General Discussions

[black_zion]

I don't like it. Yes it looks good in this slide, but there are still a number of unknowns which won't be revealed until they're in the hands of the reviewers.

Smaller L1 cache for larger L3 cache, which is going to result in increased latency, though AMD states the performance improvements will offset this.

Up to 15% higher IPC depending on workload, so we won't know what the typical IPC improvement will be. It's entirely possible average IPC gain will be half that, which will put Zen 2 still behind Intel in terms of performance per clock, and make upgrading from Zen+ or even Zen a questionable decision.

It's known AMD is stripping official PCIe 4.0 support from 300 and 400 series boards, so even the "PCIe 3.7 or so speeds", as article have stated that it wouldn't be true 4.0 due to technical issues, aren't going to be possible even though those speeds would eliminate a bottleneck of the fastest GPU currently, the RTX 2080 Ti which is bottlenecked by PCIe 3.0 x8.

And let's not forget, Lisa Su even stated X570 motherboards "will be expensive", and since this is the last Socket AM4 CPU range, unless AMD decides to delay AM5 until 2021 though much of that decision will no doubt be related to DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, any future upgrade path will result in a new motherboard required.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-3000-zen-2-microarchitecture-7nm,39609.html

[pokester]

It is a shame with that with these new boards being pricier and with new processor and boards out again next year that they don't announce like they had done a couple times in the past that maybe then next zen chip could be ddr4 or ddr5 compatible. They did that with the Phenom II's and even though it was a bout 10 percent slower than  on a ddr 3 board it was still quite an upgrade for cheap. Especially since I even got one working on an AM2 board it wasn't even listed as supporting!

I doubt that we will ever see those kind of options again though. As a person that hangs onto computers a long time it would make me a more likely buyer though.

[black_zion]

With the move to a new socket I doubt there will be any more dual memory controllers, which is sad in a way because DDR4 finally became cheap, and because outside the professional and server market the benefits of DDR5 over DDR4 are quite limited, especially if AMD solved the biggest design flaw of the Zen architecture, running the Infinity Fabric at the DRAM speed which they supposedly did with Zen 2.

Going long on computers is easier than it used to be though. With my Phenom II x4 965, and FX-8350, and really every AMD CPU between the Athlon64 series and Ryzen, there was always Intel's superior IPC hanging over it and the bottleneck they were to GPUs, but now with Ryzen, and especially with the upcoming Windows 10 1903 exclusive Ryzen scheduler patch, combined with the fact that games are getting less CPU limited and programs in general more multi-threaded, and of course 6 and 8 core processors now being mainstream helps even more.

[pokester]

True, aside from gaming, video editing and niche compute software the vast majority of software runs fine still on 10 year old processors. In reality until Ryzen forced this most recent big change in processors, they hadn't really evolved that much in the last decade plus. Even my Adobe apps all still run great on my old Phenom II. I only replaced that system for gaming. To me the biggest performance difference for the PC in recent years has been the extra speed you get from an SSD not the faster CPUs. I find it amazing that I still see computers sold with spinning hard drives as OS drives. Anyone that has not made the jump to SSD is really missing out on something that makes you computer feel amazingly fast.

[hardcoregames_]

My old Phenom II X4 965 is 125W while my new R5 2400G is 46W when a video card is installed. The CPU pays for itself in power saved. Same with moving from 80 plus bronze to 80 plus platinum pays for itself.

I use a M.2 SSD for my boot disk and I still have a couple of hard disks installed too.

I tend to buy high performance video cards which tend to be 150W or more. My GTX 1060 is 120W but it can use more when pushed.

Not sure what will surface later this year for video cards.

[quadibloc]

The slide here shows the base clock of the 3700X as 3.6 GHz, and that of the 3800X as 3.9 GHz.

I thoought they were 3.5 GHz and 3.6 GHz respectively, from the slides shown at the presentation, and it seemed to me that 3.6 GHz was too low to explain the jump in TDP.

[hardcoregames_]

expanded L3 memory does use a bit of power

[qwixt]

Given some persistent driver issues since 19.5.1, I am less inclined to buy anything AMD.

With that said, it would be a tough decision between 3800x and 3900x.

[black_zion]

Given how fast the Fury series was dropped from performance updates, I'm significantly less inclined to buy Radeon in the future, especially since we know custom Navi XT cards will be more expensive than and draw more power than the RTX 2070.

Processor wise I'm in no hurry to upgrade since there is a significant possibility Zen 2 will only have an average of 10% or less performance gain over Zen per clock. It's also going to depend on how smart AMD's Boost function has become, because Zen's is utterly moronic, mine never got above 3.7ghz despite a powerful liquid cooler even on low thread count applications. When they get less expensive I may go for the 3900X, being the last processor I buy for a long time mine as well go high end.

[hardcoregames_]

I sometimes use my vega 11 logic on my cpu and it doesn't seem to be problematic

last time i did that was to see how well vega compare with pascal for rendering h.265 HEVC vs using my R5 2400 CPU cores for rendering

what I noticed is that while slower, the CPU did a noticeably better job suggesting GPU vendors need to work on their respective encoders better