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from the Good-Fast-AND-Cheap[er-than-Intel] dept.
At AMD's keynote at the 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), AMD CEO Lisa Su announced three new "7nm" Navi GPUs and a new CPU.
The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT will have 2560 stream processors (40 compute units) capable of 9.75 TFLOPs of FP32 performance, with 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM. The price is $449. The AMD RX 5700 cuts that down to 2304 SPs (36 CUs), 7.9 TFLOPs, at $379. There is a higher clocked "50th anniversary" version of the 5700 XT that offers up to 10.14 teraflops for $499. A teraflop on one of these new cards supposedly means better graphics performance than older Polaris-based GPUs:
Looking at these clockspeed values then, in terms of raw throughput the new card is expected to get between 9 TFLOPs and 9.75 TFLOPs of FP32 compute/shading throughput. This is a decent jump over the Polaris cards, but on the surface it doesn't look like a huge, generational jump, and this is where AMD's RDNA architecture comes in. AMD has made numerous optimizations to improve their GPU utilization – that is, how well they put those FLOPs to good use – so a teraflop on a 5700 card means more than it does on preceding AMD cards. Overall, AMD says that they're getting around 25% more work done per clock on the whole in gaming workloads. So raw specs can be deceiving.
The GPUs do not include real-time raytracing or variable rate pixel shading support. These may appear on a future generation of GPUs. Instead, AMD talked about support for DisplayPort 1.4 with Display Stream Compression, a contrast-enhancing post-processing filter, AMD Radeon Image Sharpening, and a Radeon Anti-lag feature to reduce input lag.
Towards the end of the presentation, AMD revealed the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, the company's fully-fledged Ryzen CPU with two 8-core "7nm" Zen 2 chiplets. Compared to the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, the 3950X has a slightly higher boost clock and L2 cache, with the same 105 Watt TDP, for $749. This is the full lineup so far:
| CPU | Cores / Threads | Frequency | TDP | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 3950X | 16 / 32 | 3.5 - 4.7 GHz | 105 W | $749 |
| Ryzen 9 3900X | 12 / 24 | 3.8 - 4.6 GHz | 105 W | $499 |
| Ryzen 7 3800X | 8 / 16 | 3.9 - 4.5 GHz | 105 W | $399 |
| Ryzen 7 3700X | 8 / 16 | 3.6 - 4.4 GHz | 65 W | $329 |
| Ryzen 5 3600X | 6 / 12 | 3.8 - 4.4 GHz | 95 W | $249 |
| Ryzen 5 3600 | 6 / 12 | 3.6 - 4.2 GHz | 65 W | $199 |
Previously: AMD and Intel at Computex 2019: First Ryzen 3000-Series CPUs and Navi GPU Announced
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @05:39AM (13 children)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/92tt44/ipc_comparison_30ghz_and_4_cores/ [reddit.com]
There's a gigantic IPC increase. From Excavator to Ryzen 3000, IPC went up like 54% (Zen), 3% (Zen+), and 12-15% (Zen 2).
You get 2 threads per core instead of 1, which may be a benefit.
You could pick up a cheap Ryzen 1000 or Ryzen 2000 CPU + AM4 motherboard, and then have an upgrade path to Ryzen 3000 later if you want. For example, you can find [slickdeals.net] Ryzen 5 1600 for as low as $80, or bundled with a motherboard for $140. Then you can slap in a 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X after a year or two of price declines.
Zap the spy engine by microwaving the CPU for 10 minutes at full power.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday June 11 2019, @11:49AM (8 children)
Don't forget, you also need to change from the DDR3 on the Phenom-compatible motherboard to DDR4 for a Ryzen-compatible motherboard.
I upgraded from an AMD FX-8320 to a Ryzen 5 2600X. CPU + motherboard + 32GB of DDR4 (I run lots of virtual machines) was about $700 US, mostly because the 2x16 DDR4 was pricey at the time of the upgrade.
That said, outside performance-intensive games it's hard to detect a seat-of-the-pants difference from the old processor. On benchmarks the difference is enormous, and when I rip Blu Rays and convert them to H.265 it takes far less time. But I spend a good chunk of my time in a web browser and that doesn't really feel different. And my VMs are running off spinning platter hard drives, so they're not noticeably faster because 98% of the time the CPU is idle waiting for disk IO.
Still, I don't regret the purchase. I'm in my 40s and this is much cheaper than going for a mid-life crisis Mustang or BMW or enormous pickup truck that I'll only ever use for hauling groceries.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @04:38PM (7 children)
"[...] and when I rip Blu Rays and convert them to H.265". God bless you!
(Score: 3, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday June 12 2019, @02:12AM (3 children)
Sorry, I don't upload them. I had a family member get traced and sued by the movie studios and it made me nervous.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:02PM (2 children)
What ever happened with that lawsuit? Seriously, I would love to hear all the details you can provide!
Very interesting.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 3, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday June 13 2019, @12:29PM (1 child)
It was typical intimidation crap, they received a letter with the lawsuit information and an outrageous number because the film was downloaded through bittorrent. So technically they were being sued for redistribution because of the way bittorrent works, even though the brother didn't post the torrent himself. Then a lawyer from the company contacted them and said they could settle out of court for $1500 provided they signed an agreement not to disclose the details, including the settlement fee. They paid it.
I suspect if they fought it in court they could have won, or at least gotten their legal fees plus penalty down to a total of less than $1500. But they figured a $1500 sure thing with no court dates was better. I didn't find out about the whole thing until a year or two later, so I had no chance to research their options before they made their decision.
Of course I'm violating the agreement by posting about it here, but I don't even remember what the movie was and I never got the name of the law firm the publisher was using the extort people. So it's a useless disclosure.
I figure this kind of thing is a rare occurrence, or else piracy in the US would be less common. Everyone has a giant pirated film collection or knows someone else that does. But I was spooked anyway. I thought about getting an international VPN to get around it, but I haven't bothered.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 15 2019, @12:51AM
Another to avoid it is to just ignore recent releases, as the studios seem to focus their energy on busting people for recent films, especially anything still in the theater. Since there's very little that interests me coming out nowadays, that is pretty easy.
Of course, there's no reason they couldn't try to extort you for anything in their nearly 100 year old back catalogue, so YMMV.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 12 2019, @02:20AM (2 children)
When are we gonna get AV1 support, sheeeeeit
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(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday June 13 2019, @12:44PM (1 child)
I use a Khadas Vim 2 Android box with Kodi to stream my films to the living room TV. It has hardware-accelerated H.265 decoding. Since it's two or three years old and AV1 only came out in March 2018 I'm pretty sure it doesn't have AV1 support. That's why I went with H.265. I should rip something AV1 and try it just in case.
H.265 also streams nicely to Android devices running version 6 or newer. Or maybe even 5, I don't remember.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 13 2019, @01:37PM
I'm aware that absolutely nothing has AV1 hardware decode/encode support at this time.
I think this is the latest GPU media decoder info announced (out of Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, etc.):
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-navi-radeon_rx_5700_xt-rx_5700-details,39608.html [tomshardware.com]
https://www.techpowerup.com/256481/amd-navi-radeon-display-engine-and-multimedia-engine-detailed [techpowerup.com]
https://www.techpowerup.com/img/cf96IBWB2r9zYZ25.jpg [techpowerup.com]
So AMD Navi multimedia engine decodes:
VP9: 4K90, 8K24
H.264: 1080p600, 4K150
H.265: 1080p360, 4K90, 8K24
Kind of surprising since the ARM Mali-V76 GPU [anandtech.com] with maximum 8 cores is supposed to be able to decode 8K60. That was announced last year. 8K24 is really anemic. While a lot of people don't care about 8K decoding, improvements of that level could be applicable to high-resolution+bitrate VR video. So there is a reason to keep pushing the envelope.
But back on topic: No AV1 decode support means a hard pass from me (for any new device). I watch a lot of YouTube and you can be sure Google will be an early adopter. It will also be interesting to see how fast anime and "The Scene" rippers adopt it. It's the open and royalty free option and using it sticks it to MPEG. It's generally accepted that it will be superior to H.265/HEVC (probably somewhere between 10-30% smaller files/bitrates at same quality).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 [wikipedia.org]
Bunch of cool stuff involved.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @05:38PM (1 child)
Also, the old motherboards only have PCIe3 while the new boards for zen2 have PCIe4 which means super fast m2 SSDs.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @05:51PM
Well, the old motherboards I mentioned don't have PCIe4 while the newer ones don't support the older Ryzen CPUs. Let's see if I can find the table...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-x570-chipset-first-gen-ryzen-support,39474.html [tomshardware.com]
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(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday June 11 2019, @11:33PM (1 child)
Sarcasm, yes? 'cause that sounds like a really bad idea.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 12 2019, @01:35AM
It works every time™
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