AMD Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000) - *** NO COMPETITOR HINTING ***

[Potatowithearsontheside]

So Back to the Future was not a true story...?

 

[ianh]

Games consoles drive the hardware though, sure PC hardware will always be better but the games will never be built around specifications that the consoles cannot match, and the next ones are 8 core. CPUs are never the focus when building the games, its all about GPU since they will want to push graphic fidelity, so because of this 8 core is likely to become the standard as 4 core was for the last 7-8 years. Yes PC CPUs will be much better but almost no game developer will build a game based around whatever the latest PC hardware is.

Also im pretty sure most people still use quad cores right now even though we've had 6/8 core CPU's for a couple years.

Please just stop, the use of logic hurts him

Also, taking info from the Steam hardware report in Apr '19 - 4 core CPU's are used by 55.6% of gamers, who still think that 4 core CPU's are relevant despite 6 core consumer CPU's being available since 2010 and 8 core since 2011. Talking of 8 core, the number of 8 core CPU users on steam is just 2.5% - yeah 8 core will die out "quickly"

 

[Perfect_Chaos]

So Back to the Future was not a true story...?

 

[humbug]

lol

 

[Stephanie Peterson]

MS will have to fix the crap windows scheduler before we see the full grunt of more than 8 cores anyway - still ... that 12 looks good

 

[humbug]

MS will have to fix the crap windows scheduler before we see the full grunt of more than 8 cores anyway - still ... that 12 looks good

Its above 16 cores where that becomes a problem, 2990WX, 2950X is fine.

 

[Silent_Scone]

Just like 5GHz with crap IPC was irrelevant 8c will likely lose relevance very quickly too with the current core arms race. As the core counts rapidly increase over the next couple of years, programmers are actually going to use that power, in turn 8c will die out pretty quickly especially with the better core densities of Zen3 and Zen4 in the coming years.

Just looking at the bigger picture rather than focusing on 2019

It's very easy to make these kind of statements. Are you a games developer? Maybe you can write something up explaining why games will suddenly become CPU bound after all this time.

 

[4K8KW10]

It's very easy to make these kind of statements.

It's a too strong statement because 16 logical processors is still pretty serious hardware. Yes, there likely be more and more threads, for example a 12-core monster with quad or octo threads per core, but 16 won't be the minimum requirement for some time more to come.

 

[TrixX]

Games consoles drive the hardware though, sure PC hardware will always be better but the games will never be built around specifications that the consoles cannot match, and the next ones are 8 core. CPUs are never the focus when building the games, its all about GPU since they will want to push graphic fidelity, so because of this 8 core is likely to become the standard as 4 core was for the last 7-8 years. Yes PC CPUs will be much better but almost no game developer will build a game based around whatever the latest PC hardware is.

Also im pretty sure most people still use quad cores right now even though we've had 6/8 core CPU's for a couple years.

Please point out where I said it was about gaming. The other point for gaming if it is based on 8c CPU's going forward (there's even rumours the PS5 will be 3 Threads per Core) then one can assume games will be optimised for 8c, with the explosion of streaming that's another 4-8 core requirement. Final point is we still need a fast CPU to keep the GPU fed with enough information to put out that graphical fidelity, so high IPC and high frequency combined with 12-16c is looking like a very interesting proposition. For those still playing Skyrim, I'm sure the 8c CPU is a fantastic bargain.

It's very easy to make these kind of statements. Are you a games developer? Maybe you can write something up explaining why games will suddenly become CPU bound after all this time.

I'm not a games developer, though wouldn't mind the opportunity at some point
Thing is I've done tons of modding and been on the periphery for a long time. I currently do a lot with a few sim's and they are indeed still CPU locked. There's a few other games out there which are using heavy procedural generation, enough to smash my 16c/32t Threadripper into next week. I really feel bad for those using just a 7700K or 8700K on that game, their load times for certain areas are 10mins or more compared to my 30s-4mins.

I just find that many people are looking at their feet when trying to walk instead of looking where they are going.

 

[The Old School Gamer]

Well when you start offering a PCH with double or maybe even quadruple the bandwidth available to the rest of the board, if you are pushing data through most/all of those PCI-E lanes it's gonna get hot. Lets not forget that most of the Zen/Zen+ lanes were supplied by the CPU which is actively cooled, and the PCH on the X470 etc. was only 4x lanes of PCI-E 3.0 split into whatever the board manufacturer saw fit.

Indeed. If the tops boards have active cooling, I will look at modding with a bigger passive solution, swiftly.

Depending on the storage configuration of choice, there's more power drawn through the chipset than what's typical.

Well hopefully some manufacturers like Asus, MSI etc will just opt for chunky heat sinks linked by heat pipe.
Guess will shall see soon enough ah chaps.

 

[smilingcrow]

Personally I think 8c are almost irrelevant already ....

8C has yet to even start to be relevant to the majority today as they wouldn't see any benefit over a fast clocked 4C or 6C chip.
Some enthusiasts seem to completely forget what most desktop PCs are used for by home and business users.
With laptops being very popular and very few having more than 4C still, the idea that 8C is not enough is even more absurd.

That's why I asked the question recently on what the next jump will be for PC performance as the number of cores is starting to get less relevant as we move into the area of diminished returns.
The majority aren't suddenly going to need Workstation level CPU performance just because 32C @5nm might be much more affordable in 2 years or so.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

 

[Grim5]

Just like 5GHz with crap IPC was irrelevant 8c will likely lose relevance very quickly too with the current core arms race. As the core counts rapidly increase over the next couple of years, programmers are actually going to use that power, in turn 8c will die out pretty quickly especially with the better core densities of Zen3 and Zen4 in the coming years.

Just looking at the bigger picture rather than focusing on 2019

I don’t see this happening.

2020 consoles have 8 core cpus and games will be built for the lowest common denominator.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

I don’t see this happening.

2020 consoles have 8 core cpus and games will be built for the lowest common denominator.

Well it does take a few years to make a game. So "as the core counts rapidly increase over the next couple of years" - I take that to mean 2 years. You then add perhaps a 4 year game development time and we arrive at the year 2025 an approximation.

Does it really sound so unlikely that PC games will start to take advantage of 12 cores by 2025? When games are designed for an 8 core console, a PC will need extra to run them because a PC is less optimised.

 

[Stephanie Peterson]

Always best to have more cores, more resources. Windows doens just sit in the background doing nowt when your playing games, your virus check, malware checker and god knows how many other services all need resources.
More cpu cores to go along with improved IO and that means not as much bottlenecks. We have been kept back from a core heavy world for years thanks to Intel so lets hope the next few are a real push.

 

[Wucked]

Just like 5GHz with crap IPC was irrelevant 8c will likely lose relevance very quickly too with the current core arms race. As the core counts rapidly increase over the next couple of years, programmers are actually going to use that power, in turn 8c will die out pretty quickly especially with the better core densities of Zen3 and Zen4 in the coming years.

Just looking at the bigger picture rather than focusing on 2019

The bigger picture? Current Steam survey data has over 80% of PC’s on quad core or below and I imagine the majority of standard office PC’s are the same. The only place I can think of where your statement might be true is in the data centre. But everyone in the world won’t suddenly jump on the latest tech just because you say so. As far as I can tell 8c is only beginning to become relevant for most of the market and will continue to be relevant for years.

 

[Orange Nexus]

My Android has 8 cores.

Sorry, can't help it.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

The bigger picture? Current Steam survey data has over 80% of PC’s on quad core or below and I imagine the majority of standard office PC’s are the same. The only place I can think of where your statement might be true is in the data centre. But everyone in the world won’t suddenly jump on the latest tech just because you say so. As far as I can tell 8c is only beginning to become relevant for most of the market and will continue to be relevant for years.

The first 8c chip hit the mainstream market in 2014 and now games are just starting to make use of it. 6 cores are definately getting huge benefits. So if 8c took 5 years, I think it's fair to say that games will start to use 12 cores perhaps another 5 years after Ryzen 3000, which will be about 2024. Why does that seem unlikely? People are already upgrading their struggling 4 core CPUs because 6 core is becoming the minimum for gaming.

 

[smilingcrow]

Always best to have more cores, more resources.

Up to a point and then it becomes a complete irrelevance and this is true for RAM and the same for cores.
At least with SSDs when you go high end you gain a bit with latency, bandwidth, consistency etc. Very much a law of diminishing returns especially for the average user but the difference shows up clearly in benchmarks.
But give the average user a bump from 8C/8GB to 16C/16GB and you will see zero benefit so the jump to 32C/32GB just becomes silly.
It's like buying a 700 horsepower super-car just to drive around central London in the rush hour; a massive ego stroke and no more.

If Zen 4 is at 5nm with 16C chiplets then at least it should have multiple gains over Zen 2.
Native 16C should remove any potential inconsistencies that a dual chiplet design will have, lower power consumption, lower prices.
But will they dare move to 16C chiplets! Too much!
So I'm not running down AMD's Zen potential road map as it is great news for enthusiasts, just seeing it becoming less and less relevant to the majority at the high end even for AM4.
That's a nice problem to have though both for AMD and for consumers.

 

[smilingcrow]

The first 8c chip hit the mainstream market in 2014 and now games are just starting to make use of it.

Isn't Zen 1 the first real mainstream 8C chip so only 2017?

 

[Steampunk]

The issue is to get programmers and middleware to make the jump to multicore/multithread. To change the paradigm to making software easily parallel. Once that step is made, then more cores are used if they are available to speed up the processing no matter what.

Even today, using Photoshop or doing video transcoding is going to eat as many cores as it can get, because those are already very parallelized tasks. More will come as the developers and software catch up.