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AMD Ryzen: new low cost quad-core Zen 2 CPUs from $99

anandtech.com

134 pointsrbanffy130 comments

I really really want to see this (with a embedded 10G NIC) in a new generation of NASes. It's embarrassing how much that space has stagnated in the prosumer space, and this looks like a nice replacement for the celery or atom processors.

For NAS with 10GbE have a look at the embedded Epyc 3000. Though again, still wondering why we don't see native AMD 10GbE ports and instead see intel nics.

My understanding is that apart from mellanox intel has one of the best ethernet NICs when it comes to hardware offloading features, which is probably saves a large fraction of CPU cycles in embedded environments.

It's not that Intel NICs have the most features, not by far. It's that the features of Intel NICs actually work.

I get that Intel has and continues to make some of the best ethernet silicon but I find it kind of silly that in this day and age a company like AMD can't build decent NIC. I'd like to see someone implement the AMD 10 GbE ports and do some benchmarking.

I'm building a NAS right now. The Epyc 3000 parts looked appealing, but it's ~impossible to get them in Switzerland (and hard in Germany). While getting an Atom/Xeon-D board is relatively easy and there's a lot more choice.

That would be great, firewalls too. I think it's crazy that a 5-8k Cisco ASA comes with a weak intel atom processor.

Cisco's (and for that matter most other) networking gear is ASIC/FPGA based AFAIK, the Atom or whatever main CPU is almost always only for management purposes.

The Celeron Processors used in NAS ( assuming you were referring to Synology and Qnap ) are still much cheaper than lowest cost Zen 2.

For AMD's NAD offering ( or applicable to NAS ) it should be their Embedded Line [1] which offers 10G.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpo...

And availability isn't there for one off use, and from the looks of it a basic Pentium setup is still a lot less expensive.

Home NAS tech has mostly stagnated because of LAN speeds. Any improvement on the NAS side will not translate to real life performance gains. Almost nobody has 2.5/5/10G network cards or switches, most people probably don't even want them at today's costs (vicious cycle) and power consumption. Pretty sure if you ask 95+% of them they'd rather have faster, more stable WiFi. Manufacturers settled on exactly what can saturate a GbE line, with minimal power consumption, heat generation, noise, size, and most importantly price.

There are options for 10G to fit every need but none will come cheap.

The nice thing is that Ubiquiti and others are moving to a new set of switches that seem to make 10Gig much cheaper. (Check out the new 10gGIGE UDM Pro and switches). That should change the equation...

eventually.

Mikrotik has a bunch of very affordable 10G switches too :)

Still SFP based though, netgear has an 8 port + 2 10GbaseT which does 2.5/5 as well for ~$150 (GS110MX). Which is a real upgrade path, particularly for POE wifi AP's, and people unable/uninterested in pulling cable.

The problem with 10G is that the datacenter/nerds are still pushing sfp/fibre. Which completely misunderstands how people actually use 1G today. These 10GbaseT switches are literally drop in replacements for existing switches, and as the need arises cables can be upgraded. Which it turns out for home use, properly terminated cat5e works just fine at 10Gbit.

We seem to have recently switched from 10GbaseT to SFP but with reasonably cheap 10GBaseT adaptors, https://www.servethehome.com/sfp-to-10gbase-t-adapter-module... with cheaper switches and more widely available cards. Even motherboards have switched to sfp, but you dont have to use fibre. DAC is another cheap option for short distances with SFP.

I've been using a mix of DAC cables and 10G Base SR, which are quite cheap and convenient. I'm using Mikrotik switches and FS modules and seem to work fine.

The UDM Pro is just a run of the mill switch with 10gig backplane. We really need to start seeing true 8 port 10gig switches at reasonable prices for this to take off.

This 4 port Mirotik product is a good first start: https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in

You're unlikely to see anywhere near line rate though, especially with higher packets/s, as cheaper equipment tends to use CPU based forwarding. Whereas ASICs based gear, even when using merchant silicon like Broadcom or Marvell, still cost a decent amount.

QNAP also offers cheap 10G unmanaged switches that I've bought. It looks like more consumer-oriented compared to Ubiquiti/MikroTik.

Switches with two 10G ports aren't that expensive, and would support hooking a main desktop up to a NAS, while offering basic connectivity to other systems. Or for that matter, since many systems with 10G also have 1G ports, you can direct connect them, which is how I have two computers. Switched LAN to talk to everything, DAC cable to each other.

I thought that way too until recently, but MicroTik has moved aggressively into this market and has a variety of switch offerings including the Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN Switch with 4 SFP+ 10Gbps Ports and 1 Gigabit Ethernet Port.

At least for a home power user serving NAS to a few high speed clients, that $150ish switch is sufficient, but if not then MikroTik makes larger switches with more ports.

> At least for a home power user

Obviously if you are an HN reader you fall under the <5% :). If you have the need and are a power user there are options. The best one right now being the second hand market. I was eying a couple of Intel X540-T2 (~60-80E on eBay) or Mellanox ConnectX-2 (under 50E), not yet decided on the switch.

But realistically speaking, most people don't want to pay even 10E for any of this. They don't transfer bulk data or not over cable so they don't care about DIYing their network, especially once they realize everything is more expensive (cards, switches, NAS, maybe even cables).

2.5G and up has to go into ISP routers for it to really take off and become cheaper. And even then most users will still want better WiFi and not care about cables (and still most don't go for a decent AP and use the ISP router WiFi.

Interestingly 2.5Gb cable modems are also imminent. Yes early adopters are the market right now but as they purchase equipment it will drive down adoption costs due to economy of scale gradually kicking in.

Going to 2.5G seems like a wasted opportunity to go "big" without causing disruptions repeatedly or have "too much" extra cost. From the user perspective at least there's pretty much no difference between 2.5G and 5G in terms of cost and inconvenience of upgrading all the hardware).

But for the manufacturers and ISPs I imagine at that large scale the relatively small cost savings add up. And why waste a good opportunity to sell an intermediary tech. They'll be able to sell 5G/10G in a few years.

I'd disagree here. I have multiple devices in my home server rack that have native 10Gb. 10Gb PHY/SFP+ are dirt cheap these days as well. And if you want you can get a 10Gb DAC cable (fused SFP+ connectors) for under $20. 10Gb at home, today, is not expensive and is not a high consumer of power. PoE uses more power than 10Gb in switching - and that's relatively consumer friendly at this point (mainly for PoE IP cameras).

I agree, most people care more about stable WiFi, but for the prosumer home lab - 10Gb has been low cost all around for a few years already.

You have a home server rack. That places you comfortably in the "almost" part of "almost nobody".

As somebody with one as well, it’s very true. However I don’t expect 10Gb networking is going to stay out of actual prosumer and SOHO spaces (versus /r/homelab subscribers) for much longer. While consumers are moving more to streaming and offloading their stuff to the cloud, creators are going to need more bandwidth on their internal networks.

Really the killer right now is 10Gb over twisted pair is a power sucking beast; and people are (rightly) not wanting to abandon the familiarity, ubiquity and ease of installation granted by it. More PC motherboards and assembled systems are shipping with 10Gb NIC’s, we’re just waiting on switching to be affordable and fairly quiet before it can take off.

I work at a major research institute/hospital. We still have 100 Mbps connections everywhere, with a few 1 Gbps ports available if you beg (and pay!). We still move data around by sneakernet--a briskly walking postdoc can move a Tb/minute with a hard drive in their pocket.

I would love 10 Gbps connections, but I don't think they're right around the corner.

On HN the passion for tech tends to obscure the harsh realities of the "everyday person". The overwhelming majority of people don't know, need, care, or want to pay for a lot of tech that we take for granted, or as a "bare minimum" to go about our daily routine. Many others would love to have it but for whatever reasons, usually money or lack of skill, won't anytime soon.

Though I do have to admire the conviction with which some of my co-techies believe what they are describing is a generally applicable situation anywhere beyond the limits of places like HN. And I am saying this as someone who has over 1000 CPU cores and over 2TB of RAM in my home lab for some years now. I'm realistic enough to accept that this isn't a reasonable expectation even from other techies, let alone for a regular consumer.

Just for curiosity, what kind of processors and servers do you have?

About a third are functioning (albeit not very productive) "collector's items". Anything from Intel and AMD, to PowerPC and SPARC. The productive ones are mostly Intel because I acquired them before AMD's resurgence. Also plenty of AMD, and even ARM. They run Linux, Windows, MacOS, BSD, ESX, or dedicated appliance OSes. All on 1, 10, or 40G network, plus WiFi. I usually buy everything second hand, the most expensive stuff usually from companies that upgraded.

To be clear, most of the stuff I didn't buy because I need it but because I wanted to play and experiment with it. I test and play with everything I can imagine, time permitting. Then I sell most of it before it loses the resell value and top it up a bit to buy the next "big thing".

But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :)

> But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :)

Ssshh. If too many people find out buying fairly modern hardware on eBay is affordable and easy it will stop being so :)

Seriously though, in the US there’s been a recent flood of 12th gen Dell servers hitting the market with Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips in them. Sure, it’s not gonna perform as well as newer systems, but at $200-300 with power usage that even somebody in California can stomach (a fairly well specced system can consume around 100W at idle/low load) - homelabs are fun and not outrageously expensive hobbies for those that want in.

I'm not the OP, but my 82 year old dad has a server rack in his house.

It holds mostly telecom/network gear, but also has a simple NAS of some sort that he uses for backups (not sure what it is).

Also, most people with $1MM homes with integrated media systems piping through their house have a rack with telecom/network/media. A friend of mine has one in a house built 4 years ago.

So yeah, clearly this is a small minority, but still a bigger population than you might expect. And for reference, only one of the houses that I mentioned was over a million dollars. The other is about half than. And neither are geeks (one is a doctor, the other a retired manager).

This sounds more like a way to organize some regular equipment that many people would have in the house like a router or switch, a modem, a home NAS, etc. than what OP was describing when they said "multiple devices in my home server rack that have native 10Gb".

Excluding people who work(ed) in the field, and have money and time to spare I have seen exactly 0 people who have a home lab and racks of high-end IT equipment.

I can get an 8-port gigabit switch for $15 on sale. Where is my dirt cheap 10G switch?

Also "PoE" uses more power because it's actually powering a separate device entirely, that's not related to the 10G IC power consumption.

Your comment piqued my interest, so I decided to look it up and find out how much these cost. (I only have 1G, so thought it might be a chance to upgrade.) Plus, it's a chance to open up the conversation a bit...

This was the first non-ad link I found on Google when searching for "10G switch":

https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Ethernet-Unmanaged-Rackmount-...

$349

Not dirt cheap, but less than I had thought. YMMV on "cheap" or "dirt-cheap", so just sharing for a more robust conversation.

Just above in the thread: CRS305-1G-4S+IN. 4 SFP port switch for $150. I had to mount a 10G (SFP) card in a Thunderbold 3 PCIe box to get my iMac on the 10G net, lame that it's not native.

Dirt cheap with respect to pricing only a few years ago. Keep in mind comparing a 4 x 10Gb SFP+ switch with an 8 port discount switch are apples and oranges. The former provides L3 support per port and L2 functionality such as VLAN tagging. The discount switch is likely oversubscribed on the backplane (cheap switch controller) and is almost surely unmanaged. You also have to consider the savings of 10Gb - each port is not just 10 x 1Gb, but a full 10Gb lane. If you calculate the cost per Gb comparing a discount switch (8 x 1Gb switch) with a discount 10Gb switch (4 x 10Gb) - yes, it does cost more. But for anyone who wants or needs to move large files or data at home 10Gb isn't considerably more expensive. You pay $15 for 8 ports of 1Gb @ $1.87 per Gb where as that 10Gb switch you're paying around $143 for 4 ports of 10Gb @ $3.57 per Gb. So the cost factor is about 2x, but then again - L3, L2, manageability, etc are all constraints the discount switch can't compete with either. To each their own, but putting the cost of 10Gb in perspective of what it takes to move the same bandwidth with a 1Gb switch (requires LAG capabilities and even then you'd still end up short).

As for power - a typical optical 10Gb-SR will be power draw listed at 1W (PHY would draw less). It would appear to me that the power aspect is a moot point.

The thing is, I want the metaphorical 10Gb apple to compare to the discount switch apple. I don't care about the backplane being oversubscribed, and being managed is an antifeature for my home network. I want something that works exactly like my gigabit switch, but faster. Like the difference between a fast ethernet switch and a gigabit switch.

Most consumers do not have optical infrastructure, nor need L3/L2 management functionality, and most probably don't need 10G speeds. Likely the cost-per-port results in additional enterprise features being added to enterprise-grade products to justify the cost increase. 10GBASE-T likely cannot compete at commodity level pricing, as removing all the bells and whistles still results in 10x per port cost increase. However it seems a dumb 10GBase-T switch seems rare/non-existant, so we're left with options that are 20 - 30x the cost. You could say there is value in the bulk bandwidth available, but 30x is 30x, and needs considered justification, rather than being a "no brainer".

Most of the power concerns are related to 10GBASE-T, and it may only be few watts difference, but that could make a difference for mobile devices, and there is also cost per transceiver. Again practically no laptop or consumer motherboard is coming with an SFP port, and 10GBASE-T IC could be 10x the cost of a 1000BASE-T. 2.5GBASE-T is starting to show up on some consumer-level devices though.

> Dirt cheap with respect to pricing only a few years ago

Let's be honest, you don't buy things because they're cheaper than they used to be. You look at what you need and compare with what you have to see if the "extras" justify the purchase. I bought two used 40G cards and one used 48x10G(RJ45) + 4x40G(QSFP+) switch for ~1300E. Which is a lot less than I would have paid just a few years ago. Still 2 orders of magnitude above what most people care to pay for home use. And I'm sure this hasn't convinced you to upgrade.

Regular consumers, with no particular technical inclination or passion for specialized tech probably outnumber enthusiasts 100:1. For them not having fancy features to worry about is the feature. Sure, gimme a super fast connection, who knows when I need it. But make sure it doesn't cost more or require more effort in maintaining than what I have now.

> But for anyone who wants or needs to move large files or data at home

I guess this is the crux of the matter. Not many do in a world of mobile and streaming. Just think of how many systems are still sold every day with drives that have no chance of being close to saturating such a pipe.

I agree with your reasoning to go for it because I used the same one (only I went further because if it's worth doing it's worth overdoing). But the market does not agree, demand is still quite low since the extras don't justify the purchase for all but the early adopters who slowly drag the price down. Until I see a 10G port in a mainstream ISP router, the "revolution" will only happen in techie households.

> I have multiple devices in my home server rack that have native 10Gb. 10Gb PHY/SFP+ are dirt cheap these days

It's a matter of perspective. These are only a concern for a narrow niche. Outside of your/our tech bubble people don't think the same way, and don't care about this. You know what is cheaper than everything that you mentioned there? The "free" ISP router and not building a home lab because they don't need it. They don't have 10G, racks, and home labs for the same reason you don't have 40/100/200G and an actual data center. Or anything that's so much outside of your field and passion that you can't even imagine it.

I have friends that think 6000E is the least they can pay to get a decent bicycle.

True if you are putting it through a switch, but you could direct connect the NAS to your main computer to get 10gig cheap.

> cheap

Anything can be "cheap" arbitrarily. Just a few comments above other people insist 10G/40G switches and setups are "cheap". But there's a reason people don't flock to buy these for home. Most don't feel they need them enough to justify the extra cost and effort of buying. You can be sure that tech preferences of HN people are as far from generally applicable as it gets.

There are more uses. I want an appliance for mass storage and light computing needs at home that is compact and uses an efficient processor. I manage enough servers during the day that I don't want to add another one at home to the list.

The processors from Synology and Qnap have stagnated. How much more would it really cost to add to the computing power?

I'd image an issue is price point and how to market these devices. SMBs were the target in the past, but with more infrastructure and more moving to cloud hosted solutions, that market may be drying up.

Interestingly I dont have an issues with processor power as I think that is early solvable. Throw in additional $20 BOM cost and it is done.

My problem is I want to spend dollar on NAS with 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps or even 10Gbps Ethernet. But the whole ecosystem of NBase-T or 10Gbps Ethernet is ridiculously expensive. From Switches to Router.

There are just something I dont want it to live on the cloud and prefer to stay within in my own premises. But the whole Industry has far too many interest in sucking us all into the cloud.

A switch with a single 10G port is very cheap, and it helps alleviate bandwidth issues on a NAS with multi client access. Multi 10g port switches aren't even that expensive any more ($300 or so for an 8 port one).

What's the point of footnote formatting, when your footnote immediately follows anyways?

Aren't NAS's IO-constrained? The added memory in relation to Atom's may be an advantage, but, unless you use a lot of very fast storage with real time block-level deduplication and compression, the processor will be extremely bored inside its box.

It depends what you do with them. A lot of consumer/prosumer NAS boxes are effectively a little home server, with various services running on them.

They Ryzen chips have a significant bump in PCIE bandwidth compared to Intel chips of this generation. Without knowing specifically which Atom to pull up in Intel Ark, I can't compare but I expect that anything in this lineup would smoke an Atom chip for raw IO capacity.

You'd compare them to Xeon D (which are more comparable in terms of power/intended usage), so e.g. for top of the line 16 core models, the EPYC Embedded 3451 vs. the Xeon D-2183IT, with 64 vs. 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Isn't that a lot of IO capacity for a home server?

BTW, I checked Xeon D motherboards and got scared with the prices.

There's 2 generations of Xeon D's - the 15xx series from circa 2015 and the 21xx series from about a year ago. Their target market is essentially for low powered but somewhat powerful compute farms. Their pricing is part of the Intel mark-up for supporting RDIMMs on top of other datacenter-centric features such as remote management BOMs, SFF-8088 connector for onboard LSI HBAs, and even SFP+ support. Those features are quite reasonable for the $600 range when including an efficient low-TDP CPU.

My home server pegs my I/O when I run some tests to push a ton of bytes through Kafka, Postgres, Rook, etc. on top of a ZFS zpool. I do K8S at home along with some deep learning + big data-y toy projects because it's still cheaper than firing the equivalent up in any cloud provider after about 6 months of operation for myself, and at least I can repurpose my toys.

> I run some tests to push a ton of bytes through Kafka, Postgres, Rook, etc. on top of a ZFS zpool.

Step aside, Xeon D. This is a job for EPYC. Or POWER9.

There's always a time/cost trade-off to be made in any engineering endeavor and I'm willing to accept some longer processing times for hobby usage until it becomes more serious I should be investing a lot more into it. I have a 3900x I use mostly for video encoding, K8S, local dev, and games if I need more power. And honestly, if I want to run stuff super fast in a hurry and am willing to pay for EPYC and Threadripper kinds of hardware, I'm running it all into Terraform and Packer and shipping it off to a cloud to crunch it for a whole $30 in an hour or two. It's just that along the way I'd spend thousands screwing up on silly problems.

A number of people seem to do real time transcoding on them.

I couldn't find anything on using Intel or AMD GPU cores with ffmpeg, but some ARM boards seem well supported.

Soft raid+xfs, with 5+ spinners on a atom pretty much pegs the cores doing NFS/CIFS/SSHFS with an intel X540/X550 based nic.

So linux inefficiencies are a big problem here too.

linux inefficiencies?

On anything embedded, the performance of Samba is atrocious compared to plain old nfsv3, which in turn is slower than iSCSI but that comes with its own troubles.

Personally I prefer NFS at home, but what I really really want is a NAS that doesn't cost four digit sums and can do full-disk encryption on RAID basis without the performance tanking. iSCSI with OS X clients sucks.

You should try hw-offloading for crypto with AES-NI..

I use LUKS on my work laptop (company policy/etc). Sure the AES-NI bandwidth is a few GB/sec/core. But it definitely slows things like kernel builds down by more than double digit percentages. Turns out latency is still important for storage and making an extra pass over all the data doesn't help.

Maybe related story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683750

SSDs + 10GbE make most of them CPU bound, SSDs are cheap enough for home/soho NAS now.

QNAP has a bunch of their line using AMD embedded (many with 10G, but more on the "Enterprise" line). They've been using AMD for quite a while. Even though, the TS/TVS lines have many AMD options that are relatively fast in the line of prosumer space. They are, however, more expensive than what you'd spend doing an Unraid ServerBuilds.Net NasKiller type build.

That being said - totally agree. There are much better base platforms that have been out for a while of which NAS providers seem to ignore. Synology seems to have gotten really good at charging a premium for underwhelming system specs. I realize some people just want redundant network storage, however given the price points one would expect the ability to run a few additional services, containers, VMs, etc on those platforms.

Honestly, since I've not been keeping track of the actual technology and details of the various AMD CPUs / APUs, except for all the news about how AMD Ryzen is actually equivalent to or even better than Intel CPUs, all these AMD CPU models and choices are a bit confusing!

There's Ryzen 3, 5, 7, 9. Server, desktop and Mobile models. And among each various choices. And now even more choices ...

I am rooting for AMD but I sure hope they know what they are doing and improve their marketing so that consumers don't get overwhelmed and confused ... :/

>all these AMD CPU models and choices are a bit confusing!

Perfect time for a whataboutism. Intel has far more confusing names, and more offerings; AMD has adopted what is essentially a cleaner subset of the Intel naming scheme.

True - Intel too has quite confusing marketing nomenclature for its CPUs. And now that AMD has an actual technical edge over Intel CPUs, I feel they shouldn't ape Intel-like marketing and be more creative while opting for simplicty. Learn from Apple.

>Learn from Apple.

When you're finally "winning" greatly expand your product portfolio?

Sure, as long as you don't confuse your consumers, why not?

Just keep it simple. Look at the current choices on Apple products (apple.com):

You want a desktop mac - there's the iMac, the Mini, the Pro.

You want a laptop - there's the Air and the Pro.

You want a phone - there's the 11, 11 pro, SE2 and XR.

You want a TV setup box - there's 4k and HD.

You want a music player - there's the Homepod and the iPod Touch.

And so on ...

I dunno, that all sounds pretty confusing to me.

Not really - it makes it easy to research. I want a desktop computer, Apple offers me 3 choices. Easy to compare and choose.

Compare that to AMD Ryzen™ 3 3300X and AMD Ryzen™ 3 3250U.

It's easy to get confused due to the the similar naming nomenclature and not realize that one is a desktop CPU and the other a laptop / mobile CPU.

I suspect they’re trying to show product parity with Intel. To roughly compete with the i3, i5, i7, i9 intel CPUs.

When Zen first came out, intel had i3/5/7 and AMD proposed Ryzen 3/5/7 (1300, 1500, 1700 and then variantz of those, like 1750 or 1800) and then ThreadRipper (numbered 1900).

Intel saw they couldn't compete on the core count, and so they immediately announced the i9s, which were just the top i7s rebranded under a different name.

And then AMD just announce Ryzen 9 and kept the ThreadRippers. Long story short, i9 is a marketting name for the thing that would've been the most exclussive i7. And then AMD "paired" the offering just because they could. And I think they were also testing if Intel would launch an i11 ^_^"

Intel CPUs are even worse in that regard having dozens and dozens of them across categories, so...

If you are an average user, you only need to remember: buy the 3600.

Heck even if you’re building a gaming PC the 3600 is fine. I bought a 2080ti for 4k gaming, then looked at the 3600-3900x as options and realized I’d get negligible benefits from more cores. So my $1200 video card is paired with the CPU I got on sale for $150.

Te 3600 is also the one that has the highest L3 cache per thread. Despite that being "non uniform", that's still a big fat cache that helps a lot with performance.

Waiting for Zen 3 to bring unified L3 back into the table!

Is that a possibility? Also, with a NUMA aware OS what kind of performance increases would one likely see on a UMA cpu vs a NUMA one?

I think Windows and Linux both have NUMA capabilities in their kernel. Long story short, you don't have to think too much -- get one of these and try it yourself.

> If you are an average user, you only need to remember: buy the 3600.

The only negative - It requires a separate graphics card. :/

I think the segmentation is reasonable enough for typical users. Any basic user just looking for something like a desktop would only see the Ryzen 3/5/7/9 desktop SKUs, and those have a pretty sensible and intuitive segmentation.

Even within each segment, the 3xxx(_/X) setup (looking at Zen 2 SKUs) seems like it makes sense. Higher numbers in the last 3 digits have more cores/higher speeds, and the X version of a given processor has higher clocks. I think that would be intuitive enough for any random person to figure out pretty quickly.

I usually go to PassMark CPU charts and sort by value:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html

Or visit their high-end CPU chart and scroll until I see a price I'm willing to pay.

There are a lot of 10-year-old used Xeons on that list. Their value proposition might be very different if power consumption was also taken into account.

Prices of those Xeons are low because servers they originally came in got recycled in China aka they are fished out of garbage. Motherboard and older ram make whole proposition less than ideal, picking between old server gear with all the warts or "new" Chinese motherboards build using recycled chipsets and dodgy designs (single channel memory Xeon boards with SATA2 only etc).

Sorting by value is a pretty bad way to decide on what CPU to buy. There are a great deal of other factors that go into performance from things like the cache / memory, integrated GPU, power draw, etc. The Passmark score, while useful, isn't in itself very comprehensive.

How do you decide?

I decide by looking at real world benchmarks for the workloads I'll be using the computer for.

Yeah, this is a good way. Think about what you're going to be doing with the hardware that you want to buy, and then look at how the various items within your price range perform in those specific categories.

I wish they had sort-by-value based on single-threaded scores. (That whole list is full of Intel Xeons that generally have poor single-threaded performance. Single-thread benchmark scores are probably what impact regular desktop users most.) And maybe also a filter to exclude CPUs that are older than N years. And maybe an option to set a minimum core count (like filter out all CPUs with less than 4 physical cores). Then it'd be perfect.

Or maybe some needs to build an automatic UI generator that takes in a database schema, and lets you filter/sort/etc by stuff. It'd be like one of those SQL GUI desktop apps, except we'd have an embeddable client-side React component + a server-side library, instead.

You can sort by single-thread performance if you look only at those cpus, which are still on the market: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#single...

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/ does this.

Super happy to see this; having more low-price desktop processor options is great for anyone looking to build a desktop. Also excited for the B550 platform; it's been a while since they updated the mid range motherboard options.

Anyone know if these have ECC support? I need to build a few (3) really cheap x86 boxes but need ECC support.

Can't find anything official, but at least some comparison sites are saying it does.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_3_3300x-...

ECC (unbuffered) is kind of a crap shoot from what I understand and will largely come down to MB support. Only way to really tell is to try it. I know from past generations for AMD, that Asus has done better than average in working ECC. Just my $.02

I built a small home server a few months back using a Supermicro board (M11SDV-8CT-LN4F) which has ECC support and an Epyc 3201.

Aye. I've been trying to price out what's better essentially three tiny machines, a threadripper, or dual 7302s (until the higher core count ones drop in price).

The threadripper seems strangely more practical the more I think about any of them... but is also not as cheap and small as something like the 3300Xs and doesn't have quite the I/O available for really long-term usage like something outta the Epyc lineup. It is damn good for the now though...

I'll probably hold off buying anything until these come out just in case some righteous sales show up on them and some mini-itx motherboards.

For the price, 1600AF is probably the better option... if these were in the sub-$70 range, it'd be a good option.

The 1600AF is not a product. It's AMD clearing inventory. Infact the rumors are you can't find the 1600AF anymore but the 1200AF is popping up.

1600AF seems to be a lifecycle replacement for the 1600, probably for contractual obligations.

Seems to have plenty of inventory on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XTQZJ28/

While the 1600AF is great(basically a 2600 under the name of the 1600 for anyone who's confused), the different ways one can buy one aren't the clearest about whether it's actually the AF.

At least personally, I'd be wary about sending someone I was helping to pick one up on the off chance that it wasn't actually the AF.

It's in the model number on the product page... YD1600BB_AF_BOX

There's an ever decreasing chance you might get an older version, but that's less and less likely as old inventory has pretty much cycled out from amazon & newegg.

I really like what AMD is doing. AMD's Zen and going with TSMC's 7nm..etc. at the very least, AMD going to force Intel to stop fcking around. how many 14nm+++++++++ can Intel squeeze?

I wonder it would be possible to underclock/undervolt these cpus to make it consume less power.

Sometimes you just don't need pure raw speed.

it's generally preferable to complete the task faster at high clock/voltage and then go completely idle then it is to run for longer at lower clock/voltage

the total power draw is lower when the task is completed faster

The general term for this is "race to sleep", if you want to find more information on it.

thank, I'll look that up!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/fxo6ds/tuning_a_ryzen_...

This guy got a tuned system to consume 45w under load. It's got me interested in upgrading my AM1 Athlon 5350 and reusing it's 65w picoPSU.

thanks!

I like the pricing, but would like to point out that going from 4 cores to 6 cores literally doubles the price for much less in the way of perf increase.

Although, I can't fault AMD. It looks like they are just matching their competitors pricing minus a few percent and raking it in, rather than undercutting them by a lot and trying to own the market and likely running out of supply.

At some point though (likely with A76+ cores) there will be some nice ARM SBC's with 4+ cores, on a board for < $100 that will eat these things for lunch as far as price/perf is concerned. Hopefully they are prepared.

Performance and price have never been proportional. This is par for the course in silicon pricing.

The top end parts frequently have a very steep increase. The low end was a lot flatter than this though.

The Ryzen line lies entirely in the top half of AMD's current offerings, doesn't it?

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors-desktop

I mean, looking at that page, AMD's current real consumer offerings probably bottom out at the Athlon chips. I haven't seen an FX chip in a newly released system in a long time, and the A-series chips seem to be on their way out, even in the small chunk of the budget laptop market where they ever had any real share.

So Ryzen is arguably most of their consumer offering right now.

'Entry level' is a description of product marketing -- it doesn't have any bearing on whether or not anyone buys them, puts them in systems, or whether they're any good, or recently released.

Ryzen chips are labelled, priced, and marketed to directly compete with Intel's Core line of chips... which are also not entry level.

Well you not only get 50% increase Core Count, you also get 50% increase in L2 Cache per core, Double the total L3 Cache, along with 5% boost clock.

I think it isn't the value for 6 core were not good, it is AMD priced the Quad Core a little too low. I was expecting it to be $129 / $149 range. At $99 it offers insane value.

vs $122 list for

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...

I wouldn't call that "insane" if you get any kind of discount on the intel part. Competitive, yes, especially if you can use the pcie gen4.

(edit fix link for 9100 vs 9100T) (edit2, for example the 9100F also lists for $122 is selling for $78 on amazon right now)

Err, that page says $192 for me.

Location problem? It says "Recommended Customer Price: $122" in the 8th line down, and matches a couple other part/list/guides I see.

as well as random google hit:

https://technical.city/en/cpu/Core-i3-9100

All of the Intel 9100 series are 4 Core 4 Threads. For AMD $99 you get 8 Thread.

And as someone else mentioned, you also get a decent cooler out of the box.

Additionally, you also get a really solid stock CPU cooler compared to Intel's. If you're building a PC in the price range where these sit, that $20 you save by not needing an aftermarket cooler can be huge, allowing you to get an SSD or a higher tier GPU, etc.

That's only true if you stay within the current generation. You can spend $99 and get this quad core, otherwise if you are willing to give up a little bit of single core performance, you can get the 6 core 12 thread 1600AF for $85. If you want both higher core count and higher single core performance, you can spend $129 for the 2600, $174 for the 3600, etc.

It's somewhat fair price because ~8 cores Ryzen contains a one CCD contains two CCXs, and one CCX contains 4 cores. So AMD can ship a CCD chip which contains good CCX and bad CCX for 4 core CPU rather than throwing away. 4 core SKUs are reasonably cheap.

What's a good place to see CPU benchmarks? I want to know how much more perf I can get from upgrading my 2012 i7-3770.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/

Userbenchmark has been waging a one man war against AMD's high benchmarks. That isn't a really good source.

UserBenchmark's summary scores are biased toward <8 core workloads, because almost all users don't saturate 8+ cores.

All the detailed metrics are available for perusal.

That's all.

For anyone looking for some elaboration on why Userbenchmark isn't great, I'd check out this reddit thread [0]. Even if you don't agree that they outright shouldn't be used, other reviewers and benchmarkers definitely do a much better job of showing the nuance in CPU comparisons.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/g2x49q/userbenchm...

https://openbenchmarking.org/

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home

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