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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

with the AMD Ryzen CPU release tomorrow, you can now pair a lastest generation 8C/16T CPU with a 1080 for $1000, a combination that a week ago was about $1700. The Ryzen boards should be cheaper too, bringing the total system price for a configuration like this down a lot. Pretty amazing.

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Sort of, the intel 8c/16T is crazy expensive because it's a server chip with 4 memory busses, ecc support, etc. $1000 CPUs don't make sense for gamers. The fastest "normal" i7 is has plenty of cores and better single thread performance than the $1,000 intel chip. Of course AMD wants to compare to the $1k chip, not the more competitive $350 chip.

The Ryzen is a desktop chip, no ecc, half the memory busses, good at cache friendly stuff. No faster than last years CPUs on anything memory intensive.

Of course AMD's going to cherry pick the cache friendly benchmarks to brag about.

Do we know for sure ryzen does not have ecc support?

ECC support is a motherboard feature, not a CPU feature, isn't it?

Actually it's depend on both motherboard and CPU.

It requires that the memory controller support ECC and that there are extra traces from the memory controller to the RAM.

This used to mean it was solely a motherboard feature, but starting about a decade ago, the memory controller was moved onto the CPU, so now it requires both CPU and motherboard support.

It does. Asrock support claims their AM4 motherboards support it.

We do not yet know. Gigabyte specifically says ECC memory is compatible, but runs without ECC on their boards. Asrock only says that ECC ram is compatible.

I asked Asrock support earlier this week:

  MSI and Gigabyte explicitly mention "(operate in non-ECC mode)". 
  Is that also true for Asrock AM4 motherboards? Or do they fully support ECC?

Reply:

  From: ASRock Support <snip>
  Date: Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 10:17 AM
  Hello,
  ASRock AM4 motherboards fully support ECC function.

Still, someone will have to test to be sure.

Ryzen CPUs support ECC

Are there any Ryzen boards that will accept ECC RAM?

Sure, the one from MSI does. I think it was called tomohawk b350 and cost around 120 euros.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Taichi/#Specification

Got a source for that? I haven't seen anything that says they do.

The most recent AAA titles often favour more cores, as also the consoles are 8C nowadays [1] And in case you do more than gaming, i'd always take the 8C/16T over a 4C/8T for the same amount of money, even if it's 10-15% slower in single threaded workloads.

Of course AMD compares to the competing 8/16 chip, because for enthusiasts its just a much better deal. There are a lot of enthusiast gamers that do streaming or video editing for example.

Mainstream is probably better of with waiting for the 4C/8T Ryzen models and pairing that with a RX 480 or mid range Vega.

[1] https://www.computerbase.de/2017-02/cpu-skalierung-kerne-spi...

> The most recent AAA titles often favour more cores, as also the consoles are 8C nowadays [1] And in case you do more than gaming, i'd always take the 8C/16T over a 4C/8T for the same amount of money, even if it's 10-15% slower in single threaded workloads.

Really ? That contradicts everything I've ever heard and experienced myself.

At least until really recently, games where still massively dependent on the single threaded speed since all the graphic stuff was single threaded (because of DX<12 or OpenGL). Did this already change thanks to the newest graphic API (DX12 / Vulkan) ? Last time I checked, the adoption was still pretty low, it's really good news if the landscape is changing quickly. Or is it something else ?

see the article i linked to, there is a good number of new games where the 6900K is faster than the 7700k or at least on the same level.

I'd wait for AMD's Vega. They are rumored to exceed ~1080's performance at a lower price. They'd also work better in conjunction with Ryzen boards.

With widespread FreeSync availability (and better monitors), buying a Nvidia card is almost shooting oneself on their foot.

You might get HBM with the Vega card too. The 1080Ti is GDDR5X.

A 1080Ti with 352 pins at 11Gbps has almost the same BW (484GBps) than a Vega with 2048 pins running at 2Gbps (512GBps).

buying a Nvidia card is almost shooting oneself on their foot.

If all you want it for is gaming. If you also want to play around with machine learning or other GPGPU applications, then getting anything other than Nvidia is a bad idea, since that is what everyone uses and supports at the moment.

So like .01% of users.

Of all users, perhaps. For the users whom are likely to read these comments, I imagine that percentage to be quite a bit higher.

It's not just machine learning, 3D rendering is moving over to GPU as well and there is next to no support for anything other than CUDA in that space today.

Not everything starts and ends with gaming in the high end computer space.

Octane is the only real example of this I can think of. Nearly every other tool I use is openCL.

and for the gpgpu crowd it'll likely have non gimped fp32 and fp16

I don't trust AMD cards with linux or qemu/kvm passthrough, though. They have a history of poor attendance, let's just say that.

Yeah, competition is nice. We can now choose to buy a 8 core Intel 6900K without a GPU, or buy a 8 core Ryzen R7 1700X together with a Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti for the same price.

Few games are truly multi-threaded, so for gaming it's better to have a faster processor even if it's less cores.

This is currently true, but I think this will change over time for two reasons:

1) Games are becoming less CPU-bound and are putting more work on the GPU, so the CPU matters less for gaming today than it used to.*

2) Vulkan and DirectX 12 make multi-threading easier and more efficient, so there is more incentive to adopt a parallel architecture with those APIs.

* Of course, I'm generalizing. Strategy games, for instance, are still very CPU-heavy and likely always will be.

Still, there's diminishing returns on more cores for such uses. You can use 2 cores, might use 4 cores, having 6-8 cores is probably just cause excess heat that could be instead spent to run 4 cores at higher frequency.

Strategy games can also be GPU intensive if they implement neural nets instead of heuristical models

they would be both cpu and gpu bound at that point :)

While this used to be true (and mostly still is), the tide is shifting on this point. Games are using more and more cores. Overwatch, for example, uses 6. I believe DirectX 12 makes it easy/reasonable to use 4 cores, with some benefit to be gained with up to 6.

Not that it really helps with some games. Dota 2 is CPU bound for the moment, so if you play that a lot then maximizing single-threaded performance is probably the way to go.

Still, if I was buying a CPU today, I'd be cautious about going for less than quad core if I was interested in new AAA games.

For sure at least quad core is a must, I just meant having 8 or whatever slower cores instead isn't (yet) better.

times are changing though https://www.computerbase.de/2017-02/cpu-skalierung-kerne-spi... (german, but see charts at the bottom)

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