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AMD's 3rd Gen Ryzen Is The Most Exciting Processor Launch In A Decade
There have been a fair amount of rumors surrounding AMD's 3rd Gen Ryzen 'Zen 2′ processors over the last few weeks covering specifications, performance and pricing. I wrote just yesterday about the latest rumor of a supposed 16-core mainstream Ryzen CPU obtaining a huge Cinebench score and a few days ago I discussed why AMD might be considering getting rid of its low-end Threadripper CPUs too. However, leaks and rumors aside, there are far more important and genuine reasons to be excited by 3rd Gen Ryzen and what AMD will be announcing next week at Computex and after that at E3 in June.
[...] AMD could finally match or even beat Intel with Zen 2 and 3rd Gen Ryzen as lots of these issues are rumored to be solved. Memory speeds will apparently increase significantly and given the impact we've seen from relatively small boosts in memory speed, this could well see 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs offer sizeable performance gains. Thankfully, memory prices are in AMD's favor too with kits of 16GB 3,600MHz memory retailing for less than $125 - when just before Christmas that same kit would have cost you nearly $260.
[...] The latest rumor of a Cinebench score of such a CPU puts this 16-core monster on par with Intel's Core i9-9980XE – a $2,000 CPU that requires Intel's high-end desktop motherboards, yet rumors of the supposed Ryzen 9 3850X put that CPU as retailing for less than $600. While we might not see those lofty 5GHz numbers from that CPU, they might appear lower down the stack with a 12-core model, which is likely to be a favorite for general purpose users and gamers alike.
[...] The fact is, that 1st and 2nd Gen Ryzen didn't deal a death blow to Intel. It was still faster in some areas and while its CPUs and platforms usually cost more, that doesn't always matter, especially if the differences are mere 10′s of dollars and you'll be using your PC for the next few years, reaping the benefits. However, with 3rd Gen Ryzen, all the signs are that we could finally be looking at reviewers like myself recommending AMD's CPUs across the board, and not just for certain workloads.
Could it really be that AMD's offerings will be faster, with more cores, more IPC, lower energy consumption, and cheaper all at once across vast swaths of the CPU market?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @10:02PM (1 child)
And since they're sticking with Socket AM4, which only has dual channel memory support, this probably doesn't stand to improve much. Unless they move the Threadripper socket to high-end mainstream, AMD chips will all be memory bottlenecked until Socket AM5, whenever that is.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @03:02PM
Big pain? That's FUD. This is a "mainstream" desktop processor. Intel's mainstream desktop processors are only dual channel too with a similar max of
41.6 GB/s. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/i9-processors/i9-9900.html [intel.com]
So for mainstream desktop CPUs you'll experience the same memory bandwidth limits whether you're on AMD or Intel.
If you really want more you'd be going for a different socket e.g. TR4 or the "real server" sockets.
I bet for the target market the memory bandwidth would not actually be an issue - they'd be better off spending more on CPU or GPU or SSD than going for quad channel memory. Whatever performance they lose by somehow not having quad channel will be more than made up for by the faster CPU/GPU/SSD.
Tell me what percentage of Ryzen users will need a memory bandwidth faster than 40GB/sec more than they would need a faster CPU/GPU/SSD.