2016+ CPU/GPU News

[revelator]

well funny thing the itx standard was pretty much dead back when i built my current setup but seems to have had a resurgence lately , truth be told i only ever had one itx model, and it was a fujitsu siemens i inherited from my sister.

thing actually ran pretty well with an ssd but was a bit on the noisy side and not really a gaming machine but that was due to the bios being locked to certain gfx cards.

i have a micro atx gigabyte ga-h81m-ds2 with a core i5 in my sleeping room i use for streaming, its actually pretty fast though only supports pcie 2.0 so one would assume its not ment for gaming though it actually games pretty well to :).

my newly aquired gtx 980 ti will probably last me for some time yet atleast im getting around 100 fps in HZD on ultra now so woa big improvement

 

[jaxa]

My understanding is that there has been a push to put the biggest and most power hungry GPUs into (relatively) small cases. Seems pointless but that's what people want.

APUs are going to increasingly take over the territory once held by low-end graphics cards, and small form factor builds are here to stay. And after all, the end result of chip development will be to cram everything into a SoC/package to reduce latency. CPU, graphics, memory, and accelerators as close to each other as physically possible, broken up into tiles 3D stacked on one another and an interposer if needed.

[revelator]

aye cramming a monster gpu in a small case is asking for trouble but if they have the dough for it, they are probably not to worried that it will have roasted itself in a year or two. i dont have that kinda money to throw around anymore so i tend to make sure everything is properly cooled which means big hunking cases with loads of fans and in case the gfx card does not have sufficient cooling i usually mount an artic accelero extreme if it fits (usually only fits the oem versions with blower coolers but woa! that thing is massive).

[kano]

 

[jaxa]

5 hours ago, kano said:

 

It could actually get worse if they paired the Ryzen 5 4500 or Ryzen 3 4100 with the RX 6400 or RX 6300. All of those being new or soon-to-be-launched products.

[kano]

It's not that we enjoy picking on AMD, it's just that this particular config is gonna end up in lots of cost-sensitive computer builds where anything short of $300 for a graphics card and you might as well just insert a graham cracker into the PCIe slot.

[jaxa]

These products are fine for some people at the right price. It's just that they are all overpriced (especially the GPUs) and anything based on Navi 24 is nerfed based on design decisions made to make it a mobile GPU, like not including the same decode/encode capabilities as other RDNA2 GPUs. Throw in the PCIe limitation and 4 GB memory and you have a perfect storm of fail, at least in newer games.

[jaxa]

5800X3D takes the fight to the 12900KS

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d-review

 

[kano]

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/04/20/millions-of-lenovo-devices-affected-by-bios-vulnerability/

 

All I wanted was the ability to physically write-protect the firmware on my motherboard in order to prevent it from being replaced by an attacker in the event that I happen to run a malicious program. Instead, the industry has made the boot process so overly complicated that you can now play Doom right in UEFI without even loading an OS.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_UEFI

It's like, I ask for a door lock that actually works, and in response, they just make a more complicated door that still can't be locked correctly.

Edited April 21 by kano

[nbohr1more]

UEFI was not designed to make things better for "you".

UEFI was designed to make things better for hardware manufacturers and members of the PC industry.

[OrbWeaver]

There are things I like about UEFI. Being able to install Windows after Linux and not completely trash the bootloader is nice (the two OS's just add their own entries to the system partition and appear in the list alongside each other). GPT was also a big step forward over the horrible 1980s primary/extended partitions (although I think you might be able to use GPT without using UEFI).

Also for some reason Ubuntu loads so much faster in UEFI mode. I have no idea why. When I was using BIOS it took something like 2.5 minutes before I saw a login screen.

[madtaffer]

Which is better CPU for making games, running engines and compiling, 12700 or 5900 ?

[revelator]

usually the one with the most cores but not allways... depends a bit on how fast the cpu is also.

compilers today use threaded build systems to have several compiler threads working on building the source code, this speeds up compile times a lot but it is also quite hard on cpu's that have subpar performance.

older games were usually not multithreaded at all and only recently did this change, most modern games dont realy use the cpu for much besides some background stuff like networking / filesystem etc. most of the more intensive stuff is handled by the gpu these days, so most cpu's from around the last 10 years should handle any game just fine.

creating game assets usually takes more ram than cpu power, people using cad can attest to that, a bigger cpu is also good but if you have an old geezer like my core i7 3930k or newer you shouldnt have any problems at all.

[jaxa]

Zen 4 will have a roughly ~8% IPC increase, possibly more or less depending on the application, but will scale to hit much higher clock speeds out of the box. For example, 5.0-5.2 GHz all-core, 5.5-5.7 GHz single core. Also confirmed to have some subset of AVX-512 instructions. No 3D V-Cache at launch, but they can pull that out in 2023.

They also have the option to drop in a 16-core Zen 4C chiplet if they need to do that before Zen 5 appears. This could allow them to copy the 8+16 configuration of Intel's Raptor Lake.

All models should come with a small integrated RDNA2 iGPU in the I/O die, with support for up to 4 display outputs. It would likely be slower than a Steam Deck unless it can be overclocked very high, but good enough to use a GUI, play some older games, and get hardware accelerated video encode/decode including AV1 decode.

Here's a little something about a potential RX 6300 for the desktop. It could be seen as a GT 1030 replacement, but the nerfed video encode/decode capabilities of the Navi 24 die (removed AV1 decode and H.264/H.265 encode) might make it unacceptable for some HTPC users:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-possibly-preparing-a-rx-6300

Edited May 28 by jaxa

[revelator]

with the stupendous pricing atm. i doubt ill upgrade any time soon.

hell even used hardware is now double the price :S so i dusted of my old msi z87-gd65 gaming board and it runs like oil after i mounted an artic liquid cooler II 360 im running at 4.7 ghz at 35 " idle on my old 4770k Oo.

also boots a lot faster than my old asus x79 deluxe which is i have used for a media server instead.

but yeah sometime in the future when things get back to normal i might get myself something a little newer :)

[jaxa]

Now that GPU pricing has crashed, we will see "weird" things like AMD giving the go-ahead for 8 GB models of the RX 6500 XT:

https://videocardz.com/newz/sapphire-intros-radeon-rx-6500-xt-with-8gb-memory

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sapphire-rx-6500-xt-8gb

Also, Intel's discrete GPUs look abysmal, mostly because of driver issues. They may age like FineWine™.

[jaxa]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17552/amd-details-ryzen-7000-launch-up-ryzen-7950x-coming-sept-27

Ryzen 7000 is official.

Ryzen 9 7950X = 16 cores, 4.5 GHz base, 5.7 GHz boost, 170W TDP, $700
Ryzen 9 7900X = 12 cores, 4.7 GHz base, 5.6 GHz boost, 170W TDP, $550
Ryzen 7 7700X = 8 cores, 4.5 GHz base, 5.4 GHz boost, 105W TDP, $400
Ryzen 7 7600X = 6 cores, 4.7 GHz base, 5.3 GHz boost, 105W TDP, $300

+13% IPC and massive clock speed gains over Ryzen 5000
All CPUs come with small RDNA2 iGPU
- 2 CUs, 128 stream processors, 400-2200 MHz
AVX-512 instruction set support, exact details not known
New AM5 socket, DDR5 memory only
24x PCIe 5.0 lanes
Compatible with existing coolers, but no free coolers anymore (for these models)

Edited August 30 by jaxa

[nbohr1more]

Including GPU hardware on all CPU's might be a stepping stone towards sharing Floating Point performance with the CPU.

I still don't understand why AMD has not fully taken advantage of both their CPU and GPU hardware divisions and make the GPU floating point resources seamlessly available to the CPU.

The AVX-512 inclusion is pretty cutthroat and strategic:

1) Blame AVX-512 for wasting silicon on Intel CPU's and leading a less competitive chip ( take advantage of an existing internal rift between Intel design teams )

2) Intel admits defeat and deprecates AVX-512

3) Reach out to angry developers who invested in AVX-512 whose applications wont be accelerated in new CPU's and gain feedback about their requirements

4) Secretly add AVX-512 and announce it just as Intel is about to release a CPU without it

I'm sure that there are a few Intel engineers ready to put on boxing gloves and get in the ring with their colleagues over this whole sequence.

[jaxa]

5 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

I'm sure that there are a few Intel engineers ready to put on boxing gloves and get in the ring with their colleagues over this whole sequence.

I remember there was a lot of turmoil over this. As in the employees working on it thought Alder Lake would have AVX-512 despite the hybrid design and were distressed about the outcome which was decided at the last minute. And Intel said it was "fused off" but that turned out not to be true initially, so some people have used AVX-512 with certain hardware and firmware versions but with the E-cores turned off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#CPUs_with_AVX-512

Wikipedia is claiming that AVX-512 support in Zen 4 is identical to Ice Lake and Rocket Lake, but with the addition of Bfloat16. It's only missing VP2INTERSECT from Tiger Lake and Alder Lake/Sapphire Rapids (Golden Cove), and FP16 from the latter. I don't see a source for the claims so YMMV.

Finally, it's possible that AMD's approach works without huge hits to frequency that plagued earlier Intel implementations. We'll have to see once the reviews land.

Edited August 31 by jaxa

[jaxa]

EVGA is out

https://www.jonpeddie.com/news/evga-wont-offer-nvidia-next-gen-series

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17578/evga-and-nvidia-to-split-evga-wont-make-nextgen-nvidia-cards

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/evga-ends-partnership-with-nvidia-no-more-nvidia-graphics-cards.html

 

[revelator]

well with the war in ukraine i cant even afford to have my PC on most of the day anyway so even though prices have dropped considerably it would not avail me anything good as food prices are now also at an alltime high here in denmark :S. one disaster after the other it seems ...

[jaxa]

If WW3 starts, or just big problems in Europe, you won't care about having the latest computer.

If China makes a move on Taiwan in a few years, that's when you might regret not having upgraded because electronics prices will skyrocket. So keep that in the back of your mind.

Don't jump on AM5, it's too expensive right now. See how things are around April 2023, after winter ends.

[revelator]

hehe i wont i actually got a good deal on a 24 core threadripper for 196 dollars :O.