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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

anandtech.com

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

#191

Post by tbrowbdidnso »

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.

What? I've never run a parallel op on the GPU but I do on my CPU multiple times a day. GPU acceleration besides games is still extremely rare. You're grasping straws here.

You're also missing that even on chrome the js and layout engines run different threads. Same with audio and video rendering. Same with downloads. The average page is probably running things on 10-20 random threads. And the average user has multiple tabs open.

Multicore CPU is so common these days that any performance critical code that can be parallelized, is. This includes GZIP and HTTP which are used heavily by web browsers. The network stacks underneath those in the OS are also multi core capable.

Single thread performance is not all that important anymore. It's better to have 2x the number of fast cores than half the number of slightly faster cores in almost every situation these days.

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

#192

Post by Symmetry »

ldev wrote: post #126
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?

I'm actually using my computer and not running it as a build server. I'd take 16 ghz single core CPU over 4 core 4ghz any time of the day.

Generally speaking the price of a processor is going to be the square of the single threaded performance times the number of cores. So your choice is more like one 8 GHz core versus 4 4GHz cores. Which might be good or bad depending on your use case. Well, there's a threshold below which you only get linear per-core scaling but outside microcontrollers you're not going to have to worry about that.

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

#193

Post by jdietrich »

std_throwaway wrote: post #188
jdietrich wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The R7 250 is considerably less than enough if you have a 4k monitor. GPUs aren't just for gaming - if you use Photoshop or Premiere, you'll want a decent GPU. An increasing number of applications are making use of GPGPU processing.

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

#194

Post by dmm »

octoploid wrote: post #129
dmm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good information but still doesn't tell us that these cpus support ECC, right? Maybe the motherboard fully supports ECC when used with a future 1800X-PRO but not with the 3 chips reviewed here. In that case anandtech saying "We know that it is disabled for the consumer parts" and ASRock saying "ASRock AM4 motherboards fully support ECC function" can both be true.

AMD will use the same die for its server CPUs, so ECC support is on chip anyway. I see no reason why they should turn it off in the Ryzen CPUs launched today.

It looks like you are (thankfully!) right. The CEO of AMD confirmed ECC is enabled on the consumer chips. This is an awesome release overall!

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

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

#195

Post by slizard »

aesthetics1 wrote: post #148

What is the deal with 16 PCIe lanes? With the move to PCIe storage, this is disappointing. I am happy to see the price/performance is good (which is surely going to force Intel to be competitive again), but if this is targeting the high-end, I can not understand 16 PCIe lanes.

The CPU has 24 lanes and the chipset can add up to 8 additional lanes, see [1] first table.

It's a pity that they did not include at least 32 lanes on-chip to allow two full x16 GPUs at least on the 1800X, but I hope there is a 1900X in the pipeline with more lanes.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/

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

#196

Post by deepnotderp »

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…

Server supplies ~60% of Intel's total profits.

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

#197

Post by carspically »

ElatedOwl wrote: post #117
teilo wrote: 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…

>If I was after rendering performance, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen But why? http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-... The benchmarks show Ryzen being the obvious choice other than cinebench single threaded.

The reason he said that is because it makes infinitely more sense to use a renderer that does it's work on the GPU with CUDA or OpenCL.

Only if you are using a shitty software renderer or are completely stupid would you do rendering on the CPU.

The Ryzen performs nicely on the encoding tests, though that will be performed by the GPU soon. It already can be (NVENC and AMD VCE), but the quality isn't quite as good as everyone's favorite h.264 encoder, x264.

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

#198

Post by dr_zoidberg »

tutanchamun wrote: post #165
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...

what's up with some of the tests? For example this one: https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_am... A Broadwell with 3300 Mhz (3700 Mhz boost) beats a Kaby Lake (Skylake...) with 4200 Mhz (4500 Mhz boost)? Can the Broadwell use the 128MB EDRRAM from the iGPU as a L4 cache if the iGPU is not used? Would that actually make such a difference?

> Can the Broadwell use the 128MB EDRRAM from the iGPU as a L4 cache if the iGPU is not used? Would that actually make such a difference?

That's exactly what it does, and it gives you a "free"* ~20% increase in memory operations performance (which tends to be a ~20% increase in general performance).

* not actually free because you paid for those 128MB EDRRAM...

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

#199

Post by aesthetics1 »

slizard wrote: post #195
aesthetics1 wrote: post #148

What is the deal with 16 PCIe lanes? With the move to PCIe storage, this is disappointing. I am happy to see the price/performance is good (which is surely going to force Intel to be competitive again), but if this is targeting the high-end, I can not understand 16 PCIe lanes.

The CPU has 24 lanes and the chipset can add up to 8 additional lanes, see [1] first table. It's a pity that they did not include at least 32 lanes on-chip to allow two full x16 GPUs at least on the 1800X, but I hope there is a 1900X in the pipeline with more lanes. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/

This table (in the linked article) shows that each CPU has 16 lanes:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-...

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

#200

Post by tomku »

yread wrote: post #4
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.

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

And? Intel's $1,600 6950X loses to their own $170 i3-7350K in single-threaded benchmarks. When you pay extra for a CPU with more cores, you almost always get less single-threaded compute because of power/heat/design constraints forcing the clock speed down. Dual cores will often beat quad-cores, which will almost always beat hex/octo-cores.

What's happening here is that AMD has priced Ryzen so inexpensively that it actually broke the usual market segmentation by driving high-thread-count workstation CPUs (usually $1k+) into the same price range as high-end gaming CPUs (~$300-400). Think of it as being able to buy an industrial dump truck for the same price as a pickup truck. The dump truck is clearly a better value in terms of hauling capacity, but most people would be far better off with a pickup truck for their daily traveling.

AMD's pickup truck (the 1400X) doesn't launch until later this year. The 7700K will probably still beat it on single-threaded workloads due to the difference in clock speed, but it should get you most of the way there for substantially less money, around $200 if the leaks are accurate.

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