AMD Ryzen Talk.

[g_nash]

Very true Buzz , but there'll be plenty of guinea pigs willing to go before me and I'm content to wait for reviews detailing the pros and cons of Ryzen and TSW.

I also have to wait to see how much my accountant can reduce my taxable income and base my spending on what the .Gov Tax Machine won't be getting from me.

[Ericmopar]

It's looking like the R5 Hexacore chips won't be out for at least another month.
Apparently they are overclocking pretty easy on "auto" with the Asus high end mobos.
I'm more of a MSI, Click BIOS guy, so I'm waiting on info for MSI motherboards.
The people with early production boards and R7 CPUs are saying that, clock for clock, the new Ryzen chips seem to be as fast or slightly faster than Kaby Lake chips, even on a single core basis.

In other Silicon Valley news, Intel is authorizing huge price cuts on their products.
Top end i7s are coming down at least $300 and i5 "K" variants should be coming down to $200.
Intel is scrambling to come out with a budget 6 core gaming chip as well, possibly on the new Coffee Lake platform.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

It's looking like the R5 Hexacore chips won't be out for at least another month.
Apparently they are overclocking pretty easy on "auto" with the Asus high end mobos.
I'm more of a MSI, Click BIOS guy, so I'm waiting on info for MSI motherboards.
The people with early production boards and R7 CPUs are saying that, clock for clock, the new Ryzen chips seem to be as fast or slightly faster than Kaby Lake chips, even on a single core basis.

In other Silicon Valley news, Intel is authorizing huge price cuts on their products.
Top end i7s are coming down at least $300 and i5 "K" variants should be coming down to $200.
Intel is scrambling to come out with a budget 6 core gaming chip as well, possibly on the new Coffe Lake platform.

That's very good news. Intel needs to come off its high horse. Their server CPU prices are ridiculous. I7 and I5 pricedrops are also very welcome.

It will take awhile for street prices overhere to fall probably. One does worry wether AMD can supply demand fast enough.

[g_nash]

Their server CPU prices are ridiculous.

Hopefully this is where the Naples chips step in again. There's plenty of opportunity for AMD to release a series of chips in between the 1800X desktops and the rumored 32c/64t server parts. Next year I plan to replace my 4 year old dual socket Xeon workstation and I'm more than ready give the cash to AMD if they've got a 12 or 16 core part at the same level of savings as I see with the Ryzen desktops CPUs.

It seems from what I read that the 1600X is still some time till release.

Those price drops must be just a US thing, not one cent has been removed for i5/i7 price gouged parts in Oz.

[Ericmopar]

Their server CPU prices are ridiculous.

Hopefully this is where the Naples chips step in again. There's plenty of opportunity for AMD to release a series of chips in between the 1800X desktops and the rumored 32c/64t server parts. Next year I plan to replace my 4 year old dual socket Xeon workstation and I'm more than ready give the cash to AMD if they've got a 12 or 16 core part at the same level of savings as I see with the Ryzen desktops CPUs.

It seems from what I read that the 1600X is still some time till release.

Those price drops must be just a US thing, not one cent has been removed for i5/i7 price gouged parts in Oz.

Yes. I'm hearing the Intel authorized priced drops may be rumor. I'm not sure either way now.

[Ericmopar]

Waiting patiently.

Tomorrow is the day we will get to start seeing the massive amounts of test and benchmarking data.

In the Ryzen news. Cooler Master, Noctua and other large CPU cooler manufactures are offering up adapter kits for their bolt on CPU coolers, so those favorite old coolers will work with the new AM4 socket.
Clip type AMD CPU coolers should still work with the OEM AM4 motherboard brackets.

[g_nash]

Info is starting to filter through at last it seems from a post or 3 at XtremeSystems that there _may be_ immature BIOS problems with some of the boards , though apparently 3600mhz ram is not a problem.

Big news and even bigger price drops from nVidia yersterday here in Oz I can pre-order a 1080ti for less than I pay for an ASUS stock 1080 >> I will wait to see what VEGA brings

Good times are ahead for all no matter which brand you buy I think...but my excitement about these new releases just so my daughter and I can play a couple of games makes by wife think I'm crazy

[Ericmopar]

Initial reports are in. It seems the higher end 1800 and 1700 chips are great for workstations and editing, but not gaming.
The people doing the reviews say there are a lack of options in the Bios for overclocking for one thing. These Ryzen chips are either overclocked or not.
IE a person can't just extend the boost speeds like a Intel CPU which is hurting overall performance.
The Ryzen 8 core CPUs need a lot of voltage to get to a particular clock speed as well.
Some of this may be because the 8 core models aren't really meant for gaming. We may have to wait for the 1600X to come out, to get a better idea of gaming performance.
i7s are the same way, more physical cores equal lower overall clock speeds, do to heat and current limits.

Here is a chart showing voltages vs clock speed. Remember, these voltages are for all 8 cores, this may improve quite a bit on 6 and 4 core Ryzen units.
The Ryzen results here were on a Asus motherboard. The results might be different on MSI or Gigabyte boards.

KukvvzqNECQj6xXufNdEch-650-80 (2).jpg

[Ericmopar]

Info is starting to filter through at last it seems from a post or 3 at XtremeSystems that there _may be_ immature BIOS problems with some of the boards , though apparently 3600mhz ram is not a problem.

The different Mobos are definitely giving different results. Overall though, with 8 physical cores and 16 threads, the higher end Ryzens are drawing a bit of power. (not abnormal for 8 cores at full tilt)
I'm thinking that the 4 and 6 core Ryzens, combined with BIOS and driver updates will get them going at a good speed in a few weeks.
This isn't to say Ryzen 8 core are slow. They are still equivalent to mildly overclocked Ivy Bridge and Haswell CPUs, even at the stock 1700 and 1800 clock speeds. They are a huge improvement in many ways.

We'll just have to wait a bit longer and see what Asus, MSI and other companies come up with, for fine tuning the BIOS'.
Some of the tech sites said that the Ryzen CPUs weren't released to the motherboard manufacturers for development, until fairly recently, and there is some room for tweaking settings and adding features to the BIOS' in question.
We have to remember that this isn't an evolution of a design like Intel, this is a totally new CPU design from the ground up.

[buzz456]

I hate to drop a civilian question in here but does this mean anything to us hardcore TS people? Is this going to give us a gazillion fps or what? Meant sincerely not being a smarty.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

I hate to drop a civilian question in here but does this mean anything to us hardcore TS people? Is this going to give us a gazillion fps or what? Meant sincerely not being a smarty.

Good question.

So far, all benchmarks have been synthetic. We'll get to know soon when the CPU's and Mobo's hit the store shelves.

AMD will not undercut Intel's prices by that much I presume. The R&D costs must have been substantial, and need to be earned back first.

[g_nash]

I hate to drop a civilian question in here but does this mean anything to us hardcore TS people? Is this going to give us a gazillion fps or what? Meant sincerely not being a smarty.

For TS I think it wont' make much difference. For Ryzen with TSW though it's depending on how Ben Laws is handling threading ( Tick ), it __may__ also depend on whether or not DTG are using anything from the nVidia UE4 branch. The Ryzen 1600X might still be a good thing. We wait to see what happens

[g_nash]

We have to remember that this isn't an evolution of a design like Intel, this is a totally new CPU design from the ground up.

And

We'll just have to wait a bit longer and see what Asus, MSI and other companies come up with, for fine tuning the BIOS'.

Yep, it seems that they have a few teething problems. I've spent some time today following 2 early Ryzen adopters at Overclockers AU, one extremely pleased with what he has and one guy who has a serious problem of not being able to boot to Win. .. He's had to borrow an SATA SSD but reports that,

EDIT: windows installed with ease, in windows now on the sata m.2 drive, for wat ever reason my board does not like the 950 pro pci-e m.2, Not sure if compatibility, or board issue., will submit a ticket to MSI and see what they say. Hopefully will just be a bios update.

His system is also running 32GB TridentZ 3200 C14's so once he has things some what sorted I'm keen to see how those sticks perform I want the same ones.

Lots of reading on the interwebs but also much confusion..For the gaming side of things I'm going to stick with results from people I feel I can trust to give a warts and all report on the few games that interest me. Productivity tests are actually better than I thought they'd be, with the possible exception of the 1 Embree bench I can find.

Overall I still think that Ryzen might be a good for mixed home usage. I'm still almost sold

[Ericmopar]

It boils down to this.
If someone upgraded from the previous AMD generation or a Intel CPU like a i5-2500 or older, they will see a large improvement in performance in gaming.
However, the single core performance is still better with some Skylake chips. Gaming performance has actually dropped some with some Kaby Lake CPUs. I haven't heard yet why that is...

To answer Buzz's question more directly, No, the new CPUs from AMD and Intel will not give us a gazillion more FPS in TS2017, although the super powerful multi threaded performance of the AMD Ryzen, for relatively cheap, might be a boon to TSW when it comes out. Especially the R5 1600X version.
In some games that will use as many threads as possible, the 16 threaded Ryzen chips are providing excellent performance and smooth gameplay, but our 2 core TS needs higher IPC, combined with fast clock speeds.

The initial test results are very mixed. I'm guessing it's a combination of things that need to be tweaked at the production level, combined with people needing to learn the ins and outs of Ryzen.
By the way. If anyone reads that the Ryzen chips game more efficiently with the SMT (Hyper Threading) turn off, that is also true of Intel. Many programs don't like any kind of Hyper Threading turned on. So that little fact isn't bothering me in the least.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

By the way. If anyone reads that the Ryzen chips game more efficiently with the SMT (Hyper Threading) turn off, that is also true of Intel. Many programs don't like any kind of Hyper Threading turned on. So that little fact isn't bothering me in the least.

I more or less have come to the same conclusion. It is better to have 4 real cores than 8 half-cores. Spreading the load over 4 cores is already difficult enough for most game engines.

What is the general emphasis of UE4 games when it comes to multi-core CPU's? Is the UE4 core architecture auto-scaling by default or does it have to be programmed to run on multi-core?