Join us For A Tom's Hardware Ask Me Anything With AMD, Thursday April 6th

[cleeve]

As someone interested in doing virtualization and PCI passthrough of a GPU early reports of IOMMU groupings don't look promising for the consumer motherboards. Is that something AMD is able to address or entirely up to the motherboard makers?

This is something I've personally started to look at recently as a pet project. I'm playing with VM-Ware on my Ryzen system at home because, really, Ryzen's highly-threaded CPUs bring a lot of virtualization potential to the table in price segments where it hasn't been before. The sub-$300 segment has been limited to 4-thread processors on the Intel side... Ryzen 5 ratchets that up to 12 threads. Boom.

Having said that, we're in launch mode right now, and virtualization isn't a top priority at the moment. We're laser focused on making the platform as fast as we can in the near future. I anticipate we'll look harder at virtualization as time goes on.

 

[cleeve]

AMD recently signed a technology transfer agreement with THATIC, which is actually under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a national research institution. Did AMD cut its own throat?

This really isn't in my purview. I can say that AMD has good relationships with its partners that we build on trust. I can also say my colleagues are sharp and know what they're doing.

 

[redgarl]

I have 2 more questions:

Is the TV market going to implement Freesync at some point IYO?

Can we expect a console like Scorpio to have positive performances outcome with AMD GPU on PC?

 

[LordStreetguru]

Was a concept like "Reverse SMT/Hyperthreading" Ever on the books for Ryzen? Something that would let 2 cores act as one thread to effectively double the IPC of the chip? I can't remember the company that put out a concept for it, but I do think they were acquired by intel.

In any case something like that would be pretty nice to have for attempting 240hz gaming with the new monitors coming out, but mostly it would be useful for running production programs that don't properly utilize all the cores/threads of a CPU.

Is this something that could be added to a future ryzen revision? I'm going to guess it's a bit too late for anything like that if it's even possible without some major software latency.

Possibly something like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_processor

Would have made the chip a lot more adaptable to any situation and would have solved your 1080p gaming woes from launch, with a quick 8c/4t or 8c/16t option in the BIOS

 

[tredeuce]

How long do you and others at AMD get to celebrate the success before you have to move on to the next task or project? I know innovation and competition never ends, but surely I hope y'all can enjoy how well AMD is doing right now.

 

[cleeve]

Hello,
Big AMD fan - always have been.

Me too! Nice to meet you.

I have a simple question:

Why should a standard PC user who is primarily interested in gaming and graphic software performance chose Ryzen and it's AM4 platform over a competing platform of a similar caliber?

Thank you for your response and for making yourself available to the community!

I love this question. Gets straight to the heart of it.
Simple questions can be the most nuanced to answer, so bear with me.

You've got two use cases here:

1. Gaming
2. Graphics software

Let's start with number 2. This isn't even a contest, we absolutely crush Intel at every price point if you're doing any graphics rendering. We have three times the threads in the Core i5 segment, and double the threads of the Core i7 Kaby Lake segment in the consumer desktop space. We have very high single threaded performance, combined with a massive multithreading advantage, and this makes Ryzen a very deadly foe when it comes to productivity/rendering/encoding/encryption application performance.

Let's talk about your number 1 - gaming.

I don't know how old you are, but I'll date myself. Back in the old days of PC gaming, it didn't really matter what kind of CPU you had because everything out there was graphics card bottlenecked. You'd buyt the cheapest CPU out there and spend the rest of your money on the graphics card. A Duron with a Radeon 8500 performed the same as an Athlon with a Radeon 8500. Gamers didn't need to waste extra money on the CPU.

As time went on, developers started to make advanced AI, more demanding assets. Things started to shift back to the CPU and platform. Now in 2017, you want a decent 4-core CPU minimum for serious gaming. Even game consoles run 8-core processors. IPC has become a lot more important to gaming, as has platform speed if you want the highest framerates at 1080p.

Now with the introduction of Ryzen, AMD is back in the high-end gaming segment. The graphics card is still the bottleneck in a practical sense, but primarily at HD+ resolutions... 1440p, 4K, VR, etc.
So if you're playing games at 1440p and above (and you really should be with a decent processor, because HD+ is so pretty), Ryzen is fast enough to move that gaming bottleneck to the graphics card where it belongs. It's the good old days again, baby!

If you're playing at 1080p (and let's be fair, that's still the most prevalent resolution out there), the bottleneck gets shifted back to the platform and CPU. That's where we see Intel's Kaby Lake bull ahead of Ryzen in some cases. This surprised a lot of people, because Ryzen is such a dominating force in applications, why do we drop behind in some outliers?

So let's talk about that. A few points to frame this 1080p gaming conversation:

1. Ryzen is never *slow* at gaming in 1080p, it's just not as fast as Kaby Lake in some game benchmarks.
i.e. if the Core i7-7700K gets 200 FPS, and Ryzen gets 150 FPS, that's a technical loss of 25%.
In real world terms thare's no practical advantage to 200 FPS over 150 FPS. Hell, most 1080p monitors are 60 Hz, which means you can't really get a meaningful benefit from higher framerates than 60 FPS.
At 1080p, I'm not aware of any game that is so limited by Ryzen that 60 FPS is not achievable. In many games, Ryzen's 1080p performance is well above 80 FPS and 120 FPS. Even for people with ultra-high-end 144Hz monitors, Ryzen can get the job done if you're willing to adjust detail settings, which you often have to do on Kaby Lake to get those frame rates.

2. Ryzen is getting a lot faster at 1080p gaming. Ryzen is a brand new CPU, and in the month since we launched we engaged developers to address DOTA2, Ashes of the SIngularity, and Warhammer: Total War to deliver faster Ryzen performance. That's in a month. At the same time, platform limited titles are gaining a benefit from our RAM-speed ramp. And we're delivering other updates like a better windows power plan and Ryzen-Master Overclcoking sofwtare that doesn't require HPET clock to be enabled, whioch also helps performance. NET: You're going to see an uplift in Ryzen 1080p game performance in the April 11th launch day articles, and we're just getting started.

3. Developers tend to make use of as many resources as you provide - over time. You will see games take advantage of more cores and threads organically, especially now that we have new graphics APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan to take advantage of them.

So to Summarize:

1. Gaming: Virtually identical 1440p, 4K, VR game performance as the competition, and extremely smooth high-performance 1080p gaming (if not the fastest), combined with better prospects for the future thanks to advanced graphics APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan

2. Graphics software: Clean Kill for Ryzen. Your productivity/render/encoding/encryption wait times will be significantly longer on similarly-priced Intel competition.

Advantage: Ryzen

 

[cleeve]

How long do you and others at AMD get to celebrate the success before you have to move on to the next task or project? I know innovation and competition never ends, but surely I hope y'all can enjoy how well AMD is doing right now.

Wait, we get to sit back celebrate our success?

Being in the tech industry means you're never coasting. I don't see a significant reduction in the foreseeable future. But better busy than bored!

 

[jaymc]

So no concerns over ddr ram speed limitations...
Happy day's.

There have been a lot of reports of a "Silky Smooth" gaming experience.

In regard to this "Silky Smooth" feel in game's, that's being reported by many different reviewer's on the web. Is this a real phenomenon or a placebo effect ?
If the answer is yes it is real then.. What do you guy's believe it is down to, mouse latency, more Core's and Threads or a combination of thing's, please elaborate ?
An have you guy's done any testing or comparisons in regard to this ?

Also can you verify once and for all does connecting the mouse directly to the CPU via USB 3.1 reduce mouse latency because of cutting out the chipset ?
If so by how much, have you guy's any numbers on this ?

Thanks,
Jay

 

[cleeve]

I have 2 more questions:
Is the TV market going to implement Freesync at some point IYO?

I want to say, probably? It seems like an inevitable no-brainer to me, but you never know. I think it's a much clearer path to monitor domination for FreeSync.

Can we expect a console like Scorpio to have positive performances outcome with AMD GPU on PC?

Not sure, are you asking if your experience in consoles gives us some insights we take to PC products?
Yeah, I think our engineers take all the lessons they learn from console gaming and apply those lessons to the PC where it makes sense. We're a very gaming focused company here at AMD, so it's a natural progression.

 

[cleeve]

There have been a lot of reports of "Silky Smooth" gaming.
In regard to this "Silky Smooth" feel in game's, that's being reported by many different reviewer's on the web. Is this a real phenomenon or a placebo effect ?
If the answer is yes it is real then.. What do you guy's believe it is down to, mouse latency, more Core's and Threads or a combination of thing's, please elaborate ?
An have you guy's done any testing or comparisons in regard to this ?

I personally believe that having all of those extra core/thread Ryzen resources at the PC's disposal means that the windows scheduler can throw requests at resources without affecting the game, where it otherwise might have had the slightest impact on the experience. I've personally noticed that Ryzen gaming has been very smooth for me, but is there placebo there? Hard to say. I do plan to address this with testing in the future, to see if we can quantify this objectively. We do know that Ryzen's 99th percentile frame times are very good.

Also can you verify once and for all does connecting the mouse directly to the CPU via USB 3.1 reduce mouse latency because of cutting out the chipset ?
If so by how much, have you guy's any numbers on this ?
Jay

I don't have any numbers on this, I'd love to see someone dig in to this. If there's placebo anywhere, though, I suspect this is where it is. Even the 500 Hz mouse polling rate on USB2 seems like it should be sufficient to me, but admittedly I'm not a mouse performance purist and haven't looked deeply at this, or run any compares myself.

 

[cleeve]

Is this something that could be added to a future ryzen revision? I'm going to guess it's a bit too late for anything like that if it's even possible without some major software latency.

Possibly something like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_processor

Would have made the chip a lot more adaptable to any situation and would have solved your 1080p gaming woes from launch, with a quick 8c/4t or 8c/16t option in the BIOS

Nifty concept.
I'm not an architectural engineer so I wouldn't be privy if our guys were working on this, but I'll send it around. Would be interesting if the processor could do this on-the-fly and adapt to workloads as needed...

 

[Ditt44]

Q: As we saw in the mid-2000s, PC-centric game development devolved into 'Console-first', resulting in dumbed-down interfaces, specs, etc. It seems that trend is reversing (I am solidly anti-console as a gamer/modder). With AMD's diversification and integration into console markets, is development of both CPU and GPU technology base-lined on one market or the other or more parallel while sharing technology/assets/capability/etc.?

 

[Awzey]

I really love Ryzen and rearly everything about it, but I still don't get why AMD introduced the new CPU cooler mounting system for the AM4 socket instead of sticking with the AM3+ one which Asus has proven to be working just fine on their "Crosshair VI Hero" Mainboard.

 

[atljsf]

How long do you and others at AMD get to celebrate the success before you have to move on to the next task or project? I know innovation and competition never ends, but surely I hope y'all can enjoy how well AMD is doing right now.

Wait, we get to sit back celebrate our success?

Being in the tech industry means you're never coasting. I don't see a significant reduction in the foreseeable future. But better busy than bored!

yes you can sit and celebrate, in fact, we are doing just that right now

the beers are on the way, wait a little

something i want to say to amd, to you is thank you

pc world has been kept alive thanks to amd constant efforts in many fronts in all the price segments of the market, now more than ever

waiting to see the final part of ryzen 1000 series and apus to be released to see the complete picture of this new platform and cpu offering

 

[paulgrr63]

I haven't really kept up with the news besides the obvious release of Ryzen. Finding a direct answer to my question has been next to impossible and I don't have much money to spare so I don't want to regret my purchase. Which Ryzen processor would you recommend for gaming? I use my PC for gaming and schoolwork, nothing too demanding. The games I play include For Honor, Battlefield 1, World of Warcraft, and Gears of War. Thank you for your time!

 

[jaymc]

Thanks mate.. Hopefully someone put's it to bed soon..

Thing's are looking up for AMD.. I can't wait for Vega and Naples !!

Best of luck with the rebellion... Viva La Revolucion !

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[cleeve]

I really love Ryzen and rearly everything about it, but I still don't get why AMD introduced the new CPU cooler mounting system for the AM4 socket instead of sticking with the AM3+ one which Asus has proven to be working just fine on their "Crosshair VI Hero" Mainboard.

Dude!
We gave you the best of both worlds.

We include the AM3+ cooler-compatible retention frame on AM4 motherboards (to the best of my knowledge, all of them come with those retention frames), not just the ASUS Crosshair.
Just check the newegg board pics for socket AM4. They're all over the place.

You just take that retention frame off if you want to use the new Wraith Stealth and Wraith Spire coolers.
And frankly, spring screws on the AM4 Wraith Coolers are awesome.

 

[cleeve]

I haven't really kept up with the news besides the obvious release of Ryzen. Finding a direct answer to my question has been next to impossible and I don't have much money to spare so I don't want to regret my purchase. Which Ryzen processor would you recommend for gaming? I use my PC for gaming and schoolwork, nothing too demanding. The games I play include For Honor, Battlefield 1, World of Warcraft, and Gears of War. Thank you for your time!

In general, the Ryzen 5 1600X is the best Ryzen gaming choice. It gives nothing up to the Ryzen 7s, has the same clocks as the top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 1800X, and can really beat the Core i5-7600K in certain titles.

Having said that, I'd wait for Aprill 11th launch day and look at the reviews before buying. The lower-priced Ryzen 5 1500X might do the job for you.

Depends on your graphics card, too.

 

[cleeve]

Q: As we saw in the mid-2000s, PC-centric game development devolved into 'Console-first', resulting in dumbed-down interfaces, specs, etc. It seems that trend is reversing (I am solidly anti-console as a gamer/modder). With AMD's diversification and integration into console markets, is development of both CPU and GPU technology base-lined on one market or the other or more parallel while sharing technology/assets/capability/etc.?

I think products follow what people want.

There was a time when gamers were a bit intimidated by PCs and the knowledge that was required to run them properly... I think the new generation of gamers aren't intimidated and really see the benefits of the open PC platform. Combine that with the tremendous success of eSports, and the PC is leading the millennium's current gaming renaissance.

As far as base-lines, it's a loop. CPUs and GPUs get better, developers start to take advantage of that power, and then we plateau for a while.

This is why Ryzen is so fricking awesome for gamers. We basically disrupted the PC's landscape by making highly-threaded, high-perf CPUs accessible at price points where they were unheard of... and now, developers can make use for that hardware as it reshapes the market. It won't be instantaneous, but it's inevitable.

Personally, from a crystal ball standpoint, I think the PC will completely displace consoles someday. Really, consoles are just PCs with simplified user interfaces and better compatibility. We've been moving in that direction since day one, it just takes time.

 

[paulgrr63]

I haven't really kept up with the news besides the obvious release of Ryzen. Finding a direct answer to my question has been next to impossible and I don't have much money to spare so I don't want to regret my purchase. Which Ryzen processor would you recommend for gaming? I use my PC for gaming and schoolwork, nothing too demanding. The games I play include For Honor, Battlefield 1, World of Warcraft, and Gears of War. Thank you for your time!

In general, the Ryzen 5 1600X is the best Ryzen gaming choice. It gives nothing up to the Ryzen 7s, has the same clocks as the top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 1800X, and can really beat the Core i5-7600K in certain titles.

Having said that, I'd wait for Aprill 11th launch day and look at the reviews before buying. The lower-priced Ryzen 5 1500X might do the job for you.

Depends on your graphics card, too.

Thank you for your reply. I am currently using a GTX 1070(Hurry up with Vega!) I'll be keeping an eye out for reviews, particularly the 1500X!

 

[g-unit1111]

I'm really interested in upgrading my 4th generation Intel rig to a Ryzen based system. So what can we expect from the R5s? How will these favor in comparison to say an i5-7600K? Would my money be better spent there or upgrading to an R7-1700X?

Also what's the issue with AM4 mounting brackets? I see that companies like Noctua (I would plan to reuse my D14) are giving away AM4 mounting brackets but would older coolers be able to work on the new platform?

 

[redgarl]

I have 2 more questions:
Is the TV market going to implement Freesync at some point IYO?

I want to say, probably? It seems like an inevitable no-brainer to me, but you never know. I think it's a much clearer path to monitor domination for FreeSync.

Can we expect a console like Scorpio to have positive performances outcome with AMD GPU on PC?

Not sure, are you asking if your experience in consoles gives us some insights we take to PC products?
Yeah, I think our engineers take all the lessons they learn from console gaming and apply those lessons to the PC where it makes sense. We're a very gaming focused company here at AMD, so it's a natural progression.

What I mean is do you think having developers using AMD architectures will gives you a serious advantage in performances for games ported on PC, or vice-versa and using an AMD CPU/GPU?

 

[norune]

Questions :

1 : Have Amd "fine tuned" the chips allready so that the headroom for overclocking is lower on the 1800x models (not counting the luck factor) than the lower 1700 models? My impression is that both 1700 and 1700x might in fact have the potential to achieve the same clocks as 1800x. Or are we probably just seeing a bit of inconsistency in the bios and motherboards partners that might be fixed in the future giving perhaps better OC headroom?

2 : Any date for the next revision of Ryzen?Like Late 2017 or early 2018?

 

[sp1207]

What is the story with ECC? I've read reports of it working with various motherboards, working only in Linux, working in Windows but not advertising as such. Is there any AMD-side push to coordinate with microsoft and mobo manufacturers to enable ECC as an option even if not officially supported?

Additionally, please share my request for coreboot support! If AMD released a modern coreboot platform they would have immediate preference in the scientific, financial, and government sectors.

 

[Robert Pankiw]

Yeah, I think our engineers take all the lessons they learn from console gaming and apply those lessons to the PC where it makes sense. We're a very gaming focused company here at AMD, so it's a natural progression.

I was reading an article on the XBox Scorpio, which said that Microsoft engineers made significant improvements to the SoC in regards to DX12, such as taking some API calls down from thousands of instructions to 11. This allowed for significant performance gains, as you might expect.

Seeing as this isn't the work of AMD engineers, can AMD still benefit from that knowledge and implementation specifics?

Also, again about Scorpio,

It was mentioned that the SoC is a Jaguar core on 16nm. I realize that doing a process shrink isn't nearly as easy as shrinking a picture in MSPaint. What work goes into shrinking an existing core design?

Thanks for your time!