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*** AMD "Zen" thread (inc AM4/APU discussion) ***

Soldato
Joined
18 Aug 2006
Posts
10,034
Location
ChCh, NZ
I'd also want to add, and maybe a bit off topic, that this forum can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated. It's the first place I'll ask for advice but also the first place I take with a grain of salt. There's some very knowledgeable people here (Looking at your username Martini1991, I kinda recall reading some of your posts and class you as one of them - hope I'm not wrong here) but 98% of posters here knows sweet FA and only ape and parrot what the more knowledgeable posters say and try and pass it off as their own words.

It also hypes itself into the stratosphere with zero evidence and everyone seemed to get sucked into towing a party line with 'dissenters' quickly swarmed by the stupid and clueless - using words, abbreviations and terms they don't really understand but ape from the more knowledgeable posters.

More off topic, but the recent Battlefield 1 thread is another classic OCUK example. Dice's previous game crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. Battlefront died after a month. With most people swearing off pre-ordering another Dice game 'ever again'. A 2min trailer and 'ZOMG HYPE HYPE HYPE, PRE ORDER PRE ORDER PRE ORDER!!!!', all is forgotten and every dummy that made all sorts of promises a month ago is throwing money at Dice again. Hell, even people that's probably never played a Dice game before is fighting like tigers defending Dice/BF1. I swear they'll fight to the death if they had to. They don't exactly know why, but all the other apes are doing it so they're just doing their bit too. Once they realise it's probably only a reskin from Battlefront, the same promises of 'never again' are made once. Ad infinitum.

Same with the RX 480 thread. For 160 pages people were convinced it was going to match a 980Ti. On page 166 (iirc) Gibbo brings a bit of realism into it and the train is derailed. 30-40 pages later his comments are all but forgotten (Taking into account he's the only person in the thread that actually held the card in his hands and tested it) and the delusion is back on with every little stupid fanboy shrilling at everyone that dare think otherwise because of what XYZ poster said in his/her latest novel (based on zero evidence) or argument.

If you all think that the CPU section is any different, you're wrong. The same nonsense goes on in here. Some of us just like looking at it for what it is, where the market is, where the best performance and price point is, instead of how we want it to be.

And for the extremely large majority of people and what they actually do with their PCs, AMD is fine.
 
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Caporegime
Joined
17 Mar 2012
Posts
48,068
Location
ARC-L1, Stanton System
Having come from an FX 9590 to the 4690K you see in my signature now i have direct experience of Intel vs AMD FX series CPU's

In 90% of games i have seen no difference in performance, as a mater of fact the only game i do see a change in performance is World Of Warships, a DX9 game.
From minimums of about 50 on the FX to V-sync locked 60 on the 4690K.

By the same token performance in some parts of Crysis 3 (heavy physics areas) the performance was higher on the FX, and smoother.

The Intel chip is quick per thread / clock, its also power efficient., But, and One other thing, CPU's are not just about Gaming, at least not for everyone.

With the FX CPU i could Swarm Bake Lighting and Shading in Unreal Engine and then fire up Cryengine and do some more lighting maths in there while Blender and Maya was also running in the background, not a problem....

With the 4690K if i send the UE Swarm Bake going i cannot run Cryengine, or MAYA or Blender or even whatch a video because if i do the whole system hangs.
The 4690K is a one job at a time CPU, it may be quick and efficient, but its a very focused CPU 'i presume' to achieve that, because when things get difficult it doesn't achieve much at all.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
11 Jun 2010
Posts
3,754
Location
In the dwelling
I'd also want to add, and maybe a bit off topic, that this forum can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated. It's the first place I'll ask for advice but also the first place I take with a grain of salt. There's some very knowledgeable people here (Looking at your username Martini1991, I kinda recall reading some of your posts and class you as one of them - hope I'm not wrong here) but 98% of posters here knows sweet FA and only ape and parrot what the more knowledgeable posters say and try and pass it off as their own words.

It also hypes itself into the stratosphere with zero evidence and everyone seemed to get sucked into towing a party line with 'dissenters' quickly swarmed by the stupid and clueless - using words, abbreviations and terms they don't really understand but ape from the more knowledgeable posters.

More off topic, but the recent Battlefield 1 thread is another classic OCUK example. Dice's previous game crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. Battlefront died after a month. With most people swearing off pre-ordering another Dice game 'ever again'. A 2min trailer and 'ZOMG HYPE HYPE HYPE, PRE ORDER PRE ORDER PRE ORDER!!!!', all is forgotten and every dummy that made all sorts of promises a month ago is throwing money at Dice again. Hell, even people that's probably never played a Dice game before is fighting like tigers defending Dice/BF1. I swear they'll fight to the death if they had to. They don't exactly know why, but all the other apes are doing it so they're just doing their bit too. Once they realise it's probably only a reskin from Battlefront, the same promises of 'never again' are made once. Ad infinitum.

Same with the RX 480 thread. For 160 pages people were convinced it was going to match a 980Ti. On page 166 (iirc) Gibbo brings a bit of realism into it and the train is derailed. 30-40 pages later his comments are all but forgotten (Taking into account he's the only person in the thread that actually held the card in his hands and tested it) and the delusion is back on with every little stupid fanboy shrilling at everyone that dare think otherwise because of what XYZ poster said in his/her latest novel (based on zero evidence) or argument.

If you all think that the CPU section is any different, you're wrong. The same nonsense goes on in here. Some of us just like looking at it for what it is, where the market is, where the best performance and price point is, instead of how we want it to be.

And for the extremely large majority of people and what they actually do with their PCs, AMD is fine.

Great post!
 
Soldato
Joined
25 Jun 2011
Posts
5,468
Location
Yorkshire and proud of it!
Having come from an FX 9590 to the 4690K you see in my signature now i have direct experience of Intel vs AMD FX series CPU's

In 90% of games i have seen no difference in performance, as a mater of fact the only game i do see a change in performance is World Of Warships, a DX9 game.
From minimums of about 50 on the FX to V-sync locked 60 on the 4690K.

By the same token performance in some parts of Crysis 3 (heavy physics areas) the performance was higher on the FX, and smoother.

The Intel chip is quick per thread / clock, its also power efficient., But, and One other thing, CPU's are not just about Gaming, at least not for everyone.

With the FX CPU i could Swarm Bake Lighting and Shading in Unreal Engine and then fire up Cryengine and do some more lighting maths in there while Blender and Maya was also running in the background, not a problem....

With the 4690K if i send the UE Swarm Bake going i cannot run Cryengine, or MAYA or Blender or even whatch a video because if i do the whole system hangs.
The 4690K is a one job at a time CPU, it may be quick and efficient, but its a very focused CPU 'i presume' to achieve that, because when things get difficult it doesn't achieve much at all.

Yeah. I'm on an FX-8350 and it's more than sufficient for my gaming needs - I'd have to spend a lot more on a graphics card before my CPU became the bottleneck. And for non-gaming needs it does a fine job for the most part. I WANT to upgrade, but it's not so much for performance as for wanting new features like PCI SSDs on M.2 and similar things. It's frustrating because I want to buy a new AMD chip ideally, but Zen wont appear till next year. So I either side-grade now to one of Intel's cheaper chips (if you can use that word with Intel), go all in and buy one of their -E line (probably Broadwell) and accept I'm stuck on Intel for the foreseeable, or else I just grit my teeth and wait it out.

But yes, if you're happy with DDR3 RAM et al. for a little bit longer, the FX-chips are more than capable of giving good performance and in many scenarios are better than an i5. AMD misjudged the state of software development badly when they released Bulldozer. But its caught up with high core counts very nicely nowadays and still getting better, imo.
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Nov 2015
Posts
4,867
Location
Glasgow Area
Yes.

The first round of Zen will be exactly that. CPU only, and up to 8 (real) cores, 16 threads.

Only APUs of Zen will have graphics cores as well.

sounds good to me! I'm a gamer (4 cores OK) but I also edit video. so for that I would love more cores. But can't afford x99 platforms. So stick to mainstream processors. A proper good 8 core pure CPU would see me switch to AMD in a heartbeat. Even if I have to sacrifice a couple FPS.
 
Soldato
Joined
25 Jun 2011
Posts
5,468
Location
Yorkshire and proud of it!
Would have thought this would be posted already, but don't see it:

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ams-zen-engineering-sample-specs-leaked.html

Nothing we don't already suspect but a bit more confirmation moving it from "Friend of a cousin said" to "a friend of mine" status.

One thing I note is that they appear to have halved the L2 cache that Piledriver had. That's not good, imo. Though it compensates with more L3 cache. I presume Jim Keller knows more about chip design than me, though, so maybe this is a good thing?
 
Don
Joined
19 May 2012
Posts
17,319
Location
Spalding, Lincolnshire
Would have thought this would be posted already, but don't see it:

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ams-zen-engineering-sample-specs-leaked.html

Nothing we don't already suspect but a bit more confirmation moving it from "Friend of a cousin said" to "a friend of mine" status.

One thing I note is that they appear to have halved the L2 cache that Piledriver had. That's not good, imo. Though it compensates with more L3 cache. I presume Jim Keller knows more about chip design than me, though, so maybe this is a good thing?

Cache size isn't the be all and end all, as you can have the biggest cache in the world, but it's still no use if the data you need next isn't in it :)

I assume there's probably been some work done on Cache prediction and improvement in that area - and cache size will be a trade off against cost/die size.
 
Caporegime
Joined
17 Mar 2012
Posts
48,068
Location
ARC-L1, Stanton System
Cache size isn't the be all and end all, as you can have the biggest cache in the world, but it's still no use if the data you need next isn't in it :)

I assume there's probably been some work done on Cache prediction and improvement in that area - and cache size will be a trade off against cost/die size.

True but if pushed Desktop Intel Chips do tend to fall down because of the tiny cache....


RE:

Having come from an FX 9590 to the 4690K you see in my signature now i have direct experience of Intel vs AMD FX series CPU's

In 90% of games i have seen no difference in performance, as a mater of fact the only game i do see a change in performance is World Of Warships, a DX9 game.
From minimums of about 50 on the FX to V-sync locked 60 on the 4690K.

By the same token performance in some parts of Crysis 3 (heavy physics areas) the performance was higher on the FX, and smoother.

The Intel chip is quick per thread / clock, its also power efficient., But, and One other thing, CPU's are not just about Gaming, at least not for everyone.

With the FX CPU i could Swarm Bake Lighting and Shading in Unreal Engine and then fire up Cryengine and do some more lighting maths in there while Blender and Maya was also running in the background, not a problem....

With the 4690K if i send the UE Swarm Bake going i cannot run Cryengine, or MAYA or Blender or even whatch a video because if i do the whole system hangs.

The 4690K is a one job at a time CPU, it may be quick and efficient, but its a very focused CPU 'i presume' to achieve that, because when things get difficult it doesn't achieve much at all.
 
Associate
Joined
10 Mar 2005
Posts
27
Location
Stafford
It's not even the processor power that concerns me the most - I just need a platform upgrade so I can use faster memory and put in a PCI-E SSD.

^^ This!
My Phenom II 955 has all the CPU power I need for what I do with it, but the SATA 300 ports and lack of DDR4...I'm even tempted to get a Z170/6700K just for the platform :(
 
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