AMD CPU and Platform Discussion: Ryzen Might Be...Good? *knocks on wood*

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > AMD CPU and Platform Discussion: Ryzen Might Be...Good? *knocks on wood*

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adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Alereon posted:

the real concern is how it performs in more typical workloads that depend more on the performance of each thread.

Does anyone really care about "typical" single threaded workloads any more? More and more apps are being written with multithreading in mind, and even desktop computing seems to be moving towards virtualization (see: XP mode). Going forward single thread performance will be less and less important across the board. Most of the money is made in the enterprise, where max memory and number of cores are king.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2011 02:48

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# ¿ Nov 6, 2025 23:58

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Not bulldozer, but question relating to the new poo poo from AMD. Per clock, can I expect similar performance between an ontario/zacate/llano platform as I can get from PhenomII/AthlonII? I am considering replacing my fileserver, which is currently a 45W AM2 Athlon x2 1.9GHz. If I can replace this with an APU that consumes only 18W, and not have to worry about performance, it's worth it to me (my office has terrible air flow and it gets warm in there). If it goes well I might even replace my VMware server as well (Athlon X2 2.5GHz) since it rarely caps out.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2011 23:46

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

mpeg4v3 posted:

Has anyone heard anything on the supposed Bulldozer motherboards that'll be backwards compatible with AM3 cpus? I'm looking to build a VM server on the cheap and it'd be awesome if I can get a Bulldozer motherboard and a cheap Athlon X4 or some such now and just upgrade it a year or so down the line.

All of the am3+ ones should be backwards compatible.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2011 00:55

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Factory Factory posted:

I felt like it was pushing the Phenom "more cores" strategy out too far. Rather than being designed for today's (or even tomorrow's) most pressing processing needs, the chips are designed toward some highly-parallelized vision of software years from now, putting power in the wrong places compared to what most people usually wait on their processors for now.

The high margin chips are the ones people buy for their datacenters. For example, we run ~120 VMs on three physical boxes, each with 2x 6 core hyperthreaded processors. The procs themselves when we purchased were outrageously expensive. AMD would like to capture that market.

# ¿ May 30, 2011 13:29

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

There are a few applications that windows 8 on arm will likely get and will allow it to be successful. Citrix Receiver and VMware View client. With those two applications, an inexpensive, low power windows PC could definately see some success.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2011 14:46

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Space Gopher posted:

The bigger thing, to me, would be moving consoles to x86. I guess we've gotten to the point where everything's so high-level that architecture doesn't even matter all that much, but it still seems kind of weird.

The original xbox was x86.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2011 01:21

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Devian666 posted:

Correct. It won't do anything.

So, for example, World of Warcraft where the game is one thread and the audio is a second thread (probably all integer) you'll still get the same terrible performance.

If you have 4 threads running that are doing fpu calculations, this patch should increase the performance significantly. As it is windows is loading up "cores" 1-4, which only have access to fpus 1 and 2. Instead, it should load up "cores" 1,3,5, and 7 which will get it access to all four fpus. Which even in single threaded apps, you have other things going on in the background.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2011 13:44

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

HalloKitty posted:

Let me guess. 5.9. I'm pretty sure mechanical disks are capped there.
That said, Vista and 7 WEI are not comparable.

You should get the same score with the same hardware, the scale just goes higher in 7.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2011 22:07

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

we received two demo DL165 G7 servers from our reseller this week. We put ESXi 4.1u2 on them, joined them to one of our VMware clusters, and started migrating VMs over. So far, I am actually pretty impressed with the bulldozer processors in them. Since it really all depends on VM load this next number is useless, but the MAX CPU utilization we saw today was 35% on a single proc 6272.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2012 00:27

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

adorai posted:

we received two demo DL165 G7 servers from our reseller this week. We put ESXi 4.1u2 on them, joined them to one of our VMware clusters, and started migrating VMs over. So far, I am actually pretty impressed with the bulldozer processors in them. Since it really all depends on VM load this next number is useless, but the MAX CPU utilization we saw today was 35% on a single proc 6272.

If anyone wanted an update on this, the per thread performance wasn't enough to satisfy a few of our time sensitive applications so we have had to pass on these. One application in particular took over 3 times as long to run

# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 23:54

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Alereon posted:

It's after the fact, but I'm curious, are you 100% sure Turbo Core was enabled and working?

no, and even if it wasn't, unless it made a core twice as fast, it wouldn't have mattered. We have a short window to run one particular process. We would have had to have a seperate host just for this one VM.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 02:21

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I would sincerely hope that AMD would at least provide an official windows 8 driver for the 4000 series. My 4850 still provides more than enough power for the PC games I play.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2012 00:58

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Ragingsheep posted:

Wasn't Intel also doing illegal things like paying their customers to not buy AMD CPUs?

This would be the number one reason amd was unable to get more revenue when they were on top. Intel had to pay a relatively paltry sum because of it.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2012 11:27

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

JawnV6 posted:

A living, breathing AMD fanboy? Didn't y'all go extinct around '09?

When we did our recent VMware refresh, we nearly went with bulldozer. We had a single application that had terrible performance on the AMD proc though, and given it's importance we spent the extra and went with Intel. With bulldozer the aggregate performance in our testing exceeded what we are getting with the E5s we bought, for about 20% less for the whole platform.

You don't have to be a fanboy to find places where the product works well, in this case, the highly multithreaded world of VMware.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2012 18:02

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I bought an FX-4170 on monday. I will admit to being an AMD fanboy/Intel hater, but realistically, I couldn't beat the price for the performance level on the platform.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2012 00:14

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

HalloKitty posted:

It's not the no-brainer you consider it to be: the closest I can get in AnandTech bench is FX-4300, which is similar to the Core i3-3220, costs exactly the same, but at least with the Intel you'd have a board which you could then toss the best available CPUs in later.

1) the deal for cyber monday on the 4170 included a $20 newegg gift card for free, which brought the cost to $100 and I could not get a motherboard for the i3 for less than an am3+ board. My intel fanboy coworker agreed with me, gonig for performance per dollar (ignoring the extra $10 a year in electricity) the fx-4170 was the deal of the day.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2012 00:12

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Install Gentoo posted:

The shenanigan is: AMD can finally beat 2 year old Intel chips.

That are priced significantly higher.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2013 03:09

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

fx-4170 owner checking in -- I am quite happy with my purchase. I got a new motherboard, ram, cpu, and power supply for around $250 at Christmas. I couldn't get similar performance from an intel box at close to the same price.

# ¿ May 27, 2013 21:33

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Shaocaholica posted:

Thats true. I guess there's always the middle of the road devs who don't want to license an engine but also do a horrible job of coding their own. Whatever, life goes on.

I don't think we should waste too many tears on mediocre developers who don't have the business sense to license a suitable engine for the desired platform.

# ¿ May 28, 2013 03:54

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Agreed posted:

The gestalt of AMD's current situation totally blows.

I disagree to an extent -- AMD has the contract for all of the current gen consoles, and game developers will be optimizing for AMD APUs. So not only will AMD be getting cash for the console sales, they will also benefit from increased developer optimization efforts.

That doesn't mean AMD isn't in a bad spot, it just means that they still have a fighting chance. Totally blows sounds a little more dire than reality likely is.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2013 14:47

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

AutoFool posted:

I understand that the FX series is no good so I was wondering what you guys suggested. Thanks! Currently have an AM3+ motherboard.

Despite the hating in this thread, I am quite happy with my FX series processor. I bought an fx-4170 at Christmas time at a great price, and it plays the games I like to play quite well.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2013 10:29

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Alereon posted:

Moving a derail from the GPU Megathread:
There are some markets where AMD delivers compellingly better solutions than Intel, but they also failed to really capitalize on those opportunities so no one really talks about them. People write off entire market segments like netbooks and microservers just because the Intel Atom sucks too much to make a viable product. When we needed them, the E-series APUs were in limited supply and going into $400 "laptops" because they were so staggeringly better than the Atom solutions for $299. AMD bought SeaMicro but hasn't really seemed to do much with them. For high-memory servers you can get much more RAM for a lower price and lower power usage in an AMD box, it's just a shame you have to attach it all to Opterons.

Realistically, for things like VDI, AMD is a significantly better value for intel. More cores per socket, and much more RAM per socket. In most VDI use cases, you don't need many clock cycles, so the scheduling of 16 2GHz cores works out better than that of 8 hyperthreaded 3 GHz cores. Add in the extra RAM density, and you've got a winner.

Unfortunately, the VDI market segment is pretty small, and most shops just buy the same model server they bought for everything else.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2013 00:04

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I wish AMD would embrace the low end more than they have. I would love to have something crazy like a 32 core 1-1.5ghz proc for a virtualization lab or for VDI.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2013 23:28

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Alereon posted:

There also are some applications that are core-limited and thus run more efficiently on Opterons, though since Xeon cores are faster and more efficient there's not TOO many applications where sheer core count wins.

We intend to evaluate servers with AMD processors for our next generation VDI farm.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2014 00:38

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I'm not unhappy with my AMD FX CPU purchase, over a year later. People comment on how much better Intel is, but even the cheapest intel i3 proc was more expensive than my 4130 FX processor at the time I bought it. I have yet to find a game that I think suffers because of my proc (though I don't play all of the latest and greatest games).

# ¿ Jan 30, 2014 00:36

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

conductive paint? I used a heavy hand with a .05 mechanical pencil. The graphite was just conductive enough.

# ¿ May 19, 2014 22:24

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Factory Factory posted:

If you can't afford Intel, how can you afford the electricity to run AMD?

How much time does the cpu on your home pc spend at full load? At idle there isn't much difference.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2014 18:47

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Does anyone know of an AM1 motherboard (preferably one of the cheap ones) that absolutely, positively supports IOMMU?

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 22:58

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

It's hilarious that when it comes to integrated graphics, an intel solution is "good enough for anything from 2005" but for compute, if it can't run crisis 6 at 4k it's crap.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 01:44

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Factory Factory posted:

There are all sorts of reasons as to why, but it all boils down to Intel doing a good job at CPUs for Core and AMD doing a bad job for A-series and FX.

I think it boils down to Intel bribing (or blackmailing) PC manufacturers while the p4 was using 1.21 gigawatts of power, depriving AMD of R&D money to stay competitive. As a result, AMD had to spin off their foundries, putting them at an even worse disadvantage.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 00:09

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

BurritoJustice posted:

Maybe because this is a thread for recommending hardware that is a good purchase, you ignorant oval office. If you had come in saying "I specifically need AMD for *this* reason, irrelevant of it being worse" you would've got recommendations. Asking vaguely "what is a good AMD processor?" is going to get you recommended Intel because for the same money the Intel processors are objectively better.

This is a thread for discussing AMD you ignorant oval office. If he wanted generic advice he would have asked in the parts thread. Instead, he went to the AMD thread for advice on an AMD processor.

Jesus, how badly does your dick bleed after you jerk off with an intel processor?

# ¿ Dec 30, 2014 04:08

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

What gets me is why the hell AMD decided to take the same route with Bulldozer and do a speed demon architecture after the failures of the P4 were clear and it was also clear that power and heat were going to still be a big problem in future process shrinks.

I believe the initial idea for BD was that their fpu sharing was going to be a home run. It was only after it was apparent internally that it was not that they started going for clock speed. They needed SOMETHING until the next arch.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2015 19:15

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

repiv posted:

What's the use case of a fast-ish iGPU in a server though? You either don't need a GPU at all, or you're doing heavy GPGPU work and will be stuffing every PCI-E slot with discrete cards that crush any iGPU.

I could see a future use case for GPU accelerated VDI sessions.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2015 14:35

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

ohgodwhat posted:

Is Power dying too?

I doubt it. There is a lot of serious banking software running exclusively on power. Of the big four core banking vendors (FIS, FiServ., JHA, D+H), I know that 3 of them definitely run on Power, and the fourth might but I'm not sure. That's a big market, and while there might not be a significant amount of innovation, there is at least a lot of incentive to keep the status quo. It's not a business that you can easily break into, so the biggest shot at dethroning power there would be to convince one of the big four to port their software. Given my experience in the industry, good loving luck because it's filled entirely with assholes who want to keep doing poo poo the way it was done in the 90's.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2015 02:15

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Doesn't intel need the amd64 license?

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 17:52

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Nintendo Kid posted:

They already have it, and AMD or a successor can't "take it back" as it were.

So you are telling me that the contracts are written such that Intel can revoke the x86 license from someone who buys AMD, but someone who buys AMD cannot then revoke the x86_64 license? That was some short sighted poo poo right there.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 20:45

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Curvature of Earth posted:

And please stop bringing up Cisco. Cisco is a network hardware company that wants to dominate the Internet of Things, not the Internet of Desktops.

I don't think it's likely at all, but I do want to point out that Cisco also enjoys vertical integration, and they are very interested in owning the entire datacenter. They have the UCS line of servers, and many of their appliances are just x86 based linux boxes these days.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 04:12

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

if it actually got to the point where intel needed more sales, they could just license x86 like arm does.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 03:44

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

As someone who runs power in my datacenters (finance) i would switch to x86 in a heartbeat. There is something to be said for being to able to just order something from CDW with barely more than zero thought and knowing that it will fit my needs. Power is so loving expensive, it's like $1500 just to license a single core. So my 8 core proc has only 2 cores licensed.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 01:42

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# ¿ Nov 6, 2025 23:58

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

FaustianQ posted:

I've been thinking on it, but what's to recommend a 5350 over an A6-7400K Kaveri? Both have access to mini itx and the A6 has more oopmh behind it, but is that extra capability not worth the +50$ price tag?

wattage

# ¿ Aug 8, 2015 03:20

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > AMD CPU and Platform Discussion: Ryzen Might Be...Good? *knocks on wood*

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