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AMD Ryzen 7 Series Processor Reviews Go Live, Zen Looks Strong Vs Intel (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD has finally lifted the veil on independent reviews of its new Ryzen series of desktop processors that bring the company's CPU architecture back more on competitive footing versus its rival, Intel's Core series. The initial family of Ryzen processors consists of three 8-core chips, the Ryzen 7 1800X at 3.6GHz with boost to 4.1GHz, the Ryzen 7 1700X at 3.4Ghz with boost to 3.8GHz, and the Ryzen 7 1700 at 3GHz with boost to 3.7GHz. Each has support for 2 threads per core, for a total of 16 threads with 16MB of L3 cache on-board, 512K of L2 and TDPs that range from 65 watts for the Ryzen 7 1700 at the low-end, on up to 95 watts for the 1700X and 1800X. In comparison to AMD's long-standing A-series APUs and FX-series processors, the new architecture is significantly more efficient and performant than any of AMD's previous desktop processor offerings. AMD designed the Zen microarchitecture at the heart of Ryzen with performance, throughput, and efficiency in mind. Initially, AMD had reported a 40% target for IPC (instructions per clock) improvement with Zen but actually realized about a 52% lift in overall performance. In the general compute workloads, rendering, and clock-for-clock comparisons, the Ryzen 7 1800X either outperformed or gives Intel's much more expensive Core i7-6900K a run for its money. The lower clock speeds of the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1700 obviously resulted in performance a notch behind the flagship 1800X, but those processors also performed quite well. Ryzen was especially strong in heavily threaded workloads like 3D rendering and Ray Tracing, but even in less strenuous tests like PCMark, the Ryzen 7 series competed favorably. It's not all good news, though. With some older code, audio encoding, lower-res gaming, and platform level tests, Ryzen trailed Intel -- sometimes by a wide margin. There's obviously still optimization work that needs to be done -- from both AMD and software developers.
Looking more like crappy game code than crappy processor. Reviews show Ryzen doing particularly well on high quality settings. Regardless of gaming, which really is all about the GPU especially with Vulkan games coming down the pipe, Ryzen by all appearances is a kickass workstation chip at a gimme price. Because of Ryzen, I expect to pay less for my next desktop than my next phone.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
In general, the reviews are negative. We knew Ryzen would be behind in single-threaded performance, and it is. But it's also behind in multi-threaded performance in a lot of benchmarks for some reason. It beats out Intel's offerings in certain workloads (primarily video encoding), but it gets its ass handed to it in games.
On FP-heavy workloads it's toe-to-toe with Intel processors costing twice as much. On integer-heavy workloads Intel still has the better technology but on price/performance it's correctly priced between the i7-7700k and Intel's HEDT offering. On memory-heavy workloads the dual channel is no match for Intel's quad channel but the price/performance is still okay as far as I've seen.
Where it does fall short is single/few-threaded games if you game at low resolution/high frequency but since hardly any gamer would spend $1000 on an 8C Intel processor it's no surprise games don't really take any advantage of the last four cores, even hyper-threading 4C/8T doesn't do much for gaming. But if you move to 1440p the difference is less, at 4K you're GPU limited anyway.
Basically if you'll only be using it for gaming and have a Sandy Bridge or newer just save your money and use it for a 1080 Ti or Vega. I find the reviews are trying really trying to make games CPU bound when they're mostly not, at least the way I prefer to play them. Maybe the FPS addicts with 144Hz monitors see it differently, I prefer higher quality as long as frame rates are reasonably smooth.
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