AMD Ryzen

[Bartimaeus]

Seems like the general impression from the AMD fanboys is "no thank you" so far - not exactly a highly positive initial impression.

[Keyrock]

1 minute ago, Bartimaeus said:

Seems like the general impression from the AMD fanboys is "no thank you" so far - not exactly a highly positive initial impression.

I'll reserve judgement until independent 3rd party benchmarks. I think it's safe to assume AMD is going to slaughter Intel in the power efficiency department, but a fair percentage of people don't care about that, so raw performance benchmarks regardless of power consumption will be of interest to those people. Power efficiency is of high interest to me since the eventual mobile APUs, where power efficiency definitely is important, are my focus.

[Zoraptor]

I suspect a lot of people (well, gamers) will be waiting for the 3d chips, and others want to avoid Early Adoption Syndrome for DDR5/ a new chipset. Objectively it's not a bad launch, it's just less good than some of the previous Zen launches, and doesn't give a massively compelling reason to upgrade.

[Bartimaeus]

9 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I'll reserve judgement until independent 3rd party benchmarks. I think it's safe to assume AMD is going to slaughter Intel in the power efficiency department, but a fair percentage of people don't care about that, so raw performance benchmarks regardless of power consumption will be of interest to those people. Power efficiency is of high interest to me since the eventual mobile APUs, where power efficiency definitely is important, are my focus.

Yeah, I'm a little different in my approach because I think that power-to-performance efficiency is basically the only thing that matters before you factor in price, so I'm fairly certain that I will still look at Zen 4 pretty positively. However, to be fair to the people saying "nah", the price is the exact reason why they're saying that, so it does make sense. Personally, I will probably be set with my 5800X for the next ~5 years given that my personal PC doesn't need to be anything more than a good workstation with a small amount of gaming performance at this point, so probably the next 2-3 generations do not matter at all to me.

[Zoraptor]

7000/ Zen4 reviews are out*. Mostly positive (except Linus). Main caveats: expensive system costs and hot hot hot! (though you get 95% of the performance from 50% of the wattage, so solution is obvious)

*Looks like everyone got 2 SKUs to test, so there isn't a single comprehensive review unfortunately.

[Keyrock]

36 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

though you get 95% of the performance from 50% of the wattage, so solution is obvious

Sounds like Zen 4 will be the undervolt special.

[Bartimaeus]

Isn't the 5000 series already like that? I thought the only way to gain more performance out of the 5000 series is by undervolting it and improving the power/thermal efficiency. This seems a bit more extreme because it goes to the absolute limit by default - not my favorite approach personally, but if it's still an improvement when working at roughly the same power draw as the previous generation, then that's still good, particularly because you can implement that yourself if you prefer. Though these benchmarks seem to be proving that performance only matters for productivity purposes, since games just...can't saturate CPUs anymore. I still remember the days of 4 core / 8 thread CPUs being the practical limit not all that long ago...yeah, no more.

But if you love power-performance efficiency like I do, it seems the 5950x is still king(?). I wish I'd waited to build my system a little longer so I'd got one of those instead of the 5800x, but it's hard to convince myself to buy one now considering the 5800x is already far beyond my needs.

Edited September 26, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

 

Yeah...the more I know, the more I'll pass. I don't mean just AMD, I mean building a new rig, as I'm sure Intel will be little different. Expensive mobo's, extra CPU/GPU cooling likely required (more cost), different PSU (more cost),  etc.

I mean, sure, if you're looking to replace a 10 year old rig, and can pay, might be/likely worth it. But if you already have an ok/decent enthusiast pc from 2-4 years ago that at least does mostly what you want, and aren't some mega-PC/workstation user or whatever, I don't think I would consider it worth it. I'll wait another 5 years, so the (by then likely) $4-6k to build a new rig, the performance vs. cost might feel worth the stupid price and work.

...not that I won't still be jealous of Bokishi when he posts pics of his new uber rig at some point.

Edited September 26, 2022 by LadyCrimson

[Zoraptor]

1 hour ago, Keyrock said:

Sounds like Zen 4 will be the undervolt special.

Even the 65W BIOS setting supposedly gives ~80% MT performance (and still 100% ST) compared to the unlocked/ ~240W one.

Suppose you can't really blame them when the Intel equivalent looks to do the same but at +100W, and that performance is what people use for comparison.

[Humanoid]

I've been toying with the idea of a mild mini-ITX system for use with an ultrawide monitor for sim gaming, but this release doesn't really add new options. Was always a long shot anyway since any benefit would have to overcome the fact I have some good DDR4 lying around spare. That said, good B550 ITX boards are currently extortionately priced so if there's any opportunity for an alternate platform, it's because of that.

The main motivation is that it's a right pain to set up specialist peripherals at my main desk, and my displays are unsuited for ultrawide gaming unless the games are low spec enough to happily run 7680x1440. Looks like if it happens this year I'll be fine settling for a 5600 non-X with whatever video card represents good value at the ~$500 mark when it happens. Unless of course I get into MS Flight Sim in which case it'd probably receive my current RX 6800 at minimum.

[Keyrock]

If you're crazy enough to delid Zen 4 you can DRASTICALLY drop temps:

Seems the super thick IHS is to blame for the high temps.

[Keyrock]

 

[Bartimaeus]

"It feels a little bit bad if you spend $700 to buy a part, and then you go into BIOS and intentionally limit the performance."

Not for me, this is the information I've been looking forward to the most: performance/power efficiency is the most interesting part. But...I have to admit to being a little disappointed here: it feels like a lost opportunity for GN here in limiting themselves purely to the trash ECO mode presets instead of really experimenting with the power curve or individual settings themselves, while also not bothering to doing any similar kind of power testing for the 5000 series or anything Intel (if Intel allows any kind of power settings modification in the first place?). Still, the results look good: the old power/efficiency king, the 5950x, is pretty clearly dethroned here...if one can be bothered to place the same kind of power limitations on the 5950x, anyways.

Edited November 6, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

@BartimaeusThey may well put out more videos with limiting power consumption in the future. The 105W Eco Mode definitely looked terrific in this video, especially if gaming is going to be the main use of 7950X. You lose negligible amounts of performance in exchange for a whole bunch of efficiency.

[Bartimaeus]

9 hours ago, Keyrock said:

The 105W Eco Mode definitely looked terrific in this video, especially if gaming is going to be the main use of 7950X. You lose negligible amounts of performance in exchange for a whole bunch of efficiency.

The gaming benchmarks showed that ECO mode didn't matter at all for gaming with the 7950X because the games they benched didn't stress the CPU enough to hit the power limits (and the power limits are all that those ECO mode settings change - i.e. if playing a game without ECO mode would only draw a steady 140W and then you set the ECO mode to the 105W profile, which contrary to its name allows 142W of steady wattage, then yeah, little to no change is going to occur). Which makes sense, seeing as it's a 16-core $700 processor that you'd be wasting ~$400 of if you're only using it for gaming...which is why I was a little disappointed not to see them do more interesting stuff with the video.

Edited November 6, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

If gaming is your main focus and you're looking to go Team Red, I would hold off until the 7000 X3D models come out. They're supposed to arrive a lot sooner than the 5800 X3D did after the 5000 series launch, plus there will be more than just 1 model this time. We've already seen how much of an improvement in gaming the extra cache makes (it's significant) and AMD doesn't have a clear lead over Intel this time around, in fact, the 13000 series chips from Team Blue are generally a better bargain (never thought I'd see the day when Intel was the budget brand), so AMD doesn't have the luxury of waiting.

[Keyrock]

For most folks here, the 3D V-Cache CPUs will be of highest interest. The 7040 series Zen4/RDNA3 APUs are of most interest to me for a handheld or miniPC in the future.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Keyrock

[Bartimaeus]

im just glad they share the same series numbers with the desktop models now...but then again

what a mess

 

[Keyrock]

47 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

im just glad they share the same series numbers with the desktop models now...but then again

what a mess

 

Yeah, I guess it will just be easier to call them Phoenix rather than 7040 series because the numbering scheme is Intel level of unintuitive and confusing. Anyway, I'm surprised these got announced as soon as they did, given that the 6800U and 6900HX Zen3/RDNA2 APUs only recently hit the market.

[Zoraptor]

Not Intel level confusing at least as their numbering seemed to have literally no bearing on how the chip performs last time I checked. That naming scheme makes general sense with higher being 'better'.

Otherwise... yeah, a bit of a mess. How much cache does the 7940 have? Because AMD itself doesn't actually seem to know. It's either 16MB L3 or 24MB total per that link depending on whether you combine L2 and L3 or not or 20 per the slide above. Or 32MB per some media, though that is media rather than AMD of course. The 7030 has 12CU of (presumably) Vega, not 8. Indeed, the 7x30 models have 12, 6 or 4CU listed on the website, none has 8.

The Extreme Gaming laptop having a princely 2CU of RDNA2 also looks funny, though I guess they'll be sold with discrete graphics cards rather than relying on the iGPU. I will laugh if someone (probably Acer) tries to sell them for gaming using just the integrated chip.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Zoraptor

[Keyrock]

40 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

I will laugh if someone (probably Acer) tries to sell them for gaming using just the integrated chip.

I mean, those 2 CUs will probably run Nethack at 8K at like 120 FPS.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Keyrock
brain not work

[majestic]

TL;DW:  [X] SKIP (poster's opinion, not Steve's, although he's clearly conflicted there)

When you run a game, AMD just turns off half the cores to prevent the game from accidentially running on the cores without the extra cache. What that means is basically that the 7950X3D is a 7800X3D with higher clock speeds in gaming, and it does that only if you run the game bar on windows and set it to balanced power mode. Let that sink in for a moment: the entire reason why AMD is launching the 7800X3D in April is because the 7800X3D is probably going to slaughter the 7950X3D in terms of gaming value, and the only reason that CPU boosts for 700Mhz less is because otherwise it would probably be tied (and to probably not outright kill the 7900X3D for gaming).

It's slightly better than an i9-13900k in many of the gaming tests, with Shadows of the Tomb Raider being a massive outlier in favor of the R9 7950X3D, and in Final Fantasy XIV it is even behind the i7-13700k. In production workloads it is just a 7950X.

Looking forward to the 7900X3D tests, as AMD didn't ship any of those to the reviewers, apparently. If that CPU exhibits the same behaviour as the 7950X3D, meaning it will just turn off half the cores in gaming, it might end up performing worse than a 7800X3D in games that make good use of the extra two cores over the higher clock speed. Wouldn't that be fun to see? 

[Bartimaeus]

i laugh every time one of these reviews gets to the power efficiency slide and intel looks awfully bulldozer-y across the broad

[majestic]

12 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

i laugh every time one of these reviews gets to the power efficiency slide and intel looks awfully bulldozer-y across the broad

Performance per watt is definitely an issue for 13th gen Intel CPUs in all core workloads.

[Bokishi]

13th gen is literally an over-volted alderlake, with all it's power efficiency thrown out the window. Not the most ideal upgrade over 12th gen