AMD Ryzen 3000 announced

[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.

[profquail]

Have you considered using the POWER9-based Raptor Blackbird uATX board for your next build? The firmware is open, and they advertise it as a feature:

https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html

[shrimp_emoji]

Does Intel let you disable PSP?

Meanwhile, AMD seemed to in the past[0].

0: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-PSP-...

[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.

[DCKing]

If you want a discrete GPU with the same featureset as a modern integrated Intel GPU - with basic desktop features such as 1) being able to decode modern video codecs like HEVC 2) prime Windows and (especially) Linux support or 3) modern video outputs such as HDMI 2.0 - you need to buy a Radeon RX550. This will still set you back more than $80 and add another fan to your build.

A Radeon R7 240 from 6 years ago will still set you back $50, but will not give you modern video outputs or video codecs (although it at least still has relatively prime driver support). It's probably even slower than Intel's current integrated graphics too. Might as well go for the upsell then.

The prevalence of internal GPUs unfortunately seems to have killed the market for up-to-date very low end discrete GPUs. The "budget stuff" starts at $80, which is quite steep for something that barely has added value over an integrated GPU.

[deaddodo]

> 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.

What? No you don't. They literally have an entire line dedicated to the exact use case you mentioned (CPU w/ iGPU for business use):

https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-5-pro-2400g

[MrGilbert]

You could pick a Ryzen with "G", like the Ryzen 5 2400G, though... They have an integrated GPU.

[lm28469]

You can get a cheap passive gpu, most don't even need power from the PSU. Something like a nvidia GT 710 or 730.

[bitL]

Mobo manufacturers could solder some weak GPU on board, but nobody seems to be interested so I guess they did their homework and decided it didn't make any economical sense.

[deafcalculus]

Yep. Intel iGPUs have good open source Linux drivers too. I had hoped that AMD would have some basic graphics in the IO die, but it looks like that won't happen.

[gigatexal]

The G-line of CPUs with integrated graphics is also interesting to me as well! As system ram gets quicker (it's my understanding that the frame buffer for these integrated GPUs comes from system ram) and nanometer tech gets better that a competent integrated GPU+CPU chip will be able to play AAA games at 1080P with some of the visuals turned up. Though the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that the console makers would never let that happen as it would mean DIY PC gamers would be able to build < 500 USD machines that could be play all the latest games.

[sascha_sl]

There's always the 2200G and the 2400G, I'd expect those to get refreshed within the next year too.

[carc1n0gen]

2200G and 2400G from current gen ryzen have integrated graphics though.

[szatkus]

They use the same chip for desktop and for server market where it doesn't make much sense to add a crappy iGPU. Intel with their scale could build much more different chips.

[skrebbel]

When I put together my computer a year or two ago, I just added some cheap $40 radeon board. It really didn't impact the bottom line much.

[gigatexal]

It's my understanding that Navi is just GCN but tweaked with faster memory.

[dethac]

The 2400G existed. It's a lower end chip, but has the GPU you want.

[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.

[dr_zoidberg]

This! I usually run code where I'm cache limited and adding more processes/threads slows down everything! At 64 MB of L3 cache, I'd be able to run things way faster[0] on image processing tasks!

[0] for the curious reader, I've two machines: a 3MB-L3 i5 and a 20MB-L3 Xeon. So id't be looking at 20x and 3x improvements -- without taking into account other architectural improvemnents, like not-underclocked-AVX2, and the GHz count

[zepearl]

Thanks for the heads-up - I totally missed this "detail" when I skimmed through the article & specs table earlier today.

And just in case that somebody missed it, here is again the link to the PDF "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory" by Ulrich Drepper...

https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf

...which was posted here sometimes earlier this year and which talks about every detail of RAM and L1/2/3 cache access times and architectures etc... . Very heavy for me (read so far 25%) but as well very interesting.

[Manjuuu]

This, people tend to forget what huge difference a few mb of cache can make. I'd prefer 1Mb more of cache over half a GHz of frequency.

[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.

[gigatexal]

ball parking the build in my head: - Ryzen 9 or Ryzen 7 - 32GB ddr4 - RTX 2070 or equivalent Navi for games* (depending on benchmarks and if I decide to actually do anything with CUDA) - everything else I have, NVMe system drive, case, PSU etc * Vulkan is big in the games I am targeting: Rage2, Doom Eternal

[WC3w6pXxgGd]

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

[dmix]

Do you work on a desktop machine? At home?

[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.

[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.

[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...

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

[danbolt]

A lot of AAA game studios with larger C++ codebases use Incredibuild a lot. I can imagine having something with this level of parallelism would be incredibly useful.

[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...

[1] https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/400-series-pci-4-0-bandwidth-bi...

[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.

[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).

[pedrocr]

The "monster" is the 12/24 and that's still only 105W. For a real monster you'd need a Threadripper. The cheaper 8/16 at 65W/329$ looks like a great choice. But I guess 6/12 for 130$ less is also nice.

[shmerl]

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

[loser777]

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

[hsivonen]

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

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[shmerl]

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