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AMD Ryzen 7 Launches
Reviews and benchmarks for AMD's Ryzen 7 8-core desktop CPUs flooded out at 9 AM EST/6 AM PST:
Along with the new microarchitecture, Zen is the first CPU from AMD to be launched on GlobalFoundries' 14nm process, which is semi-licenced from Samsung. At a base overview, the process should offer 30% better efficiency over the 28nm HKMG (high-k metal gate) process used at TSMC for previous products. One of the issues facing AMD these past few years has been Intel's prowess in manufacturing, first at 22nm and then at 14nm - both using iterative FinFET generations. This gave an efficiency and die-size deficit to AMD through no real fault of their own: redesigning older Bulldozer-derived products for a smaller process is both difficult and gives a lot of waste, depending on how the microarchitecture as designed. Moving to GloFo' 14nm on FinFET, along with a new microarchitecture designed for this specific node, is one stepping stone to playing the game of high-end CPU performance.
Ryzen 5 chips will be released sometime in "Q2", and are presumed to have 4 to 6 cores with hyperthreading enabled. One of these has been revealed: the Ryzen 5 1600X. It has 6 cores, and equivalent clock (3.6 GHz) and turbo (4.0 GHz) speeds to the $500 8-core flagship Ryzen 7 1800X. Ryzen 3 chips will be released in the second half of the year, and include quad-cores with no hyperthreading.
The Intel Core i7-7700K maintains a lead in single-threaded performance, but the Ryzen 7 chips lead in many multi-threaded benchmarks (sometimes beating the $1089 Intel Core i7-6900K).
AMD Ryzen 7 Great, but Underwhelming for Gamers
PC Gamer has just published a lengthy and in-depth review of the new AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, (unfortunately broken down into seven separate pages). Their verdict? The AMD Ryzen 7 has plenty of power, but underwhelming video game performance.
The good news is that in heavily-threaded workloads, Ryzen looks every bit as potent as AMD has suggested. Processors with eight cores and sixteen threads have been relegated to the extreme performance community by Intel going back to the i7-5960X, with a starting price of $1000. AMD takes that ludicrous price tag and kicks it to the curb with a $500 halo part, and then ups the ante with $400 and $330 offerings. And just for good measure, every single Ryzen processor is multiplier unlocked, so enthusiasts can coax even more performance out of the parts.
If you've been longing to try out a beastly 16-threaded monster, the price barrier to entry just got slashed from around $2000 for a complete high-end build to around $1250. Ryzen also easily beats the old FX-series in every test I ran, with even the entry-level Ryzen 7 1700 at times more than doubling the performance of the FX-8370. Yeah.
The bad news is that Ryzen's single-threaded performance, and perhaps more importantly its clock speeds, aren't quite as impressive. In some workloads, Ryzen does a great job at keeping up with Intel's Haswell/Broadwell architectures, but it's about 5-10 percent slower per clock compared to Skylake/Kaby Lake. Toss in the higher clocks of Kaby Lake and 10 percent can quickly turn into a 40 percent deficit in some tests. Among the use cases where Intel maintains a decent lead over Ryzen is gaming performance, though this varies by game.
The result is some great wins for Ryzen, and some painful losses. But the losses are actually a bit odd. To be frank, Ryzen and the AM4 platform feel a bit undercooked right now.
It appears that Intel will remain the choice of CPU for video gamers, at least until the Zen+.
AnandTech's Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11177/making-amd-tick-a-very-zen-interview-with-dr-lisa-su-ceo
Q5: How vital was it to support Simultaneous Multi Threading?
LS: I think it was very important. I think it was very complicated! Our goal was to have a very balanced architecture. We wanted high single threaded performance, and SMT was important given where the competition is. We didn't want to apologize for anything with Zen – we wanted high single thread, we wanted many cores, but sorry we don't have SMT? We didn't want to say that, we wanted to be ambitious and give ourselves the time to get it done.
[...] Q8: Do you find that OEMs that haven't worked with AMD are suddenly coming on board?
LS: I will say that we have engagements with every OEM now on the high-performance space. Twelve months ago, a number of them would have said that they don't have the resources to do multiple platforms. So yes, I think momentum helps in this space.
Q9: At Intel's recent Investor Day we learned that future chips will incorporate multiple dies on the same package. This allows a semiconductor firm to focus on smaller chips and potentially better yields at the expense of some latency. Given what we predict will happen, what is your opinion on having large 600mm2 silicon? Is there a future?
LS: There has been a lot of debate on this topic. I find it a very interesting debate. Certainly on the graphics side we view High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and the ability to get that interconnect between the GPU and memory to be extremely differentiating. So certainly we will use that throughout our graphics roadmap. If you look at our CPU roadmap, I do think there's a case to be made for multi-chip modules. It depends on the trade-offs you have to do, the bandwidth requirements you have, but yes as the process technology becomes more complicated, breaking up the tasks does make sense.
The day of reckoning.
Also at Tom's Hardware (which includes gaming benchmarks, unlike the AnandTech review), Ars Technica ("AMD Ryzen is an excellent workstation CPU—shame its gaming performance is weak"), PCWorld, HEXUS.
Previously: New Details of AMD's Desktop Zen/"Ryzen" Chips Released
AMD Ryzen Processor Hype is Building
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @12:00PM (20 children)
AM4 is the first prosumer chipset from AMD that has the PSP (Platform Support Processor aka AMD's TrustZone core) on it. If you are one of the people who migrated to AMD over spyware concerns related to Intel's ME (Management Engine), you are officially out of luck from this generation on. As soon as AM3+/G34 chip supplies run out you only have a choice between three processor architectures all of which are now using partial/wholly signed+encrypted firmware blobs with privileges, obscurity and hardware access all greater than your own.
Furthermore if you have adopted Tor, I2P, or another anonymity network assuming it will protect you from the government, realize these same engines could be used to perform Sybil attacks against the majority of the network since almost everyone providing peer node services is running a chip new enough to have these privacy and security concerns, meaning the added traffic obfuscation should not be trusted to actually exist!
Food for thought on this bitter bitter day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @12:37PM (7 children)
If you're so concerned, why not just monitor the data passing between your computer and the world?
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Friday March 03 2017, @03:08PM (6 children)
Because cryptography doesn't work like that. An encrypted message looks like random noise. Unfortunately, a message encrypted with a backdoored encryption algorithm also looks like random noise. Thus, one simply can't tell from looking at the data if there is an issue - hence the insidious nature of this threat.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @03:29PM (5 children)
Where is the traffic going? When is the traffic going? How much traffic is going? All of this META data is what is ACTUALLY valuable in making a determination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @03:33PM (4 children)
NSA shill detected. Content is what gets you convicted.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 03 2017, @05:32PM (3 children)
No, the previous AC has a point. If your network card is phoning home, you should be able to see evidence from a trusted machine. If you are in control of your computer, you should have access to all of the necessary decryption keys to decode your own traffic.
The difficulty, IMO, is that 99.99% of the time the TLAs will not be actively monitoring you. Tor may even make it difficult for them to send a specially crafted packet to your NIC.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday March 03 2017, @11:04PM (2 children)
The problem is networking happens on lots of layers. Look up tcpip programming. Weird shit happens at a lower layer than tcpip. Shit your stack or routers don't even know about. It must be something super genius because I haven't heard anything from wikileaks about it. Yet it exists. What does it send?
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 03 2017, @11:39PM (1 child)
Generally, things happening below the TCP layer are non-routable (based on MAC address).
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 03 2017, @11:44PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @12:40PM
I'm looking at ryzen for an air gapped workstation so fill my upturned the tinfoil hat and pass the ketchup!
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday March 03 2017, @01:02PM (1 child)
If no packets can get to your vulnerable machines, their vulnerabilities will never be exploited.
Such "enterprise-friendly" mis-features are pretty much universal, the milk's already been spilt. Then again, some of us are happy running non-x86 archs like MIPS/ARM or are still running on:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 10
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 2074.549
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @01:37PM
Or can DPI enough to keep out unknown and as-yet undocumented attacks utilizing the ME/PSP is the point at which you don't need an x86 arch piece of hardware and have the finances to either audit those systems to ensure an adequate level of security or pay for systems without those misfeatures.
The problem is this technology fundamentally compromises the security of not only your own local hardware, but also any remote hardware you might be accessing, some of which intentionally or unintentionally may have access to code operating on your system allow privilege escalation which then allows attacks against other hardware in your system, whether the CPU/ME, the bios, the firmware on your network card/encryption processor/gpu, or code injected/activated on your storage device's firmware (whether HDD, SSD, or another storage technology.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @01:04PM (7 children)
I guess that rules out Libreboot on Ryzen systems for now. My money will stay in my wallet then.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @01:29PM (6 children)
No coreboot support or documentation releases for Ryzen.
A seperate one linked to a Reddit AMA with AMD staff including the CEO and had one of their PR people reply that he would mention the unsigned PSP option to their hardware department (no doubt to make an excuse later like they have done the last two times they backed away from open documentation/open source bios support, after getting off to such a good start in the years prior.)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @02:41PM
Also an interesting quote [phoronix.com] from what appears to be someone working at AMD:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @03:39PM (1 child)
nice link, jackass.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @04:15PM
Here's the link for the asshole AC:
-.... ....- ..... --... -.... ....- -.... . ..... ----. ...-- ..--- ..... ----. ...-- -.... ....- -.-. --... ----. ...-- ----. --... .---- -.... .---- -.... -.. -.... ..-. --... ..... ..... .- ..... ---.. ....- .- --... ---.. -.... ...-- ..... ---.. ..... .- -.... . ....- -.-. -.... . ....- ..--- -.... ----. -.... ..... -.... ----. ...-- ----. -.... -.-. ....- -.-. ...-- ----- ...-- ..... ...-- -.... -.... ...-- ..... ...-- ...-- ----. --... --... ..... ----. -.... . --... ----- ...-- -.... -.... ...-- -.... -.. ....- -.... -.... . ..... .- -.... ----. ...-- ---.. ...-- .---- -.... .---- --... .- ..... ..--- ...-- .---- -.... .---- ...-- ..--- -.... --... --... -.... -.... .---- -.... . ....- .- -.... -.... -.... ..--- -.... -.. ..... -.... --... ----. ..... ---.. ...-- ..--- ...-- ..... ...-- -.... -.... ...-- ..... -.... ...-- ----. --... --... ..... .- ..... ---.. ....- .- --... ..... ..... .- ...-- ..--- ....- .- -.... -.-. ..... .- -.... -.-. ...-- ----. -.... ----. -.... ...-- ...-- .---- ...-- ----. --... ..... ..... .- ...-- ...-- ..... -.... ...-- ..... ..... ----. -.... -.. ....- -.... -.... -.... ..... .- ..... --... ...-- ..... --... ---.. -.... ...-- -.... -.. ....- .- -.... ---.. ..... ---.. ...-- ..--- ...-- ..... -.... ---.. -.... ...-- ..... -.... ...-- ----. -.... ----. ..... .- ...-- ...-- ..... -.... --... ----. ..... .- ..... ...-- ...-- ---.. ...-- -..
If you had asked nicely I wouldn't have made you work for it. Now fuck off.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @03:48PM
if they want me to upgrade they will either have to wait many years until i have no choice/give up the good fight or get their hardware trustable. sick of stupid ass hardware vendors trying to treat us like we're ignorant slaves. You're so smart you can't read the writing on the wall? Or maybe you just want to force tyranny on us b/c you're whores of the supranational surveillance state? Maybe you're just too dumb to figure out how to make money without being a slave trader? Either way you are, at the very least, tarnishing your brand. Good job geniuses. Don't release another chip until you have something trustable.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 03 2017, @05:53PM (1 child)
> two times they backed away from open documentation/open source bios support
Notice the implication of this. AMD took its time and resources to open up stuff, thereby acquiring an image and commercial advance, only to do a 180 degree turn, losing image, money. It is clearly caving in to pressure from shadow government.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @08:00PM
Stupid management decisions seem like a far more likely explanation. Some manager doesn't see any value in releasing free stuff to the public so it just looks like wasted staff time that can be spent on more productive activities like reading SoylentNews.
AMD is not winning on raw performance, but due to the totally locked down nature of Intel's entire product lineup today they really do have an opportunity to stand out in other areas, such as a blob-free boot sequence and not requiring any mysterious omnipotent coprocessors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @03:43PM
It's a shame, really. AMD has an opportunity to really stand out from Intel by not having an Intel ME clone and not copying the way Intel FSP works.
Sad that Talos failed.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tibman on Friday March 03 2017, @02:47PM (11 children)
All to pro-Intel people will be out claiming that AMD failed to release a good processor again. They're wrong. If you read the reviews, even biased ones, they clearly shows the processor is very good. Whether it's the best or not is the argument. Might be several months before the dust settles on this one. There are a lot of drivers to still tweak and so on.
Disclaimer: I'm biased. Ryzen 1800x is on the way : )
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(Score: 2) by Celestial on Friday March 03 2017, @03:27PM (8 children)
From everything I've read thus far, AMD Ryzen CPUs are very good. It's just that Intel Kaby Lake CPUs are better for video games, sometimes up to 40% better. If you don't play video games, the Ryzen certainly looks very appealing. If you do play video games however, Intel is the way to go.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @05:09PM (5 children)
40% better? I don't believe that's possible in anything but some pointless corner-case of a badly programmed or unoptimized game. Considering the problems that sites have been having with the Asus motherboards sent out, I'm more inclined to believe that much of a difference is due to faulty hardware and bad review practices.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 03 2017, @05:44PM (4 children)
Source: AMD Ryzen R7 1800X Review: An i5 in Gaming, i7 in Production; page 7 (Gaming benchmarks) [gamersnexus.net]
Had to click though 6 Ad-heavy pages to get there :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @08:12PM (3 children)
That is so far off of the rest of the data that it must be treated as suspicious. At the very least, presenting it as the average use case is disingenuous at best, and more likely purposely deceptive.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 03 2017, @08:54PM (1 child)
AMD has been pressuring reviewers to benchmark at 4k resolutions: pushing bottlenecks to the GPU, rather than the CPU under test.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tibman on Friday March 03 2017, @09:25PM
There's a half-truth in that. They've been pressuring reviewers to not just do 1080p. To ALSO review 1440p and 4k.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday March 03 2017, @09:22PM
I think that's a big part of it. There's some wildly different results. Trying to figure out why might take a little while.
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 03 2017, @07:07PM
Most AAA games are more GPU-bound than CPU-bound.
Even an old CPU will do the job, if your video card is recent enough.
(Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Friday March 03 2017, @07:23PM
Well, if you do play games keep in mind just how much CPU power you really need and your budget. Personally I'm not an fps obsessed player that needs the shiniest moving water possible (but have no qualms with anyone who is - after all it drives progress).
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Sunday March 05 2017, @04:17AM (1 child)
I just hope they have some decent chipsets. The Athlon XP was hobbled by shitty VIA chipsets, with only nVidia's nForce chipset which came in towards the end being any good. However, that was not to last, as nVidia's chipsets for AM2 were absolute garbage. After dealing with AMD's own flaky chipsets on AM3, I finally gave up on the AMD platform and assembled my first Intel system. I'm still rooting for AMD, but at the same time I also like my computer to work.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday March 07 2017, @03:03PM
Totally with you on the chipset thing. The processor is only a part of the whole ecosystem.
That nForce chipset did have bad linux support. I remember the ethernet being very difficult to bring up.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Friday March 03 2017, @03:25PM
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 5, Informative) by Bill Dimm on Friday March 03 2017, @04:48PM
For what it's worth, the tail end of the PCWorld article [pcworld.com] says that AMD blames the game performance on games being optimized for Intel (since AMD didn't really have high-end CPU offerings in recent years) and they are working with developers to improve that.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Chromium_One on Friday March 03 2017, @05:44PM (2 children)
With a little due diligence and you won't get caught out.
The Intel Management Engine IS IN NO WAY ANY FUCKING KIND OF MAGIC. Communications in and out from it are done via a more-or-less standard NIC and TCP/IP. It has to be able to talk to your network to get anything out, and you can snoop traffic, filter the MAC at your firewall, whatever, like anything else on your network.
On your normal home PC, this feature set is generally disabled by default, and sometimes even hardware disabled by your manufacturer. If you want to use it, if it's even available, you'll have verify drivers are installed and then go find the tools to configure it.
For corporate systems, hire someone halfway competent to prep new installs before deployment.
As for AMD, I have not had opportunity to play with their version of this tech. Would expect that it's not that much different though.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Friday March 03 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
I have not done any technical investigation into this matter whatsoever. However, I have read online that the ME has its internal NIC which is tied to the integrated ethernet controller on the motherboard. To me, this stands to reason. A proposed workaround I saw was the addition of a PCI NIC. Would the ME still be able to access it? Or is this a fundamental misunderstanding of mine about the technology?
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 03 2017, @10:11PM
Depends: is the replacement and Intel Pro adapter?
Any add-on card has access to memory via DMA.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Friday March 03 2017, @06:35PM (4 children)
If I use my system for mixed work (often multithreaded?) and gaming (mostly single threaded?) does Ryzen do a better job of balancing these than intel, or would intel be better on average for both tasks?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @07:33PM (2 children)
If your primary concern is gaming you might still want to stick with Intel (at least for now), but if you're mixing a lot of multithreaded work in there, the performance loss in older/current games might be worth it since everything I've seen so far suggests that the Ryzen chips are comparable to Intel's $1000 offerings for multi-thread workloads.
Something else to consider is that gaming has been getting better about using multiple cores, so even though most current games only use 2-4 — single-threaded games are much less common now, outside of indie stuff maybe — we're starting to see an uptick in games using what you've got when available. Games that aren't made to handle more than one or two cores will do better with Intel, but older games are also not as likely to push a system anyway, so it's probably not a huge concern. Also, if you're interested in streaming while you play, Ryzen may still be a win even despite the single-thread performance difference because the recording and encoding should have less effect on game performance.
Finally, keep in mind that current game performance is a risky thing to base CPU choice off of because future games are likely to be better optimised for a new CPU's features and quirks, whereas the games already out won't unless they get patched. Plus there's all kinds of shenanigans going on with regard to optimising for specific CPUs and GPUs, anything compiled with Intel's compiler likely still punishes non-Intel CPUs and many devs don't care (they had to add a notice that it happens but not actually change the behaviour, AFAIK), etc.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Friday March 03 2017, @10:22PM (1 child)
It sounds like there isn't a simple answer. OK, does the choice become easier if cost (a few hundred dollar difference) is not a factor? What is the most future proof?
Disclaimer: I don't know what I am talking about. Specifically I don't know how much of my typical workload is multithreaded.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Monday March 06 2017, @02:22AM
[First off, sorry for the delayed response. I saw the response notification while on mobile and forgot about it by the time I had a chance to sit down and respond. Just remembered it again...]
If cost is no concern at all, probably Intel, at least for the moment. Even if Ryzen's better in every way it's going to take time for software to catch up. As for future-proofing, there's no way to say. AMD's last architecture bet heavily on certain types of workloads and that didn't pan out, while Intel's plan did, so they've been ahead for a while. Prior to that, Intel bet on longer pipelines with Pentium 4 around when AMD went for 64bit, and AMD won that one.
If it were my call, I'd go for Ryzen right now and hope for the best, but that's as much because I don't like Intel's business practices as any other reason. AMD seems to have a good enough design this time that I feel like I can back the company that deserves it while still getting good performance, and a good price/performance value.
Specifically I don't know how much of my typical workload is multithreaded.
It's nice when software can use the cores directly, of course, because you can see a direct impact (faster compiles/renders/etc.) but it's not the only way your system can use them. Even if your software can't take advantage of it, you can still benefit from extra cores as long as your OS can, because it can put different processes on different cores and keep things running smoothly. Like the example I gave of encoding video for streaming while gaming, or being able to dedicate cores to virtual machines without sacrificing performance on the host OS, etc.
Sorry I'm not giving you a clean, clear answer here. There isn't one to give, it's a muddy subject with no single correct answer. Most anything will be "good enough" for most tasks, and picking something optimal to a specific workload has as many answers as workloads.
It also doesn't help that it's hard to trust benchmarks and other information, which makes it even harder to give an answer. Intel has repeatedly been caught using its compiler (ICC), which has been super-popular especially on Windows, to fudge benchmarks or cripple competitors' chips. They had it check the CPU vendor information and disable optimisations for non-Intel parts in the past, and more recently attempted to fudge a popular Android benchmark by having the compiler check if the benchmark was running and, if so, replaced certain calculations with no-ops on Atom CPUs to make them score better. So, even when Intel really is performing better, it's hard to say how much of it is real, and how much of it is due to compiler shenanigans.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by linkdude64 on Friday March 03 2017, @10:10PM
Seems like if you want to stick to Intel for equal gaming performance you can pay a few hundred dollars more - but then you'll lose on the other facets, generate more heat (will throttle), have spent more money, and will have supported the monopoly.