Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 290 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#281

Post by Bayart »

mtarnovan wrote: post #237
Bayart wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compilation should profit pretty linearly from more cores thrown at it. Considering the Erlang VM is very concurrency-conscious it should be a pretty natural fit. But I'm not at all in on the intricacies of it, are there any particular CPU features (instruction set or module) it's known to take advantage of ?

You mean like vectorized instructions and such? I don't know, but if I had to guess I'd say no. Anyway, I'm sure there are some compilation phases that won't benefit from more cores, but the bulk of the compilation seems to do so. Even though Elixir has incremental compilation, due to use of metaprogramming in the Phoenix framework sometimes even changes to a single file will trigger recompilation of hundreds of othe…

Try to ask around Stack Exchange or whatever, I'm certain some people have been running the BEAM on the second generation Threadripper chips (this one being pretty much just a better 16c Threadripper on a consummer socket) since they've been so popular for productivity/compilation.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#282

Post by Bayart »

IanCutress wrote: post #225
lliamander wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer, other benchmarks I would like to see: * compile benchmarks for different mainstream languages (Java, C#, etc.) * IDE related benchmarks (i.e. how long does it take to index a large solution/workspace) * source control conversion tests (svn to git). Obviously not something that happens everyday, but I've done it at two different jobs, and generally when it happens you are often converting many repos as…

Got any standardized methods that could be automated/scripted under a clean Windows environment and doesn't require internet access / licensing? Give me a shout - ian@anandtech.com

Honestly something like a Linux Kernel compilation would be the most straightforward, static and consistent method to test it out. Just have a basic environment without overhead (like Alpine Linux) with GCC or LLVM/Clang sitting on a USB key, use GNU time to measure the execution of your command, redirect to a log file and you're done.

user@host$ (time make -j[insert number of threads]) 2>logfile.txt

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#283

Post by NicoJuicy »

paulmd wrote: post #226
Retric wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I read AMD processors aren't affected by the Meltdown bug. And the overall performance hit was 9x as large for Intel. However, if that’s wrong I would love to read about it.

Like I said, AMD was unique on Meltdown in that their branch predictor uses a neural-net based approach that is difficult to train to follow a specific path. It affected everyone else in the industry - Intel, IBM, ARM, Oracle, everyone.

So researchers aren't checking AMD.

A bit later, AMD was uniquely not affected. But they were investigated, yes?

Seems like you like Intel more than AMD.

No problems with that, I'm the other way around :)

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#284

Post by NicoJuicy »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #213
paulmd wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has been overbought by brand fanboys/"amateur investors" egging each other on (see: r/AMD_Stock) and is now effectively pricing in a massive amount of expected future growth. Probably decades worth. For context: Intel currently has a P/E ratio of 13.57, which is 70th percentile of tech stocks. AMD currently has a P/E ratio of 201.89, which is 5th percentile of tech stocks. https://www.gurufocus.com/term/pettm/int…

Server, desktop, laptop and video cards. Lots of room if they break Intel's monopoly though. Intel had 16 billion revenue in 2018 and AMD "profits" from TSMC and their clients ( eg. Apple, Nvidia,... ) In the server market, it seems that they are partially breaking Intel's monopoly. Today's news in Intel won't change that perspective. P/e is also a bad ratio if a company invests a lot. But yeah, a lot of hype on the…

Fyi, Amazon's P/e was even 1.100 at a time. P/e is not the best indicator for a company investing/researching and selling in lower prices. The AMD product line-up proves that they are investing a lot.

What I see lately is that AMD is raising prices. This seems like a good indicator of how they are positioning themselves versus the market.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#285

Post by lliamander »

scns wrote: post #277
hajile wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux Kernel would probably be good. WSL could probably do it without much trouble though I don't know how WSL affects performance compared to native Linux. Compiling Visual Studio Code Typescript could be an interesting target too. There should be a large open-source C# and/or Java project out there that can be compiled as well.

Is Typescript compilation multithreaded?

A good question, though I will point out that either way benchmarking would still be useful.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#286

Post by zlynx »

boring_twenties wrote: post #272
zlynx wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beside clean builds is Git branch checkouts. I hit this at least twice a week. Finish a feature branch and push it. Check out master. Pull master. Make new feature branch. Get an urgent bug fix request, switch to release branch, make a bugfix branch. Now go back to the new feature. During this I may end up doing large rebuilds because Git changes modification times even if you end up back with the same header file yo…

Do you know about `git worktree`? You may not want a separate one for each branch you work on, but at least one for master and one for release would help you I think.

There are problems with worktree. But yes, I often do use multiple checkout directories. When you do the git clone using the --reference option it gets most of the objects from the referenced directories.

But this still results in slow compile times because the less used release directories get stale, have to be pulled up to date and often mostly rebuilt anyway. If I remember to actually use the second checkout directory, it does save on needing to rebuild the master/feature branches afterward.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#287

Post by mtone »

scns wrote: post #277
hajile wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux Kernel would probably be good. WSL could probably do it without much trouble though I don't know how WSL affects performance compared to native Linux. Compiling Visual Studio Code Typescript could be an interesting target too. There should be a large open-source C# and/or Java project out there that can be compiled as well.

Is Typescript compilation multithreaded?

The source code is in .ts, and appears to use Node child processes [0], so probably yes. I'd be curious to see the kind of resource usage is involved building TSC.

My limited experience using Node worker threads (to compile small React apps with WebPack in parallel) showed lots of overhead and memory usage for just starting the build (Node and library instances, can't say in what proportion), although it is still worth the expense.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/scripts/...

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#288

Post by mtone »

Matthias247 wrote: post #144
ibobev wrote: post #72

As a developer I am keen to see some compilation benchmarks. Unfortunately those kinds of benchmarks are almost never included in such reviews. Instead there are many gaming benchmarks which purpose is not exactly clear for me, after obviously gaming is not the primary target market for R9 3950X.

As already said by others, Phoronix has some compilation benchmarks. I have recently bought a 3900X. Some things about compilation I would note is that it heavily depends on your programming language and tooling. And that you would note is that you get most benefits on clean builds of big projects, which scale very well per core. On incremental builds or smaller projects it is however not uncommon to see It's all nic…

Another potential area might be unit testing. As an example, I've been running a test suite on a C# github project (xUnit and mocking libraries) with ~1.5K tests. The CPU is at a solid 100% cpu usage all the way through.

In higher-level languages, running tests often takes considerably more time than building. A prosumer CPU like this would bring nice day to day improvements.

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#289

Post by rasz »

starpilot wrote: post #164
moonbug wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's so, they're helping Make AMD Great Again.

AMD was never great.

AMD had three great moments before Ryzen.

1991. Am386DX-40 introduced at $200, quickly discounted to slower ~$200 386DX-33 and $258 486SX-20. With this one CPU AMD won the budget segment for a couple of years https://redhill.net.au/c/c-4.html#dx40 Intel replied by suing AMD, they lost the case.

2000. Duron/Athlon and first desktop 1GHz CPU. Intel replied by faking release of Pentium 3 1GHz, (only limited review samples, no stock shipped) followed by real release of 1.13GHz Pentium 3 dubbed the "Fastest x86 CPU in the world", except they crashed in users computers and resulted in expensive recall and delays https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/revisiting-intel,221-2.... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/28/intel_recalls_1_13g...

2003. AMD64, first desktop 64bit cpu starting at $218, half the price of comparable Pentium 4. Intel replied by directly bribing, intimidating and blackmailing distributors/retailers, resulting in biggest EU antitrust fine at the time of over $1.3 Billion. Intel hasnt paid a dime of this fine to this date! and keeps throwing lawyers at the problem and appealing. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/09/06/victory-in...

Re: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

#290

Post by speedplane »

rasz wrote: post #289
starpilot wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD was never great.

AMD had three great moments before Ryzen. 1991. Am386DX-40 introduced at $200, quickly discounted to slower ~$200 386DX-33 and $258 486SX-20. With this one CPU AMD won the budget segment for a couple of years https://redhill.net.au/c/c-4.html#dx40 Intel replied by suing AMD, they lost the case. 2000. Duron/Athlon and first desktop 1GHz CPU. Intel replied by faking release of Pentium 3 1GHz, (only limited review sampl…

> AMD had three great moments before Ryzen.

AMD's current ascension can also be explained by the death of Moore's law. Moore's law is an exponential curve. Meaning, if you started behind someone else on the curve and increase on the same curve, over time, they will always get further and further ahead of you. You can never catch up.

Assuming progress stops following an exponential, and starts looking more linear, with a reasonable (i.e., non-exponential) amount of investment, you can overtake someone who is ahead of you.

This news may be great for AMD, but it does not bode well for everyone else.

Post reply on HN