Zekk Pacus' AMD Ryze(n) hardware thread, July 2017

[Overspark]

Lol, I can fit more spinning rust in due time but the mobo is maxed (ok could fit larger NVMEs but that's it).

Do what I did, get a PCIe card with one or two NVMe slots on it. They cost only a few tenners and give you a lot more options provided you have a suitable PCIe slot free. It's a minor hassle to match the NVMe, PCIe and mobo capabilities (lane count and PCIe version) but if you know how it works it's not hard.

I'm actually using this instead of the second NVMe slot on my motherboard as that one steals lanes from the GPU slot and I don't want that to happen.

That's not a bad idea tbh, if only to get less clutter with SATA cables. I'm not really interested in RAID NVME's, will a multiple NVME card show up as diffrent drives or must they be raided?

Depends on the PCIe card I think. RAID cards should be more expensive as they need an additional chip, you want one that's basically straight copper to different PCIe lanes.

[Equium Duo]

The 7series x3d is launching:

tldr:
AMD claiming 20-30% increase over the 5800x3d for the 7800x3d
and
claiming 13-24% improvement over the 13900k for the 7950x3d

[Malcanis]

scepticaldog.png

[Cosmin]

The 7series x3d is launching:

tldr:
AMD claiming 20-30% increase over the 5800x3d for the 7800x3d
and
claiming 13-24% improvement over the 13900k for the 7950x3d

Whilst I can see a 20-30% increase over the 5800x3d happening - whilst at the same time drawing a lot more power and running significantly hotter - the improvement over the 13900K is likely to be over stock speeds. You can't beat the 13900K's o/c potential seeing it can run its performance cores around 6GHz on a daily basis on water and I'm expecting the Zen 4 x3d chips to have almost zero o/c potential.

What will be very interesting to see is whether if you power cap the zen 4 x3d chips if they run faster than a power capped 13900K, case in which they'll be extremely interesting CPUs.

[Equium Duo]

The 7series x3d is launching:

tldr:
AMD claiming 20-30% increase over the 5800x3d for the 7800x3d
and
claiming 13-24% improvement over the 13900k for the 7950x3d

Whilst I can see a 20-30% increase over the 5800x3d happening - whilst at the same time drawing a lot more power and running significantly hotter - the improvement over the 13900K is likely to be over stock speeds. You can't beat the 13900K's o/c potential seeing it can run its performance cores around 6GHz on a daily basis on water and I'm expecting the Zen 4 x3d chips to have almost zero o/c potential.

What will be very interesting to see is whether if you power cap the zen 4 x3d chips if they run faster than a power capped 13900K, case in which they'll be extremely interesting CPUs.

I forgot to add to this, we've been a little bamboozled.

The 7800x3d is a full 3dvcache chip. The 7900 + 7950 have the 7800x3d onboard plus std chiplets to bring them up. Hence why their top boost clocks are so much higher (narrator: they aren't).

However, with the release of the non-x cpus they seem amaziongly good value if "good enough" gaming is all you need. They run in normal operation at about 90W, with the 7900 running at 45 degrees C!. If you enable PBO and up th epower limit to the same as the X version, it runs identical. Its also $130 cheaper than the X varient. Absolute banger of a bargain.

Once again, Steve shows us the way:

[walrus]

The 7series x3d is launching:

tldr:
AMD claiming 20-30% increase over the 5800x3d for the 7800x3d
and
claiming 13-24% improvement over the 13900k for the 7950x3d

Whilst I can see a 20-30% increase over the 5800x3d happening - whilst at the same time drawing a lot more power and running significantly hotter - the improvement over the 13900K is likely to be over stock speeds. You can't beat the 13900K's o/c potential seeing it can run its performance cores around 6GHz on a daily basis on water and I'm expecting the Zen 4 x3d chips to have almost zero o/c potential.

What will be very interesting to see is whether if you power cap the zen 4 x3d chips if they run faster than a power capped 13900K, case in which they'll be extremely interesting CPUs.

Yeah, the 6GHz 13900K is pretty amazing at... *checks notes* ...320 watts.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18726...ngs-to-6-0-ghz

[Cosmin]

I forgot to add to this, we've been a little bamboozled.

The 7800x3d is a full 3dvcache chip. The 7900 + 7950 have the 7800x3d onboard plus std chiplets to bring them up. Hence why their top boost clocks are so much higher (narrator: they aren't).

Yeah it's the usual bamboozle, I wasn't expecting such high 3d cache to make sense at those boost speeds. Likely the 7800x3d will be the actual best buy for gaming whilst the others for people who want an extra clock speed advantage since putting all that cache would have probably severely limited their boost speed.

Yeah, the 6GHz 13900K is pretty amazing at... *checks notes* ...320 watts.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18726...ngs-to-6-0-ghz

Even if I'm on a quest to limit the power draw I'd still like my pauper 5950x to be able to reach 6GHz (which it probably can on its best cores with a lot of tweaking and voltage and caressing and convincing and lots of cooling) for benchmarking purposes (I haven't had a truly capable chip since my 3200+ Venice to play with).

[Malcanis]

I'm a bit puzzled about the cache situation with Zen4. AMD made a big noise (and rightfully so IMO) about Infinity Cache on RDNA2 allowing them to maintain high performance with lower bus widths and thus reduce costs But the bus widths for the 7900XT and XTX are 320- and 384-bit respectively. AMD lean heavily on their cache tech in CPUs and in video cards yet they seem to have rather backed away from it with RDNA3. I understand the cache is on the MCMs now, so it's not a direct equivalence, but still.

[Spartan Dax]

Cache or no cache, buswidth still matters. The 6000 series dropped more in performance when going to 4k than equal tiered cards at 1080p. We can see this trend today with the 4070Ti's 192 bit bus as well.

So why did they keep the large (total) cache on the MCM's? Probably because it's dirt cheap and just moving the memory controller wouldn't be worth it but mostly it's because the GPU needs some cache regardless. And moving it to a cheaper production node makes sense especially since SRAM cells has stopped getting smaller with smaller manufacturing nodes.

Relevant article.

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7343/...death-of-sram/

[Malcanis]

5-16 6MB MCM caches is a lot different to a unified 192MbIt on die cache, for sure.

It will certainly be interesting to see if the X3D versions of RDNA3 actually show 'worthwhile' performance improvement at 4k then, because the buswidth won't be changing, and why bother being even more overpowered at 1440p? Those cards will be even more expensive than the already too expensive XT/XTX, and I would expect people willing to pay that kind of money to be routinely running either 4k, or at least 1440p superwide screens. But If AMD want people to pay 4080 money for the XTX-3D then it's going to need to be quite an uplift.

[Spartan Dax]

Wasn't aware an X3d version of RDNA3 was underway. They can do it as they've already proven with Ryzen but to me it seems like 7900 XTX is good for bandwith as it is.

If AMD wants more performance they need a bigger compute chip IMO. That's probably not going to happen this generation.

[Cosmin]

If AMD wants more performance they need a bigger compute chip IMO. That's probably not going to happen this generation.

I thought that was the issue supposed to be solved by the chiplet design - you don't make a bigger compute chip, you just put more chiplets on the board and go from there? May be wrong there, but it has been working with Ryzen (so far) although the Zen architecture has improved in IPC as well as core count.

GPUs rely more on parallel processing than CPUs so I'd expect chiplet design to scale more meaningfully in the case of graphics cards but if they manage to improve the GPUs just as they improved on the CPUs (so with IPC boosts as well as more chiplets) then we may see really interesting cards. An issue here is also that if they go x3d on the GPUs then they're going to kneecap the effective frequencies as well since we've seen this happening with CPU x3d chips too.

What really bugs me is that HBM isn't really making a comeback, it was an exceedingly interesting technology and the Radeon VII was a beast in itself and even if it didn't challenge at the very top (2080 would be faster) the bandwidth was insane. I'd really like to see RDNA 4 with HBM, it may really challenge the top end if AMD brings more IPC and more chiplets.

[El Capitano]

My understanding was that HBM was very expensive and wound up being overkill for gaming GPUs. NVIDIA managed to trounce AMD by using standard, cheaper GDDR memory. Given those circumstances, would you stick with the more expensive and unnecessary option?

[Spartan Dax]

If AMD wants more performance they need a bigger compute chip IMO. That's probably not going to happen this generation.

I thought that was the issue supposed to be solved by the chiplet design - you don't make a bigger compute chip, you just put more chiplets on the board and go from there? May be wrong there, but it has been working with Ryzen (so far) although the Zen architecture has improved in IPC as well as core count.

GPUs rely more on parallel processing than CPUs so I'd expect chiplet design to scale more meaningfully in the case of graphics cards but if they manage to improve the GPUs just as they improved on the CPUs (so with IPC boosts as well as more chiplets) then we may see really interesting cards. An issue here is also that if they go x3d on the GPUs then they're going to kneecap the effective frequencies as well since we've seen this happening with CPU x3d chips too.

Apparantly getting dual GPU chips to work seamlessly is really really hard. Both AMD and nVidia has patents on how to solve it but it's not here yet. We already have dual GPU chips in servers doing compute stuff but for displaying a pleasent non laggy gaming experience apparantly more black box magic is needed.

The upside to the chiplets is that AMD's GCD is fairly small (75% of a 4080) so they will be getting better yields on it and there's room to make it larger without blowing it up to 4090 die size levels. All I'm saying is, there's room to grow without killing your yields completely. AMD chooses not to, probably because they don't think they can make any money on it.

The 3d cache is not an issue for frequencies. It goes on the memory chiplets, not the GCD.

[Nordstern]

My B550-F system is up and running now. Swapping onboard audio for a Sound Blaster Zx makes a world of difference. Need to hook up the additional SSDs tomorrow and get my Steam library installed.

[Malcanis]

If AMD wants more performance they need a bigger compute chip IMO. That's probably not going to happen this generation.

I thought that was the issue supposed to be solved by the chiplet design - you don't make a bigger compute chip, you just put more chiplets on the board and go from there? May be wrong there, but it has been working with Ryzen (so far) although the Zen architecture has improved in IPC as well as core count.

GPUs rely more on parallel processing than CPUs so I'd expect chiplet design to scale more meaningfully in the case of graphics cards but if they manage to improve the GPUs just as they improved on the CPUs (so with IPC boosts as well as more chiplets) then we may see really interesting cards. An issue here is also that if they go x3d on the GPUs then they're going to kneecap the effective frequencies as well since we've seen this happening with CPU x3d chips too.

Apparantly getting dual GPU chips to work seamlessly is really really hard. Both AMD and nVidia has patents on how to solve it but it's not here yet. We already have dual GPU chips in servers doing compute stuff but for displaying a pleasent non laggy gaming experience apparantly more black box magic is needed.

The upside to the chiplets is that AMD's GCD is fairly small (75% of a 4080) so they will be getting better yields on it and there's room to make it larger without blowing it up to 4090 die size levels. All I'm saying is, there's room to grow without killing your yields completely. AMD chooses not to, probably because they don't think they can make any money on it.

The 3d cache is not an issue for frequencies. It goes on the memory chiplets, not the GCD.

Some dudes on r/hardware saying that the main problem is that, for whatever reason, the new dual-issue units are not performing. In theory they should be able to give "up to" 100% IPC uplift in a perfect scenario (which is where all the turbo mega performance pre-launch hype numbers came from). In practice, Nvidia got a much smaller but still pretty significant uplift going from 2000 to the 3000 series, but RDNA 3 is getting close to nothing.

No idea if this is remediable via software or microcode or if RDNA3 is fucked until RDNA3+ appears.

[Equium Duo]

For the cheaper part of the world:

I jsut piocked up an Erying i9 11800 ES equivalent chinese aliexpress special.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005...1a7a1802P0DTJo

Reviews were decent.


Intended use is to replace my dell r720, i want faster game server performance and this is looking like an execllent replacement.

[Mashie Saldana]

For the cheaper part of the world:

I jsut piocked up an Erying i9 11800 ES equivalent chinese aliexpress special.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005...1a7a1802P0DTJo

Reviews were decent.


Intended use is to replace my dell r720, i want faster game server performance and this is looking like an execllent replacement.

A motherboard with a soldered on Engineering Sample CPU, what could possibly go wrong?

[Equium Duo]

For the cheaper part of the world:

I jsut piocked up an Erying i9 11800 ES equivalent chinese aliexpress special.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005...1a7a1802P0DTJo

Reviews were decent.


Intended use is to replace my dell r720, i want faster game server performance and this is looking like an execllent replacement.

A motherboard with a soldered on Engineering Sample CPU, what could possibly go wrong?

Theres a lot of people raving about them, i'll let you know how it goes

Also he did another video: