Good on AMD for pushing the competition forward by significant amounts.
Reading reviews of coolers and fans was just eye-opening with regards to AMD's recent success. Most reviews proudly mentioned some Ryzen product, and barely any mentioned Intel at all (and most coolers are compatible with both).
I realize that the build-your-own-PC enthusiast represents only a minor fraction of the overall market, but seeing AMD's reputation going from "the budget CPU" to becoming the new Coca-Cola whereas Intel is now Pepsi, all in the span of what, 2 years? was amazing.
The server and laptop markets have other dynamics (a few large buyers, instead of many individuals) and I'm not sure AMD can compete with Intel on these dynamics, but I really wish them success.
Also personally built a gaming PC this year, picked a Ryzen just for fun.
Right now, it's low-end gaming, I got a 3200G because the integrated graphics are adequate for the games I play. The PCIe slot sits empty, waiting.
In some years when AM5 comes out and AM4 chips get cheap, I'll look at the last/best of the breed and pick a new chip. It probably won't have integrated graphics, so at that time, I'll add a discrete GPU. I plan to have this motherboard and RAM for probably 15-20 years.
(Just like its predecessor, an AthlonX2 4850e, in an AM2+ board from 2008. Which I recently dropped a $30 Phenom into, and it's a relevant machine again, my workbench workhorse.)
So I can run the latest 3000 series with my current first gen AM4 board which is great. As you point out though the 16 and 32 core chips might be too power hungry for some boards.
I would love to see an AM4 3600G and 3700G though, basically a 3600 or 3700 with the addition of a GPU chiplet. There are plenty of people out there that could use more CPU but don't need a discrete GPU for work.
As I understand it, they aim the high-TDP parts at the enthusiast/gamer/workstation market where a discrete GPU is just a given, so there'll probably never be a 3700G. Darn!
AMD is finally showing life across their entire product catalog, and I couldn't be happier.
For Linux, it's been more than a pain, and pretty much have to install with a 5.3 kernel base os to begin with for it to work from the start, saw a lot of just black screens in the nearer term distros. When the 19.10 Ubuntu came out, it mostly just worked, then after an update, blank screens... same with 18.04 and the supported drivers.
On windows, a number of issues, reset, more issues.
Since around 5.4 kernel, and now on 5.6 rc, it's been much better, and the recent driver update for Windows has stabilized. Just the same, would have been better off with NVidia for the past 5 months or so.
I was planning on waiting until January to build, but was having issues with my old system (i7 4790K). So built out with an x570 mb, and 3600, swapped out with 3950X late december. Had a few issues with motherboard drivers as well (intel bt and wireless very bleeding edge).
At this point I'm very happy though. Just took a while to stabilize and wouldn't go bleeding edge AMD again, but would wait 3-6 months for any new chipset or gpu.
I'm not using latest Ryzen though so I wouldn't know what bleeding edge AMD on the CPU side feels like.
Aside, RGB support for linux sucks.
There seems to be large variance in the different 5700XTs. Some of the third party ones don't have adequate cooling and quite literally cannot meet their intended specifications, like the ASUS TUF line.
I have no idea how well it works on Linux
Although I have to say - the last gaming PC I made was about ~13 years ago and this made me hesitant to move to AMD. During the time I was 'gaming' (mid 2000s to mid 2010s) all the hype was intel..
I have hardware that is over a decade old, 'young' people scoff at anything over a few years old! But there's a sweet spot to be had where you can buy older, rather than ancient or new and save yourself a fortune.
That said, my latest console is a Gamecube.
But they also offer reasonably competitive offerings at decent prices. Intel, nearest I can tell, still has faster chips, but AMD has closed the gap enough and isn't struggling with internal issues like Intel.
Disclaimer: I built an AMD Ryzen box a couple of months ago, running linux on it and gaming -- works like charm.
I'd go as far as declare UserBenchmark actively harmful if you are trying to figure out benchmarking results. You're likely better off by just throwing dice!
Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize.
However: you don't need to be the best, you just need to be at the "agreed upon" high end for game requirements, which is the xbox and ps4 (soon to be next gen).
And so, if you're trying to build a "generation proof" gaming PC in a standard sized case, the 3800X is currently your best bet for a new build (or waiting for zen3). If you're trying to do SFF, Intel may be a better choice.
Regardless: AMD's competition has dropped the prices in the "enthusiast" segment. My next build will be AMD, simply because I don't need the best of the best, but rather, good enough.
On my 3900X I've seen even single player action titles utilize 16+ threads with overall CPU utilization reaching peaks of 80-90 %.
Yes, it maybe be hard to parallelize game engines, but all major ones heavily use multiple cores. A bunch of years ago (4-5) people would recommend an i3-K dual core for gaming, because you could overclock it to 5+ GHz on air. That was sufficient for many titles back then. (And these i3s would sometimes give you higher FPS compared to the more expensive quad-core options). But a CPU like that is far too weak for newer titles.
> You still can't beat intel at the high end. Both in terms of heat and performance. If you have a task that doesn't parallelize well, you can't beat intel.
In terms of heat, that is, performance per Watt, Intel's high end is quite a bit worse than AMD's. It is true however that you can get slightly higher single-threaded performance out of Intel's highest-end CPUs, but not because they are more efficient (- AMD is better both perf/W and IPC-wise), but just by raw, unadulterated clock speed, pushing them to 5+ GHz. And that causes them to burn a lot of power.
Zen 2 has consistently ~10-15 % higher performance clock-for-clock compared to Intel's best while achieving approximately 60-80 % higher perf/W.
This LTT review captures the massive advantage Zen 2 has in efficiency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYqG31V4qtA
Under load the system is brilliant (it's 4x faster with the same power usage, makes using my laptop painfully slow in comparison). The power management on these CPUs is incredibly advanced (each core runs at different speeds & voltages), I'm just surprised that it doesn't do better at idle.
The usual desktop (3500-3800 series) chips perform similarly well, it's just the two-chiplet AM4 processors that have been somewhat plagued by problems like this.
which ones? genuinely curious. I have two Intel E5 eight-cores in an old workstation and rarely ever see a game using more than 2-4 threads.
I guess i'm not spending my time on the latest and great AAA games as soon as they come out, but i've spent quite a few (shameful) hours gaming on fairly recent titles.
In fact it’s one of the reasons we made our own game engine.
It's not only that the turbo boost of those Ryzen cpus is high and at the same clock Intel does not have a lead anymore. It's also that recent games are already pretty parallelized. There is no need to wait for the next console generation to see that effect.
Btw, the 3800X is not a good pick. It is just a minimally higher clocked 3700X. If you want 8 cores, get the 3700X, the higher price of the 3800X is just a waste of your money. But for gaming you want to stick to a Ryzen 5 3600.
[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids[...
That really depends on the pricing situation, very much like with the 3600x.
Over the months I've seen the price difference between a 3800x and 3700x see as low as 20€, the same with the 3600 and the 3600x.
That's because the 3600 and 3700x are recommended, and sold so often that retailers sometimes end up sitting on large stocks of 3600x/3800x too long and clear them out at discounts.
Imho even for gaming the 3800x might be a pretty good long term choice. The higher clocks are particularly relevant yet you still get the core advantage of the 3700x, without taking the same clock hit.
But if it's all about the budget and price/performance then it's really difficult to beat the 3600.
Now, if it's the same price there is no reason not to get the 3800X over the 3700X :)
> The top 20% of all 3800X processors tested passed their 4.3 GHz AVX2 stress test, whereas the top 21% of all 3700X processors were only stable at 4.15 GHz. Also, all 3800X processors passed the test at 4.2 GHz, while 3700X processors were only good at 4.05 GHz, meaning the 3800X has about 150 MHz more headroom when it comes to overclocking.
That's a minimal difference of course, but right at the clock wall of Ryzen, so AMD has to do binning here to enable the 3800X.
It would not make a difference when judging Intel vs AMD or Ryzen 3000 vs Intel 9000 series.
The source articles for the benchmarks are linked though, often enough they also have those 1% or 0.1% benchmarks.
This sentiment is almost a year out of date. Since Zen 2 launched, Intel has a measurable disadvantage in IPC. Intel's single-thread performance is only partially won back with higher clock speeds at the expense of far greater power usage.
ECS and being able to safely run "systems" within your game concurrently is becoming a thing rapidly as "lists of objects" do not scale.
I just checked Doom Eternal: it's running 81 threads. (Of course, not all of them are always active or doing things concurrently. It's just a datapoint.)
Intel basically only wins by a non-significant margin at video encoding nowadays thanks to AVX512 which AMD does not implement. AMD wins or is comparable at a lower TDP on everything else.
https://twitter.com/axelgneiting/status/1241487918046347264?...
I’ve been wondering if this will become de facto standard for multi-threaded/multi-core systems going forward.
ECS, the observer pattern, and behavior trees are probably the three main things that answered all the "how on earth do they build something this complex" questions for me.
I just ran across this: https://csherratt.github.io/blog/posts/specs-and-legion/
Specs? At least that's what Amethyst uses.
e.g. in say a jrpg you have "new game/continue" menu -> world map -> battles and character menu and back again.
Edit: oh I misunderstood you - you were asking about behaviour trees. I haven't used them for anything other than controlling game unit behaviour (although not necessarily just enemy ai - one other example is using them to combine a bunch of simple actions into one thing that the user can tell a unit to do - so like an attack move in an RTS is actually "loop (is enemy nearby? -> no -> move towards location -> yes -> attack (which is probably it's own behaviour tree))
That's some dinosaur games from the past. Modern games are using all available CPU cores with something like Vulkan and saturate GPU fully. So Intel CPUs are left in the dust with all the cores you get from high end Ryzens.
There should be a formalized law for this - anything that was once widely known as true (because it was) will continue to be treated as gospel far after it ceases to be the case.
And when challenged by the new norm, the old guard repeat their gospel louder and in greater numbers! So if you hear some technological rule of thumb repeated often enough, you should doubt it even more than if you hadn't heard it at all.
It is not that the Gamers and Prosumers dont know.
But they are willing to trade ~10% of Single Thread Performance for Double the Core at a similar or less price point.
Sounds like a very reasonable decision to me.
Citation needed. Games are about the least "Traditional" software engineering culture on the planet. We've had multicore CPUs for the last two gens of consoles (and I've seen multi-core programming on the Saturn and N64). On PC we've had mainstream multicore since 2009-ish. That's about when I left games. But given the need to win big on consoles, I can't imagine anyone has a main loop anymore that does everything on one thread.
>> traditionally
> anymore
> does everything on one thread
Multithreading is useful for concurrent programming separately from its value in parallel programming.
[0] https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_S...
Most games are lightly threaded, with newer games being much better optimized for 6+ cores.
Even for Gaming, only the 9900K/KS are even in consideration for a good choice, and if you're doing anything besides gaming or quicksync loads, odds are you're better off with AMD. The 3900X is less expensive and does as good or better in most workloads, and even in gaming, most wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
As to best of the best for higher end, the Threadripper has no peer.
There is a free to play game Armored Warfare (crysis engine?), which I genuinely used to test stability of my cpu. 8 threads fully loaded and probably with some form of AVX.
Reviews of upcoming Mount&Blade also note how it loads 16+ threads (mostly for NPC on battlefield).
Arma3 was notorious for being bound by single thread performance and low latency memory.
on a old midrange i5 6500 b5 does a solid 30+ fps on ultra and cpu load doesn't top out so I find the claim that it needs a top of the line cpu very dubious. I'll try armored warfare since it's free.
also, the fps reduction seems more in line with the low end intels having less pci lanes, and not the game being cpu capped.
Very few people genuinely notice the difference. I ran a 3600 while waiting for a 3950X, and if I had it to do over, would probably have just gone 3900X to start with... For the most part, I don't notice the difference, only after I'm running a couple databases and a few services that are active to I even come close to seeing a difference in general use.
I know GPU and Monitor options are similar, and CPU/GPU combination in terms of balance are important. Unless you're going RTX 2080 or higher, then it's much less of a difference in general use anyway.