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Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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