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AMD Intel Power Hardware Technology

AMD Ryzen 7 Series Processor Reviews Go Live, Zen Looks Strong Vs Intel (hothardware.com) 175

MojoKid writes: AMD has finally lifted the veil on independent reviews of its new Ryzen series of desktop processors that bring the company's CPU architecture back more on competitive footing versus its rival, Intel's Core series. The initial family of Ryzen processors consists of three 8-core chips, the Ryzen 7 1800X at 3.6GHz with boost to 4.1GHz, the Ryzen 7 1700X at 3.4Ghz with boost to 3.8GHz, and the Ryzen 7 1700 at 3GHz with boost to 3.7GHz. Each has support for 2 threads per core, for a total of 16 threads with 16MB of L3 cache on-board, 512K of L2 and TDPs that range from 65 watts for the Ryzen 7 1700 at the low-end, on up to 95 watts for the 1700X and 1800X. In comparison to AMD's long-standing A-series APUs and FX-series processors, the new architecture is significantly more efficient and performant than any of AMD's previous desktop processor offerings. AMD designed the Zen microarchitecture at the heart of Ryzen with performance, throughput, and efficiency in mind. Initially, AMD had reported a 40% target for IPC (instructions per clock) improvement with Zen but actually realized about a 52% lift in overall performance. In the general compute workloads, rendering, and clock-for-clock comparisons, the Ryzen 7 1800X either outperformed or gives Intel's much more expensive Core i7-6900K a run for its money. The lower clock speeds of the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1700 obviously resulted in performance a notch behind the flagship 1800X, but those processors also performed quite well. Ryzen was especially strong in heavily threaded workloads like 3D rendering and Ray Tracing, but even in less strenuous tests like PCMark, the Ryzen 7 series competed favorably. It's not all good news, though. With some older code, audio encoding, lower-res gaming, and platform level tests, Ryzen trailed Intel -- sometimes by a wide margin. There's obviously still optimization work that needs to be done -- from both AMD and software developers.
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AMD Ryzen 7 Series Processor Reviews Go Live, Zen Looks Strong Vs Intel

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  • Then you start playing games then that strong hits a bit of a road block.
    • Re:strong til ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by andydread ( 758754 ) on Thursday March 02, 2017 @08:03PM (#53966953)
      some older games...and it still performed quite strong without optimization...and it's half the price of the $1000+ intel processor that it trailed by 20% but feel free to pay the extra $500 for 20% more performance for some older games.
      • Re:strong til ... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Thursday March 02, 2017 @08:10PM (#53966977)

        Looking more like crappy game code than crappy processor. Reviews show Ryzen doing particularly well on high quality settings. Regardless of gaming, which really is all about the GPU especially with Vulkan games coming down the pipe, Ryzen by all appearances is a kickass workstation chip at a gimme price. Because of Ryzen, I expect to pay less for my next desktop than my next phone.

        • Regardless of gaming, which really is all about the GPU especially with Vulkan games coming down the pipe, ...

          Vulkan has even another reason: it supports better multithreading, and Ryzen seems to shine under those circumstances.

          (That's also why older, more single-thread-oriented games don't work better)

        • Reviews show Ryzen doing particularly well on high quality settings.

          Those tend to be tests where the GPU - and not the CPU* - are bottlenecked. Did you only look at the graphs and not actually read the reviews?

          *Don't get me wrong; I'd still pick it over anything Intel for all but the priciest builds but I wouldn't mind seeing two more DDR4 channels and more PCI-E lanes added to the processor northbridge (as opposed to the motherboard chipset/southbridge)...

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by sexconker ( 1179573 )

        $500 R7 1800X vs $340 i7 7700k.

        http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwr... [gamersnexus.net]

        The 1800X is a shitty choice for gaming. Perhaps drivers, coptimized software, and more mature motherboards/BIOSes will help over time. AMD's shit does tend to improve with age, but there's a huge delta there.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Tough Love ( 215404 )

          Don't forget Vulkan, which effectively puts the CPU in the back seat. And there are lots of great Ryzen reviews [wccftech.com] out there, in contrast to the Intel dicksuck site you picked.

          • Re:strong til ... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday March 02, 2017 @09:01PM (#53967159) Homepage

            Don't forget Vulkan, which effectively puts the CPU in the back seat. And there are lots of great Ryzen reviews out there, in contrast to the Intel dicksuck site you picked.

            1. Links to wccftech (the 4chan of tech sites)
            2. Uses the word "dicksuck"
            3. A poor CPU is still a poor CPU after Vulkan

            And I say that as someone planning to buy a Ryzen.. is it perfect? No. But it's close enough that AMD deserves a sale so Intel doesn't get to monopolize the high end again. Just deciding on whether I'll hold out for Vega or not...

        • Re:strong til ... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Thursday March 02, 2017 @08:50PM (#53967097)

          > $500 R7 1800X vs $340 i7 7700k.

          The 1800X is like 8 cores to the 7700K's 4 cores. The 7700K, having half the cores, will presumably do better on single threaded tasks, such as the benchmarks in question. Future code, especially that which makes requests to the GPU in a multithreaded fashion, will perform better with more damned cores. For single threaded (or basically that), the 7700K also blows away Intel's 6950X, their top desktop CPU offering with 10 cores.

          A better comparison per price point would be the 1700X or 1700 to the 7700K. Again, you find that the 8 core chip blows away the 4 core chip on multiprocessing, with less amazing results from a single thread.

          There's a ton of applications that scale well with cores, and games will begin to do so more in the future. There will always be tasks that can't be parallelized, but the question is, when do they matter versus the ones that can? The question of cores versus speed per dollar is about as old as CPUs, and the answer is always "what is your use case".

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I wish they would offer more PCIe lanes though. Intel isn't any better. Top end Ryzen mobos give you one 16/8x8 slot for a GPU or two, a 4x slot and a few 1x slots. Apparently the combo of 16x GPU and 8x RAID card isn't catered for.

            • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
              Who honestly uses a RAID card on a desktop system these days? Software RAID does everything you need, and just works with no noticeable performance hit for the most common desktop RAID0/1/10 configurations, with no expensive hardware needed. Servers with HA requirements I wouldn't run without them.
          • No, the answer is that single threaded is nearly always more important than multi-threaded, because you are doing single threaded tasks about 99% of the time.
            Even tasks that are multi-threaded benefit from having good single threaded performance.
            The best scenario is having a CPU that is good at both. (but it's not the only thing, memory and cache is also important)
            From what I read in the reviews is that AMD has improved their single threaded performance by 50%, which brings it close to Broadwell levels. Tha

            • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
              Single threaded performance is benchmark for how fast a single unit of work can be done. Multi-threaded is how many units you can do simultaneously. Games have notoriously been single threaded for ever, because it's a lot easier to program a linear algorithm and keep memory use clean. when you go parallel, there's all sorts of fun involved, especially if you're simultaneously doing multiple tasks on the same in memory data. Most developers have trouble with the linear algorithm already.
              • by cfalcon ( 779563 )

                > Games have notoriously been single threaded for ever, because it's a lot easier to program a linear algorithm and keep memory use clean.

                Some things games have to do are fundamentally single threaded, but you are correct: it's easier to program a single thread, and often the gain from another thread doesn't help much. 3D games are a little different, because much of the CPU tasking involves doing stuff so that data can be pushed to the graphics card. Those scale VERY well with extra cores, but only i

                • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

                  An example is the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. ...inter In an area where there's a ton of players, your frame rate drops below 60 fps, and sometimes even below 30 fps, and the graphics card fan is silent.

                  That case is exactly where an asynchronous model would excel, keeping the framerate steady and offloading all object rendering to external pieces. It should be easy enough to do so, but the re-assembly is where it gets hard. However, that still doesn't get around the base issue that 100K+ things are being rendered for a frame when only a few hundred, at most, will ever be seen. Those particular game devs only know 1 way to solve a problem, which is the core problem.

            • by cfalcon ( 779563 )

              > No, the answer is that single threaded is nearly always more important than multi-threaded, because you are doing single threaded tasks about 99% of the time.

              The answer is nowhere near that simple. If your single threaded task is any manner of I/O bound- disk, network, or memory, then you can't speed it up any further with a faster CPU, on clock or IPC. If PARTS of it are bound in those ways, then a faster processor will help, but not linearly.

              But in general, if you had a choice between a 4 GHz 8 core

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Look at the delta from i7 7700k to R7 1800X to FX-8370. It's a reminder of how far AMD has come.

          And if the best thing that comes out of Ryzen is that Intel lowers its prices, then we all win anyway.

          I'll probably pick up an R7 1700 or the R5 later this year, because yes I'm an AMD fanboy.

      • Plus anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows you'll get better bang for the buck throwing that extra $500 at a good video card on the Ryzan box instead of dumping it into minor gains on the CPU side with Intel.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 02, 2017 @09:44PM (#53967341)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re:strong til ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by David_Hart ( 1184661 ) on Thursday March 02, 2017 @10:39PM (#53967511)

        The "bad" review? Was from hothardware....you ever went to that site without adblock? Last time I did the entire page was NOTHING but Intel ads.

        From what I've seen there is 4 sites you should never listen to, hothardware, Ars Technica, and the worst are Tom's Hardware (where their "expert" told a person asking what CPU to buy for GAMING that he should buy a Pentium dual core over a lower priced AMD X6 even though he admitted that most games the person wanted to play required a quad) and Anandtech who went so far as to drop several new triple A titles from their benchmark that so happened to play better on AMD hardware and replaced them with older titles that were expressly built with Nvidia Gameworks (which has been shown to have "cripple AMD" code baked in)...you wanna guess who their biggest advertiser is?

        Its sad that I have to even say this but you really have to do some digging before you can actually take any "news" as credible as we have had so many cozy deals with advertisers and companies affiliated with those they are reviewing that a good chunk of what you see and hear these days is just corporate propaganda or FUD.

        Toms Hardware is excellent, from my experience, for their hardware reviews. I've been building my own systems for a long time now and have used their reviews as primary source for selecting hardware components and have never had a problem with their findings. As for their "forum experts", I've had no experience with them. Saying that a whole site is horrible based on one bad experience is a tad on the extreme side, though.

        From a PC gaming perspective, until recently, very few games have taken full advantage of multi-core processors. Even if a game uses multi-core, they tend to be poorly optimized such that the load is not spread evenly across all cores. Your still better off getting the fastest CPU that you can buy even if it means getting a quad-core vs an octa-core.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          What he's talking about is obvious bias towards particular builds rather than empirical comparisons involving $ amounts as a divisor of performance numerals, rather than simply a small subset/collection of intentionally skewed benchmarks to make a case for something that in effect is an artifact of the analysis.

          If you want fanboyism you will find it in every flavor. Including integrated into specific benchmarking applications, intentionally. Do the reviewers know enough about the underlying use-cases to a

          • by Anonymous Coward

            I would really like a Ryzen gaming system with top of the line Nvidia graphics. I'm going to ask my dad tomorrow to buy me one. He's in the hospital with something wrong with his kidney. The family wants me to get tested to see if I could donate a kidney. If he says no to me, I'm going tell him straight out, no gaming system, no kidney. He can go fuck him self. Fucking old bastard.

        • Not all tasks can simply be split out in parallel. I mean you can see that with physical tasks, just like computer tasks: Some things just have to be done in sequence, you can't speed them up by doing them at the same time.

          Well with some kinds of games it may well be there's only so much you can spin off to run in parallel and you are still going to have one or two threads that hit the hardest, so they'll be the limiting factor.

          Now that said, it looks like this processor is still plenty fast enough for gami

      • by epine ( 68316 )

        From what I've seen there is 4 sites you should never listen to

        I don't know what you're on about (or your ulterior motive), but I just read Peter Bright's summary on Ars, and it was just fine—yeoman's work—modulo 2017. BTW, "never" is a long time and a broad brush and also a brush that points in both directions.

        I miss Jon Stokes from way back something fierce, but that's not even true: I miss the era where the articles that Jon Stokes was writing could be written. AK-47[*], more than a billion

      • by Anonymous Coward

        No wonder I saw (and recognized) 3 of these 4 sites top of my first 'ryzen' search today! (Ars, Anand and Tom). I'm new to PC building and so I'm not aware who are the Intel shills. Thanks for the enlightenment!

      • To be honest Hairy I have not seen 1 positive review for games.

        Tomshardware did not totally bash it. It mentioned it as a big improvement and great workhorse CPU.

        The Joker did another video here [youtube.com] and I made a comment after I noticed something? This was evident in the last game tested but I noticed in Tom Clancy's THe Division cpu utilization was higher on the Intel while lower on the 1st core for Ryzen

        "I think I figured out what Ryzen's issue is? Look at the CPU core usage? On the Ryzen the first core has a

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Pfff. This is all garbage. A half decent CPU is all you need for gaming these days. The real grunt work is all done on the GPU - and it's getting more and more the case.

      CPUs these days are close to being irrelevant - and Intel knows it - even though they've done their best to convince people it's not the case. Monster processing tasks are all GPU based - and you shove in a mediocre CPU with multiple cores to coordinate things.

  • Freedom of choice (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Ryzen isn't quite perfect but it's nice that AMD has burned their white flag of surrender and once again gotten fit to fight against chipzilla.

  • by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Thursday March 02, 2017 @08:22PM (#53967011)

    I have a feeling feeding a multi GPU rig will show some of its muscles. STH has some nice benchmarks showing it holding its own against a lot of Xeons.

  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday March 02, 2017 @08:33PM (#53967041) Homepage Journal

    After a while the virtualization code I was working with just stopped being maintained upstream for AMD because the value proposition was just so ludicrously bad vs. Intel and nobody was using them.

    Has AMD, perchance, contributed code to KVM or Xen to get a running start or are we going to be waiting until after Intel's next chip rev. before Zen stands a chance again in this arena (at which point, it's already lost its advantage)?

  • all intel has to do is use the headstart money from the i-series whatever all the names were slash the price on i7, make i5 the new celeron even if selling it virtually no profit http://www.tomshardware.com/re... [tomshardware.com] and bob's amd's uncle
    • Just what Intel needs, even more of its fabs not making any money for them, except this time its on purpose?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Certainly good to see AMD come out with a real positive chip for a change. Still early yet, and Ryzen is more a chip for desktops and gamer's. But it's going to go up against Intel pretty well which has to be good for end users.

  • This just in... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02, 2017 @10:44PM (#53967541)

    Intel releases the 8-core i7-7900K for $499 which blows all the Ryzen 7 1800X away in every performance metric...
    This is not probably too far off, and based on single threaded performance of the i7-7700K which is already 18% faster than the 1800X, an 8-core i7-7900K (if the price was right) would push AMD's best back to being #2...

    However, the good news will be Ryzen will be a strong enough competitor to force chipzilla into a pricing war, and that'll make every buyer happier, no matter which horse you back.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 )

      still need to up the pci-e lanes. 16 + DMI is to low. and give the Skylake-X cpus 44 in ALL cpus.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      "which blows all the Ryzen 7 1800X away in every performance metric..." - WRONG.

      • You're saying his hypothetical headline for a fake chip is wrong? Really? What next, point out that Huckleberry Finn is a work of fiction?

    • by Melkman ( 82959 )

      The i7-7700k runs at a turbo frequency of 4.5GHz. Thats 10% faster than the maximum frequency of the X1800. The rest of the performance gain is better IPC. However the i7700K also has a TDP of 91W which is almost the same as the 95W TDP of the X1800. If intel doubles that chip it will melt down unless they scale back the clock speed. And you wind up with something that performs less than the i7-9600 which performs at about the same level as the X1800. So nope, not going to happen any time soon. What I'm won

      • by Anonymous Coward

        AMD's TDP != Intel's TDP

        Or, maybe TDP does, power consumption definitely does not.
        65W 1700 ends up using a bit more power than 91W 7700K.
        95W 1700x/1800x are using power roughly in the same range as 140W 6900K.

      • All Intel has to do to accommodate more power is replace their crappy thermal interface material with something better, or use solder like AMD does. Die temperature under heavy load drops from 95 C to 65 C in some cases.
    • Yeah, but that won't happen til next year... by which time AMD have Zen2

  • by Anonymous Coward

    "AMD multithread optimized games" is right up there with "Year of Linux desktop".

  • Going through the benchmarks, it appears that AMD has really developed an architecture that was built with the datacenter/server/virtualization/HPC world in mind. It crushes Intel 6900k on some of the intensive Floating Point and computational processes that utilize all the cores efficiently. While on the desktop this may not be as crucial, in the server/hpc/virtualization world this huge. The new 'Naples' server chip, if it performs as well as the Ryzen, will be a major competitor to Intel in the HPC, c
  • I have an aging Sandybridge Quad. From the the benchmarks I've ready, the Ryzen will be a slight upgrade for me in gaming.

    Obviously, when I edit and compress video, as I often do when starting a youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCALWDnHfbhcpdPco0cXIeOQ/videos?sort=dd&view=0&shelf_id=0

    ...and raytrace images from Rhino 3D, compress music, it will quite an upgrade.

    I am glad AMD is competitive again because I like competition in the marketplace.

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