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AMD Ryzen launches, is competitive with Broadwell-E
As compared to an 8-core Broadwell-E that costs twice as much and is Intel's latest generation high-end desktop line, a Ryzen 7 1800X wins some and loses some. It isn't necessarily close on either count, and I'd say it loses more than it wins. But still, being mixed is huge progress for AMD, and the 1800X costs about half of the Intel chip. In some benchmarks, Broadwell-E wins by huge margins purely by virtue of having double the memory bandwidth.
As compared to Kaby Lake, whether Ryzen wins or loses is almost entirely a question of how well the program scales to many CPU threads. If it's single threaded, Kaby Lake wins, and it's often not even close. With many threads that can fully load eight cores, Ryzen pulls away. Games are sometimes in the "not enough threads" category and sometimes in the "a GPU bottleneck means the CPU doesn't matter" category. I haven't seen any where Ryzen beats Kaby Lake by a comfortable margin as you can get when you move away from games.
Ultimately, AMD isn't going out of business over this, as would have happened if Zen cores were another Bulldozer-level fiasco. Ryzen is what it needed to be, and last's years run up of AMD's stock prices is justified. The architecture is more compelling in servers and probably in laptops than it is in desktops, but those parts aren't out yet. Raven Ridge will finally be the fusion we've been waiting for, years after AMD dropped that branding of their APUs.
The choice of Ryzen 7 versus Kaby Lake is pretty similar to the choice of Broadwell-E versus Kaby Lake, though Ryzen has a much smaller price premium than Broadwell-E. Gamers usually chose Kaby Lake over Broadwell-E, and should usually choose it over Ryzen 7 for the same reasons.
The rumored 6-core and especially 4-core parts are more interesting for gaming, however. It's hard to justify a $500 Ryzen 7 1800X for gaming over a $330 Core i7-7700K. But if reducing the core count means the Ryzen part is $200, or even $150, that can look a whole lot more interesting, as a low clocked Core i5 isn't nearly as fast as a high clocked Core i7. Ryzen has a chance at beating the Intel parts in those price ranges outright.
There's also the issue that I expect games to tend to thread better as time passes. We're far into the multi-core era already, of course, but DirectX 12 and Vulkan mean that there's really no excuse for newer games that use them to have a significant single-threaded bottleneck.
As compared to Kaby Lake, whether Ryzen wins or loses is almost entirely a question of how well the program scales to many CPU threads. If it's single threaded, Kaby Lake wins, and it's often not even close. With many threads that can fully load eight cores, Ryzen pulls away. Games are sometimes in the "not enough threads" category and sometimes in the "a GPU bottleneck means the CPU doesn't matter" category. I haven't seen any where Ryzen beats Kaby Lake by a comfortable margin as you can get when you move away from games.
Ultimately, AMD isn't going out of business over this, as would have happened if Zen cores were another Bulldozer-level fiasco. Ryzen is what it needed to be, and last's years run up of AMD's stock prices is justified. The architecture is more compelling in servers and probably in laptops than it is in desktops, but those parts aren't out yet. Raven Ridge will finally be the fusion we've been waiting for, years after AMD dropped that branding of their APUs.
The choice of Ryzen 7 versus Kaby Lake is pretty similar to the choice of Broadwell-E versus Kaby Lake, though Ryzen has a much smaller price premium than Broadwell-E. Gamers usually chose Kaby Lake over Broadwell-E, and should usually choose it over Ryzen 7 for the same reasons.
The rumored 6-core and especially 4-core parts are more interesting for gaming, however. It's hard to justify a $500 Ryzen 7 1800X for gaming over a $330 Core i7-7700K. But if reducing the core count means the Ryzen part is $200, or even $150, that can look a whole lot more interesting, as a low clocked Core i5 isn't nearly as fast as a high clocked Core i7. Ryzen has a chance at beating the Intel parts in those price ranges outright.
There's also the issue that I expect games to tend to thread better as time passes. We're far into the multi-core era already, of course, but DirectX 12 and Vulkan mean that there's really no excuse for newer games that use them to have a significant single-threaded bottleneck.
Comments
As far as game engines, most are using a middleware engine now. Most of them are programmed well. I think only Total War games are programmed with more than 8 threads in mind.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/03/02/amd_ryzen_1700x_cpu_review/4
Also various bugs, and better performance with smt(hyper-threading) turned off is also due to this and windows and other software needing some updates to work better with ryzen ( and mobos needed new bioses) For instance guys at hardware unboxed had horrible problems with asus crosshair VI.
memory instability and low speeds with high latency are mainly because of two reasons, bioses need new updates, Tom from oc3d solved most of his problems with a new asus prime x370-pro 505 bios from this morning for instance.
https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_cpu_review/5
And second reason for memory problems is single/double rank, as in you need 1 rank memory sticks or ryzen gets wierd (especially 2x16GB, 4xanything).
Getting 2x8GB 2666Mhz is the safest bet, though up to 3200Mhz works fine but you need to check that the ram is 1rank.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/74814-amd-ryzen-7-1800x-performance-review-5.html
some websites point to a possible dpc latency problem, but that is probably just a combination of something from above.
The nice thing to note is that ~$170 Asus prime x370-pro can get any ryzen 7 processor to 24/7 all cores at 4GHz overclock ( making ryzen 1700 + x370-pro the absolute best buy, oc3d is gonna have a complete overclock guide in a few weeks for this as well, and der8auer is probably also gonna have some awesome oc guides soon)
https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_cpu_review/19
Oh also there are some completely wrong reports of skyhigh aida64 memory latency (aida64 guys said in a tweet they still haven't updated the app for proper results).
https://twitter.com/AIDA64_Official/status/837308895882276866
Oh and i sure hope u didn't LoL at my post questing the validity of what i wrote in it.
Everything there is absolutely irrefutable.
1080p vs 2k wierd fps discrepancy:
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_processor_review,17.html
Well shoot, aren't we a ray of sunshine? Looks like AMD is on the brink of disaster with this mediocre product launch... seems to be a theme among a certain segment. Wonder who they work for.
I am already planning a 1800x setup, the Ryzen chip makes the I7 chip seem slow in that kind of an environment.
Meanwhile the Ryzen is showing 95 TDP.
As of right now it is not competive with broadwell like the OP suggests.
As for the consumer desktops, if Ryzen 5 keep the core performance of Ryzen 7, having 20% less performance than i5 might not matter all that much since GPU will bottleneck you much earlier and having those extra 4 logical core is a nice bonus.
So far it truly looks like FX all over again but more benchmarks and some time is needed to see how it will actually pans out this time...
???
bottleneck is now lower than it was before
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
If you use a lot of programs that use multithreading, then it might be profitable to upgrade.
For gaming: not really. Not if you have decent hardware, like a good GPU, enough memory and SSD's for example.
Gaming uses clockspeed, not cores. Well, some do , but you can count those few games on 1 hand.
If you plan to use it for gaming, then a GPU upgrade (if yours is 'poor') is probably a much better option.
Workstations on the other hand can/will profit from a Ryzen upgrade. So if you want to stream AND play and/or do lots of rendering+encoding, then a Zen *might* be profitable.
The Ryzen 1800x seems like a good workstation cpu, but above average for gaming so far it seems.
I would recommend the Gamers Nexus Youtube channel and the Ryzen benchmark as reference. That guy is 99.99% spot on with unbiased reports and with that info you should be able to see if a Zen upgrade is worth it or not.
If not, I would recommend to wait for many more benchmarks and reviews.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
"Specifically, every other core is a 'logical' core, meaning an SMT-enabled core, and it shares resources with a physical core.
If you happen to run a workload that only uses four or so heavy threads, and Windows happens to put two of the heaviest threads on the same physical core, performance will end up being lower—sometimes significantly so!—than if Windows were to schedule the threads on separate physical cores. Disabling SMT makes it so resource contention is lower, as each core ends up being dedicated to a single task."
I honestly cannot believe how hard people have trolled me for being right.
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-ryzen-7-review/3/
In the gaming front. The only thing that matters is if it can render enough frames. For me that's 60, it could also be 90 and 144. Considering its losing to the top gaming CPU, that is not too bad. It performs similar to most Intel CPUs in gaming aside from the most recent Core i7. I could care less how many or less frames it renders beyond that point.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Perhaps the bigger question is, if you buy Ryzen now, whether there will be anything worth upgrading to later. If a couple of generations from now, AMD offers a CPU that is 10% faster than what you buy today, is that really worth an upgrade even if you don't need a new socket? If they can offer a 50% speed boost, that's more interesting, but I don't see that happening.