AMD Ryzen

[Zoraptor]

Pfft. Early adopters deserve to get reamed on pricing. The 7600X's street pricing is a 45% discount on its MSRP after all, since its MSRP is, well, higher than the 9600X's. If you want to compare it to a skylake iteration, spare a thought for the poor buggers who bought a 4 thread 7600k at premium prices...

As for the generational improvement, it's no Bulldozer --> Zen for sure*. But even the 3-5% IPC gain that seems typical is still more in one generation than Intel managed in its 5 skylake iterations. It's also, unlike [skylake iteration], potentially a fantastic improvement for both server and laptop performance due to the increased efficiency. May well have been better received if it was called Zen4+.

But anyway, comparison to skylake is hyperbolic. People tend to forget just how bad that stagnation was because Intel was constantly bolting on extra cores and mucking around with the threading.

*but these aren't the days of Moore's Law any more; people may just have to buy a deck of cards and deal with it when it comes to incremental improvements.

Edited August 9 by Zoraptor

[Humanoid]

I do recall that when I was shopping for my current system, the 5600X was actually sometimes going for above it's RRP, getting up to $500AUD and very hard to find in-stock even then. I ended up importing a 5800X from the UK instead (the same store didn't ship the 5600X overseas), which ended up at just over $600 shipped. That, incidentally, is pretty much the exact same price as the 9700X is now. My CPU before that was a 6700K which cost me around $520, so all things considered, I'm still relatively content that pricing is remaining under the inflation curve.

I'm not in the market for any PC-related things other than 1-3 OLED monitors at the moment, not sure I'll even need a new CPU before AM6/DDR6 hits. Given how bandwidth-starved Zen 5 supposedly is, there may be decent gains from DDR6 alone.

I do sincerely hope that the low-TDP of the current X series isn't just an excuse to launch a 105W+ XT variant early in this timeline though.

Edited August 9 by Humanoid

[Zoraptor]

Surely AMD cannot be thinking of having XT processors. Stupid enough having CPUs and GPUs with the occasional same model number and very commonly similar, they'd end up having the exact same regularly if they brought in XT CPUs as well. Then what 9950XTX3D? XFX could sue them for gimmick infringement at that point.

Don't think AMD can really use covid as an excuse for pricing any more. A 9600X here costs 10% more than I paid for my 8 core 1700 back in 2017 (500NZD), if it eventually settles to the same price as as 7600X it will be 20% cheaper though- and still a bit more than a 1600x cost. Though they were cheap GloFo 14nm; one suspects quite a lot of the premium goes to TSMC as effective last man standing for competitive advanced fabs.

[Humanoid]

31 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

they'd end up having the exact same regularly if they brought in XT CPUs as well.

They did just release the 5800XT and 5900XT, but it's completely different because for CPUs there's no space between the numbers and letters, see. No potential for confusion at all.

Just as well though that RDNA1 only went up to the 5700 XT. I did have a HD 5850 back in the day though...

EDIT: Bring back the Black Edition CPUs I say.

Edited August 9 by Humanoid

[Bartimaeus]

I got me a Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition in a closet somewhere...

Idle power usage isn't disastrous by any means and does look mildly improved over the Zen 4, but still does leave a little to be desired next to the Intel chips. Kind of have to think idle power usage is an important metric for laptops and other battery-driven devices, no? Though how desktop chips are tuned versus laptop chips is a whole other thing, so it's not necessarily indicative of much yet. But look at that darling 5800X3D there hanging with the Intel chips (and also the 3900X): what a beaut. I don't think anybody sensible is going to upgrade from one of those any time soon...it's got long legs.

Edited August 10 by Bartimaeus

[Bartimaeus]

tl;dr: Supposed power efficiency gains with Zen 5 are largely non-existent in gaming workloads (though it is improved for all-core/production workloads), so given that performance is essentially the same, this new generation looks fairly pointless for gaming, go get a 7800X3D if you're building a new PC for that, which performs better and is more efficient for gaming.

[majestic]

Sinkclose exploit allows potentially unseen and night unremovable malware to be carried by virtually all AMD CPUs of the past decades.

Well, AMD's right in saying that in order to exploit this on a CPU in the field you already need so much access that it doesn't matter any more. It's a good thing supply chain attacks don't happen and that there's no precedent with the NSA installing backdoors in intercepted Cisco shipments. One could start to wonder, in such a case.

[Zoraptor]

Don't think the NSA would bother when they have PSP (and IME for Intel; and Pluton on newer MBs for overkill) already.

(I'm always mildly suspicious when what we're told are 'essential security features' for us are, for some mysterious reason, excluded from or disabled for products supplied to the US government...)

[majestic]

Please, for the love of god, do not use the Admin account unless you really have to (hint: if you would, you would know - just forget it even exists). Getting ten frames per second more is definitely not a use case.

Love how much work the tech channels have to put into these videos simply because the DIY tech bubble can't get over the fact that Zen 5 isn't a good product outside of some productivity workloads.

On 8/14/2024 at 11:04 AM, Zoraptor said:

Don't think the NSA would bother when they have PSP (and IME for Intel; and Pluton on newer MBs for overkill) already.

(I'm always mildly suspicious when what we're told are 'essential security features' for us are, for some mysterious reason, excluded from or disabled for products supplied to the US government...)

Fair enough, I mainly used the NSA as an example because of their confirmed supply chain attacks.

Edited August 15 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, majestic said:

Please, for the love of god, do not use the Admin account unless you really have to (hint: if you would, you would know - just forget it even exists). Getting ten frames per second more is definitely not a use case.

Yeah, I think it was very unnecessary to give instructions to enable the built-in administrator account, but the uploader's reply to the top comment saying "please don't do this" makes it pretty clear that they didn't have any clue exactly what they were suggesting to do before they went ahead and did exactly that. I guess the channel's name is "Hardware Unboxed" and not "Software Unboxed" for a reason. I'm curious to know whether the same benefit is experienced if UAC is hard-disabled, which gets you most but not quite all of the way there, though I don't recommend general users do that either. The recommendation really should've just been "wait for Microsoft to fix it".

[majestic]

Looks like Windows 11 24H2 will bring a nice performance boost for Ryzen processors. Relative performance of Zen 4 to Zen 5 is not really improved though, it's similar gains for every generation, even Ryzen 3. It's more like a free boost for everyone who has Windows 11. Also massively game dependent. Gears 5 sees a chunky increase (even on the one Intel CPU tested for three games, although to a lesser degree) while Baldur's Gate 3 sees a much smaller difference, borderding on tolerance levels.

So much for AMD's claims that the much improved branch prediction of Zen 5 depends on a Windows update not out yet, but it will certainly give Arrow Lake a harder time now. The boost is in the ballpark of projected, leaked and expected IPC gains for Arrow Lake over the 14900KS. Altough we've just seen what leaks and performance expectations are worth, so yeah, all we can do is wait.  

Either way, it's going to be hard to compete with Zen 4's current pricing for Intel - and ironically, for AMD just as much (sales of Zen 5 seem to be abysmal). If the 5800X3D was AMD's 1080 Ti moment, well, then maybe Windows 11 24H2 will extend that to Zen 4. 

Edited August 26 by majestic

[majestic]

Well, and then you benchmark a bunch of games, and factoring in the also existing - but less pronounced - gains on Intel CPUs, and Zen 5 CPUs catch up by ~2%. Of course there are outliers, but they exist on Intel too, whatever the update does, it certainly boosts Jedi Survivor performance by a lot. Funny how that goes.

Anyway, nothing really new to see here. The 7800X3D remains the top pick for a gaming CPU. I'm really interested in the upcoming 9800X3D's performance, the larger cache will show if there's a bottleneck situation that is holding Zen 5 performance back.