AMD Ryzen

[Nexus]

On March 2, and preorderable today, the first three Ryzen processors will be available to buy. All three processors use AMD's brand-new Zen core. All are eight-core, 16-thread parts; all have a 16MB level 3 cache shared across all cores; and all three are unlocked for overclocking.

The top-end part is the R7 1800X. This $499 chip will have a 3.6GHz base speed and a 4.0GHz boost speed, with a 95W TDP. AMD is positioning it against Intel's i7-6900K, a $1,050 processor using the Broadwell-E core running at 3.2 GHz, and turboing up to 3.7GHz.

In the Cinebench R15 multithreaded rendering test, AMD says that its new processor scores about 9 percent higher than Intel's. In the single threaded version of the same test, it's a dead heat.

AMD hasn't quite matched Broadwell's instructions per clock—it's relying on a few hundred extra megahertz to achieve that tied score—but it's not far off. And given that the Ryzen ships at a few hundred extra megahertz more than Intel's twice-as-expensive chip, the shortfall in IPC is largely academic. IPC is interesting in that it gives a sense of how cores are designed, but workloads aren't constrained by IPC or clock speed per se; they're constrained by thermal and power constraints. And AMD compares very favorably there, too: the Intel chip is a 140W part, so can use about 50 percent more power than the AMD.

Per AMD's demonstrations, the Ryzen also beat the Intel chip in Handbrake video encoding and boasted somewhat better frame rates in Sniper Elite 4 at 4K.

The other two parts are the R7 1700X, a $399 part with a base of 3.4GHz and a boost of 3.8GHz; and the R7 1700, with clocks of 3.0 and 3.7GHz, selling for $329. AMD is positioning these against the $439 Intel Core i7-6800K (a six-core, 12-thread part) and $349 Core i7-7700K, respectively.

This last comparison is particularly significant; the Kaby Lake processor is only a four-core, eight-thread processor. It has a sizable clockspeed advantage—its base frequency of 4.2GHz is higher than the boost frequency of any Ryzen, and it turbos all the way up to 4.5GHz—and AMD concedes that in strictly single threaded workloads, the Intel chip will open up a gap over the Ryzen, but as soon as you're doing something that can use all eight of those cores and all 16 of those simultaneous threads, that clock speed delta shows its limits: in Cinebench the Ryzen is 46 percent faster.

The company was aiming to improve IPC by 40 percent over its previous processor design, and Lisa Su said that it didn't just hit this target—it surpassed it for a 52 percent improvement. This puts AMD back in the performance game.

Full benchmarking will have to wait—the reviews will not arrive until launch day—but if the Cinebench scores are indicative, Ryzen isn't just giving AMD its first credible desktop processor for more than a decade; it's also putting Intel on the back foot, leaving Intel's already expensive Broadwell-E chips looking very overpriced indeed.

AMD is promising that March 2 will be a hard launch, too, with chips in abundant supply, 82 or more different motherboards from a wide range of OEMs, and systems from 19 different boutique PC vendors. All the major OEMs should have Ryzen systems within about 30 days of launch, too.

Source

 

[Tornado]

So AMD finally decided to show up.

 

[Techy]

Would be nice to see their lower SKUs, the 1600 and below. But with the NDA fast approaching we'll see benchmarks soon enough.

 

[ryandtw]

Looks promising. But can it run Project CARS 2 well? Hmm...

 

[Techy]

Looks promising. But can it run Project CARS 2 well? Hmm...

Well, we don't know how PCARS 2 will run, as it's very far off from now. Luckily Ryzen would be released for a while, which adds a lot of demand for optimizing for Ryzen CPUs.

 

[sesselpupser]

I'm still very skeptical of AMD products, they may sound good on paper and deliver great results in synthetic benchmarks, but I'd like to see how consistently Ryzen outperforms Kaby Lake. Why is only Sniper Elite 4 performance being talked about here? Not to mention the fact that there are still only a tiny number of games that can leverage more than four cores, hence why the 6-core Haswell-E processors are sometimes actually outperformed by Skylake. I don't think this will change until Intel has a consumer-grade CPU with more than four cores, primarily because of their enormous market share and historic anti-competition business practices that crippled AMD and locked us into the situation we're in now.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Ryzen wipe the floor with Intel to force them to up their game, but I'm going to need a lot of convincing that this is really it.

 

[Nexus]

I'm still very skeptical of AMD products, they may sound good on paper and deliver great results in synthetic benchmarks...

Well, AMD GPU's are pretty competitive. Even though there's no true competitor to the GTX 1070 and above, the Fury and Fury X are doing surprisingly well against the 1070. And the rest of the Polaris lineup is doing good against the Pascal lineup. Their older cards have held up quite well, too.

As for games not using more than four cores, there's an increasing amount of games that are doing exactly that, and I'm sure that DX12 and Vulkan will contribute to that.

But anyway, we'll only find out how good Ryzen is when reviewers release benchmarks.

 

[Techy]

Seeing that AMD only announced the 1800 and 1700 SKUs, it seems that the lower-tier SKUs, the 1600 and below, are slated for Q2 2017. That can be as late as May. A bit of a shame AMD went with this stagnated launch pattern, as for people who don't really need 8 cores or those who don't need all that power will have to wait even longer. It's especially true for gaming-oriented builds, because it is possible that the 8 cores won't overclock nor have the single-thread IPC to run games with as much finesse as Intel's 7700K or similar. In fact it's pretty much the case for any 8 core CPU. Doesn't mean the chips won't run games very well. It'll perform decently, as I predict, but not as well as Intel's i7 or i5 chips. And I know there are some games out there that can use 6 or 8 cores and scale performance. More the reason to see gaming benchmarks of the 1700 and 1800 SKUs

There is also the argument of disabling the cores of the Ryzen 8 core chips to allow better overclocking. Hopefully a tech outlet will go to such lengths to test this theory (and they should, seeing how big Ryzen is in the CPU market).

Here's a slide that's a good food for thought

I suspect the 1600 and 1600 X will be the chips the average gamer are looking for. But the interesting bit is that they increased the clocks a little bit compared to the last leak of the Ryzen 1600 SKUs.

 

[Omnis]

I'm still very skeptical of AMD products, they may sound good on paper and deliver great results in synthetic benchmarks, but I'd like to see how consistently Ryzen outperforms Kaby Lake. Why is only Sniper Elite 4 performance being talked about here? Not to mention the fact that there are still only a tiny number of games that can leverage more than four cores, hence why the 6-core Haswell-E processors are sometimes actually outperformed by Skylake. I don't think this will change until Intel has a consumer-grade CPU with more than four cores, primarily because of their enormous market share and historic anti-competition business practices that crippled AMD and locked us into the situation we're in now.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Ryzen wipe the floor with Intel to force them to up their game, but I'm going to need a lot of convincing that this is really it.

Sniper Elite is probably the only CPU bottleneck game that was designed to run on AMD graphics. They're not going to put Big Green's hardware in their demo rigs.

I'm really stoked on Ryzen. I'm thinking of upgrading my trust X58 rig to a Ryzen AM4 system. The fact that you can get that much power for half the price of Intel's top bin is amazing. Per AMD's released data so far, 1700X has more per-core power than Intel's chips. That means 1800X should be the new sheriff in town and that's not even considering OC headroom.

This chip should be a smash hit for small media studios. The world doesn't revolve around gaming, but it does that well too.

 

[Nexus]

Some speculation on Ryzen's IPC.

 

[Dennisch]

I'm still very skeptical of AMD products, they may sound good on paper and deliver great results in synthetic benchmarks, but I'd like to see how consistently Ryzen outperforms Kaby Lake. Why is only Sniper Elite 4 performance being talked about here? Not to mention the fact that there are still only a tiny number of games that can leverage more than four cores, hence why the 6-core Haswell-E processors are sometimes actually outperformed by Skylake. I don't think this will change until Intel has a consumer-grade CPU with more than four cores, primarily because of their enormous market share and historic anti-competition business practices that crippled AMD and locked us into the situation we're in now.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Ryzen wipe the floor with Intel to force them to up their game, but I'm going to need a lot of convincing that this is really it.

So much this.

Edit.

I'm also hoping that this release will make the Intel prices drop like a rock.

 

[Techy]

Another slide

 

[Omnis]

#Winning

 

[Nexus]

An interesting page from MSI's X370 Titanium motherboard manual:

Source: r/AMD

 

[Techy]

Interesting. But these sort of gimmicks to make overclocking easier isn't working out. Most of the time they just apply too much voltage, and it always comes down to the silicon lottery. Some chips may work fine with those Stages, some won't. And this knob, laid out in such a way that suggests that overclocking in general is easy, is not making things easier nor more convenient. Can fool the average builder that overclocking is as simple as turning a knob or clicking a "boost!" button, now everything's 10x faster.

 

[JakeMR2]

How small would be the numbers on the board will be? And how tiny is that knob? How will he/she be able to adjust the knob while it's running or off in the case itself?

Those are questions that AMD should be able to answer to everybody, I feel like it would be a pain to overclock that way though. I thought it was done by a nice program inside the BIOS that let's you do that, but I guess not. Oh well. Not to mention it is near the motherboard essential stuff too.

 

[Techy]

You can see the knob in this photo of the motherboard, bottom-right

And this pic is from a fellow who recently got a Ryzen chip for review. So I'm thinking the guy will test out this Boost knob and see if it's cracked up to be. It just might, but I'll stand to my previous post.

 

[JakeMR2]

You can see the knob in this photo of the motherboard, bottom-right

And this pic is from a fellow who recently got a Ryzen chip for review. So I'm thinking the guy will test out this Boost knob and see if it's cracked up to be. It just might, but I'll stand to my previous post.

I see that it has a Power and Reset on the test board, maybe it's for debuging purposes or just on the release board itself.

 

[Nexus]

Those are questions that AMD should be able to answer to everybody, I feel like it would be a pain to overclock that way though. I thought it was done by a nice program inside the BIOS that let's you do that, but I guess not.

I mean, it'd be a bit silly if you couldn't overclock the traditional way. This is probably just for people who want a "quick" way to OC.

 

[Ibonibo]

The tuning knob isn't new.

I have it on my Skylake... From what I gathered on information at the time, the first steps are okay... turning it to max settings can be unstable (lottery).

And you can still do it via normal OC in the Bios.

 

[Nexus]

R7 1800X Reviewer's Kit Unboxing:


tl;dw:

CPU: AMD Ryzen R7 1800X
CPU cooler: Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 2X8GB 3000MHz DDR4
Motherboard: Aorus AX370-Gaming 5

 

[Terronium-12]

So I think, maybe, Intel is having K8 flashbacks: https://www.techpowerup.com/231038/...attempts-to-manipulate-ryzen-reviews#comments

Seriously? Seriously?

 

[Nexus]

So I think, maybe, Intel is having K8 flashbacks: https://www.techpowerup.com/231038/...attempts-to-manipulate-ryzen-reviews#comments

Seriously? Seriously?

Let's just hope that they don't get away with it this time...

 

[Sanji Himura]

So I think, maybe, Intel is having K8 flashbacks: https://www.techpowerup.com/231038/...attempts-to-manipulate-ryzen-reviews#comments

Seriously? Seriously?

This is more in line with Hillary's Correct the Record campaign involving Social media. Intel is trying to control the message here.

I, for one, am not amused by the effort.

 

[Grayfox]

AMD did the Athlon XP 4500 PR thing.
They made motherboard manufacturers show the PR rating rather than clock speed.
Isn't that just as worse?

 

[super_gt]

 

[Pillo-san]

Performs like an i5 in games, which is not that bad but there is lots of performance issues bugs right now that obviously needs to be sorted out. Before it can be a "revolution", hehe. But it looks bright if AMD manages to sort it all out.

 

[Nexus]

Results from reviews seem to be all over the place right now. From what I can gather, it might be because some reviewers did benchmarks with older BIOS versions.

 

[Pillo-san]

It seems like that, and it seems that 1700 has less bugs somehow with the mem controller.
Look at jokers review. When other had problems with running mems at xmp 3000 speeds, he did not have that problems at all. Must be because of the bios or that he has a 1700.

 

[ryandtw]

Pretty good processor content-creating-wise, not as good as Intel's in raw gaming. Don't buy if the only purpose is gaming, which isn't the case for me. I would like to have an eight-core (with SMT/Hyperthreading) someday (maybe next year?) as it really helps out with video transcoding (with Handbrake) A LOT, I'm glad AMD is bringing eight-core processing to more people than before. I would like to transcode Blu-rays in the future.

Although I'm tempted for the $500 price tag of the 1800X, I would pick the $400 1700X. Even then it would be a significant improvement over my i7-860!