Ryzen/Threadripper Prices Have Been Dropping Ahead Of The Holidays

[vsteel]

There is no agreement. All fabs are cranking out memory as fast as they can. It is higher demand from phones which is driving prices up.

[andrei_me]

There is no agreement. All fabs are cranking out memory as fast as they can. It is higher demand from phones which is driving prices up.

AFAIK, smartphone components are the ones to blame here

[TMM_]

Hope the unstable Ryzen system bugs can be solved soon, because I would be interested to replace my Intel server soon. But right now my desktop suffers from random freezes and it won't wake up if the display turns off (but this is maybe a bug of the AMD GPU).

Yeah, this seems to be a problem with pre-dc amdgpu drivers. I have the same problem on my polaris10 (rx580). dc solves it but gives me some other problems. The problem appears to be that DP link training doesn't work after a wake-up.

I can't use dc right now because my panel is treated like a 6bit panel so colors are really bad, but if your panel gets detected properly I imagine that 4.15 will solve your wake from suspend problem.

I have a Ryzen 7 1700 + rx580 box and apart from that I have no stability issues at all on 4.14.0

[Apopas]

Any news about when we will see Ryzen APUs for desktop? I want to build a htpc.

[Spooktra]

Prices have been falling for a while, Microcenter has repeatedly priced the Ryzen 5 1600 for just $170+$50 off any supporting motherboard for a while now; the price fluctuates between $170-$200 for that processor all the time.

The reason is that Ryzen based processors simply do not offer a good deal compared to Intel processors if you take AVX/AVX2 into account and when you start talking AVX-512 AMD is really at a disadvantage.

Look at these articles:

http://x265.org/x265-receives-significant-boost-intel-xeon-scalable-processor-family/

https://us.hardware.info/reviews/7602/8/intel-core-i7-8700k--i5-8600k--i5-8400-coffee-lake-review-affordable-six-cores-benchmarks-video--en-audio-encoding-x264-x265-and-flac

As you can see a 3.3Ghz 10C/20T 7900X is capable of beating a 3.4Ghz 16C/32T 1950X when encoding x265 with the latest x265 builds and matching a 12C/24T 1920X with x264 encoding.

Even without AVX-512 in play, the 8350K is capable of matching and beating a 1500x in x264 and x265 encoding:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i3-8350k-cpu,5304-8.html

Then you read that all of Intel's mainstream Cannonlake processors will have AVX-512 support and Optane DIMMS will also make an appearance next year and why would anyone build anything using an AMD processor?

Now if AMD offered a mainstream 12C24T Ryzen for under $400, then maybe I could be talked into it.

[TMM_]

The reason is that Ryzen based processors simply do not offer a good deal compared to Intel processors if you take AVX/AVX2 into account and when you start talking AVX-512 AMD is really at a disadvantage.

If what you're doing is AVX heavy, sure. I primarily use my system for gaming, software development (C++ mostly), and doing on-laptop labs to test/demo configurations for work. My Ryzen 7 1700 is perfect for this. I want cores for compiling and the virtual machines, and I want at least decent IPC for gaming. This processor gives me that at a price that Intel simply can't beat.

Now if I was doing x265 encoding all day maybe my opinion would change, but I don't.

[xiando]

Phoronix: Ryzen/Threadripper Prices Have Been Dropping Ahead Of The Holidays

I call FAKE NEWS on this "price drop".

1799 SEK for R5 1500X, now 1749 SEK, wow I can save 50 SEK for a whopping $6 on a $214 CPU?

Or before 2285 SEK, now 2149 SEK - saving 136 SEK or $16 on the R5 1600X CPU $272 CPU?

These "price drops" are barely in the range of rounding errors.

AMD will have to slash prices a lot more to make them a compelling buy compared to the latest Intel coffin lake CPUs. Not that CPUs are a big part of the cost of a build these days compared to RAM and GPU, though. The state of the PC market is quite .. expensive.

[Spooktra]

If what you're doing is AVX heavy, sure. I primarily use my system for gaming, software development (C++ mostly), and doing on-laptop labs to test/demo configurations for work. My Ryzen 7 1700 is perfect for this. I want cores for compiling and the virtual machines, and I want at least decent IPC for gaming. This processor gives me that at a price that Intel simply can't beat.

Now if I was doing x265 encoding all day maybe my opinion would change, but I don't.

It's more than encoding x265, it's working with video in general, scientific applications, DAW, anything that uses a lot of floating point math via AVX2, check out these articles:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/Skylake-X-7800X-vs-Coffee-Lake-8700K-for-compute-AVX512-vs-AVX2-Linpack-benchmark-1068/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/Intel-Core-i9-7900X-and-7980XE-Skylake-X-Linux-Linpack-Performance-1059/

In this article they test a number of Intel cpu's and AMD Threadrippers, the Threadrippers hold their own unless you add temporal noise reduction at which point the Intel cpu's just walk away from them:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-14-CPU-Performance-Skylake-X-vs-Threadripper-1063/

Finally look at these DAW benchmarks:

http://techreport.com/review/32607/intel-core-i9-7980xe-and-core-i9-7960x-cpus-reviewed/12

The Core i9-7960X basically doubles the Threadripper 1950X's performance at a buffer depth of 64, a figure that maps nicely onto the vast gulf in floating-point throughput between Zen and Skylake-X we saw early in this piece. The only thing keeping the gulf from being wider at 128 samples is that we maxed out the number of voices of polyphony available in DAWBench VI. Kind of astounding, really.

I'm not even going to bother posting links to Xeon Gold and Platinum processors when running AVX-512 but go read through ServeTheHome if you're inclined.

In a nutshell, if you're on a tight budget and run virtual machines all day or compile a bunch of code, then yeah, Ryzens are a good choice but if you can afford it and floating point performance means anything to you then your only choice is Intel and will most likely continue to be for a really long time.

[eydee]

Prices dropping, new Ryzen 5's being 8-core parts, as an early adopter, I feel myself cheated.

[oleyska]

I call FAKE NEWS on this "price drop".

1799 SEK for R5 1500X, now 1749 SEK, wow I can save 50 SEK for a whopping $6 on a $214 CPU?

Or before 2285 SEK, now 2149 SEK - saving 136 SEK or $16 on the R5 1600X CPU $272 CPU?

These "price drops" are barely in the range of rounding errors.

AMD will have to slash prices a lot more to make them a compelling buy compared to the latest Intel coffin lake CPUs. Not that CPUs are a big part of the cost of a build these days compared to RAM and GPU, though. The state of the PC market is quite .. expensive.

I see a 1700X at 2500 nok (norway). so that's good value for sure!