News Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500 Review: Firing Back at Alder Lake

Jimbojan

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For a $150 /chip, AMD's margin will be significant lower, it is likely losing money selling it; while Intel has a 15% margin over AMD, thus if Intel has a gross margin at 50%, AMD will have 35% gross margin, AMD will have to lose money to sell it, for it requires at least 39% gross margin to be in the black.
 

wifiburger

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For a $150 /chip, AMD's margin will be significant lower, it is likely losing money selling it; while Intel has a 15% margin over AMD, thus if Intel has a gross margin at 50%, AMD will have 35% gross margin, AMD will have to lose money to sell it, for it requires at least 39% gross margin to be in the black.
Prices are still crap, they will drop soon enough it's a dead platform and old cpu form 1.5years ago.
You also have choice now with Intel not increasing their prices and good performance.
It will get worst for AMD with 13th gen supporting DDR4.

example for the 5700x

5700x is already discounted from 450$ to 400$ on newegg.ca
5800x sits at 425$ can
 
For a $150 /chip, AMD's margin will be significant lower, it is likely losing money selling it; while Intel has a 15% margin over AMD, thus if Intel has a gross margin at 50%, AMD will have 35% gross margin, AMD will have to lose money to sell it, for it requires at least 39% gross margin to be in the black.
It's also likely that these products were born from a bunch of chiplets that didn't make the cut for something else.
 
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It doesn't look like 300 series mobos are getting Cezanne support (Asus board pulled at random; heck the 5600X isn't listed even), so the 5500 is probably off the table there as a terminal upgrade.
Lots of places have reported AMD is promising to extend Zen 3 compatibility to the 300 series motherboards.

It's just a question of whether or not the manufacturers care to bring that update over.
 
Jul 4, 2021
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The article mistakenly states that the 12400 has UHD 770 graphics. However, the 12100 and 12400 models only have UHD 730 graphics. 12500 and up have UHD 770 graphics.
 
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gruffi

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For a $150 /chip, AMD's margin will be significant lower, it is likely losing money selling it; while Intel has a 15% margin over AMD, thus if Intel has a gross margin at 50%, AMD will have 35% gross margin, AMD will have to lose money to sell it, for it requires at least 39% gross margin to be in the black.
You are talking nonsense. Intel's gross margin is at 55%, constantly decreasing since 2018. AMD's gross margin is at 48%, constantly increasing since 2018. These new Ryzen models are based on cost optimized B2 stepping (except Cezanne based SKUs). So, margins should still be quite decent for AMD. I don't think they are worse than Intel's. For example, the 5600 needs a tiny ~80mm² chip while the 12400 needs a chip that's twice as large. Sure, the Ryzen also needs a ~120mm² IOD. But that one is way less expensive per mm² than TSMC's 7nm or Intel's 10nm process. I also think TSMC's 7nm process still has better yields than Intel's 10nm process.
 

Giroro

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I'm unclear why the i5 12400 DDR4-3600 is less efficient (ie higher power consumption) and higher performing than the other i5 12400. Is it overclocked in some way other than the minor boost to memory frequency?
Are either of these CPUs using DDR5?
 
I'm unclear why the i5 12400 DDR4-3600 is less efficient (ie higher power consumption) and higher performing than the other i5 12400. Is it overclocked in some way other than the minor boost to memory frequency?
Are either of these CPUs using DDR5?
DDR5 can achieve faster speeds with less voltage. I'm going to assume their RAM kit used the nominal 1.1V the JEDEC standard specifies. Whereas to get DDR4 to 3600 MT/s usually requires it to run at 1.35V. Assuming that power dissipation for RAM works similarly with CPUs (where power = C * V ^ 2 * f), the 1.35V DDR4 uses contributes to nearly 50% more to the equation than the 1.1V DDR5 uses.

EDIT: I'm also assuming the memory controllers operate at the same voltage as the memory itself.
 
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Giroro

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For a $150 /chip, AMD's margin will be significant lower, it is likely losing money selling it; while Intel has a 15% margin over AMD, thus if Intel has a gross margin at 50%, AMD will have 35% gross margin, AMD will have to lose money to sell it, for it requires at least 39% gross margin to be in the black.

It's beyond unlikely that AMD is losing money on a $150 CPU. They are charging (what used to be full their price) on faulty chips that would otherwise go in the trash.
CPUs cost less than you might think to manufacture. They cost $100s of dollars mostly to pay for all the R&D, mixed with a marketplace where it is effectively impossible for a new company to become a competitor - except for in cases where an unspecified world government is actively helping it's companies steal IP.
 

Giroro

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DDR5 can achieve faster speeds with less voltage. I'm going to assume their RAM kit used the nominal 1.1V the JEDEC standard specifies. Whereas to get DDR4 to 3600 MT/s usually requires it to run at 1.35V. Assuming that power dissipation for RAM works similarly with CPUs (where power = C * V ^ 2 * f), the 1.35V DDR4 uses contributes to nearly 50% more to the equation than the 1.1V DDR5 uses.

EDIT: I'm also assuming the memory controllers operate at the same voltage as the memory itself.

I wasn't aware that memory voltages were taken into account for the CPU efficiency charts. Regardless, it is still unclear if either tested configuration is using DDR5.

The Test configurations list "2x 8GB Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 - Stock: DDR4-3200 14-14-14-36 / OC: DDR4-3800 " ... but that table is labeled "Core i9-12900K and Core i5-12600K Test System Configurations " So it must have been copied in from a different review.

I did notice the bottom of the table says the power limits were lifted on the CPU with overclocked memory.
 
You are talking nonsense. Intel's gross margin is at 55%, constantly decreasing since 2018. AMD's gross margin is at 48%, constantly increasing since 2018. These new Ryzen models are based on cost optimized B2 stepping (except Cezanne based SKUs). So, margins should still be quite decent for AMD. I don't think they are worse than Intel's. For example, the 5600 needs a tiny ~80mm² chip while the 12400 needs a chip that's twice as large. Sure, the Ryzen also needs a ~120mm² IOD. But that one is way less expensive per mm² than TSMC's 7nm or Intel's 10nm process. I also think TSMC's 7nm process still has better yields than Intel's 10nm process.
Yes intel doubled their yearly income from 2017 onwards ( +100% profit) and decreased their profit margin from 61% to 55% ( -6% profit) ,whoop dee doo.

And most of that reduced profit margin is because they eat up the increased cost of shipping, handling and all the other thigs that increased in cost due to the pandemic, every other company increased prices, they are big enough for it to not matter to them, they can just sell more chips at lower prices and still make more money than before.
 

Landstander

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The connections to the GPU side are likely lasered off to prevent anyone from doing this.
AMD is kind of known for intentionally leaving things like that on the table for techies to go bananas for.
Probably have to do something to compensate for being PCIe 3 instead of four though. They might have simply disabled the graphics because it would provide a bottleneck. How do you sell a specific model onchip graphics that's bottle-necked inside its own chip? It's easier to just disable it.
 
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AMD is kind of known for intentionally leaving things like that on the table for techies to go bananas for.
Probably have to do something to compensate for being PCIe 3 instead of four though. They might have simply disabled the graphics because it would provide a bottleneck. How do you sell a specific model onchip graphics that's bottled neck inside its own chip? It's easier to just disable it.
The last time I heard any AMD products had hardware functionality you could re-enable was back in the Athlon/Phenom X3 days. There was that incident where you could turn an RX 480 4GB into an 8GB, but that was more on the VRAM being defective and worked around.

I've yet to hear anyone turning a Ryzen 5 CPU into a Ryzen 7, since they both use the same die, just the Ryzen 5 has disabled cores.

Also I doubt any of this is intentional. Why sell a lower tier product that anyone can make into a higher tier one and cannibalize your market?
 
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These are most likely dies that are not good enough for higher SKUs.
All companies do it.
But my understanding is TSMCs 7nm is very high yields.
So it takes a while to collect enough lower quality dies to produce lower end parts in any quantity.
These will probably be limited availability parts like earlier generations.
 

Landstander

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These are most likely dies that are not good enough for higher SKUs.
All companies do it.
But my understanding is TSMCs 7nm is very high yields.
So it takes a while to collect enough lower quality dies to produce lower end parts in any quantity.
These will probably be limited availability parts like earlier generations.
Again, manufacturing costs are then pretty much identical.
If there is more market demand for the lower end chips, you disable more higher end ones and sell them in the low end, making overclock extremely effective.
We've seen it before. Yeah, yeah, I'm daydreaming, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong.
 
Damn, AMD. This has slapped "too little, too late" all over. I have to agree that, for these, you won't really be looking to AM4, as it's a dead end platform. No matter how much we mock Intel for their lackluster low end platform, at least they do have a few forward looking features right now to give them the edge at price parity.

You are about a year late to get any kudos.

And no; I hardly doubt these are harvested dies. Maybe the 5500, as it has the iGPU disabled, but the 5600 and 5700X, hell no.

Regards.
 
If there is more market demand for the lower end chips, you disable more higher end ones and sell them in the low end, making overclock extremely effective.

And no; I hardly doubt these are harvested dies. Maybe the 5500, as it has the iGPU disabled, but the 5600 and 5700X, hell no.
So either the low-end market demand has caught up to AMD's arbitrary standards to suddenly care about it, or AMD has enough chips that didn't past muster over the past 16 months that they would rather do something with them than write them off.

Considering that AMD's strategy for CPUs has been to have a single die design for their entire product lineup, I'm willing to bet they have a lot of "defective" chips to go around.

This is unlike Intel where they have separate die designs for different market segments.

These are most likely dies that are not good enough for higher SKUs.
All companies do it.
But my understanding is TSMCs 7nm is very high yields.
So it takes a while to collect enough lower quality dies to produce lower end parts in any quantity.
These will probably be limited availability parts like earlier generations.
Assuming this hasn't changed much, TSMC's 7nm is around 93% View: https://twitter.com/chiakokhua/status/1203905744191381505?lang=en


Though of course, that depends on what the tool's definition of "defective" means.
 
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King_V

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Performance more or less where expected. The prices are definitely going to have to come down some, though, given the current available prices of existing CPUs.


I know it's the lower end, but I'm pretty interested in what the 4100, 4500, and 4650G will be like. I imagine their performance will be generally worse than the i3 Alder Lake, but have a notable advantage over them in threaded loads.