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

[humbug]

People jumping to any conclusions over what was shown last night are gullible. That's not a 'veiled' insult. That's me calling straight up saying - you're gullible. Actually that's not really fair. I'd say you're more......*inclined* to believe the best when it comes to anything AMD. It's a form of gullibility, but it extends further than that.

Seriously, there's nothing about DOTA 2 that should strain a top level, modern i7. If Valve have messed things up that badly, something is very, very wrong. No way they've just made the game SO much more demanding that it now requires an 8 core CPU to stream at a decent rate without stupid ridiculous stutter.

Dude, honestly, these have all been extremely suspect, cherry picked tests. The BF1 was particularly laughable, turning the res up to 4k.

But whatever man. If you want to get stupidly hyped about something over such scant evidence, by all means, go ahead. I'm not the one whose gonna be disappointed later or look totally foolish if or when these CPU's dont quite deliver what you're trying to suggest they will.

Look at it a different way.

Its not very impressive to most people if you showcase your new CPU running a 10 year old World of Warcraft game at 720P, to you, me and others reading this that is what we want to see because then we can see the IPC levels of the CPU, but 90% viewing that don't understand why, to those people running the latest game at 4K smoothly is what they understand.
AMD are marketing the Chip, the same reason they use Blender and not Cinebench, Blender is what matters to a significant sector of their market, what's Cinebench?

 

[Sampsy]

Eh I'll wait until I see reviews and 3rd party benchmarks to trust any results. At best these launches cherry pick scenarios which show the product in the best possible light.

The main thing I am worried about is that it's possible Zen is an awful overclocker. If it is then all their stock-stock comparisons are much less meaningful and I can only presume they didn't show overclocked comparisons for a reason.

 

[SiDeards73]

People jumping to any conclusions over what was shown last night are gullible. That's not a 'veiled' insult. That's me straight up saying - you're gullible. Actually that's not really fair. I'd say you're more......*inclined* to believe the best when it comes to anything AMD. It's a form of gullibility, but it extends further than that.

Seriously, there's nothing about DOTA 2 that should strain a top level, modern i7. If Valve have messed things up that badly, something is very, very wrong. No way they've just made the game SO much more demanding that it now requires an 8 core CPU to stream at a decent rate without stupid ridiculous stutter. That would be such an insanely awful shot in the foot.

Dude, honestly, these have all been extremely suspect, cherry picked tests. The BF1 was particularly laughable, turning the res up to 4k.

But whatever man. If you want to get stupidly hyped about something over such scant evidence, by all means, go ahead. I'm not the one whose gonna be disappointed later or look totally foolish if or when these CPU's dont quite deliver what you're trying to suggest they will.


Cautious scepticism.

I know I know, totally ridiculous stuff. I guess I should just immediately buy everything they tried to tell me last night without question.

Not getting hyped as such, were not exactly running around shouting OMG OMG Its gunna make Intel go outta business... etc...

Were just optimistic that what was demo'd has some semblance or basis of truth in it.

Yes it was cherry picked results.

Yes the Gaming portions (other than the DOTA bit) were not really needed as they proved nothing, other than the RyZen CPU can run those games.

Ultimately i, and probably others, are just hopeful that AMD can pull off a winnner, at the minimum it seems the 8/16 RyZen is going to be better than my 4770k, so its an upgrade for me, and a day one purchase, thats all i care about really, oh as long as the pricing is right, obviously.

I dont understand why you feel the need to basically shout down everyone who is looking at the positives either? surely you can just gloss over those comments no? seems odd to me that you have to vehemently put your opinion across and basically call anyone else excited about what RyZen and AMD can bring as stupid.

Thought this was a forum for people to discuss tech, not basically just lord their opinion over everyone else and shout down those that have differing opinions, or belittle them with comments such as calling them stupid and gullible...

 

[MatTheCat]

To me, that was an example of them doing some funky nonsense because no way should a 6700k be struggling to that degree.


You seem to be assuming it'll even be as powerful as a 6700k in the first place.

Man, it's no wonder these presentations always include some ridiculous cherry picked tests that will fool gullible consumers.

yep....seems that many here have forgotten about all the Bulldozer pre-launch hype and all the benches showing out it either matched or beat the i7 2600K..........only for it to turn out to be a big steaming dog ****, although it did take some while before the fact that Bulldozer was a big steaming pile of **** became conventional wisdom.

I am not impressed at all from the results of a couple of cherry picked synthetic benchmarks and examples of some games running in circumstances where CPU power is neither here nor there. If AMD really had a winner on thier hands, then they had to really set out to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt and they have not done this. The fact that AMD haven't provided any pricing or release date information at this time is also very annoying for those like myself, looking to build a new system and quite frankly, recent past experience has proven to me that it really doesn't pay dividends at all to delay gratification until AMD get's their act together. That goes for GPUs and CPUs.

Edit: wow, OcUK considers 't.u.r.d' as a profanity.

 

[humbug]

The 8 core will be under $500, thats what Lisa said ^^^^

Eh I'll wait until I see reviews and 3rd party benchmarks to trust any results. At best these launches cherry pick scenarios which show the product in the best possible light.

The main thing I am worried about is that it's possible Zen is an awful overclocker. If it is then all their stock-stock comparisons are much less meaningful and I can only presume they didn't show overclocked comparisons for a reason.

The only real concern i have is clocks, but then over the lifetime of leakes its gone from a base clock of 2.8Ghz to 3.0Ghz to 3.1Ghz to 3.2Ghz and now 3.4Ghz, its still undergoing tuning and Lisa said they ain't done with that yet.

 

[Seanspeed]

Look at it a different way.

Its not very impressive to most people if you showcase your new CPU running a 10 year old World of Warcraft game at 720P, to you, me and others reading this that is what we want to see because then we can see the IPC levels of the CPU, but 90% viewing that don't understand why, to those people running the latest game at 4K smoothly is what they understand.

No, that is patently ridiculous. That BF1 demo showed *nothing*. Absolutely, 100% meaningless. If people dont understand what makes for a proper CPU demonstration, that's on them. Putting up a demo that doesn't demonstrate CPU capability whatsoever, then trying to pass that off as evidence/proof of it being as good as some $1100 CPU, it is straight up BS, misleading advertising.

I know you totally agree with me here deep down man.

AMD are marketing the Chip, the same reason they use Blender and not Cinebench, Blender is what matters to a significant sector of their market, what's Cinebench?

No, this is not the same thing. The Blender test(while still questionable given its variable results) was *far* more of a relevant showcase of a CPU's abilities.

And what is Cinebench? It's a benchmark, based on Cinema 4D, a digital 3d artist app.

Come on man. Is it really so hard to agree that people shouldn't be getting carried away just yet as there's *plenty* of things we still need to know about first before jumping to conclusions? I totally feel like you'd be right here with me if we were talking about a new Nvidia GPU or something. Hell, SiDeards probably would be, too....

 

[SiDeards73]

yep....seems that many here have forgotten about all the Bulldozer pre-launch hype and all the benches showing out it either matched or beat the i7 2600K..........only for it to turn out to be a big steaming dog ****, although it did take some while before the fact that Bulldozer was a big steaming pile of **** became conventional wisdom.

The fact that AMD haven't provided any pricing or release date information at this time is also very annoying for those like myself, looking to build a new system and quite frankly, recent past experience has proven to me that it really doesn't pay dividends at all to delay gratification until AMD get's their act together. That goes for GPUs and CPUs.

Dont think anyone can forget how bad Bulldozer was...

If anything i think it will make AMD more cautious this time round, its no secret to anyone who can do a google search on the Internet how badly AMD dropped the ball on Bulldozer.

Fairly certain they would not make that mistake again, demoing and previewing hardware that was only ever going to shine in those best case scenarios, thats why im really optimistic about RyZen.

That and Jim Keller was brought in to bring it to life, i think that is an important factor in it. AMD has not been really been competitive in the CPU arena for a good number of years, for many its last chance saloon with them, and for even more they wouldnt even take notice of AMD unless they made some groundbreaking products that shook up the market.

 

[Seanspeed]

Not getting hyped as such, were not exactly running around shouting OMG OMG Its gunna make Intel go outta business... etc...

Not far from it dude. You were getting quite giddy over the idea of AMD selling a Ryzen CPU that makes the 6700k and up Intel CPU's irrelevant.

at the minimum it seems the 8/16 RyZen is going to be better than my 4770k

I wouldn't say that has been demonstrated at all yet.

I dont understand why you feel the need to basically shout down everyone who is looking at the positives either?

I'm not doing that to everyone. I'm cautiously optimistic of AMD creating a competitive product myself, even if it means being a little short on performance but delivering on price. I'm only laughing at the people getting totally carried away based on last night's fairly lousy demonstrations. It's like people never learn. Especially after Polaris. And Fiji before it.

 

[humbug]

No, that is patently ridiculous. That BF1 demo showed *nothing*. Absolutely, 100% meaningless. If people dont understand what makes for a proper CPU demonstration, that's on them. Putting up a demo that doesn't demonstrate CPU capability whatsoever, then trying to pass that off as evidence/proof of it being as good as some $1100 CPU, it is straight up BS, misleading advertising.

I know you totally agree with me here deep down man.


No, this is not the same thing. The Blender test(while still questionable given its variable results) was *far* more of a relevant showcase of a CPU's abilities.

And what is Cinebench? It's a benchmark, based on Cinema 4D, a digital 3d artist app.

Come on man. Is it really so hard to agree that people shouldn't be getting carried away just yet as there's *plenty* of things we still need to know about first before jumping to conclusions? I totally feel like you'd be right here with me if we were talking about a new Nvidia GPU or something. Hell, SiDeards probably would be, too....

Did you read anything i said?

That stream was not for you, or me, it was for the masses, the masses don't care about a 10 year old game running at 720P, the masses do not understand that running a GPU heavy game at 4K off loads the workload off the CPU to the GPU, the masses think running Battlefield at 4K is demanding to the CPU, so guess what, thats what AMD fed them, they are marketing the product, its not because they are trying to hide something from you and me, you and me are pretty irrelevant to AMD as we are a tiny fraction of their market, we just don't matter.

 

[RavenXXX2]

What a guy lol, one day he's having a go at me for putting the downers on Vega the next he's in here having a go at those excited by Zen. How about keeping your negativity to yourself and get them issues sorted out.

 

[SiDeards73]

Not far from it dude. You were getting quite giddy over the idea of AMD selling a Ryzen CPU that makes the 6700k and up Intel CPU's irrelevant.


I wouldn't say that has been demonstrated at all yet.


I'm not doing that to everyone. I'm cautiously optimistic of AMD creating a competitive product myself, even if it means being a little short on performance but delivering on price. I'm only laughing at the people getting totally carried away based on last night's fairly lousy demonstrations. It's like people never learn. Especially after Polaris. And Fiji before it.

People learn, thats why i went from a 290 to a 1070, yep i dislike Nvidia but when the only option for an upgrade is Nvidia you have to do what you gotta do. I dont like them as a company and prefer not to support them financially but there comes a time when your just sick and tired of waiting, if AMD had a product that was better value than my 290 i would have bought it, Fiji and Polaris were definitely not that product either.

But i think the demos of Handbrake and Blender were good, they showed the cpu has the power to do those computational things and do them well. I will agree the rest of the game stuff was utter rubbish, except the DOTA thing which i maintain was impressive given the nature of what they were showing.

While you are right we have no solid evidence that the 8/16 RyZen will be better than my 4770k, i think even if Handbrake and Blender are the best tests that RyZen can perform in, the average performance will still at minimum be around my haswells, that i believe, i have no evidence for this other than gut feeling, but based on that i'll happily buy the chip if its under £400 as it offers twice the cores my current chip has.

However i stand by my point, its logical to assume if AMD RyZen is infact 6900k performance or better across the board and they price it sub £450 it will make the 6900k and 6700k basically irrelevant.

You would not pay money for a 6700k level chip when for another say £80-100 you can have 6900k performance, and you would definitely not pay £1100 for a chip thats bettered by a £450 variant.

We will know the truth when the RyZen chips are in the hands of real people and given real tests, if they prove to offer around 6900k performance, and come in at a good price point, then the CPU market is going to get a much needed boot up the rear.

 

[humbug]

Handbreak and Blender showcase the two main aspects of CPU's performance, Integer and Floating Point performance, Gaming performance depends on Floating Point performance, as we have seen in Blender that is at least on par with the 6900K.

Its not quit as simple as that, it certainly does not guarantee that Zen's gaming performance will match Intel across the board so caution is required, its also ok to be optimistic, i see no reason yet to be a pessimist.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Unless AMD has implemented some super SMT on their chips,it would hint that single core performance has gone up a decent amount over the Piledriver based chips,and if AMD can get performance/watt up it should help them more in the server market. This is what the 8C core Ryzen chip is,more for commercial usage.

I will be far more interested in the 4C and 6C chips,since hopefully the cores will be less TDP constrained and boost should be higher.

If they can get closer to Haswell to Broadwell level IPC in gaming and upto 4GHZ normal clockspeed on the 4C/8T version and they can price it around Core i5 6600K level,it might be my next CPU when I eventually upgrade.

 

[pete910]

Well I'll just upset a few regards the blender render ,

30.37 sec

Stock 4790k .

Belender 2.78

 

[humbug]

Well I'll just upset a few regards the blender render ,

30.37 sec

Stock 4790k .

Belender 2.78

Yeah its a lot faster in Linux.

 

[nashathedog]

I sat down and watched last nights show in the early hours of the morning and I don't think it showed us anything new that mattered, I was very disappointed, And struggle to see the relevance of as an example the Bf1 segment where the crowd was asked to give a cheer for the computer managing to load an as good as empty private server. I'm completely at a loss over that and was hoping for more, I won't be jumping on RyZen straight away, There's too many unknowns.

 

[pete910]

Yeah its a lot faster in Linux.

As much as I would like to say "oss ftw" Not by that margin .


I'll see how long it takes for people to work out what trickery is at play, and no it wasn't rendered with a GPU.

 

[Martini1991]

I'll reiterate.
Blender is crap.

 

[StarShock]

I will be far more interested in the 4C and 6C chips,since hopefully the cores will be less TDP constrained and boost should be higher.

If they can get closer to Haswell to Broadwell level IPC in gaming and upto 4GHZ normal clockspeed on the 4C/8T version and they can price it around Core i5 6600K level,it might my next CPU when I eventually upgrade.

Agree with this, though I hope they actually do it, my fear right now is that they don't make a 4c8t chip until we see the APUs end of next year. If all they release are a 6 and 8 core to go up against the x99 line up, they would have to be priced very low or most people will continue to just buy the skylake/ kabylake CPUs as they offer the best gaming performance for the money at the moment, even compared to what they showed yesterday.

 

[humbug]

As much as I would like to say "oss ftw" Not by that margin .


I'll see how long it takes for people to work out what trickery is at play, and no it wasn't rendered with a GPU.

Did you turn the tessellation or polygons down?