Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Sunday September 08 2019, @08:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the going-for-the-weak-point dept.

Too Hot to Last? Investigating Intel's Claims About Ryzen Reliability

AMD's Ryzen 3000-Series processors landed two months ago, bringing with them an incredible increase in real-world performance and upsetting the pricing paradigm with an impressive increase in performance-per-dollar, but the launch has been marred by reports that many users aren't receiving the rated boost speeds. AMD announced this week that it had identified an issue with its firmware that reduces performance in some situations and that it would update the community on an incoming fix on September 10.

As we often see in marketing, Intel has chosen to attack during AMD's perceived time of weakness. At the IFA tradeshow this week, Intel presented a slide deck to members of the press that includes information from a recent survey conducted by YouTuber Der8auer in which a surprising number of respondents reported they have been unable to reach the rated boost frequencies with their Ryzen 3000 processors.

Interestingly, Intel then drove further on the issue, citing a report that claims reliability is behind AMD's apparent, but not proven, reasons for reducing its chips' frequencies.

We were already investigating the claims Intel cited in regards to the relationship between Ryzen's clock frequencies and longevity, and we had secured comment from AMD before its admission that there was an issue with its firmware. Today we'll present some of the testing we conducted to investigate those claims.

Also at CRN.

Previously: Survey Says Many Ryzen 3900X CPUs Can't Hit Rated Boost Clock Speeds, BIOS Fix on Sept. 10th


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday September 08 2019, @12:18PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday September 08 2019, @12:18PM (#891259) Journal

    Manual overclocking is starting to wane as CPUs can automatically overclock themselves based on "the silicon lottery", workloads, and the available cooling solution. There is apparently not much overclocking potential for something like Ryzen 3000, unless you start talking about absurd and expensive cooling. It has already been optimized to reach the clock speeds it reaches.

    When it comes to the turbo/boost clock speeds, definitions matter. The company can choose to either highlight the all-core boost, single-core boost, or even the boosts for 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, etc. cores at the same time. For Ryzen 3000, the publicized boost clock is only guaranteed for one core. But apparently many users couldn't even reach that. That will be addressed by a BIOS fix on Sept. 10.

    Intel harping on longevity is a little bizarre. Has anyone here actually had any CPU, overclocked or not, die after 5-10 years? By the time it dies, replacement systems should run circles around it. CPU death also isn't the tragedy that a hard drive failure with data loss could be.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Informative=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @01:38PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @01:38PM (#891282)

    I think the proper stat should be area under the boost curve. Ie, for an 8core cpu the curve could be:

    ncore = 1:8
    boost = c(4.5, 4.4, 4.3, 4, 3.8, 3.6, 3.2, 3)
    auc = sum(sma(boost, 2))

    In this case auc = 27.05. Perhaps then we could get some measure of energy used or heat generated and get the ratio. Say at max boost the cpu is using 100 w. Then the stat would be 270.5 GHz/mW.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:38PM (2 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:38PM (#891305) Journal

      0.28 MHz/mW, surely?

      See my naive calculation (I just picked 3.5 GHz as an average, didn't try to work backward):

      3.5 GHz * 8 cores = 28 GHz
      28 GHz / 100 Watts = 0.28 GHz / Watt
      0.28 GHz / Watt = 280 MHz / Watt = 0.28 MHz / mW

      Green500 top 10 systems [top500.org] have 10-15 gigaflops per Watt.

      Zen 2 has 16-32 FLOPS per cycle [wikichip.org]. Multiply 16 by 0.28 GHz / Watt and you get about 4.48 gigaflops per Watt for double precision. Which is probably not a real world number but may be in the ballpark.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:46PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:46PM (#891308)

        I meant GHz/kW.