AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
AMD had said for years their Zen goal was a 40% IPC gain over their previous microarchitecture, but they ended up with a 52% gain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch-ryzen-52-more...
Today's launch event by AMD's CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8
Because they get exploded in single-threaded performances, so they have to pit their 8-core parts against Intel's 4 cores.
The 1700X will be competing against the $350 7700K more than the $1100 6900K (which incidentally is a Broadwell-E part not a Skylake part despite de 6 prefix)
The only redeeming quality of the 7700K is that Intel was able to raise the turbo freq to 4.5 GHz, while the 1700X only boosts to 3.8 GHz. So yeah single-threaded perf will be higher with Intel.
I should add that the above is the main reason the kaby lake release is so lackluster. There is very little reason to upgrade your desktop to a 7 series (laptops get power optimization and 4k playback support).
It's also the main reason why AMD might look appealing, lack of worthwile upgrade from Intel while AMD delivers twice the cores/threads for not a gread deal more then a 7600K.
You're talking about Skylake 6-series, the 6900K is Broadwell-E not Skylake despite being 6-branded.
Kaby Lake only brought GPU & video decoding improvements to the table, that's it. CPU performance is otherwise identical to Skylake.
[0] http://ark.intel.com/products/94196/Intel-Core-i7-6900K-Proc...
I assume that they are getting blown out of the water on single core performance and hence picked up an i7-7700k. We'll see if I made the right choice on March 2nd when real benchmarks surface.
- AMD have optimized for die size, at 44mm^2 vs Broadwell-E at 246mm^2. This will result in an order of magnitude better yields and margin improvements.
- Intel prices high in the >= 8-core space because: they can; there is no current competition; and the aforementioned yield/margin issue.
- The Intel parts have more advanced and expensive features aimed at professional markets; i.e. quad-channel memory controller, more PCIe lanes, and in newer architectures, integrated Thunderbolt controllers, to name a few.
So Intel's "-E" enthusiast line isn't really the optimal price point in terms of generating revenue via volume, it's just the high end of a sliding scale.
In case you were also wondering why Intel's pricing has been so obscene, it's to do with AMD's underwhelming pre-Zen microarchitectures and having had no serious competition in the past decade until now.
I'd expect them to make token gestures in MSRP and quietly make larger drops in practice; and to accelerate new models so it appears as if those new models are better price/perf wise due to their great new design.
Oh and of course, intel's 7700k is still quite a bit faster per-core, and there's AVX, so intel can play those cards loudly. I'd argue that even today almost all people are best served by a few fast cores than many slightly slower ones; there;s just so much poorly scaling software around. And where multicore works really well trivial the GPU is often just around the corner...
For servers the story may be different.
That way, Intel sells to those OEMs not only the hardware but also the promise that end customers will think that the parts were more expensive.
1. Because Intel is about to significantly drop their prices in response to Ryzen.
2. Because AMD really wants to immediately hurt Intel's revenues as badly as possible.
3. Because AMD has such an uphill battle to regain mind share that it really needs to release a product that makes people realize that AMD now has the superior perf/$ product, beyond any doubt. If Ryzen was only priced 20% lower than Intel, many people/OEMs/etc would not be motivated enough to go AMD.
If they price their CPUs anywhere near Intel, even if they are marginally better, OEM and partners will be shy and slow in creating new lines of products. They will only modestly deep their toes on AMD waters.
Intel can hold the line for a couple of years by offering OEMs large rebates/discounts for keeping volumes of sales in line with what they bought pre-Zen.
AMD has no choice but build market share and ecosystem by pricing way below Intel. Otherwise, history will repeat itself and they won't be able to capitalize long term on the Zen architecture as happened with the Hammer architecture.
Also in terms of gaming performance, Intel will probably remain king, due to single threaded performance and OC potential.
Personally, i'd always take 8 cores vs 4 for the same price even if they are 10-20% slower.
Total War is one example.
There are some optimizations to reduce the per-eye overhead, but it is still a lot.
Sony's headset can run at native 120Hz, increasing things more, but not too many games are using that mode.
Also, you're correct that GPU's can play all sorts of tricks to get multiple projected views for low CPU-overhead. But that is with significant software support. Otherwise VR will have to build twice the amount of framebuffers/frame as a single view game.
> GPU's can deal with making 2 images without meaningful CPU overhead.
I meant to say that with this "There are some optimizations to reduce the per-eye overhead, but it is still a lot." But I didn't word it well. I didn't mean per-eye overhead was a lot after the optimizations, but that the increase in CPU usage was still a lot in spite of them due to the higher update rates.
Another thing is that many enthusiasts nowadays go for high refresh rate monitors and at 1080p/1440p you can still be CPU bottlenecked if you are shooting for >144FPS on a 144Hz screen.
Overclocking is also limited on the Intel counterparts, so that's not really a big deal. Most kaby lakes won't do 5ghz, and good ones hit the wall at 5ghz. That's not much of an increase over the stock 4.2/4.5ghz for the 7700K
Also AMD is claiming a lower TDP than Intel, so that would suggest Ryzen has more OC headroom than Intel has. Although of course this is all wait-and-see.
PS: mirror since it was removed from YouTube.
My personal opinion is to wait for more data, march 2 is not far away. For sure anandtech and the other good bench sites will have a Perf/$ graph.
If these comparisons are real, my next build may be AMD again.
Heck, if I built a PC in the past year, I would have gone with a FX-8350 just because it's so damned cheap yet very performant. Once Zen is out, it's really a no-brainer for me.
(Yes, today the FX CPUs are much cheaper, but when they came out they were barely so. I know because I got an FX-8350 as soon as it came out and regretted it.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972
(However the FX series perf/watt is worse than Intel, I give you that.)
(They're much cheaper now, so it might make a lot more sense to buy one today, but I'm sticking with my Intel CPU until AMD can prove themselves.)
Another way to look at it: instead of putting an extra ~$100 on an i5, which has performance most people don't really take advantage of anyways, you could get a better graphics card.
Hopefully that isn't true anymore, or Intel may still be the superior chip for gaming.
Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.
I'm guessing that adopting these lower priced chips without lowering prices would have a negligible impact on sales for Apple if the performance is as good as AMD claims.
If I remember correctly, you'd have to get permission to add Thunderbolt support into drivers....
Now, just need a refresh on the GTX 1080, so that 4K gaming can be consistent at >= 60fps.
ASIDE: I've been using nvenc with vbr2 for h.265 with very good results (but about 10-15% larger than roughly equivalent x265).
Depends, I suppose, on how much AMD chooses to undercut on pricing.
E.g. see http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1826?vs=1729 (6900k vs. 7700k) - there are quite a few relevant workloads where the 8 core loses significantly to the 4-core. Even stuff where you'd think more cores are really natural (such as POV-ray), the perf advantage of the 8-core over the 4-core is less than 50% (!). For an example where fewer faster cores obviously win, consider web-browsers: the 4-core is 36% faster in google octane v2.
Servers that have lots of independant tasks, on the other hand, will love this cheap many-cores. And coincidentally, servers often don't use AVX all that much anyhow.
If you pick a comparison where the clock speed isn't so far apart, things look different: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1832?vs=1729
Of course, fewer cores usually means a higher available clock speed. Just pointing out it's not just "code isn't parallel enough" that drives the disparity.
To be specific: you can't get the equivalent of a 7700k with eight cores - the 6900k is (AFAIK) the next best thing, and by the looks of it, ryzen for all it's revolutionary improvements wrt bulldozer, is not all that different from a 6900k. AMD's own numbers place it at an identical single core perf.
If you're lucky enough to primarily be bottlenecked on parallel stuff: go nuts, of course!
In any case, I don't want to suggest I'm not happy with AMD finally being a real competitor, I'm just trying to temper expectations of intel-beating world domination. Most users aren't so lucky. Many people use laptops, and slow websites are more of a problem than slow handbrake sessions. For me, it's visual studio and various build/run cycles. Sure, some tools use more cores with the right settings, but it typically scales really disappointingly after around 2 or so. That overclocked 5820K would probably lose to a stock 7700k in my workload, and that's just annoying.
CPU, GPU, HBM all on one package. That would be a game changer for building analytics databases. There's a bunch of GPU based databases out now but a lot of the benchmark numbers they give you rely on having the data cases in GPU RAM. Real world benchmarks that require moving data over PCIe are less generous.
I've been wanting something wider to play with at home for a long time, but the AMD parts are slow, and the Intel parts are expensive and have expensive motherboards. I guess I don't want it that bad.
The quad-channel boards genuinely cost more to manufacture. It's not clear how much more because almost all of them are intended as server or enthusiast boards and have other things driving up the cost.
If Intel marketed LGA-2011v3 as a mainstream option then I think it might be reasonable, but I really can't tell.
Not sure why this PC World article is coming up now. There have already been many stories on Ryzen pricing and the release date of March 2 has been known for several days now... [1]
Product lauch video [2]
[0] http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-reviews-live-february-28th-tes...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5urylu/when_does_...
[0] http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&I...
386DX - copied Intel design verbatim (1:1 microcode). Got sued, won only because Intel had multiple source agreements with IBM.
K6 - purchased NexGen. Designed 100% by outsiders.
K7 - once again hired somebody else's engineers. This time almost whole DEC Alpha design team.
K8 - DEC people had some more steam left in them.
K9-Zen period - no more companies to take over and claim credit for their designs, add terrible management bleeding engineering talent while burning money on stupid ideas like Seamicro = in house garbage with 50% Intel IPC.
Zen - finally managed to rehire competent ex DEC engineer Jim Keller after his successful career at Apple.
Until my DVD reader burned my desktop motherboard I was using a core2quad and it was still fast enough. No lag whatsoever. Now I'm using a laptop with the first gen I5 and I feel no need to upgrade it (I'm using it as a desktop battery life does sucks)
I understand why PC sales drop every year. You just don't have to buy a new one unless yours die.
Beyond the product quality itself, I think AMD has had a pretty smart launch strategy by releasing the CPU chips first to show that it can beat "Intel's best".
But they really need to start focusing on notebooks ASAP. That's where they can steal most of the market from Intel, especially now that Intel is showing signs of (slowly) abandoning the notebook market, by prioritizing Xeons over notebook checks for its new node generations.
AMD should prioritize notebook chips either next year or the one after that, at the latest. They should be making the notebook chips first, before the PC ones. They need that market share and awareness in the consumer market.
In terms of how they should compete against Intel in the notebook market, I would do it like this (at the very least - AMD could do it even better, if it can):
vs Celeron: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled
vs Pentium: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT enabled
vs Core i3: 4 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled. Or keep SMT and lower clock speeds, as Intel did it. This may help further push consumers as well as developers towards using "more cores/threads".
vs Core i5 (dual core): 4 cores with SMT enabled
vs Core i5 (quad core/no HT): 4 cores with SMT enabled + higher clocks and better pricing. Maybe even 6-core with HT, if AMD goes the 6-core route. I honestly don't even know why Intel decided to make "Core i5" a quad-core chip as well, and its Core i7 a dual-core chip as well. It's so damn confusing - but maybe that was the goal. For differentiation's sake, it may be better for AMD to have a 6-core at this level or maybe even an 8 core with SMT disabled - so same thing as Intel, but with twice the physical cores. I don't know why but for some reason 6-cores don't attract me much. It feels like an "incomplete" chip.
vs Core i7 (quad core/HT): 8 cores with SMT enabled
The guiding principle for this strategy should be "twice the cores or threads with competitive/better single-thread performance, and competitive/better pricing).
In a way it would be the inverse of the PC strategy where they maintain the number of cores but cut the price in half. This would mainly focus on doubling the number of cores (because notebooks come with so few in the first place), while maintaining similar or better pricing.
The only ones that don't really fit well in this strategy are the Celeron and Pentium competitors and that's because a dual-core Ryzen, even at low clock speeds should destroy Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium. We could be looking at a least +50% performance difference, and that's what AMD should strive for there as well. AMD should show Intel what a mistake it made when it tried to sell overpriced smartphone chips for laptop chip prices.
It's still scheduled for 2017, but there hasn't been much noise about it for a long time so I suspect it's been delayed, as they're still focusing on Zen & Vega.
Zen & K12 probably share a lot of elements, so if Zen is awesome, K12 probably will be too.
A "Zega" APU would be killer in notebooks as well as HPC...
Intel did not do anything as a market leader, 8 years back I could still buy 4 core machine. Waiting to see, how AMD does on Server parts, 32 cores / 64 cores ? Power9 does 24 cores/ 96 threads.
And when comparing the 1700/1700X to the $200-250 price range i5-7600 Kaby Lake.
If you use them, the Intel chips downclock (sometimes severely) in order not to violate their TDP, but the dual FPUs are still there, and it's still a win for GEMM. I can see why AMD didn't follow along here, but it could be a factor in some small spaces - when you need GEMM but can't use a GPU.
Note that Ryzen can split its 256-bit FPU into two 128-bit units, so on code that's not using AVX, it's completely on par with Intel.
I'm dumb.
It's interesting that power consumption increases with avx instructions. Do you happen to have a link?
MKL? I don't think so, it takes the worst codepath if the chip isn't GenuineIntel. OpenBLAS? Doesn't have Ryzen support. Doesn't even recognize some AMD cores. ACML? Wasn't updated since 2013 or so.
This is a serious question. What are you supposed to do if you need a GEMM kernel for Ryzen? I sure hope AMD puts out updated ACML libraries real soon.
That said I agree it makes more sense for AMD to contribute to OpenBLAS than anything else.
I would also need to update this benchmark (if I can get hold of the new AMD CPUs) ;-) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5260068/multithreaded-bla...