Ryzen 2, Wraith Coolers, and Infinity Fabric
redgarl: Goldman Sachs recently depreciated the value of AMD in a report. Do you think the public and the industry is still missing what AMD is trying to accomplish with their new lineup of products?
DON WOLIGROSKI: Goldman Sachs depreciation: This is my personal and not AMD-related opinion: AMD is really well positioned for the long haul, so frankly I'm not worried one iota about it. We've only just begun with Ryzen, Naples isn't released yet, and the public has no idea of our detailed plans. Take from that what you will.
Aspiring techie: What are the low hanging fruits that AMD can easily improve from Ryzen to Ryzen 2 and do you think the gains will be significant? Can we expect improvements in clock rates, SMT, CCX scheduling, overclocking, or other microarchitecture features?
DON WOLIGROSKI: Ryzen represents a double introduction here: an all-new architecture, and an all-new 14nm FinFET process. There are many levers to pull in pretty much every aspect of the CPU. The ones you mentioned are all part of that. And that's a really awesome place to be, when Ryzen is only 6% slower than Intel's newest Kaby Lake architecture clock-for-clock in Cinebench single-thread right out of the gate.
scout_03: Which cooler will come with the 1500x and the 1600x OEM CPU sale in box kit?
DON WOLIGROSKI: The Ryzen 5 1500X comes with the Wraith Spire cooler. This is the same cooler on the Ryzen 7 1700, but without the illuminated LED ring on the Ryzen 5. The Ryzen 5 1600X is sold without a fan, like the Core i5-7600K, which is its main competition in the price segment.
jaymc: Can we expect further performance improvements from Infinity Fabric [AMD’s latest interconnect technology and the successor to HyperTransport]? How future proof is it? Will Infinity Fabric keep up with DDR4 4000MHz? What about speeds in excess of 4500MHz DDR4 memory?
DON WOLIGROSKI: Well, I haven't heard of any engineering concerns about the Infinity Fabric interconnect. On the contrary, if you speed up Infinity Fabric you should drop some latency, so it's all good.
As I've answered already, we're very focused on improving memory speeds and latency, but I haven't heard any concerns about how far we can go before we're capped yet.
Presentato: As someone interested in doing virtualization and PCI pass-through of a GPU early reports of IOMMU groupings don't look promising for the consumer motherboards. Is that something AMD can address or are any improvements reliant on motherboard manufacturers?
DON WOLIGROSKI: This is something I've personally started to look at recently as a pet project. I'm playing with VM-Ware on my Ryzen system at home because, really, Ryzen's highly-threaded CPUs bring a lot of virtualization potential to the table in price segments where it hasn't been before. The sub-$300 segment has been limited to 4-thread processors on the Intel side, while Ryzen 5 ratchets that up to 12 threads. Boom.
Having said that, we're in launch mode right now, and virtualization isn't a top priority at the moment. We're laser focused on making the platform as fast as we can in the near future. I anticipate we'll look harder at virtualization as time goes on.
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