AMD Ryzen AMA

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By Tom's Hardware Community
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Last week AMD joined us for a very special Ryzen AMA. Dive into our lengthy digest to learn about the past, present, and future of Ryzen.

Mobile, Naming Scheme, and Naples

awetle: Theoretically, how fast can the Infinity Fabric clock? Will we see an iteration of this interconnect technology on Ryzen compatible with the higher speeds of DDR5?

DON WOLIGROSKI: I'm not aware of an Infinity Fabric ceiling. That's not to say there isn't one, but it's never come up as a limitation in the meetings I've been a part of.

I can't comment on memory technologies that don't even have a defined specification yet. I can say that AMD has committed to keeping the AM4 platform around for years to come, and we're very committed to the Ryzen brand, so we'll have to see if that collides with the consumer release of DDR5.

skgs2017: Are there plans to release an 8-Core Ryzen CPU for Laptops this year?

DON WOLIGROSKI: We haven't publicly released the specifications of our Ryzen-based laptop APUs, so I can't comment.

LordStreetguru: Why weren’t the Ryzen series of processors named Ryzen 4, Ryzen 6, Ryzen 8, Ryzen 12, and Ryzen 16?

DON WOLIGROSKI: We did a ton of research and found that the vast majority of people just want a good/better/best brand segmentation scheme. They value the simplicity and clarity of it. Good = Ryzen 3, better = Ryzen 5, best = Ryzen 7. Boom! Done.

randomizer: Do you ever miss writing reviews?

DON WOLIGROSKI: Sometimes, but not nearly as much as I miss playing with all the new hardware that used to come across my desk.

The opportunity I miss most is reporting on the VR industry when the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were released. I was there before it started; I made a polarized 3D projector before you could buy them, and I tested the crap that was out before the first Oculus Rift Development kit. I met Palmer Luckey in a tiny hotel room at CES where he showed me the very first DK1. I'll always feel it's a story I never got to delve in to as much as I expected I would.

chriscambridge: We do data processing using single and dual Xeons. We actually know very little about AMD and the new Ryzen CPUs, as we are more Intel/Nvidia users. Would Ryzen processors and their related motherboards have anything to offer us? We require high core counts with hyper-threading, at the quickest frequency possible, with AVX/AVX2, auto-overclocking, and DDR4 RAM?

DON WOLIGROSKI: Ryzen has single-threaded IPC comparable to Intel's Broadwell-E. Clock for clock, we're about 6% behind Kaby Lake, Intel's best.

At the same time, we offer colossal multithreading advantages over the competition. Our 6-core/12 thread Ryzen 5's start at just over $200 USD. Our 8-core/16 thread Ryzen 7s start at just over $300 USD. The $499 Ryzen 7 1800X offers multithreading performance about 9% better than the Core i7-6900K, which costs over $1000.

Ryzen CPUs can use ECC memory, but Intel consumer CPUs cannot (although Ryzen boards are not qualified for this). Ryzen also uses DDR4 RAM. It's a new platform so we're ramping up memory, but we're stably at 3200 MHz and making fast progress with BIOS updates.

If you use Xeons, though, do some research on AMD's upcoming Naples server parts. Quad-channel RAM, unholy amounts of I/O bandwidth, 32-core/64-thread CPUs. Absolutely killer server value coming your way.

XaveT: Are there any plans to release a low-power Ryzen processor, such as one with a TDP of 25W less, designed in the same vein as the Athlon 5300-series? I love those little workhorses, and am hoping to see an AM4 version with PCIe 3.0 and DDR4 support. Any chance of us seeing this?

DON WOLIGROSKI: Nothing we've announced specifically. Although we're making mobile Ryzen processors in the future, so that's some indication.


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13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • BugariaM
    Many people ask clear and technically interesting questions, hoping to get the same answers ..

    And they are answered by a person who is far from the technical plane and the engineering questions.
    He is a manager, he is a salesman.
    His task is more blah-blah, only for the sake of an even greater blah-blah.

    Thanks, of course, but alas, I found nothing interesting for myself here.
    Reply
  • genz
    I intensely disagree Bugariam. All the info he could provide is provided and he asked people actually close to the metal when he did not know. You will not get tech secrets or future insights from ANY AMD or Intel rep on tomshardware; Its far too public and every drop of information here is also given to Intel, Nvidia, and any other competitors hoping to steal AMDs charge. What we did get is a positive outlook on AMD's products.... when you compare that to what we already had from Toms and other publishers who have spent years watching Intel lead and thus don't have faith (or simply got their jobs for their love of Intel) was major.

    I personally think he did not remind us that the current crop of 8 core consoles will inevitably force AMD's core advantage to eat all the competition Intel currently has. In 5 years every single Ryzen 1 processor will terrorize the Intel processors they competed with.... Ryzen 5s will have 50% performance gains over Kaby i7 etc etc.

    Intel knew this was the future, that is why all Intel consumer processors have stuck to 4 cores to try and keep the programming focus on their IPC lead. Now that that lead is only 6% and the competition has more cores, we will see the shift toward 6+ cores that we saw when Core 2 Duo came and made dual FX and Dual Pentiums viable mainstream gaming chips, and when Core Quad and Nehalem made quad cores viable gaming chips.

    As the owner of a 3930k, you can read my past posts and see I have always said this is going to happen. Now, a month after you are seeing the updates come out already. Wait till there are 12 threaded games on the market (this year I expect) and you will see just how much the limitation of the CPU industry's progress was actually created by Intel's refusal to go over 4 cores in the mainstream.

    For all the talk of expense creating 6 and 12 core processors, Intel could have had consumer 8 core low clock chips in mainstream for prosumers and home rendering types years ago and they didn't. My theory is that they are scared of heavily threaded applications in the mainstream creating opportunity for competition to outmanouvre their new chips based on slower, more numerous cores. It's not like a 2ghz 6 or 8 core in the mainstream was never an option.
    Reply
  • Calculatron
    I remember being really excited for the AMD AMA, but could not think of anything different from what everyone else was already asking.

    In retrospect, because hindsight is always 20/20, I wish I would have asked some questions about Excavator, since they still have some Bristol Ridge products coming out for the AM4 platform. Even though Zen is a new architecture, there were still some positive things that carried over from the Bulldozer family that had been learned through-out its process of evolution.
    Reply
  • Ernst01
    As a long time AMD Fan it is so cool AMD has more in the future for us.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    "TDP is not electrical watts (power draw), it's thermal watts."Argh, this kind of annoys me. "Electrical watts" and "thermal watts" are the same thing here, power draw = heat generated for a CPU. There are reasons why TDP is not necessarily an accurate measure of power draw, but this isn't one of them.
    Reply
  • alextheblue
    Thank you Don!
    Reply
  • Tech_TTT
    19562297 said:
    Many people ask clear and technically interesting questions, hoping to get the same answers ..

    And they are answered by a person who is far from the technical plane and the engineering questions.
    He is a manager, he is a salesman.
    His task is more blah-blah, only for the sake of an even greater blah-blah.

    Thanks, of course, but alas, I found nothing interesting for myself here.

    I agree with you 100% ... Ask me anything should include people from the R&D department and not only sales person. or maybe a team of 2 people , Sales and Research. or even better? the CEO him/herself included.

    Reply
  • Tech_TTT
    @Tomshardware : WE DEMAND APPLE AMA !!!
    Reply
  • genz
    19566458 said:
    "TDP is not electrical watts (power draw), it's thermal watts."Argh, this kind of annoys me. "Electrical watts" and "thermal watts" are the same thing here, power draw = heat generated for a CPU. There are reasons why TDP is not necessarily an accurate measure of power draw, but this isn't one of them.

    That is simply not true.

    Here's an example. 22nm and 18nm TDP is usually far higher than actual draw because the chip is so small any cooling solution has a much smaller surface area to work with. Another example: When Intel brought over onboard memory controllers from the bridge to the CPU socket, the TDP of their chips went unchanged because (thermally speaking) the controller was far away enough from the chip to never contribute to thermal limitations... despite the temperature of the chip rising much faster under OC because of the additional bits, and the chips themselves drawing more power due to more components. A final example: I have a 130W TDP chip that without overvolting simply cannot reach a watt over 90 even when running a power virus (which draws the max power the chip can draw - more than burn-in or SuperPi). The TDP rating is directly connected to the specific parts of the chip that run hot and how big they are, not their true power draw. This is why so many chips of the same binning have the same TDP despite running at lower clocks and voltages than each other.

    Further to that, TDP is rounded up to fixed numbers to make it easy to pick a fan. True power draw is naturally dependent on how well a chip is binned, and super badly binned chips may still run with enough volts so they usually add 10 to 20 watts for the thermal headroom to make that possible.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    @genz I never said TDP is equal to power draw, in fact I explicitly said there are reasons why it isn't. I simply said that "thermal watts" (heat being generated by the CPU) are equivalent to "electrical watts" (power being consumed by the CPU). At any given moment, the power being drawn by the CPU is equal to the heat being generated.

    I'll admit, I'm sort of nitpicking a small part of the answer given in the AMA regarding TDP, I just felt the need to point it out because this is a misconception I see on a semi regular basis.
    Reply