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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

anandtech.com

231–240 of 359 posts

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

#231
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my homelab is ready.

Really not wanting to poop on anyone's parade but an off lease Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation used from eBay will beat the pants off anything else for homelab. You can get an E3-1240 V2 with 8Gb RAM for the kingly sum of ... $200. Including motherboard, chassis and PSU.

Could you offer some specific, searchable product names?

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

#232
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multipl…

"GPU acceleration besides games is still extremely rare"

Not even. Video acceleration, browser acceleration, flash acceleration, and much more, are becoming increasingly GPU-oriented.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 e…

Depending on rendering task, GPU rendering isn't always feasible. In particular, for very large scenes consuming a large amount of RAM, it is difficult to find graphics cards with over 8 GB of VRAM, while 32gb or 64gb of desktop RAM are easily accessible.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 e…

are you saying gpu x264 encoding is reaching bitrate/quality ratio similar to cpu x264 soon ?

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

#236
I'm still trying to work out whether only dual channel RAM means 64GB RAM is the limit, or do different mobo chipsets support actually support quad-channel? Kind of a deal breaker (for bioinformatics work) if I can't go over 100GB RAM, which is really annoying given those cheap threads.

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

#237
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my homelab is ready.

Really not wanting to poop on anyone's parade but an off lease Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation used from eBay will beat the pants off anything else for homelab. You can get an E3-1240 V2 with 8Gb RAM for the kingly sum of ... $200. Including motherboard, chassis and PSU.

"beat the pants"? Compared to Ryzen, E3-1240 V2 has: half the cores, half the L3 cache, half the memory throughput of Ryzen, no AVX2, etc. Plus average price is more like $300-350 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R210-II-1U-Rackmount-... And it's still comparing apples to oranges favoring Intel. Wait a few months and compare used Ryzen gear to that old Intel gear...

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

#238
Out of curiosity, why aren't CPUs with asymmetrical core designs a thing? For example: a single, large primary core with a high clock speed supported by many lower-clocked smaller cores. Theoretically that would allow for the best of both worlds.

I imagine if such a design existed, it would disincentivize proper multi-core utilization in software to some degree. It would likely further complicate parallel programming as well.

At the same time, multi-core computing has been a thing for well over a decade now, and the reality is that a CPU's single-core performance still matters.

Are the efficiency advantages inherent in symmetrical core designs simply too great? Would asymmetrical designs not be suited for use with existing OS schedulers? Is operating a chip at multiple frequencies simultaneously somehow insane from a design perspective?

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

#240

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...

For anyone looking at a new AM4 build with high speed memory, be warned that Linus' review stated he could not POST with memory clocked past 2666MHz[0]

[0]https://youtu.be/9wJQEHNYE7M?t=4m43s

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