AMD Ryzen

[Bartimaeus]

It's always been my wont to support AMD over Intel and nvidia for much the same reasons (plus AMD has always been the underdog against both)...but when I had a chance to get a $90 i7-4770k, well, I kinda had to take it, especially with AMD's desktop CPUs being so bad for so long.

[Malcador]

Well, figured it'd be something ideological. I've gone with Intel for the last 3 builds as they were better than the alternatives at the time (though one was just because I couldn't find AMD when I wanted to build, bastard Bitcoin miners I think).

[Zoraptor]

It isn't ideological for me- I've been happy with all the Intel processors I've used and if Intel offered a better product at a better price I would still buy from them. Doesn't look like they will though, and I certainly don't have so much loyalty to Intel that I'd buy a worse product just for the brand. The feeling that they should have been offering better products for less certainly doesn't help, but that is the only ideological part.

 

OTOH my attitude towards nVidia probably is ideological- I'd actively avoid their products if possible and would have bought a 480 over a 1060 even when the 1060 appeared to be better value. That that would have been a good decision due to AMD's driver improvement would just reinforce the decision.

[Bartimaeus]

The driver thing is weird - for so long, AMD always had such a bad reputation for their drivers, while nvidia was lauded for theirs. Now, in like the past year, maybe two years, it seems to have reversed a bit. Was there a specific event that caused nvidia to suddenly get a worse reputation for their drivers?

[Sarex]

The driver thing is weird - for so long, AMD always had such a bad reputation for their drivers, while nvidia was lauded for theirs. Now, in like the past year, maybe two years, it seems to have reversed a bit. Was there a specific event that caused nvidia to suddenly get a worse reputation for their drivers?

 

Burning cards with faulty drivers, beta drivers becoming hotfix drivers and AMD coming out with Vulcan. It's a combination of Nvidia getting worse and AMD getting better,

 

Just remembered the period where my 560ti was not supported for a couple of months (3 or more) because the new drivers BSOD the PC on that architecture. The amount of time they needed to fix that issue was embarrassing.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Sarex

[teknoman2]

 

Seems like you should have replaced it a while ago, Intel CPUs weren't -that- bad to you,surely

 

I've been extremely satisfied with my now ancient Core2Duo, it would play pretty much any game up until recently and has been 100% reliable for ten years. Could not have asked for more and it will get the electronic equivalent of burial with full honours (and repeated F pressing) when replaced.

 

I've been less happy with Intel over that time though, they've mostly coasted on their advantage and a situation with no AMD competition would mean Skylake-> Kabylake type transitions where the improvements are... limited would be further encouraged. To be honest though, their products looked significantly overpriced/ under featured even before the Ryzen leaks, and now they don't (from the leaks at least) look competitive against the AMD offerings in terms of what I want- future proofing, with things like current game performance decidedly secondary. Ideally, I want a CPU that will last for another ten years, and I simply cannot see an Intel chip doing that as well as Ryzen at this point.

 

It's basically the same situation with nVidia, was happy with their cards but not happy with their attitude, and bought AMD (and will again) since they'd support and improve them longer.

 

if you look back you can see that most of the time it was AMD that made the most innovations but intel and nvidia were the more famous brand names so amd never managed to get the market share it deserved, resulting in poor products... until the console deal got them the money they needed to get back in the game with the RX470/480 and now Ryzen

[Zoraptor]

R5 chips are now slated for Q2, R3 for 2nd half of 2017.

 

On the positive side though at 500NZD* for a 1700 the 8 cores are within budget and I could even stretch to an X model if pressed despite having to buy a custom cooler as well. Depends if the old computer carks it soon or not. I was expecting at least $100 more for the CPU given our tech prices are usually inflated massively compared to US.

 

*about $50 less than it 'should' be given the US price, after currency conversion and 15% GST so a very good deal.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Zoraptor

[teknoman2]

[Azdeus]

I'm not one bit surprised if it turns out to be accurate.

[Malcador]

I'm not one bit surprised if it turns out to be accurate.

In a way that makes it more likely to be false. I like the Jew remark there, hilarious kids these days.

 

Is some fuss about them offering rebates to IT departments on Reddit. Not quite sure it is Jihad time yet for that.

[mkreku]

Gotta love all these little leaks:

 

http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-i7-6900k-gaming-benchmarks/

 

Also gotta love that they're comparing a 500 dollar CPU to a 1000+ dollar CPU..

[Bartimaeus]

"The 1800X is said to even outperform the Kaby Lake speed demon i7 7700K in single threaded performance and the 10-core i7 6950X $1700 desktop flagship Intel HEDT processor across the board with a one-click auto-overclock on air cooling."

 

Uh, yeah, I'll believe it when I see it...from a better source. Even with overclocking, that's just a little much to believe.

[kirottu]

Didn't this same thing happen with Radeon 480?

[Sarex]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-is-dropping-processor-prices.html

 

Scroll down for a comment regarding Intel's mails to reviewers.

[Zoraptor]

Didn't this same thing happen with Radeon 480?

 

To be fair, the 480 was exactly where AMD said it would be- around 390-/x level. Well, apart from PCIe power draw, at least. People got over hyped by things like its async compute scores which were always going to be better than nVidia as their cards are crap at that, same as nVidia would murder AMD cards at tesselation.

 

So long as people keep their expectations reasonable and accept that there will be limitations and problems with a new launch the hype train should not derail.

 

Then again, while beating the 7700k in single threaded in a like-for-like (ie not overclocked 1800x on very good cooling in a top line MB vs stock 7700k in a low cost B or H MB) test is not a reasonable expectation given the Ryzen has twice the cores I've seen an awful lot of people who suddenly think that ST performance is the paramount factor in choosing a chip and that cores/ threads are unimportant around the net lately. Fanboys gonna fan, for both sides.

[Bokishi]

Intel price cut incoming

[teknoman2]

in the few cases it is behind its under 1.5% and it can be attributed to the slower RAM

[kirottu]

I'm starting to feel the hype and it feels, oh, so good.

[Sarex]

I've been talking with some people from work and they seem to think that if Ryzen turns out to be what people think it will be, Intel is gutted in desktop CPU department for the foreseeable future. According to the info I got from them, Intel has been focusing all of their R&D on the mobile platform, their Desktop architecture has remained largely unchanged and they have simply been brute forcing it so far, so if Ryzen turns out to be legit, that simply won't cut it anymore.

 

Even on the server front AMD has CPUs based on the Ryzen architecture, with more cores then their Intel counterpart, coming up. So it's going to be very interesting to see how/if Intel turns this around.

[Zoraptor]

I doubt that Intel will be gutted, they're too big and have a large war chest with plenty of scope for price cutting to induce competitiveness. Same as nobody got fired for buying IBM nobody will get fired for buying Intel and their brand recognition is very high, as are their contacts/ PR. They'll definitely lose a lot of the highish end workstation and enthusiast/ gaming market though, and both pretty quickly*; and their days of price gouging are over which will hurt their bottom line a lot. Casual retail and a lot of beige box corporate stuff will probably stay staunchly Intel though. End of the day, AMD had some solid years with superior processors in the 2000s, and didn't really get rewarded for it then.

 

If AMD can get a killer laptop chip out there for cheap Intel may be in real trouble though, their i5/i7 (2 core i7? hmm) branding there is terrible and a low draw Ryzen based APU even with 460 level graphics would be trouble. That's still months off though, assuming they'd use R3s as the base.

 

Peripheral, but Vega press conference today as well.

 

*We're already getting shops trying to unload Broadwell-E quickly here- got an email last night for 68__X systems with a $400 price cut- as that platform looks near dead at current price point.

[Sarex]

Well a gut wound does necessarily kill. Either way, the lack of a new architecture (for years now) will certainly hurt Intel and prevent them from recovering lost ground any time soon.

 

It would funny, in a tragic kind of way, if all this hype turned out to be false. I doubt it though.

[Keyrock]

I've been talking with some people from work and they seem to think that if Ryzen turns out to be what people think it will be, Intel is gutted in desktop CPU department for the foreseeable future. According to the info I got from them, Intel has been focusing all of their R&D on the mobile platform, their Desktop architecture has remained largely unchanged and they have simply been brute forcing it so far, so if Ryzen turns out to be legit, that simply won't cut it anymore.

 

That sounds ominously familiar...  let me think...  Ah yes, the Pentium 4 toasters, back when Intel was all about clock speed and were mostly marketing and selling their chips on having the highest clock speed, because "look higher number!".  Meanwhile AMD was investing into new and different ways of increasing IPC and their slightly lower clock speed and slightly lower price processors were going toe to toe with Intel's higher clock speed higher price processors.  Intel had visions of 5 and 6 GHz...  then they hit the 4 GHz thermal brick wall and, unable to keep ramping up clock speeds because their Pentium 4s were space heaters, they got left in the dust, performance wise, until they went back to the drawing board.  Of course Intel still outsold AMD during that time simply because they had the Intel name, they used shifty marketing, and a lot of people weren't smart enough to buy the better and cheaper product.

Edited March 1, 2017 by Keyrock

[AwesomeOcelot]

Intel has the the CPUs that can beat Ryzen, they just have to cut prices to compete. Intel did stop pushing desktop performance for years and AMD haven't caught up with Ryzen apart from overtaking them in parallelism, it's a bit disappointing. Intel have the capacity to increase cores and threads, they have been very slow to do so because they had no competition, did not want to compete with enterprise, and the market is not growing for desktop. AMD is in a good position because Intel could take over a year to respond, AMD could own the desktop giving it the marketshare it needs for software to support their features and standards. I haven't considered buying an AMD CPU since 2004 when I bought one of the first AMD64 CPU.

[Ganrich]

Intel would have to remove their IGPs in order to make room for more cores on their chips. They can't just slap more cores on an architecture without removing things. They could have had separate skews for apus and cpus a long time ago, but that wouldnt let them price gouge people nearly as well.

[Keyrock]

Intel would have to remove their IGPs in order to make room for more cores on their chips. They can't just slap more cores on an architecture without removing things. They could have had separate skews for apus and cpus a long time ago, but that wouldnt let them price gouge people nearly as well.

Intel has chips without IGPs.  Some of the Xeon server chips are pure CPUs, no GPU bolted on.  There are Xeon E3 variants that are more or less the exact same chip as the same generation of i3/i5/i7, minus the IGP.