AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
7th) Will all Zen products have all of the instruction sets and platform extensions, or could lower end chips lose features like virtualization?
A7: In the consumer client space we have no plans to turn off virtualization or features.
9th) Does AM4 / consumer ZEN support ECC memory?
A9: ECC is enabled on Ryzen and AM4.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...]
edit: added link
Don't get me wrong, I have a bunch of rack pull servers and they're great for the price but I colo mine for less/server than the power bill/server would be at home and have them ona faster connection. I stick with low power options for light in-home usage
Modern processors do some clever tricks to minimize using power if it is not needed, and have gotten progressively better at it. For home use cases, it's often worthwile to spend more money to get newer or otherwise more efficient PC components. This is especially true in areas where electricity costs are higher (e.g. average price per KWh can be almost twice as high in the Benelux when compared to the US).
One thing to get an indication about how good a CPU/chipset is is idle power usage of a system. It seems Ryzen is even better at this than Intel's already excellent Sky/Kaby Lake architectures [1], possibly because of the fact that Ryzen motherboards contain fewer components. On the contrary, the Ivy Bridge architecture of the chip mentioned by the parent cannot be considered competitive from a power consumption perspective, despite still being a great performer.
[1]: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
Ultimately the memory clock speed doesn't affect performance very much, so I'm not sure it matters.
From what I've been reading about the upcoming Ryzen, no motherboard so far claims to support ECC.
However, I expect that there will eventually be some workstation grade motherboards from vendors like Supermicro which will be more direct about guaranteeing ECC support. This will be especially true if AMD decides to release some “official” small server grade CPUs on the AM4 socket (kind of like Intel’s Xeon E3 which uses the regular consumer socket, but requires a different chipset). I don’t know if there are any plans for such a CPU from AMD, but it wouldn’t surprise me considering there’s probably some real demand for something a little less expensive and powerful than the 32C/64T Naples server CPU. Rebranding a consumer 8C/16T Ryzen seems like a logical step, with the only cost being validation.
The thing to remember is that supporting ECC on an AM4 motherboard basically amounts to running a few extra traces between the CPU and DRAM slots, and adding support in the BIOS to initialize the memory controller properly. My experiencing in implementing boot code to initialize memory controllers leads me to believe that it’s probably one or two days worth of work to actually get it working (once everything else is done).
The real cost comes from testing and validation, which is why some manufacturers are so hesitant to give a straight answer regarding ECC support on consumer platforms. There is no point in spending the money to validate a feature that the majority of their customers think is a complete waste.
By offering “working but not validated” ECC support, they’re able to satisfy the demand of those who want to use these chips for small non critical servers without undercutting their higher margin server grade components.
Link on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
While there is reason to think soft errors are much less common than often claimed and therefore ECC memory has been much less necessary than people think (at least within the atmosphere), there's now a pretty good reason to prefer ECC memory because of rowhammer.
PS: Radiation also makes a huge difference.
Anyway as a former memory subsystem designer and a former employee of a memory chip maker, I like ECC. It provides some protection against bus noise errors even if you have full confidence in the memory chips themselves.
Personal anecdote: Upgraded RAM in my PC, ran memtest, everything fine. A year later, I need to move and so I consolidate all my data on a big hard disk. As the disk is new, I run some verification and notice some non-matching checksums. Long story short, the new RAM had become defective, and a new memtest showed a handful of errors after a few hours. Had I had ECC on that machine, I probably would have seen notifications about memory errors even before that day (plus the errors would likely have been corrected).
If Ryzen allows us to build a powerful PC with ECC for little more money than a non-ECC one, I'll happily pay for this "feel good feature". The current ECC-capable alternative from the Intel universe (Xeon CPU & motherboard) is simply too expensive for most people.
Definitely this. The extra safety of mind offered by ECC RAM is totally worth the tiny price difference for me. The only thing that stopped me from actually using it was the lack of (affordable) CPU support. Ryzen changes that.
On that note, I hope it's not long until we can easily buy ultraportable laptops with ECC RAM without paying through the nose for Intel's ridiculous prices for their mobile Xeon CPUs.
It's not a silver bullet if the user is just paranoid about data integrity (nothing beats end-to-end integrity checks built into your system, while ECC only addresses one step in the process).
In any case I LOVE ECC. Sure random radiation caused bit flips are relatively rare. But it's REALLY nice to see high levels of ECC errors when something died and not have to wonder if it's the flash drive, power supply, graphics card etc. Sure sometimes its the dimm, sometimes it's the motherboard, sometimes it's the CPU. But with ECC errors you can much more quickly/easily tell if it changes when you swap things around.
EDIT, in response to the other edit: sorry about that, I wasn't sure which comparison you were making. Still, the difference is slim enough that if I were in the market, I'd go with this one just to put the heat on Intel.
[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny (apologies for the TVTropes link at night!)
http://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-two-horses-pulling-tog...
I'm about to buy a beefy machine for FPGA development, I'm definitely considering AMD. Seems like I'd get better performance for a much lower price. I'm still waiting for more in-depth reviews though.
[1] http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2017/03/ryzen_ci...
Web and office? Single-threaded?
Why are these benchmarks, specially in 2018?
I do understand where you're coming from, but real-world performance is important, especially when that world is imperfect.
That's a load of bullshit. No one ever complained that the web is unbrowsable or an excel spreadsheet is unworkable without a high-end boutique processor. Those benchmarks are simply a load of bullshit that evaluate something that is utterly irrelevant.
With AMD's previous offerings, they benched well but ran like crap because so many applications are single-threaded. These single thread tests are important to know how these chips will work in real world scenarios.
This is the data enterprise buyers want to hear. If AMD can match Intel at a much lower cost, expect enterprise buyers to switch.
That said, those numbers aren't particularly bad for a new CPU running un-optimized software. All the important software will be updated soon enough once the compilers are in order.
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
Perhaps you'd like to restrict yourself to 32 bit software just to be standards conformant?
If you do more than games, the Ryzen seems like a a good choice. It has serious power in applications, and is still fast in Games - which is a big step up compared to the FX. But no, it is not the goto choice for a gaming PC.
I'd take Intel CPU that runs 120 FPS average over AMD that runs 130 FPS average, when lowest FPS for Intel drops to 100 FPS and for AMD it drops to 80 FPS...
The Ryzen quads will come. I'm not at all sure what your point is here.
By ~15% compared to >160% for Bulldozer.
And this is day zero before any applications have been optimized for the new microarchitecture, compared with Core which everything has been targeting for more than a decade.
They did good.
Would you do it if you had the choice between that or adding new money making features/fixing bugs?
Of course I would, because people are going to benchmark my software against my competitor's software and choose the one that runs faster on their hardware.
Especially if my software is a compiler and people are benchmarking the programs it produces against other compilers, which is where most of the optimizing actually happens these days.
As for the priorities of the compiler devs, I think it will get some love.
Besides, if your application is one where performance is a serious issue, then you are going to spend some time optimizing rather than adding features. For some applications, performance is a feature.
Do you really care if your webpage renders for half a second longer?
If I was after encoding performance, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen. If I was after rendering performance, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen. Throw an mid-range nVidia on there for OpenCL, and the only CPU that makes sense for that price range is the 7700K.
If you're after pure performance, then you simply go with the best for your use case, whether it is Ryzen or not.
If you're on a tight budget, however, things get interesting.
hence, "things get interesting"
I expect if AMD went back through again, they could improve them even more.
(In the handbrake case, most likely it's half-speed AVX2 that is hurting them)
But why? http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-...
The benchmarks show Ryzen being the obvious choice other than cinebench single threaded.
Only if you are using a shitty software renderer or are completely stupid would you do rendering on the CPU.
The Ryzen performs nicely on the encoding tests, though that will be performed by the GPU soon. It already can be (NVENC and AMD VCE), but the quality isn't quite as good as everyone's favorite h.264 encoder, x264.
You're also missing that even on chrome the js and layout engines run different threads. Same with audio and video rendering. Same with downloads. The average page is probably running things on 10-20 random threads. And the average user has multiple tabs open.
Multicore CPU is so common these days that any performance critical code that can be parallelized, is. This includes GZIP and HTTP which are used heavily by web browsers. The network stacks underneath those in the OS are also multi core capable.
Single thread performance is not all that important anymore. It's better to have 2x the number of fast cores than half the number of slightly faster cores in almost every situation these days.
Not even. Video acceleration, browser acceleration, flash acceleration, and much more, are becoming increasingly GPU-oriented.
For the first time in a decade, AMD are seriously competing at the high end. That's great news for everyone except Intel.
Technically this is true, but unlike the desktop market where you can buy stuff in pieces, it really depends on how the laptop manufacturers adopt them. As in how fast they show up in product lines, and in which laptop segments they show up in.
If, for example, Intel gives laptop manufacturers pricing incentives (legally or not) to stick with their chips, it may not cause any problems at all with respect to actual customer purchases.
Cheap, power efficient, eight cores. It may not win everything, but it works for me.
It also has 1/2 cores, which doesn't show up on the single threaded benchmarks but explains the price and TDP differences.
The 7700k is losing in all aspects below w.r.t. the Ryzen 7 1800X, except absolute single-threaded perf. Intel is losing in:
- absolute multi-threaded performance
- relative multi-threaded performance per $
- memory bandwidth
- L3-cache bound workloads (AMD has twice more L3)
- price of motherboards
> - relative multi-threaded performance per $
Highly depends on the particular workload. Given the few benchmarks we have right now, it seems to go 50-50 once you factor in the lower price of the 7700k. At the very least, this one is close.
> - memory bandwidth
Seems about equal from the measurements I've seen (the theoretical numbers are irrelevant).
> - L3-cache bound workloads (AMD has twice more L3)
Cache-size bound workloads to be precise. Cache latency still seems higher, even on L3.
Overall, the 1800X seems to make the entire Broadwell-E series redundant on price/performance (at least at current price), no argument there. Against the 7700k, however, it's a very interesting decision, entirely based on the distribution of your workloads. And if Intel drops the prices on Kaby Lake, the value equation can change very quickly indeed.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_proce...
[1] https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
What's happening here is that AMD has priced Ryzen so inexpensively that it actually broke the usual market segmentation by driving high-thread-count workstation CPUs (usually $1k+) into the same price range as high-end gaming CPUs (~$300-400). Think of it as being able to buy an industrial dump truck for the same price as a pickup truck. The dump truck is clearly a better value in terms of hauling capacity, but most people would be far better off with a pickup truck for their daily traveling.
AMD's pickup truck (the 1400X) doesn't launch until later this year. The 7700K will probably still beat it on single-threaded workloads due to the difference in clock speed, but it should get you most of the way there for substantially less money, around $200 if the leaks are accurate.
Indeed. Single threaded performance, however, seems bad. Virtual cores most likely share less of the actual core than on Intel parts, allowing one to compete less with the other and get more done. On my i7 laptop, on anything more demanding, I see half the "cores" idling, probably because one is using the actual underlying core while the other is waiting.
Still, while AMD obviously did a good job, it will not make the Intel guys lose any sleep for now.
The server parts are another story. If they manage to reliably outperform Xeons (even if it's only on a per watt basis), it'll be fun to watch.
Right, thats exactly what happens with Hyper-Threading. If you can fully utilize the physical core, Hyper-Threading can't do much.
From the benchmarks, it seems a single thread can fully utilize all resources from an Intel processor while it can't on the new AMD ones and that's why their single-thread performance is lower and their multi-thread performance is higher.
We should keep in mind the benchmarks know nothing about the new AMD parts and how to keep all parts of the processor busy.
Yeah, as would be expected from most people on this site. Sad thing is, there's a bunch of pissed-off gamers right now who were on the hype train expecting Ryzen to be the next big thing in gaming, but it's far from it. Ryzen is great, just not amazing for gaming.
ECC should be a standard feature. If you don't want it you don't have to use it but to disable simply for market segmentation is lame.
Has Asrock explicitly stated that it works with all CPUs, or just that all their boards can do it (IF the CPU also supports it)?
> AMD Ryzen series CPUs support DDR4 2667/2400/2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory
So the board seems to accept ECC memory, hopefully that means the memory controller actually performs ECC? I found a reddit comment claiming that the boards accept ECC memory but don't perform error correction[1]. Not a great source but seemingly possible.
Do you have any more sources suggesting that ECC is actually being implemented?
For example, BIOSs often have ECC settings, if we had some screenshots of an AM4 board bios showing ECC setting that would be strong evidence.
[0] http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLIac/index.asp...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5v0cqo/ryzen_supports_...
In that case anandtech saying "We know that it is disabled for the consumer parts" and ASRock saying "ASRock AM4 motherboards fully support ECC function" can both be true.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
This is set up by the firmware (BIOS). Since we all already know that quite some of these still have issues (unsurprisingly, it's a new platform), it isn't far-fetched at all that current firmware doesn't quite do the right thing with certain memory sticks.
Note that this is unbuffered, unregistered ECC memory, which is usually more expensive and less available than the standard server memory (DDR3R / DDR4R), which is NOT compatible with any consumer CPUs.
Right now the #3 system in the world is a Cray system using Opterons.
Edit: If no motherboard supports its, in Linux one can use ecc_enable_override (similar thing might be available in Windows). That is if the CPU support it. It can USE ECC memory, but we don't know if it can use the ECC checksums, most motherboards have a NO here.
Might as well ask her about the possibility of coreboot if we are at it.
Edit: Account made, instructions received. If all goes well I should be asking later today.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
btw: someone asked about coreboot: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wO1MKok...
I agree ECC should be a standard feature, but it follows the same marketing patterns (in that industry) as disabling multi-processor support or artificially limiting clock speeds.
Without ECC you may get a completely wrong answer when the increasingly small, vulnerable, and numerous dram cell is flipped.
I don't like this situation, but I certainly understand it. AMD needs the server market to raise revenues. This means its server offerings, from soup to nuts, need to be rock solid. Letting whitebox resellers junk up their reputation is not within their interests.
Not to mention, enterprise sales often subsidize consumer sales. Those big enterprise markups go into the same pot of money that allows AMD to sell consumer chips at lower prices. Anything that threatens enterprise sales could affect the consumer space. AMD needs to be very careful here as, compared to intel, it needs to prove the value of its brand every chip generation. They also need to overcome a lot of bad mojo they've developed from questionable benchmarking and marketing of its previous two, or more, generations of chips. Bulldozer, I believe, had half the single core performance compared to the intel equivalant at the time, yet it benchmarked well due to its extra cores. The market doesn't forget shenanigans like these.
That said, the market allows 'workstation' level cpus and motherboards that support ECC. A little legwork can find you decent deals, but no, they're not going to be $59 NewEgg specials and you won't be able to use the consumer Ryzen on it. Consumer CPUs are almost always gimped anyway - smaller caches, disabled features, slower clocks, etc. The ECC limitation isn't too different from this, but it is annoying.
Very interesting times in Silicon.
Something like that could be a monster for HPC & ML type tasks. Provided AMD gets their software and tooling up to par; Nvidia doesn't rule HPC/ML because their GPU's are leaps and bounds ahead of AMD, but because CUDA is..
If so, might explain why they went with a (relatively) gimped vector FPU for Zen compared to Intel offerings (particularly the soon arriving Skylake Xeons with 512-bit wide SIMD).
It seems that in common use (web browsing, office, gaming), fewer but stronger cores still shine and even the fastest Ryzen is slower and more expensive than Intel's offering.
So it really depends. A lot.
Hopefully more software starts to make use of multiple cores more effectively. It's not like it's a new feature of chips any more.
R7 1700 i7 7700K
Cinebench 120 W 112 W
Prime 95 128 W 145 Whttp://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...
Also, another AMD employee chimed in:
"But what's also clear is that there's a distribution of games that run well, and a distribution of games that run poorly. Call it a "bell curve" if you will. It's unfortunate that the outliers are some notable titles, but many of these game devs (e.g. Oxide, Sega, Bethesda) have already said there's significant improvement that can be gleaned. We have proven the Zen performance and IPC. Many reviewers today proved that, at 1080p in games. There is no architectural reason why the remaining titles should be performing as they are." Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
Unfortunately you can bet Intel is going to put all the spin they can into "AMD underperforms for gaming", while the software game developers are going to slowly optimize for Zen, up to the point where this perf discrepancy will be fully fixed but people will still have the mindset that "AMD unperforms for gaming"... sigh
https://software.intel.com/en-us/gamedev/
But also things like physics engines (eg. Havok, which was acquired by Intel and heavily optimized for Intel processors), etc.
And of course Intel's C Compiler is known to cripple AMD: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 And some/many games are compiled with ICC...
Honestly I'm not very optimistic about that happening. Maybe some will. But the mentality these days seems to be that there's one winner and fuck all the rest -- we're busy and we don't have time to optimize for losers. Like with web developers seeming to almost exclusively work with Chrome except where they're told to support IE (or Safari?). Firefox just isn't popular.
Still, there's a chance the multi-core revolution will eventually happen. Vulkan could help us get there, although weren't DX12 was supposed to provide similar improvements in multi-threaded access to the GPU?
The fix is to have a driver to help Windows treat a CCX almost as if it was its own socket. See https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/official-amd-ryzen-benc...
In theory a workaround would also be to disable cores 4-7 (and keep 0-3) in the BIOS. Sadly no Ryzen reviewers tried it...
The 1800X does seem like a killer value for the money for us C++ people :)
You can get Radeon R7 250 under $50, which absolutely destroys i7-6700k's integrated HD530.
(Technically HDMI 1.4 also supports 4K but only at 24hz, which is fine for TVs but a miserable experience on a PC desktop)
Hence my question about having GPU integrated to the motherboard like older boards had it.
If neither monitor has HDMI 2.0 then an RX470 would be required to get dual DisplayPort outputs.
I say "odd" because, apart from basic daily tasks and occasional gaming, my workload mostly consists of scientific computing. Ryzen's performance on AVX2 is precisely as bad as I expected from the architecture (effectively, a 50% penalty) and given the thermal constraints on 6900k's, a lightly overclocked 7700k (usually easy to get to 4.8-5 Ghz after delidding) seems to deliver by far the best price/performance ratio even on multithreaded workloads as long as vectorization is a significant component of the workload. Not to mention the added benefit of delivering the undisputed best single threaded performance money can buy. Ryzen also seems to have issues with memory bandwidth that may or may not be solved by future microcode or MB firmware upgrades, and very limited overclocking headroom.
It's still nice to see AMD bring competition back to the CPU marketplace, and I'm looking forward to their server CPUs in Q2. I'd also love to be proven wrong on anything I said above and reconsider my build options, so please point out any oversights on my part.
It's true that I'm in a very niche spot in that most of my workloads are vectorization-heavy, but I don't think it's quite as niche as people think. If you look at the benchmarks, quite a few workloads (check out x265 performance on ffmpeg, or audio encoding, or compression...) are sufficiently vectorized for the 7700k to be more cost efficient than the 1800X. Realizing that does feel a bit sad, though, I agree.
For pure gaming, I'd still get the fastest Kaby Lake i5 and be done with it. It doesn't matter what happens with DX12, etc., games are still going to be GPU bound for the foreseeable future and the cheap i5 won't significantly bottleneck you for many years to come.
The aggregate performance of an 8C/16T machine from any vendor is astonishing, of course.
If we assume a similar AVX IPC (and Ryzen 1/2 with AVX2), you'll double your cores with Ryzen, so the AVX2 throughput per clock would be about the same. 7700 clocks higher, but then downclocks again when AVX are encountered. It seems like in practice, they are about the same for performance with AVX, but Ryzen is ahead in every other multi-threaded bench.
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...
But that's only half the story. The thing is, a decent 7700k (after fixing the thermal interface via delidding and using high end air or low to mid end water cooling) is actually capable of running at 4.8-5 Ghz without downclocking for AVX. You might get an unlucky sample and only do 4.6 Ghz, but it's still cost effective. A 6900k, on the other hand, doesn't have the thermal headroom to go much past its stock frequencies on AVX-heavy workloads, unless you go full crazy with sub-ambient cooling.
So, in the end, it looks like the 7700k has at least double the price/performance ratio of a 1800X in AVX-heavy workloads along with vastly superior single thread performance. It looks to me like Ryzen is a great leap in price/performance only insofar as your workloads are highly multithreaded, yet don't make much use of vectorization at all.
[1] http://media.bestofmicro.com/ext/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1...
[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,49...
It's a pity that they did not include at least 32 lanes on-chip to allow two full x16 GPUs at least on the 1800X, but I hope there is a 1900X in the pipeline with more lanes.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-...
3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) over 16 threads
15,812 Passmark for ~$500
-----
Intel i7-7700K (Kaby Lake):
4.2 GHz (4.5 GHz Turbo) over 8 threads
12,321 Passmark for ~$350
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Intel Core i7-6850K (Broadwell E):
3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) over 12 threads
14,500 Passmark for ~$575
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Competition is back. Ya!
I imagine if such a design existed, it would disincentivize proper multi-core utilization in software to some degree. It would likely further complicate parallel programming as well.
At the same time, multi-core computing has been a thing for well over a decade now, and the reality is that a CPU's single-core performance still matters.
Are the efficiency advantages inherent in symmetrical core designs simply too great? Would asymmetrical designs not be suited for use with existing OS schedulers? Is operating a chip at multiple frequencies simultaneously somehow insane from a design perspective?
The major difference is that the PPE and SPE's have the same clock speed, but it is definitely a heterogenous architecture.
AMD is trying to change that. Of course 16t games won't be available from day one of Ryzen launch.
Ryzen is much better positioned anyway because it has almost comparable IPC (Broadwell levels), that means even when you get a dual core/single core optimised game you'll get good performance rather than the horrible situation with older AMD CPUs.
What some people here are anticipating is the situation where games really do scale well to 8 cores, at which point we'd likely see the Ryzen compete against Intel's stupidly expensive 8-core parts and roughly match them in performance while solidly beating them in price/performance ratio. Just like in the encoding benchmarks that actually do run well with multiple cores. These games aren't here now. We aren't there now. But it might be the future.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,49...
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...
Compiler tests sound more interesting to me, I'm looking forward to those benchmarks.
Boards initialization takes forever
For the last weeks Computerbase had access to different mainboards [...]. They had an extremely long init process in common: even with the latest BIOS it took up to 30s to get to the POST screen. Obviously this needs optimization.
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German:
Die Boards initialisieren ewig
ComputerBase konnte die letzte Woche auf drei verschiedene Mainboards zugreifen, neben den X370-Varianten von Asus und MSI auch auf das Gigabyte GA-AB350-Gaming 3 mit Chipsatz B350. Allen gemein war auch mit dem letzten BIOS der extrem langwierige Initialisierungsprozess: Bis der Post-Screen erscheint, vergeht über eine halbe Minute. Auch hier gibt es offensichtlich noch deutlichen Optimierungsbedarf.
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https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800x-1700x-17...
But the actual compilers people use (IE not that version of GCC) are rarely well-optimized for CPU. In fact, most compiler profiles are not flat yet, and where your compilation takes a long time, it's because some optimization or algorithm has gone nuts and needs to be fixed.
Until that kind of state of the world changes, measuring compile time is IMHO, a bit pointless, because they are only artificially CPU bound, and not in a way that is useful to benchmark (IE while i understand that people use these compilers every day, and care about performance, i'm just saying that, given a compiler benchmark, i could still probably make it take zero time with limited amounts of work)
Sure, in that sense, but you also don't want benchmarks that are trivial to game by performing optimizations to them. :)
If someone managed to make an optimization that could suddenly make GCC 2x faster without humans editing GCC's source, that would be a major CS breakthrough :)
However,
"If someone managed to make an optimization that could suddenly make GCC 2x faster without humans editing GCC's source, that would be a major CS breakthrough :) "
No, it really wouldn't. For example, if you optimize the line-ending and tokenization finding in GCC's parser to use SIMD, you would become significantly faster. Not 2x, but significantly. These are entirely doable by compilers. " But you don't ever get to re-write the benchmark itself, you can't replace a 2^N path with an N^3 path or anything like that."
Except, you can, by hoisting calls out of loops, etc. There are also dynamic memoization optimziations that can be applied, etc.
"If someone managed to make an optimization " This is a common fallacy that it's ever really one optimization. It's usually combinations of optimizations, each buying you N%.
I will state outright, having worked on pretty much all of the slow parts of gcc (according to spec profiles), and having a team of 80+ people working on compilers, 2x on gcc through compiler optimization is more than within the realm of possibility.
For some reason one of my sideprojects needs more than two minutes to link but the task manager tells me it's neither CPU nor RAM nor disk bound. I haven't found the cause yet.
It looks like Intel's retail channel partners have a lot of inventory still in the pipeline. Prices are still within the bounds of the second half 2016. My best guess is the retail channel partners will be the most hurt by any slowdown of Intel CPU sales.
[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-cpu-prices-drop...
Interesting would be 4C/8T parts - if they can run them cool (given 8C/16T 1700 uses 65W I think it's not unreasonable), they probably can clock them to get to 7700k parity at 95W.
http://techreport.com/review/31366/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-ryzen-7...
- If you're buying a desktop quadcore processor in 2017, you're doing it wrong. May as well buy a laptop.
- Kabylake sucks as a workstation chip but is ok for gaming if your PC is solely a glorified Xbox.
- Vast majority (90%+) of gaming rigs are GPU-bound. Think very carefully before giving up 8 cores and 16 threads at the same price.
- Intel's margins and lineup are utterly destroyed especially once you consider how expensive Intel HEDT boards are on top of it all.
- AMD made CPUs Great Again. Bravo AMD!
Not true, IDEs, web browsers, office tools need single core performance and not 4+ cores. A laptop is more expensive, will make more noise when loaded, is harder to upgrade, is less customizable, has less ports, is more expensive to expand (ThunderBolt devices are not cheap at all). What are you talking about?
>> Intel's margins and lineup are utterly destroyed especially once you consider how expensive Intel HEDT boards are on top of it all.
There are few people who build workstations for themselves(even among software developers). HP and Dell haven't announced any Ryzen systems as far as I'm aware. Right now AMD's new chip will have minimal impact on Intel profits. Only if AMD can remain competitive on stability, performance and price for a few years will Intel start loosing major chunks of income and market share.
>> Kabylake sucks as a workstation chip but is ok for gaming if your PC is solely a glorified Xbox.
PCs are universal machines, you can play games AND do work on the the SAME PC ;-)
>> Vast majority (90%+) of gaming rigs are GPU-bound. Think very carefully before giving up 8 cores and 16 threads at the same price.
GPU-bound does not mean all CPUs produce the same framerates on a given GPU.
I personally do hate Intel and nVidia monopoly and hope AMD can increase their market share, but your points are very weak.
It even has a name '"buy the rumor, sell the news"
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/news-trader.asp
The idea behind this, simply put, is that if you are in a trade for whatever reason with a stock that has a major announcement coming; you are pretty much at the potential peak at announcement time so it is a good time to get out.
https://www.techpowerup.com/226719/amds-zen-to-implement-adv...
It's possible only Naples will support it.
Would be nice to make a simple one-click benchmark: download a VirtualBox VM and click Start — it boots mfsbsd and starts compiling to a RAM disk, measuring the time.
I'm going to build an 1800X-based box in a few weeks (for games; planning to run Steam on a GNU/Linux distro), I'll want to see `make -j16 buildworld` for sure.
SuperMicro has spoiled me.
Nooooooooooooope. Was looking forward to a nice SLI rig but looks like Ryzen just died for my choice on upgrade. Guess I'll stick with the power-hungry beast.
Please try again when you need to juggle 1,000+ video feeds simultaneously and truly understand what REAL power requires.
Allow me to introduce you to Camfrog. Absolutely consumer, boss.
https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_am...
Maybe knowing consumers will probably have more than 2 cores will make games optimise better for parellelism, it's not like the engine programmers _cant_ do it, they do it all the time with GPUs.
When making AI bots it's quite common to have all of the work of processing the AI it's own thread, so each rendered frame will do all calculations for all bots. That in of itself would be cheap, except it has to share it's core with a bunch of other crap.
With 2 cores you can have a main thread for updating the screen and then an "everything else" thread. If you can't be sure people will be playing with >2 cores then you have to keep your budgets down to 2 cores when developing and that's quite limiting.
it's not that it's "hard" to parralellise(?), it's that you run out of resources super quick if you make assumptions about CPU topology.
https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/premiera_i_test_procesora_am...
A Broadwell with 3300 Mhz (3700 Mhz boost) beats a Kaby Lake (Skylake...) with 4200 Mhz (4500 Mhz boost)? Can the Broadwell use the 128MB EDRRAM from the iGPU as a L4 cache if the iGPU is not used? Would that actually make such a difference?
That's exactly what it does, and it gives you a "free"* ~20% increase in memory operations performance (which tends to be a ~20% increase in general performance).
* not actually free because you paid for those 128MB EDRRAM...
But from a consumer point of view, it increases performance (either for graphics or for the whole system if I have a discrete GPU), and it can also help with GPU numerical processing, because you get "free" transfers from memory (L4) to graphics memory by flipping a bit (or a few bits) in hardware. Don't know why this wasn't expanded further, appart from the cost of the embedded RAM.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-...