
Ryzen Community Update #2 - mrb
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/03/30/amd-ryzen-community-update-2
======
mrb
I submitted this with a more informative title, but a mod reverted it to the
vague original title. So let me explain what this is about...

The big news is that on the Ryzen launch day, despite benchmarks in general
looking outstanding, the gaming ones were somewhat disappointing. AMD said it
is due to software problems (eg. detecting the CPU vendor through cpuid and
enabling Intel-only optimizations only for Intel CPUs). People seemed to be
dubious or overlooked this.

But now AMD proved that with software-only optimizations that took 1-2 weeks
they were able to boost the Ryzen gaming performance by 15-30% on the 2 major
games they worked on.

~~~
obl
I don't think the article states that the improvement in performance isn't the
same for intel CPUs.

maybe they just optimized the game.

~~~
vancan1ty
Benchmarks with Intel vs AMD here:

[https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Ashes-
Singularity-G...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Ashes-Singularity-
Gets-Ryzen-Performance-Update)

Whatever they did for AoS significantly increased 1800x performance while
keeping 6900k performance essentially flat.

------
jnordwick
OT: That social media bar is killing me. It takes up the firsts few columns of
letters making it difficult to read, and it keeps reappearing whenever I
scroll the page.

Who does stuff like that?

Edit: I actually stopped reading the article because it became so annoying.

~~~
ac29
I don't see any social media bar when using uBlock Origin.

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snvzz
>6ns improvement

That's actually a lot for a memory access. All these launch day benchmarks
will be obsoleted.

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projproj
HardOCP has a video showing the boost:
[https://youtu.be/9ZLfJcHEMog](https://youtu.be/9ZLfJcHEMog).

------
DominoTree
My Ryzen 1800x box is so disgustingly fast that it almost makes up for the
consistent stability issues I've encountered while using it

~~~
stusmall
What kind of stability issues are you seeing? Have you OC'd? What are you
running as OS? Windows or Linux?

~~~
DominoTree
Failure to boot, random freezes in Windows and Linux.

That said, I got it sorted out. It turned out to be an incompatibility with
both the NVMe disk I was using as well as an incompatibility with the memory I
had purchased.

Getting the exact parts listed in your motherboard manufacturer's
compatibility list appears to be pretty important for Ryzen currently. It's
been rock solid since I swapped out those components.

~~~
stusmall
Awesome! Thank you for the follow up. I'm planning on building one out at the
end of the summer so I'll keep that in mind.

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tbrock
You are now aware we live in a world where even CPUs have microcode patches.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
We've been living in that world for a while - what do you think is new here?
E.g. [http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx-
instru...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx-instructions-
erratum-found-in-haswell-haswelleep-broadwelly) (and Intel is suspiciously
tight-lipped about the (security?) impact of the TSX bug, while AMD's FMA3 bug
seems to be a comparatively-harmless hang.)

~~~
nowaynohow
What security impact of the Haswell/early-Broadwell TSX bug? The support for
all TSX instructions where really disabled by the microcode update, and we
know that for sure because it crashed the world instantly (in Linux).

Now, _working_ TSX can have a security impact, yes. At least on TSX as
implemented on later Broadwell/early Skylake, memory accesses done from
_inside_ an speculative region are allowed to bypass stuff they shouldn't. Is
that what you meant?

------
giancarlostoro
King of odd they're testing with an Nvidia GPU, instead of... I don't know,
AMD? Or at least both?

~~~
sp332
They've been demoing with nvidia cards for months. It is kind of odd, but
nvidia has quite a performance lead at the moment. If you're selling a CPU to
people who have a lot of money, and those people are worried about their top-
end GPUs being bottlenecked by the CPU, it's a more effective demo. I do
expect the demos to change when Vega comes out later this year.

