Author Topic: AMD Ryzen - New CPU Series that is cheaper but better then Intel Core I Series  (Read 31601 times)

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Offline aandrew

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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.
 

Offline Homer J Simpson

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OC3D TV

Asus Crosshair VI AM4 Ryzen Overclocking Motherboard Review

 

Online David Hess

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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.
 

Online brucehoult

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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.
 

Offline Muxr

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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.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2017, 12:43:12 am by Muxr »
 

Offline Fsck

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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.
"This is a one line proof...if we start sufficiently far to the left."
 

Offline Muxr

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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.
 

Online wraper

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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.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2017, 01:38:57 am by wraper »
 

Offline Fsck

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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.
"This is a one line proof...if we start sufficiently far to the left."
 

Offline Muxr

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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.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2017, 02:05:06 am by Muxr »
 

Offline Fsck

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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.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2017, 02:53:44 am by Fsck »
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Offline Howardlong

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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?
 

Offline Muxr

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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).
 
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