AMD - Zen chitchat

[Ozaron]

Sadly you can't keep the boot kits.


PS. when will spoiler handles be a thing

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Sadly you can't keep the boot kits.


PS. when will spoiler handles be a thing

It will be a retail A6 9500:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment..._kit_from_amd/

[Ozaron]

It will be a retail A6 9500:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment..._kit_from_amd/

Yeah, I know. They told me all about it in the rest of the email(s). I would have appreciated being able to hold onto it though, which you can't, as they went them back. I can't imagine that AMD doesn't have enough 9500s to ship out to us weirdo early adopter APU builder (with no other Ryzen CPU) types though, so why they want them back is a little beyond me. Can't be worth that much.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yeah, I know. They told me all about it in the rest of the email(s). I would have appreciated being able to hold onto it though, which you can't, as they went them back. I can't imagine that AMD doesn't have enough 9500s to ship out to us weirdo early adopter APU builder (with no other Ryzen CPU) types though, so why they want them back is a little beyond me. Can't be worth that much.

Investors would not like them giving away free CPUs in the 1000s I suspect!! OTH,might be worth doing a few quick benchmarks to see how much better then new APUs are though!!

[DanceswithUnix]

Investors would not like them giving away free CPUs in the 1000s I suspect!! OTH,might be worth doing a few quick benchmarks to see how much better then new APUs are though!!

Well they are second hand now, can't be sold as new. Makes sense to cut down the number that get used for this, though in the end if they boost the AMD market share and sell some more motherboards that probably isn't a bad thing. Perhaps they will all just end up on ebay

[watercooled]

*you get some very interesting results if you look at the theoretical latencies in that review. 14 cycles at 2933MHz gives a theoretical 47ns, v 70ns measured latency. 16 cycles at 2400MHz gives a theoretical 67ns, against a measured latency of 57ns. Somewhere along the line something's gone fishy with the Intel latency testing....

Presumably prefetching interfering with their testing methodology? That's just reminded me of a rant I never had. Testing latencies is a strange one - I remember reading some people complaining about some software being 'optimised' for Ryzen after initially poor results. They didn't seem to get that there's literally one correct answer for memory/cache access latencies and measuring it correctly may require some software adjustments to allow for some architectural differences e.g. prefetching algorithms. I wonder if said people would also complain if the Intel results increase if they get fixed. Maybe they'll be too correct then?

It will be interesting to see if Ryzen+ improves in this regard. Currently being stuck with 16gb of 2400mhz DDR4 does kind of not help my own circumstances when it comes to my next upgrade.

I wouldn't be overly concerned about it personally, I also have 2400 DDR4 and it seems like, while memory benchmarks and some synthetics show major differences, they're generally fairly minor for actual applications. That's for CPU performance of course - GPUs obviously love as much bandwidth as you can throw at them!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I wouldn't be overly concerned about it personally, I also have 2400 DDR4 and it seems like, while memory benchmarks and some synthetics show major differences, they're generally fairly minor for actual applications. That's for CPU performance of course - GPUs obviously love as much bandwidth as you can throw at them!

It depends on the game,and guess what game scales very well with RAM speed. You guessed it!!





Having said that it makes me wonder whether the high memory lateny with Ryzen might be the issue here too.

[kompukare]

Seems Lenovo are going to release two ThinkPads with Raven Ridge.
The E485 and E585 which are based on the 14" E480 and the 15.6" E580 respectively.

So that means at last a Raven Ridge laptop with a TrackPoint

(Source: https://cloud.kapostcontent.net/pub/...IfjbsvUQDKs1jA, which seems to be where NBC got their info)
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo....285214.0.html
https://www.computerbase.de/2018-02/...e485-e585-amd/

The ThinkWiki doesn't really cover the E series that well, and only has entries for the Haswell models (E440 and E540) on the English site, and Skylake (E460 and E560) on the German sites:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:E440
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:E540

http://thinkwiki.de/E460/E465
http://thinkwiki.de/E560/E565

[watercooled]

It would seem Samsung weren't being overly optimistic with their single threaded performance claims for the Exynos M3 cores! https://www.anandtech.com/show/12460...-the-galaxy-s9



That's an impressive generational jump, I look forward to seeing the rest of the benchmarks including power consumption!

In other news I see some places (wccf included) complaining about 4/6GB RAM as though it's going to impact performance somehow. Seriously??? And with the current RAM situation, the last thing it needs is for one of the best-selling phones to put yet more unnecessary demand on the market!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It would seem Samsung weren't being overly optimistic with their single threaded performance claims for the Exynos M3 cores! https://www.anandtech.com/show/12460...-the-galaxy-s9



That's an impressive generational jump, I look forward to seeing the rest of the benchmarks including power consumption!

In other news I see some places (wccf included) complaining about 4/6GB RAM as though it's going to impact performance somehow. Seriously??? And with the current RAM situation, the last thing it needs is for one of the best-selling phones to put yet more unnecessary demand on the market!

The tech sites are also fawning over the camera being able to switch between two apertures. There have been sub £100 compacts which have had variable apertures for years.

[watercooled]

I didn't bother looking at the rest to be honest - I was only interested in Exynos performance vs the Snapdragon.

It would be really nice if this class of SoC along with a decent screen e.g. good quality 1920x1080 IPS LCD along with decent build quality etc made it to more mid-range phones. I'm really not all that bothered about the 'fancy' cameras, pixel density race, thinness, etc.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I didn't bother looking at the rest to be honest - I was only interested in Exynos performance vs the Snapdragon.

It would be really nice if this class of SoC along with a decent screen e.g. good quality 1920x1080 IPS LCD along with decent build quality etc made it to more mid-range phones. I'm really not all that bothered about the 'fancy' cameras, pixel density race, thinness, etc.

The biggest improvement is what you showed - the CPU performance is what tech sites should be concentrating on more. At some point,the phones should be able to replace even laptops for more normal usage,ie,using it as a hub which you can run a larger screen,etc off as some companies have tried to do in the past. The other aspect I am interested in is dropping the power of other parts such as the wireless modules and screen,so we can have more and more phones move towards true 24 hour battery life even if you using things like GPS,internet,etc.

Instead they are concentrating on one of the cheaper parts(which cameras tend to be),and the fact it is doing things which even cheapo 35MM compacts did in the 1990s!! It was like with the tech sites fawning over "glass lens elements" in a LG phone last year.Like,why is it such a big deal in a £600+ device - I actually thought they already had glass elements and variable apertures. I just hate when simple features are just marketed as being "revolutionary". If that is the case,I am going to stick with a cheapo sub £200 phone and get a £300 compact which by mobile phone standards will be space age for the next few years!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It looks like this B350 board works fine with ECC RAM:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment...rime_b350plus/

[watercooled]

The biggest improvement is what you showed - the CPU performance is what tech sites should be concentrating on more. At some point,the phones should be able to replace even laptops for more normal usage,ie,using it as a hub which you can run a larger screen,etc off as some companies have tried to do in the past. The other aspect I am interested in is dropping the power of other parts such as the wireless modules and screen,so we can have more and more phones move towards true 24 hour battery life even if you using things like GPS,internet,etc.

Instead they are concentrating on one of the cheaper parts(which cameras tend to be),and the fact it is doing things which even cheapo 35MM compacts did in the 1990s!! It was like with the tech sites fawning over "glass lens elements" in a LG phone last year.Like,why is it such a big deal in a £600+ device - I actually thought they already had glass elements and variable apertures. I just hate when simple features are just marketed as being "revolutionary". If that is the case,I am going to stick with a cheapo sub £200 phone and get a £300 compact which by mobile phone standards will be space age for the next few years!!

Instead of all the marketing gimmicks, I'd sooner have a reasonably-sized phone with a decent battery rather than concentrating on paper-thinness, protroding bezels made of some sort of shock-absorbing material to protect the glass screen rather than something perceived as high quality but vulnerable to damage i.e. glass/metal, decent attention paid to the radios, etc. Some of the Galaxy 'active' phones seem to tick a lot of those boxes (at least they did last time I checked which was a while ago TBF) but they are even more expensive than the base model and seldom available in the UK which is a shame.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Instead of all the marketing gimmicks, I'd sooner have a reasonably-sized phone with a decently sized battery rather than concentrating on paper-thinness, protroding bezels made of some sort of shock-absorbing material to protect the glass screen rather than something perceived as high quality but extremely vulnerable to damage i.e. glass/metal, decent attention paid to the radios, etc. Some of the Galaxy 'active' phones seem to tick a lot of those boxes (at least they did last time I checked which was a while ago) but are even more expensive than the base model and seldom available in the UK which is a shame.

Motorola introduced waterproof phones long before many others(Defy,Moto G,etc) and did the super tough Force range,so its possible,but ever since Lenovo bought them up,reliability and support seems rather meh which is a shame.

[watercooled]

Yeah I was aware of the Motorola ones when I was looking but I can't remember what it was that put me off. TBH it was around the time of the Snapdragon 810 so that might have had something to do with it. I dodged that by choosing a Huawei phone which used their HiSilicon 955 chip which fitted with my requirements quite well - decent power management, a focus on useful CPU performance rather than chasing benchmarks with a huge GPU, etc. That, and I had to return two Moto X (2014 IIRC) because of a fairly severe screen issue they both had (dimmer and distorted colours towards one end of the OLED panel and evident screen burn out of the box!) At that point I assumed it was a bad batch rather than a one-off so gave up on it.

Something I've picked up on is that at least some phones do seem to change specs somewhat after the initial batches. A friend had a Galaxy S5 which had considerably faster storage than the original review models!