Intel in the laptop/ultrabook market, Ryzen's power consumption looks very low and their iGPU technology is years ahead of Intel's.

>> The Zen based APU platform is going to cause real problems for Intel in the laptop/ultrabook market

Technically this is true, but unlike the desktop market where you can buy stuff in pieces, it really depends on how the laptop manufacturers adopt them. As in how fast they show up in product lines, and in which laptop segments they show up in.

If, for example, Intel gives laptop manufacturers pricing incentives (legally or not) to stick with their chips, it may not cause any problems at all with respect to actual customer purchases.

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

#188

Post by std_throwaway »

jdietrich wrote: post #103
olegkikin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to add a 150+EUR GPU? There are many cheap options. You can get Radeon R7 250 under $50, which absolutely destroys i7-6700k's integrated HD530.

Low-end GPUs are a very poor value proposition. For $89 you could have an RX 460 with nearly 3x the performance of the R7 250 plus HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4.

What is the added value of 5 times more than enough compared to 2 times more than enough?

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

#189

Post by fcanesin »

From the reddit AMA today with Lisa Su (CEO):

7th) Will all Zen products have all of the instruction sets and platform extensions, or could lower end chips lose features like virtualization?

A7: In the consumer client space we have no plans to turn off virtualization or features.

9th) Does AM4 / consumer ZEN support ECC memory?

A9: ECC is enabled on Ryzen and AM4.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...]

edit: added link

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

#190

Post by BuckRogers »

Looks great, coup successful by AMD. Takeaways after a few of the reviews on this list[0][1]:

- If you're buying a desktop quadcore processor in 2017, you're doing it wrong. May as well buy a laptop.

- Kabylake sucks as a workstation chip but is ok for gaming if your PC is solely a glorified Xbox.

- Vast majority (90%+) of gaming rigs are GPU-bound. Think very carefully before giving up 8 cores and 16 threads at the same price.

- Intel's margins and lineup are utterly destroyed especially once you consider how expensive Intel HEDT boards are on top of it all.

- AMD made CPUs Great Again. Bravo AMD!

[0]https://videocardz.com/66826/amd-ryzen-7-review-roundup

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJQEHNYE7M

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