*** AMD "Zen 4" thread (inc AM5/APU discussion) ***

[alec]

I feel 170W is AMD going with the times and market.
Intel has been selling 200W+ desktop CPUs for couple generations now, and buyers are fine with it.
GPUs went way over 250W (which for me was a hard limit, as in "no way I don't want a 2080Ti, it is too power hungry". Now this thought reads like a joke), hitting 350-400-450W peaks and buyers are fine with it

r9 5950X can fully unleash itself when power limits are raised, coincidentally to 150W-170W.

moores law IS dead. Technology is advancing in different direction. We have better cases and coolers than 10 years ago, so limits of acceptable power use are shifting.
And the extra power is not wasted. You are actually getting more perfomance, too. Unlike Netburst or Bulldozer.

 

[Journey]

Well since CPUs are near indestructible, the question is where would a find a reliable LGA1155 board in 2021+?

I bought a job lot of brand new Gigabyte Z77 boards recently, brand new as in unused stock, ~£18 per board. They are out there if you look, but as you say you eventually need an excuse.

Maybe if I wait until Zen5 by which time DDR5 should be cheaper too!

Lots of speculation around DDR5 being massively expensive when it launches, no actual idea if it will be, it could be 20-30% more, or it could be double, but given the VRM is now on the module obviously it isn't comparing like-for-like any more so people will have to get used to paying more, especially for the premium brands targeted at overclocking.

 

[KompuKare]

I feel 170W is AMD going with the times and market.
Intel has been selling 200W+ desktop CPUs for couple generations now, and buyers are fine with it.
GPUs went way over 250W (which for me was a hard limit, as in no way I don't want a 2080Ti, it is too power hungry. Now this thought reads like a joke), hitting 350-400-450W peaks and buyers are fine with it

r9 5950X can fully unleash itself when power limits are raised, coincidentally to 150W-170W.

moores law IS dead. Technology is advancing in different direction. We have better cases and coolers than 10 years ago, so limits of acceptable power use are shifting.
And the extra power is not wasted. You are actually getting more perfomance, too. Unlike Netburst or Bulldozer.

I think most desktop enthusiast don't mind large max power figures if the CPU idles well.

So as long as the actual physical process and packaging can cope with running at under 10W most of the time and still safely use 250W or whatever when needed that is fine...

... Provided the efficiency is there. Making a 100W CPU use up 200W for 5% extra performance?

That's not so good.

With that comes the realisation that traditional overclocking is finished and all the bigger spender can do is invest in better cooling and power delivery and let boost do what it can with that.

 

[alec]

Making a 100W CPU use up 200W for 5% extra performance?

Worth it to claim the crown and be the fastest CPU in all comparison benchmarks.
The argument could be reversed. Modern (Zen3) CPUs will retain 100% single thread and 80% multithread performance when power limit is lowered from 100W to 60W. Is extra 40W worth it?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well since CPUs are near indestructible, the question is where would a find a reliable LGA1155 board in 2021+?
Plus, after not buying for so long I would probably see it as an excuse to treat myself to an upgrade.
My old upgrade criteria of doubling the ST would still be hard, but any upgrade should see MT scores quadruple or more.
Maybe if I wait until Zen5 by which time DDR5 should be cheaper too!

The single core performance increase might be more than you suspect. I always test my hypermodded Fallout 4 playthroughs as its a very good test of single core gains(very single core and latency limited) due to the heavy scripting loads and increase in drawcalls. I went from an IB Xeon E3 1230 V2(Core i7 3770) to a Ryzen 5 2600,and minimums went up by 25% to 30% in the worst places. Moving to a Ryzen 7 3700X saw almost the same level of gains. That averages out in my estimations around 50% to 70% higher minimums in the best case scenario for me if I had skipped the Ryzen 5 2600 and gone straight to a Ryzen 7 3700X.

I would hazzard a guess,a CFL/RKL CPU or a Zen3 CPU would average even more,because Creation type games probably do run better on these designs than Zen2(at least a Core i7 6700K is apparently a tad quicker than my Ryzen 7 3700X).

 

[humbug]

This is untrue, isn't it. The current CPU supplies are way higher than what the market needs, hence all the retailers offer as many Ryzens as you would wish.

It remains a mystery what AMD is so not serious and completely fails with the GPUs supplies, though.

Tech Tubers, some of them are still going on as if Ryzen 5000 CPU's are difficult to get a hold of

They are not, i just took this screenshot, its been like this now for literally months, i think some of them want Ryzen 5000 to be unavailable rather than reporting facts. Like they switch from using 'Rainforst' to the 'eggy one' for their "Value for money" reporting, the latter are very over priced for Ryzen CPU's. because they sell like gold dust encrusted hotcakes.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

@humbug TBF the Ryzen 9 CPUs were really hard to get for the first 5 months or so,hence why there were threads like this:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/5950x-960-nah-mate.18925753/

But Ryzen 5 5600X and especially the Ryzen 7 5800X seemed to have more supply even at the start. I even saw bundle deals,and famous auction site deals where you could a Ryzen 7 5800X for as low as £330 around 2~3 months ago.

 

[humbug]

@humbug TBF the Ryzen 9 CPUs were really hard to get for the first 5 months or so,hence why there were threads like this:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/5950x-960-nah-mate.18925753/

But Ryzen 5 5600X and especially the Ryzen 7 5800X seemed to have more supply even at the start. I even saw bundle deals,and famous auction site deals where you could a Ryzen 7 5800X for as low as £330 around 2~3 months ago.

Oh, very true, the thing is tho when i bough my 5800X i could shop around to get the best deal, there was only about a £30 difference in price but everywhere had them in stock, and yet tech tubers were telling me i couldn't get one anywhere, the 5800X has actually had a $40 price drop. that's a price reduction $40 below MSRP and you can get them pretty much anywhere at the below original MSRP now, except 'Fresh Egg' and whose pricing do they use when pricing them up, the 'Egg' one, who did they used to use, 'Rainforest'
Oh and no ones reported on the price drop.
Ryzen 9 have been readily available for about 2 months now.
-----------

Anyway. The limiting factor for power was the PGA socket, its limited to 125 Watts, with the LGA socket AMD can tune them to be even more performant, Intel have been knocking out mid range 200 Watt Mainstream CPU's for years now, no one cares, people don't care about Bulldozer anymore, which didn't use as much power as some of these Intel CPU's so the lesson AMD learned from Bulldozer, in its power consumption at least, can be set aside, no one cares.

I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but 170 Watts is not that high, in todays context its still very good, and its 65 Watt's more than what AMD have been putting out on the PGA socket.

 

[Journey]

Tech Tubers, some of them are still going on as if Ryzen 5000 CPU's are difficult to get a hold of

EU and Asia are much better accounted for than the USA, not sure about elsewhere. The 5900X and 5950X only really came into free stock in the last 4-6 weeks, and the 5600X and 5800X a little before that, but it seems the R9 stock in the USA is still hit and miss presently.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but 170 Watts is not that high, in todays context its still very good, and its 65 Watt's more than what AMD have been putting out on the PGA socket.

It might be AMD deciding to merge TR and Ryzen,so if they make the socket capable of higher power delivery,you can cram more cores in.At least for the average consumer 8~12 cores will be the sweetspot for a while I think. So higher core counts make more sense for HEDT.

ATM,Intel can't really compete in pure core count,and with a larger socket you might even be able to fit in 32 cores at some point(further die shrinks?).DDR5 will also end up being able to rival quad channel DDR4 in terms of memory bandwidth.So I suspect it makes sense AMD might try to unify both under one socket?? At least that is my specculation.

 

[humbug]

The 5800X, with a 105 Watt TDP loads its 8 cores between 4.65Ghz and 4.85Ghz, depending on what its doing
the 5950X, also a 105 Watt TDP loads its 16 cores between about 4.1Ghz to 4.3Ghz, depending on what its doing, tho it can load less cores, 6 or 8 up to 5.05Ghz, games for example, the 5800X is capped at 4.85Ghz, segmentation, but with a few tweaks i have got mine to 5.2Ghz, tho its not worth running it above 5Ghz as its tuned to with in an inch of its life above that.

Now imagine what the 5950X could do if it had another 50 Watts in the tank.

 

[alec]

merge TR and Ryzen

not going to happen.
TR just too lucrative a market and they get it almost for free. Socket, package, controller chip all lifted from EPYC.
4-channel (DDR5) memory at non-server speeds coupled with 5GHz capable cores?
Not for mainstream desktop, but definitely has a market

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

not going to happen.
TR just too lucrative a market and they get it almost for free. Socket, package, controller chip all lifted from EPYC.
4-channel (DDR5) memory at non-server speeds coupled with 5GHz capable cores?
Not for mainstream desktop, but definitely has a market

The thing is surely they could make more money selling those CPUs as single socket servers using the server sockets?? The big issue here is Intel can't even compete with the Ryzen 9 5950X,and if they are going to 24 cores next year,ADL is not going to be able to compete. I am just thinking from a margin kind of view - if they can sell say upto 24 or 32 cores on a consumer socket for HEDT pricing,it might make them higher margins. Then they bring down the single socket Epyc systems to skim the top end of where the TR CPUs are at for those who need 48 and 64 cores.

 

[humbug]

Zen 4 EPYC will have 96 cores, 192 threads.

There is lots of room between 24 cores and 96 cores to squeeze HEDT CPU's into

AMD are just increasing the core count, again.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I suppose AMD has enough leeway to do what they want,when Intel is missing from the core wars!

 

[humbug]

If you will allow me this one of the things that i find quite annoying is how some Tech Tubers bang on about how Ryzen 5000 are too expensive, still now.

In some ways i agree Ryzen 5000 CPU's are expensive, but compared to the competition they are also much better, significantly higher per core performance, including in gaming, i agree both perform very well and the Intel CPU's are fast enough to drive an RTX 3090 even at 1080P, mostly, but that's not the same thing as "equal performance" like some Tech Tubers not just present it but actually say that, if it was not for the underlying context that they use this would be a lie, they did the same for the the Ryzen 3600 vs the 9900K. its not an AMD vs Intel thing its an activist journalistic thing.

But that is besides the point, they are in fact missing the point, because like AMD Intel also never miss a trick, they have realised these Tech Tubers are focusing on the price of the CPU, there are other ways to keep your margins high, Chip-sets for example, you can't run a CPU without a motherboard.

So, B560 (Intel) boards are quite cheap, as cheap as AMD's B550, but they are also pretty ###### dyer, they are not as good as AMD's B550 boards and you still can't overclock the CPU on them.

For overclocking and to get a half decent board you have to get Intel's higher end Chip-sets, and they cost.

So, lets price up a system.

5800X: £390 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/amd-...hz-socket-am4-processor-retail-cp-3cb-am.html
B550 Gigabyte Aoras Elite: £140, it doesn't have Intel Wifi 6, mine does it was £180, they are now £160, so £160. https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...2-amd-am4-b550-atx-motherboard-mb-593-gi.html
A good 240mm AIO: £80 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/arct...ormance-cpu-water-cooler-240mm-hs-07b-ar.html
------

11700KF: £330, the 5800X has no iGPU so its fair to use the KF. https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...ocket-lga1200-processor-retail-cp-696-in.html
Z590 Gigabyte Aoras Elite AX: £250 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...-lga-1200-ddr4-atx-motherboard-mb-59c-gi.html
Same AIO: £80 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/arct...ormance-cpu-water-cooler-240mm-hs-07b-ar.html

5800X system: £630
11700KF system: £660

 

[KompuKare]

It might be AMD deciding to merge TR and Ryzen,so if they make the socket capable of higher power delivery,you can cram more cores in.At least for the average consumer 8~12 cores will be the sweetspot for a while I think. So higher core counts make more sense for HEDT.

ATM,Intel can't really compete in pure core count,and with a larger socket you might even be able to fit in 32 cores at some point(further die shrinks?).DDR5 will also end up being able to rival quad channel DDR4 in terms of memory bandwidth.So I suspect it makes sense AMD might try to unify both under one socket?? At least that is my specculation.

It is hard to design one socket to span everything. Any actual quad channel (or even tripple channel like LGA 1356) designs tend to waste a fair bit of energy at idle.

Still, if AMD's great new strategy is to abandon the low-end then not having to designing to sell £30 CPUs with £30 mobo would be an advantage for them.

The single core performance increase might be more than you suspect. I always test my hypermodded Fallout 4 playthroughs as its a very good test of single core gains(very single core and latency limited) due to the heavy scripting loads and increase in drawcalls. I went from an IB Xeon E3 1230 V2(Core i7 3770) to a Ryzen 5 2600,and minimums went up by 25% to 30% in the worst places. Moving to a Ryzen 7 3700X saw almost the same level of gains. That averages out in my estimations around 50% to 70% higher minimums in the best case scenario for me if I had skipped the Ryzen 5 2600 and gone straight to a Ryzen 7 3700X.

I would hazzard a guess,a CFL/RKL CPU or a Zen3 CPU would average even more,because Creation type games probably do run better on these designs than Zen2(at least a Core i7 6700K is apparently a tad quicker than my Ryzen 7 3700X).

I have a different cunning plan: if I keep off upgrading Bethesda will eventually release a TES game with a fixed Creation engine game. Or was it hell and ice, or pig and aeronautics I should wait for?

 

[humbug]

Epic Games have just release their frankly insanely good Unreal Engine 5 in early access, it will use as many cores as you can throw at it, no amount is too many, and yes they partnered with AMD.


---------------------

I'll explain why this Tech Tuber shenanigans bothers me.

It takes a lot of work and money to continuously improve ones products, and no one can argue AMD haven't worked hard to improve their products over the last few years, and there is a reason for it, to reap the rewards for being competitive, what everyone has been crying out for them to do.

Tech Tubers are the consumers window into what these products are like. Being well meaning activists is one thing, but they are not as clever as they think they are, AMD putting an absolute crap tonne of work and money into surpassing their competition is completely pointless if those proving the windows into those products present that as "oh they are all the same, get whatever is cheaper"
Why should anyone put the effort in when all you have to do is be good enough because that's the limit of what activistic Tech Tubers are willing to say about your products, why not just save yourself the money and the work and just stagnate? Because that's the limits of what these people are willing to present your products as anyway.

Lets say AMD gain another 30% performance, along comes one of these Tech Tubers and GPU bottlenecks the crap out of this CPU and then say "bah its all just the same" Like Intel did now AMD learn "why even bother" like 4 cores is all you need.....

 

[clv101]

I feel 170W is AMD going with the times and market.
Intel has been selling 200W+ desktop CPUs for couple generations now, and buyers are fine with it.
GPUs went way over 250W (which for me was a hard limit, as in "no way I don't want a 2080Ti, it is too power hungry". Now this thought reads like a joke), hitting 350-400-450W peaks and buyers are fine with it

r9 5950X can fully unleash itself when power limits are raised, coincidentally to 150W-170W.

The majority of the market, laptops, small form factor, corporate offices etc are very energy aware.

moores law IS dead. Technology is advancing in different direction. We have better cases and coolers than 10 years ago, so limits of acceptable power use are shifting.
And the extra power is not wasted. You are actually getting more perfomance, too. Unlike Netburst or Bulldozer.

Some buyers are fine with it. I have no plans to run a 200W CPU or 400W GPU.

The majority of market, laptops, SFF, large corporate deployments etc are very energy aware.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

@humbug Not all the B560 motherboards are that bad. Hardware Unboxed just on purpose ignored/underplayed many of the cheaper ones which had VRM heatsinks. Remember,how the ASRock B350/B450 Pro series were ignored?? Well the B560 equivalents(including the Steel Legend) for between £90~£130 seem to be quite solid. The Steel Legend can run a Core i7 11700 fine. Having said that the Core i7 11700 is meh anyway,because the Core i7 10700 is much cheaper. The only RKL CPU which seems really worth it is the Core i5 11400F.

It is hard to design one socket to span everything. Any actual quad channel (or even tripple channel like LGA 1356) designs tend to waste a fair bit of energy at idle.

Still, if AMD's great new strategy is to abandon the low-end then not having to designing to sell £30 CPUs with £30 mobo would be an advantage for them.

Welcome to our budget Intel/Nvidia overloads. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss??

I have a different cunning plan: if I keep off upgrading Bethesda will eventually release a TES game with a fixed Creation engine game. Or was it hell and ice, or pig and aeronautics I should wait for?

You are an eternal optimistic then! But TBH,the Ryzen 7 3700X isn't too expensive now - seen newish ones for around £200,and secondhand seen them go for less.