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AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Processors Launched and Benchmarked (hothardware.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the new-and-improved dept.

MojoKid writes: AMD launched its 2nd Generation Ryzen processors today, based on a refined update to the company's Zen architecture, dubbed Zen+. The chips offer higher clocks, lower latencies, and a more intelligent Precision Boost 2 algorithm that improves performance, system responsiveness, and power efficiency characteristics. These new CPUs still leverage the existing AM4 infrastructure and are compatible with the same socket, chipsets, and motherboards as AMD's first-generation products, with a BIOS/UEFI update.

There are four processors arriving today, AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X, the Ryzen 7 2700, the Ryzen 5 2600X, and the Ryzen 5 2600. Ryzen 7 chips are still 8-core CPUs with 20MB of cache but now top out at 4.3GHz, while Ryzen 5 chips offer 6 cores with 19MB of cache and peak at 4.2GHz. AMD claims 2nd Gen Ryzen processors offer reductions in L1, L2, and L3 cache latencies of approximately 13%, 34%, and 16%, respectively. Memory latency is reportedly reduced by about 11% and all of those improvements result in an approximate 3% increase in IPC (instructions per clock). The processors now also have official support for faster DDR4-2933 memory as well. In the benchmarks, 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs outpaced AMD's first gen chips across the board with better single and multithreaded performance, closing the gap even further versus Intel, often with better or similar performance at lower price points. AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen processors, and new X470 chipset motherboards that support them, are available starting today and the CPUs range from $199 to $299.

25 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Bringing competition back to the market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I hope AMD can keep this ball rolling.

    1. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It would be nice to see a return to the Athlon days when AMD chips were strong competitors. From a quick skimming of the benchmarks, it looks like for gamers and average users, there's no real benefit to the Intel chips performance wise and they cost around $100 more. If I were AMD, I would be pounding that fact hard in the press.

    2. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The benchmarks are being run before the patches that fixed Intel's shit security. Check out the Anandtech one for something a bit more realistic.

    3. Re: Bringing competition back to the market by aliquis · · Score: 2

      Plenty of benefits for Intel chips precisely for gaming.
      That's were they are leading.

      Rather than putting it like you do the truth is that you don't need the fastest cpu unless you have a beast of a graphics card or run at settings to maximize frames per second. Because you'll be gpu limited anyway.

      But if you aren't then Intel have a lead in games.

    4. Re: Bringing competition back to the market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Plenty of benefits for Intel chips precisely for gaming.
      That's were they are leading.

      Rather than putting it like you do the truth is that you don't need the fastest cpu unless you have a beast of a graphics card or run at settings to maximize frames per second. Because you'll be gpu limited anyway.

      But if you aren't then Intel have a lead in games.

      Actually, if you turn on XFR2 and if you apply the meltdown patches on Intel (which will be automatically done w/ Windows updates), the AMD processors are now faster for gaming.

      Check out Anandtech article here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12625/amd-second-generation-ryzen-7-2700x-2700-ryzen-5-2600x-2600

      The AMD 2700X absolutely kills the top of the line Intel in gaming.

    5. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The "Athlon" days when AMD was ahead in performance was also when Intel had their head wedged so far up their ass they had to cut in switchback trails to find it. The Pentium 4 architecture was fucking horrible, and had the albatross of Rambus around it's neck. When they corrected that, they blasted right back in front and stayed there.

      The good news for AMD: It appears that Intel once again has their head wedged so far up their ass that the suction from extraction just might kill them. If AMD was ever to give Intel another crotch-punch in benchmarking, now's the time.

      --
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    6. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The Pentium 4 architecture was fucking horrible, and had the albatross of Rambus around it's neck.

      Intel also had most of their best people working on Itanium, and only the B-team working on x86.

      Once the Athlon iceberg had sunk the "Itanic", Intel put the A-team back to work on x86.

    7. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You know jack shit about this.

    8. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by ravenshrike · · Score: 2

      Well, that and they froze AMD out of the market entirely so they had no revenue stream to commit to R&D. Combined with the fact they pushed for their own foundry too early and AMD was fucked.

    9. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by Lonewolf666 · · Score: 5, Informative

      It is a bit more complex like that, the performance leadership changed a few times.
      At first, the Pentium 4 was badly outclassed, unless you bought the really expensive RDRAM memory from Rambus.

      Then Intel released the Northwood series with support for DDR RAM and eventually two memory channels, which helped the bandwidth-hungry Pentium 4 architecture a lot. I guiess that is what you meant with "blasting in front" and for a while, the reworked Pentium 4 was in fact faster than AMD's Athlon XP.

      Enter the Athlon 64. For a while, AMD was leading the race again, the Pentium 4 had run into a clock speed limit Intel had not foreseen (that was the age of the extremely hot running Prescott).

      In 2006, Intel countered with the Core 2, which brought them in front again for several years. AMDs efforts in that time varied between "inferior" and "competitive but not ahead" (Phenom II). AMD kept itself afloat with aggressive pricing, at the expense of meager financial results.

      Now there is the Ryzen, which started out competitive a year ago and appears to win over Intel with the new models. We seem to be back in a new "Athlon age" which pleases me no end as someone who dislikes Intel's business methods. I hasten to add that this is not meant to disparage Intel's engineering team:
      Their processors are pretty good, at worst there has been a bit of stagnation lately. It just seems that AMD can do even better these days :)

       

      --
      C - the footgun of programming languages
    10. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by Highdude702 · · Score: 2

      Sorry but your reply is just flat out incorrect. https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen...

      Maybe 400% faster than YOUR amd CPU.. but not even close to that much difference on mine(R7-1700 overclocked) and damn sure not more than zen+.

    11. Re:Bringing competition back to the market by Khyber · · Score: 3, Informative

      Bullshit. I have a Ryzen 5 1400 and an i3-7320, both have identical GPUs. The i3 got the patches the other day and GTAV went from a solid 60FPS at 1440x900 to not being able to average 45.

      Guess you forgot all the modern GTA games are mad CPU drivers versus GPU.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  2. Re:BIOS update required by AvitarX · · Score: 2

    The motherboards in general should be better about that now.

    Also, AMD was sending free CPUs for that purpose of you ended up unlucky.

    Still hoops to jump through.

    Anything with the new chioset will definitely work.

    As would anything coming with a recent firmware.

    --
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  3. Is Windows 7 supported? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have zero plans to let Microsoft's spyware, Windows 10, on my systems.

    1. Re:Is Windows 7 supported? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you actually gave a damn about Microsoft spying on you then you wouldn't be using Microsoft products because (surprise!) they all spy on you.

      The most common excuse for not using Linux is lazy users that insist on 100% feature parity.

      --
      Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    2. Re:Is Windows 7 supported? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Informative

      For anyone interested, found this article about GPU passthrough, Linux, and Windows:

      GPU passthrough: gaming on Windows on Linux

    3. Re:Is Windows 7 supported? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you're doing it right, the GPU is dedicated to the VM. This has been a thing for a few years now - Intel calls it VT-d, AMD calls theirs AMD-Vi.

      Most hypervisors that aren't ancient also support it, but your mileage may vary with GPUs made by twats that specifically disable this in their firmware in order to get you to buy a much more expensive version of the same card (Nvidia)

    4. Re:Is Windows 7 supported? by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

      My excuse is that I'm a gamer that doesn't want to spend endless hours trying to get games to work rather than simply playing them. Using an OS should not be hard work.

      --
      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    5. Re:Is Windows 7 supported? by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

      I just watched a video benchmarking Linux wine vs windows in VM and the benchmarker couldn't get some of the benchmarks to work and had to do what sounds like a lot of research to get the stuff working that did work.

      Unlike my windows games (win7 - updates individually picked) where I download a game and play it 99% of the time without any difficulty. My windows machine doesn't crash any more than a Linux machine, it doesn't force down updates and I haven't allowed the spyware updates.

      I'm a gamer, I want to play games, lots of games, mostly indie games, without hassle and without being severely restricted. Linux just isn't ready for that.

      I've done enough mucking around trying to get software working for one lifetime, it's not fun it's frustrating and with games+linux often it's just going to be a dead-end which is even worse.

      " but most important... It does what you tell it to!! "

      So long as that's not "play my games".

      --
      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
  4. How sweet by jwhyche · · Score: 3

    I'm in the market for a new cpu. AMD's timing couldn't be more perfect.

    --
    I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    1. Re:How sweet by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Really liking AMD's offerings too. Great CPUs, great chipsets and a socket that won't be obsolete in a few months.

      For a workstation I'd save up for a Threadripper though. It's not just the threads, it's the fact that you get so many more PCIe lanes. Loads of PCIe lanes effectively future proofs you because you will have enough expansion capability to add that 30GB/sec SSD or USB 4.0 controller. Also the IOMMU support is good so you can run Windows in a VM with near native GPU performance on a Linux host.

      --
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    2. Re:How sweet by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      I planned out a new PC build yesterday

      Ahh, nothing like the thrill and the dread on first power up of a new build. Lovingly you put all the parts in, rechecking everything. Then you flip the switch and ..... nothing. After a few frantic moments of rechecking everything you realize it would work better if you plugged the damn thing in.

      For a workstation I'd save up for a Threadripper though. It's not just the threads, it's the fact that you get so many more PCIe lanes

      I was disappointed by the number of pci-e lanes in this chip. Good call on the future expansion capability.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    3. Re:How sweet by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      Loads of PCIe lanes

      64 PCIe lanes.....

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
  5. Re:BIOS update required by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    from the sounds of it -- I would need to buy (or borrow) an older AM4 CPU just to flash the latest BIOS to the motherboard.

    I don't know why you would think that. I have build two Ryzen machines recently, an R 1700 in a Gigabyte AB350 and an R 1600 in a MSI X370 MB. I did not reflash either until after completing the install.

    You will need that GPU because there is otherwise no graphics, not even VGA. That is, except for the new R 2200/2400G parts that reportedly turn in better GPU performance than some low end PCI GPUs. With current sky-high GPU prices, I can see some builders going that route just to wait out the GPU shortage, maybe end the drought with Navi.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  6. Re:BIOS update required by Lonewolf666 · · Score: 2

    What's turned me off from an AMD build is that -- from the sounds of it -- I would need to buy (or borrow) an older AM4 CPU just to flash the latest BIOS to the motherboard.

    If you buy an used motherboard, then yes. Maybe even if you buy new specimen of an older model (but then I would demand that the dealer flashes the latest bios for me).

    When in doubt, get one of the new motherboards from the 4xx series. Those should be up to date with the processor support for 2nd generation Ryzen.

    --
    C - the footgun of programming languages