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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

#201

Post by ufo »

mrb wrote: post #184
kayoone wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In what ways can games be optimized for Intel? What is the sort of change that the game developers would need to make to increase performance on AMD?

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

#202

Post by brandmeyer »

DannyBee wrote: post #124
daxfohl wrote: post #12

Do they ever do compiler speed tests or boot speed tests? Which of the existing ones would be most similar?

GCC is part of spec2006, which they optimize for. But the actual compilers people use (IE not that version of GCC) are rarely well-optimized for CPU. In fact, most compiler profiles are not flat yet, and where your compilation takes a long time, it's because some optimization or algorithm has gone nuts and needs to be fixed. Until that kind of state of the world changes, measuring compile time is IMHO, a bit pointles…

GCC is a useful benchmark not because it is unoptimized, but because it represents a real-world work profile that is otherwise poorly represented in SPEC. The working set sizes are large relative to the cache size, and its composed of a bunch of pointer-chasing branch-heavy logic as it winds through the various trees and intermediate languages. That profile is quite a bit closer to the profile of common business and server applications than nearly all of the other members in SPEC.

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

#203

Post by dbancajas »

rbanffy wrote: post #160
trueSlav wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it doesn't have an integrated gpu is a GREAT THING. This is an enthusiast/server CPU, if you can't be bothered to buy a cheap dedicated graphics card, wait for the mobile/apu Zen.

I think it'd be great if we could rely on every part having a standard, reasonable, GPU, even if we just use it as a clever vector unit and never push a single pixel through it.

No really. You'd prefer to use that silicon area to increase your perf. If you want a CPU-GPU combo wait for the laptop/mobile part of Zen codename RavenRidge.

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

#204

Post by seanp2k2 »

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...

Thanks. Still want to see someone actually get ECC to show up as enabled on something like the Asus Crosshair Hero board, which is what I've pre-ordered. I just grabbed a 16GBx2 kit of G.Skill 3200 but it would be great to get ECC for this quantity.

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

#205

Post by tutanchamun »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #198
tutanchamun wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Nice, now I'm wondering why Intel doesn't slap 128MB EDRAM on an Kaby Lake i7 4 core 8 thread and then release it for the enthusiast platform x99. Maybe even select chips to make it possible to release them at 5ghz. Of course with a large premium (expensive EDRAM etc.).

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

#206

Post by brandmeyer »

tormeh wrote: post #169
Orangeair wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a lot of other people online are pointing out, this is pretty much the exact same thing people said when Bulldozer came out, but it never materialized. AMD has always won in terms of core count, and people have been saying for years that games capable of taking advantage of 8+ threads/cores are right around the corner, but it never really happened. We shouldn't be basing purchase decisions today on what might theo…

They are here now. Almost no modern AAA game recommends less than 4 cores. Many won't start with less than 4 threads. And they do scale to 8 cores. This is because of the consoles, which both have 6-7 cores.

According to the Steam hardware survey, only about half of PC gamers have four cores, with the other half having two cores. Granted, many of those two-core systems will be four-thread systems, but I don't think its fair to say that the market is dominated by 4+ core users today.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

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

#207

Post by greglindahl »

chrisp_dc wrote: post #138
octoploid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back when high-end supercomputers used AMD Opterons, systems with a lot of memory would have had observable problems had ECC not worked pretty well.

Right now the #3 system in the world is a Cray system using Opterons.

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

#208

Post by Orangeair »

ufo wrote: post #201
mrb wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In what ways can games be optimized for Intel? What is the sort of change that the game developers would need to make to increase performance on AMD?

​

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

#210

Post by throwawayish »

dmm wrote: post #69
octoploid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for pointing this out. I found this on the specification page[0] for the ASRock "X370 Killer SLI/ac" AM4 board: > AMD Ryzen series CPUs support DDR4 2667/2400/2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory So the board seems to accept ECC memory, hopefully that means the memory controller actually performs ECC? I found a reddit comment claiming that the boards accept ECC memory but don't perform error correction[1]. N…

> So the board seems to accept ECC memory, hopefully that means the memory controller actually performs ECC? I found a reddit comment claiming that the boards accept ECC memory but don't perform error correction[1].

This is set up by the firmware (BIOS). Since we all already know that quite some of these still have issues (unsurprisingly, it's a new platform), it isn't far-fetched at all that current firmware doesn't quite do the right thing with certain memory sticks.

Note that this is unbuffered, unregistered ECC memory, which is usually more expensive and less available than the standard server memory (DDR3R / DDR4R), which is NOT compatible with any consumer CPUs.

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