N4CR
Supreme [H]ardness
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A kiwi retailler told me they sold out of basically all stock (4 units of 3600 left) and that demand was higher than expected. Had at least 50-60 units across the range in store.
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Zen 2 Review Summary
- Thread starter DuronBurgerMan
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thebufenator
[H]ard|Gawd
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The 4930k launch price was $600.
I'm not really sure $750 for a top of the line consumer CPU is ridiculous. I remember a time when far and away the most expensive part in a system was the CPU. Somewhere along the way we all let NV (and I guess AMD to a smaller extent) sell us on a GPU being worth $1200-$1400 for top of the line consumer stuff.
That was sort of more my point is... $750 for a CPU seems Crazy ? When that is mid range GPU card pricing these days.
For some semblance of context....
June Fifth 2000 AMD released the Athlon thunderbird... top of the line Athlon 1GHZ $990. The Athlon 900mhz was a more pocket friendly $589... and if you could live with 800mhz AMD was only charging $359. (Now remember this is 2000 numbers so factor in a 47% inflation rate... or $1,472.. $875... and 533) All throughout 2000-2001 AMD kept upping the clock and dropping the prices on newer parts... within a year selling GHZ+ Althon chips for half the price.
Back in 2000 AMD led the fight to bring MHZ (GHZ) to the masses at a reasonable cost. You could even argue it helped convince the Intel brass that Netburst was the way to go... jack the MHZ and win the PR war. Now AMD is fighting the battle on core count. The 3900x would sell for right around $500 in 2000 money. I would say AMD is doing insanely well when it comes to making multi core CPUs pocket friendly. And just like back in 2000.... you don't HAVE to buy a 3900x, squeezing a 3700 or even a 3600 is probably the sweet spot. I think the 3600 is looking to be our new Celeron 400a, accept it doesn't have its cache hacked off.
lolSome fun reading from way way back in the day.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/612
OnceSetThisCannotChange
Limp Gawd
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WWZ released Zen2 patch and 3900x is equal to 9900k now (was in around 15% deficit before the patch), looking good for Zen2 that the dev is paying attantion and that they were able to release this patch so fast.
I'm not really sure $750 for a top of the line consumer CPU is ridiculous. I remember a time when far and away the most expensive part in a system was the CPU. Somewhere along the way we all let NV (and I guess AMD to a smaller extent) sell us on a GPU being worth $1200-$1400 for top of the line consumer stuff.
That was sort of more my point is... $750 for a CPU seems Crazy ? When that is mid range GPU card pricing these days.
For some semblance of context....
June Fifth 2000 AMD released the Athlon thunderbird... top of the line Athlon 1GHZ $990. The Athlon 900mhz was a more pocket friendly $589... and if you could live with 800mhz AMD was only charging $359. (Now remember this is 2000 numbers so factor in a 47% inflation rate... or $1,472.. $875... and 533) All throughout 2000-2001 AMD kept upping the clock and dropping the prices on newer parts... within a year selling GHZ+ Althon chips for half the price.
Back in 2000 AMD led the fight to bring MHZ (GHZ) to the masses at a reasonable cost. You could even argue it helped convince the Intel brass that Netburst was the way to go... jack the MHZ and win the PR war. Now AMD is fighting the battle on core count. The 3900x would sell for right around $500 in 2000 money. I would say AMD is doing insanely well when it comes to making multi core CPUs pocket friendly. And just like back in 2000.... you don't HAVE to buy a 3900x, squeezing a 3700 or even a 3600 is probably the sweet spot. I think the 3600 is looking to be our new Celeron 400a, accept it doesn't have its cache hacked off.
Some fun reading from way way back in the day.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/612
Forget T-Bird, you want crazy, how about a $2000 Pentium II? https://www.cnet.com/news/300-mhz-pentium-ii-box-for-1999/
BUT that was the absolute bleeding edge at the time, and also PCs weren't as common, so less volume = higher cost per capita, amongst other reasons why prices were so high back then.
$750 gets you around a 2080, which is decidedly not mid-range but high end (just not highest end). Mid-range would be something like 2060, which has also inflated to a ridiculous $400. In any case this is all semantics, point really just being that there's no justification for these increases in prices other than "because we can and most people will still buy our shit". Not that me as one person will make any difference whatsoever, but I refuse to give in to such extortion, and thus have not upgraded since 980 Ti.
I'm not really sure $750 for a top of the line consumer CPU is ridiculous. I remember a time when far and away the most expensive part in a system was the CPU. Somewhere along the way we all let NV (and I guess AMD to a smaller extent) sell us on a GPU being worth $1200-$1400 for top of the line consumer stuff.
That was sort of more my point is... $750 for a CPU seems Crazy ? When that is mid range GPU card pricing these days.
For some semblance of context....
June Fifth 2000 AMD released the Athlon thunderbird... top of the line Athlon 1GHZ $990. The Athlon 900mhz was a more pocket friendly $589... and if you could live with 800mhz AMD was only charging $359. (Now remember this is 2000 numbers so factor in a 47% inflation rate... or $1,472.. $875... and 533) All throughout 2000-2001 AMD kept upping the clock and dropping the prices on newer parts... within a year selling GHZ+ Althon chips for half the price.
Back in 2000 AMD led the fight to bring MHZ (GHZ) to the masses at a reasonable cost. You could even argue it helped convince the Intel brass that Netburst was the way to go... jack the MHZ and win the PR war. Now AMD is fighting the battle on core count. The 3900x would sell for right around $500 in 2000 money. I would say AMD is doing insanely well when it comes to making multi core CPUs pocket friendly. And just like back in 2000.... you don't HAVE to buy a 3900x, squeezing a 3700 or even a 3600 is probably the sweet spot. I think the 3600 is looking to be our new Celeron 400a, accept it doesn't have its cache hacked off.
Some fun reading from way way back in the day.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/612
And as I've said before, Intel had its Extreme Edition CPU's at $1,099.99 for at least a decade or more. While this was at the top of the pile it was still a mainstream part. Intel had Xeon's back then which were used in workstations and servers. This was a practice going back to the Pentium 4 and functionally ending with the introduction of the Core i7 6950X. My Core i7 5960X was about $1,099.99 at Microcenter. The Broadwell-E chip was some $1,599.99 at launch. My Threadripper 2920X was some $600 or more when it first came out for the same core and thread count. So AMD offering 12c/24t for $500 is damn reasonable.
I know most people want the top of the line processor, but the fact of the matter is most people aren't doing anything that will really make use of something with 8c/16t, much less 12c/24t. The core wars has got HEDT level core counts hitting the mainstream and HEDT parts are getting straight up server core counts.
To be fair, HEDT as a market segment did not exist during P4's era. So to classify the top SKUs (and the infamous emergency editions) as "mainstream" seems misleading. They were the de facto "HEDT" parts during a time in which Intel had not segmented the mainstream/HEDT platforms.
somebrains
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Server density is paramount right now.
Everyone wants to use Kubernetes bc release is easier, but there’s this idea your applications will somehow need to scale to Gmail size within an availability zone.
Refactoring monolithic applications to docker containers or platform specific functions is everything Dev is expected to roadmap, or they’re somehow deficient.
Im on the Ops side, so my scripts have filtering for service availability bc no one wants to hear that we ran out of capacity during a scaling event.
Compute is ideally more of a fabric rather than discreet monolithic compute.
No one wants to hear about autoscaled vms or clusters.
They want service aware HA, there isn’t time to boot a full OS (there is).
They want to see micro services self heal without understanding that it means there’s computers available somewhere that are taking load.
Any decent DevOps engineer should have had Salesforce, Apple, Google, AWS hit them up ad nauseum the last few weeks and they all want to talk about the same thing.
The old things are slow, we need new things connected to handle an unknown queue depth and an uncertain velocity at an SLA of at least 7 9s durability.
Also we need to add lots of data Ops, machine learning and serverless BI riding on serverless dbs are a thing.
We need those, lots of those, no one knows how to use them, but you need to have experience 5 years before they were released.
Managing infrastructure becomes untenable when I constantly hear an attitude of “configuration management is an anti-pattern”.
Sucks when I have to tell a bunch of guys using Terraform that they don’t know anything about encryption, and somehow blackholed a bunch of production keys by malforming KMS policies with a bad cut and paste.
Hey, the machine is smart, just declare what you want without knowing what it is and it’ll happily spit it out.
There’s no machine there, it’s just a bunch of yaml or json.
Machines are a dirty concept, everything is code, vendors are trying their damndest to makes the densest rack you’ve ever seen.
AMD might be winning.
More machines means more overhead, less profit, but capacity is king.
Everyone is playing the same game of consolidating rows into a single row, racks into a single rack.
Latency needs to be reduced, uptime needs to add on another 9.
It’s ironic bc underpinning containers are Linux vms
New ways a hypervisor can work still rely on kvm, so those swarms of billions of functions executed daily can’t all live on a single rack.
Desktop compute gets the trickle down.
Whether your average person will deploy any of the resources to a meaningful depth is not likely.....but they certainly use them everyday.
Everyone wants to use Kubernetes bc release is easier, but there’s this idea your applications will somehow need to scale to Gmail size within an availability zone.
Refactoring monolithic applications to docker containers or platform specific functions is everything Dev is expected to roadmap, or they’re somehow deficient.
Im on the Ops side, so my scripts have filtering for service availability bc no one wants to hear that we ran out of capacity during a scaling event.
Compute is ideally more of a fabric rather than discreet monolithic compute.
No one wants to hear about autoscaled vms or clusters.
They want service aware HA, there isn’t time to boot a full OS (there is).
They want to see micro services self heal without understanding that it means there’s computers available somewhere that are taking load.
Any decent DevOps engineer should have had Salesforce, Apple, Google, AWS hit them up ad nauseum the last few weeks and they all want to talk about the same thing.
The old things are slow, we need new things connected to handle an unknown queue depth and an uncertain velocity at an SLA of at least 7 9s durability.
Also we need to add lots of data Ops, machine learning and serverless BI riding on serverless dbs are a thing.
We need those, lots of those, no one knows how to use them, but you need to have experience 5 years before they were released.
Managing infrastructure becomes untenable when I constantly hear an attitude of “configuration management is an anti-pattern”.
Sucks when I have to tell a bunch of guys using Terraform that they don’t know anything about encryption, and somehow blackholed a bunch of production keys by malforming KMS policies with a bad cut and paste.
Hey, the machine is smart, just declare what you want without knowing what it is and it’ll happily spit it out.
There’s no machine there, it’s just a bunch of yaml or json.
Machines are a dirty concept, everything is code, vendors are trying their damndest to makes the densest rack you’ve ever seen.
AMD might be winning.
More machines means more overhead, less profit, but capacity is king.
Everyone is playing the same game of consolidating rows into a single row, racks into a single rack.
Latency needs to be reduced, uptime needs to add on another 9.
It’s ironic bc underpinning containers are Linux vms
New ways a hypervisor can work still rely on kvm, so those swarms of billions of functions executed daily can’t all live on a single rack.
Desktop compute gets the trickle down.
Whether your average person will deploy any of the resources to a meaningful depth is not likely.....but they certainly use them everyday.
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That "high end" 2080 will require an upgrade FAR sooner than the "mid range" 3950X. In fact, the 3950X will probably outlast a bare minimum of 3-4 generations of high end GPUs. Pricing is important but it's nearly useless when not put into perspective.
I agree with you on the GPU end of things. I used to enjoy buying mid range GPUs every couple years and getting the previous top of the line performance at that price. Lack of GPU competition has really hurt. The 5700 give me some hope... it seems like for the price they are providing that previous top of the line performance at a more budget friendly price.
CPUS though... they have actually come down. $750 isn't AMDs mid range CPU its their highest end. The 3700x/3600 are the sweet spot for average users, and compared to what we used to pay they are a steal. I haven't checked inflation pricing ect but I'm pretty sure the 3600 is selling for less then the Celeron/Duron overclock kings of our youth did. Granted its a bit less sexy these days with the auto overclocking features being so good. Still sort of have that same feeling myself.
It would be real hard to not suggest the basic 3600 for most folks. It seems with proper case cooling even the basic included stealth cooler will give people real world performance so close to the top of the line that it's hard to not get excited. 6 cores 12 threads... and enough IPC lift that its trading blows with the 2700x in things like blender render times. That is what impressed me most about the 3000s.... that this generations 6 core is arguably a better real world performer then the year old 8 core zen proto refresh part.
Mobile Icelake uses the SoC version of 10nm+ not the HPC version of 10nm++ that will use desktop.
I did read the 5GHz claim for Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller, Zen, Zen+, and Zen2. Nice to heard it now for Zen3.
DuronBurgerMan
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You didn't hear it from me. I predicted ~4.7GHz boost for Zen 2, and that was pretty damned accurate. Zen+ was +250mhz over Zen, and Zen 2 is +350mhz over Zen+. Extrapolate one more generation and you have ~5GHz boost.
D
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Even if you buy DDR4 2400 for a 3900x, the CPU is the same price as a 9900k, a x470 costs the same as z390 and x570s are more expensive.
Platform price is the almost exactly the same. Which has been my point from the start, but everyone missed that by going on some tangent about about RAM performance. Potentially buying lower than spec RAM just to win an argument, doesn't make it cheaper than an equivalent Intel system.
I am in the wrong forum. Reading is fundamental.
Cheaper really depends on what you’re comparing. Mainstream vs Mainstream AMD isn’t really cheaper and could be a bit more expensive with x570 but has a pronounced multi thread performance advantage that you cannot equal without going HEDT on Intel which would make AMD far more economical.
There’s enough variables here that everyone can technically be right depending on what they are choosing to compare and prioritize. That’s a good thing though. It’s nice having options that you really can’t go wrong with, that hasn’t been the case in a long time.
IdiotInCharge
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The RAM variable makes comparisons hard. It's one thing for reviews to use the same RAM, and another to use the fastest RAM that each system takes, or use the RAM that is at the edge of diminishing returns- and these last two can be quite different for each system.
It's not a tangent, as good RAM can make a difference both in performance and in price- so the cost of memory for a certain level of performance must be considered as part of 'platform' costs. You're not going to run a system without it.
XoR_
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Comparable system to 9900K with the same PCI-E speeds would be getting 3700X and 3xx or 4xx series chipset (though some mobos allegedly support PCI-E 4.0 on some ports)
Price advantage is obvious
AMD simply wins this round. There should be no doubt about that!
Not that it is enough to convince die hard Intel fanboys like myself to get AMD platform
<laughing madly while putting i9 9900K to Z390 mobo>DuronBurgerMan
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If you use the boxed cooler, and you're planning on buying the same RAM kit for either build, AMD will be cheaper in most brackets.
But how many of us really use the boxed cooler? And how many of us would just buy any old RAM kit, instead of carefully selecting based on how the CPU responds to different frequencies and latencies?
Generally, I'd say AMD is a hair less. Or at least provides you with more options to cheap out if you really want to. But as Dan said earlier, we've reached near-parity on pricing between platforms, really.
DuronBurgerMan
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Comparable system to 9900K with the same PCI-E speeds would be getting 3700X and 3xx or 4xx series chipset (though some mobos allegedly support PCI-E 4.0 on some ports)
Price advantage is obvious
AMD simply wins this round. There should be no doubt about that!
Not that it is enough to convince die hard Intel fanboys like myself to get AMD platform
The 9900k is an excellent CPU, and if it had existed when I built this rig I have now, I'd have gone with it over Ryzen. But at the time I built this (originally with a 1700X and not 2700X), It was 7700k (not enough cores) or 6900k (old platform and ridiculous price).
X470 motherboards are generally cheaper, but not necessarily cheaper than Z390 motherboards. Otherwise, there is perfect platform cost parity. Of course you can point out how expensive X570 is, but there are also cheap X570 motherboards as well. I probably wouldn't ever use one, but that's just me.
While I understand that X570 is the new hotness and premium'ish stuff, "cheap" seems to be a bit relative given the cheapest board I currently see at Newegg is $170 and going up to $700. So in that context vs a $700 board I guess $170 is indeed cheap.
IdiotInCharge
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I thought about waiting for Ryzen myself, but decided to jump up because I was not happy with the broad crapshoot that Ryzen memory compatibility was, and how random it seemed to find motherboards that actually had good VRM implementations for maintaining boost clocks. The 9900K is still the fastest CPU on the market for everything I do that is CPU limited.
I wouldn't recommend it now for general usage, of course.
DuronBurgerMan
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AMD has stayed one step ahead of Intel for my use case. When I built this rig... choices were another quad core, an overpriced HEDT part, or cheap-ass 8 core from AMD. Choice was clear! I recall saying "if only Intel had a 6 core mainstream CPU, I'd buy that instead!"
So Intel releases the 8700k after I built my rig. I get to thinking... hey maybe I should switch. The single core performance of the 1700X is kind of shitty. But then AMD releases the 2700X. Not as fast as the 8700k there, but better, and hey, a cheap and easy drop in for me. But I recall thinking... man, an 8 core Intel mainstream would be great! 9900k comes out. I start getting some serious envy. All the 8 core goodness I liked about Ryzen, none of the drawbacks.
But now there's the 3900X and 12 cores, and single thread performance getting very close to the 9900k. Also, a drop-in replacement. Will switch whenever these things pop back into stock.
I get to thinking "you know, a 10 core Intel part would be nice..."
IdiotInCharge
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If you don't overclock
If you bought a decent board, you'll actually get to use the features of the new CPU too...
Which was where I checked out. Some got lucky, but generally speaking, way too much uncertainty with Ryzen. Now we have great boards and probably parity in terms of memory compatibility, it's much easier to look at AMD now for many uses.
DuronBurgerMan
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If you don't overclock
As sad as it may sound here, I don't bother with overclocking much anymore. I played with OCing the 1700X and 2700X for a bit after I first dropped them in, then just set it back to stock in the case of the 1700X, and PBO for the 2700X (yes, PBO is enabled for my X370 board even though they say it shouldn't be - I guess Asus did a little extra work).
Went with the Asus X370 Prime Pro. It's a barebones board with good VRMs. Held up well so far.
I had a lot of memory overclocking problems, especially since I'm using dual-rank memory because I needed 32GB for my work, which Zen/Zen+ doesn't like. Never could get more 3000 MHz out of it. Right now, it's running at 2933 (but pretty low latency). Hope dropping a 3900X in here helps with that.
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jlbenedict
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Ill put it in a summary: competition is great.. AMD continues to be the "value" choice.
The ladder part is only true if you're looking for HEDT performance from a mainstream part.
DuronBurgerMan
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Kinda sorta. I'd argue Zen 2 is the best all-rounder design, where as the 9900k is the best no-compromise gaming CPU.
Agreed, though more often then not when people say "value" what they mean is "cheaper" which isn't really the case, so the only scenario where the "value" label makes sense is if you're comparing Intel HEDT to AMD Mainstream.
The elitism that comes with running Intel exists only in ones imagination at this point.
Depends what you use your computer for and if you feel your 7700K isn't doing a good enough job with it.
Randall Stephens
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Seems like AMD realized that they needed a way to bring more cores to the data center at lower cost to fight back to relevance. Zen for consumers feels like a bit of a compromise to leverage what the data center needs. That said, these are awesome chips.
DuronBurgerMan
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AMD probably figured they could save some serious R&D money by designing one product to do all the things. Server, desktop, maybe mobile eventually. Pour all of their limited funds in that one project and do it really well.
The output was a design that does everything "pretty good" and scales really well on core and thread count, but will lose on some edge cases and some specialized workloads. The respective products from AMD and Intel are very reflective of their business strategies, really.
DuronBurgerMan
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For gaming? Frankly, no. A 7700k is still an excellent gaming CPU, and though the 3900X finally puts AMD convincingly over top of the 7700k in gaming, it's not by all that much. Certainly not worth the money.
For mixed-use workloads? Hell yes. Going from 4c/8t to 12c/24t? That will be INSANE.... IF your work can utilize the extra cores, that is.
I’m actually looking for another M.2 slot to put my second SSD. I only have 1 M.2 slot on this ASrock Z170 motherboard lol. Also, I do use my system mainly for gaming.
Wut I never said 3950X was mid-range lol. I actually objected to labeling 3950X as "mainstream" even though it's on a "mainstream" platform since 16C/32T is anything BUT mainstream, and of course the price reflects that. But all that got lost in translation somehow.
Forget the 3950X, you could've made your argument stronger with the 3700X which costs 44% as much. Btw I'm not disagreeing with what you said.
I agree with you on the GPU end of things. I used to enjoy buying mid range GPUs every couple years and getting the previous top of the line performance at that price. Lack of GPU competition has really hurt. The 5700 give me some hope... it seems like for the price they are providing that previous top of the line performance at a more budget friendly price.
CPUS though... they have actually come down. $750 isn't AMDs mid range CPU its their highest end. The 3700x/3600 are the sweet spot for average users, and compared to what we used to pay they are a steal. I haven't checked inflation pricing ect but I'm pretty sure the 3600 is selling for less then the Celeron/Duron overclock kings of our youth did. Granted its a bit less sexy these days with the auto overclocking features being so good. Still sort of have that same feeling myself.
See comment above.
Also my original point was we should avoid these sorts of rationalizations (oh a mid-range GPU is $500, what's $750 for a top of the line CPU) because that's how one ends up with $1700 10C/20T CPUs (looking at you 6950X). Not saying AMD will try emulate Intel, just if we internally justify these prices and keep hitting our wallets harder, the end result won't be pretty.
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3900x is overkill for gaming alone. Your right unless your doing something more then just gaming the 3600 is a good place to look. Like it or not 99% of games are still heavily single threaded.... and 4-6 physical threads are still what makes them go. Heck there are "modern" games everyone is playing where disabling SMT gains a decent amount of FPS.
7700k though ya would be hard to argue it would be worth the upgrade for gaming alone. Advantage on Zen2 is you no longer "loose" any benchmark cred in games... while gaining all the advantage in non gaming. Really Zen proto and Zen Proto+ where both good gaming CPUs as well... you would have to break out some very high frame benchmarks to really see a difference.
7700k not being that old I imagine if you had a real use for many cores it wasn't the go to anyway.
Not saying AMD will try emulate Intel, just if we internally justify these prices and keep hitting our wallets harder, the end result won't be pretty.
Fair I follow and agree with your point. In the case of Zen2 I hope a lot of people open their wallet for the 12 and 16 core parts. No its not going to shift the base of what a good processor goes for. I mean heck amd is selling the 3600 for a song.... and imo it might be the best performing processor going for 99% of what people are really doing today.
If people do buy into many cores for mainstream (and they seem to be with all the lineups and out of stocks in stock out of stocks) then Intel will be forced to follow suit. Ya no mainstream users NEED 16 cores today. But they didn't NEED 1GHZ when the thunderbird dropped. The GHZ wars pushed CPUs further in a few years then they had gone for years prior and since really. AMD opened with Ryzen proto and we got 8 core decently priced competition. I fully expect at some point Intel will respond to consumer 12 and 16 thread parts.
I think when we see what will be on the market from both AMD and Intel in a year for 500 bucks we'll all be very happy AMD decided to drop 16 cores into mainstream chipsets.