AMD Ryzen 3 Rolls Out, Linux Benchmarks Coming

[bridgman]

Ok color me confused, I thought ECC wasn't disabled on Ryzen, but it sounds like what you are saying is it has to be in order to be competitive? Or are you just saying in general that's why AMD might choose to disable a feature which, in theory, costs them nothing to leave enabled?

The latter. I was responding specifically to duby229's comment that "the only reason for disabling features was to screw your customers".

[k1e0x]

Bah, was hoping this was an APU. Common AMD bolt on a rx570 or 560 on one of these.

[Geopirate]

Those are all good points, but it is a rebuttal, because you'd have to look at single board computers to find something comparable today. Except I'd imagine Thunderbird and Coppermine both would have better IPC and much higher power usage..

Ok, I'm more talking about comparing what $100 of CPU buys you today vs 5, 10, 15 years ago, then doing the same for $1000 of cpu. Especially for the last 5/10 you'll find a more more dramatic increase in IPC and core count at the top as opposed to the bottom. The lowest common denominator moves a lot more slowly, and that's my point.

[R41N3R]

Minimum 4 real core's in Ryzen, that will clearly help to drive multithreading forward. With Intel only concentrating on increasing their profit, CPU's stagnated for years. It was so boring that I didn't even buy a desktop CPU for several years... that changed with Ryzen 7, I couldn't resist a 8 core/16 thread CPU :-) And there is more interesting technology on the horizon...

[Michael_S]

Fixed that for you.

The problem is that once one company does it everyone has to do it, unless your mfg costs are so much lower that you can sell a full featured part for same price your competitor charges for the de-featured parts, which in turn are subsidized by the higher prices they charge for full-featured parts.

Let's say your R&D and build costs would require you to charge $300 per chip. You can either sell nothing but full-featured parts at $300 or you can sell a de-featured part for $200 and a full-featured part for $500, where the purchasing mix works out to the same $300 average selling price.

If one company sells de-featured for $200 (where most people don't care about the feature) and the competing part is $300, the $200 part will suck up about 90% of the business because most of the PC market (pretty much everything except DIY desktop systems) is so incredibly price sensitive.

The real problem is lack of competition. Intel has huge name brand recognition. There are AMD fanboys and fangirls around, but most people will just go for the Intel part. So the real reason Intel would sell that chip at $300 from 2009 until this spring is that the only other products customers are looking near that price also come from Intel. Intel doesn't have to sell the part a $300, they just get away with a price that high as part of ten billion dollars in profit per year.

Via tried to become a serious player in x86 processors, but they've been dead in the consumer market for years. The same is true for Cyrix before them (now part of Texas Instruments, but out of the x86 business). AMD had an advantage over Intel for portions of the 2000s, but even then Intel had name recognition - plus a few monopoly tricks. And from... what, 2009 until this spring? - Intel didn't have serious competition except for a tiny portion of the market.

[Nille_kungen]

My opinion: Ryzen 3 looks good for the price. I'm however won't recommend anyone to buy it before Raven Ridge is released. If you are looking for a cheap gaming setup integrated graphics might be better than buying a low-end GPU.

That depends if you're an laptop or desktop user.
For laptops it do make sense to wait for zen based APU (raven ridge) since it will most likely show up this year and not to long into the future but we don't have ryzen 3 here.
On the desktop you will have to wait to next year (2018) for that APU and AMD just released new bristol ridge for the desktop (the same series as we had in laptops last year).
If your an desktop user you should buy the ryzen 3 now if it suits you since it will most probably be a long wait for zen based desktop APU.

[Geopirate]

The real problem is lack of competition. Intel has huge name brand recognition. There are AMD fanboys and fangirls around, but most people will just go for the Intel part. So the real reason Intel would sell that chip at $300 from 2009 until this spring is that the only other products customers are looking near that price also come from Intel. Intel doesn't have to sell the part a $300, they just get away with a price that high as part of ten billion dollars in profit per year.

Via tried to become a serious player in x86 processors, but they've been dead in the consumer market for years. The same is true for Cyrix before them (now part of Texas Instruments, but out of the x86 business). AMD had an advantage over Intel for portions of the 2000s, but even then Intel had name recognition - plus a few monopoly tricks. And from... what, 2009 until this spring? - Intel didn't have serious competition except for a tiny portion of the market.

Well there was a recently released video outlining a lot of the reason Intel was able to secure that "name recognition".

[audi.rs4]

Not disabled, but not officially supported either. The feature exists, but is not part of platform validation. And it's up to the individual mobo makers whether or not to implement the feature in their BIOS.

Better bet is to wait for the Epyc 5000 and 3000 series, which will officially support ECC, and be priced lower than comparable intel E5 and E3.

Or you can pickup a cheap supermicro H8SCM mobo for $50 from ebay, and an Opteron 4365 for $25 from ebay, and enjoy a proper server platform with ECC support and only 40w TDP, for peanuts price. It's what I did.

I like the look of that Opteron, but I am not seeing any SuperMicro boards for it under $200, let alone $50. Still though, you can build a rig with that, having full server features like IPMI at a decent price.

[edwaleni]

While many consider the lack of real competition a driver for slow technical progress from Intel, but many in the industry feel that Intel purposefully slowed down so AMD didn't fall too far behind.

Intel fears being a regulated monopoly way, way more than any product from AMD. The magical growth of A Series APU's in OEM products represents that the "dirty tricks" era is over for now.

[puleglot]

Or you can pickup a cheap supermicro H8SCM mobo for $50 from ebay, and an Opteron 4365 for $25 from ebay, and enjoy a proper server platform with ECC support and only 40w TDP, for peanuts price. It's what I did.

Yeah, I have H8SCM-F + 4332 HE. The only problem is that the good silent CPU cooler for socket c32 from Noctua is rather expensive. The alternative is an AM3 cooler with the clip + retention brackets.