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AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
271–280 of 359 posts
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#272From 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.
That's well below median of around 1+/year per server, and might indicate you are not logging all ECC errors found or just not using most of your memory heavily. However, ECC is much more useful for early detention of memory problems than actual recovery from memory problems. Further, if you get do large scale measurements you will get vastly higher numbers as the average is dominated by the worst offenders.
PS: Radiation also makes a huge difference.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#273From 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.
I run a few more modern servers and we see corrected ECC errors fairly often, but typically not randomly distributed across the boxes. This makes me suspect bad memory devices. We've replaced modules here and there with positive results.
Anyway as a former memory subsystem designer and a former employee of a memory chip maker, I like ECC. It provides some protection against bus noise errors even if you have full confidence in the memory chips themselves.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#274Barely half of the PCI-E lanes than my FX-9350. Nooooooooooooope. Was looking forward to a nice SLI rig but looks like Ryzen just died for my choice on upgrade. Guess I'll stick with the power-hungry beast.
8 lanes per GPU is plenty, the performance diff with 16 is ~3%. Games will run faster with SLI setup on Ryzen. Why do you even need SLI, 1080 Ti will be good enough for 5K gaming.
Your piddly 5K doesn't stand up to my 8K professional video setup. To boot, I have multiple drives, and PCI-E/M.2 based networking and storage as well.
Please try again when you need to juggle 1,000+ video feeds simultaneously and truly understand what REAL power requires.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
8 lanes per GPU is plenty, the performance diff with 16 is ~3%. Games will run faster with SLI setup on Ryzen. Why do you even need SLI, 1080 Ti will be good enough for 5K gaming.
Your piddly 5K doesn't stand up to my 8K professional video setup. To boot, I have multiple drives, and PCI-E/M.2 based networking and storage as well. Please try again when you need to juggle 1,000+ video feeds simultaneously and truly understand what REAL power requires.
I don't know if it was attempted, but you can turn down the condescension.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's still losing in every web and office single threaded benchmark. EDIT: compared to 7700k that costs about the same
Or, seen another way (better representation of the overall reality): The 7700k is losing in all aspects below w.r.t. the Ryzen 7 1800X, except absolute single-threaded perf. Intel is losing in: - absolute multi-threaded performance - relative multi-threaded performance per $ - memory bandwidth - L3-cache bound workloads (AMD has twice more L3) - price of motherboards
I'll have to disagree on a few of the points on that list:
> - relative multi-threaded performance per $
Highly depends on the particular workload. Given the few benchmarks we have right now, it seems to go 50-50 once you factor in the lower price of the 7700k. At the very least, this one is close.
> - memory bandwidth
Seems about equal from the measurements I've seen (the theoretical numbers are irrelevant).
> - L3-cache bound workloads (AMD has twice more L3)
Cache-size bound workloads to be precise. Cache latency still seems higher, even on L3.
Overall, the 1800X seems to make the entire Broadwell-E series redundant on price/performance (at least at current price), no argument there. Against the 7700k, however, it's a very interesting decision, entirely based on the distribution of your workloads. And if Intel drops the prices on Kaby Lake, the value equation can change very quickly indeed.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#277I'm someone who's still running an ancient (2007, IIRC) Nehalem i7-920 based workstation for daily use and was eagerly waiting for this launch to finally decide on a new build. After reviewing all the day one benchmark data, I've come to the odd decision that I'm probably going for an i7-7700k, especially if Intel drops the prices by even a tiny amount.
I say "odd" because, apart from basic daily tasks and occasional gaming, my workload mostly consists of scientific computing. Ryzen's performance on AVX2 is precisely as bad as I expected from the architecture (effectively, a 50% penalty) and given the thermal constraints on 6900k's, a lightly overclocked 7700k (usually easy to get to 4.8-5 Ghz after delidding) seems to deliver by far the best price/performance ratio even on multithreaded workloads as long as vectorization is a significant component of the workload. Not to mention the added benefit of delivering the undisputed best single threaded performance money can buy. Ryzen also seems to have issues with memory bandwidth that may or may not be solved by future microcode or MB firmware upgrades, and very limited overclocking headroom.
It's still nice to see AMD bring competition back to the CPU marketplace, and I'm looking forward to their server CPUs in Q2. I'd also love to be proven wrong on anything I said above and reconsider my build options, so please point out any oversights on my part.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do have to consider that this is an 8 core, and more and more applications are being developed with this in mind. Whoever still thinks that Single threaded performance is the most important, lives in the past.
Consumer applications? Doubt it. Not a whole lot of consumer-oriented applications parallelize that well to be honest.
Even crusty old Microsoft Excel parallelises worksheet recalculation.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For these applications, any modern desktop CPU is enough , and enough is all you need for them. People browse the web and do office tasks just fine on tiny 10W "Ultrabook" CPUs.
Just this week I bought three systems for PXE-boot office use at http://infinite-food.com/ and settled on Kaby Lake G3950 dual core Celerons with integrated Intel HD graphics. Here in China a whole mini-ITX system (including case, 180W power supply, 8GB DDR4 2133 RAM, G3950 CPU, motherboard, keyboard and mouse but not screen) is ~USD$174 (inc. parts shipping). I think Intel's integrated GPUs are still very attractive at the lower end of the market.
Re: AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
#280From 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.
To word your statement differently: without ECC, your memory either works fine or is corrupted. But you don't know which one it is, until you run memtest. How often do you do that?
Personal anecdote: Upgraded RAM in my PC, ran memtest, everything fine. A year later, I need to move and so I consolidate all my data on a big hard disk. As the disk is new, I run some verification and notice some non-matching checksums. Long story short, the new RAM had become defective, and a new memtest showed a handful of errors after a few hours. Had I had ECC on that machine, I probably would have seen notifications about memory errors even before that day (plus the errors would likely have been corrected).
If Ryzen allows us to build a powerful PC with ECC for little more money than a non-ECC one, I'll happily pay for this "feel good feature". The current ECC-capable alternative from the Intel universe (Xeon CPU & motherboard) is simply too expensive for most people.