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

Soldato
Joined
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5,951
There's nothing even out yet. Why hype in hope?
Think it was more sarcasm than hyping.
There are often other reasons behind the biggest discounts. Some may work well for buyers, other times against. Last year for example there was a big thing about the 6700K over the week of Black Friday......less than a year later we're had Z270, now Z370 with their accompanying 7700K and 8700K CPU's and that's without noting the increased competition. So the 6700K a year ago was a good price but also for good reason :)
AMD might just have quite a profit margin per item indeed some new stuff is soon to follow, or they might just want to gain some market share.......and/or could be many other reasons.

I'm always sceptical of sales. Besides, at some places they seem to sale on 24hrs a day 365 days a year (furniture places especially).
 
Soldato
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The first review of the HP X360 using the Ryzen 5 2500U is up:

https://hothardware.com/reviews/ryzen-mobile-benchmarks-and-performance-analysis?page=1

CPU and IGP performance is very strong,but due to a combination of a dull display(which needed to be ramped up to full brightness) and what they suspect as potential driver issues,battery life is not as good.

Geekbench shows a bit of a mixed bag of results, but is perhaps telling of the various laptop thermal solutions and possibly where systems might be throttling. Surprisingly, though we tested it over and over, Intel's Core i5-8520U in the Acer Swift 3 consistently beat out the 8th Gen Core i7 CPUs in either Dell or HP machines, at least when it came to Geekbench. AMD's Ryzen 5 2500U in the HP Envy x360 puts up decent Geekbench numbers, hanging with the Intel's 8th Gen chips, and smoking the 7th Gen Kaby Lake score in the ThinkPad in Multi-Core processing, but falling behind it in Single-Core. To be honest, however, the Geekbench scores are all over the map and don't instill confidence. Cinebench seems to scale cleanly, however.

Cinbench puts AMD's Ryzen 5 2500U near the top of the stack with respect to its CPU throughput, just 5% shy of the top 8th Gen score we got from Dell's XPS 13. Surprisingly, in the GPU-focused OpenGL test, Ryzen Mobile is only showing about as fast as Intel's UHD 620 IGP, while getting thoroughly trounced by the discrete GeForce MX150 GPU in one of the Acer Swift 3 configs.

However, we'd offer that this OpenGL score for the Ryzen 5 2500U is more likely the result of a driver optimization issue or memory bandwidth, because, as you'll see in the following graphics and gaming benchmarks, Ryzen Mobile's integrated Vega GPU can deliver much stronger performance than this relative to Intel's integrated graphics solutions.

We also have to underscore, unfortunately, that the model of HP Envy x360 15z that we had to work with here has a woefully dim display. On battery power, even at a 100 percent brightness setting, the machine was only able to output 100 lux on our meter. Since our test methodology has always been to calibrate all laptop displays tested to this modest light output level in order to achieve a level playing field, we had to set the HP machine at 100 percent brightness to run are tests. As a result, this may not be AMD Ryzen Mobile's best foot forward, so to speak, with respect to battery life. In any event, below are the results we achieved with this particular Ryzen Mobile-powered laptop.

Perhaps it was the fact that we had to peg display brightness on battery power to get a reasonable output level, or perhaps it was that Ryzen 5 Mobile is still needs optimization for video playback. Either way, the end result here is not encouraging.

We also quickly tested CPU utilization whether running VLC or the Windows 10 video player, and saw Ryzen 5 2500U CPU utilization oscillated at a low 4 - 12 percent. So, it appears at least with respect to VLC and video playback, that Ryzen Mobile with Vega 8 graphics is more power-hungry or perhaps has a bit more driver maturity to undergo to be fully optimized.

The early indicators for AMD's Ryzen Mobile platform are strong, both on the CPU and GPU side of the equation. With respect to battery life, however, the picture for us is still pretty murky and we're going to reserve judgement for now. Frankly, we don't feel like the HP machine we picked up at retail is a very compelling solution overall. Though it's priced right at $729, its dim display and pokey hard drive left a lot to be desired and ultimately hampered our testing from getting a clean A/B comparison in certain spots. With Ryzen Mobile in a more premium configuration, with a higher quality more power-efficient display and fast SSD, our view of its performance profile could have been significantly different.

In fact, AMD may be in a peculiar spot with Ryzen Mobile. The delineation line may be drawn for some users between making the jump from integrated graphics, to whether or not discrete graphics solutions, like NVIDIA's GeForce MX150, might be available in a given model of machine. As we showed, a GeForce MX150 puts up next level performance over Ryzen 5 2500U's Vega 8 IGP at least, though the question still remains how a Ryzen 7 2700U would compare with 2 more Radeon CUs and a touch more clock speed at its disposal.

Ultimately, it will come down to what AMD's OEM partners like HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Dell can pull together for laptop designs with Ryzen Mobile. It would seem the product lends itself very well to premium configurations, if battery life can be managed in thin and light designs. Either way you slice it, our early view of Ryzen Mobile is encouraging with some real bright spots, coupled with a bit of uncertainty as well. We'll just have to see what comes to market from the major players in the months ahead. What's very clear, however, is that AMD is back on competitive footing again with Intel in mobile processors as well, with Ryzen and Vega delivering a solid 1-2 punch.

Le sigh,I am not sure why AMD allows these issues to slip past.
 
Associate
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15 Oct 2015
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A quick question now in the time of Black Friday. Is the Ryzen 7 1700 worth a shot for a computer that will be used at my parents place as a backup computer for me, but also be used for used CAD, Photoshop, Arcgis desktop, mapinfo pro and qgis (my dad works in construction and uses CAD and my oldest brother studies stuff in regards of mapping nd stuff like that). Was thinking about getting a Ryzen 7 1700 with at least 16gb memory (possibly 32gb).
 
Man of Honour
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those benchamrks look disappointing, it doesn't appear to beat intelsintegratedd graphics. I thought these were meant to be big on the graphics.
 
Soldato
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Associate
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Pretty poor battery life aye! Nice performance, though a bit off what some of the earlier leaks were showing which would have been nicer :D

Shame there is only one battery test there though, especially given the task chosen can be massively influenced by certain decoders etc. A few more use-cases for comparison would give us a better feel for if it's poor battery life in general, or poor battery life in video decoding (dunno how specifically it was decoding either :/) in particular.
 
Soldato
Joined
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The earlier leaks were for the Ryzen 7 2700U,not the Ryzen 5 2500U,and the former has 25% more shaders and 17% more clockspeed,and 10% higher CPU base clockspeeds. Also,remember,boosting will be dependent on the chassis used and of the three launch models,the Acer one is the only one which has a 25W TDP chassis.

The Cinebench scores look around what was seen by various users on Reddit,so it seems these are verifiable.

Also,it seems Raven Ridge radically changed the video decode block:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/79xvot/amd_raven_apus_leave_behind_uvd_unified_video/

Instead of UVD which was there from the ATI 3000 series,its now called VCN,and if the drivers are not fully working for that it might explain the issues.

OFC,it is still the fault of AMD if it is driver issues though.
 
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Associate
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Pretty poor battery life aye! Nice performance, though a bit off what some of the earlier leaks were showing which would have been nicer :D

Shame there is only one battery test there though, especially given the task chosen can be massively influenced by certain decoders etc. A few more use-cases for comparison would give us a better feel for if it's poor battery life in general, or poor battery life in video decoding (dunno how specifically it was decoding either :/) in particular.

Apparently they had to crank up the brightness on the LCD to match the brightness on the other screens - from what I gather from the comments, the other machines were much higher end.

The APUs are likely to be in my next machine, albeit in desktop form, so I'm glad the performance seems to be decent.
 
Soldato
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NBC have started their review and previewed some results:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Our-f...Intel-has-every-reason-to-worry.266618.0.html

Article Title said:
Our first Ryzen 5 2500U benchmarks are in and Intel has every reason to worry

Spectre x360 15 with the i7-7500U CPU and GeForce 940MX dGPU while providing a roughly 50 percent boost in multi-thread CPU performance and 20 boost in GPU performance. The performance-per-Watt is even more impressive when compared to AMD's own demanding mobile RX 460 GPU.

apgmdOm.png

To put in context,the Core i5 7500U and Core i5 6200U CPUs are 2C/4T.
 
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Soldato
Joined
17 Jun 2012
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5,951
Any tips for 1600X tuning?

I've never messed with AMD overclocking so I've no idea what I'm doing TBH. As a fresh install on auto voltage it's hitting 1.45-1.5v which seems ridiculous.

Also, can I set this to all core 4ghz or is it one core only?
 
Soldato
Joined
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Any tips for 1600X tuning?

I've never messed with AMD overclocking so I've no idea what I'm doing TBH. As a fresh install on auto voltage it's hitting 1.45-1.5v which seems ridiculous.

Also, can I set this to all core 4ghz or is it one core only?

What's the voltage with all cores under load? Run cinebench and keep an eye on it. That is the real voltage set.

When overclocking you'd be tweaking all the cores and setting them to the same speed. 4.0ghz is certainly possible but no guarantee.

At stock the 1600X is at 4.1ghz when up to 2 cores are under load (this is where the voltage goes to 1.4v+) and 3.7ghz when 3+ cores are under load.
 
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