Hacker News Reader

Comment by LordKano | Hacker News Reader

I'm most impressed by the Ryzen 7. Only the i9 is faster and it's less than half the price of the i9 7900.

It outperforms the i7 5960 and it's similarly less than half the price.

AMD can compete well in the enthusiast-on-a-budget segment of the market.

I'm impressed too, if only it wouldn't have those nasty mce and segfault bugs, and AMD could actually explain what's going on after all this time testing it.

I don't know why you are being downvoted (I am no expert), but it seems like the segfaults are a big deal.

AFAIK it's currently being blamed on a bug in the PHP testsuite that segfsults in Intel too.

Segfaults happen under heavy compilation workload - nothing to do with PHP specifically, for instance compiling Mesa produces it. And mce bug means random freezes and reboots, when CPU core wakes up from some sleep C state.

I'm still quite certain that some test suite had a faulty PHP benchmark that segfaulted on both vendors and people claimed it was Ryzen only.

Oh well.

Either way, IMO it's not a roadblock for office and gaming usage.

It is a roadblock, if you need to build something from source and it segfaults. Can be quite useful for gaming too (building Mesa, Wine, open engines and what not).

Besides, mce bug is more critical, since it actually makes the whole system unstable.

The MCE bug might explain some behaviour on my system, however, I could just as easily also blame frequent brownouts.

On the other hand, the compile thingy has never been an issue yet, despite me compiling a lot of things. (Ryzen 7)

And for gaming, I've never had a game crash, I do doubt that many people really game under Linux yet, most gaming happens on Windows.

Office use is not roadblocked at all.

These bugs aren't consistent, and likely affect only part of Ryzen CPUs of the same model, not all of them. That's why the results are so over the place for different people. It also can be affected by power setup, which adds a lot of variables and makes it harder to reproduce.

By the way, for users or Gentoo or other distros which actually build packages when installing them, these segfaults are a very major roadblock for any kind of use case.

You're right about that. The context there was another phoronix article. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-se... and the update to it explains what happened.

There are however reports of segfaults during compilations that seem more Ryzen-specific, though even there GCC versions were said to play a role. It is all a bit obscure currently.

The last story on 'AMD segfaults' actually segfaulted on Intel processors too.

You can make a test that will segfault everywhere. We aren't talking about those, but about regular workloads, like compiling Mesa for example. If Mesa compilation segfaults everywhere, something is really wrong.

The early examples were supposedly going to be fixed with a microcode update. What happened with that?

There were no microcode updates that fixed this issue so far.

I got a 1700 because it uses 65W instead of 95W but still has eight cores.

There are some minor glitches with the system, but as far as performance on CPU-bound workloads is concerned, I am very, very happy with it. When I look at what comparable chip from Intel would have cost me, I am even happier.

I also have a 1700 and with a $100 closed loop liquid cooler was able to clock it up to 4ghz without any trouble at all. Obviously it draws more power that way but it's nice to know the option is there if you ever want more out of it.

For a more conservative approach, most 1700s will do 3.7 at the stock 1.1875v (or at most 1.2v). The bundled cooler handles either with aplomb.

> The bundled cooler handles either with aplomb.

That was a pleasant surprise. The fans Intel ships with its CPUs are ... not very good.

I like my Ryzen 1700X which I use as a home server. But after overclocking my 5960x runs most software faster. The Ryzen CPUs seem to have some kind of hard speed limit right around 4 GHz. My 5960x can go to 4.3 although I keep it at 4.1 normally. That's 4.1 GHz on all cores at full load, not boost clocks.

But yeah, AMD is cheaper. And if you compare it to a 5960x at stock 3.3 GHz clock, it is faster.

Have you tried higher clocked ram? Benchmarkers seem to show that ryzen really benefits from higher ram clicks like 3000+mhz [1]

[1]https://www.eteknix.com/memory-speed-large-impact-ryzen-perf...

I have been told that. But since this was for a server, I specifically chose Ryzen for ECC support, so my Ryzen system is running 2400 MHz ECC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com