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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive

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

#261

Post by ganfortran »

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.

I don't so it is good for me

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

#262

Post by resoluteteeth »

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.

> Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC.

While there is reason to think soft errors are much less common than often claimed and therefore ECC memory has been much less necessary than people think (at least within the atmosphere), there's now a pretty good reason to prefer ECC memory because of rowhammer.

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

#263

Post by yuhong »

mee_too wrote: post #259
sounds wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Look up "rowhammer" attacks for example.

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

#264

Post by srssays »

mee_too wrote: post #249
BuckRogers wrote: post #190

Looks great, coup successful by AMD. Takeaways after a few of the reviews on this list[0][1]: - If you're buying a desktop quadcore processor in 2017, you're doing it wrong. May as well buy a laptop. - Kabylake sucks as a workstation chip but is ok for gaming if your PC is solely a glorified Xbox. - Vast majority (90%+) of gaming rigs are GPU-bound. Think very carefully before giving up 8 cores and 16 threads at the…

>> If you're buying a desktop quadcore processor in 2017, you're doing it wrong. May as well buy a laptop. Not true, IDEs, web browsers, office tools need single core performance and not 4+ cores. A laptop is more expensive, will make more noise when loaded, is harder to upgrade, is less customizable, has less ports, is more expensive to expand (ThunderBolt devices are not cheap at all). What are you talking about? >…

IDEs are very very easy to parallelise, since most of the hard work is done in background tasks, which can run simultaneously. Compilation also parallelises very nicely.

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

#265

Post by mjevans »

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.

If you value the integrity of your data, particularly in longer term archive / recall / processing scenarios, then you value having ECC RAM as /part/ of a solution for detecting and correcting errors.

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

#266

Post by amaranth »

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.

Not that it's likely to matter for these systems but there has been some recent work on using ECC to recover from errors caused by refreshing less often. This would use less power so I suspect we'll see someone try it in phones or laptops soon.

http://thememoryguy.com/using-ecc-to-reduce-power/

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

#267

Post by O5vYtytb »

toss1941 wrote: post #180
O5vYtytb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who buys a $350+ processor with 8C/16T for web/office?

Quad cores are the absolute minimum I would want for a standard office machine, unless it's only for a handful of basic applications. My latest work laptop is a quad core with 32 GB of RAM for running multiple VM's, but they couldn't give me an SSD which ends up wasting at least a few hours of productivity a week.

Right, I guess that's my point. The minimal gains in CPU are widely offset by upgrading other components like a SSD. So what if Ryzen is a few percent slower on a javascript benchmark? Does this actually noticeably affect any apps that people actually use?

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

#268

Post by [deleted] »

aroch wrote: post #223
chx wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And you're also stuck with a $200/month power bill and the full home heater.... Don't get me wrong, I have a bunch of rack pull servers and they're great for the price but I colo mine for less/server than the power bill/server would be at home and have them ona faster connection. I stick with low power options for light in-home usage

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

smallet wrote: post #229
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single-socket Xeon E3 that GP mentioned is 69W TDP. The Ryzen 1700 is 65W, while the 1700x and 1800x are 95W. Why do you think the Ryzen box will be a lot less power hungry?

The Ryzen 1700 has 8/16 and much better performance compared to the mentioned Xeon E3. I think the Ryzen 5's would be the ones to look out for (still more cores and much less price), hope they push the power consumption even lower.

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by chx »

nagvx wrote: post #231
chx wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-Q...
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