Core Competencies
March 30, 2017 10:28 PM Subscribe
On March 2nd, AMD launched their "Ryzen 7" line of 8-core CPUs, designed to compete with Intel's i7 desktop CPU lineup. After years of being relegated to the budget segment due to poor performance, is AMD finally offering Intel serious competition again?
Basically, yes. The reviews (Ars Technica, PC Gamer, PC World, AnandTech,Tom's Hardware) are mostly positive, with a big caveat: The gaming performance is significantly lower than would otherwise be expected based on the CPU's performance in other areas.
In the days and weeks following the launch, speculation raged as to the cause of the lackluster gaming performance. AMD themselves debunked a number of fan theories, before announcing a few weeks later optimizations for DOTA 2 and Ashes of the Singularity that boost frame rates in those particular games.
Ryzen is based on AMD's all-new "Zen" microarchitecture, replacing their earlier "Bulldozer" microarchitecture, which was widely regarded as underperforming and even led to AMD being sued over the definition of a "core."
For those interested in CPU architectures, David Kanter of Real World Technologies has written a very nice overview of the Zen microarchitecture and gave a wide-ranging interview to PC Perspective discussing Zen prior to the launch.
This launch comes as PC sales saw their fifth consecutive year of decline after peaking back in 2011. Eyeing the server market, where Intel has >99% market share, AMD has announced their Zen-based "Naples" line of 32-core server processors, positioned to compete against Intel's Xeon line of server CPUs.
AMD desperately needs Zen-based products to succeed in the marketplace after posting losses of $660 million in 2015 and $497 million in 2016. Those numbers are a big deal to a company of AMD's size, which "only" took in $4.3 billion in revenue in 2016, compared to Intel's $59.4 billion.
Basically, yes. The reviews (Ars Technica, PC Gamer, PC World, AnandTech,Tom's Hardware) are mostly positive, with a big caveat: The gaming performance is significantly lower than would otherwise be expected based on the CPU's performance in other areas.
In the days and weeks following the launch, speculation raged as to the cause of the lackluster gaming performance. AMD themselves debunked a number of fan theories, before announcing a few weeks later optimizations for DOTA 2 and Ashes of the Singularity that boost frame rates in those particular games.
Ryzen is based on AMD's all-new "Zen" microarchitecture, replacing their earlier "Bulldozer" microarchitecture, which was widely regarded as underperforming and even led to AMD being sued over the definition of a "core."
For those interested in CPU architectures, David Kanter of Real World Technologies has written a very nice overview of the Zen microarchitecture and gave a wide-ranging interview to PC Perspective discussing Zen prior to the launch.
This launch comes as PC sales saw their fifth consecutive year of decline after peaking back in 2011. Eyeing the server market, where Intel has >99% market share, AMD has announced their Zen-based "Naples" line of 32-core server processors, positioned to compete against Intel's Xeon line of server CPUs.
AMD desperately needs Zen-based products to succeed in the marketplace after posting losses of $660 million in 2015 and $497 million in 2016. Those numbers are a big deal to a company of AMD's size, which "only" took in $4.3 billion in revenue in 2016, compared to Intel's $59.4 billion.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble
I just built a new computer based around the 1800X, and I've been happy with it - though to be fair, I haven't really pushed it hard yet.
As for the whole "controversy" over gaming performance, the reality is that it will perform quite well on modern games - it just won't beat Intel's offerings aimed directly at gamers. But in exchage, you get a chip that can compete with Intel's $1000 workstation offerings at half the price.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:47 PM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]
As for the whole "controversy" over gaming performance, the reality is that it will perform quite well on modern games - it just won't beat Intel's offerings aimed directly at gamers. But in exchage, you get a chip that can compete with Intel's $1000 workstation offerings at half the price.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:47 PM on March 30, 2017 [3 favorites]
Every generation gets its "AMD kicks ass!" moment.
posted by rhizome at 12:32 AM on March 31, 2017 [11 favorites]
posted by rhizome at 12:32 AM on March 31, 2017 [11 favorites]
Yeah I have an i7 from around 6 years ago that is still running like a champ. My graphics card on the other hand...(someday gtx1080...someday...).
posted by littlesq at 1:39 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by littlesq at 1:39 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
I got one of these:
posted by mikelieman at 2:09 AM on March 31, 2017
Model name: AMD A10-7870K Radeon R7, 12 Compute Cores 4C+8Gon an
A88XM-E, BIOS 1902 01/18/2016That I guess I put together sometime in 2015? WORKSFORME. But then again, I don't do a lot of cutting edge stuff and run a lightweight window manager.
posted by mikelieman at 2:09 AM on March 31, 2017
I thought 'Ryzen' is what they call a dried grape in Birmingham, UK.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:38 AM on March 31, 2017 [19 favorites]
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:38 AM on March 31, 2017 [19 favorites]
the reality is that an i5-2500K from 6 years ago is a perfectly usable CPU for almost any kind of gaming you want to do nowadays
Not a gamer, but I do produce music, and an i7-2600K has just, six years later, started to give me trouble on certain types of projects using some newer, heavy instruments and effects at high sample rates.
Every time I think about upgrading I don't because it just hasn't been necessary, and the truth is that the new CPUs aren't that much better anyway.
posted by uncleozzy at 3:05 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
Not a gamer, but I do produce music, and an i7-2600K has just, six years later, started to give me trouble on certain types of projects using some newer, heavy instruments and effects at high sample rates.
Every time I think about upgrading I don't because it just hasn't been necessary, and the truth is that the new CPUs aren't that much better anyway.
posted by uncleozzy at 3:05 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
Oh boy do I remember my last Radeon. 30 seconds into any game and the variable speed fans would ramp up like a 747 at take off. If you turned this off it would go above 100c alarmingly fast. I'd end up turning the sound way up, not even to drown it out the fans, but just to understand the dialogue. Then when they went quiet during normal use, I'd play an mp3 and very hastily turn it down, not realising how loud I had to turn it up just to hear people talk over the fans. Complaining online in chat I had a lot of people saying 'mine too', didn't seem to matter which manufacturer. Mine was a Gigabyte but I heard the same about Asus and MSI, which aren't exactly brand-x.
I became so accustomed to this that when I replaced it with a Geforce it was so whisper quiet that for weeks I found myself checking the temperature and peering into the case, thinking it was too quiet. The fans mustn't be working!
posted by adept256 at 3:10 AM on March 31, 2017 [4 favorites]
I became so accustomed to this that when I replaced it with a Geforce it was so whisper quiet that for weeks I found myself checking the temperature and peering into the case, thinking it was too quiet. The fans mustn't be working!
posted by adept256 at 3:10 AM on March 31, 2017 [4 favorites]
Lack of competition in the CPU market has definitely kept Intel CPU prices high in the new AND used market. Last year I was shopping for a used CPU from a couple generations back on ebay and was amazed at how high the prices were. I ended up picking up a Haswell Refresh i5 for what I thought was quite a bit of money considering it was a 2+ year old CPU.
I welcome AMD back to the market.
posted by LoveHam at 4:26 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
I welcome AMD back to the market.
posted by LoveHam at 4:26 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
Are y'all telling me that Moore's Law has ended with a whimper?
posted by clawsoon at 5:31 AM on March 31, 2017
posted by clawsoon at 5:31 AM on March 31, 2017
Sounds like it ended with a broken gpu fan grinding.
posted by notyou at 5:41 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by notyou at 5:41 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]
adept256, how long ago was this? I had an R9-280x for a long time that produced a quite reasonable level of noise. And I just recently picked up an RX-480 that's pretty damned quiet. The older Radeons definitely did have overheating problems, though.
Anyway, I'm not in the market for a new CPU for a while, since that would require a whole motherboard and RAM overhaul as well. But I'm glad that Zen is competitive and that it's offering a sort of orthogonal approach to Intel. Go to Intel for the best single-core performance, go to AMD if you want just a ton of cores. I mean, that's been the case for a while, but Zen has brought the single-core performance up to a competitive level as well, even if Intel still has them beat there.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:05 AM on March 31, 2017
Anyway, I'm not in the market for a new CPU for a while, since that would require a whole motherboard and RAM overhaul as well. But I'm glad that Zen is competitive and that it's offering a sort of orthogonal approach to Intel. Go to Intel for the best single-core performance, go to AMD if you want just a ton of cores. I mean, that's been the case for a while, but Zen has brought the single-core performance up to a competitive level as well, even if Intel still has them beat there.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:05 AM on March 31, 2017
AMD discovered, after following McKinsey & Company's advice to cut a third of its work force, that things can't get done if you have no people to do them.
That said, it is encouraging to see AMD succeed after pursuing failure for so many years. I plan on upgrading my desktop this year and will likely lean towards AMD.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:14 AM on March 31, 2017 [4 favorites]
That said, it is encouraging to see AMD succeed after pursuing failure for so many years. I plan on upgrading my desktop this year and will likely lean towards AMD.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:14 AM on March 31, 2017 [4 favorites]
Every time I think about upgrading I don't because it just hasn't been necessary, and the truth is that the new CPUs aren't that much better anyway.
It's not just about the CPU, though. The Summit Ridge platform adds support for things like DDR4 RAM, M.2 PCI-E SSDs, and other latest and greatest components like that.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:12 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]
It's not just about the CPU, though. The Summit Ridge platform adds support for things like DDR4 RAM, M.2 PCI-E SSDs, and other latest and greatest components like that.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:12 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]
Are y'all telling me that Moore's Law has ended with a whimper?
No.
Moore's law is often misunderstood/misquoted as "CPU power doubles every two years." What he actually said (and I'm still paraphrasing) is that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. In 2014 a 15-core Xeon fit about 4 billion transistors onto a 550mm2 size chip. In 2016 the 22-core Xenon fit 7 billion transistors on the same real estate.
Moore's 50 year old prediction stands, which is pretty damn amazing. The Intel 8088 (released in 1976, and powered the original IBM PC) had 29,000 transistors on 33mm2. That's not a typo. In 40 years CPUs have gone from tens of thousands of transistors to billions.
What's changed in the last 5 years or so is that the doubling of transistors no longer doubles performance, at least in the consumer CPU market.
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:12 AM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]
No.
Moore's law is often misunderstood/misquoted as "CPU power doubles every two years." What he actually said (and I'm still paraphrasing) is that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. In 2014 a 15-core Xeon fit about 4 billion transistors onto a 550mm2 size chip. In 2016 the 22-core Xenon fit 7 billion transistors on the same real estate.
Moore's 50 year old prediction stands, which is pretty damn amazing. The Intel 8088 (released in 1976, and powered the original IBM PC) had 29,000 transistors on 33mm2. That's not a typo. In 40 years CPUs have gone from tens of thousands of transistors to billions.
What's changed in the last 5 years or so is that the doubling of transistors no longer doubles performance, at least in the consumer CPU market.
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:12 AM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]
Lack of competition in the CPU market has definitely kept Intel CPU prices high in the new AND used market.
I have also been looking at old computer parts on Ebay. It seems to me a lot of 7-to-10-year-old junk (motherboards, all makes of CPUs, GPUs) I would expect to be sold by the pound turns out to be $50-$100 each instead. I suspect a myriad of market conditions have combined to make repairs and upgrades (as opposed to replacement) much more attractive than they were ten years ago. I think that's going to continue.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:43 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
I have also been looking at old computer parts on Ebay. It seems to me a lot of 7-to-10-year-old junk (motherboards, all makes of CPUs, GPUs) I would expect to be sold by the pound turns out to be $50-$100 each instead. I suspect a myriad of market conditions have combined to make repairs and upgrades (as opposed to replacement) much more attractive than they were ten years ago. I think that's going to continue.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:43 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
Wasn't AMD being kept alive by Intel for antitrust reasons, or is that only my paranoid suspicion?
posted by benzenedream at 8:16 AM on March 31, 2017
posted by benzenedream at 8:16 AM on March 31, 2017
Like xdvesper says, the real competition these days is in GPUs. For gaming AMD/Radeon is still holding its own in the middle of the market, but is being squeezed from the bottom and the top. But AMD managed to entirely miss the market for machine learning usage, NVidia and CUDA got a huge head start in the market. It sounds specialist, but cloud computing providers like Amazon and Google are currently buying 100,000s of GPUs for machine learning applications. Not to mention end users like Apple, Google, etc. It's a whole new market AMD is lost on.
Ryzen looks like a nice product though, catching up with and maybe barely overtaking Intel. Meanwhile the laptop and desktop CPU market is super close to being completely overturned by AMD designs, I give it five years at most.
I want AMD to succeed, I've liked them ever since I bought their 287 clone in 1991 and made Mandelbrot sets render super fast. We need competition. But they sure missed a few years' opportunity and maybe a whole market in machine learning.
posted by Nelson at 8:26 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]
Ryzen looks like a nice product though, catching up with and maybe barely overtaking Intel. Meanwhile the laptop and desktop CPU market is super close to being completely overturned by AMD designs, I give it five years at most.
I want AMD to succeed, I've liked them ever since I bought their 287 clone in 1991 and made Mandelbrot sets render super fast. We need competition. But they sure missed a few years' opportunity and maybe a whole market in machine learning.
posted by Nelson at 8:26 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]
Re, fans...
If you can install flashing neon LED strips on the sides of the 3d printed skull you use for a case, you can certainly install a water cooling system.
More seriously, I think GPUs are driven at least as much by learning problems and giant data center use as by games at this point...
posted by kaibutsu at 9:08 AM on March 31, 2017
If you can install flashing neon LED strips on the sides of the 3d printed skull you use for a case, you can certainly install a water cooling system.
More seriously, I think GPUs are driven at least as much by learning problems and giant data center use as by games at this point...
posted by kaibutsu at 9:08 AM on March 31, 2017
Think I'm going to pull the trigger on a new computer soon and will be going with a Ryzen build. I've always had a soft-spot in my heart for AMD and my gaming habits are not cutting edge so the lesser performance vs. Intel doesn't bother me too much.
posted by snwod at 9:16 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by snwod at 9:16 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
The big issue I had with mine was motherboard availability, especially if you're looking for an X370 (high end) board. I basically got lucky and caught Newegg having the MB I wanted on sale (Nowinstock is your friend here.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:28 AM on March 31, 2017
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:28 AM on March 31, 2017
Ugh when I said laptop and desktop CPU market is super close to being completely overturned by AMD designs I meant ARM. Customized ARM processors, like what's in an iPad or iPhone. Apple's rumored to be playing with offloading some laptop work to ARM already for powersavings. The stupid touchbar in the new Macbook Pro has an ARM processor in it. But I have to imagine the big companies are experimenting with fully ARM computers.
posted by Nelson at 9:52 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 9:52 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]
ARM still sucks for desktop.
They have low power parts for mobile, cheap low-end processors for stuff like Chromebooks, and new massively multicore chips hoping to find use in web servers. But I haven't seen much for anything that cares about per-core performance. (Links welcome though.)
posted by ryanrs at 10:08 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
They have low power parts for mobile, cheap low-end processors for stuff like Chromebooks, and new massively multicore chips hoping to find use in web servers. But I haven't seen much for anything that cares about per-core performance. (Links welcome though.)
posted by ryanrs at 10:08 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
When a post ends with a question, is the answer usually "no"?
posted by TreeHugger at 3:23 PM on March 31, 2017
posted by TreeHugger at 3:23 PM on March 31, 2017
" I suspect a myriad of market conditions have combined to make repairs and upgrades (as opposed to replacement) much more attractive than they were ten years ago. I think that's going to continue."
I'd attribute it to the lack of new Windows 7 machines.
posted by MikeWarot at 6:07 PM on March 31, 2017
I'd attribute it to the lack of new Windows 7 machines.
posted by MikeWarot at 6:07 PM on March 31, 2017
But I have to imagine the big companies are experimenting with fully ARM computers.
After the Windows RT fiasco you'd think Microsoft was done with it, but no, they're back to planning Windows for ARM, and with emulation so it can run x86 software too.
posted by JHarris at 6:52 PM on March 31, 2017
After the Windows RT fiasco you'd think Microsoft was done with it, but no, they're back to planning Windows for ARM, and with emulation so it can run x86 software too.
posted by JHarris at 6:52 PM on March 31, 2017
But I have to imagine the big companies are experimenting with fully ARM computers.
After the Windows RT fiasco you'd think Microsoft was done with it, but no, they're back to planning Windows for ARM, and with emulation so it can run x86 software too.--JHarris
And that's actually the second time Microsoft tried this. Back in the 1990s there was something called the ACE Consortium, and people could compile their programs for Windows NT to work on Intel 386, IBM Power PC, Digital Alpha, and MIPS processors and you could include the executables for these on your release disks. No one did this, and it flopped.
Third time's a charm!
posted by eye of newt at 7:28 PM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]
Part of it is that it's not just backwards compatibility, there's new stuff in there too. In fact, with emulation now, hardware-level backward compatibility is arguably unnecessary for many purposes, which is what Microsoft is betting on.
It's important to note that there is nothing magical about the x86 architecture that makes it particularly performant, it's just that it's been made for so long and had so many people at Intel and AMD thinking about it that it's got a huge lead in optimization and production economies. But lots more ARM chips are made now, by many more companies, than x86, although I think they mostly hold their optimizations closer to their chest? That may be a delaying factor, might ultimately be THE delaying factor. I'm just speculating audibly though.
posted by JHarris at 10:12 PM on April 1, 2017
It's important to note that there is nothing magical about the x86 architecture that makes it particularly performant, it's just that it's been made for so long and had so many people at Intel and AMD thinking about it that it's got a huge lead in optimization and production economies. But lots more ARM chips are made now, by many more companies, than x86, although I think they mostly hold their optimizations closer to their chest? That may be a delaying factor, might ultimately be THE delaying factor. I'm just speculating audibly though.
posted by JHarris at 10:12 PM on April 1, 2017
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The biggest advance in CPU power came with the Sandy Bridge generation in 2011. Ever since then, every annual release has barely eked out an incremental 5% in compute speed. You could say that it's because Intel had no competition, or they had hit the limits of Moore's law, or that there was simply no need for faster compute speed for the majority of users, but the reality is that an i5-2500K from 6 years ago is a perfectly usable CPU for almost any kind of gaming you want to do nowadays. Ryzen has "caught up" to Intel, but even Intel users are looking at something like a 5 year upgrade cycle (instead of the 3 year upgrade cycle in the past).
Contrast that to how fast GPUs are advancing - a single generation, say the GTX 980 to the GTX 1080 in the span of 18 months, has nearly doubled its graphics processing power from 4 to 8 teraflops.
Arguably, most of the decline in PC sales would be on the lower end machines, which have never generated much revenue for manufacturers in the first place. Gamers building their own PCs don't get counted here, because they buy parts piece-meal! NVIDIA revenues jumped from 4.5 billion in 2014 to 7 billion in 2016. Intel revenues are flatter, but still an increase from 56 billion to 59 billion over the same period. Part of this I believe is linked to the much faster pace of improvement in GPUs which encourages users to get on a 3 year upgrade cycle (you can get 100% performance increase every generation, about 18 months, so buying upgrades is compelling) and a slower one on CPUs (which only gives you a 5% performance increase each generation which is 12-18 months, no one is running to the store to buy the latest CPU)
posted by xdvesper at 11:41 PM on March 30, 2017 [8 favorites]