1st Ryzen CPU Review Leaked

[razor1]

It is not our hype but CanardPC are very trustworthy, and they are the people that do the validations for CPUID/CPU-Z so I think I trust them more than most.

AMD have done next to no hype on this CPU at all, in fact it almost secretive.


My feeling two months ago was that best case or at least the target was Haswell, talking to people with privy to ES samples adn going on the stategic leaks, there is genuine sentiment that Zen is a very strong architecture. I get that hype can be a set up, but unlike bulldozer and the 500 delays, marketing rubbish and what not that went on for a year, Zen is anything but that. AMD have ensured that even the ES chips are sandbagged. Not a single ES chip feature the XFR, SenseMI technology, no finished retail boards yet with teh full support, no clocks yet and it still managed to be inside 10% to a 6900K. It has been forever since I had an AMD CPU, and given how "boring" intel has become with useless peripherals to mask less than optimal improvements, I want something new and a little gung ho.

I am one of those people that wants a strong AMD, the market is better for it, that is great for everyone, to have choices.

Even with CanardPC, with their gaming benchmarks still looks to be the IPC of somewhere between Haswell and Ivy Bridge. Gaming benchmarks are more telling in this regard. So sitting around and trying to extrapolate them from something we don't have enough information on, just doesn't do anyone any good as it can be lower or higher, its all up in the air.

AMD has hyped it enough, they did so to get their stock price up, got people to talk about it, in more ways than one, where websites have stated it beats Broadwell with a similar core count and frequency. Which as for right now for enthusiast systems are the fastest chips available in market. if you don't consider that hype, not sure what else is cause, if it comes out and those gaming benchmarks come out as real or close to real, well that is over hype. AMD might not have done it directly because they were only showing specific tests (blender and handbrake) but none the less others have taken AMD's word for it and attributed it to every application. AKA Polaris, it wasn't hyped by AMD when it came to performance but websites, forum members did, look how that turned out. AMD also hyped Polaris's power consumption levels, look how that came out. There is a fine line between managing expectations and marketing, if they can't manage expectations then marketing is automatically bad.

 

[Dullard]

I think you are underestimating the IPC, I think the 1180+ score posted by the Japanese guy was base clock IPC, making it possibly faster than Haswell at very least equal.

I wasn't even an early adopter, but by the time Ryzen becomes widely available I will have 2 years on my HW-E system. Of course Intel hasn't really released anything that I couldn't live without in those 2 years, either. It's all down to clock speed IMHO. If Ryzen clocks in the mid 4s, that'll turn some heads. Haswell performance at even 3.7GHz isn't going to impress many - especially gamers - although I'm always trying to get across that gaming isn't the only thing many people use computers for.

 

[Gideon]

Looks like Intel may have confirmed on their own that they think the Zen chip is a real competitor.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cp...eportedly_working_on_a_new_x86_architecture/1

 

[aztekk]

Looks like Intel may have confirmed on their own that they think the Zen chip is a real competitor.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cp...eportedly_working_on_a_new_x86_architecture/1

"One of the biggest changes that Intel plans on making with this new core design is removing some older/unused SIMD and Hardware reminders, removing full x86 backwards compatibility but creating a more streamlined power friendly CPU design. "

Did they learn nothing from Itanium...? I think (hope) this part is bs. But I'm sure Intel engineers are working on new architecture designs, nothing surprising there.

This doesn't "confirm" Intel considering Zen a competitor in any way. Just part of normal progress of technology, not an answer to Zen directly as their current line-up will serve that purpose fine (especially with price drops).

 

[razor1]

"One of the biggest changes that Intel plans on making with this new core design is removing some older/unused SIMD and Hardware reminders, removing full x86 backwards compatibility but creating a more streamlined power friendly CPU design. "

Did they learn nothing from Itanium...? I think (hope) this part is bs. But I'm sure Intel engineers are working on new architecture designs, nothing surprising there.

This doesn't "confirm" Intel considering Zen a competitor in any way. Just part of normal progress of technology, not an answer to Zen directly as their current line-up will serve that purpose fine (especially with price drops).

I think they will be dropping legacy support like 32 bit, kindly like how x87 was dropped or reduced? They still have them but to a much lesser degree....

They can't get away from x86, most likely the article read into things a bit wrong.

But if this article is true, yeah Gideon, Intel wasn't planning on Zen being as good as it might be. Which actually according to the article will be 3 years which is kinda what I have been hinting at. But in the meantime Intel will still be able to have its process advantage of going to 10nm for about a year or two before hand.

 

[aztekk]

I think they will be dropping legacy support like 32 bit, kindly like how x87 was dropped or reduced? They still have them but to a much lesser degree....

They can't get away from x86, most likely the article read into things a bit wrong.

Moving away from x86 would be the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It isn't a legacy feature like the x87 instructions, 32-bit x86 programs are actively developed and up until recently even major browsers provided 32-bit only binaries. Also with the exception of H.264 and HEVC most high quality MPEG2 (and DivX although that has improved x64 support now) encoders still are 32-bit only and all TV broadcasting for example uses MPEG2. Even on my x64 systems I'd say 80-90% of programs I use are 32-bit. Clearly they cannot move away from x86 completely and if they did they would be giving away marketshare to competitors, and the CEO would have to be fired...

I don't think it makes sense to even reduce 32-bit functionality (whatever that means) because so much critical software relies on it and requires good performance. I just don't see this happening, I understand why something like 3DNow! was removed on the AMD side, no one used it but to remove or reduce 32-bit x86 functionality is crazy, has already been tried by Intel in the past and it hit them hard in the crotch. I don't think they want to repeat that mistake.

 

[razor1]

Moving away from x86 would be the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It isn't a legacy feature like the x87 instructions, 32-bit x86 programs are actively developed and up until recently even major browsers provided 32-bit only binaries. Also with the exception of H.264 and HEVC most high quality MPEG2 (and DivX although that has improved x64 support now) encoders still are 32-bit only and all TV broadcasting for example uses MPEG2. Even on my x64 systems I'd say 80-90% of programs I use are 32-bit. Clearly they cannot move away from x86 completely and if they did they would be giving away marketshare to competitors, and the CEO would have to be fired...

I don't think it makes sense to even reduce 32-bit functionality (whatever that means) because so much critical software relies on it and requires good performance. I just don't see this happening, I understand why something like 3DNow! was removed on the AMD side, no one used it but to remove or reduce 32-bit x86 functionality is crazy, has already been tried by Intel in the past and it hit them hard in the crotch. I don't think they want to repeat that mistake.

32 bit software is become legacy, Firefox is 32 bit that is the only one that I can think of from a browser stand point that doesn't have a 64 bit version (although others have recompiled it to 64 bit, like Waterfox). All software that I use on my windows machine is 64 bit.

Mobile and cell phones too have gotten away from 32 bit as well. Now having said, yeah many companies still use 32 bit and need 32 bit but in 3 years down the road is it going to be the same or can those things be emulated with enough performance or just recompiled with a few modifications.

This isn't like Itanium where software companies have to rewrite their entire stack.....

Just FYI Linux distros are looking into dropping 32 bit on their OS in the next few years. MS pretty much did the same thing too as Windows 10 is 64 bit only now.

 

[aztekk]

32 bit software is become legacy, Firefox is 32 bit that is the only one that I can think of from a browser stand point that doesn't have a 64 bit version (although others have recompiled it to 64 bit, like Waterfox). All software that I use on my windows machine is 64 bit.

Mobile and cell phones too have gotten away from 32 bit as well. Now having said, yeah many companies still use 32 bit and need 32 bit but in 3 years down the road is it going to be the same or can those things be emulated with enough performance or just recompiled with a few modifications.

This isn't like Itanium where software companies have to rewrite their entire stack.....

Just FYI Linux distros are looking into dropping 32 bit on their OS in the next few years. MS pretty much did the same thing too as Windows 10 is 64 bit only now.

Actually Firefox has officially provided 64-bit binaries for Windows since version 42. Thus I said "until recently"

In my opinion 32-bit software support is extremely critical, as you said most applications are indeed 32-bit and will likely stay that way. Software that is still developed will be able to adapt to 64-bit if necessary, with increased cost of course (good for programmers jobs) but that can't be done for legacy binaries (some of which require performance, for example HC encoder and Cinema Craft Encoder are still 32-bit and are used in all TV studios across the planet, to encode digital TV broadcasts and DVD releases). That accompanied with the increased cost on software developers to convert existing code into 64-bit is what killed Itanium's success and is no different for any CPU that doesn't support 32-bit x86 instructions.

Windows and Linux distros can move to 64-bit precisely thanks to x86-64 preserving 32-bit instructions. x64 itself only got popular because its built onto the foundation of x86 and keeps that 32-bit functionality intact, so you can take advantage of 64-bit integers while continuing to have hardware (well, sort of hw considering CPU's today are RISC based and not actually x86 CISC) support for legacy software. I don't think a processor can succeed in the desktop market without keeping that support intact, you may differ with me on this that's fine

 

[razor1]

Actually Firefox has officially provided 64-bit binaries for Windows since version 42. Thus I said "until recently"

In my opinion 32-bit software support is extremely critical, as you said most applications are indeed 32-bit and will likely stay that way. Software that is still developed will be able to adapt to 64-bit if necessary, with increased cost of course (good for programmers jobs) but that can't be done for legacy binaries (some of which require performance, for example HC encoder and Cinema Craft Encoder are still 32-bit and are used in all TV studios across the planet, to encode digital TV broadcasts and DVD releases). That accompanied with the increased cost on software developers to convert existing code into 64-bit is what killed Itanium's success and is no different for any CPU that doesn't support 32-bit x86 instructions.

Windows and Linux distros can move to 64-bit precisely thanks to x86-64 preserving 32-bit instructions. x64 itself only got popular because its built onto the foundation of x86 and keeps that 32-bit functionality intact, so you can take advantage of 64-bit integers while continuing to have hardware (well, sort of hw considering CPU's today are RISC based and not actually x86 CISC) support for legacy software. I don't think a processor can succeed in the desktop market without keeping that support intact, you may differ with me on this that's fine

Ah ok,

Well Windows 64 bit can emulate legacy 32 bit applications, it doesn't run it natively, it emulates through WOW64 which is a 32 bit emulator. There is no need for the processors to have 32 bit anymore, cause its all taken care of by the OS.

There is very little cost to covert to 64 bit, cause really the only main differences between 32 bit and 64 bit, are header sizes, pointer sizes, which should be taken care of by a recompile yeah maybe some tweaks here and there but that's about it.

 

[aztekk]

Ah ok,

Well Windows 64 bit can emulate legacy 32 bit applications, it doesn't run it natively, it emulates through WOW64 which is a 32 bit emulator. There is no need for the processors to have 32 bit anymore, cause its all taken care of by the OS.

There is very little cost to covert to 64 bit, cause really the only main differences between 32 bit and 64 bit, are header sizes, pointer sizes, which should be taken care of by a recompile yeah maybe some tweaks here and there but that's about it.

WOW64 used to be an emulator in the Itanium days but on x86-64 it actually just switches the CPU back and forth from native 32-bit mode and 64-bit to execute the correct instructions, this is what allows 32-bit software to run just as fast on an x64 OS. I read somewhere you are a programmer too (sorry if I'm mistaken) so if you understand ASM there is a concept called "Heaven's Gate" which allows you as a programmer to switch parts of your own code to 64-bit when your main program is 32-bit (or vice versa). Here's something for your holiday coding analysis: https://gist.github.com/Cr4sh/76b66b612a5d1dc2c614

So speaking of Assembly, a lot of people still prefer to code ASM to some extent (I do mainly parts of code that need extreme optimization, but many others still write full ASM applications). And in that case converting code to 64-bit is not as much of a walk in the park as with Visual C++

 

[razor1]

WOW64 used to be an emulator in the Itanium days but on x86-64 it actually just switches the CPU back and forth from native 32-bit mode and 64-bit to execute the correct instructions, this is what allows 32-bit software to run just as fast on an x64 OS. I read somewhere you are a programmer too (sorry if I'm mistaken) so if you understand ASM there is a concept called "Heaven's Gate" which allows you as a programmer to switch parts of your own code to 64-bit when your main program is 32-bit (or vice versa). Here's something for your holiday coding analysis: https://gist.github.com/Cr4sh/76b66b612a5d1dc2c614

So speaking of Assembly, a lot of people still prefer to code ASM to some extent (I do mainly parts of code that need extreme optimization, but many others still write full ASM applications). And in that case converting code to 64-bit is not as much of a walk in the park as with Visual C++

I haven't been programming anything from a low level in quite some time, but WOW pun intended, learning something new ever day! thx!

Yeah I'm familiar with haven's gate.

 

[luminousone]

x86 opcode layout is pure madness, if their plans are to drop some mostly useless/unused instructions, and rework the opcode layout, putting all the instructions on different opcodes, but still more or less having all of the same useful instructions, then it is very possible that it would not cause much of an issue, recompile, and even assembler might just work mostly after a recompile as well.

If they can work it so that the highest bit or 3 of an opcode defines the instruction size, have a flat opcode layout, and put the register address into the same byte(right now the register address to spread across a prefix byte before the opcode and a postfix byte after the opcode, and the register postfix byte also sets the address mode).

The decoder for x86 is the biggest thing holding x86 back, make that sane, and maybe they could expand to a 10 issue wide or wider chip.

 

[Shintai]

Looks like Intel may have confirmed on their own that they think the Zen chip is a real competitor.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cp...eportedly_working_on_a_new_x86_architecture/1

Its it the same source that claimed Skylake would contain morphcores. (Yes, wccftech is also the source for this one).

 

[Shintai]

32 bit software is become legacy, Firefox is 32 bit that is the only one that I can think of from a browser stand point that doesn't have a 64 bit version (although others have recompiled it to 64 bit, like Waterfox). All software that I use on my windows machine is 64 bit.

Mobile and cell phones too have gotten away from 32 bit as well. Now having said, yeah many companies still use 32 bit and need 32 bit but in 3 years down the road is it going to be the same or can those things be emulated with enough performance or just recompiled with a few modifications.

This isn't like Itanium where software companies have to rewrite their entire stack.....

Just FYI Linux distros are looking into dropping 32 bit on their OS in the next few years. MS pretty much did the same thing too as Windows 10 is 64 bit only now.

Removing 32bit makes no difference. CPUs can still run 8bit code as well.

Ah ok,

Well Windows 64 bit can emulate legacy 32 bit applications, it doesn't run it natively, it emulates through WOW64 which is a 32 bit emulator. There is no need for the processors to have 32 bit anymore, cause its all taken care of by the OS.

There is very little cost to covert to 64 bit, cause really the only main differences between 32 bit and 64 bit, are header sizes, pointer sizes, which should be taken care of by a recompile yeah maybe some tweaks here and there but that's about it.

64bit Windows still run 32bit natively. 16bit however is removed. If you want 32bit removed, you will have to look 20 years into the future or so.

 

[NamelessPFG]

While I'm not surprised that Intel would consider putting the axe to seemingly unused functionality today, I won't be surprised in the least if that results in even more old game incompatibilities than we face today.

If push comes to shove, though, that's why I've got my P4EE retrogaming box for the Win9x/XP-era stuff that my 4770K rig won't already run just fine. Sometimes, you just gotta have period-appropriate hardware to run the software.

I think you are underestimating the IPC, I think the 1180+ score posted by the Japanese guy was base clock IPC, making it possibly faster than Haswell at very least equal.

Low clocks and 200mhz turbo headroom is not great for gaming, it is the reason why my 4460 is not used for gaming, why I use a 4790 as a gaming system. The higher clock spead and wider turbo are great. If it can game with Skylake i5's already and be unoptimised (ie: low native IMC on ES is 2133, beta motherboards, flimsy turbo that sometimes doesn't even boost) I think it is far more promising than most want to believe. Caution is fine but out right negitivity isn't. Why would AMD waste 5 years of development to develop a Sandy bridge processor when the stake of the company is on it? AMD did what intel had to do with Pentium 4 and D, roll out your rubbish architecture but on the side work on the new one and fix the mistakes made. Intel did that with Conroe, AMD has done that before with Hammer, they will do it again with Ryzen.

Another indicator for me is AMD are not stalling this CPU, they seem very confident in its performance but they are not excessively releasing market fud like the BD era marketing. They are very secretive on this, but when need to they are quite confident.

Believe me, I want to see the AMD I knew a decade and a half ago back in full force, when the Athlon/XP/64 lines gave Intel a swift kick in the ass. Intel has become too complacent these days.

However, I can't be certain Ryzen will deliver what we're looking for until we see some independent benchmarks and testing. It doesn't help matters much that I'm looking for game benchmarks that most reviewers wouldn't bother with, since most of the usual stuff focuses on more mainstream, GPU-limited games.

Also note that we don't get to see a given architecture's general overclocking headroom until after we see some final silicon in the hands of reviewers for a few months. Getting an extra 1+ GHz easily does wonders for overall single-threaded performance, and it's only because of that overclocking headroom that old Sandy Bridge CPUs are still seen as viable today, even as more recent benchmarks have shown where it hits a wall compared to Skylake.

All things considered, the most I can feel about Ryzen at the moment is cautiously optimistic until I have the information I need - independent gaming benchmarks and overclocking headroom. If it delivers well enough on both counts for the cash, then I might actually find myself recommending an AMD build for the first time in years.

 

[AbRASiON]

Even with CanardPC, with their gaming benchmarks still looks to be the IPC of somewhere between Haswell and Ivy Bridge. Gaming benchmarks are more telling in this regard. So sitting around and trying to extrapolate them from something we don't have enough information on, just doesn't do anyone any good as it can be lower or higher, its all up in the air.

AMD has hyped it enough, they did so to get their stock price up, got people to talk about it, in more ways than one, where websites have stated it beats Broadwell with a similar core count and frequency. Which as for right now for enthusiast systems are the fastest chips available in market. if you don't consider that hype, not sure what else is cause, if it comes out and those gaming benchmarks come out as real or close to real, well that is over hype. AMD might not have done it directly because they were only showing specific tests (blender and handbrake) but none the less others have taken AMD's word for it and attributed it to every application. AKA Polaris, it wasn't hyped by AMD when it came to performance but websites, forum members did, look how that turned out. AMD also hyped Polaris's power consumption levels, look how that came out. There is a fine line between managing expectations and marketing, if they can't manage expectations then marketing is automatically bad.

If the CanardPC benchmarks are correct, we can only pray that the 8 core Zen chip is capable of overclocking to a bare minimum of 4 to 4.5ghz on air, just like many Intel CPUs
If Kaby Lake can make 5ghz kinda easy (it's not dead simple but it does sound more common) then the Zen needs to at least come kinda close.
If it's struggling to do 3.4ghz and instead doing 3.15 on this ES chip, that's not good, but let's assume they are taking it easy right now,....

I don't care if it's beneficial with twice the cores, or two hundred times the cores, in /most/ operations, the CPU needs an semi-decent IPC.
We'll see how it goes but my personal expectation is that in single threaded applications, at the same clock speed it'll be at least 20% slower than Kaby Lake and more worrying, I suspect it won't overclock as high either.
(Translation: for enthusiasts like us, it's not only 20% slower than KL, it's like 30 or 35% slower due to less OC headroom too)

Pure theory, of course, pray I'm wrong, but I can't imagine it coming within 20% of a max OC KL.

 

[funkydmunky]

If the CanardPC benchmarks are correct, we can only pray that the 8 core Zen chip is capable of overclocking to a bare minimum of 4 to 4.5ghz on air, just like many Intel CPUs
If Kaby Lake can make 5ghz kinda easy (it's not dead simple but it does sound more common) then the Zen needs to at least come kinda close.
If it's struggling to do 3.4ghz and instead doing 3.15 on this ES chip, that's not good, but let's assume they are taking it easy right now,....

I don't care if it's beneficial with twice the cores, or two hundred times the cores, in /most/ operations, the CPU needs an semi-decent IPC.
We'll see how it goes but my personal expectation is that in single threaded applications, at the same clock speed it'll be at least 20% slower than Kaby Lake and more worrying, I suspect it won't overclock as high either.
(Translation: for enthusiasts like us, it's not only 20% slower than KL, it's like 30 or 35% slower due to less OC headroom too)

Pure theory, of course, pray I'm wrong, but I can't imagine it coming within 20% of a max OC KL.

So it must compete with Intel's 16 thread chips at half the price, but then your stating it must compete with Intel's 4/8 thread chips @ high O/C's as well?
So it needs to be a miracle chip?

 

[realworld]

Here is something interesting from that same French magazine that's hidden on the last page.

http://i.imgur.com/ULV4p2F.png

Notice the binary code:
010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111

Using this tool here, it translates to:

ZenOC@Air=5G

So, they were able to overclock this Zen processor to 5ghz on air!?

 

[SighTurtle]

Here is something interesting from that same French magazine that's hidden on the last page.

http://i.imgur.com/ULV4p2F.png

Notice the binary code:
010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111

Using this tool here, it translates to:


So, they were able to overclock this Zen processor to 5ghz on air!?

Good question, and they are doubling down.

 

[razor1]

Good question, and they are doubling down.

yeah they are guessing, that's what the emoji is cold sweet on forehead.

 

[SighTurtle]

Numbers from latest image turn into: Intel GPU = AMD

So...nothing.

Edit: Here are the numbers:
010010010110111001110100011001010110110000100000010001110101000001010101001000000011110100100000010000010100110101000100

 

[Shintai]

Numbers from latest image turn into: Intel GPU = AMD

So...nothing.

Edit: Here are the numbers:
010010010110111001110100011001010110110000100000010001110101000001010101001000000011110100100000010000010100110101000100

You can then add it with the anger the writer got with Intel for some reason. Then you start to get Charlie/Rottenberg homemade BS.

 

[Tup3x]

Numbers from latest image turn into: Intel GPU = AMD

So...nothing.

Edit: Here are the numbers:
010010010110111001110100011001010110110000100000010001110101000001010101001000000011110100100000010000010100110101000100

No. That's old one from March 2016 and turned out to be quite accurate. Since the Intel & AMD licensing deal (although there are rumours that Intel is planing Intel CPU+AMD GPU MCM).

This is the newest binary:
010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111
ZenOC@Air=5G

 

[Shintai]

No. That's old one from March 2016 and turned out to be quite accurate. Since the Intel & AMD licensing deal (although there are rumours that Intel is planing Intel CPU+AMD GPU MCM).

This is the newest binary:
010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111
ZenOC@Air=5G

And it was BS. I am sure the excuse will be that only the ES sample could. Because who really thinks an octo core Zen will OC to 5Ghz on 14LPP using air? But hey, whatever sells the most


Note the Skylake rumour too.

 

[Tup3x]

They are definitely teasing but there are rumours about 4,3 GHz stable overclock on air and higher for suicide runs. It does sound like a bit over 4 GHz should be doable. It doesn't looks like Zen is a dud when it comes to clock speed but we'll see. CPC has leaked a lot of stuff before (if I remember correctly they did benched Athlon 64 way before the official release) so I do not have any reason to not believe the Zen bench leak.

 

[Shintai]

They are definitely teasing but there are rumours about 4,3 GHz stable overclock on air and higher for suicide runs. It does sound like a bit over 4 GHz should be doable. It doesn't looks like Zen is a dud when it comes to clock speed but we'll see. CPC has leaked a lot of stuff before (if I remember correctly they did benched Athlon 64 way before the official release).

Everyone benched K8 before release. Even as low as 800Mhz prototypes because AMD knew it had a winner. Same with Bobcat.

 

[dgz]

If the CanardPC benchmarks are correct, we can only pray that the 8 core Zen chip is capable of overclocking to a bare minimum of 4 to 4.5ghz on air, just like many Intel CPUs
If Kaby Lake can make 5ghz kinda easy (it's not dead simple but it does sound more common) then the Zen needs to at least come kinda close.
If it's struggling to do 3.4ghz and instead doing 3.15 on this ES chip, that's not good, but let's assume they are taking it easy right now,....

I don't care if it's beneficial with twice the cores, or two hundred times the cores, in /most/ operations, the CPU needs an semi-decent IPC.
We'll see how it goes but my personal expectation is that in single threaded applications, at the same clock speed it'll be at least 20% slower than Kaby Lake and more worrying, I suspect it won't overclock as high either.
(Translation: for enthusiasts like us, it's not only 20% slower than KL, it's like 30 or 35% slower due to less OC headroom too)

Pure theory, of course, pray I'm wrong, but I can't imagine it coming within 20% of a max OC KL.

Do you honestly expect an 8 core chip to clock as high as a 4-core chip?

 

[Armenius]

From a performance standpoint it boils down to max attainable frequency; at 4GHz it would trade blows with a stock 6900K in threaded applications (and Broadwell has virtually no clock headroom), while more or less matching the 6700K in games. If it's stuck at 3.4GHz (which isn't a stretch, remember how poorly Broadwell clocked?) it better be $349.
At the very least it looks like we're back to the Phenom II vs i7-9xx days, AMD will give you significantly better multithreaded performance for less while not being awful at single threaded applications (unlike the disaster that was Bulldozer); I'd probably still buy Intel as my primary gaming rig, but Ryzen will put a cap on how much Intel can charge.

A 4.5 GHz overclock on an i7-6900K is not uncommon. At a 22% overclock, this 8-core chip has as much or a little more overclocking headroom as the typical 4-core i7-6700K.

 

[OrangeKhrush]

Even with CanardPC, with their gaming benchmarks still looks to be the IPC of somewhere between Haswell and Ivy Bridge. Gaming benchmarks are more telling in this regard. So sitting around and trying to extrapolate them from something we don't have enough information on, just doesn't do anyone any good as it can be lower or higher, its all up in the air.

AMD has hyped it enough, they did so to get their stock price up, got people to talk about it, in more ways than one, where websites have stated it beats Broadwell with a similar core count and frequency. Which as for right now for enthusiast systems are the fastest chips available in market. if you don't consider that hype, not sure what else is cause, if it comes out and those gaming benchmarks come out as real or close to real, well that is over hype. AMD might not have done it directly because they were only showing specific tests (blender and handbrake) but none the less others have taken AMD's word for it and attributed it to every application. AKA Polaris, it wasn't hyped by AMD when it came to performance but websites, forum members did, look how that turned out. AMD also hyped Polaris's power consumption levels, look how that came out. There is a fine line between managing expectations and marketing, if they can't manage expectations then marketing is automatically bad.

The 6900K was beaten by a i5 and i7 and the common denominator is a higher base clock and higher turbo, things games love, not threads. The Zen CPU around 3.4Ghz will perform very close to CPC's ratings on the 6900K which is still in comparison to Intel Skylake in gaming so it is not like a FX9590 that needs to run at 5Ghz to barely be competative with Sandy and Ivy quad cores, this is a low frequency chip that slap bang sits in the middle of an i5 Skylake plethora in games that don't scale beyond 4 threads and knowing it was tested on an unbranded beta board with iffy turbo issues considering non of the main MB manufacturers have a retail level X370 board yet. Again it was such a disadvantage yet low clocks can and knowing that AMD want it to run around 3.4Ghz factor that 10% jump and it is right at the 107% mark set by the 6900K.

I don't get this clinging to Ivy bridge rhetoric, it seems more like a dying hope and dream for some people who are hell bent on wanting AMD to perform at that level for some kind of ritualistic inuendo. There is enough emperical evidence that Zen is considerably better than most believed 6 months ago, even myself, I was more expecting haswell levels due to the nature of AMD's business model needing a arch to leverage market gains on and to be honest if AMD was wasting 5 years to attain 20% IPC gains to hit ivy bridge levels then they probably deserve to go bankrupt. The laws of nature are simple, aMD is headed by a very astute and ambitious person, Lisa Su would not aim for 2011 performance, she has always been about high performance for the best marketable position.

My last point is unlike Bulldozer where the then hopeless AMD marketing regime who made false claims on slides touting the chips up, this time AMD have done nothing to pump the hype up, the hype is coming from credible sources, those that were vermently against Bulldozer, Everyone I know that had privy to the ES chips has been exceedingly bouyed up on Zens performance potential.

Right now I am giving benefit of the doubt, that AMD may have delivered the impotus Intel needs to pull finger or fall behind. The only thing I see is stong competition makes pricing great and choice great so I am all aboard this, I am tired of paying 3k for garbo entry level intel quads just because, and I don't have 30K to blow on a 6950X.

 

[doz]

The 6900K was beaten by a i5 and i7 and the common denominator is a higher base clock and higher turbo, things games love, not threads. The Zen CPU around 3.4Ghz will perform very close to CPC's ratings on the 6900K which is still in comparison to Intel Skylake in gaming so it is not like a FX9590 that needs to run at 5Ghz to barely be competative with Sandy and Ivy quad cores, this is a low frequency chip that slap bang sits in the middle of an i5 Skylake plethora in games that don't scale beyond 4 threads and knowing it was tested on an unbranded beta board with iffy turbo issues considering non of the main MB manufacturers have a retail level X370 board yet. Again it was such a disadvantage yet low clocks can and knowing that AMD want it to run around 3.4Ghz factor that 10% jump and it is right at the 107% mark set by the 6900K.

I don't get this clinging to Ivy bridge rhetoric, it seems more like a dying hope and dream for some people who are hell bent on wanting AMD to perform at that level for some kind of ritualistic inuendo. There is enough emperical evidence that Zen is considerably better than most believed 6 months ago, even myself, I was more expecting haswell levels due to the nature of AMD's business model needing a arch to leverage market gains on and to be honest if AMD was wasting 5 years to attain 20% IPC gains to hit ivy bridge levels then they probably deserve to go bankrupt. The laws of nature are simple, aMD is headed by a very astute and ambitious person, Lisa Su would not aim for 2011 performance, she has always been about high performance for the best marketable position.

My last point is unlike Bulldozer where the then hopeless AMD marketing regime who made false claims on slides touting the chips up, this time AMD have done nothing to pump the hype up, the hype is coming from credible sources, those that were vermently against Bulldozer, Everyone I know that had privy to the ES chips has been exceedingly bouyed up on Zens performance potential.

Right now I am giving benefit of the doubt, that AMD may have delivered the impotus Intel needs to pull finger or fall behind. The only thing I see is stong competition makes pricing great and choice great so I am all aboard this, I am tired of paying 3k for garbo entry level intel quads just because, and I don't have 30K to blow on a 6950X.

I got my 6700k on sale for $280 and others got it cheaper.

If AMD can provide a chip that is better and at the same price, Id gladly sell my Intel shit tomorrow (which is only 2 months old). Then again, this wont happen.

 

[razor1]

The 6900K was beaten by a i5 and i7 and the common denominator is a higher base clock and higher turbo, things games love, not threads. The Zen CPU around 3.4Ghz will perform very close to CPC's ratings on the 6900K which is still in comparison to Intel Skylake in gaming so it is not like a FX9590 that needs to run at 5Ghz to barely be competative with Sandy and Ivy quad cores, this is a low frequency chip that slap bang sits in the middle of an i5 Skylake plethora in games that don't scale beyond 4 threads and knowing it was tested on an unbranded beta board with iffy turbo issues considering non of the main MB manufacturers have a retail level X370 board yet. Again it was such a disadvantage yet low clocks can and knowing that AMD want it to run around 3.4Ghz factor that 10% jump and it is right at the 107% mark set by the 6900K.

I don't get this clinging to Ivy bridge rhetoric, it seems more like a dying hope and dream for some people who are hell bent on wanting AMD to perform at that level for some kind of ritualistic inuendo. There is enough emperical evidence that Zen is considerably better than most believed 6 months ago, even myself, I was more expecting haswell levels due to the nature of AMD's business model needing a arch to leverage market gains on and to be honest if AMD was wasting 5 years to attain 20% IPC gains to hit ivy bridge levels then they probably deserve to go bankrupt. The laws of nature are simple, aMD is headed by a very astute and ambitious person, Lisa Su would not aim for 2011 performance, she has always been about high performance for the best marketable position.

My last point is unlike Bulldozer where the then hopeless AMD marketing regime who made false claims on slides touting the chips up, this time AMD have done nothing to pump the hype up, the hype is coming from credible sources, those that were vermently against Bulldozer, Everyone I know that had privy to the ES chips has been exceedingly bouyed up on Zens performance potential.

Right now I am giving benefit of the doubt, that AMD may have delivered the impotus Intel needs to pull finger or fall behind. The only thing I see is stong competition makes pricing great and choice great so I am all aboard this, I am tired of paying 3k for garbo entry level intel quads just because, and I don't have 30K to blow on a 6950X.

Well since you don't see the relationship to IPC and Clock speed with conjunction with frame rates you would say that! Black and white man *specific quoted in red*, the rest of it, I'm not going to speculate on because much to what you say there hasn't been anything that shows me otherwise (at least nothing that has been tested to show otherwise)

I don't expect it to be like a bulldozer launch, but I'm not going to give AMD high fives, till I see tests independent of AMD being done, cause too many times they have shown they hyped too much.

 

[SighTurtle]

Spoiler

Thanks to the OP at /r/AMD_Stock, we have all the pages on the Zen preview,
The album of photos: http://imgur.com/a/KOXPd

Also included are comments summarizing CanardPC's article on Intel's outlook, including this:

So, a forum member at Anandtech posted his own summary of the Intel article, about the same as the one I posted from /r/amd_stock, but a little more fleshed out. Whatever the truth of it, I still feel its interesting enough to post it.

I actually read the full Intel article from Canard since I speak French. Here's the most important points:

• They say Intel's in the most precarious time ever in its existence.
• Employees blame Krzanich as the main cause, he's impatient and eager and keeps changing/canceling projects before they get anywhere.
• Many employees/engineers got fired in recent times and they say Krzanich treats engineers (replacing them) like supermarket cashiers, many new hires are inexperienced and not getting trained well enough. The mood in the company is at an all-time low and many employees are in fear for their jobs.
• Murphy Renduchintala is said to actually be a glimmer of hope in the whole mess as since he's been brought on he's been able to focus R&D properly and actually has technical background and makes decisions that engineers are able to get behind on. Some say they're hoping he'll replace Krzanich as CEO once they hope he'll get the boot from the board.
• 10nm is suffering all kinds of problems, both technical as well as management problems. The first samples that got in apparently were extremely disappointing in performance, not to talk about yields.
• Kaby-Lake as well as Cannon-Lake were supposedly late designs just to save face and management was just hoping AMD wouldn't compete. Cannon-Lake is said to bring almost no architectural improvements.
• 10nm will sample in late 2017 but production won't happen till 2018.
• Intel has nothing concrete till 2019.
• Long-term, Intel is said to be very worried about x86 as ARM is gaining ever more. If they can't keep Apple happy in the Macbooks that would be the first sign of the decline of x86.
• Because of the above, they say that they have one CPU project which can do hybrid x86/ARM execution and they say they'll have the first prototype wafers with this within the next few months.
• There's an Intel CPU AMD GPU MCM in the works.

They state the sources on all of this were off-the record interviews with both current and ex-employees.

 

[Shintai]

So much BS

 

[blkt]

So much BS

 

[zrav]

x86 opcode layout is pure madness, if their plans are to drop some mostly useless/unused instructions, and rework the opcode layout, putting all the instructions on different opcodes, but still more or less having all of the same useful instructions, then it is very possible that it would not cause much of an issue, recompile, and even assembler might just work mostly after a recompile as well.

The decoder for x86 is the biggest thing holding x86 back, make that sane, and maybe they could expand to a 10 issue wide or wider chip.

Current x86 is a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack on top of a baroque architecture.
I'd say even requiring "just" a recompile is not significantly better for acceptance than switching architectures altogether. And in that case we should move to ARM.

 

[luminousone]

Current x86 is a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack on top of a baroque architecture.
I'd say even requiring "just" a recompile is not significantly better for acceptance than switching architectures altogether. And in that case we should move to ARM.

x86 for all its faults, still has better opportunities for instruction level parallelism then arm, The actual working instructions are fine, its just that their layout is madness. It also has wider and more useful SIMD/MIMD.

And if we are forcing a uarch change, we should move to IBM zSeries chips not ARM!!!!!!

 

[5150Joker]

that is as usefull as a cock flavoured lollipop to the lay person.

Actually this would sell very well in many markets.

 

[funkydmunky]

Actually this would sell very well in TOO many markets.

 

[Magic Hate Ball]

And it was BS. I am sure the excuse will be that only the ES sample could. Because who really thinks an octo core Zen will OC to 5Ghz on 14LPP using air? But hey, whatever sells the most

Note the Skylake rumour too.

I believe Buildzoid ("Actually Hardcore Overclocking" Youtuber) had hinted that the 5ghz was a single core number for OC, but that 4.4ghz may be the region to look for an overall 8c OC.

All rumors and hearsay till we have chips in hand out of NDA.