Enterprise, Best GPUs, CCX Latency, and Scheduling
mikeangs2004: Are the Ryzen CPUs stable enough for use in an enterprise environment? Are APUs a lower R&D priority compared to high core count CPUs?
DON WOLIGROSKI: Personally, I would have no reservations over recommending Ryzen for enterprise clients. It’s a crazy good part. Ryzen-based APUs are well on their way. I think it's great that we could stagger releases to make sure we could give each part the proper focus it deserves.
FireDFL: Which Ryzen CPU would you recommend for a gaming/overclocking/rendering build? I'll be doing light-intermediate rendering before I become an advanced renderer. Also, which GPU do you recommend to pair with any Ryzen CPU if I want to game in 1080p and 1440p at 60FPS?
DON WOLIGROSKI: If you plan to render at all, get the best Ryzen you can afford. It's that simple. The good news is that at every price point you're getting rendering performance that blows away the pre-Ryzen status quo, which was 4 threads below $275 (we deliver 12), and 8 threads under $400 (we deliver 16).
Honestly, you can get great 1440p game performance with a Radeon RX 480 or a GeForce GTX 1060 under $200. Only spend more if you want to crank up detail levels and anti-aliasing.
cryoburner: You mentioned that there are already performance optimizations for certain games such as Ashes of the Singularity. What exactly do some of these software optimizations for Ryzen entail? I've heard that communication between cores on the same CCX might be significantly faster than it is between cores on disparate CCX units. Are these optimizations due to updated code keeping threads that communicate often on the same CCX? Would this avoid the increased latency between different CCX cores?
DON WOLIGROSKI: It’s all over the map, there's no silver bullet, even though that's what people want to hear. The CCX latency is there, but it's not that bad and it's not responsible for the outliers.
I'll give you an example of the kids of things that are holding Ryzen back: a developer found that their game code automatically assumed that AMD CPUs had all-physical cores, because we didn't have SMT before now. Once the game was guided to behave as it does on Intel HyperThreaded CPUs, we saw a notable boost in performance.
It sounds simple, but this is what happens when a new architecture is introduced. It sounds trivial, once you know what's happening it can be easy to attack, but finding it takes work.
wildcard1978: When can we expect a fix for the BIOS, RAM speed bugs, and scheduling issues?
DON WOLIGROSKI: Ryzen RAM speed and compatibility is improving all the time. We have a huge BIOS update enabling 3200 MHz DDR4 that should hit most boards April 11th, and there is another update scheduled for May.
As for scheduling issues, there aren't any “issues” per se. Windows is doing what it's supposed to do. The balanced power plan wasn't working optimally and we fixed that with an updated plan you can download from the AMD website.
That's not to say we can't work with Microsoft to make the schedulers work better in the future, but there's no problem right now. It's working as designed.
Bursar: What is the IPC improvement you are looking for between Ryzen and Ryzen 2?
DON WOLIGROSKI: Personally, I'm looking for as much performance uplift as possible! We haven't disclosed anything yet, but I'm quite optimistic.
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