
AMD Ryzen 3000 announced - DuskStar
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14407/amd-ryzen-3000-announced-five-cpus-12-cores-for-499-up-to-46-ghz-pcie-40-coming-77
======
zanny
No mention of it, but the pressure should still be on AMD to open source or
allow firmware disable of their Platform "Security" Processor.

I would really like to be more enthusiastic for my next build to use something
like this, but all my computers are presently trustable in a way new platforms
with proprietary coprocessors that haven't seen me_cleaner support cannot
achieve.

It really sucks to give Intel money - its not like they support the me cleaner
project and are actively antagonistic to third parties disabling their
backdoors - but at some point it stops being a matter of principle and becomes
one of practicality. I can disable the unwanted parts of the hardware on one
platform and not on the other.

~~~
StudentStuff
AMD's PSP is ARM TrustZone, there is no way AMD could open it in their current
chips, they don't own the IP and ARM is vehemently opposed. Due to the outcry,
they are more likely to build their own secure enclave/supervisor processor in
the next major rework of Zen, which they would own the IP of.

~~~
walterbell
There are open-source TrustZone implementations (OP-TEE).

AMD could drop Arm and move to a RISC-V based secure enclave. Google is
developing OpenTitan as open hardware based on RISC-V.

------
tmd83
I'm really looking forward to this. But one issue with current AMD cpu is that
you have to buy a desktop GPU even when you are not doing any kind of gaming
and such. I know intel iGPU haven't been terribly good but for work they are
good enough and is one less part and cheaper to boot. For same performance a
Ryzen 3rd gen + gpu might still be cheaper but the price advantage gets
reduced.

I haven't really seen that mentioned much I wonder why is that. I do love the
potential for Zen2 + 7nm. The 65w of 3700x and the high frequency of the 3900X
both suggest interesting potential for the future. One could end up seeing
that the Ryzen 5, six cores might have higher overclocking headroom.

Then there's of course Navi, the first new GPU core in a long long time.

~~~
jdietrich
_> But one issue with current AMD cpu is that you have to buy a desktop GPU
even when you are not doing any kind of gaming and such._

AMD just aren't selling many CPUs to business desktop system integrators,
partly due to dubious tactics by Intel to keep them out of the market. If you
sell most of your CPUs to enthusiasts, it just doesn't make sense to squander
die area on a crappy iGPU. Gamers obviously want a fast GPU, but so do most
creative professionals - Photoshop is heavily GPU accelerated, as is Premiere
and Resolve, not to mention essentially all 3D modelling and CAD packages.
Scientific computing is also rapidly moving towards the GPU. GPU performance
has a surprisingly large impact on day-to-day responsiveness, because all the
major browsers use GPU compositing.

The market for fast chips with crappy iGPUs just isn't as big as it used to
be, nor is it particularly accessible to AMD. The Athlon and Ryzen APUs make a
great deal of sense for the current market, offering a good balance of
performance between CPU and GPU. I expect to see 6 and 8 core Ryzen chips with
Vega GPU cores as part of the Ryzen 3000 generation, which will further close
the gap.

~~~
josteink
> AMD just aren't selling many CPUs to business desktop system integrators,
> partly due to dubious tactics by Intel to keep them out of the market. If
> you sell most of your CPUs to enthusiasts, it just doesn't make sense to
> squander die area on a crappy iGPU.

I'm a developer, and I want fast build times. I don't need a dedicated GPU for
that.

Right now I'm squandering money and power on a dedicated GPU which is probably
idling at 0.0000001% rendering a composited 2D desktop in its sleep.

~~~
djsumdog
Same here. I recently did a Ryzen 7 build with a Thin-ITX board.

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/louqe-ghost-s1-build-and-
revi...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/louqe-ghost-s1-build-and-review/)

I have a separate gaming machine, and would have rather just used the
integrated for my Linux machine. It doesn't look like AMD is refreshing their
APU lineup at all in this release. Did I miss it, or are there no APUs in the
list?

~~~
mroche
The APU/mobile chips typically come later. Raven Ridge chips were released
after their desktop counterparts, and the Zen+ (12nm) 3000U series mobile
chips were announced only a few months ago.

------
ksec
At close to 300 comments, I am surprised there is no mention of what I thought
was the most important and surprise, 32 to 70MB L3 Cache. A lot of people
focus on Core and Thread as well as IPC. We already knew what improvement IPC
could do, we already knew what we could do 32 Thread. None of these are really
new.

But 64MB of L3 Cache? In a consumer CPU at a price that I would hardly call
expensive ( I would even go on to call it a bargain ). We used to talk about
performance enhancements and cache miss, we now have 64MB to mess with, we
could have the whole languages VM living in Cache!

~~~
pedrocr
_> we could have the whole languages VM living in Cache_

When dual-core processors came out someone said you could now have one core
run your stuff and another run the anti-virus. That was widely joked about.
This feels a little close to that. Having more CPU cache than we recently had
RAM ending up being used for programming language overhead.

~~~
ncmncm
Agreed. For those of us using VMs, the extra cache in each package is enough
for the working set of the systemd we are obligd to run in each VM.

Looking back to the 8M total RAM I had on a Mac SE/30, running A/UX Unix and a
MacOS GUI comfortably, the sloppiness of modern productions is a disgrace and
an embarrassment.

What galls is not the wasteful extravagance. It's the failure of imagination
that makes such meager, pitiable use of such extravagance. We make, of
titanium airframes and turbojet engines, oxcarts.

~~~
ksec
Agree with both the comment above, but do we really have a solution?

It is a trade off between Cross Platform, time to market and development
resources. And unlike any other scientific and engineering industry, Software
Development doesn't even agree on a few industry standards, instead everything
is hyped up every 2 years and something new come around and becomes a new
"standard". And we keep wasting resources reinventing the flat tire.

------
gigatexal
Yup. Just waiting on the benchmarks from independent reviewers and to see how
XFR in this generation works but I’ll be getting a Ryzen 9 if everything
checks out. 24 threads will be amazing for local development (microk8s, and
others) when I’m not gaming and save me from having to build a separate box.

~~~
WC3w6pXxgGd
What will you be doing that will actually use 24 threads?

~~~
gameswithgo
A common developer scenario can involve a few things that will eat a lot of
threads:

1\. playing some background music 2\. running a local database 3\. running a
local webserver 4\. running a browser 5\. running an ide 6\. running all of
that stuff concurrently while testing the backend code 7\. doing builds which
are multi threaded in near linear speedup fashion in many
languages/environments.

I don't know if 12 cores 24 logical is going to make that scenario feel
overall better than 4 cores 8 logical, but I do know that 4x8 feels much much
better than 2x4 in my own use cases.

#7 alone can be a really, really big win for long compiling projects.

~~~
dkersten
Yeah, my docker setup alone runs a ton of processes. Aside from docker running
a copy of my stuff, I often have tests auto-running, a separate REPL to try
stuff out in, my editor, slack, music, browser. It all adds up and a bunch of
cores/threads definitely makes everything run more smoothly.

------
burtonator
Man.. Loving this. Going to get the Ryzen 9 I think. My current machine is an
8 core i7 At 3.6Ghz and boost to 4.

Having 12 cores without the hyperthreading issues with intel and boost to 4.6
is going to rock.

~~~
tracker1
i7-4790K myself, going to hold out a couple months longer to see if they get
the 16core r9, or a new Threadripper out.

------
lettergram
Finally! I’ve been using a Ryzen 1800x since it’s release. Unfortunately, it
has some stability issues and I’ve been waiting to upgrade on the Ryzen 3000,
7nm line.

This is going to be a solid 75%+ boost to performance, given I regularly max
out my machines threads. Pretty amazing improvement in 2 years.

~~~
m0zg
Could be that it'll still continue to have stability issues. For some reason
Ryzens are extremely picky when it comes to memory. There's really no
guarantee that 3-rd gen will resolve this issue. It's to the point where e.g.
Corsair makes memory specifically designed to work with AMD CPUs. This memory
typically contains Samsung B-die chips which work fairly well.

~~~
coder543
No, the stability issues they're talking about are on a release day 1800X.
It's not memory issues, and I've _never_ had memory issues with either of my
Ryzen processors.

This is the issue they're certainly talking about:
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-
Se...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Segv-
Response)

And it is _assuredly_ not a problem with any Ryzen processors manufactured
after the very first few months.

~~~
readittwice
Well, there are some stability issues with my ryzen 2700x. At first there were
CPU freezes in idle on Linux:
[https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683](https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683).

After applying workarounds, I still see some strange crashes, not sure if at
least some of those are still related to the CPU hangs from the bug above. TBF
this might not be the CPU's fault. This is all quite annoying to me and time
intensive to investigate (where do I even start?). Even though I really like
AMD's tech I am quite frustrated and I haven't had these problems with my
previous Intel builds so far...

------
gratilup
Now imagine a Threadripper with the Zen2 cores, higher IPC and frequency would
be certainly welcome. Have the 32 core 2990WX and it's an incredible CPU for
compiling large C++ programs, running big test suites and never having to
worry about running too many tasks at the same time.

~~~
empyrical
Conjecture on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if we also see a 64 core
Threadripper - there's going to be a 64 core Epyc:

[https://wccftech.com/amd-7nm-epyc-64-core-32-core-cpus-
specs...](https://wccftech.com/amd-7nm-epyc-64-core-32-core-cpus-specs-
benchmarks-leaked/)

Although they may save it for a "Zen2+" or something similar, like they did
with 32 core Threadripper

~~~
bitL
I am specifically waiting for 64c Threadripper. Would be also great if 32GB
UDIMM ECC became available by that time to bump up RAM from 128GB to 256GB.
That computer could then last a decade.

------
jaytaylor
It's not clear to me from TFA:

Do any existing AM4 mobos / chipsets have support for full PCIe 4.0 bandwith
(64Gbps)?

Or will the existing mobos be limited to PCIe 3.0 (~5-6Gbps)?

    
    
      All of the five processors will
      be PCIe 4.0 enabled, and while
      they are being accompanied by
      the new X570 chipset launch,
      they still use the same AM4
      socket, meaning some AMD 300
      and 400- series motherboards can
      still be used.
    

I was just reading about PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 yesterday [0], and some quick
research indicates only a week ago it was announced some current AMD boards do
support PCIe 4.0 [1].

Would be awesome because the rate when transferring terabytes across SSD RAID
arrays will see a 3-10x increase from ~500-600MBps to ~1.5-6GBps+. Fantastic!

[0] [https://videocardz.com/review/pci-express-riser-extender-
tes...](https://videocardz.com/review/pci-express-riser-extender-test)

[1] [https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/400-series-pci-4-0-bandwidth-
bi...](https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/400-series-pci-4-0-bandwidth-bios-support-
ryzen-3000)

~~~
wtallis
Existing 300 and 400 series boards may be able to operate at PCIe 4 speed for
the CPU-provided lanes (as opposed to the ones routed through the chipset that
you can't upgrade), however signal integrity issues may limit this to just the
slot closest to the CPU. So far, I haven't heard about any particular boards
that have been validated for a specific number of slots working at gen4
speeds. Whatever you're using for an SSD RAID array will probably get in the
way of using gen4 speeds, since you likely won't be able to get gen4 speeds
over any cables or risers without redriver chips.

------
p1mrx
It will be interesting to see whether they can match Intel in single-threaded
performance across the board, and not just some carefully-selected benchmarks.
This would be the first time since the Core2/Athlon64 days.

~~~
sadris
I'm begging for a good single threaded CPU that isn't $600

~~~
ianai
Read that often here tonight. Is there a killer app for single core
performance other than UI/UX?

~~~
PureParadigm
In all seriousness, I've been wanting better single threaded performance for
running a Minecraft server.

~~~
ehnto
What kind of player count are you getting?

I have been running 4 players with one of the most taxing modpacks on a mid
tier digital ocean VPS with no hitches. Not many players I guess but in case
you were curious if you could use a VPS. Even when we had multiple excavators
sending thousands of entities through sorting pipelines it was stil doing
surprisingly well.

~~~
imtringued
A max size reactor in minecraft consists of 50000 Tileentities and it only
produces a few million RF/t enough to power a handful of max tier void miners.
Thousands isn't exactly impressive.

~~~
ehnto
Well we had a max size reactor powering our excavators so I guess we had those
entities too. I didn't realise it took so many entities to run. Not to mention
the hundreds of other pieces in our worlds automation puzzle and it was all
spread out quite far apart, with chunk loaders maintaining the networks
presence. Things were routed, crushed, smelted, crafted and eventually stored
or utilized, all automatically.

------
DiabloD3
I watched the keynote live.

I'm sold, my desktop is most likely going to be a Ryzen (although not the 8/16
monster, come on, it's a desktop, if I need high core count, I have stuff at
work for that).

~~~
shmerl
I don't mind 12 cores / 24 threads on my desktop. Makes compiling Mesa, Wine
and Linux kernel a lot faster.

~~~
eugene3306
Cool, but we haven't seen compiling benchmarks yet. 12 cores might be
bottlenecked by dual-channel memory.

~~~
shmerl
Would be good to see some benchmarks.

~~~
agrover
agree. Hopefully the seventy megabytes of cache between the two chiplets will
help...

------
loser777
Biggest surprise seems to be the 65W 8/16 3700X. Hopefully that means a bit of
overclocking headroom.

~~~
DuskStar
Considering that the 105W 8/16 3800X only gains 300MHz base and 100MHz turbo
for the extra 40W, I'm not sure that's the case. Still almost certainly what
I'll be replacing my 4790k with though

~~~
tracker1
Going to wait a couple more months to see if 16c 39xx shows up, or a new
Threadripper... also on a 4790k.

------
hsivonen
What's the outlook for AMD to provide the kind of performance counters and
performance counter accuracy that is needed for rr?

~~~
mkl
For those curious like me: [https://rr-project.org/](https://rr-project.org/)

It's a debugger from Mozilla that works by recording and replaying program
executions.

------
fencepost
My question is how is their architecture doing regarding the assorted
speculative execution baked-in issues and what kind of impact is there on the
AMD processors compared to comparable Intel CPUs?

~~~
xvector
Frightening lack of press around this. Basically all of Intel's and AMD's
lineups are centered around high thread count right now. Completely useless if
I can't reasonably enable SMT.

~~~
makomk
AMD's chips apparently don't have the security vulnerabilities that make SMT
unsafe to enable on Intel chips - they released a white paper explaining why
MDS etc aren't possible and what exactly the boundaries are on their chips:
[https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-
whitepap...](https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-
whitepaper.pdf) It just didn't get a huge amount of press coverage.

------
jdsully
I didn’t see any word on whether the vector units are still half width. That’s
still a major performance advantage for Intel.

~~~
phonon
They announced they doubled the floating point, so I assume that means full
width per clock.

Hear it here.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy0Q75xCwDU&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy0Q75xCwDU&feature=youtu.be&t=5810)

~~~
jdsully
Ah cool! Hopefully the BMI2 instructions are upgraded too.

------
Epopeehief54
Takes guts to stick with that core count and at least you get to enjoy the
full 70MB of cache. Good thing Blender and Cinebench all fits inside that, not
sure you can ever say the same for productivity workloads.

I guess AM4 also means no real improvements on the PCIe lane count: Would love
to see real and IF switches to give a bit of flexibility and what they plan
for a new Threadripper.

~~~
muxr
> I guess AM4 also means no real improvements on the PCIe lane count

The new Ryzen 3000 CPUs support PCIe Gen4.. so while the number of lanes will
remain the same, their bandwidth could be doubled. Just announced Navi GPUs
also support Gen4.

------
sandworm101
Looks like that 499 will include a cooler too. Id probably not use it (liquid
cooling is better imho) but an included cooler is a perk.

~~~
radicsge
It is amazingly cheap (compared to the intel's 1.1K), wonder what could be the
reason behind it.

~~~
sandworm101
They probably have something secret to counter intel in the 1k range. Probably
128 cores spread across a square-foot of silicon. Enough output that you can
boil your coffee while gaming.

~~~
sq_
Isn't that what AMD GPUs are for? They'd be eating their own market share for
PCs that double as frying pans/ovens!

~~~
snvzz
If you're basing that comment on TDP, think again.

NVIDIA redefined TDP to their convenience, to mean something more like
"averages". So their numbers can't be compared directly.

Always look at third party measurements. I'm looking forward to Navi's, while
on the topic, as they've announced large improvements in power efficiency.

~~~
sq_
In response to what you said about Navi, I'm also excited about that. I'd
really love to see some really strong competition to Nvidia's offerings that
might be able to give them a good fight.

Their dominance and tendency to push for proprietary features seems quite bad
for the industry as a whole.

------
IlegCowcat
My guess: standing by for a last 2019 or 2020 refresh. AMD simply doesn't have
to play their full hand right now to be competitive. Going to 16 core on AM4
looks to be trivial on paper since they're already doing 12 core: just a
matter of clock speeds and core voltage to make it happen inside of AM4
parameters.

~~~
tracker1
My guess is their chiplets may have defective cores that are being disabled,
and they aren't getting high enough yeilds on 8-core chiplets to release a 16c
pair CPU yet.

I doubt they'd hold back on offering a significant bump over Intel's current
offering with a 16c/32t mainstream cpu.

------
psnosignaluk
I’ve really been looking forward to these chips. The 2700X was pretty close to
Intel in 1440p benchmarks, so I’m looking forward to what the likes of Gamers
Nexus have to say about overall performance, specifically in line with
performance elements like frame render time. Not that it really matters to me.
I’ll have one of the 8 core chips on a micro-ATX X570 and build up a system
around that. I’ve purposely held off building a new desktop because of Ryzen
3000. In a Ghost S1 or NCase M1, it should be the ideal CPU for a powerful SFF
build.

------
PaulBGD_
I'll probably still get it since I've been waiting for it to release, but a
bit disappointed they couldn't get 5GHz.. I'm curious what overclocking could
be done here.

~~~
dralley
Despite being behind on frequency, it seems they've totally caught up (and
maybe surpassed, not enough info to know yet) Intel in IPC, and even the 3700X
will have more than double the cache of the 9900K

So we'll have to see what the benchmarks look like but they might not be as
far behind as the frequency gap would suggest.

~~~
PaulBGD_
That's true, if more software starts taking advantage of multiple threads it'd
probably be better than most of Intel's offerings.

~~~
mort96
What software which requires a lot of processing power currently doesn't take
advantage of multiple threads? Games are increasingly parallel, browsers do
most non-JS things in parallel (and obviously run each tab in parallel),
compiling code and video rendering eats CPU cores like crazy.

~~~
gameswithgo
yeah a lot of people will assert that games don't benefit from more threads,
but, if you fire up fortnite or battlegrounds and look at your cpu grapsh, you
will see at least 8 of them working pretty hard

------
shmerl
12 cores with 105W TDP - good improvement over 8 cores with same TDP for Ryzen
7 2700X.

------
techntoke
Nothing mentioned about their "G" series.

~~~
snvzz
They already launched a new generation of that recently, based on Zen+ with
Vega. The previous one was pre-zen+.

Their gpu+cpu chips are always based on the more mature tech.

~~~
Marsymars
The only Zen+ based APUs are mobile/embedded-only though. Desktop APUs are all
still pre-Zen+.

~~~
techntoke
The 2200/2400G is Zen-based.

------
joeleisner
I'm excited for these CPUs to come out; I've been yearning to get away from
Intel after they've continually shot themselves in the foot, and these models
price/performance are really selling team red to me.

------
harry8
What is the interthread latency between cores on a ryzen?

Something like:
[https://gitlab.com/hal88/interthread_latency](https://gitlab.com/hal88/interthread_latency)

I get in the ballpark of 250 cycles on an intel $whatever (it's been pretty
stable for a while) for cores on the same package full round trip,
(hyperthreading off).

    
    
        mean = 255, 247 (ignoring blowouts) 
        max: 4898276 
        min: 93 
        (cyles)

------
bashwizard
Nice. I guess it's time to upgrade from my old 1700X.

------
auvi
I really expected a 16C/32T Ryzen 9 though.

~~~
jlawer
Potentially is a yield issue / segmentation issue.

Releasing the top SKU as a 12 core instead of 16 core part gives AMD:

1.) Still the highest core count "Mainstream" part. I would expect Intel to
fire back with a higher IPC / thread performance part rather then try and ramp
core counts. Outside of productivity, content creation and server workloads I
really don't see the need for anything past 6-8 cores right now.

2.) Lets AMD keep the flawless chiplets for Ryzen 7 where there will be high
demand. While providing a way to move more 6 core chiplets. They can change
the product mix once yields improve. I would imagine that there is likely
better margin on Ryzen 7 (1x chiplet) rather then the R9 (2x chiplet).

3.) Keeps more of the Threadripper line viable for those that need high cores
(especially if you don't require the extra memory bandwidth).

4.) Sells a bunch of CPUs now, while keeping the ability to quickly respond to
Intel if needed (or as a spoiler around the Intel 10nm release)

~~~
NightlyDev
1) Intel won't be able to, at least not until they finally manage to get the
new architecture out. Heat is already a huge issue for intel.

2) AMD might be saving perfect core chiplets, but probably mostly for use in
EPYC as the margins are higher.

4) I expect 16 core am4 to arrive someday.

~~~
jlawer
Good point on EPYC, I had assumed these would be using a different design like
earlier generations, but the chiplet design makes this not only possible, but
likely where the best chiplets are going.

I agree that 16 core will arrive this generation, but I could also see it
being 6 months or so. I have also wondered if it is waiting for a second
generation I/O die with an enhanced memory controller to feed the extra cores.

------
gravelc
Is there any clarity on how much RAM the 3900X supports? Presumably can do
4x32GB, which would make for a great little bioinformatics workstation. Am
very excited with this chip and Windows bringing the full Linux kernel - can
do everything I want at home with just one fairly cheap PC and no dual
booting. Good times!

~~~
jaytaylor
Are 32GB sticks of fast registered DDR4 still absurdly expensive?

~~~
gravelc
Still not cheap - $200 for DDR4-2666 up to $350+ for DDR-3200 from what I can
see on Newegg

------
deathtrader666
We've had 32 cores from AMD, yes.. But what about 64 cores like Intel's Knight
Landing Xeon Phi?

~~~
wyldfire
Well the Phi is sold/packaged as an accelerator so it's not quite the same.
But I was pretty sure i had seen >= 32 core Xeons (though those were likely
with now-nerfed HT so kinda moot).

------
andy_ppp
Any chance I can have a Mac Mini with a 3700X in please?

~~~
vbezhenar
AFAIK Apple has zero macs with AMD cpus. Also I've heard about issues running
macOS even in virtual machine on AMD hardware. So I have my doubts about that.
You're more likely to have RAM Mac Mini.

------
saltminer
Did AMD talk about VME instructions? I'd love to be able to run a Win 9x VM
again.

~~~
sebazzz
Running a VM is already possible. Graphics acceleration is what the real issue
is.

~~~
saltminer
I'm referring to virtual 8086 mode enhancements. They're broken on Ryzen 1-
and 2-series chips, AMD responded to my bug report saying they had no
intention of fixing them in microcode updates. You wouldn't notice this unless
you tried to run older OSes in a VM, like DOS-based Windows, or some
applications in DOSBox.

------
jxi
The Ryzen 7 3700X looks like it hits a sweet spot. 65W TDP, $330, almost as
fast as a 9900k. Was originally planning to go for the Ryzen 5, but with these
specs it seems silly not to go for the 3700X.

~~~
TheOperator
Also with CPU performance starting to taper off I think people need to also
start think of their computers as longer term investments. I think the 8 core
makes sense. Even my phone has 8 cores now...

~~~
zelon88
I've been hearing this for a long time, but the "taper" isn't really a taper
in all markets. In consumer markets, yes the taper is very real. Infact I bet
you could take one $500 machine off the shelf of Wal-Mart every year for the
past 5 years and benchmark them all within 15% of each other overall.

But it isn't really visible when money is no object. If it's not the cores
getting faster it's the core-count going up. Moore's Law is really easy to
beat if you focus on making your CPU die's larger instead of their transistors
smaller.

~~~
alkonaut
Also for at least one part of high perf computing, gaming, the trend has been
that more cores now actually count in modern engines. Couple of years ago you
wanted a couple of cores but single thread perf was the big thing. Now some
modern game engines scale very well beyond 4 cores. Presumably they have
shifted to some sort of work-item based system instead of having fixed threads
for subsystems (rendering, AI, ...).

So upgrading from a 4 to 8 core a few years back was expensive and mostly not
worth it for gaming, whereas now it might actually give the huge speedup the
core count would indicate (Obviously for gaming this just means moving the
bottleneck, but still)

------
vbezhenar
No 5GHz, I'm disappointed. Was considering switching to AMD, but Intel looks
better. I'll wait for Threadripper announce, though, may be they'll release
something powerful.

~~~
jaytaylor
This may be an oversimplification. There is more to it than just megahertz or
gigahertz. The most important metric in this case is work done per clock, on
average.

~~~
vbezhenar
I don't believe that AMD made better architecture than Intel in regards to
performance. They might be similar, but definitely not 10% better. So in the
end it comes to frequency (and core count for niche tasks).

~~~
abdulmuhaimin
just based on the previous gen benchmark, the perfomance/clock of Zen+ cpu is
better htan intel offering. What makes you say it isnt so?

~~~
vbezhenar
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-
core-i9-9...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-
core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-i5-9600k-review/7) this page compares 9900K and 2700X.
9900K should work at 4700 MHz with all cores loaded. 2700x should work at 4300
MHz. So the difference is roughly 10%. And Intel in most benchmarks scores
more than 10%.

~~~
the_why_of_y
Those benchmarks were done 3 or 4 Meltdown microcode mitigations ago... the
problem with Intel CPUs is, they become slower the longer they're exposed to
security researchers.

~~~
vbezhenar
Not everybody uses those mitigations.

