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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

#301

Post by chx »

mrb wrote: post #237
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.

"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...

Check price per performance please. And I said workstation, not sure why everyone is looking at rack servers? http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-Q...

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

#302

Post by smitherfield »

caf wrote: post #292
smitherfield wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not the feeling you get when you use it, it seems more like the underlying engine hasn't really changed a great deal in 20 years.

That's the price of backward compatibility. But I think it's a bit of a "Seinfeld is unfunny"[1] situation; if Microsoft decided to save on the nine-figure budget and outsource Excel development to, say, your favorite purveyor of antivirus software, you'd notice real fast.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny (apologies for the TVTropes link at night!)

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

#303

Post by mrb »

kayoone wrote: post #24
robotmay wrote: post #11

The 1700 is really well placed, often seems to beat the i7 7700k in benchmarks whilst drawing less power and costing roughly the same/cheaper. Probably even better value if the stock coolers are as solid as they sound. Definitely going to be a popular chip with gamers (I'm very tempted myself). Hopefully more software starts to make use of multiple cores more effectively. It's not like it's a new feature of chips any…

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!

Also, super important: another reason games underperform is that Windows load-balances threads across CCXs (CPU complexes). The 8 cores of Ryzen are split across 2 CCXs. The 8MB of L3 cache is also split with 4MB per CCX. So when the OS scheduler arbitrarily decides to move a thread from a core to another, it might accidentally resume the thread on the other CCX, causing the thread to lose all is L3-cached data, incurring a high perf penalty.

The fix is to have a driver to help Windows treat a CCX almost as if it was its own socket. See https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/official-amd-ryzen-benc...

In theory a workaround would also be to disable cores 4-7 (and keep 0-3) in the BIOS. Sadly no Ryzen reviewers tried it...

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

#304

Post by jrockway »

BayesStreet wrote: post #240
Unklejoe wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is this uncommon? I have a 6950X with some "3200MHz" RAM, and it definitely doesn't work reliably at that speed. Nothing above 2666MHz will pass stress tests, even with conservative timings.

Ultimately the memory clock speed doesn't affect performance very much, so I'm not sure it matters.

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

#305

Post by jrockway »

tomku wrote: post #200
yread wrote: post #4

Earlier 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

And? Intel's $1,600 6950X loses to their own $170 i3-7350K in single-threaded benchmarks. When you pay extra for a CPU with more cores, you almost always get less single-threaded compute because of power/heat/design constraints forcing the clock speed down. Dual cores will often beat quad-cores, which will almost always beat hex/octo-cores. What's happening here is that AMD has priced Ryzen so inexpensively that it a…

I think Intel severely underclocks the 6950X by default, so that it fits within the stated TDP of 140W with all 10 cores at full load. If you have adequate cooling, it is very easy to overclock. I think I ended up at 4.2GHz for 10 core loads, 4.4GHz for 4 cores.

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

#306

Post by sliken »

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.

How much hardware have you used? I regularly find machine that crash, see errors reported in mcelog, and when I run memtest no errors. I'm guessing that memtest doesn't use a challenging access patterns, or something about powersaving/clocking that runs it a bit slower.

In any case I LOVE ECC. Sure random radiation caused bit flips are relatively rare. But it's REALLY nice to see high levels of ECC errors when something died and not have to wonder if it's the flash drive, power supply, graphics card etc. Sure sometimes its the dimm, sometimes it's the motherboard, sometimes it's the CPU. But with ECC errors you can much more quickly/easily tell if it changes when you swap things around.

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

#307

Post by stolsvik »

geezerjay wrote: post #215
matthewmacleod wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

> 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. That's a load of bullshit. No one ever complained that the web is unbrowsable or an excel spreadsheet is unworkable without a high-end boutique processor. Those benchmarks are simply a load of bullshit that evaluate something that is utterly irrelevant.

Hi geezerjay, I'm trying to find a way to contact you - I was wondering whether you could comment on a previous comment about used opterons for "Budget HPC": Where would I go to find this, and build myself such a rig? Links?

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

#308

Post by lightedman »

MrRadar wrote: post #281
lightedman wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"If those are your needs you're well beyond enthusiast/prosumer"

Allow me to introduce you to Camfrog. Absolutely consumer, boss.

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

#309

Post by scott_karana »

MaysonL wrote: post #228

I wonder: is there any possibility that Ryzen is what Apple has been waiting for for new desktops?

I doubt it. Their big switch to x86 had their laptops shipping with the new Core Duos before any other manufacturer, and I suspect they'd have a similarly dramatic launch if it was true.

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

#310

Post by BuckRogers »

clarry wrote: post #250
timdafweak wrote: post #7

Impressive! While it doesn’t utterly destroy Intel, AMD does offer a MUCH better price/performance ratio. Things have gotten much more interesting indeed. Intel’s dominance is being called into question. As a result, we all profit.

It offers much better price/performance ratio if the seriously multi-threaded use scenarios matter for you (that is where you compete with Intel's seriously overpriced >$1000 chips). It seems that in common use (web browsing, office, gaming), fewer but stronger cores still shine and even the fastest Ryzen is slower and more expensive than Intel's offering. So it really depends. A lot.

No it doesn't. Chips much slower than Ryzen aren't struggling with those common usecases at all. All you're doing is losing 8C/16T and spending the same amount or more to do it.
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