Hacker News Reader

Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

I built a new workstation in December, and I like my computers to be as quiet as possible, so I looked for a huge cooler and a top-quality fan.

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.

View on HN

One anecdote data point; we’re building new bare metal clusters, about 500 new quad chassis servers. I did the performance testing and per performance/price from Dell we went with AMD Epyc CPUs whereas at my job only 2 years ago doing a similar build it never even came up, Intel was the unquestioned default.

Also personally built a gaming PC this year, picked a Ryzen just for fun.

I built a gaming PC last fall, also Ryzen, but I picked it specifically because I know AMD likes to keep a CPU socket around a good long time. So really, my main goal was to buy a Socket AM4 motherboard, and then stuff a cheap CPU and some RAM into it.

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.)

AMD has committed to supporting AM4 until 2020, but you still have a fantastic upgrade path to the 3950X 16C32T CPU and plenty of RAM.

A matching socket is not enought though, the motherboard has to support it too. If it's an older one it might not get a BIOS update for the newest generation, and/or the VRMs on cheaper boards might not be able to handle a 16 core chip.

Just an anecdotal observation. I bought a micro ATX MSI motherboard (a relatively niche product) together with my Ryzen 1700X way back when and they provide support for the latest Ryzen CPUs via bios updates. I'd be surprised if other more popular boards did not get updates.

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.

Is there any confirmation if this means Ryzen 2 only or also Ryzen 3? Lots of the enthusiasts expect this to include the upcoming Ryzen 3, but the wording is very vague.

Most of what I've seen seems to indicate that Ryzen 3 will be AM4, with Ryzen 4 moving on, I'd be suprised not to see a shift to DDR5 at that time and usb3+thunderbolt in that generation in a couple years.

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.

Oh man, this exactly. I'd happily add more heatsink and bump my APU TDP by 20-30 watts, rather than get similar performance by stuffing a whole mountain more hardware in a PCIe slot with its own TDP somewhere around 60-100 watts because of all the bus transceivers and other overhead.

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!

I bet a lot of ITX builders would be ecstatic if that happens.

Absolutely...

Zen 3 == am4, zen 4 == am5 (next)

Did a Ryzen 3700X build last year, though I went with a 2080. Looking forward to being able to add an AMD GPU -- not for any reason other than I believe Nvidia has been as stagnant as Intel. From the 1080 to the 2080 was what, 30 months (March 2016 to September 2080)? And in all that time we got a nominal boost in performance, DLSS to make your games blurry and RTX to slow them down. That's unbelievable.

AMD is finally showing life across their entire product catalog, and I couldn't be happier.

Given my own pain with an RX 5700XT, I'd suggest waiting a few months after big navi release to upgrade.

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.

New RX 5000 series XT owner here. On Linux Mint 19, I was forced to install kernel 5.5 from mainline Ubuntu deb packages, also mesa drivers and libvulkan from the unstable padoka ppa, but since then it has been a smooth lockdown experience.

I'm not using latest Ryzen though so I wouldn't know what bleeding edge AMD on the CPU side feels like.

On the chipset side has mostly just worked, afaik, there've been enhancements that work better for scaling/timing etc... but I haven't noticed issues there.

Aside, RGB support for linux sucks.

Did a Ryzen build with a 5700 as well, tried to make it work but essentially just said "screw it" and installed the latest Fedora; ain't nobody got time to screw with graphics drives. Worked fine. Fedora likes new stuff -- sometimes too new, which broke my nVidia card in the past -- but the AMD drivers on board work fine.

I run a Sapphire pulse RX 5700 XT on Windows 10. My only issue was an old driver was causing crashes on a very specific, very niche game, but that was fixed weeks before I actually went to play the game, and wouldn't have known about had I kept my driver up to date, ie, it was an issue for a very short time and I'm impressed by AMD's responsiveness to a small indie.

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

I built a gaming PC this last week, and also went with Ryzen.

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..

Early to mid 2000s, Athlon 64 and the Digital tech (as in DEC Alpha's EV6 bus) was where it was at, until Intel got back in front with Core 2. AMD got to define the 64-bit instruction set for x86 with Athlon 64. 2007 or so (13 years ago) was after the decisive swing back to Intel. I got a Q6600 in 2007 that I was using (in its final form in a NAS in the attic) until late last year.

I brushed off an old AMD motherboard. And did a quick CPU scout on Ebay to see what I'd need to pay for the greatest CPU of yesteryear. And for about a tenner, I could get AMD's best offering. But alas, it burnt many watts, and had barely any more grunt than my old Core2Duo in my aging laptop - so I doubt it is actually worth the bother.

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.

Good ole Q6600. Move to that from a Pentium D. Didn't keep my dorm room as warm as the Pent-D, but ran everything 100% better...

yeah I got it when the core2duo was released, so apperantly in 2006 :)

AMD is going very strong in server market (specially in DC market), all major sever vendors has now comprehensive AMD offering. The advantage AMD now days has over Intel is so big that choosing AMD is a no-brainer for majority(I would even say most) of DC applications;

Yeah, for all that AMD has edged ahead in desktop, their server offerings completely blow Intel out of the water. Which is largely Intel's doing, because they pushed their profit margins up to spectacularly high levels while they had the best chips.

Marketing works -- and AMD has been marketing hard.

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.

My understanding is that Intel has like one chip that is within a few percentage points better than AMD's fastest in single threaded very very specific workloads, with fewer cores, quadruple the price, and more feature discrimination

Reply on news.ycombinator.com