If Ryzen’s auto-tuning can bump the chip to 5 GHZ on operations that can’t be multithreaded (which are many), would that not still be a good thing?
That would essentially mean a good performance bump on single-threaded tasks, which is especially important in areas like 3D (though that assumes the chip’s software will really do that).
Looking at you Freestyle.
The unveiling has started (with a list of new AMD motherboards and CPU vendors making Ryzen PC’s).
So far, they have a few well known names such as Origin, CyberPower, and Maingear among others (one of them is even right where I live). The new motherboards also have more of the latest features compared to those that served older AMD processors (and we’re just getting started).
AMD announces that the Zen architecture will be used for 4 years
What’s interesting is that AMD is not interested in making due with a simple iterative process during the time (like Intel just did with Kaby Lake). They want the improvements to be bigger from one chip to the next (something that the PC industry should be hoping for since it will drive sales from people upgrading).
Something else they announced was that with Ryzen at least, they will have a ‘no paper launch’ policy (the chip will be available from day one).
Report; Ryzen is 10 percent smaller in size than Skylake (and has double the memory cache)
Also confirmed, a quad-core model is in the initial lineup (alongside the six and eight core models).
The chips should be out a month from now, so it’s not too long until we start seeing real benchmarks.
if the price leaks are true then these should become the preferred blender cpus. http://hothardware.com/news/leaked-amd-ryzen-pricing-should-give-intel-pause-kaby-lake-positioning
AMD Ryzen 7 1700: $316.59
AMD Ryzen 7 1700X: $381.72
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X: $490.29
all 8 core 16 thread chips. the 1700 is the chip that was as good as the best intel chip. the 1800x has a base clock of 4k mhz. equal performance 70% cheaper (1700) and only 65w. its going to make renderfarms affordable.
yes bigbad, $316 is much cheaper than $1,100
That is some aggressive undercutting there, that combined with Ryzen making Octocore mainstream means I may finally have a reason to upgrade from my current Ivy Bridge setup (a machine with a recent-generation AMD card).
If it indeed is true, then Intel is going to have to make some drastic moves to preserve their overall dominance.
From what i hear they are distribution prices, not reseller prices… expect them to be about 20-30% higher then that.
even at 20-30% higher it puts the 1700 at $360 - $395 for the chip that matched intels $1,100 chip. it drops it from 70% cheaper to only 60% cheaper. its still a no brainer. get two amd systems for the price of one intel and render twice as fast, or get the 1800x and blow a single intel system out of the water for half the price. and with amd sponsoring blender devs…if you are going to build a rig for blender…unless all the leaks are lies go amd. and we’ll know in less than 3 weeks. maybe less than 2. you know somewhere in the supply chain there is gonna be someone who’s going to take a chip for personal use and post a bench for bragging rights just to be 1st. if its 3 weeks for retail consumers to get them they have to be in shipping channels already.
well the lower power should mean cheaper running costs and cooler running, but even at the lower price i would be loathe to go back to AMD after their woeful apathetic [ie, non-existant] customer service last time i had issues, not to mention the total clusterfk of their driver releases.
It is fully supported by windows 7…
A while ago we posted a news item that AMD would be fabbing specific Windows 7 drivers based on a report from computerbase. As it turns out, that is not the case. Ryzen processors however are supported and working on Windows 7.
Considering that the Ryzen 8-core parts do not have an Integrated GPU, it actually could make sense. It is AMD themselves that confirmed this rumor, AMD also states that they have tested and validated Ryzen processors on a variety of operating systems, including Windows 7.
“To achieve the highest confidence in the performance of our AMD Ryzen desktop processors (formerly code-named “Summit Ridge”), AMD validated them across two different OS generations, Windows 7 and 10,” AMD said in a statement. “However, only support and drivers for Windows 10 will be provided in AMD Ryzen desktop processor production parts,” the company added
Hi, AMD send a official statement to Heise Online a German PC magazine.
“To achieve the highest confidence in the performance of our AMD Ryzen desktop processors (formerly codenamed “Summit Ridge”), AMD validated them across two different OS generations, Windows 7 and 10. However, only support and drivers for Windows 10 will be provided in AMD Ryzen desktop processor production parts.”
So they really kick Windows 7 support and drivers.
Cheers, mib
And before anyone bashes AMD, Intel is doing the exact same thing with their new chips (likely at the request of Microsoft).
If you don’t like Windows 10, then these chips should also be able to work well with Linux (once the proper drivers are out).
Who installs drivers for CPU??? They have no GPU so who cares? First test comparing performance on win10 and win7 of recent processors from both Intel and AMD show that performance increase is negligible/nearly under the error threshold. But if you have many hundreds euros to spend for the word “supported”, you are free to pay more of course.
So Windows at least wouldn’t have to install anything to take full advantage of the auto-tuning and other smart technologies in CPU’s these days?
I’m left to wonder because the modern CPU is far more complex than the simpler computing squares of yesterday.
Drivers tell a CPU how to communicate with a peripheral. A CPU driver would be telling the CPU how to talk to itself???
No. A driver tells the operating system how to communicate with a device.
Yes, and the OS is software running on the CPU.
I’m not sure what exactly these drivers (will) contain, but there’s two things that come to mind:
1.) Microcode Updates
These are necessary for CPUs to run stable. Pretty much all modern processors have bugs, often they can be fixed by microcode updates. Microcode is the “real” instruction set that a processor uses internally, while x86 is the one exposed to the outside. The conversion step from one to the other is patchable.
2.) Additional Features
CPUs have features that are not part of the instruction set, such as hardware-accelerated video decoding or crypto. These need to be supported somehow, e.g. through a driver.
It is not supported. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It means if you run into trouble, you’re on your own. AMD won’t necessarily do anything about it.