Hacker News Reader

Comment by vcarl | Hacker News Reader

> in a HandBrake-based video transcoding task, Ryzen scored a narrow win [against a stock i7-6900k]

Man, if that holds true in more benchmarks, that's fantastic news. AMD chugged along by "competing" further and further down Intel's product line more or less since Sandy Bridge, if they can genuinely compete with the i7 now I can't wait to see the next few years. Intel has always seemed content to release incremental improvements until they get kicked in the pants by somebody else, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a bunch of stuff waiting in the wings to maintain their edge over AMD.

View on HN

Delta of 5 seconds (54s for ryzen, 59s for 6900k).

Also IIRC, ryzen wasn't using any form of boost while the 6900k was allowed to push its enveloppe.

Not a time to buy an intel cpu.

Tre 6900k was not only not boosting they downclocked it to a locked 3.0ghz....

If there is no room for boost on Zen parts it's gonna be dead in the water for enthusiasts. My 5820k does 4.6ghz and it's a 6 core part.

That said what's even more important is going to be USB 3/3.1, storage and PCIe performance which ATM on AMDs current platforms are abysmal.

I missed the mention to 3GHz lock, did they mention it on the live feed or to journalists ?

No you didn't I thought you were referencing the old blender demo. They apperantly did another one.

Would be interesting to see the boost stats in that case, 3.7 boost is a bit low for a 6900k part tho everyone I know that had it rubs it around 4.2-4.3ghz.

Good, I would be really sad if they were pulling these kinds of bench "games".

I don't think full load boost higher than 3.7GHz is guranteed by Intel. It makes sense to only compare it within its official specification.

With the stock cooler, you can expect the CPU to start at 3.7GHz and come down to ~3.3GHz or so near linearly over about a minute, which is about how long the demo lasted.

If AMD left a benchmark to run as a space heater right up to when they started the timed one, the CPU would start at 3.3GHz.

There is no stock cooler for the 6900k nor any other enthusiast part intel makes and this has been the case for a while now there is also no official oem reference design for the cooler either.

As for the boost, I haven't seen a load that would prevent a core i7 from boosting permanently on air cooling, with water you'll have no problems keeping it at 4.3-4.5 even with an AIO...

The ones at my office, including older generations, run at full boost for hours on end.

No point of testing anything within official specs when even OEMs like HP sell overclocked PCs that push the CPU 15-20% over its intended clocks.

> Tre 6900k was not only not boosting they downclocked it to a locked 3.0ghz....

This is incorrect. They did a "both CPUs locked to 3.0GHz" test a few months back, today they did a "Intel CPU running absolutely stock, AMD one locked to without boost" test.

Yes we covered this already check the child posts.

Yeah Ryzen looks like a big win, however it's been the entry level i7's that have been the sweet spot for gaming, offering fewer cores that can be clocked from 4.5 to 5+GHz quite easily. Coupled with the current paradigm where most games don't scale beyond 4 cores much at all, gamers haven't really wanted the 6900k anyway. Long term Ryzen will continue to become more useful as GameDevs learn how to make better use of cores, but I don't see the need to replace my 5 year old 2600K just yet.

Has there been any pricing info or are we just assuming now that this thing won't be 10% more expensive than the Intel parts it turns out beating?

$500 vs ~$1100 for the Intel part.

Until the day the AMD ships.

Usually when top products have close performance price war starts so it's possible that "10% more expensive than the Intel" will be much lower than that Intel price today.

But Intel also has an ability to put pressure on OEMs (because of monopoly position and massive supply volume, so if they will not sell CPUs to some vendor as a punishment for buying AMD, AMD will not be able to supply enough CPUs on their own) and brand loyalty, so probably they will keep their "high-end" price points.

The i7-6900K is a Broadwell-E part (i.e., not their "mainstream" high-end parts)—while it implies an eight-core part against an eight-core part is competitive, it doesn't say anything about four-core against four-core (which as far as I know at Intel are different designs from different masks, and that's ignoring the fact that now the competition there is Skylake and a different microarchitecture too).

It isn't boxing, you don't have to put two chips in a head to head battle to see who wins.

AMD was never expected to beat Intel's best, they are expected to beat Intel on price performance.

You could cherry pick benchmarks back in the Bulldozer days that AMD would edge intel out in - while getting handily beat in everything else

They were real-world though. The Bulldozer architecture is optimal for some applications, just not very many that mattered at the time (and even now). I think the architecture was just way ahead of its time. It anticipated the software practices of the future and tried to build a CPU for it within the confines of today. Such futurism is impressive, although kinda foolish, for such a capital-intensive product.

The final result is that the Bulldozer and derivated cores, has aged very well. Any FX core works better now that they was released, because actually a lot of programs have in mind multicore that when the original FXs was released.

I think AMDs downfall started way before SB. AMD was competitive against Core and Core 2, but already Nehalem was rather... troubling. SB and the following iterations where just the death stab in many markets for AMD; after SB AMD didn't even try to compete with Intel in the server markets (their platform is six years old. Their newest server processors were released in 2012).

AMD fell the moment they failed to improve over K10.

Purchasing ATI didn't seem to help them much, either. Perhaps it was to offset the losses that they saw coming, but it also seemed to distract them a bit.

I never understood what were the failure and what could AMD have done better. When intel started to be ahead in single threaded IPC, AMD tried to innovate by bringing low consumption, multi threaded, with embedded GPUs cheap SoC. It seemed quite in touch with the early netbooks where people would need a blend of capabilities (hardware video accel, compositing / CSS3 able GPU) instead of a compilation workhorse.

I don't know if the designs were really absurd, or if the market couldn't understand AMD's value prop. Or if the programmers couldn't (or wouldn't) tap into their APU idea.

Multiple papercuts made them fall I guess.

The funny thing is that that's where the market is sort of heading now.

APUs didn't take off except in low-end-ish notebooks and low-end desktop computers not because the idea is bad, or the graphics performance was poor (it wasn't), but because the CPU part was subpar.

The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins.

AMD dedicated graphics have only minor issues imho, they're very competitive with nVidias offerings. But in the professional and compute segments they fail to take off, because nVidia established the popular, proprietary CUDA standard there. I don't think there's a (major) technical reason why AMD has much less market share there.

> The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins.

They're likely fairly consistent income, however, even if the margins are relatively slim. For a company in AMD's state, constant income no matter how small is likely a good thing.

Always good to have economic mass, market presence. I have no data, but I could see a guy owning an AMD based game console thinking about other AMD products for its PC.

The problem with that is unless that guy figures out what's inside his console, he would never realize that an established PC vendor was providing key parts inside. I've never had a game console, but I don't remember seeing AMD stickers on consoles or their packaging.

In large, it pays for fabrication facilities and some R&D. While it may not be ideal, it's not bad either.

One problem with APUs is that they make it so difficult to rank offerings by performance. A convenient benchmark blend is a reasonably useful approximation of actual utility for conventional general purpose CPUs. But when GPU becomes part of the mix, you get a lot more uncertainty if you do not investigate the details. For an entry level system, where APUs are at home, few people are willing to invest that much effort into their buying decision.

AMD marketing tried to put GPU performance in the spotlight. The unfortunate effect was that a moderately informed consumer then had the choice between a somewhat predictable level of graphics performance paired with whatever CPU that came with it if buying AMD, versus a somewhat predictable level of CPU performance paired with whatever GPU that came with it if buying Intel. In most market segments, uncertainty about graphics performance has much less impact on buying decisions than uncertainty about general purpose compute. The (involuntarily, given their portfolio) focus of AMD's marketing on the graphics part of their APUs made it close to impossible to successfully communicate value-for-money advantages in their price range (assuming they had it).

No, it was early designs (intentionally?) fucked up that deviated strongly from AMD's reference design.

Rumors went around that Intel paid manufacturers to do it intentionally, but nothing was ever proven. However, given how Intel has had similar behavior in the past, it isn't an unreasonable rumor either...

Anyone know how well handbrake scales with number of cores?

Also are the 8 cores they're claiming 8 physical cores or logical?

8C/16T

Oop yes it says so on the image on the page. Depending on price point this could be very interesting. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing what they can offer in high-core-count models.

Shame they still seem to have a 15-year-old in charge of marketing though. Should have just stuck with "Zen".

it seems like their naming scheme is to take a three-syllable name, and cut off the first syllable. Triathalon -> Athlon, Centurion -> Turion, Horizon -> Rizen.

"Zen" is a lot harder to trademark than "Ryzen".

Also, it sounds like "Ryzen" is their consumer product line. Their server product line might be called something else. It makes sense to have multiple product lines with different names and to refer to the common microarchitecture as "Zen".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com