AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by MrRadar » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

lightedman wrote: post #274

mee_too wrote: post #245

Earlier 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.

If those are your needs you're well beyond enthusiast/prosumer and into workstation/enterprise server territory. Their upcoming Naples platform will probably be right up your alley, with octo-channel memory and up to 32 cores/64 threads per socket (though, of course, I'm sure it will all come at a cost).

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

#282

Post by strmpnk » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 2:25 AM UTC

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.

ECC is great for detecting errors more than correcting them. Then one can do thorough memtests and decide if it's time to replace memory modules. It doesn't really prevent problems (there are unrepairable ECC errors too) as much as it leads to early detection and repair. Well worth it when you're optimizing for MTTR.

It's not a silver bullet if the user is just paranoid about data integrity (nothing beats end-to-end integrity checks built into your system, while ECC only addresses one step in the process).

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

#283

Post by michaelmrose » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 2:32 AM UTC

chx wrote: post #221

simplemath wrote: post #217

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.

You can get used amd workstations too its not really valid to compare the cost of used 5 year old machines vs new.

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

#284

Post by innocenat » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 2:49 AM UTC

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…

Wouldn't the SpeedStep or whatever it is called be that? They dynamically disable cores and boost clock speed.

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

#285

Post by BlytheSchuma » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 2:53 AM UTC

I'll never buy an AMD processor, but I'm glad they are giving Intel some competition.

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

#286

Post by mrb » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 2:58 AM UTC

keldaris wrote: post #276

mrb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Ryzen 7 1800X unambiguously beats the 7700k on memory bandwidth:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_proce...

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

#287

Post by BuckRogers » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 3:05 AM UTC

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? >…

You're very confused, it's clear you didn't really understand what I'm saying. Think about it more and read more reviews.

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

#288

Post by smitherfield » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 3:09 AM UTC

caf wrote: post #278

anthonybsd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but Excel is presumably one of the most optimized (in terms of the amount of money and brainpower devoted to optimizing it) applications in existence.

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

#289

Post by Tsagadai » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 3:11 AM UTC

throwawayish wrote: post #213

Asooka wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not that expensive or rare: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682024...

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

#290

Post by lewisl9029 » Fri, Mar 03, 2017, 3:30 AM UTC

photon-torpedo wrote: post #280

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.

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. L…

> 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?

Definitely this. The extra safety of mind offered by ECC RAM is totally worth the tiny price difference for me. The only thing that stopped me from actually using it was the lack of (affordable) CPU support. Ryzen changes that.

On that note, I hope it's not long until we can easily buy ultraportable laptops with ECC RAM without paying through the nose for Intel's ridiculous prices for their mobile Xeon CPUs.