AMD Ryzen - New CPU Series that is cheaper but better then Intel Core I Series

[ZeTeX]

Better performance for cheaper, Intel now will have probably no other choice but to reduce the prices significantly or release new series that can compete.
But we still don't know if there is any problems in the Ryzen series, who knows, it might not explode like Samsung note but something else.

[BradC]

Don't get me wrong. I'm an AMD fan from way back and my main workhorse is still an FX-8350 from 2012. But..... let's wait for the reviews before we crown it king.

Yes, I'm as excited as the next bloke, and I've hovered over that pre-order shopping cart more than once in the last week or so, but having 2 phenoms, a bulldozer and a piledriver in the shed (the two later are still 24/7 machines), I want some hard proof before I drop another grand on more AMD kit.

[Augustus]

How's the power consumption of these? I don't care if it's slightly faster than Intels offerings if it runs hot like hell... 

[Ampera]

How's the power consumption of these? I don't care if it's slightly faster than Intels offerings if it runs hot like hell... 

Fairly low and good. They are a great series of chips for AMD. The socket is actually stupid though. PGA sucks, and it's REALLY dense.

My i7-4790k is still a budget performer, and it's gonna last me several years more.

[wraper]

How's the power consumption of these? I don't care if it's slightly faster than Intels offerings if it runs hot like hell... 

They consume less power than intel counterparts.

[bibz]

AMD's hype machine is rolling out but noone has any actual results from it. They've cherry picked the numbers, ramped up the taglines, but I haven't seen a single real world result. It's worrying imo that their banking on preorders pretty hard with a selected paper launch.

I do hope for great bang for buck though. Happy to have competition, Intel really doesn't see much progress from the CPU division unless you spend waayy big bickies. I think these Ryzens will be great for the multicore nerds. Unfortunately I'm still limited by the per thread clock speed of cpu's still.

[wraper]

PGA sucks, and it's REALLY dense.

Cannot agree, considering how often socket pins get bent on intel mobos.

[rollatorwieltje]

How's the power consumption of these? I don't care if it's slightly faster than Intels offerings if it runs hot like hell... 

direct comparison according to this article.

Ryzen 7 1800X: 95W, Core i7 6900K: 140W
Ryzen 7 1700X: 95W, Core i7 6800K: 140W
Ryzen 7 1700: 65W, Core i7 7700K: 91W

So the Ryzen appears to consume less power as well.

Still would like to see some real world results, especially single threaded performance. But it's good that there's finally some competition, CPU performance has stagnated for years now. My I5 2500 is still on the same chart when comparing it to more recent CPUs (in a similar price bracket of course), even though it's 5 years old. Most performance gains seem to have come from faster memory.

[Howardlong]

I agree, it needs to be out in the wild, not just a few leaks and limited invitation-only controlled tests.

Although there are a number of people with press kits, as far as I am aware they're currently locked into an NDA regarding performance.

Having said that, with the limited results available so far, if they turn out to be reliable, are a very good indication that'll have Intel on the backfoot regarding pricing, particularly on Broadwell-E, which has turned out to be quite a damp squib as the previous Haswell-E performs significantly better once overclocked.

Cooling a 95W TDP processor is going to be a lot easier than a 140W Broadwell-E.

[wraper]

Intel is already cutting prices on i7 and i5, so Ryzen should be very good, obviously.
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/56440/intel-rocked-core-over-ryzen-price-drops-begin/index.html

[MarkS]

LinusTechTips is known for having a strong pro-AMD bias. I'm interested in this architecture as well, but let's wait for actual real-world tests and not give biased videos weight.

[brucehoult]

How's the power consumption of these? I don't care if it's slightly faster than Intels offerings if it runs hot like hell... 

Fairly low and good. They are a great series of chips for AMD. The socket is actually stupid though. PGA sucks, and it's REALLY dense.

My i7-4790k is still a budget performer, and it's gonna last me several years more.

Ryzen doesn't have anything to touch the 4790K (or 6700K, or 7700K) if your task uses four threads or fewer.

If you don't have one of those then the top Ryzen will match your i7 for lightly-threaded tasks, and blow it away for things that can use all eight cores. And be cheaper.

The problem is most tasks *are* lightly threaded and four cores is usually plenty. Video compression/transcoding/filters is one of the few reasonably common non-benchmark tasks that can use more than four cores.

With the recent move to cmake and ninja, building software is starting to be able to use more cores effectively. Still, the common case is rebuilding only a couple of object files and linking ... and both running cmake initially and the linker at the end is where most of the time goes, and a single 4.5 GHz core is way more useful than 100 3.0 GHz ones.

[Howardlong]

It depends on your use case and workflow. If you're a gamer running only one application at a time then yes, there's generally little point going beyond four cores.

But not everyone's using their machine for gaming.

If you're a developer or content creator, there are reasons to benefit from increased cores count, partially because the software can benefit from those extra cores, but mostly because your workflow frequently includes performing multiple tasks simultaneously.

As a developer, it's also not at all uncommon to have VMs running, a case where multiple cores comes into its own.

In the past couple of weeks I updated my daily driver desktop from an Ivy Bridge I7 4C/8T to a 6800K after evaluating the 5820K, 6700K and mich more recently the 7700K. While I may yet put the 5820K back in (despite being older it overclocks far better than the 6800K), I found the 6700K/7700K still limited my workflow in the more extreme scenarios, typically when using multiple VMs.

I still would hold fire on Ryzen until it's had time to settle in. For example, it wasn't clear until some weeks after Broadwell-E was released that it was a crap overclocker compared the the previous Haswell-E, and that you're generally better off going for the Haswell-E series if overclcoking is your thing.

[thm_w]

Fairly low and good. They are a great series of chips for AMD. The socket is actually stupid though. PGA sucks, and it's REALLY dense.

Does anyone know specifics?
AMD used LGA for opteron because it was such a high pin count (1,900) and PGA for everything else.
But it seems to me the cost of producing PGA be lower overall, and the pin count is high for AM4 (1,334).

[Ampera]

PGA sucks, and it's REALLY dense.

Cannot agree, considering how often socket pins get bent on intel mobos.

Which would you rather replace, 100-300 USD motherboard, or 300-1500USD CPU?

[David Hess]

What about ECC support on socket AM4 processors?

[wraper]

What about ECC support on socket AM4 processors?

It's not certain. Gygabyte, for example, says that motherboards support unbuffered ECC RAM but it will work without ECC.

Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules (operate in non-ECC mode)

Asrock on the other hand says ECC RAM is supported (without mentioning if ECC is functional). AMD refuses to answer until release. So we need a few days to know for sure.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLIac/#Specification

- Supports DDR4 2667/2400/2133 ECC & non-ECC un-buffered memory

[Ampera]

Does it support my 72 pin SIMMs? It's FPM, so it should be compatible.

[David Hess]

What about ECC support on socket AM4 processors?

It's not certain. Gygabyte, for example, says that motherboards support unbuffered ECC RAM but it will work without ECC.

Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules (operate in non-ECC mode)

Asrock on the other hand says ECC RAM is supported (without mentioning if ECC is functional). AMD refuses to answer until release. So we need a few days to know for sure.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLIac/#Specification

- Supports DDR4 2667/2400/2133 ECC & non-ECC un-buffered memory

I read the AM4 ASROCK manuals yesterday and thay all say the same thing.  ECC and non-ECC DIMMs are supported but there is nothing about ECC other than that so I suspect ECC DIMMs will used without ECC functionality.  Over on RWT, a response argued that the manuals are incomplete since the DRAM settings are not mentioned either so we will have to see.

AMD has been making product segmentation statements which imply ECC will not be supported except on server sockets so I suspect my next system will be an Intel LGA1151 Intel i3 or LGA1150 Xeon.

[wraper]

I read the AM4 ASROCK manuals yesterday and thay all say the same thing.  ECC and non-ECC DIMMs are supported but there is nothing about ECC other than that so I suspect ECC DIMMs will used without ECC functionality.
...
AMD has been making product segmentation statements which imply ECC will not be supported except on server sockets

Previous AMD CPUs supported ECC (but not nearly all mobos), So I don't see why Ryzen shouldn't.

[BradC]

Which would you rather replace, 100-300 USD motherboard, or 300-1500USD CPU?

That's like saying "which car is cheaper to replace after you crash it, a Toyota or a Ferrari?". Unlike driving (where you can't account for the other idiots on the road), putting a CPU into a motherboard is one of those tasks where you can actually pay attention and apply due care to make sure you don't break your new expensive toy.

We all make mistakes. I dropped a brand new 1GB SCSI drive while getting out of a car (back when that was worth more than 2 weeks salary). I learned to be more careful! I've even bent a pin on a CPU (A Cyrix). It's a mistake you only make once. Hell, I de-lidded a 3770K with a vice and a hammer (I did a 3570K first but didn't video that one). Can't go through life saying "Oh, I'll buy *that* one as it's cheaper to replace when I break it". Plan not to break it instead!

[wraper]

Which would you rather replace, 100-300 USD motherboard, or 300-1500USD CPU?

1. Excuse me, but many intel CPUs cost the same or even less than mobo, down to 10x less than $300 you claim.
2. Pins on AMD CPUS are  rather stiff and not easy to bend, and if few are bent, very easy to straighten. On intel motherboard, you look on it funny, and pins are already bent. Very hard to straighten them if you don't have a microscope, sharp tweezers and straight hands.
3. If CPU pins are bent, you cannot insert it into the socket, nothing bad happens. If pins are bent on LGA socket, very likely they'll short to nearby pins, and pray god something doesn't burn on motherboard and/or destroy CPU.

[g.lewarne]

Whats to stop intel changing to quad core/8 thread low end and standardising 8 core/16 thread mid and high end?  their individual cores are still better than Ryzen and as I understand it, would obliterate them in one swoop.  Intel also have the manufacturing grunt to take a hit on profits and make them cheaper - now they actually have some competition

[wraper]

their individual cores are still better than Ryzen and as I understand it, would obliterate them in one swoop.

They are not. 8 core Ryzen beats 8 core Intel. Actually about the same IPC for single tread, for multithread AMD IPC is higher. Seems only higher clock speed on 4x and lower core count CPUs can save intel.

[g.lewarne]

their individual cores are still better than Ryzen and as I understand it, would obliterate them in one swoop.

They are not. 8 core Ryzen beats 8 core Intel. Actually about the same IPC for single tread, for multithread AMD IPC is higher. Seems only higher clock speed on 4x and lower core count CPUs can save intel.

ahhh, gotcha, I was mistaken.  That's really cool then, gives Intel the kick up the butt they need

[Terrius]

Whats to stop intel changing to quad core/8 thread low end and standardising 8 core/16 thread mid and high end?  their individual cores are still better than Ryzen and as I understand it, would obliterate them in one swoop.  Intel also have the manufacturing grunt to take a hit on profits and make them cheaper - now they actually have some competition

At this point Intel's biggest issue is that they still dedicate a large portion of their die to on board graphics. In order to make a mainstream 8 core 16 thread they would have to scrap the IGPU.  They've had no competition in the last few years that would drive them to find a way to move 8 core CPUs into the mainstream.

Whether you are an AMD fan, or Intel fan, the biggest thing to take away from Ryzen is that it will (hopefully) drive some healthy competition and innovation in the CPU industry again. Intel has had basically a Monopoly for the last 5-10 years and every year Intel has become more and more complacent offering poorer and poorer gains for more and more money. If AMD can chip some of the market away from them it will force them to start innovating again instead of maintaining their status quo of stagnation!

In the end, if Ryzen is as great as AMD says it will be a Win-Win for everyone.

[Monkeh]

At this point Intel's biggest issue is that they still dedicate a large portion of their die to on board graphics.

Pretty sure the GPU's gone off-die.

[Terrius]

At this point Intel's biggest issue is that they still dedicate a large portion of their die to on board graphics.

Pretty sure the GPU's gone off-die.

Only in their extreme chips, all of their mainstream chips have an integrated Graphics core. The Intel I7 7700K has about 30% of it's die used up by their IGPU.  If they removed the GPU they'd have plenty of room to make impressive 6 core CPUs, and surely if AMD can make an 8 core CPU on a smaller area die than Intel (Ryzen die: 44mm2 VS Intel 7700K die: 49mm2), Intel could figure out how to fit 8 cores into their die sizes.

You can see the die Shot of the 7700K here:
http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2017/01/intel-core-i7-7700k-i5-7600k-review/die-shot-1920x1080.png

[Monkeh]

At this point Intel's biggest issue is that they still dedicate a large portion of their die to on board graphics.

Pretty sure the GPU's gone off-die.

Only in their extreme chips, all of their mainstream chips have an integrated Graphics core. The Intel I7 7700K has about 30% of it's die used up by their IGPU.  If they removed the GPU they'd have plenty of room to make impressive 6 core CPUs, and surely if AMD can make an 8 core CPU on a smaller area die than Intel (Ryzen die: 44mm2 VS Intel 7700K die: 49mm2), Intel could figure out how to fit 8 cores into their die sizes.

You can see the die Shot of the 7700K here:
http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2017/01/intel-core-i7-7700k-i5-7600k-review/die-shot-1920x1080.png

Well, a large number of the current gen have.. two dies. So what's #2?

[Terrius]

Well, a large number of the current gen have.. two dies. So what's #2?

Not sure, unless you are referring to the Northbridge die which is integrated onto the same package as the CPU itself? Do you have a link referencing the 2nd die anywhere?

[Monkeh]

Well, a large number of the current gen have.. two dies. So what's #2?

Not sure, unless you are referring to the Northbridge die which is integrated onto the same package as the CPU itself? Do you have a link referencing the 2nd die anywhere?

'Northbridge'? That's in the image you showed - it's called a memory controller.

Look at any 14nm mobile CPU. I suppose it could be the eDRAM, but I don't see why they'd bother for all the chips which.. don't have eDRAM.

[Terrius]

Well, a large number of the current gen have.. two dies. So what's #2?

Not sure, unless you are referring to the Northbridge die which is integrated onto the same package as the CPU itself? Do you have a link referencing the 2nd die anywhere?

'Northbridge'? That's in the image you showed - it's called a memory controller.

Look at any 14nm mobile CPU. I suppose it could be the eDRAM, but I don't see why they'd bother for all the chips which.. don't have eDRAM.

-EDIT-
I confused union point as an on-die chipset, I was incorrect. There has only been 1 die on intel processors since the I series was released


   Also the Mobile CPUs die and package are different than the Desktop chips to which I am referring.

[ovnr]

'Northbridge'? That's in the image you showed - it's called a memory controller.

Look at any 14nm mobile CPU. I suppose it could be the eDRAM, but I don't see why they'd bother for all the chips which.. don't have eDRAM.

... no. Intel CPUs have had an (on-die) integrated memory controller for *years*.

All desktop 7th generation parts are single-die parts under the lid, with an integrated GPU. I do know that some mobile parts ship with 128MB eDRAM, but there could also be SoC variants with a on-package chipset.

[Monkeh]

There is a separate chipset die on the CPU package as well

Feel free to point it out:

The 200 series chipset (Union Point) would be an additional die on the package. Which controls the PCI-E lanes, intel VT-D, SATA, SATAe, PCIe M.2, USB V3.0 and 2.0.

.. That's a PCH. It's not even on the package.

It's not to be confused however with the south bridge chip set that is different based on the motherboard series.

And that's not a southbridge, it's a PCH.

[Terrius]

There is a separate chipset die on the CPU package as well

Feel free to point it out:

The 200 series chipset (Union Point) would be an additional die on the package. Which controls the PCI-E lanes, intel VT-D, SATA, SATAe, PCIe M.2, USB V3.0 and 2.0.

.. That's a PCH. It's not even on the package.

It's not to be confused however with the south bridge chip set that is different based on the motherboard series.

And that's not a southbridge, it's a PCH.

Yeah I apologize I got confused, I assumed you had a reason to believe there was a second die and I used a quick google search to find out what it possibly was. The image you linked confirms that the die shot I posted was the entire die and there is no secondary die.

[Monkeh]

I assumed you had a reason to believe there was a second die

I do:



I'm guessing they just populate the eDRAM on everything.

[Monkeh]

3. Intel Crystalwell (eDRAM) for Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake is a second die copackaged with CPU. This applied to both desktop, workstation and laptop SKUs. This only affects GT3e GPU SKUs.

Please explain the above, then.

[Terrius]

I assumed you had a reason to believe there was a second die

I do:



I'm guessing they just populate the eDRAM on everything.

That would seem to make sense, I haven't payed much attention to the mobile CPU market. It doesn't really impact me at all.

It would seem the point of confusion was you were referencing mobile CPUs and I was talking about desktop CPUs.

Is it still true that all but the HQ and HK I7 mobile chips only have dual cores and aren't actually quad cores? I remember that being an annoying clarification that people couldn't understand when I sold laptops.

[Monkeh]

3. Intel Crystalwell (eDRAM) for Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake is a second die copackaged with CPU. This applied to both desktop, workstation and laptop SKUs. This only affects GT3e GPU SKUs.

Please explain the above, then.

That is not a GT3e part.

[Monkeh]

Okay, yes, you're right, I forgot about the U part. Seeing as they effectively all are now.

[Muxr]

I pre-ordered a Ryzen 1800X. This thing is looking like a beast. Should make compiling and FPGA synthesis much faster.

[Homer J Simpson]

[grumpydoc]

Well, this is going to make my next choice of motherboard & CPU interesting.

I am totally agnostic in the AMD vs Intel debate and do not feel at all loyal to either side. That said all but one PC I have bought or put together has had an Intel CPU because they have had the better performing CPUs for pretty well forever.

It is, as has been said, really nice to see AMD back in there with some serious competition.

 

[BradC]

The fanboy hysteria is building at quite a rate. It's actually far more amusing to watch than I thought possible. Between the genuine leaks, the fake leaks and the half-arsed speculation from kids pretending to know what they are talking about it is generating thread after thread of pissing contests.

I still want one, but not enough to drop the cash before I read some solid benchmarks.

[David Hess]

I still want one, but not enough to drop the cash before I read some solid benchmarks.

I cannot imagine preordering a processor whether from AMD or Intel.  Waiting a couple months saved from from a crippled Phenom I.

[BradC]

I still want one, but not enough to drop the cash before I read some solid benchmarks.

I cannot imagine preordering a processor whether from AMD or Intel.  Waiting a couple months saved from from a crippled Phenom I.

I bought a Bulldozer anyway. I upgraded it to a Piledriver the next year, and to be honest both are still doing the job they were bought for. Right tool for the right job at the right price though. I've always been a bit of an AMD fan. I retired a K6-2 300 from 24/7 service only last week.

[wraper]

I still want one, but not enough to drop the cash before I read some solid benchmarks.

I cannot imagine preordering a processor whether from AMD or Intel.  Waiting a couple months saved from from a crippled Phenom I.

Yep, regardless of how much I want it, I'll wait a little bit. Don't want to be a beta tester. Or run into suboptimal component match.

[Deridex]

While i think the hype is quite to much, i still expect some decent processors.

They will prolly perform as good as the Intel-CPU's (sometimes better, sometimes not), but i don't think they are the holy grail.
If they perform as expected and if there are no major bugs in the new platform, im gonna get one of the smaller Ryzens (4 or 6 cores). And i seriosly put some hopes on the APU.
Mainly because i had a few some problems which look like they got caused by the Intel-Graphics-Driver.

[Muxr]

I still want one, but not enough to drop the cash before I read some solid benchmarks.

I cannot imagine preordering a processor whether from AMD or Intel.  Waiting a couple months saved from from a crippled Phenom I.

I can always cancel the pre-order if I don't like what we see. I've been waiting on (Zen) Ryzen for awhile. My current computer is on its last legs with frequent crashes (Intel 4770k), due to lid heat transfer issues and overheating.

With that said, I never had issues with AMD's products I pre-ordered. You can usually tell pretty early on if they have any major issues or not. Phenom I's TLB bug was known before the launch and so was Bulldozer's poor performance.

Also with such a highly anticipated launch there has been plenty of leaks.

[wraper]

My current computer is on its last legs with frequent crashes (Intel 4770k), due to lid heat transfer issues and overheating.

How high is that temperature? 90% of the crashes I've ever had on my desktop PCs were because of the faulty RAM or because of particular RAM having issues on particular mobo. Also, I guess your CPU could be less than 3yr old and can be returned to intel for exchange. Process takes just a few days and they pay for DHL express both ways.

[Muxr]

My current computer is on its last legs with frequent crashes (Intel 4770k), due to lid heat transfer issues and overheating.

How high is that temperature? 90% of the crashes I've ever had on my desktop PCs were because of the faulty RAM or because of particular RAM having issues on particular mobo. Also, I guess your CPU could be less than 3yr old and can be returned to intel for exchange. Process takes just a few days and they pay for DHL express both ways.

The CPU core itself gets pretty hot, like 95C. The problem with these Haswell CPUs is the lid heat transfer material they used. So instead of the heat going to the heatsink lid it all either stays trapped in the CPU or it heat soaks the motherboard and the nearby VRMs via the socket. I have confirmed this with a thermal camera. I think the source of my instability is actually the motherboard, due to having been heat soaked from the CPU for so long. Like I've experienced odd behaviour like audio on board turning on and off. I have undervolted the CPU to get me through a few more months, but I still get an occasional crash now and again.

The fix for these is to de-lid the CPU .

But I didn't want to risk it until I had a replacement.

The CPU is older than 3 years old. The issue was always there but I didn't really notice it until a few years in, and it's only gotten worse since then.

But yeah. Intel's packaging of the CPU leaves a lot to be desired. Even on their new Kaby Lake people have registered huge temp drops by de-liding. Another reason why I've been wanting to ditch Intel for awhile.

[S13]

Finally something to possibly kick intels butt again!
Perhaps now Intel will pick up the pace... My 6yr old 2600k is still doing fairly ok compared to the latest 7700k, and thats a shame imo...

Of course AMD still needs to prove itself with the new Ryzen CPU's. Im very suspicious about them not sharing too much single core performance figures yet... Hopefully this wont be just as big of a problem as with their previous architecture. I would not pre-order for this reason alone.

[S13]

In response to the de-lidding, ive seen much improvement in core temperatures from other cpu reviewers, so that could be of great help with CPU stability
Running hot all the time slowly degrades the CPU (and mobo caps/powersupply) anyway, so the cooler you can run, the better imo.

[gnif]

I am very excited for the Ryzen, when I can get enough funds together I will be upgrading from my FX-8350. I know this CPU has been bashed on for it's gaming performance but for a multi threaded work machine it has never missed a beat.

I am also running a DIY water cooling rig, so I am very interested to see what Ryzen does with the better then normal cooling setup.

[senso]

My current computer is on its last legs with frequent crashes (Intel 4770k), due to lid heat transfer issues and overheating.

How high is that temperature? 90% of the crashes I've ever had on my desktop PCs were because of the faulty RAM or because of particular RAM having issues on particular mobo. Also, I guess your CPU could be less than 3yr old and can be returned to intel for exchange. Process takes just a few days and they pay for DHL express both ways.

The CPU core itself gets pretty hot, like 95C. The problem with these Haswell CPUs is the lid heat transfer material they used. So instead of the heat going to the heatsink lid it all either stays trapped in the CPU or it heat soaks the motherboard and the nearby VRMs via the socket. I have confirmed this with a thermal camera. I think the source of my instability is actually the motherboard, due to having been heat soaked from the CPU for so long. Like I've experienced odd behaviour like audio on board turning on and off. I have undervolted the CPU to get me through a few more months, but I still get an occasional crash now and again.

The fix for these is to de-lid the CPU .

But I didn't want to risk it until I had a replacement.

The CPU is older than 3 years old. The issue was always there but I didn't really notice it until a few years in, and it's only gotten worse since then.

But yeah. Intel's packaging of the CPU leaves a lot to be desired. Even on their new Kaby Lake people have registered huge temp drops by de-liding. Another reason why I've been wanting to ditch Intel for awhile.

And have you already cleaned you cooler and repasted with something decent like Kryonout or Artic MX-4?
Intel TIM is bad, but not THAT bad....

[BradC]

In response to the de-lidding, ive seen much improvement in core temperatures from other cpu reviewers, so that could be of great help with CPU stability
Running hot all the time slowly degrades the CPU (and mobo caps/powersupply) anyway, so the cooler you can run, the better imo.

I've been running a watercooled i7-3770K since about 2013. After de-lidding I used Coolaboratory Pro between the die and the IHS and got about a 25C temperature drop under load. It's pretty impressive TIM actually as long as you don't get it anywhere near aluminium.

[Muxr]

My current computer is on its last legs with frequent crashes (Intel 4770k), due to lid heat transfer issues and overheating.

How high is that temperature? 90% of the crashes I've ever had on my desktop PCs were because of the faulty RAM or because of particular RAM having issues on particular mobo. Also, I guess your CPU could be less than 3yr old and can be returned to intel for exchange. Process takes just a few days and they pay for DHL express both ways.

The CPU core itself gets pretty hot, like 95C. The problem with these Haswell CPUs is the lid heat transfer material they used. So instead of the heat going to the heatsink lid it all either stays trapped in the CPU or it heat soaks the motherboard and the nearby VRMs via the socket. I have confirmed this with a thermal camera. I think the source of my instability is actually the motherboard, due to having been heat soaked from the CPU for so long. Like I've experienced odd behaviour like audio on board turning on and off. I have undervolted the CPU to get me through a few more months, but I still get an occasional crash now and again.

The fix for these is to de-lid the CPU .

But I didn't want to risk it until I had a replacement.

The CPU is older than 3 years old. The issue was always there but I didn't really notice it until a few years in, and it's only gotten worse since then.

But yeah. Intel's packaging of the CPU leaves a lot to be desired. Even on their new Kaby Lake people have registered huge temp drops by de-liding. Another reason why I've been wanting to ditch Intel for awhile.

And have you already cleaned you cooler and repasted with something decent like Kryonout or Artic MX-4?
Intel TIM is bad, but not THAT bad....

I have, this isn't my first rodeo, I have built 100s of computers (not even exaggerating). I've tried Cryorig H7 and Corsair H100i to no avail.

[rrinker]

 I've only built dozens, but except for the ones where I recycled the parts or sold off the old stuff, they are ALL still working fine. I've never had a CPU failure, that's for sure. I don't overclock, or only do very mild overclocks though. But my current array of systems is powered on 24/7 and either have stock Intel coolers or in the case of my main desktop, a Coolermaster something or other that doesn't drop temps a whole lot but also was cheap - it has a very high bang for the buck rating at HardOCP.

 Going to need to see some good real world numbers to consider Ryzen. I did go AMD in the XP1700+ days, they were much better than the Intel equivalent, but my mistake with that system was to go with a 9700 video card, ATI never was on par with the equivalent nVidia and I discovered that when I put Linux on that box and had utterly horrible graphics performance, the machine I had previous to that was a Pentium3-500MHz with whatever mainstream nVidia card was current when I built it and it had BETTER graphics performance under both a Windows based 3D CAD program AND Linux. AMD CPUs since have been pretty much just disappointing. Hopefully Ryzen is a reversal and there is some real competition again.

[Homer J Simpson]

Hitler Finds Out About Ryzen Benchmarks

[Muxr]

AMD doesn't play around.. lid is soldered with Indium and Gold:



No need to Delid AMD CPUs like Intel ones which use a cheap TIM solution.

[Homer J Simpson]

[Kevman]

Tom's hardware review is out too:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951.html

Somewhat better than I expected, honestly- its competitive in non-threaded workloads but can even beat Intel in highly threaded applications. Power doesn't look bad, either, but they don't compare power to any other systems for some reason.

If you do encoding, 3d rendering, or any other highly threaded work, its looking like a no-brainer which is really all anyone could hope for.

In regards to the 4770k, I've had mine overclocked to 4.3Ghz for 3 years and have only gotten unexpected BSoDs a few times. Temps have a massive impact on stability when overclocking- BSoDs will happen before thermal throttling. I've been considering delidding to see if I can get over 4.5Ghz. I use a custom water cooling loop.

[wraper]

In regards to the 4770k, I've had mine overclocked to 4.3Ghz for 3 years and have only gotten unexpected BSoDs a few times. Temps have a massive impact on stability when overclocking- BSoDs will happen before thermal throttling. I've been considering delidding to see if I can get over 4.5Ghz. I use a custom water cooling loop.

I decided to not overclock anything a long time ago. For 2 simple reasons, 1. stability is more important than a little bit of added speed. 2. As power consumption rises a LOT with overclocking, I'd rather pay more for the CPU rather than the same amount or more for electricity over it's lifetime (running PC for 15+ yours a day). Might be different, if electricity is almost free for you or you, run PC only occasionally, or run at stock most of the time and overclock when needed.

[CraigHB]

I don't run overclocked either, never felt the risk to stability was worth the rather meager actual use performance gains.  Though it makes for a good tool to verify stability. I think it's pretty amazing some of these CPUs can be overclocked as much as they can.  Makes me wonder why they don't just sell them at the higher clock speed.  Do they need that much of a margin to guarantee stability?

[RGB255_0_0]

Hitler Finds Out About Ryzen Benchmarks

I think he'll be laughing now. Intel will be ahead again when X299 arrives while AMD is struggling to figure out why DDR4 is broken.

[Howardlong]

Tom's hardware review is out too:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951.html

Somewhat better than I expected, honestly- its competitive in non-threaded workloads but can even beat Intel in highly threaded applications. Power doesn't look bad, either, but they don't compare power to any other systems for some reason.

Grrr! One of those heavily ad laden websites that almost fails to load on a mobile device!

I digress, I liked the pic of the trophy stereo HMO 3054 scopes, 10 grand of scope to make a couple of current readings. Judging by the probe cable management and location on shelves above the bench, I doubt they get much serious use.

[ixfd64]

AMD hasn't been competitive since the Athlon days. Glad to see they're Ryzen up to the challenge again.

[Kevman]

In regards to the 4770k, I've had mine overclocked to 4.3Ghz for 3 years and have only gotten unexpected BSoDs a few times. Temps have a massive impact on stability when overclocking- BSoDs will happen before thermal throttling. I've been considering delidding to see if I can get over 4.5Ghz. I use a custom water cooling loop.

run at stock most of the time and overclock when needed.

Most overclocked CPUs are like that by default these days. While mine is overclocked, all of its power saving functions still work and it only pushes the extra voltage when running at the overclocked speeds. Power consumption is not increased at all until the extra speed is used. Of course this doesn't help if you are running software that uses 100% CPU regardless. So actual impact to the power bill is very small.


The "overclocking" concept is a little... cloudy these days. The 4770K is rated at 3.5Ghz with a  3.9Ghz "turbo." By merely replacing the stock cooler with a better one it'll run indefinitely at the faster speed... so is that an overclock?

[RGB255_0_0]

AMD Q&A on Reddit:- https://as.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/

Why there is huge discrepancy is gaming benchmarks for reviewers today? Is this something related to BIOS update?

Lisa Su:
Ryzen is doing really well in 1440p and 4K gaming when the applications are more graphics bound. And we do exceptionally well in rendering and workstation applications where more cores are really useful. In 1080p, we have tested over 100+ titles in the labs…. And depending on the test conditions, we do better in some games and worse in others. We hear people on wanting to see improved 1080p performance and we fully expect that Ryzen performance in 1080p will only get better as developers get more time with “Zen”. We have over 300+ developers now working with "Zen" and several of the developers for Ashes of Singularity and Total Warhammer are actively optimizing now"

"In addition to Lisa's comments, there are also some variables that could affect performance:
1) Early motherboard BIOSes were certainly troubled: disabling unrelated features would turn off cores. Setting memory overclocks on some motherboards would disable boost. Some BIOS revisions would plain produce universally suppressed performance.
2) Ryzen benefits from disabling High Precision Event Timers (HPET). The timer resolution of HPET can cause an observer effect that can subtract performance. This is a BIOS option, or a function that can be disabled from the Windows command shell.
3) Ryzen benefits from enabling the High Performance power profile. This overrides core parking. Eventually we will have a driver that allows people to stay on balanced and disable core parking anyways. Gamers have been doing this for a while, too.
These are just some examples of the early growing pains that can be overcome with time."

-----------------------------------------------

Hello AMD! This question is a very short one.
Do Ryzen CPUs support ECC Memory, yes or no?

Lisa Su:
Yes they do!

-----------------------------------------------

[wraper]

Most overclocked CPUs are like that by default these days. While mine is overclocked, all of its power saving functions still work and it only pushes the extra voltage when running at the overclocked speeds. Power consumption is not increased at all until the extra speed is used. Of course this doesn't help if you are running software that uses 100% CPU regardless. So actual impact to the power bill is very small.

AFAIK usually you add some voltage (say + 0.1V) over default voltage. And that additional voltage is applied all of the time. Yes it drops with frequency but is always higher than normal by this amount. Also, CPU frequency and voltage jumps to maximum even at relatively light loads, not nearly 100 or even 50%.

[wraper]

AMD Q&A on Reddit:- https://as.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/

Why there is huge discrepancy is gaming benchmarks for reviewers today? Is this something related to BIOS update?

It seems that disabling SMT significantly improves performance in some games. Probably virtual cores get the load while the rest of real cores stay idle.
On the other hand, when using real graphics settings in games, there is no difference between the CPUs in the vast majority of cases. Who buys $300+ CPU and plays @1366x768 resolution?

[RGB255_0_0]

AMD Q&A on Reddit:- https://as.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/

Why there is huge discrepancy is gaming benchmarks for reviewers today? Is this something related to BIOS update?

It seems that disabling SMT significantly improves performance in some games. Probably virtual cores get the load while the rest of real cores stay idle.
On the other hand, when using real graphics settings in games, there is no difference between the CPUs in the vast majority of cases. Who buys $300+ CPU and plays @1366x768 resolution?

1080P is still the most common. Valve's hardware surveys show that. In that case the Intel chips are better. But the reason why they use these resolutions is to show how each CPU/architecture scales.

It's pointless showing 4K benchmarks of a CPU when 5-year-old processors perform the same as the one just come out - that's just showing a GPU limit.

Ryzen is a great workstation CPU, bad at workloads which fail to make use of multi-threading and SMT as you said. IPC and single core is better on Kaby Lake, and better overall chipset capabilities.

[BradC]

It seems that disabling SMT significantly improves performance in some games. Probably virtual cores get the load while the rest of real cores stay idle.

There has been an interesting point on this. The processor is made from 2 4-core clusters, and each has its own L3. The cluster to cluster L3 bandwitdh is about 1/4 of the core to L3 bandwidth. People were noticing windows shuttling tasks between cores (as it does), and every time a task gets moved to a core on the other cluster it either severely impacts cache performance or generates a cache miss. It will be interesting to see what happens when they patch windows to be aware of the logical core layout (much like they had to do with the bulldozer architecture).

Not that I really care as I don't use Windows.

On the whole, AMD did better than they said they would and really delivered. They never promised it to be an Intel killer and they never promised it to excel across all games/configurations. What they did promise was Excavator + 40%, and they underpromised and over-delivered. They have a new architecture to build on for the next few years, and they'll bring some real competition back into the CPU market.

I am finding the number of butthurt gamer weenies crying that they pre-orderd hardware based on promises AMD made (that they never did) and screaming that it's a turd and AMD has failed again, quite amusing. Then again, they were probably still in nappies when the last round of major architecture bumps occurred and therefore missed all the release day teething troubles associated with those too.

I'll wait for the next couple of rounds of microcode updates before I order one, but it has just jumped up my priority list. It'll be a nice upgrade from the FX-8350 that has been driving my server since 2012 and might even replace the overclocked 3770K in my CAD machine.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Don't get me wrong. I'm an AMD fan from way back

I'm not.

I saved $50? on a mobo/cpu at the computer shop once in ~2002. The bloke conned me into buying the AMD athalon XP. I only wanted another machine to run menial disk maintenance tasks and possible a spare machine if the main rig broke down.

Found out the dos-based Norton Ghost disk cloner doesn't support non-intel in the fine print and sure enough after an hour or two munching on a drive, it hangs.

Never bothered to find out if it ran win98 as reliably(?) as on a Pentium 4 I got soon after in disgust.

The board found use as a firewall for about four years until the caps blew out and the thing wouldn't boot anymore. I learned my lesson.

[Monkeh]

Don't get me wrong. I'm an AMD fan from way back

I'm not.

I saved $50? on a mobo/cpu at the computer shop once in ~2002. The bloke conned me into buying the AMD athalon XP. I only wanted another machine to run menial disk maintenance tasks and possible a spare machine if the main rig broke down.

Found out the dos-based Norton Ghost disk cloner doesn't support non-intel in the fine print and sure enough after an hour or two munching on a drive, it hangs.

Never bothered to find out if it ran win98 as reliably(?) as on a Pentium 4 I got soon after in disgust.

The board found use as a firewall for about four years until the caps blew out and the thing wouldn't boot anymore. I learned my lesson.

I don't really see how Norton's violent level of incompetence has anything to do with the CPU.

[Ed.Kloonk]

I don't really see how Norton's violent level of incompetence has anything to do with the CPU.

Yeah. I know.

I blame both companies. I mean, really, what on earth could be in a dos based disk copy program that needs specific intel cpu ops?

And the marketing in those days suggested that the CPU was 'compatible'.

[Monkeh]

I don't really see how Norton's violent level of incompetence has anything to do with the CPU.

Yeah. I know.

I blame both companies. I mean, really, what on earth could be in a dos based disk copy program that needs specific intel cpu ops?

And the marketing in those days suggested that the CPU was 'compatible'.

It's as compatible as any Intel CPUs.. code built for one of my Atoms will not run on a pre-Haswell CPU - it took more than four years for anything but the Atom series to implement MOVBE.

[Ed.Kloonk]

I don't really see how Norton's violent level of incompetence has anything to do with the CPU.

Yeah. I know.

I blame both companies. I mean, really, what on earth could be in a dos based disk copy program that needs specific intel cpu ops?

And the marketing in those days suggested that the CPU was 'compatible'.

It's as compatible as any Intel CPUs.. code built for one of my Atoms will not run on a pre-Haswell CPU - it took more than four years for anything but the Atom series to implement MOVBE.

There's no excuse for putting in code for a specific, exotic part without taking advantage of the very easy defines in C to provide a portable alternative. What fraction of a percent of code needs the specific op codes? It just seems lazy to me.

[Hensingler]

In the end, if Ryzen is as great as AMD says it will be a Win-Win for everyone.

Actually it will be a Win 10 for everyone which is definitely not a win, that or linux.

Shame, supporting Win 7 would have been a big advantage over the latest Intel parts.

[BradC]

Shame, supporting Win 7 would have been a big advantage over the latest Intel parts.

AMDs Ryzen Windows driver support bundle states Win7/10, so it might be worth looking a bit closer at that before discounting it completely.

Code: [Select]

? ? ? ?Description:

???Supports Windows 10/7 (?64-bit)

[BravoV]

Guess its time to upgrade, what kind of heatsink mounting does it use ?

Will old AMD's heatsink work ? I'm talking high end OC air heatsink, had few of them like thermalright, noctua and prolimatech.

[Ed.Kloonk]

When video encoding... stand by with a can of cold spray...   

 

[Terrius]

In the end, if Ryzen is as great as AMD says it will be a Win-Win for everyone.

Actually it will be a Win 10 for everyone which is definitely not a win, that or linux.

Shame, supporting Win 7 would have been a big advantage over the latest Intel parts.

I run windows 10 with no issues. Though I run Win10 pro with a bunch of the store junk and bloat permanently disabled through powershell.  While I do find their privacy settings and policies for win10 very shady, it's not really all the much worse than IOS or Android. Welcome to the era of IoT and Personal Data mining, big brother is always watching.

I upgraded to Win10 for the performance boosts over Win7, but I worked in a Retail PC/PC part store, so I understand how and why some people are unwilling to make the change and that is perfectly fine.


It does appear that AMD is supporting win7 64-bit though according to their drivers page.
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download  Scroll to the bottom and look on the right.

AMD Socket AM4/AMD Ryzen™ Processor Software Drivers
Windows 10/7 (64-bit)

[BradC]

Guess its time to upgrade, what kind of heatsink mounting does it use ?

It's looking like old heatsinks with the clip on bracket are compatible, but heatsinks with the screw on bracket certainly require new hardware. I've read Noctua are providing retrofit mount kits for "free" (where free depends on how you can source them).
No serious confirmation on the clips yet, I just based that on a quick comparison of measurements and looking at some of the AM3/AM4 compatible heatsinks that use the clip and don't seem to be providing additional hardware.

[wraper]

Don't get me wrong. I'm an AMD fan from way back

I'm not.

I saved $50? on a mobo/cpu at the computer shop once in ~2002. The bloke conned me into buying the AMD athalon XP. I only wanted another machine to run menial disk maintenance tasks and possible a spare machine if the main rig broke down.

Found out the dos-based Norton Ghost disk cloner doesn't support non-intel in the fine print and sure enough after an hour or two munching on a drive, it hangs.

Never bothered to find out if it ran win98 as reliably(?) as on a Pentium 4 I got soon after in disgust.

The board found use as a firewall for about four years until the caps blew out and the thing wouldn't boot anymore. I learned my lesson.

I don't really see how Norton's violent level of incompetence has anything to do with the CPU.

Nor blowing caps as it was widespread issue in the industry at the time. Heck even Dell motherboards (for intel BTW) with japanese nichicon HM/HN caps failed after a year of work.

[BravoV]

Guess its time to upgrade, what kind of heatsink mounting does it use ?

Notcua has a new AM4 model that looks like just another Noctua with a special mounting bracket.
If you can buy the bracket along, you are likely to use your old Noctua.

It's looking like old heatsinks with the clip on bracket are compatible, but heatsinks with the screw on bracket certainly require new hardware. I've read Noctua are providing retrofit mount kits for "free" (where free depends on how you can source them).
No serious confirmation on the clips yet, I just based that on a quick comparison of measurements and looking at some of the AM3/AM4 compatible heatsinks that use the clip and don't seem to be providing additional hardware.

Ok, confirmed, no need for new AM4 bracket, old AM3 bracket works ! 

Source -> http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/780364-My-time-with-Ryzen

[CJay]

2. Pins on AMD CPUS are  rather stiff and not easy to bend, and if few are bent, very easy to straighten. On intel motherboard, you look on it funny, and pins are already bent. Very hard to straighten them if you don't have a microscope, sharp tweezers and straight hands.

Never bent pins on a socket but I've accidentally bent a few cpu pins so I can't vouch for how difficult a socket is to fix (it looks like it'd be a sod of a job) but CPU pins are not stiff enough to survive a drop from a few inches without bending and I've seen plenty snapped off by people who tried to straighten them, the more stiff the pin is, the more likely it is to snap when you try and straighten it.

They are however, as you say, much simpler to straighten than a socket if they're not bent too far and you take care when straightening them.

3. If CPU pins are bent, you cannot insert it into the socket, nothing bad happens.

Not true, I've replaced several CPUs and motherboards in desktops and servers because people have bent CPU pins and managed to burn up a board and or CPU, one particularly memorable instance was on a HP DL580 system on which you could see the power traces to the affected CPU  because they'd cooked so much it'd caused the fibreglass to burn and bubble. You don't have to get the pins into the socket, all you need to do is bend them enough that they short to an adjacent pin.

[wraper]

Ok, confirmed, no need for new AM4 bracket, old AM3 bracket works ! 

Source -> http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/780364-My-time-with-Ryzen

Only if you buy motherboard with which has AM3 style holes in addition to AM4 holes. Or use spring bracket as stock coolers do.

[David Hess]

Never bent pins on a socket but I've accidentally bent a few cpu pins so I can't vouch for how difficult a socket is to fix (it looks like it'd be a sod of a job) but CPU pins are not stiff enough to survive a drop from a few inches without bending and I've seen plenty snapped off by people who tried to straighten them, the more stiff the pin is, the more likely it is to snap when you try and straighten it.

They are however, as you say, much simpler to straighten than a socket if they're not bent too far and you take care when straightening them.

The problem I have seen with the Intel LGA sockets involves coplanarity and lack of compliance.  If the motherboard becomes warped which is easy to do if the CPU heat sink is mounted incorrectly, then it is easy for some of the socket pins to not make good contact resulting in improper operation at best or a burned socket and possibly CPU at worst.

[Hensingler]

I run windows 10 with no issues.

Funny how people claim to run Win 10 without issues then explain they needed the pro/enterprise version and how and what they disabled and turned off and it is still a privacy leak and of course no one knows what the next update which most people can't refuse will bring.

There is a reason why almost twice as many people are still running Win 7 compared with Win 10 despite Win 10 being free and rammed down their throats by Microsoft. Sadly if enough sheeple accept the polished turds Microsoft produce that is what all of us are going to get, but, hey I'm glad you have no issues, apart from the ones you had, and have, and that updates will bring.

On Ryzen Win 7 support opinion is divided. AMD said they would and then said they wouldn't and yes some Ryzen hardware seems to list Win7 drivers.

[MarkS]

Funny how people claim to run Win 10 without issues then explain they needed the pro/enterprise version and how and what they disabled and turned off and it is still a privacy leak and of course no one knows what the next update which most people can't refuse will bring.

Agreed, but I think most people are referring to it being stable. I'm running the home version of Windows 10 without stability issues, but I have had to disable and block far too much. It's a potential security nightmare.

[Corporate666]

Finally something to possibly kick intels butt again!
Perhaps now Intel will pick up the pace... My 6yr old 2600k is still doing fairly ok compared to the latest 7700k, and thats a shame imo...

Of course AMD still needs to prove itself with the new Ryzen CPU's. Im very suspicious about them not sharing too much single core performance figures yet... Hopefully this wont be just as big of a problem as with their previous architecture. I would not pre-order for this reason alone.

That's THE BIGGEST advantage to Ryzen.  I remember many years ago when I was a working stiff and AMD came out with (I think it was) the Athlon (or was it the Phenom?  it was whatever one made them actually competitive with Intel).  I bought a lot of stock in AMD and made a killing. 

Fast forward to this week... I just bought a new laptop that uses a Core i7 7700HQ processor to replace my Core i7 3610QM processor laptop - that I bought in 2012.  And the new processor is only about 15% faster.  That is absolutely crazy... almost 5 years later and it's only a hair faster.  Back in the day, a 5 year old computer would be virtually unusable.  I guess it's good from a consumer standpoint that the rate of change has slowed, but the other thing that bothers me is I paid more for this laptop than the one from years ago, and the specs aren't really any better (memory, hard drive, screen size, resolution, battery life). 

In other words, the rate at which computers have been getting faster has ground to a halt.  But also, the rate at which the same specification parts have been getting cheaper has also ground to a halt.  The only exception is graphics cards. 

Ryzen will hopefully change that - light a fire under Intel's ass.  They have been abusing the consumer by soaking them and gouging them for YEARS. 

[innkeeper]

On the surface it would seem we have hit a cpu core performance wall

Personally I still run 4 i7-920's overclocked which are circa 2008/9 because i've seen no need to upgrade as there has been no significant performance increases at the price level at around 199 retail at the time.
(note these can overlcock to like 4.2ghz+ pretty easily, but i run them at a conservative 3.8-4.0ghz 24/7 for the last 8 years) These were known for there overclocking, but still at a modest overclock, there jsut 25% slower then the i7-7700hq, and on par with the i7-980 circa 2009 .. where it has the advantage is a TDP of 45W vs 130W+ for similar performance cpus made 8 years ago.

So i agree, performance wise on the consumer level, there has not been much advancement at the per core performance level.
Where there has been advancement is number of cores per die and TDP.

On the consumer side though, graphic performance has been sticking to mores law in its growth, and along with it the floating point processing abilities that can be offloaded to a gpu (i draw a parellel to that  the old math coprocessors). SSD's have givin a huge performance boost to disk io, and memory continues to get faster as we go from ddr-ddr2-ddr3-ddr4-ddr5

I think this is due mostly economic reasons frankly and where the ROI is for development of new technologies. The money for intel is selling cpu's for visualized environments and in cloud architectures where a single cpu goes for 3,000 dollars.  What comes out of that is larger number of cores on a single chip, not necessarily driving higher performance per core, but, lower TDP per core for the most cost effective power consumption.

This fits and overall shift even at the consumer level as applications get more and more efficient at using multiple cores it becomes more important to ahve more cores then the performance per core.

I am a big AMD fan but have not used them in a long time ...  sadly it has taken AMD a long time to catch up to intel in recent history.  AMD used to rule the virtualization space, and was a price leader int he home computing space in the early 2000's intel recognized this and concentrated on architectures to compete and dominate the virtualization space and quicly surpassed amd

I've noticed that intel has reacted to the release of the Ryzen by immediately lowering the cost of the competing cpu's to lower then amd's retail costs. this is likely more of a loss leader to not allow amd to get a foothold again. The only way we will see the consumer prices stay low is if amd succeeds in this generation of cpus at retail. otherwise intel remains the 1000 lb gorilla in the room.

So sadly the "cheaper" part is no longer true.

I do wonder of amd has any server grade cpus in line for launch. that would be a game changer.

[Terrius]

I run windows 10 with no issues.

Funny how people claim to run Win 10 without issues then explain they needed the pro/enterprise version and how and what they disabled and turned off and it is still a privacy leak and of course no one knows what the next update which most people can't refuse will bring.

There is a reason why almost twice as many people are still running Win 7 compared with Win 10 despite Win 10 being free and rammed down their throats by Microsoft. Sadly if enough sheeple accept the polished turds Microsoft produce that is what all of us are going to get, but, hey I'm glad you have no issues, apart from the ones you had, and have, and that updates will bring.

On Ryzen Win 7 support opinion is divided. AMD said they would and then said they wouldn't and yes some Ryzen hardware seems to list Win7 drivers.

I run Windows 10 home on a windows 7 era laptop with no issues as well (the laptop didn't even have windows 8 support). So you certainly don't "need" nor did I say you "need" the pro or enterprise version.  I simply stated I run windows 10 with no issues though I use Win 10 Pro and disabled the bloat and dodgy stuff.

My PC ran perfectly fine with the bloat and dodgy privacy stuff , but anyone who knows anything at all about IT security immediately disables all the key-loggers and other things baked into Win 10, or at least I would hope they do.

I find it particularly amusing when people freak out about windows privacy issues and then immediately go on facebook/social media on their phone... Never realizing or caring that all of the things they are scared about windows 10 are already baked into Android, IOS and the majority of social media apps.

Windows 10 has 25.6% of the market share now, so it has already done far better than windows 8 or 8.1 combined. While there are people who prefer windows 7 still, that market shrinks each month especially in the enthusiast and business markets.

It is important to note however that windows 10 falls in a period where most enterprise and business customers are looking to migrate to a newer version of Windows due to 7's extended support cutoff in 2020. Windows 8 and 8.1 both fell outside of this upgrade period so most enterprise/business customers ignored them.


I happily acknowledge that there are issues with windows 10, but it is far from the fiasco that was Windows 8. There seems to be some sort of rose coloured glasses issue going on where people remember Windows 7 as being perfect and having no privacy/security/usability issues... and yet at launch out the majority refused to upgrade from XP and many had the exact same issues that people have with windows 10. Fact is no matter how good an OS is at launch it will never be as stable and secure as the OS that has been patched for the last 5-10 years, change is always difficult.

Microsoft is actually fairly open about what their updates will bring, it is easy enough to find the patch notes if you actually care.

The biggest pet peeve I have, is the automatic install of all service packs and driver updates. In my opinion it is far from a "Polished Turd" but it all depends on how open to adaptation you are. The fact remains, this is the direction Windows is headed, and while it may not be ideal, it is certainly better than Windows 8 and 8.1 which both failed horrendously due to innumerable compatibility issues that still plague the OS.



As for the Ryzen support, it is listed on the official AMD drivers page as supporting Windows 7, so it is supported. Whether Motherboard and device manufacturers wish to use engineering time developing for Win 7 which is E.O.L.(End Of Life) and has already been dropped from Mainstream support and will be dropping extended support in 2020, well that is a completely different issue.




Anyways back on topic,

I am excited to see what Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 will bring to the table. If they can manage the same single threaded performance as Ryzen 7 but in cheaper more mainstream machines, it could become a decent rival to the I5s and I3s.

[Hensingler]

I find it particularly amusing when people freak out about windows privacy issues and then immediately go on facebook/social media on their phone... Never realizing or caring that all of the things they are scared about windows 10 are already baked into Android, IOS and the majority of social media apps.

I find it particularly amusing when people try to use the privacy invasion of google and facebook as an excuse for the new privacy invasions perpetrated by Microsoft.

[BradC]

I've noticed that intel has reacted to the release of the Ryzen by immediately lowering the cost of the competing cpu's to lower then amd's retail costs.

Can you point to any evidence of that? There have been a couple of very poorly researched clickbait articles that have said that was the case, but as yet they've proven to be hot air. If you have any credible evidence I'd appreciate a link.

Frankly I don't think Intel can *afford* to do an immediate price drop. A) that would draw immediate attention to the AMD products and announce loudly that they are a viable option to everyone who might not have noticed that yet, and B) that would also be admitting they have been taking the absolute piss for the last 5 years and reaming their clients with a pineapple. Nether are particularly a good look.

[Terrius]

I find it particularly amusing when people freak out about windows privacy issues and then immediately go on facebook/social media on their phone... Never realizing or caring that all of the things they are scared about windows 10 are already baked into Android, IOS and the majority of social media apps.

I find it particularly amusing when people try to use the privacy invasion of google and facebook as an excuse for the new privacy invasions perpetrated by Microsoft.

I wrote a fairly lengthy reply to that quote but it seems like a discussion for a separate topic, this thread was about the new Ryzen CPUs and whether they will put up a fight against Intel. So if you want to discuss that further I'd happily join another thread about it! It is quite an interesting topic to be honest. 



Back on point, so far the benchmarks are mixed, but mostly agree on the fact that in Multi threaded application these new chips are killers, and in single threaded they are respectable. It's been many years since AMD has hit even a slight parity in the CPU markets!  I am really looking forward to the R5 and R3 chips, their potential is quite high if they can maintain this performance but in a cheaper more mainstream package.

I've noticed that intel has reacted to the release of the Ryzen by immediately lowering the cost of the competing cpu's to lower then amd's retail costs.

Can you point to any evidence of that? There have been a couple of very poorly researched clickbait articles that have said that was the case, but as yet they've proven to be hot air. If you have any credible evidence I'd appreciate a link.

Frankly I don't think Intel can *afford* to do an immediate price drop. A) that would draw immediate attention to the AMD products and announce loudly that they are a viable option to everyone who might not have noticed that yet, and B) that would also be admitting they have been taking the absolute piss for the last 5 years and reaming their clients with a pineapple. Nether are particularly a good look.

I don't know about anywhere else but there were about $20-$40 price drops on the Intel chips here in Canada that started on March 1st. Uncharacteristic for this time of the year, normally those drops don't happen until closer to big sale days/months. Their socket 2011 chips haven't had any movement price wise though, just the 7000 series chips.

[Deridex]

Ryzen performs as i expected.
And it even seem to work well for a completly new cpu-architecture. Even if there are a few issues left, i gotta say: Well done AMD 
But i will wait some more months, till all fixes for the performance issues are done. I don't like being a beta tester.

[Howardlong]

What seems clear now is that the overclocking potential is minimal unless you go to impractical exotic methods. Partially this may be to do with their use of an indium based thermal interface to the heat spreader, providing excellent thermal conductivity, and therefore being able to run the chips close to their limit even with air based coolers. Even the extreme de-lidders don't appear to be able to do much to better it.

The one question seems to be around the 1080p games performance anomaly, which isn't anywhere near as pronounced in 1440p or 4k when compared to Intel Broadwell-E. Anecdotally there also seems to be a marginally improvement by disabling SMT.

Irrespective, for creators and productivity, there is now a compelling alternative to Intel in the single socket market.

[FireFlower]

Poor OC potential is probably due architecture noise amount on signal paths. Better cooling (liquid) improves a bit heat noise and you get a little bit more overclocking but that's about it with conventional methods. 

Sub-temps the heat noise is not truly not an issue anymore and you can go much higher overclock.  Seems like same problem experienced with Phenom II series where temps were fine but you hit a wall around 4GHz and nothing you can do about it above room temps.

Basically AMD engineers are probably at this moment improving 14nm process and tweaking signal paths on architecture to go for higher clocks.


Game performance problems is pretty obvious when Intel easily has more than 75% of the market share on gaming platforms so you an easily think game developers optimizing their games for just Intel processors and ignored AMD's optimization guides? Dunno I am not game developer, just  my personal opinion why game performance has so much gap compared to similar clock speed Intel counter parts.

[aandrew]

Personally I still run 4 i7-920's overclocked which are circa 2008/9 because i've seen no need to upgrade as there has been no significant performance increases at the price level at around 199 retail at the time.

I'm in the same boat. I have a 1st-gen i7 (i7-950) that I bought new what must be 6 or 7 years ago now. When I bought it, I bought a good power supply, motherboard and maxxed out the RAM (24G) as well. I have had *no* need to update this machine, with the possible exception of power consumption. I have an ebayed Dell C6100 blade server whose Xeon L5520s run lower power than the 950.

I have to say, it's quite nice to be in this position after so many years of wanting newer hardware for the speed increases.

[Homer J Simpson]

OC3D TV

Asus Crosshair VI AM4 Ryzen Overclocking Motherboard Review

[David Hess]

Game performance problems is pretty obvious when Intel easily has more than 75% of the market share on gaming platforms so you an easily think game developers optimizing their games for just Intel processors and ignored AMD's optimization guides? Dunno I am not game developer, just  my personal opinion why game performance has so much gap compared to similar clock speed Intel counter parts.

Intel disables the use of instruction set extensions in the libraries they provide if the processor does not identify as an Intel processor.  Last time I checked, they still did this on their compiler despite  the lawsuit over it but I do not know how many game companies use their compiler.

[brucehoult]

Personally I still run 4 i7-920's overclocked which are circa 2008/9 because i've seen no need to upgrade as there has been no significant performance increases at the price level at around 199 retail at the time.

I'm in the same boat. I have a 1st-gen i7 (i7-950) that I bought new what must be 6 or 7 years ago now. When I bought it, I bought a good power supply, motherboard and maxxed out the RAM (24G) as well. I have had *no* need to update this machine, with the possible exception of power consumption. I have an ebayed Dell C6100 blade server whose Xeon L5520s run lower power than the 950.

I have to say, it's quite nice to be in this position after so many years of wanting newer hardware for the speed increases.

I had an i7 860, which is similar generation to your 950. I overclocked it quite a bit and got (stock, then overclocked):

2388/8365 https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/7509
2721/9389 https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/332502

Now I have an i7 6700K which I have left stock:

5200/20290 https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5266295

Over twice faster was definitely worth spending US$1200 for new motherboard, CPU, RAM, M.2 SSD. In fact the SSD is 3x faster write, 5x faster read.

[Muxr]

I've been running my Ryzen build now for over a week. I must say I love it so far. 8 cores and 16 threads really make a difference when it comes to compiling stuff and running bunch of VMs. I don't really game much but I tried it and everything just feels very smooth. I upgraded from my i7 4770K Intel Haswell machine quad core. Ryzen feels much smoother overall.

The beast in its naked state:


Noctua 15D is just massive.. I swear I could probably just remove the fans and let my case's airflow do the job:


Lights up like a Christmas tree (all these gaming components now days have RGB LEDs it seems), maybe it's a bit tacky but I think it looks cool personally:



One thing I have yet to test is how much faster I can synthesize my FPGA projects now. Maybe I do some benchmarks compared to the old system.

edit: also it's been a while since I had bought a new case. These new cases man, they make cable management so much easier. I can just hide everything behind the motherboard, it's a piece of cake to work on these and make it all look nice.

[Fsck]

needs more ram. "better" is such a relative term.
I went from my overclocked 920 (24GB of ram) to a 5820k *2* years ago because I wanted more ram. 96GB of ram is really shiny to have.

kind of disappointed with AMD still, since my last AMD rigs are S939.

[Muxr]

needs more ram. "better" is such a relative term.
I went from my overclocked 920 (24GB of ram) to a 5820k *2* years ago because I wanted more ram. 96GB of ram is really shiny to have.

kind of disappointed with AMD still, since my last AMD rigs are S939.

I have 32Gb in there (2x16Gb), and that's plenty for now. Apparently Ryzen also supports ECC RAM, so if I were going with that much RAM would probably invest in ECC. AM4 doesn't support more than 64Gb though. They are supposed to release Naples next. Which should support truck loads, but it's also going to cost an arm and a leg I would imagine. Although it would be nice to have a workstation with 32 cores and 64 threads, also 64 PCIe lanes lol.

[wraper]

I have 32Gb in there (2x16Gb), and that's plenty for now. Apparently Ryzen also supports ECC RAM, so if I were going with that much RAM would probably invest in ECC. AM4 doesn't support more than 64Gb though. They are supposed to release Naples next. Which should support truck loads, but it's also going to cost an arm and a leg I would imagine. Although it would be nice to have a workstation with 32 cores and 64 threads, also 64 PCIe lanes lol.

Nope, there are 128 PCI-E lanes. If two CPUs config is used, half of those lanes goes to interconnect between CPUs and you have 64 PCI-E left on each, still 128 total.
EDIT, each CPU also have 8 RAM channels.

[Fsck]

needs more ram. "better" is such a relative term.
I went from my overclocked 920 (24GB of ram) to a 5820k *2* years ago because I wanted more ram. 96GB of ram is really shiny to have.

kind of disappointed with AMD still, since my last AMD rigs are S939.

I have 32Gb in there (2x16Gb), and that's plenty for now. Apparently Ryzen also supports ECC RAM, so if I were going with that much RAM would probably invest in ECC. AM4 doesn't support more than 64Gb though. They are supposed to release Naples next. Which should support truck loads, but it's also going to cost an arm and a leg I would imagine. Although it would be nice to have a workstation with 32 cores and 64 threads, also 64 PCIe lanes lol.

haswell-e consumer chips don't support ecc. only the xeons do and they don't overclock. I would've bought ecc if it was supported. Anyways, ECC DDR4 UDIMMs cost an arm and a leg. 180$ per 16GB stick here, and very few options.

a theoretical overclockable naples would be amusing. I still have an overclocked opteron 165 rig around.

[Muxr]

I have 32Gb in there (2x16Gb), and that's plenty for now. Apparently Ryzen also supports ECC RAM, so if I were going with that much RAM would probably invest in ECC. AM4 doesn't support more than 64Gb though. They are supposed to release Naples next. Which should support truck loads, but it's also going to cost an arm and a leg I would imagine. Although it would be nice to have a workstation with 32 cores and 64 threads, also 64 PCIe lanes lol.

Nope, there are 128 PCI-E lanes. If two CPUs config is used, half of those lanes goes to interconnect between CPUs and you have 64 PCI-E left on each, still 128 total.
EDIT, each CPU also have 8 RAM channels.

Ahh, interesting, that's even crazier. heh

I do think those 32 core chips will probably be $2k+. There is no reason for AMD to undercut Intel as they perform better for their intended use. Better perf/watt which is king in the datacenter.

[Fsck]

haswell-e consumer chips don't support ecc. only the xeons do and they don't overclock. I would've bought ecc if it was supported. Anyways, ECC DDR4 UDIMMs cost an arm and a leg. 180$ per 16GB stick here, and very few options.

Xeon E5 supports RDIMM, which is cheaper than UDIMM because there are used sticks available from decommissioned servers (yes, there are rich companies phasing out DDR4 2133 now!). The same is for ECC DDR3. It is just a matter of scale. Not too many people can find a use of UDIMM, therefore LRDIMM and RDIMM are cheaper, just because there are much more of them on second hand market.

Xeon E5 is also kinda overclock-able. E5-16xx v3/v4 are just server versions of i7x, and have unlocked frequency multipliers. E5-26xx v3/v4 have locked multipliers, but BCLK is overclock-able, you can get ~3% performance boost without affecting stability, though reliability may suffer if you run them 24/7.

A recent crack on Intel BIOS allows all Broadwell Xeon cores to stay at their maximum single core turbo boost frequency, which can also boost performance by a lot. However, this hack doesn't allow CPUs to breach TDP-wall, so don't expect any AVX/SSE performance increasing. Integer performance, on the other hand, can improve by a lot.

haswell-e was a q3 '14 release, I purchased in q1 '15, and nobody was decomissioning <2 quarter old gear yet.

it will be interesting for me in a year or so to see if there will be ryzen servers in the <200$ server/desktop market which is currently occupied with old SB/IVB systems. the power efficiency improvements are nice but I doubt the 10W or so you'd save would be worth it to pay more.

it's still early (and I haven't checked very hard), but I haven't seen anything announced by AMD to fight it out with the xeon-d or C2000/C3000 markets, or old SB/IVB which is also used in this low-range market.

I know that companies which don't require high performance are still deploying SB-E, IVB-E, haswell, haswell-e and broadwell-e but there are also those caveman companies with S940 and LGA775 systems still in play on DDR1 and DDR2 respectively even though spending a few bucks for a new system would save them so much on power that would result in a lower TCO.

[Howardlong]

needs more ram. "better" is such a relative term.
I went from my overclocked 920 (24GB of ram) to a 5820k *2* years ago because I wanted more ram. 96GB of ram is really shiny to have.

Does that work on a 5820k? I thought they were limited to 64GB.

I recently upgraded to 32GB for my daily driver from a 16GB machine, but I also have 64GB and 192GB dual Xeon rendering and VM boxes, and I can't say I've ever really needed more than 24GB, but never say never. What do you do that uses all that RAM?

[Muxr]

If you need to run bunch of VMs which require a lot of RAM, you can try giving Docker containers a try instead. Basically you can have multiple Docker containers run inside one big VM and instead of needing dedicated RAM for each VM they would share it (paravirtualization).