I'm curious whether we really will have to install Windows 10 to use the Ryzen CPU as AMD and Microsoft proclaimed. I would rather not and use it on Windows 7. I looked at a JayzTwoCents YouTube video where he ran benchmarks on a Intel Skylake processor on Windows 7 with no apparent issues. It too is supposed to only run on Windows 10. I wonder if the hardware abstract layer for Ryzen is different enough to require support of Windows 10 and isn't supported in Windows 7. I understand that Microsoft support for Ryzen will only be for Windows 10 but that is the case for all hardware now in Windows 7 since it is at EOL.

I did some research on this because... I am NOT moving to 10 until all the datamining and spying crap is removed (pipe dream, I know it will never be removed), but I want Zen. I kept hearing the whole "only win10 is supported" on the new hardware (both Zen and Kaby Lake), but all the tech sites kept asking MS what "support" in this case means. None got a reply.

The best research I could find from one site was that there are microcode improvements to making the power-saving throttling states happen faster. Basically, what I found is that there's the ability, only if supported by the OS, to change the clock speed in as little as 15ms instead of the normal ~100ms. And in the case of turbo-speed, the microcode allows the kernel to know that there is a specific core that is running 300MHz faster and it can put the single-threaded task on that one core. .......but if you're like me and you turn that turbo-core crap off, who cares?

The other thing I found that is "only supported in 10" is "fine grained clock gating." I had absolutely no idea what that was, and articles wouldn't explain it..they would only just mention it as a buzzword. If I understood the wikipedia article on it correctly, basically.. when an area of the circuitry is not going to be needed in the foreseeable future (fractions of a second), power-down entire branches of the circuitry for a few clock cycles until it is needed, thus reducing power consumption and heat output.



so... from my understanding of what all I had read is.. you'll get all of the cores, at full speed, with throttling of speeds when idle, and you'll still get turbo speed. The problem is that the clock-rate changes won't be 15ms, and the single-threaded task that would benefit from turbo core won't get locked to the turbo-speed core. Annnnnnd that's about it. That's all that 10 offers over 7 on the "this CPU is only supported in 10" front.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

The best research I could find from one site was that there are microcode improvements to making the power-saving throttling states happen faster. Basically, what I found is that there's the ability, only if supported by the OS, to change the clock speed in as little as 15ms instead of the normal ~100ms. And in the case of turbo-speed, the microcode allows the kernel to know that there is a specific core that is running 300MHz faster and it can put the single-threaded task on that one core. .......but if you're like me and you turn that turbo-core crap off, who cares?

The other thing I found that is "only supported in 10" is "fine grained clock gating." I had absolutely no idea what that was, and articles wouldn't explain it..they would only just mention it as a buzzword. If I understood the wikipedia article on it correctly, basically.. when an area of the circuitry is not going to be needed in the foreseeable future (fractions of a second), power-down entire branches of the circuitry for a few clock cycles until it is needed, thus reducing power consumption and heat output.

I think your "who the crap cares" comment is succinct. When Ryzen debuts on Enthusiast X370 motherboards, I am for sure going to turn off every Turbo and power saving feature of the motherboard, chip and chipset and overclock the crap out it to see what AMD has birthed. I will be using the chip in my crunchers in the same fashion as my FX processors and push the systems to max efficiency on BOINC and my projects. I will be curious to see just what the system power needs are when overclocked compared to my overclocked FX processors. Since the chips are based on a 95W TDP package, I hope to see a little less power consumed or about the same power consumption when overclocked. Hope that AMD has a winner this time.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

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Despite what MS wants manufactures are not cutting support for Windows7 any time soon. It is still nearly half on the computers on the planet.
To get the support of the newest devices in an older OS you just grab the latest drivers from the manufacture. Sometimes that does require rolling drivers into the OS installation, but that is a pretty simple process.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-1700-cpu-specs-confirmed/

Oh is that so! If this is true then this could be a cpu crunchers wet Dream..

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http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-1700-cpu-specs-confirmed/

Oh is that so! If this is true then this could be a cpu crunchers wet Dream..

Thanks for the link -=Vyper=-. First time I've seen any information on how many SKU's were going to be released and the official part designators. The Ryzen 7 1700X looks particularly interesting to me. Often the best bang for the buck comes from the mid-high performance chips over their top of the line binned parts. Just give the chip some decent enthusiast water cooling and push the clock multipliers. You can almost always achieve better overclocking than the top binned part with its stock cooling solution. Case in point, my stock 3.3 Ghz FX-8300 running at 4.0 Ghz non-turboed all day with nothing but a multiplier bump that I purchased from Amazon for $105.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Yes, AMD fans have been burned before. They'll be wanting hard independent data before committing. My impression so far is that it may compete well with i5 and Skylake in general, but we'll see.

It's been a while since I have bought a new Intel proc, but if the prices stated above are accurate, doesn't that seem fairly expensive (at least the $500 mentioned) for an equivalent i5? I thought the i5's were basically mid tier chips, and aren't those usually priced in the $2-400 range? My idea of AMD is more of a 'value' brand, not bleeding edge one, and provide mid tier performace for a little less than normal (read Intel) mid tier pricing. Am I off on that one? As I said, it's been a while since I bought a new CPU, most of mine are a gen or 3 old at this point.

. . I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong but from all that I have seen/read that would be the S7 high end variant which is aimed to compete with high end i7 CPUs (like the 6900K). The chips to compete with i5 will be the S5 series (they are making it easy for us simpletons now) and will be priced somewhat lower.

Stephen

.

so... from my understanding of what all I had read is.. you'll get all of the cores, at full speed, with throttling of speeds when idle, and you'll still get turbo speed. The problem is that the clock-rate changes won't be 15ms, and the single-threaded task that would benefit from turbo core won't get locked to the turbo-speed core. Annnnnnd that's about it. That's all that 10 offers over 7 on the "this CPU is only supported in 10" front.

. . Thanks for that summary, saves me a lot of reading :)

Stephen

.

http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-1700-cpu-specs-confirmed/

Oh is that so! If this is true then this could be a cpu crunchers wet Dream..

. . Watching and waiting :)

Stephen

:)

So that has me looking at a couple of Asus Prime X370 motherboard with Ryzen 7 1700 (8 core/12 thread 65w) machines to replace i7-4770K machines (which pull 140w just for the CPU).

Memory support is 2400Mhz which seems rather slow unless Asus give their overclocked memory options.

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BOINC blog

I'm looking at replacing my old i7 2600 system with a i7 7700K system, but if AMD has got it's act together then they will become another valid option.

They look promising, but I want to see multiple reviews of retail products before passing judgement.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Yes, AMD fans have been burned before. They'll be wanting hard independent data before committing. My impression so far is that it may compete well with i5 and Skylake in general, but we'll see.

It's been a while since I have bought a new Intel proc, but if the prices stated above are accurate, doesn't that seem fairly expensive (at least the $500 mentioned) for an equivalent i5? I thought the i5's were basically mid tier chips, and aren't those usually priced in the $2-400 range? My idea of AMD is more of a 'value' brand, not bleeding edge one, and provide mid tier performace for a little less than normal (read Intel) mid tier pricing. Am I off on that one? As I said, it's been a while since I bought a new CPU, most of mine are a gen or 3 old at this point.

. . I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong but from all that I have seen/read that would be the S7 high end variant which is aimed to compete with high end i7 CPUs (like the 6900K). The chips to compete with i5 will be the S5 series (they are making it easy for us simpletons now) and will be priced somewhat lower.

Stephen

.

The linked article does a pretty good job detailing the breakout of the SKU's equivalent to the Intel i family parts. Looks like four i7 equivalents, six i5 equivalents and three i3 equivalents. The article only listed MSRP bulk OEM prices in the Ryzen 7 classes so can't really say where AMD is going to price out the mid and lower tier parts compared to Intel. I think the Ryzen 7 1800X even at $500 pencils out pretty well compared to the i7 6900K at $1050. And the Ryzen 7 1700 part I mentioned earlier of interest to me pencils out well at $320 compared to the new Kaby Lake i7 7700K at $330 retail at twice the core count and half again as much TDP rating. I think it's looking good for AMD if the performance matches Intel.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

So that has me looking at a couple of Asus Prime X370 motherboard with Ryzen 7 1700 (8 core/12 thread 65w) machines to replace i7-4770K machines (which pull 140w just for the CPU).

Memory support is 2400Mhz which seems rather slow unless Asus give their overclocked memory options.

If I remember correctly, I thought I watched a JayzTwoCents YouTube video where he did gaming benchmarks with differently clocked memories and showed there really isn't all that much difference in gaming benchmark performance whether you were using common 2400 Mhz DDR4 memory or the highest 3000-3600 Mhz DDR4 memory. There was only a 1% or so difference in benchmark timings. The only place that shows up significant differences in memory speeds is in synthetic benchmarks. Not much difference in real world or common desktop applications.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

From the PCper architectural details, given on their last podcast, the half clocked AVX256 might be something to consider for many. For our purposes mostly feeding GPUs, I think/hope that'll be much of a muchness. Had to be a compromise. Pretty sure I could live with half speed AVX256 at the price and power advantages over the equivalent Intels. We'll see.

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

I've more-or-less already decided/settled on the plain 1700. Sure, it would be nice to have the 1800X just to have the top model, but based on the pricing, I don't think an extra 300MHz is worth an extra $200.

About the only benchmark I'm interested in is thread-scaling. With my FX-6100, using all six cores results in ~4.1x speed-up versus 1 core (a 33% performance loss). If you can turn "HT" off on Ryzen, I'm wanting it to be an absolute very minimum of 7.00x. With "HT" on.. I'd like it to be at least 12x.

That's about my only requirement at this point. I just want thread scaling to actually..scale properly.

I'm not going to have the funds for purchase until early-mid May anyway, so that gives time for more SKUs to come out, and more mobos to come out. And plenty of reviews.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I haven't been able to find anything that mentions how much memory the X370 chipset/CPU will support. I'm hoping (given the Ryzen 7 1700 has 8 cores/16 threads) that it will support up to 32Gb of DDR4.

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BOINC blog

I haven't been able to find anything that mentions how much memory the X370 chipset/CPU will support. I'm hoping (given the Ryzen 7 1700 has 8 cores/16 threads) that it will support up to 32Gb of DDR4.

You're right. Haven't seen any specific spec on that either. The Ryzen S7 coupled with the X370 chipset can do dual channel DDR4 memory implemented in 4 DIMM slots. Likely the memory tops out at 32GB with common memory density chips. See that the later Raven Ridge APU versions will also support HBM memory along with DDR4 so memory capacity might be a lot larger, maybe up to 128GB with the higher density of HBM memory.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

For those interested in the nitty gritty of Ryzen, here's an article from David Kanter

Almost every company has produced one or two subpar architectures: Intel had the P4 and Itanium, IBM had the Power6 and Cell, ARM had the Cortex-A8, Sun had the UltraSparc V, and Nvidia had the NV30. After winning plenty of battles with the K8 microarchitecture, AMD’s Waterloo was the Bulldozer line, which all but ended the company’s presence in the lucrative server market as well as in midrange client systems. After five difficult years, the Zen core is slated to reset the competitive landscape and reinvigorate AMD’s product line.

On the basis of our estimates, the 14nm Zen core should offer performance somewhere between that of Intel’s Ivy Bridge and Haswell generations on integer workloads. Although Zen-based processors cannot rival the latest Skylake core in high-end clients, AMD’s eight-core Summit Ridge chip should be a credible contender for midrange desktops. The company will thus have a shot at PC designs that were previously out of reach, expanding its market share and increasing average selling prices. Future Zen-based notebook processors should be similarly compelling, although they won’t arrive until late 2017.

For those crunching Seti (and other projects) one point of particular interest-

Zen offers more FP flexibility than Sandy Bridge and will deliver much better performance on SSE code. Haswell and Skylake, however, provide twice the flops per clock using AVX FMA instructions and, more importantly, twice the cache bandwidth to feed the FP and SIMD execution units.

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Grant
Darwin NT

On paper for similar core, thread, thread configurations AMD and Intel are pretty close for the types of systems I normally build.

Name		c/t	Clock	L3	TDP	MSRP
R5-1400X	4/8	3.5 GHz	8MB	65W	$199
R3-1200X	4/4	3.4 GHz	8MB	65W	$149

i7-7600		4/8	3.6GHz	6MB	65W	$312
i5-7500		4/4	3.4GHz	6MB	65W	$202

Given the AMD chips have a similar TDP and don't have an integrated GPU does lead me to think they will run a fair bit hotter under full load.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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On paper for similar core, thread, thread configurations AMD and Intel are pretty close for the types of systems I normally build.

Name		c/t	Clock	L3	TDP	MSRP
R5-1400X	4/8	3.5 GHz	8MB	65W	$199
R3-1200X	4/4	3.4 GHz	8MB	65W	$149

i7-7600		4/8	3.6GHz	6MB	65W	$312
i5-7500		4/4	3.4GHz	6MB	65W	$202

Given the AMD chips have a similar TDP and don't have an integrated GPU does lead me to think they will run a fair bit hotter under full load.

Not sure we can assume that they will run hotter. No real tests on unreleased SKU's yet. On paper, their technical underpinnings for chip power management seems pretty advanced. I think we will have to wait for real data before making a pronouncement that the new AMD chips will run hotter than equivalent TDP Intel chips. You may be correct, but I think I will hold back any opinion until the real product is tested. Anyway, there are plenty of choices for 65W thermal management that are economical matches to their expected MSRP price points. The box stock Wraith cooler that will be likely bundled is more than capable of handling 65W. You can of course splurge on more exotic cooling options to handle any overclocking that can be achieved. I know that I will be doing AIO water cooling on the R7 chip I expect to purchase.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Ok, one more observation/question. Again (somewhat recent) historically, if I am remembering correctly, AMD comes out with something that about catches up with Intels then current (and usually out for a while at that point) processors in the performance, but within what seemed to be fairly short order, Intel dropped the next bomb (new gen CPU) on them, and Poof went AMD's sales numbers.

So my question would be, does anyone know if Intel has the next version (post Kaby Lake?) ready to drop out of the sky on their heads again, or possibly being able to drive the cost of Kaby Lakes (this is their latest offering, correct?) down enough to cause pain and suffering in AMDville? Again, I'm a bit out of the loop other than what I read around here mostly, as I don't build many latest and greatest systems any more. Thanks for the education!

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