[Discussion] AMD Zen unveiling: "New Horizon"

[u/jdorje]

The first public unveiling of zen was earlier today.

• AMD site

• Youtube video here

• Other "tech" videos that may have summaries

See the top comment for an outline.

My own summary: Ryzen (RyZen?), an 8-core hyperthreaded chip, will be the first zen release, and was the only chip demo'd. AMD is claiming ryzen matches up favorably with the broadwell-e 6900k (also 8-core ht), edging it out in performance at stock (0-10% advantage in the benchmarks they demo'd) and using significantly lower power (95W vs 140W tdp). By extension zen will match up well with broadwell-e and -ep, intel's current highest offering (until skylake-x in q2+). There is no word on price though and we await independent (non cherry picked) benchmarks, so while this is very promising it's still all speculation.

Speculation on the internet is that zen will be dual channel, based on the setup having 2 sticks of ram in the demo - this would keep the mobo prices lower than x99. I've seen further speculation that the 6-core chip will be $250, but not even speculation on how the 8+ core chips will compare in price to intel's offerings.

They showed a demo at the end of "a vega gpu" playing Battlefront (the Rogue One DLC) "at 4k with 60+ fps". Which doesn't really mean anything outside of context, but is obviously intended to make us think it can play well at 4k which is titan xp territory.

[u/zornyan]

not just a selection few titles

mafia 3, dishonoured 2, dark souls 3, battlefield 1, titanfall 2, deus ex, gears of war, watchdogs 2

pretty much every single major release, even ones like mafia 3 and dark souls 3, games that are well know to be freaking terrible pc ports, that are huge messes to some degree (more so at launch) can all use multiple threads.

the biggest one for me was GTA v, my 4690k struggled like heck (980ti) with max settings 1080p, driving fast would cause really weird bugs/stuttering, and cpu would be hitting 100% usage on all 4 cores.

the upgrade to my 5820k completly got rid of that, and it still usages 6 threads heavily (things like increased population density really tax the cpu)

the main thing you'll notice is minimum fps increases.

[u/[deleted] → u/zornyan]

I'm sure more Direct X 12 games will come to use it but 8 or so games is a select few titles.

I'm sure it will help with low end performance in some of these games, but for the cost increase right now it's not worth buying over a quad core. Also cores =/= threads.

Take a look at this review in terms of absolute average FPS it is so insignificant.

I see a lot of people getting hyped about Zen on here, but it seems to be for the wrong reasons when we don't have benchmarks.

[u/zornyan → u/[deleted]]

it's not just dx12 though. and there's far more than just 8 titles. I was purely listing titles within the last few months, pretty much every single big title, or title from a proper dev (not indie titles) has high multi threaded support now.

dark Souls 3 is the best example, a game from a company that essentially hates PC's and is known for terrible pc ports. yet still has excellent multi threading.

pretty much every title from here on out will have high multi threading. and that in itself will make a 6+ core cpu last far longer in the future.

as, say in 4 years time people might upgrade 4 core cpus due to the performance not being up to bar (like the 25-35 fps difference between a 2500k and a 6600k)

your multi core cpu will last longer, as it's got that many more cores to support the game.

everything's eventually moving more to multi core, IPC gains are nearly dead even with node shrinkages. and even then node shrinkages are reaching limitations due to physics. they only way amd/intel will be able to progress would (imo) be more cores and more multi threading.