Discussion AMD Ryzen MegaThread! FAQ and Resources

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juanrga

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Current top ThreadRipper sample is 16C @3.1GHz with a marketing TDP of 180W (>200W real).

Also current top RyZen model is 8C @3.6GHz with a marketing TDP of 95W (>120W real). And ThreadRipper is almost two RyZens glued together, which means 16C at similar speeds would be rated at 190W (>240W real).

I would like journalists are reporting those 'leaked' specs to explain me how AMD can get 3.5GHz 16C on 155W.
 

juanrga

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Did we forget the nonsensical 'leaks' about RyZen overclocking? 5GHz on air was the claim then...

ThreadRipper is basically two RyZen glued together. The overclocking capability will be similar to RyZen, which hits a ~4GHz barrier.

1800X averages
Air: 4061 MHz
Water: 4085 MHz
LN2: 5210 MHz



Indeed, because RyZen gets in the 5GHz range only with LN2.
 

juanrga

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When reading SA articles and the forum section one has to translate to normal language. For instance "Nvidia is in trouble" usually means that Nvidia is going to break a sales record due to good products.

And excerpt that caught my attention:

What you can say about them is that the 12-18 core models will be slower, more expensive, and consume more energy than the 6-10 core models. There is no reason to buy these i9 models, they will be worse than the smaller parts in every way when gaming,

Evidently a 36 threads chip is not aimed at gaming, but at workstation-kind of applications that can scale up and fill all those threads, and in those specific applications those chips will be performance kings. No one has said that 18-core is for mainstream users and no one will be purchasing a 36 threads chips for playing games, what makes Charlie's rant useless.

What I reading behind doors is that Intel is not precisely the one full of pain.

Hints:

- Check why ThreadRipper was released, when it didn't appear in AMD original roadmaps.

- Check what socket/platfform is no longer promoted in public by AMD.

- Check AMD own guidance for the rest of year to get expected deskopt sales. Check also their financial model for servers and how expect to get 10% share by about 2020.

- Check motherboard companies response.
 

truegenius

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are ram drive strength settings available in new bioses ?
these settings provides major stability boosts, usually board set them higher for more populated slots, higher means less stable at higher clocks.

so if they are available now can someone test them with lowest values and check how far they can push ram ( use 2 sticks only ) ( and compare them with clock speed achievable with them at auto ) ? jdwii ?
 

salgado18

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Not knowing where to even start looking for this, I'd like to know what you know about this.
 


True, but since SLI/CF is handled by the Developer now, you see it being handled properly a lot less, let alone tri/quad setups. Those days of tri-8800 GT's are long gone.

Make no mistake: These are parts that serve no tangible benefit for gamers. They serve no purpose but to satisfy ego.
 

jdwii

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You bring up a good point i really should actually check for power figures myself. I remember when i had my 8350 just clicking into chrome would cause my power consumption to go to 200-250 watts that was with a 770.

But i did notice in terms of voltage and heat 3.3Ghz with at least this stepping works best with Ryzen which means performance per watt that is what i expected from their 16 core, its fair to say Amd is going to push it as far as they can for at least the top-end model.

Ryzen runs really cool so i highly doubt heat will be a MAJOR issue which is what Amd and Intel basically rate these anyways not power figures.
 

jdwii

Splendid


I'm not on a beta bios but i heard using all 4 slots still has issues running at 3000+ i suspect that to stay the same unless you get qualified ram for ryzen then maybe 3200mhz will work. As for running with two sticks i don't even have samsung memory and i've been running fine at 2933mhz and i know 3200 will work once i update to the beta or wait to the final release.

If buying new personally i'd stick with Amd ryzen qualified memory or at least go with samsung based memory. Get 3200mhz or higher and make sure your board can support the memory.
 


What I don't get is why everyone on here is *so* obsessed with gaming as the primary focus for a CPU? I mean most of the review sites glossed over Ryzens excellent production scores as declared Intel better based on gaming numbers, why? Am I the only person that uses a PC for work anymore?

Threadripper is a production oriented chip, just as the Intel X299 parts are (with the exception of the 2 quad core parts- I really don't understand why they even exist?).

I mean if gaming is really *all* you're doing with a pc, then why not just go console? A PS4 pro provides excellent visuals, is gurenteed to work with all titles released for it (without having to dig through pages and pages on a support forum to work out whats wrong) and will cost a lot less than an equivalent performing gaming PC due to the huge overheads involved in running Windows / background apps and such. The only argument for a dedicated gaming PC is if you specifically want to play something not on consoles like RTS titles- such as AOTS (which apparently is only a benchmark as 'no one plays rts anymore'- again apart from me it seems). I think most PC enthusiasts use a PC for more than just gaming though- in which case a high core count cpu that *can also handle games* does in fact make sense.

What these parts are good for:
- Video production
- Gaming whilst streaming
- Software rendering applications (big names such as Keyshot are still exclusively cpu bound due to the rendering technique- essentially you cannot do photo-real raytracing on a gpu, which is required for the most realistic images)
- Mesh based 3D design / 3D Scanning related stuff (these are usually well threaded, engineering CAD is usually quite poorly threaded and runs better on high speed low core count parts, aside from rendering)
- Software development especially compiling
- Music production (most of the big composition suits assign VST and effect plugins per core- more cores means more real time voices and effects at once)

I'm sure there's loads more stuff as well- I mean these are the things that meant PC's stayed relevant despite tablets. I love a bit of gaming but I don't really get the obsession with it as the be all and end all (heck look at Toms review of Ryzen- 10 pages of games benchmakrs and a single page dedicated to 'other stuff''- the same applies to Intels higher core count parts too, people dismiss them too quickly imo).
 


If you look into motherboards you'll quickly find *a lot* of unhappy people over the mess that is Intel's X299 platform. It's quite ludicrous that the features are so inconsistent motherboard makers are including LED indicators on individual interfaces to indicate if they are available or not based on the host processor.

At least with x399 / Threadripper AMD have created a simple, consistent feature set with the differentiating factor being number of cores / clock speed.
 


If I was feeling cynical, does it not seem strange that there is suddenly a much heavier focus on gaming now that AMD are equal / ahead in everything else? If you go back over earlier articles on Intel 6 / 8 core parts you'll notice a much shorter section on games and a much longer section on the 'everything else' than there was on the Ryzen review....

We've seen this before from Intel- 'guiding' reviewers to highlight whats 'most important' wouldn't be out of character at all- at least it's better than outright preventing oem's using AMD parts (plenty of design wins being announced for Ryzen at the moment).


 


That's a very nice review- does go to show that quad channel memory is worth it in a lot of productivity workloads. That should help Threadripper even more vs Intels high end. I just hope the motherboard costs aren't too high, as I'm fairly sure the lower end Threadripper cpu's will be *priced quite competitively (given the recent price cuts I'm guessing the bottom 10 core will start around where the 1800x launched, circa ~$500).

*edit.
 

8350rocks

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Actually, I would like to point out that I mentioned 3 years ago that Zen was aimed at a 16 core top end SKU.

3 years ago this was planned.

AMD is not hurting anywhere in CPUs right now.
 

jdwii

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Oh boy for many reasons, mods graphics that are not medium at best i remember with dying light even the PC at the lowest possible settings had better draw distance. 30FPS GROSS. unless its a older game and i mean N64 or before.

I love simulation games and RTS games something consoles lack.

BUT i get your point when i built my ryzen PC my one friend was over and he said what will this make your PC do that it didn't do well before? Will it game better and i said it should be about the same for gaming and he said what else does a PC do. Granted he is a welder but still haha. Just so others here know i encode a lot of videos and film over and compress them using handbrake and i perfer CPU based encoding over GPU accelerated as i find it to be better.

Reason why reviews compare how they do in games has nothing to do with shrills or some other lame thing it has to do with gaming pushing hardware. Micro Center even said they are seeing massive sales in GAMING based hardware, I've even seen my local best buy actually care more, desktop sales are WAY down but gaming PC's and custom built PC's are up, nvidia-Intel-Amd as well as motherboard manufactures say this. As for everything else well even a 60$ Pentium is good enough for 90% of what people do on a PC.

That same troll friend of mine who is a welder owns a PS4 and he can't wait for me to build him a PC, he just bought minecraft for his crappy walmart APU computer and he said he'd rather have that then the console version. Mainly so he can play it at decent settings.

Another thing is Amd is pricing these parts at the I5 and lower-end I7 levels people who spend that much on a CPU and build there own computer are probably major gamers.

EDIT

Here is Jayztwocents thought on what Intel is doing and Amd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJNRtGo5IMc


Quad channel+64 PCI-E lanes for ALL threadripper CPUs is a major advantage in this market i bet Wendell from Level One Techs is quite happy as this was his main concern with the AM4 platform.

Also Jay thinks these will cost the same as i do 999.99$ for the top SKU.
 

goldstone77

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Great job! I like it! Impressive scores! Faster RAM really makes a difference! How is game play from your own personal experience on the 1500X@3.9GHz, 3600MHz RAM, and with the 1060 6GB?
 


https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Rise-Tomb-Raider-Gets-Ryzen-Performance-Update

Puts it right where it should be.

Some interesting stuff caught my attention though:

Crystal Dynamics was able to get back to us with a couple of points on the changes that were made with this patch to affect the performance of AMD Ryzen processors.

1: Rise of the Tomb Raider splits rendering tasks to run on different threads. By tuning the size of those tasks – breaking some up, allowing multicore CPUs to contribute in more cases, and combining some others, to reduce overheads in the scheduler – the game can more efficiently exploit extra threads on the host CPU.

2: An optimization was identified in texture management that improves the combination of AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU. Overhead was reduced by packing texture descriptor uploads into larger chunks.

There you have it, a bit more detail on the software changes made to help adapt the game engine to AMD's Ryzen architecture. Not only that, but it does confirm our information that there was slightly MORE to address in the Ryzen+GeForce combinations.

Threading is hard.
 

juanrga

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AMD had a 16-core CPU planned, I know, but not for desktop (my first hint)

AMD-Raven-Ridge-APU-Specs-and-AMD-Pinnacle-Ridge-CPU-Specs.png


The original 16-core CPU was aimed at microserver/workstation and designed for the SP4 socket (second hint). In fact, the current TR4 socket for the Threadripper platform is not a desktop version of the SP4, but AMD had to develop TR4 from the SP3 socket (TR4 is the commercial name, the internal name is SP3r2) because of the fiasco of the SP4 platform.

Nobody can pretend that Intel is "in full pain" when motherboards makers have tested both X-series and ThreadRipper and have decided to massively support the X-series on a proportion of 10:1 (my third hint).
 

jdwii

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^^^ Whatever it was Amd caught Intel off guard. Intel wasn't going to do a I9 or 14-16-18 core processor for HEDT until they saw Ryzen then Amd said they are doing a 16 core for HEDT.

This is why we need Amd to be good so we are not stuck with dual cores for 170$ for the next 10 years.

I still wish Ryzen was even better in terms of IPC but it's a great start i guess.
 

goldstone77

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From the beginning, synthetics didn't match gaming benchmarks! That should have been elephant in the room with a flashing light and siren on it's head! People tried really hard to pick apart the new technology and expose presumed weakness that really had little impact. Now there are still significant gains that can be made with Ryzen with faster memory, and I can't wait to see the benchmarks in optimized games for 3600MHz RAM now that it is much easier to achieve for people with little knowledge of overclocking or unsupported hardware! And everyone can talk all they want about IPC, but ~150 score singe thread on Cinebench is more than enough to play games! I said it then, and I'll say it again now poor optimization for Ryzen has been the main problem with performance in gaming and some applications. Like I've shown before R5 1500X and i7 7700k reduced to 3.5GHz is very telling about how good this 1st generation Ryzen uarch is compared to this 7th genreation Intel.
Review-chart-template-2017-final.003-1440x1080.png

Review-chart-template-2017-final.002-1440x1080.png
 

jdwii

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I'd like to note that every day that goes by i'm seeing haswell like IPC and its always been higher then ivy even in the worst case such as dolphin emulator.

Go ahead look at the latest game updates ryzen is seeing massive gains from a simple little software update. Just recently this happen.
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ryzen-game-perf-increases-with-new-rise-of-the-tomb-raider-patch.html


With Ryzen we really are seeing Haswell like IPC give or take + or - 10% given the application.

Now with bulldozer and piledriver IMO we were seeing 40 maybe 50% the IPC of ryzen or to keep some users here sane "cough cough YUKA i'm playing man performance per cycle"

I was very vocal towards piledriver still to this day i'd rather have a I3 4360 over a 8350 i doubt that will change.
 

Nope 1151

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It seems that someone at AMD (Read Lisa Su), has been reading her
出其不意,攻其不备 《孙子 *计》
"Do something unexpected and attack those who are unprepared"
Remember the R7 launch and how closely the information was held until the launch? And before that how AMD has not *really* improved its mainstream CPUs (except the 9xxx series disaster). AMD was testing some of the new tech on the APUs I believe, and played Intel in to complacency in believing that AMD relegated itself to the lower-end market segment. They pretty much caught Intel with their pants off who now have a fire lit under their butts. It will be quite interesting to see the David Vs the Giant battle later here.


Side note: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Compiler-Issues
Seems like there is an issue with AMD R series chips in compilation tasks, that is an issue for a lot of those content developers there.