AMD Ryzen Discussion Thread.

[Hood]

There seems to be some disagreement on this issue, and it should be interesting to see how it plays out. I rarely go to Anandtech, for reasons that should be familiar to most TPU members, and I feel that PCPerspective has matured into a respectable hardware review site ( my 2nd favorite, after TPU).

 

[the54thvoid]

Well after a chat with another forum member @Finners I've swung back to Ryzen. Reasoning? In one year Kabylake z270 platform will be replaced (i think for coffee or cannon). In one year AM4 will still be relevant. In 2 years, until 2020, so if a refresh of Zen comes out in a year or so, with higher IPC, i can keep the mobo and upgrade the CPU.
Intel outdates it's platform so quickly I'd rather go red. Stability. Well, it will be when the mobo makers get their bugs fixed and Devs start coding with CCX arch in mind.

 

[cadaveca]

Well after a chat with another forum member @Finners I've swung back to Ryzen. Reasoning? In one year Kabylake z270 platform will be replaced (i think for coffee or cannon). In one year AM4 will still be relevant. In 2 years, until 2020, so if a refresh of Zen comes out in a year or so, with higher IPC, i can keep the mobo and upgrade the CPU.
Intel outdates it's platform so quickly I'd rather go red. Stability. Well, it will be when the mobo makers get their bugs fixed and Devs start coding with CCX arch in mind.

I do understand your reasoning, but part of the reason that Intel updates its boards so often is because it tends to offer more with each platform. Although the main CPU core in KabyLake isn't that much different from SandyBridge, the entire platform around that core has changed in huge ways, adding in things like PCIe 3.0, USB 3.1, M.2/U.2, better audio chips as well as better UEFI implementations. So why AMD has not changed their platform in many years, their boards quickly grew outdated, and the same is likely to happen with AM4.

To me, that's the real flaw in Ryzen; the platform that surrounds it. What AMD has done with Ryzen is adjusted core CPU performance to match the times, and then gone and removed the iGP that Intel has on it's mainstream platform, and provided more CPU cores in that space. With that, AM4 is NOT a high-end platform. Mainstream platforms get quickly outdated, and AMD will need to have new boards out with better features when they do release an updated ZEN-based CPU, just like Intel has done over the years when they had their good core design; incremental differences in CPU performance, but huge changes in the hardware that supports it. That is the future I see for AMD. So if you are cool with that, then by all means buy Ryzen.

But buy it because it gets rid of the useless iGP, and replaced that with usable cores. That is the true strength of Ryzen, and I haven't seen a review talk about that at all (but I could have missed it)

 

[EarthDog]

Exactly the pitfalls of a stagnant chipset... now, they may update and add features, but, part of the reason some are not going with Intel is due to platform longevity. In that case, you are going to have to buy another motherboard and chip to do so. Well, to get the latest features on AMD and likely full function of Zen+, you will likely need another mobo in AM4 land as well. If you want Zen+, you will have to buy a CPU...so... yeah.

...I'd look into that line of thinking a bit more.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Exactly the pitfalls of a stagnant chipset... now, they may update and add features, but, part of the reason some are not going with Intel is due to platform longevity. In that case, you are going to have to buy another motherboard and chip to do so. Well, to get the latest features on AMD and likely full function of Zen+, you will likely need another mobo in AM4 land as well. If you want Zen+, you will have to buy a CPU...so... yeah.

...I'd look into that line of thinking a bit more.

Looking into that line a bit more leads to the what will require a pin swap.
And the what is pciex4 for AMD and I'll wager Zen+ will be a minor tweak possibly a few more pciex lanes at 3 speeds, Zen++ will be AM4+ PCIEX4 and that's fairly reasonable timings.
Although there's no reason for pciex to Have to use more pins.
If we see quad channel memory (from AMD)in consumer land it will be a hedt type platform imho.

 

[OneCool]

I do understand your reasoning, but part of the reason that Intel updates its boards so often is because it tends to offer more with each platform. Although the main CPU core in KabyLake isn't that much different from SandyBridge, the entire platform around that core has changed in huge ways, adding in things like PCIe 3.0, USB 3.1, M.2/U.2, better audio chips as well as better UEFI implementations. So why AMD has not changed their platform in many years, their boards quickly grew outdated, and the same is likely to happen with AM4.

To me, that's the real flaw in Ryzen; the platform that surrounds it. What AMD has done with Ryzen is adjusted core CPU performance to match the times, and then gone and removed the iGP that Intel has on it's mainstream platform, and provided more CPU cores in that space. With that, AM4 is NOT a high-end platform. Mainstream platforms get quickly outdated, and AMD will need to have new boards out with better features when they do release an updated ZEN-based CPU, just like Intel has done over the years when they had their good core design; incremental differences in CPU performance, but huge changes in the hardware that supports it. That is the future I see for AMD. So if you are cool with that, then by all means buy Ryzen.

But buy it because it gets rid of the useless iGP, and replaced that with usable cores. That is the true strength of Ryzen, and I haven't seen a review talk about that at all (but I could have missed it)

Well said cadaevca. Totally agree.
People complain about Intel updating their chipset so much but they do it to keep up with all the peripheral connections that never stop coming out.
That said does Intel take advantage of the CPU socket change with that... Of course they do. Money is money and for some reason .....people can't figure out...That will never change.

 

[Hood]

Well after a chat with another forum member @Finners I've swung back to Ryzen. Reasoning? In one year Kabylake z270 platform will be replaced (i think for coffee or cannon). In one year AM4 will still be relevant. In 2 years, until 2020, so if a refresh of Zen comes out in a year or so, with higher IPC, i can keep the mobo and upgrade the CPU.
Intel outdates it's platform so quickly I'd rather go red. Stability. Well, it will be when the mobo makers get their bugs fixed and Devs start coding with CCX arch in mind.

Good point, Intel wants our $ frequently, someone has to pay for their huge R&D budget. I would love to have a CPU with 16 threads on tap for audio/video editing/conversion, etc, but I would not pay $1000 for it. I would pay $500 for it, if everything else worked properly,, so I'm waiting to see how Ryzen is doing after a year has gone by. But I'm also waiting to see how Xpoint/Optane matures - I don't see AMD supporting it anytime soon, and that probably means only Intel systems will run it, further widening the performance gap. For now, AMD has mostly caught up with them on PCIe, SATA, M.2, and USB specs, but for how long? AMD platforms are slow to adopt the latest standards (6 years since 990FX).

 

[cadaveca]

AMD platforms are slow to adopt the latest standards (6 years since 990FX).

AM4 should not have the same problems, since AMD is not the chipset maker. Board makers will release new boards with whatever they can when new AM4 CPUs drop.

 

[Hood]

AM4 should not have the same problems, since AMD is not the chipset maker. Board makers will release new boards with whatever they can when new AM4 CPUs drop.

Sorry, I forgot that Asmedia is making the chipset. But AMD will still have to work with Asmedia on updates to standards and continue to update their CPUs, and that's the part I question, due to their track record (updates to SATA, USB, PCIe, and RAM speeds all fell behind Intel's, AFAIK).

 

[eidairaman1]

AM4 should not have the same problems, since AMD is not the chipset maker. Board makers will release new boards with whatever they can when new AM4 CPUs drop.

I say it would be good to bring the chipset back in house

 

[R0H1T]

I do understand your reasoning, but part of the reason that Intel updates its boards so often is because it tends to offer more with each platform. Although the main CPU core in KabyLake isn't that much different from SandyBridge, the entire platform around that core has changed in huge ways, adding in things like PCIe 3.0, USB 3.1, M.2/U.2, better audio chips as well as better UEFI implementations. So why AMD has not changed their platform in many years, their boards quickly grew outdated, and the same is likely to happen with AM4.

To me, that's the real flaw in Ryzen; the platform that surrounds it. What AMD has done with Ryzen is adjusted core CPU performance to match the times, and then gone and removed the iGP that Intel has on it's mainstream platform, and provided more CPU cores in that space. With that, AM4 is NOT a high-end platform. Mainstream platforms get quickly outdated, and AMD will need to have new boards out with better features when they do release an updated ZEN-based CPU, just like Intel has done over the years when they had their good core design; incremental differences in CPU performance, but huge changes in the hardware that supports it. That is the future I see for AMD. So if you are cool with that, then by all means buy Ryzen.

But buy it because it gets rid of the useless iGP, and replaced that with usable cores. That is the true strength of Ryzen, and I haven't seen a review talk about that at all (but I could have missed it)

I don't agree with that, the x170 didn't offer much over & above x97 & the same goes for x270 vs x170, except the lock in for Optane via skylake refresh i.e. Kaby lake. There is no tangible difference between Haswell & Kaby Lake, apart from the IPC improvements & DMI 3.0 & in essence you're paying just to keep up with the tag of latest & greatest.

 

[evernessince]

I don't agree with that, the x170 didn't offer much over & above x97 & the same goes for x270 vs x170, except the lock in for Optane via skylake refresh i.e. Kaby lake. There is no tangible difference between Haswell & Kaby Lake, apart from the IPC improvements & DMI 3.0 & in essence you're paying just to keep up with the tag of latest & greatest.

I'd have to agree with this. Intel chipsets are incremental at best. Zen has all the latest features like M.2., which should be good for awhile. Heck, you can even go and get sandy bridge CPUs and the chipset is still pretty good. Point being, you don't need to update the chipset every year because technology simply isn't going to outpace it anytime soon. USB 3.1 and M.2. aren't even mainstream yet. By the time those go mainstream AMD will likely be past Ryzen.

Simply put, incremental platform upgrades are only going to be advantageous to those who seek the absolute bleeding edge, for which AMD will very likely release a high end platform for. Forcing the mainstream market to upgrade every year though? No point.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I say it would be good to bring the chipset back in house

I couldn't disagree more. AMD has been shite at making chipset since the very beginning. VIA saved the Athlon and what came after that was chipsets with cripped features. AMD managed to make the second worst USB 3.0 host controller, only TI was slower, which is something of a feat. ASMedia suffers when it comes to SATA RAID as they don't go beyond 0+1 which will be a downside for AMD, but they have the in-house expertise to make everything else quite well. Keep in mind that ASMedia is a mashup of engineers from just about every Taiwanese chipset maker from the past, so they have the know-how when it comes to making a chipset, it's just a matter of what AMD lets them do as well.

I don't agree with that, the x170 didn't offer much over & above x97 & the same goes for x270 vs x170, except the lock in for Optane via skylake refresh i.e. Kaby lake. There is no tangible difference between Haswell & Kaby Lake, apart from the IPC improvements & DMI 3.0 & in essence you're paying just to keep up with the tag of latest & greatest.

Not quite true, the 1x0-series added HSIO which was a huge improvement for the board makers when it comes to what ports they can add and the flexibility in the chipset to allow them to do so. This was further improved in the 2x0-series. Is it enough? Maybe not, but it's one of the biggest improvements Intel has done to its chipsets in a long time, it's just not a very obvious feature, as users can't directly take advantage of it.

Apart from that, Intel also added PCIe 3.0 to the 1x0-series and went from 8 to 20 PCIe lanes (obviously limited by the DMI interface and not all usable at once in most configurations) which allowed for things like NVMe, Thunderbold and USB 3.1 to be added.

What Intel need to do is what AMD did with Ryzen, add four lanes of PCIe 3.0 for NVMe directly to their CPUs. Sadly AMD didn't end up on parity with Intel on the chipset side and this might hurt them a little bit, especially considering the premium prices on some X370 motherboards.

 

[eidairaman1]

I couldn't disagree more. AMD has been shite at making chipset since the very beginning. VIA saved the Athlon and what came after that was chipsets with cripped features. AMD managed to make the second worst USB 3.0 host controller, only TI was slower, which is something of a feat. ASMedia suffers when it comes to SATA RAID as they don't go beyond 0+1 which will be a downside for AMD, but they have the in-house expertise to make everything else quite well. Keep in mind that ASMedia is a mashup of engineers from just about every Taiwanese chipset maker from the past, so they have the know-how when it comes to making a chipset, it's just a matter of what AMD lets them do as well.

The 990FX is pretty good, the SATA ports wouldn't crap out like on the P67/Z68 chipsets. However I believe my board uses Asmedia for usb 3.0

 

[TheLostSwede]

The 990FX is pretty good, the SATA ports wouldn't crap out like on the P67/Z68 chipsets. However I believe my board uses Asmedia for usb 3.0

AMD's 900 series was an exception when it comes to chipsets from them, a good exception, but AMD has proven that chipsets aren't their strength over the years.

AMD has made at least half a dozen crappy chipsets which is something of a record in this business. They often relied on third parties for good south bridges and they've messed up their USB implementation many times. Admittedly some of those chipsets were made by ATI, but none of the Taiwanese chipset makers had the same kind of problems, well, maybe SiS...

That's not to say that Intel hasn't messed up a good few times as well, such as the P67 and a few other older chipsets.

 

[Tatty_Two]

I don't agree with that, the x170 didn't offer much over & above x97 & the same goes for x270 vs x170, except the lock in for Optane via skylake refresh i.e. Kaby lake. There is no tangible difference between Haswell & Kaby Lake, apart from the IPC improvements & DMI 3.0 & in essence you're paying just to keep up with the tag of latest & greatest.

Hmmmm........ DDR4?

 

[TheLostSwede]

Hmmmm........ DDR4?

That's a CPU feature now, no? It was a long time since Intel had the memory controller in the chipset...

 

[BiggieShady]

Console devs coding for jaguar cores have to be careful how they organize threads so they don't communicate across module boundary unless they want huge latency increase. Sounds familiar?
Games will suddenly start functioning optimally once they start being ported from PlayStation 5

 

[Ferrum Master]

Console devs coding for jaguar cores have to be careful how they organize threads so they don't communicate across module boundary unless they want huge latency increase. Sounds familiar?
Games will suddenly start functioning optimally once they start being ported from PlayStation 5

Sounds much better than coding for PS3 Cell anyways...

 

[BiggieShady]

Sounds much better than coding for PS3 Cell anyways...

Infinitely easier ... just by following the guidelines on how to properly size and align data structures to be cache friendly and grouping threads by purpose (non co-dependant threads) on each side of the boundary, you can get around limitations ... main problem is that typical gaming workloads rarely have non co-dependant threads with similar "weight"

 

[Tatty_Two]

That's a CPU feature now, no? It was a long time since Intel had the memory controller in the chipset...

Of course, the point however is that moving from Z97 gave us that opportunity so it was on offer due to the move to x170 which was significant as it moved DDR4 from enthusiast only to mainstream.

 

[cadaveca]

I don't agree with that, the x170 didn't offer much over & above x97 & the same goes for x270 vs x170, except the lock in for Optane via skylake refresh i.e. Kaby lake. There is no tangible difference between Haswell & Kaby Lake, apart from the IPC improvements & DMI 3.0 & in essence you're paying just to keep up with the tag of latest & greatest.

Yeah, DDR4 made the change necessary from Z97 to Z170. Haswell to KabyLake made HUGE changes at the chipset level. Not everyone may notice those changes either, but once you start running multiple M.2 devices, you tend to notice the difference. Z170, depending on how those M.2 ports are wired, commonly had M.2 RAID slower than Z270. There is also the Optane support added, which again, is a HDD-level change. Since the HDD interface is the slowest interface we have next to USB, any changes that offer us more performance in this area are more than welcome in my books.

That's a CPU feature now, no? It was a long time since Intel had the memory controller in the chipset...

It still necessitated the board-level change, since connectivity to that memory is the job of the board.

 

[r9]

Fix already in place for Linux kernel to properly assign threads to phyisical cores and and smt to avoid latency.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3176...ves-linux-support-for-zen-multithreading.html
Now we are waiting on Microsoft to do the same with their scheduler.
This should speed up the process, MS can look into Linux code and get an idea how it needs to be done. lol

 

[TheLostSwede]

It still necessitated the board-level change, since connectivity to that memory is the job of the board.

Oh, sure, but in this case the discussion was about features brought by the chipset, not the motherboard itself.

 

[cadaveca]

Oh, sure, but in this case the discussion was about features brought by the chipset, not the motherboard itself.

Yes and no. People were complaining about board changes, making note of how AMD kept their platform for nearly a decade, and only needing CPU swaps. But I digress, you correct, that was a CPU change, but that's no different than the change to AM4 IMHO.