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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

#251

Post by mee_too »

fcanesin wrote: post #189

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…

ECC is a feel good feature, but is mostly useless. Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC. I have over 50 10+ year old Itanium servers with 192GB ECC RAM each, there are 2 ECC errors logged total, while running 24/7.

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

#252

Post by seanalltogether »

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?

It's hard to put any faith in the large spread of numbers presented by this article regarding gaming performance. Anandtech just recently did a review of the I7 7700K and pretty much all the cpus over $200 posted the same numbers since most games are gpu bound.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-...

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

#253

Post by dr_zoidberg »

tutanchamun wrote: post #205
dr_zoidberg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.).

The Iris chip (the extra EDRAM for GPU/L4) is seen by Intel as a performance improvement for mobile solutions (ultrabooks, MS Surface Pro, maybe Macbooks some day?) and not a desktop solution.

But from a consumer point of view, it increases performance (either for graphics or for the whole system if I have a discrete GPU), and it can also help with GPU numerical processing, because you get "free" transfers from memory (L4) to graphics memory by flipping a bit (or a few bits) in hardware. Don't know why this wasn't expanded further, appart from the cost of the embedded RAM.

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

#254

Post by clarry »

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…

> while the software game developers are going to slowly optimize for Zen

Honestly I'm not very optimistic about that happening. Maybe some will. But the mentality these days seems to be that there's one winner and fuck all the rest -- we're busy and we don't have time to optimize for losers. Like with web developers seeming to almost exclusively work with Chrome except where they're told to support IE (or Safari?). Firefox just isn't popular.

Still, there's a chance the multi-core revolution will eventually happen. Vulkan could help us get there, although weren't DX12 was supposed to provide similar improvements in multi-threaded access to the GPU?

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

#255

Post by rbanffy »

dbancajas wrote: post #203
rbanffy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CPUs already have vector units. Having vector units that more closely resemble a GPU as part of the base ISA would be an interesting development.

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

#256

Post by clarry »

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.

All the benchmarks I just glanced over show a different story. Yes, big games claim to want 4 cores because that's what big intel has offered for big gamers. Sure they run on 8-core chips and may get a speed boost for that, or not. But it is quite small overall, with the Intel 4-core parts mostly performing better than Ryzen while being cheaper or similarly priced as Ryzen.

What some people here are anticipating is the situation where games really do scale well to 8 cores, at which point we'd likely see the Ryzen compete against Intel's stupidly expensive 8-core parts and roughly match them in performance while solidly beating them in price/performance ratio. Just like in the encoding benchmarks that actually do run well with multiple cores. These games aren't here now. We aren't there now. But it might be the future.

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

#257

Post by sounds »

mee_too wrote: post #251
fcanesin wrote: post #189

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…

ECC is a feel good feature, but is mostly useless. Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC. I have over 50 10+ year old Itanium servers with 192GB ECC RAM each, there are 2 ECC errors logged total, while running 24/7.

Newer memory uses smaller transitors which are more easily corrupted.

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

#258

Post by clarry »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #253
tutanchamun wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

The Iris chip (the extra EDRAM for GPU/L4) is seen by Intel as a performance improvement for mobile solutions (ultrabooks, MS Surface Pro, maybe Macbooks some day?) and not a desktop solution. But from a consumer point of view, it increases performance (either for graphics or for the whole system if I have a discrete GPU), and it can also help with GPU numerical processing, because you get "free" transfers from memor…

This is what I got frustrated with and decided to stop waiting & buy a Ryzen, in fact. I've been looking forward to an enthusiast segment desktop chip with eDRAM and Iris/Iris Pro (or better!) from Intel, for a few years now, but it hasn't surfaced.

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

#259

Post by mee_too »

sounds wrote: post #257
mee_too wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC is a feel good feature, but is mostly useless. Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC. I have over 50 10+ year old Itanium servers with 192GB ECC RAM each, there are 2 ECC errors logged total, while running 24/7.

Newer memory uses smaller transitors which are more easily corrupted.

How much more - 1%, 10%, 100%? Has anyone ever seen an ECC error on a desktop, with a module that passes MemTest?

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

#260

Post by ClassyJacket »

rl3 wrote: post #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…

They do exist, but on ARM, not x86. Most high end phones on the market today have that.
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