AMD Zen processors...Are you interested?

[Artorius]

This is a very specific example and not my only one, but the other night I was doing normal Nighthold, I had WoW on my centre monitor, YouTube on the left monitor playing a video (farm is dull), and discord/whatsapp clients on the right monitor (yes I have three, don't judge me). A very warforged trinket dropped that I couldn't trade due to ilevel, so unsure if it was an upgrade I opened Simcraft on my right monitor and simmed my char then re-simmed it twice with the new trinket in each slot. Neither the Youtube video or WoW experienced any slowdown.

Comically the first time I walked into Stormwind in 2004 I had a frame rate so bad it was like cycling through the screenshot folder XD

And SimulationCraft is known to multithread itself very well, that's actually something I can see any serious raider doing =p

[Deleted]

Ideally i woulda waited for zen 2 but i had the money to build now. And usually ya, sockets are useless but if you look how long AM3 was around i may be upgrading just a CPU down the line for the first time

I agree with you, I think you will get another CPU upgrade on AM4. It already has the tricks which drove intel chipset/socket evolution and AMD settled on PGA, so I think that's it for a bit. I hope it goes well for you Fascinate, I think it was a bold but not a silly move.

I reckon once foibles are ironed out Ryzen will be in a good spot going forwards, even for gaming. Doom is currently the only game which has done Vulkan properly (even id are learners though), the others have hacked in a temporary abstraction layer to cover what isn't now handled by the API/drivers. The way most engines are handling/distributing render and physics pipelines is basically as they were over dx11 (dx12 also suffers from this). It's only in the new generation of engines, when we have stuff written expressly to properly utilitse threads,m_alloc, command buffers, fences, semaphore etc will we see the new API's shine. Logical thread count will overhaul a slight ipc + clockspeed advantage at some point on this curve, as it does now in straight computation.

The downside is that all that takes a lot of work; some truly horrible engines can be created using either low-level g-api and there isn't a gpu driver dev in the world that can save them. The upside is that engine dev's have far more visibility of the hardware, it's now up to them to determine how to address it. We will see fewer engines initially. Addressing a low-level api is beyond the scope/ability of a typical game dev, and until there is additional open resources available (dx12/vk higher level abstraction layer templates) it's the big engine houses which will do the work.

A lot of vulkan development is coming from mobiles; opengl es became neglected with khronos' attention on vk, but the mobile platform offers itself to parallelism anyway, and vk will much improve things on newer devices there. A good chunk of a vk implementation in a mobile engine can be directly re-sourced for desktop, and it's platform agnosticism seem to make it a better option to dev for than dx12 (though no striped multi-gpu for vk yet). Feck x-box and it's hacked dx implementation, it''l soon be the only platform steadfastly not supporting vulkan (Apple will have MoltenVK).

[Artorius]

Point to note regarding temperatures; https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu...egree_offset/1
What did I tell ya? I knew the temperatures weren't as high as reported. Essentially, that means that my 1700X at 1.35V at 3.6Ghz is actually running at 32°C instead of the 52°C being reported as the idle temp in Ryzen Master. Interesting that an 8-core chip is running at 48°C under load (a delta temperature of approx. 25°C for me) - even by AIO standards, that's pretty fantastic.

It's built on high density libraries and in an incredibly power efficient process, efficiency and heat output are really great because of that =p
Downclocking Zen makes it even more ridiculous, the perf/watt around ~3GHz is basically insane.

And yeah, it didn't really make any sense when someone said here the 1700 was magically cooler. It had no reason to, the 1700X and 1800X can even reach the same clocks are lower voltages which invalidates that even more.

[Life-Binder]

I hope they dont continue to prioritize low power/eff at 3 Ghz over 4.5-4.6+ clocks for Zen2

Im not a server, Im a home user/gamer and those clocks would be greatly appreciated


elsewise Intel will still be ahead in games no matter IPC improvements, especially when they roll 6c into mainstream

[Gray_Matter]

Noticed this on Reddit:



It looks like the article on Guru3D that contained it has been removed but reddit still has the image.

Edit

And some more:

http://imgur.com/a/FGkBF

And this:

[moremana]

Decent pricing. Next one I do is the 1600X, maybe the 1500X. Especially if I can find a MSI B350 Mortar.

[Fascinate]

Hmmm leaks were wrong then, pretty sure leaks had the 1500 being a 6 core part.

[Evildeffy]

Here's to hoping the 1400/1500X are actual 1 CCX dies and not a dual CCX part with 4 cores shut down.

This would decrease CPU complexity and very likely offer a more potent OC-able chip.

If it's the same die you'll get identical results as the Ryzen 7s.

Edit:
Though I honestly believe that Ryzen 5 is the same part and Ryzen 3 is the single CCX die.

[Fascinate]

Nvm i am a retread, i was looking at vid not vcore.

I really dislike HWinfo, i hope HWmonitor gets their stuff together soon so i can go back using that lol.

[MatthewOU2015]

The AMD subreddit is going crazy. Someone needs to remind them the wait for benchmarks. Intel is still king.

[Artorius]

The 4/8 SKUs are supposed to be single CCX.

[ovm33]

As I said a couple of weeks ago, the R5 series is where things get interesting. The 1600x looks to be an 7600k killer. Ten bucks more for 2c / 8t more? Even if the IPC is 5-10% lower I would take that deal any day of the week. The 1400 just roflstomps the 7300 / 7350k. Who in their right mind would choose a 2c / 4t chip, even with higher IPC, over a 4c / 8T chip?

[Gray_Matter]

The AMD subreddit is going crazy. Someone needs to remind them the wait for benchmarks. Intel is still king.

There is more to the story than who is "king". Very few people can afford or even want to buy the fastest processor. For the most part, it's about price/performance. A strong price/perf option from AMD is good for everyone, even those people who wouldn't touch AMD with a barge pole because at the very least, Intel will drop prices to remain competitive.

[Vash The Stampede]

Yea, I don't see a reason to buy Intel at this point. You pay $170 for what is essentially an i7. Good luck convincing people to buy Intel.

[moremana]

There is more to the story than who is "king". Very few people can afford or even want to buy the fastest processor. For the most part, it's about price/performance. A strong price/perf option from AMD is good for everyone, even those people who wouldn't touch AMD with a barge pole because at the very least, Intel will drop prices to remain competitive.

I actually don't think arrogant Intel will drop prices. The R5s are due in 3.5 weeks, the R7 has been out 3 weeks, they haven't budged on pricing. They must think if they do that means defeat and Intel cant handle that lol.

Yea, I don't see a reason to buy Intel at this point. You pay $170 for what is essentially an i7. Good luck convincing people to buy Intel.

I agree, no more Intel, at least until pricing and matched core/thread options become available to the mainstream market. Dual cores are so outdated but they stayed due to no competition. Those days are over.

[Evildeffy]

The 4/8 SKUs are supposed to be single CCX.

Any source on this?

Haven't seen any info regarding this.

[Vash The Stampede]

I agree, no more Intel, at least until pricing and matched core/thread options become available to the mainstream market. Dual cores are so outdated but they stayed due to no competition. Those days are over.

Yea the i5's and i3's need some serious repricing, and the i5's need hyperthreading. I don't even know what they'll do with Pentiums. Their quad core i7's need to go down tremendously in price. Then and only then can anyone here debate me about buying an Intel CPU.

This is Intel right now.

[Artorius]

Any source on this?

Haven't seen any info regarding this.

They used this slide some time ago:



And it is completely pointless if they're not releasing the 4/8 SKUs as single a CCX. One of the reasons they even went with CCXs was that they could split Zeppelin in two and have working quad-cores too. The other reason is being able to stack more of them and make larger SKUs like Naples.

But I mean, who knows. I'm saying "supposed" because that's what logic implies, but who knows really. I'm lazy to go look if they made any other statement of any kind.

[Life-Binder]

Zen 2 will have to convince me to buy it over 6c Coffee, not the other way around

[BicycleMafioso]

I hope they dont continue to prioritize low power/eff at 3 Ghz over 4.5-4.6+ clocks for Zen2

Im not a server, Im a home user/gamer and those clocks would be greatly appreciated


elsewise Intel will still be ahead in games no matter IPC improvements, especially when they roll 6c into mainstream

Having a good power efficiency will allow them to to push further, though. Hopefully, the new node-size does ineed lend itself for better clocks.

They also set up a target for IPC with Zen - they told their engineers that you needed 40% more IPC than Bulldozer.
The engineers said this was too high of a goal, but I think they landed somewhere around 52%~ right?
This is a huge jump and a great first step.
They'll only grow better once they don't have to pull something magic out of their hat and had to discard their entire CPU lineup and architecture and are able to reiterate and improve.

I haven't had a desktop AMD CPU since the AMD Athlon XP+ 1600+, but when I need to upgrade my CPU in a few years, Zen 3 or Zen 4 is looking like a good option unless something magical happens on the CPU market in terms of performance, my 4770k will have to chug along with its poor clocking performance.