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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

anandtech.com

211–220 of 359 posts

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

#211

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.

ECC is not complex to implement.

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

#212
post #201
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?

Intel provides a lot of tools and SDKs for game developers. I presume some/many are specifically optimized and highly-tuned for running best on Intel processors:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/gamedev/

But also things like physics engines (eg. Havok, which was acquired by Intel and heavily optimized for Intel processors), etc.

And of course Intel's C Compiler is known to cripple AMD: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 And some/many games are compiled with ICC...

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

#213
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is that buffered ECC or unbuffured ECC? Because last time I checked, my AM3 board had support only for unbuffured, which is really hard to find and I just didn't bother.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, your comment is accurate. Consumer hardware traditionally does not support registered memory, which is (reg ECC) the standard for server hardware hence cheap, while unbuf, unreg ECC is rather rare. AM4/Zen is no exception, no DDR4R for consumers.

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

#214
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.

The IMC in almost any Intel CPU also could do ECC, but on most consumer SKUs there's that pesky little configuration flag set by the factory telling it not to. Why? Because Intel can, that's why.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 people still buy new computers and use those applications on them – that's why single-thread performance is (for the moment at least) still important. I do understand where you're coming from, but real-world performance is important, especially when that world is imperfect.

> Because people still buy new computers and use those applications on them – that's why single-thread performance is (for the moment at least) still important.

That's a load of bullshit. No one ever complained that the web is unbrowsable or an excel spreadsheet is unworkable without a high-end boutique processor. Those benchmarks are simply a load of bullshit that evaluate something that is utterly irrelevant.

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

#216
post #68
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.

>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. I agree ECC should be a standard feature, but it follows the same marketing patterns (in that industry) as disabling multi-processor support or artificially limiting clock speeds.

Actually no, enabling external cache coherency (eg. QPI) incurs a significant cost in terms of pin count, power, die space and clock speeds. The same does not transfer to ECC memory.

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

#217

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…

my homelab is ready.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5vsz90/ryzen_does_not_... De-comfirmed unless the source is lying.

FWIW, I remember ASRock being mistaken about AMD features in the past: iirc there was a while when they were wrongly asserting that Bulldozer didn't support I/O virtualisation. (Eventually they implemented it on their own AM3 motherboards.)

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

#219
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly the opposite is correct. ICC generated code whose runtime dispatch looked at "Are we running on Intel? Select fast path. Not running Intel? Select generic i386 path."

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49

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

#220

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…

Link to the comment of the CEO of AMD confirming that Ryzen supports ECC memory:

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

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