AMD Ryzen 7 CPUs Shipping 2 March, Pre-Order Today

[Michael]

Michael:

I don't know what happened to my last post (lost in moderation), but I would be especially interested in NAMD benchmarks on the new Zen CPUs. In conjunction with some GTX 1080s they could enable economical simulation performance with CUDA enabled NAMD 2.12. There currently isn't much info about NAMD performance on AMD CPUs.

There isn't currently any NAMD test profile for the Phoronix Test Suite so first someone would need to contribute that...

[Strunkenbold]

First OC results are out in the wild. Ryzen will certainly do some damage...

[lindgrenj6]

Donated $10 to go towards benchmarks.

Very excited to see the results, the 1700 is probably what I'm going to go for, I have an Xeon E3 1231 v3 (haswell 4c/8t) right now, it looks like it'll be a pretty good upgrade.

[smitty3268]

From the AMD benches, it looks like a 4Ghz Ryzen core is about on par with a 3.7Ghz Broadwell core for single-threaded code.

I expect Kabylake can probably match that with 3.5 Ghz, and since you can buy them into the 4Ghz+ range I think Intel will continue to win the single-threaded benchmarks for the most part.

This is a huge improvement for AMD, though, and it looks like the pricing will put them in a good position. Especially with the server/workstation market where Intel is selling these Broadwell parts it looks like Ryzen could crush them.

[edwaleni]

On NAMD

There is a NAMD test profile located at :

http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/performance.html

The profile links are at the bottom below the charts.

On Ryzen

I am buying it because I am a technologist, not a fanboy. Besides I buy my Intel's off the refurb market to avoid the ridiculous pricing.

I usually buy my AMD's new because they are cheap to begin with and the sockets have long shelf lives. Again, that is why I buy Intel off refurb.

On PTS

I will send Phoronix a gift for the Ryzen test costs, just as I did when he expanded the OpenCL tests. I am not premium, its just the right thing to do.

On Windows 7 w/Ryzen

There is a chance that you will get a unknown device in Device Manager when/if you load Windows 7. Microsoft usually bundles these with the OS for the CPU and chipset. It's not clear if the Windows 10 Anniversary Edition SMBus driver will function on a down rev of Windows. It's possible certain motherboard manufacturers may have drivers available to offset what MSFT won't create or the Win10 chipset drivers will work. We will just have to try it and see. There are some low level functions in Ryzen for performance management, but I don't know if these have to be enumerated at boot time.

Linux on Ryzen

I am running Linux anyway on Ryzen as my start to depart Windows as my primary OS. Windows 7 will live on as a VM. Future Windows, who knows?

[Imroy]

What's a suggestion for a small but reasonable donation? I really want to see Michael test Ryzen (multiple even) but I'm saving for my own Ryzen systems and other things. Is $10 too little?

[L_A_G]

Well that was somewhat out of the blue, but I'm slightly annoyed over the fact that they had to go and only open up the R7 series for pre-order, or rather pre-purchase as it seems like you have to pay for the things in full to make a pre-order.

Over here in Finland they naturally had to pick, Verkkokauppa.com and Jimm's, two retailers well known for price gouging as the stores that get to do pre-orders so the cheapest R7 is naturally 390 euros plus shipping. In comparison Mindfactory.de has the same same CPU for 360 euros plus shipping and even then it's just too much for me to pay for it up front. So it looks like I'm going to first wait for benchmarks, then see when the 6 core chips come out (some rumors have those won't be ready until April) and after that decide what I'm going to get.

Still, exiting times and I eagerly wait to see review sites release benchmarks.

[Michael]

Donated $10 to go towards benchmarks.

Very excited to see the results, the 1700 is probably what I'm going to go for, I have an Xeon E3 1231 v3 (haswell 4c/8t) right now, it looks like it'll be a pretty good upgrade.

Thanks!

[vein]

2 1700X pre-ordered! Happy days!

[B.Jay]

Michael, once you got the hardware there's one thing I'm particularly interested in (in retrospect to the FX chips):

- Need to issue any obscure kernel parameters to boot up Linux properly. I.e. on most of the FX8xxx based system I dealt with in the past they all required either "iommu=pt,noaperture" and/or "amd_iommu=on" to make Linux behave ... read: avoid "AMD-Vi" related errors keeping things like USB 3.0 root hubs (mostly VIA and NEC chips in my observation), Realtek audio/network chips, Nvidia proprietary driver et al from working.

- System monitoring (fans, temps et al) ... on the 970/990 chipset boards it has always been a nightmare to whip up a sensors3.conf because of a "how ya doin'" implementation of the monitoring chips (Gigabyte with their multiplexed integration of Winbond/ITE chips was world-leader in making it the utmost pain to use their boards with Linux, followed by ASRock and their choice of NCT6xxx chips). And yes, I mean just the hardware sensors chip... k10temp always worked (same goes for the additional "power usage" (Watts) it reports back with the FX chips).

- Observed oddities during your benchmark runs - in short everything that may be relevant information which your usual suspects of "TechTubers" don't even tell you about because exposing product flaws and openly discussing them seems to be against the agreement they have with the manufacturers to keep that sweet advertisement money filling bank accounts.

After the pain AMD caused with the FX chips (and Opterons based on the Bulldozer/Piledriver design) they not only have to deliver something meaningful but also something that works flawlessly and doesn't need obscure kernel params to work around half-borked stuff (and the IOMMU was the point of failure with the FX chips ... I always loved how the driver in the AMD Chipset drivers was just a "null" driver doing nothing more than to list it in Device-Manager but avoid the IOMMU otherwise totally).

That being said ... while the reported prices look good in comparison to Intel's offerings I have to say that the R7 1800X is about 300 bucks more than I'd be willing to pay after the "FX debacle" (and I paid ~350 for my FX8350 at the time I built that box - got replaced more than a year ago by a i7 5960X/X99 based box which was well worth the money because I grew tired waiting for AMD).

Looking forward to your review... maybe you'll be able to change my mind about forking out some serious dough for a secondary tin can to accompany my 5960X.