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AMD Launches Ryzen PRO CPUs: Enhanced Security, Longer Warranty, Better Quality (anandtech.com)

Posted by msmash on from the competition-heats-up dept.

Reader harrisonweber shares a report: This morning AMD introduced their Ryzen PRO processors for business and commercial desktop PCs. The new lineup of CPUs includes the Ryzen 3 PRO, Ryzen 5 PRO and Ryzen 7 PRO families with four, six, or eight cores running at various frequencies. A superset to the standard Ryzen chips, the PRO chips have the same feature set as other Ryzen devices, but also offer enhanced security, 24 months availability, a longer warranty and promise to feature better chip quality. The AMD Ryzen PRO lineup of processors consists of six SKUs that belong to the Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 families targeting different market segments and offering different levels of performance. As one would expect, the Ryzen 7 PRO models are aimed at workstation applications and thus have all eight cores with simultaneous multithreading enabled, the Ryzen 5 PROmodels are designed for advanced mainstream desktops and therefore have four or six cores with SMT, whereas the Ryzen 3 PRO models are aimed at office workloads that work well on quad-core CPUs without SMT. The specifications of the Ryzen 7 PRO and the Ryzen 5 PRO resemble those of regular Ryzen processors. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 3 PRO are the first chips from the Ryzen 3 lineup and thus give us a general idea what to expect from such products: four cores without SMT operating at 3.1-3.5 GHz base frequency along with 2+8 MB of cache.

9 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Re: "Enhanced Security" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    They fixed a few silicon errors in the spying functionality of the original chips that a microcode couldn't fix. So now that TLA can effectively spy on you, the processors offer advanced (national/homeland) security.

  2. Comparison by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ryzen 7 = Core i7
    Ryzen 5 = Core i5
    Ryzen 3 = Core i3

    Ryzen Pro is Xeon equivalent?

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    1. Re:Comparison by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      No - Epyc is the Xeon competitor.

    2. Re:Comparison by randomErr · · Score: 2

      Its not exactly an apples to apples comparison but I found this:

      http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6850K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X/3606vs3916

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    3. Re:Comparison by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Epyc is the Xeon equivalent. The main differences between those and desktop CPUs are number of PCIe lanes and advanced CPU features.

      These are something new... And then there is Threadripper too. These are like a cheap Xeon but for desktop motherboards, so you get some server/workstation features like the memory encryption but with cheap mobos and fewer PCIe lanes.

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  3. Re:"Enhanced Security" by klingens · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This time it does: it encrypts the main memory. So in the DRAM only encrypted data is stored. It gets decrypted on the fly, transparently when loaded into the CPU, so there is no special support needed by the OS or any software. This does increase latency of course.

    This encryption can also be used to encrypt VMs running on the CPU, where every VM has a different randomly created AES key, isolating VMs from each other.

  4. Re:8 "cores" by steveha · · Score: 2

    AMD took forever to get Ryzen out, but they really did do a good job with the chips. No games, no tricks, and 50% more instructions per clock. And to specifically answer your question: yes, each core has its own FPU.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/3176907/components-processors/ryzen-cpus-explained-everything-you-need-to-know-about-amds-disruptive-multicore-chips.html

    The most interesting thing about the new Ryzen PRO chips: much more PCI-E lanes. From an article a month ago: "...AMD committed offering all 64 PCI-E lanes and 4 DDR4 memory channels on every ThreadRipper SKU regardless of price, clockspeed, or core count. These [Intel] Core X-series chips haven't even been publicly announced for a full 24 hours and already it's clear that AMD's offering the better chip."

    http://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/31/amds-ryzen-threadripper-brings-socket-tr4-x399-chipset/

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  5. Re: "Enhanced Security" by thegreatbob · · Score: 2

    RTFA, looks like integrated TPM device and memory encryption (including extensions for VM hypervisors). Nothing that would remove/alter features that existed in the other line, and nothing that would nominally affect the operation of software that did not explicitly attempt to use it. Conceivable that the stuff was already in the silicon but skipped out on for one reason or another (e.g. binning).

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  6. Re:8 "cores" by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    Ask and you shall receive?
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

    AMD is back with a new architecture from scratch after the terrible piledriver architecture.

    It's equivalent to an 8 core 16 threaded i7 4790k if one ever existed in gaming and beats the i7 7700k in productivity tasks and matches $2000 i7 6900 series CPUs in both gaming and productivity.

    AMD rehired it's Alpha and AthlonXP CPU designer for Ryzen with it's new design from scratch. Downside are bugs and errata as it's brand new

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