Would love to play with one of these setups..
The hype between here and reddit about i9 is astounding to me. You've been able to get an i7 in a 10 core variant for a year now [2]. Need 6 cores? Take a time machine back to Q3'11 and pick up an i7 3930k [3]. And if you needed twelve cores, you could buy Xeon [4]! Heck, go crazy, get 22 [5]!
The only difference is likely price; hopefully the i9 is cheaper.
Fundamentally, why you should not be excited about these things: They'll use the enthusiast motherboard socket/chipset, not the consumer socket. And they'll have a 140W TDP, whereas Ryzen has 95W max. These two things are what makes Ryzen so amazing. If you ignore these two things, then you might as well by Xeon; Intel has lead in that category for years and continues to.
[1] http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-x-kaby-lake-x-q2-2017-road...
[2] http://ark.intel.com/products/94456/Intel-Core-i7-6950X-Proc...
[3] http://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Intel-Core-i7-3930K-Proc...
[4] http://ark.intel.com/products/91767/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...
[5] http://ark.intel.com/products/93805/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...
https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2017/04/06/amd-ryzen-7-170...
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8072/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu-...
http://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-1700x-1700-...
(bear in mind the 5820K/6800K/6850K are 6C, the 5960X/6900K are 8C, and the 6950X is 10C)
Essentially AMD is rating their TDP under a very light load - like a single thread at full boost clocks. Under an all-core load they are running roughly 30% over TDP. Intel's TDP rating is much more generous - they aren't quite rating at full, nonstop AVX load (eg Prime95) but typical full-load consumption is 15% under their TDPs which leaves some headroom for intermittent AVX usage.
Anecdotal evidence: my 10C20T Haswell-E Xeon pulls ~60% of its rated TDP during a Handbrake x264 encoding run. My 6C12T 5820K Haswell-E gaming chip (overclocked to 4.13 GHz all-core at stock voltages) pulls 75% of its rated TDP during a similar Handbrake x264 run. And supposedly x264 is smart enough to use AVX, so that should be a realistic-but-high figure. My OC'd 5820K pulls 90% of its rated TDP during a Prime95 SmallFFT run.
It's still a huge gain compared to Bulldozer - but not quite as rosy a picture as AMD is trying to paint. They are equal with Haswell-E/Broadwell-E in most respects, not 40% ahead like AMD is rating them.
AMD is playing the same game in the GPU market too. AMD's RX 480/580 are rated for "GPU only" TDP (which they define to exclude memory/etc) but NVIDIA rates the whole card. In practice, AMD is ~30% above their official TDPs while NVIDIA is pretty much spot on.
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Pl...
(RX 580 is rated at 185W TDP, GTX 1060 is rated at 120W TDP)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/
> Indeed, Ryzen's 95W TDP looks impressive compared to the 140W TDP of Intel's 6900K, a similar 8C/16T processor based on the Broadwell-E architecture. But in practice, Ryzen pulls just as much wattage from the wall as the 6900K, in some cases slightly more. Considering just how power-hungry Bulldozer was, that remains a significant achievement, even if it means that overclocking headroom isn't as high as some might have hoped.
False-ish
Single socket server boards are on par with home motherboards. They only become expensive when you start wanting 2+ NIC's and A LOT of sockets. But then yes your feature thing is mostly true.
> and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines.
False-ish
Intel's server socket (for non E7's) is 2011v3 which is also their enthusiast socket. I dropped a XEON E5v4 2030 into a 2011v3 ""ethusiast board"" and it worked without a problem.
Sure my enthusiast board doesn't support ECC RAM, and I can't over clock a XEON. But a 2011v3 board in and of itself is only ~50-60 more then an EXTREME low end <$100 stock standard home user motherboard.
You get what you pay for if you want a dirt cheap board to drop a server class CPU into you can find it.
And you can find motherboards in pretty much any price range except the barest of dirt cheap. There are motherboards like the GA-X99-SLI that regularly hit $125 or lower. Cheapest thing on Newegg right now is a $150 Asrock board that supports ECC.
The only price range that you "can't get" for X99 is the under-$100 price range, i.e. the super-shitty low-end chipsets. And you actually can get it if you are willing to take an open-box item. I paid $60 after tax for my last X99 board.
Also realize that most of the people who are bitching up a storm about X99's $150 motherboards likely turned around and paid $250 for an X370 board when Ryzen launched. I mean, you gotta get one of the nice ones with the external clockgen so you can get your $300 Samsung B-die memory kit to run stable, right? (but that's totally different! /s)
You want ECC you have to get Xeons.
You want OC you have to get regular mainstream K chips or enthusiast -E chips without ECC support.
I think the last chipset which let you OC Xeons and still use ECC was X58 on 1366 socket.
Disclaimer: I am not counting tiny BCLK OC available on Xeons.
Tangent: a lot of people wonder who would pay $1700 for a 6950X. The answer I always give is "people want to do intensive work and gaming on the same system". Otherwise the 4/6C chips are better choices for the money.
The great weakness of that system is - as you note - the lack of ECC.
I strongly, strongly recommend building two different systems for this situation. Depending on your needs it can almost be more economical to do it this way. i3s (and now Pentiums) support ECC and make good ZFS servers. The 4C Xeons aren't too bad either. You can also do some cheap E5 Xeon builds using engineering samples. Many-core Xeons are more than sufficient for the kind of stuff you need ECC for, even at relatively low clock rates. A 10C at 2.4 GHz is roughly comparable to 6C at 4.13 GHz (I use mine in Handbrake). And uses 2/3 of the power to boot.
And then you can focus on gaming performance in your gaming system. Like 3x as much for a given level of performance.
It's a lot like laptops. You're going to spend a lot more if you insist on only owning one system that can do everything.
The segmentation here does suck, I would rather see it supported even on consumer hardware, but practically speaking I don't think Intel is going to change this any time soon. Even if AMD does.
(and note: unless the manufacturer is willing to stand behind ECC, Ryzens's "unofficial" ECC support holds about as much weight as using Intel's engineering samples)
ECC is to guarantee system stability. Solving rare event that become regular once you have hundreds of boxes running.
OC INCREASES system instability. You put more power into a chip, increasing the probability of incorrect or malformed answers.
Now both these scenarios are rare, especially for single box home enthusiasts. Generally if you have a stable OC you won't hit garbled instruction results. Likewise you may almost never have an error that ECC would present.
---
Having OC and ECC basically says, "I want to solve one extremely rare error while opening myself up to another!" This is an idiotically unsound decision.
Having ECC memory in an OC setup will increase its stability further - and there are perfectly valid reasons for overclocking, for example if you want more computing power than even a 22-core Xeon does not provide.
You're also not guaranteed perfect operation inside the CPU without an overclock, so if it's idiotic to combine OC and ECC, it's idiotic to use ECC at all.
X79, X99, both are related to equivalent server chipsets in C602 and C612 respectively. Yes boards are more expensive but the HEDT platform has all the features you'd expect of a consumer/enthusiast board. also the high end i7s are all met with equivalent non overclockable Xeon E5-1* processors
https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/05/intels-new-scalable-xeon...
It's looking like with Moore's Law dying, Intel has just given up, and is instead trying to "innovate" with how to trick its customers to pay more for the same or weaker stuff.
It is the first desktop CPU to bring AVX512. If the code is designed for it, that by itself doubles the perf compared to AVX2 CPUs.
I look forward to porting my algorithms to 16 wide SIMD.
AVX512 was already planned for Cannonlake.
This is also likely unrelated to AMD, with Coffee Lake coming which brings 6-core/6-thread and 6-core/12-thread CPUs to the mainstream (150-300$) Intel likely wants a new tier to relay performance segmentation when even a core i5 will come with 6 cores from Q3 2017 onwards.
Intel is playing catchup.
I know it hurts but AMD needs to have ship an almost unreasonable number of units for several consecutive to be considered mainstream. If Ryzen will be anything like the Athlon 64, AMD would fail to capitalize on it and just be behind Intel when it comes to iterations.
AMD's great revolution was getting the TDP on that core count below 100W, and getting them onto a consumer chipset/socket instead of the enthusiast/server platform. That's it.
We keep saying they forced some revolution in price/performance that Intel has had to respond to. Its 80% hype, 20% truth. Intel was complacent on the desktop, yes. But Ryzen's perf gains over Skylake aren't significantly more than Intel's tick/tock perf gains they push each year; the main difference is that Ryzen focused on the enthusiast, which is something Intel had de-prioritized.
[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-Core-i7-5820K-Proc...
They are even priced essentially the same as the 4C8T i7s.
I basically had Ryzen performance at Ryzen prices a year ago when I built my 5820K system. Motherboard, processor, and 32 GB of DDR4-3000 CAS15 cost me $600 all together. I hit 4.13 GHz all-core on stock voltage and still run well under the rated TDP.
Ryzen was an incremental improvement at best. 8 core Ryzen is slightly faster (being that it has 33% more cores) but I'm still winning vs the 6-cores.
The real change Intel needs to make is dropping the cost of the 8-core and higher chips, because they're just past any reasonable budget.
You're right on all counts. Ryzen was vastly overhyped. Its highly likely Cannonlake and KabyLake-X will destroy it when they are released in a couple months.
The world needed Ryzen to push Intel to lower prices on their high end chips. But, like most of the times when AMD "pushes ahead", Intel will beat them within a year, and hold that position for another 4 years. And then the cycle repeats.
I don't know how much longer AMD can keep this up. It seems like they're being propped up by their dominance in console tech.
Intel is still sitting on a ~10% lead in per-core performance in real-world applications, and Broadwell-E is handicapped in a number of ways. Skylake-X is going to be a huge step forward. I think the 6C Skylake-X chips are going to come real close to the 8C Ryzen 7s (let's call it within 5-10%). And that leaves the 8C Intel chips with a pretty solid lead.
(Synthetics like Cinebench are definitely tilting AMD - but I don't see a corresponding lead in real-world applications, on a core-for-core basis)
If Intel can maintain premium performance, they can also maintain premium pricing.
No question the race is on, though. Next year is gonna be interesting, when both companies have sized up the other and fully prepared their responses. There's some obvious fixes for AMD (like the interconnect, or just getting memory stability fixed), and Intel could do something like put the L4 eDRAM back on their dies to get minimum framerates up[0].
[0] http://techreport.com/review/28751/intel-core-i7-6700k-skyla...
Either way, I'm happily using a newly built R7-1700 in a Node 202 mini-ITX case with a Geforce 1060 Founders Edition. It's very quiet and having 8 cores and 16 threads is far more useful than I assumed it would be. It's one of those things that you didn't know you needed until you have it. I use it for so much stuff, and it handles it all with ease.
If nothing else, the 16 threads get a workout daily as my Steam Link is set to do CPU encoding and that uses 8 threads. Beautiful image quality on the TV as a result when the fam is doing some gaming. I'm in love with this system, very happy with Ryzen. Thanks to AMD! :)
The Ryzen chip is a third of the cost of the Intel chip and doesn't require the expensive enthusiast X99 platform.
AMD's great achievement is bringing 6 and 8 core chips /to the mainstream/, affordable by pretty much everyone. Intel's X99 enthusiast platform has been around longer but is massively more expensive.
16 cores is absolutely insane my first computer was a commodore 64 VIC-20 it was 1 MHz with 32kb of ram...
Hopefully this will bring some life back into AMD..