AMD Zen Discussion Thread

Lu Tze

EoinHef wrote: »

Im wondering how much use all these cores are going to be for games,even ones coming out over the next year or so. Its only performance in that department that interests me,when you see i3's performing exactly the same as i7's im thinking that bar the odd outlier that most games will perform similarly on a ryzen quad core as they will on a ryzen octo core.

You are probably right, but most of us would run some software which would make use off it, or multiple programs simultaneously. That said, I'll not be upgrading for a good while, a 3770 still doing me fine, and not bottlenecking me in anything, or rarely at least.

BloodBath

EoinHef wrote: »

Im wondering how much use all these cores are going to be for games,even ones coming out over the next year or so. Its only performance in that department that interests me,when you see i3's performing exactly the same as i7's im thinking that bar the odd outlier that most games will perform similarly on a ryzen quad core as they will on a ryzen octo core.

8 real cores are going to be better than 4 with SMT though but I doubt many games use anything past 4 cores heavily. The SMT on the 8/16's is not gonna do much for gaming.

I'm thinking the 6/12 will be the sweet spot for price/performance in the high end while being easier to cool and overclock. The 4/8's should be the go to processor for mid range gaming PC's and the cheapest 4/4 for budget builds.

We'll have to see if the XFR is worth paying a premium for or whether manual overclocking will achieve similar results.

EoinHef

Lu Tze wrote: »

You are probably right, but most of us would run some software which would make use off it, or multiple programs simultaneously. That said, I'll not be upgrading for a good while, a 3770 still doing me fine, and not bottlenecking me in anything, or rarely at least.

Oh yeah im sure theres plenty of people who could make use of the cores,just cant see lots of games taking much advantage for awhile yet.

On ivy bridge myself,3570K,its been really good to me but ive decided to upgrade this year while i can still get a few bob for the old gear. Ill be waiting for Ryzen benches to make a final decision what way im going to go.

The way its looking to me now though a lot is going to depend on pricing in the EU. Like the RX480 was supposed to be a $200 card,not in the bloody EU it isnt,no reason to think ryzen wont be the same imo.

wotzgoingon

I was all set on the 1700X last night until I seen the euro prices today.

Now I'm just thinking to myself do I need to upgrade as my current PC is fine. Plays all games perfectly.

I will wait for reviews and then reviews from general users on different forums. If people start raving about how good their new CPU is then I may budge and bite the bullet. But as I said I am on the fence atm as my current setup is fine.

Lu Tze

EoinHef wrote: »

Oh yeah im sure theres plenty of people who could make use of the cores,just cant see lots of games taking much advantage for awhile yet.

On ivy bridge myself,3570K,its been really good to me but ive decided to upgrade this year while i can still get a few bob for the old gear. Ill be waiting for Ryzen benches to make a final decision what way im going to go.

The way its looking to me now though a lot is going to depend on pricing in the EU. Like the RX480 was supposed to be a $200 card,not in the bloody EU it isnt,no reason to think ryzen wont be the same imo.

If you don't nees the extra cores go with that new overclockable i3 and over clock the bejaysis out of it! Or one of the 4c ryzens seeing as they are all unlocked.

I reckon we won't know really how good or how much value they are until some legit reviews start to land

EoinHef

BloodBath wrote: »

8 real cores are going to be better than 4 with SMT though but I doubt many games use anything past 4 cores heavily. The SMT on the 8/16's is not gonna do much for gaming.

I'm thinking the 6/12 will be the sweet spot for price/performance in the high end while being easier to cool and overclock. The 4/8's should be the go to processor for mid range gaming PC's and the cheapest 4/4 for budget builds.

We'll have to see if the XFR is worth paying a premium for or whether manual overclocking will achieve similar results.

Yeah the overclocking potential is going to be important,if games are not going to use all the cores at least could get more from them with clock speeds. Was delighted to see they are going to unlock the multipliers across the range,very consumer friendly.

Hopefully the single core performance is up to it,if its not with games only starting to make use of a lot of cores i feel ryzen may not be great for gaming currently. That may change of course over the next few years. Be just like AMD to release something that gets better over time rather than concentrating on the now.

EoinHef

Lu Tze wrote: »

If you don't nees the extra cores go with that new overclockable i3 and over clock the bejaysis out of it! Or one of the 4c ryzens seeing as they are all unlocked.

I reckon we won't know really how good or how much value they are until some legit reviews start to land

For me the new i3 k sku is too close in price to the i5's,four genuine cores for a very similar price sounds like a better deal for me,givin the clock speeds of the i5's out of the box.

The 4c\8t or 6c\12t ryzen if we can overclock the pants off them would interest me. After that i feel anymore cores would be wasted on my machine. Be interesting to see how they line up against the 7600k and 7700k. For gaming i think thats going to be the most competitive section of the line ups. Then the i3 vs the 4c ryzen for the budget end.

dazberry

Budget wise I had a figure in my mind of ~around~ €350 for a new cpu, so it looks like a toss up between a 1700 8/16 or a 1600X 6/12. I'll be replacing a Phenom II x6 so leaning towards the 8/16 but I'll be reading the reviews and make a call then. Board wise I'll be looking mid-range, just need something that will eventually take 64GB and 6 SATA ports, should be able to pickup a B350 for less than €100, and 32GB DDR4 initially.

I bought 120 AMD shares last June to help fund this, while their shares can be a bit volatile, I'm hoping they take a bit of a stretch when Ryzen finally appears, hope to only flog half to put towards this build, and the remainder next year towards something else - all my kit is either AM2+ or AM3+ so it all needs a refresh.

D.

smacl

dazberry wrote: »

Budget wise I had a figure in my mind of ~around~ €350 for a new cpu, so it looks like a toss up between a 1700 8/16 or a 1600X 6/12. I'll be replacing a Phenom II x6 so leaning towards the 8/16 but I'll be reading the reviews and make a call then. Board wise I'll be looking mid-range, just need something that will eventually take 64GB and 6 SATA ports, should be able to pickup a B350 for less than €100, and 32GB DDR4 initially.

Interesting, currently running an 8350 @ 4ghz on my main development PC on Windows 7. Might do something like this when I'm upgrading to Windows 10, something I've been putting off for awhile now. Most important thing for me is multi-core performance, as the software I develop and tools I'm using are heavily multi-threaded. So couple of questions for those with more knowledge than myself;

- I wonder how much of the current build I could keep? Obviously case, PSU, drives, and graphics card but what about RAM? Currently have 32gb but not sure on spec.

- There are no Win7 drivers for the Zen, would this mean that Win7 wouldn't run at all, or just that it would run sub-optimally with generic drivers? Reason I ask is that normally on a big OS upgrade I stick a new drive in, install to that, and keep the old drive as a 2nd boot option for legacy installations.

FWIW, the original plan for replacement was this 32 thread xeon build which would be a fantastic PC for my needs but quite a bit more expensive.

K.O.Kiki

smacl wrote: »

Interesting, currently running an 8350 @ 4ghz on my main development PC on Windows 7. Might do something like this when I'm upgrading to Windows 10, something I've been putting off for awhile now. Most important thing for me is multi-core performance, as the software I develop and tools I'm using are heavily multi-threaded. So couple of questions for those with more knowledge than myself;

- I wonder how much of the current build I could keep? Obviously case, PSU, drives, and graphics card but what about RAM? Currently have 32gb but not sure on spec.

- There are no Win7 drivers for the Zen, would this mean that Win7 wouldn't run at all, or just that it would run sub-optimally with generic drivers? Reason I ask is that normally on a big OS upgrade I stick a new drive in, install to that, and keep the old drive as a 2nd boot option for legacy installations.

FWIW, the original plan for replacement was this 32 thread xeon build which would be a fantastic PC for my needs but quite a bit more expensive.

Your RAM is DDR3 so you can't use it on AM4 motherboards; however you should still get a good price for it on the 2nd-hand market (new kits are hovering around €170 on e-tailers).

AlmightyCushion

Does all this talk about Zen remind anyone of when Intel launched Conroe. Before Conroe Intel were the ones releasing poor performing chips that used too much power and produced too much heat whereas AMD chips were the better chips in pretty much every metric and benchmark. Then Intel hyped Conroe and the benchmarks and figures released/leaked looked way too good to be true. Turned out Conroe lived up to if not exceeded the hype. Hopefully, we see something similar from AMD with Zen.

smacl

BloodBath wrote: »

8 real cores are going to be better than 4 with SMT though but I doubt many games use anything past 4 cores heavily. The SMT on the 8/16's is not gonna do much for gaming.

Depends whether you're talking about last years games, or those coming out this year or next year. FWIW, I'm a full time developer involved in high performance geospatial apps (not gaming), and more and more of the libraries and algorithms on which 3d modelling are based are moving from single threaded to multi-threaded for performance gains. To be fair, a lot are also moving to the GPU, but my feeling is going forward high performance applications will be using all the available power from GPU and CPU. Also worth remembering that as 4k becomes mainstream the poor old GPU has its hands full dealing with ~8.3 megapixels where it previously only has ~2.1 on 1080p, which leave's it with little surplus processing power. Just my opinion, but going forward CPU performance gains will be based more number of cores than performance per core.

Cuddlesworth

Looking more likely to happen in the next few years. Quite of a few of the AAA titles this year have shown good multi-threaded performance, the Division being a shining example of it. Far Cry even demanding four threads just to to run.

Unfortunately for AMD, they bet on that happening a long time before this and lost.

smacl

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Unfortunately for AMD, they bet on that happening a long time before this and lost.

They weren't the only ones. Anyone else here old enough to remember the transputer when it first came out, and how computing would never be the same again?

BloodBath

smacl wrote: »

Depends whether you're talking about last years games, or those coming out this year or next year. FWIW, I'm a full time developer involved in high performance geospatial apps (not gaming), and more and more of the libraries and algorithms on which 3d modelling are based are moving from single threaded to multi-threaded for performance gains. To be fair, a lot are also moving to the GPU, but my feeling is going forward high performance applications will be using all the available power from GPU and CPU. Also worth remembering that as 4k becomes mainstream the poor old GPU has its hands full dealing with ~8.3 megapixels where it previously only has ~2.1 on 1080p, which leave's it with little surplus processing power. Just my opinion, but going forward CPU performance gains will be based more number of cores than performance per core.

That may be true but in terms of gaming it usually boils down to the lowest common denominator which is consoles and whatever the rough average core count is in PC gaming which is still under 4 cores.

You will not see any games utilize more than 8 threads for at least another 5 years imo. The ones that use 8 currently only use 4 heavily.

smacl

BloodBath wrote: »

That may be true but in terms of gaming it usually boils down to the lowest common denominator which is consoles and whatever the rough average core count is in PC gaming which is still under 4 cores.

You will not see any games utilize more than 8 threads for at least another 5 years imo. The ones that use 8 currently only use 4 heavily.

Not so. Multi-threading can be applied in two different ways, the first is where you have different threads doing different things (e.g. a thread handling UI, another handling culling, another handling I/O etc...) in which case what you say is true. The other case is where multi-threading is applied to a parallel algorithm or library, e.g. parallel meshing, where you have a number of threads sharing the workload for a single task. In this case, the program will use as many threads as are available, quite often using a multiple of the number of physically available threads in order to balance the load. In this case, a program originally written for a four core processor will be much faster on a CPU with eight cores. The focus of most multi-threaded development today is in parallelization of algorithms which then scale to the number of available processors / cores / threads.

BloodBath

smacl wrote: »

Not so. Multi-threading can be applied in two different ways, the first is where you have different threads doing different things (e.g. a thread handling UI, another handling culling, another handling I/O etc...) in which case what you say is true. The other case is where multi-threading is applied to a parallel algorithm or library, e.g. parallel meshing, where you have a number of threads sharing the workload for a single task. In this case, the program will use as many threads as are available, quite often using a multiple of the number of physically available threads in order to balance the load. In this case, a program originally written for a four core processor will be much faster on a CPU with eight cores. The focus of most multi-threaded development today is in parallelization of algorithms which then scale to the number of available processors / cores / threads.

We're not talking about other programs that can do that though are we? We're talking about games here. Show me an example in a game that can dynamically shift the load between cores like this.

There is a reason why IPC and clock speeds are still king in the world of gaming.

smacl

BloodBath wrote: »

There is a reason why IPC and clock speeds are still king in the world of gaming.

Not saying they're not, but don't see that being the case going forward. Game engines are already being parallelized, as described in this Intel article for example, and once this happens at the engine level for the next cut of game engines out there, all the games that sit on those engines will benefit. Anybodies guess when exactly this will happen, I'd think sooner rather than later, but then its something I'm already using on other 3d modelling projects. Clock speeds haven't changed much in the last couple of years, and IPCs have improved primarily through vectorization which is really just the programmers passing the buck for parallelization back to the hardware boys. For future performance gains more cores running at full tilt is going to provide a far better return than marginal gains on single core IPC. Given the advent of 4k resolution on larger screens, demand for processing power has jumped and GPUs are struggling.

Venom

smacl wrote: »

Not saying they're not, but don't see that being the case going forward. Game engines are already being parallelized, as described in this Intel article for example, and once this happens at the engine level for the next cut of game engines out there, all the games that sit on those engines will benefit. Anybodies guess when exactly this will happen, I'd think sooner rather than later, but then its something I'm already using on other 3d modelling projects. Clock speeds haven't changed much in the last couple of years, and IPCs have improved primarily through vectorization which is really just the programmers passing the buck for parallelization back to the hardware boys. For future performance gains more cores running at full tilt is going to provide a far better return than marginal gains on single core IPC. Given the advent of 4k resolution on larger screens, demand for processing power has jumped and GPUs are struggling.

That's all well and good but 4 core+ chips have been around for years and 99% of games still don't make use of the extra cores. AMD offering 6/8/12 cores even at a lower price to Intel, is not going to change that.

smacl

Venom wrote: »

That's all well and good but 4 core+ chips have been around for years and 99% of games still don't make use of the extra cores. AMD offering 6/8/12 cores even at a lower price to Intel, is not going to change that.

True, but the main reason is programmers struggling to get to grips with developing robust and effective multi-threaded code which is not easy. This is changing as the libraries and game engines they use become multi-threaded, so basically for games programmers most of the hard work is done for them and these techniques become better understood. For example, the following discussion on multi-threading in the Unreal engine exhibits a difference of 90fps versus 40fps for single threaded vs multithreaded versions of the same sample code. Also the gains are linearly proportional to the number of threads minus a bit for synchronisation costs. What this means is that multi-threaded routine on a CPU with 16 threads could run close on 16 times faster than the single threaded version, which is not a performance gain that can be easily ignored if the CPU is competitively priced.

z0oT

I'm having a hard time believing that AMD's new processors will be extremely competitive with Intel's in a significantly lower power envelope (140W vs 95W) at a much lower price point.

However the leaks are coming fast and strong now and have been originating from several sources so it certainly looks as if that is the case.

I won't believe until I see benchmarks though. :P

Serephucus

To be fair TDP (especially from Intel), means feck-all.

Take the 6950X. This 10 core, 20 thread 3.5GHz monster has a TDP of 140W despite the 6800K (a 6/12 CPU with similar clock speed) having the exact same TDP.

I'd imagine it'll be similar with AMD; "They're more what'cha call guidelines anyway".

smacl

Serephucus wrote: »

I'd imagine it'll be similar with AMD; "They're more what'cha call guidelines anyway".

Hopefully better than FX-8350 which runs hot and isn't up to sustained load with all cores at 100% unless you've an after market cooler.

Cuddlesworth

Serephucus wrote: »

To be fair TDP (especially from Intel), means feck-all.

Take the 6950X. This 10 core, 20 thread 3.5GHz monster has a TDP of 140W despite the 6800K (a 6/12 CPU with similar clock speed) having the exact same TDP.

I'd imagine it'll be similar with AMD; "They're more what'cha call guidelines anyway".

Power is complicated, it scales with frequency and is squared with voltage I think.

But I'm pretty sure they are the exact same chip, just that one has 6 working cores and 1 has 10. They don't go into the process saying we are going to make a x core chip. They come away from the binning testing to see how many chips have working cores.

Serephucus

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Power is complicated, it scales with frequency and is squared with voltage I think.

But I'm pretty sure they are the exact same chip, just that one has 6 working cores and 1 has 10. They don't go into the process saying we are going to make a x core chip. They come away from the binning testing to see how many chips have working cores.

Sure, but that doesn't mean they couldn't give a slightly more accurate TDP figure for whatever chips come out of the binning process.

BloodBath

Some gaming benchmarks have been leaked. These were on the low clocked 8/16 engineering samples at 3.15ghz base and 3.4ghz boost which is well below what the final clocks will be. They are supposed to overclock to 4.3 - 4.5Ghz easily on air on all cores as well.

Clock for clock it's looking like it really is close to being on par with the 6900k. The 3.6/4ghz top end model should beat out the 6900k out of the box at half the price coming with a far superior and much better looking cooler.



http://www.techradar.com/news/amds-ryzen-benchmarks-get-leaked-and-theyre-jaw-dropping

Icyseanfitz

maybe im just not getting it but from that graph it looks pretty bad, 300mhz behind the 6900k and 10% slower, worse than a i5 6600???

Serephucus

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

maybe im just not getting it but from that graph it looks pretty bad, 300mhz behind the 6900k and 10% slower, worse than a i5 6600???

It's about 10% slower in performance vs 6900K, but it's also about 10% slower in clock speed too, so this is about what's expected. As for being slower than the i5? Something something threaded optimisation.

Xenoronin

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

maybe im just not getting it but from that graph it looks pretty bad, 300mhz behind the 6900k and 10% slower, worse than a i5 6600???

Look at it this way instead, 10% off a 6900K while being half the price and underclocked quite significantly, and being an engineering sample.

Edit: Also, the graph is an average of 7 different games, so it's not that great a graph other than to average it as a gaming chip. So in this case, it is among the top intel chips, while applying the brakes, and with an unoptimised environment (early bios).

Icyseanfitz

guess i was hoping they would match intel ipc performance, but from that my 6700k @ 4.4 will be much better for gaming. but as ye said it was an engineering sample with lower clocks, maybe the memory was crappy, maybe turbo/xfc wasnt working right. Guess we wont know until the actual benchmarks are out. Just shocking to see a graph where intel have the top 6 out of 11 cpu's after all this hype