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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.
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.
There are huge discrepancies across the benchmarks and people aren't sure what to make of it yet. Do we need BIOS/microcode updates for shit like better memory clocks/timings? Does software need to be recompiled? Why does disabling SMT increase performance so drastically in so many workloads? When will we get a driver and Windows scheduler update to fix some of the performance issues related to core parking, etc.?
The chips have a hard temperature limit of only 75 degrees and have limited overclocking potential. Under any sort of sustained load they throttle fairly quickly, to boot.
The 1800X is basically useless unless you need a lot of cores for specific workloads. The 1700X looks to be a better all around choice, but even the lower price of this model doesn't justify choosing it over a i7 7700K for gamers.
I had hoped that Ryzen parts would be the clear winner in performance/$, but they're not unless you're doing software rendering/encoding, or running VMs.
$500 R7 1800X vs $340 i7 7700k.
http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwr...
The 1800X is a shitty choice for gaming. Perhaps drivers, coptimized software, and more mature motherboards/BIOSes will help over time. AMD's shit does tend to improve with age, but there's a huge delta there.
still need to up the pci-e lanes. 16 + DMI is to low. and give the Skylake-X cpus 44 in ALL cpus.
And therein lies the problem. Linux is a technical OS, for technical people who can solve technical problems. When my mother can use it without me walking her through changing her monitor resolution, it will be on par with windows as far as usability goes. That's the problem with Linux, only technical people (in general) use it, so the ease of use is not getting fixed, because everyone using it doesn't see the problem.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.