PCem

Well, well, well. Ryzen is finally here. I know many of you (me included) were eager to see the first benchmarks and see if it was viable for PCem...
I´d say, it was kinda deception to me. Single thread performance is much worse than current Intel products.
So, if you were waiting for Ryzen for PCem usage on mind, I'd suggest to stay away.

Obviously we can't tell for sure until someone buys a Ryzen and runs PCem on it, but the benchmarks I've seen don't look quite as dismal as you suggest. It's behind Intel in single threaded performance, but not by anything like as much as Bulldozer was; unlike that chip, I probably won't be telling people to avoid this chip like the plague! It'll probably be slower for PCem, but not by miles.

Plus, so far the benchmarks are of the 8-core Ryzen 7, which is completely unnecessary here. If it's priced right, the Ryzen 3 could be a tempting option, and may well outperform an i3 or Pentium when doing Voodoo stuff.

The whole release feels like a lot of smoke and mirrors, pre-launch reviewers doing their tests at 4K where CPU performance isn't as bottlenecked. There's also a wide variety in reviews, some are claiming benchmarks much higher then others.

However, it wasn't a total flop. If I was someone who pre-ordered with the intent for multi-core encoding and professional work, I would be so ecstatic right now. Unfortunately, many gamers are rightfully pissed because they're now hinging on the 'wait and hope there's a fix coming'.

I'm hoping that the single core performance is fixable via microcode/BIOS in the upcoming weeks like the RX480, we'll have to see. I am tired of Intel's 'monopoly' and absurd pricing.

Sure! It wasn't a flop! But for what I see, AMD only catched up with Intel in terms of performance, and I was hoping they could take the crown again like in 2006 or so with the Athlon 64 when AMD clearly took the leading edge over Intel

That was never going to happen - AMD got relatively lucky with the Athlon 64, in that Intel were screwing up badly at the time, and the gap between Athlon XP and Pentium 4 was never anything like the one between Bulldozer and the current Intel lineup. They've got themselves close enough to be competitive again, which is pretty good going considering their relatively small resources compared to Intel.

In any case, it's very early days for Ryzen. It'll be easier to judge in a couple of months or so when BIOSes and microcode stabilise a bit, more of the lineup becomes available and some people other than reviewers actually get to use it.

Yes I am interested in seeing what happens with AMD if they continue down this road and I think they have earned my money. Even If I am waiting for a PCI-E 4.0 board before buying a new computer. Who knows maybe some of the problems can be worked out of it by that point. I have heard that the UEFIs might be getting some updates that could make some big changes. People doing benchmarks claimed from time to time every update they got sent over the time they did there testing had huge swinging changes to performances up and down in different given pieces of software.

So yes I plan on getting Ryzen if things stay the same or get better for AMD. And I also won't be the first to test PCEM on it so sorry I cannot help there.

There's a good video by Gamers Nexus explaining differences in reviews. Or at least, it seems like a good one to me - I'm not a reviewer, and I don't have any inside information.

AMD Ryzen was overhyped by a lot of people, IMO. What we got with the R7's seems reasonable. Very reasonable, in fact; 8-core CPUs at a lot cheaper than the Intel CPUs they're competitive with.

Those Intel CPUs are just not gaming CPUs. And AMD stated before launch which Intel CPUs they were competing against.

For the R5 and R3? We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

A. Naim wrote:There's a good video by Gamers Nexus explaining differences in reviews. Or at least, it seems like a good one to me - I'm not a reviewer, and I don't have any inside information.

AMD Ryzen was overhyped by a lot of people, IMO. What we got with the R7's seems reasonable. Very reasonable, in fact; 8-core CPUs at a lot cheaper than the Intel CPUs they're competitive with.

Those Intel CPUs are just not gaming CPUs. And AMD stated before launch which Intel CPUs they were competing against.

For the R5 and R3? We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

Addendum: It seems AMD's marketing is getting rather defensive about Ryzen's R7 gaming potential.

Which is rather mixed signals, for a chip stated to be a competitor for the 6900. The 6900 is, after all, not a gaming CPU.

I bought a shiny new Ryzen laptop the other day. Preliminary results - in software Quake under PCem v14, a Ryzen 5 2500U at 3.3 GHz gives about 2/3rds the performance of a Core i7-7700k at 4.4 GHz. Make of that what you will!

SarahWalker wrote: ↑Fri 20 Apr, 2018 1:55 pm I bought a shiny new Ryzen laptop the other day. Preliminary results - in software Quake under PCem v14, a Ryzen 5 2500U at 3.3 GHz gives about 2/3rds the performance of a Core i7-7700k at 4.4 GHz. Make of that what you will!

Ryzen refresh has been a pretty decent bump in power/value over it's previous gen; and I'm not sure how affected PCem was by Spectre/Meltdown fixes but I'd imagine quite a bit. That reminds me...

In either case: It's very tempting to go back to team AMD, just waiting on the rumors about Intel's 8c/16t 'fixed' chips.

Spectre/Meltdown mainly affect code that makes huge numbers of kernel calls, mainly IO heavy stuff. PCem doesn't really fall into this category, hence it shouldn't be too badly affected.

I can confirm that the Windows 8.1 patches for Spectre/Meltdown have had no noticeable impact on PCem performance on my Ivy Bridge-based system.