321–330 of 359 posts
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I don't think spending time and effort to optimize code for Ryzen will be time well spent. Would you do it if you had the choice between that or adding new money making features/fixing bugs?
This is a compiler optimization, not an application optimization. I'd certainly add -march=zen as a compiler flag for my application. As for the priorities of the compiler devs, I think it will get some love.
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…
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...
From what I've been reading about the upcoming Ryzen, no motherboard so far claims to support ECC.
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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...
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main thread has to go somewhere. :\ Maybe knowing consumers will probably have more than 2 cores will make games optimise better for parellelism, it's not like the engine programmers _cant_ do it, they do it all the time with GPUs.
GPU parallelism is very different from main-core parallelism. The GPU is an entirely different architecture than the CPU. The stuff that's still on the CPU are things that don't trivially parallelize to begin with.
When making AI bots it's quite common to have all of the work of processing the AI it's own thread, so each rendered frame will do all calculations for all bots. That in of itself would be cheap, except it has to share it's core with a bunch of other crap.
With 2 cores you can have a main thread for updating the screen and then an "everything else" thread. If you can't be sure people will be playing with >2 cores then you have to keep your budgets down to 2 cores when developing and that's quite limiting.
it's not that it's "hard" to parralellise(?), it's that you run out of resources super quick if you make assumptions about CPU topology.
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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...
Isn't the problem with AMD mobos that it's very difficult to find a motherboard manufacturer that supports the ECC? From what I've been reading about the upcoming Ryzen, no motherboard so far claims to support ECC.
However, I expect that there will eventually be some workstation grade motherboards from vendors like Supermicro which will be more direct about guaranteeing ECC support. This will be especially true if AMD decides to release some “official” small server grade CPUs on the AM4 socket (kind of like Intel’s Xeon E3 which uses the regular consumer socket, but requires a different chipset). I don’t know if there are any plans for such a CPU from AMD, but it wouldn’t surprise me considering there’s probably some real demand for something a little less expensive and powerful than the 32C/64T Naples server CPU. Rebranding a consumer 8C/16T Ryzen seems like a logical step, with the only cost being validation.
The thing to remember is that supporting ECC on an AM4 motherboard basically amounts to running a few extra traces between the CPU and DRAM slots, and adding support in the BIOS to initialize the memory controller properly. My experiencing in implementing boot code to initialize memory controllers leads me to believe that it’s probably one or two days worth of work to actually get it working (once everything else is done).
The real cost comes from testing and validation, which is why some manufacturers are so hesitant to give a straight answer regarding ECC support on consumer platforms. There is no point in spending the money to validate a feature that the majority of their customers think is a complete waste.
By offering “working but not validated” ECC support, they’re able to satisfy the demand of those who want to use these chips for small non critical servers without undercutting their higher margin server grade components.
Seems like gamers in general are a little disappointed, for everyone else this CPU is amazing at that pricepoint though.
I'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…
You're right about the AVX2 part. If that's important to you. Otherwise I'd have to disagree, waiting all those years and going to a quadcore is sad. This is a monumental shift to see $330 8C/16T chips start to be mainstream. I also hate that Intel went with that cheap TIM that requires delidding. You're in a tough spot given the focus on AVX2 IMO. My thoughts on Ryzen in general though is that the base 1700 is the c…
It's true that I'm in a very niche spot in that most of my workloads are vectorization-heavy, but I don't think it's quite as niche as people think. If you look at the benchmarks, quite a few workloads (check out x265 performance on ffmpeg, or audio encoding, or compression...) are sufficiently vectorized for the 7700k to be more cost efficient than the 1800X. Realizing that does feel a bit sad, though, I agree.
For pure gaming, I'd still get the fastest Kaby Lake i5 and be done with it. It doesn't matter what happens with DX12, etc., games are still going to be GPU bound for the foreseeable future and the cheap i5 won't significantly bottleneck you for many years to come.
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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.
Do they ever do compiler speed tests or boot speed tests? Which of the existing ones would be most similar?
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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...
Isn't the problem with AMD mobos that it's very difficult to find a motherboard manufacturer that supports the ECC? From what I've been reading about the upcoming Ryzen, no motherboard so far claims to support ECC.
Link on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...