Ryzen Benchmarks

[Elie]

Has anyone seen the new Ryzen benchmarks in comparison to Intel?
Buck for buck it beats Intel on multicore processing, but it's very poor in gaming where fewer cores are necessary.

What do you all think?

I just built an Intel Kaby Lake 7700K rig for gaming and I'm glad I did.

[Umfriend]

I had a look yesterday, it seemed promising but weird, in some cases Ryzen did very well, in others it could not beat an i3. So yes, intel cores are still way more efficient although AMD has made a huge step forward, the first in many years, and they simply pack more cores/threads in those things.

I currently have an i7-67000HQ laptop and do some SQL stuff on it which benefits (often) from additional cores/threads so If they get out a lower TDP version it might be interesting for me as well.

[cjolley]

...do some SQL stuff on it which benefits (often) from additional cores/threads...

I'm curious. If you are hosting a database then maybe (just maybe). If you are talking about client side it's very hard for me to imagine what difference a powerful proc would make.
PM me if necessary. It's kind of my bailiwick.

[Jammrock]

The best review I saw summed it up nicely, "The Ryzen is an i7 when it comes to production applications. It's an i5 when it comes to gaming."

Basically the Ryzen is amazing at anything that is multi-threaded, and really sucks at anything that is single-threaded (when compared to an Intel). Some games will be on par with an i7 if they heavily rely on multi-threading. There are not a ton of those, however, so gaming perf is generally less than thrilling.

The problem happens when you consider the price. The Ryzen is i7 premium priced, but can't deliver the total i7 package.

So if you're building a gaming rig then stick with Intel. If you're building a production system with MT friendly applications, then the Ryzen is an amazing proposition. SQL would fall under this category, and a Ryzen 7 1700 would be a fantastic low cost SQL server, and only run 65W.

One other interesting note from the gaming benchmarks. If you disable SMT (the AMD Hperthreading) gaming performance goes up by 10%-30%. Basically there is some weird overhead with SMT that AMD hasn't completely optimized yet when dealing with single-threaded tasks.

If Ryzen Gen 2 can fix single-threaded performance and the SMT overhead, and make another leap in performance, it will be an Intel killer. But that's a tall order. Though their first outing with Zen gives some hope that they can pull it off.

[Umfriend]

I'm curious. If you are hosting a database then maybe (just maybe). If you are talking about client side it's very hard for me to imagine what difference a powerful proc would make.
PM me if necessary. It's kind of my bailiwick.

I abuse SQL Server for data analysis, typical financial time series like stuff. So yeah, I host and client on the same machine. What often happens is that raw data needs to be enriched somewhat before it can be easily queried and as I need to discover how to enrich it there is a lot of I/O and updates going on. SOme queries run ST, but more ofte than not, if a query runs, SQL simply uses 100% CPU.

@Jammrock: I currently run it on a 45W TDP i7 that is undervolted as well and I am not going to use higher TDPs in the lappy. What I would like to do someday is build a new home server (WS2016 Essentials) and run a VM for remote desktopping into a real beast. For that, Ryzen might make sense indeed. Perhaps assign 2C/4T to WS2016 and 6C/12T to the RDP or somesuch. Great thing would be that I could have a really lightweight lappy, although it would need to be able to output DP to at least 2 screens.

[dZeus]

have you considered using Big Data platforms (Hadoop) for your work? I'm seeing more and more clients using that for various purposes...

[Umfriend]

Never even heard of it. I find that I am a bit lazy to learn new tools. And it is not for the technical skills that I am hired but for knowing how to put them to use on the subject matter at hand. But I'll be sure to look at it soon. Often, my assignments are not of a sort where I deliver something that is supposed to last for years, more to answer questions about the past, a bit more forensic-accounting type issues.

[cjolley]

Sounds like fun.

[Umfriend]

Sounds like fun.

Well yeah, not always but more often than not my job is like a hobby