from Hacker News

AMD Unveils Ryzen 9000 CPUs for Desktop, Zen 5

by rx_tx on 6/3/24, 4:34 AM with 292 comments

  • by buildbot on 6/3/24, 6:07 AM

    AVX512 in a single cycle vs 2 cycles is big if the clock speed can be maintained at all near 5GHz. Also doubling of L1 cache bandwidth is interesting! Possibly, needed to actually feed an AVX512 rich instruction stream I guess.

  • by dhx on 6/3/24, 5:49 AM

    How are the 24x PCIe 5.0 lanes (~90GB/s) of the 9950X allocated?

    The article makes it appear as:

    * 16x PCIe 5.0 lanes for "graphics use" connected directly to the 9950X (~63GB/s).

    * 1x PCIe 5.0 lane for an M.2 port connected directly to the 9950X (~4GB/s). Motherboard manufacturers seemingly could repurpose "graphics use" PCIe 5.0 lanes for additional M.2 ports.

    * 7x PCIe 5.0 lanes connected to the X870E chipset (~28GB/s). Used as follows:

      * 4x USB 4.0 ports connected to the X870E chipset (~8GB/s).

  * 4x PCIe 4.0 ports connected to the X870E chipset (~8GB/s).

  * 4x PCIe 3.0 ports connected to the X870E chipset (~4GB/s).

  * 8x SATA 3.0 ports connected to the X870E chipset (some >~2.4GB/s part of ~8GB/s shared with WiFi 7).

  * WiFi 7 connected to the X870E chipset (some >~1GB/s part of ~8GB/s shared with 8x SATA 3.0 ports).

  • by irusensei on 6/3/24, 12:43 PM

    I'll probably wait one or two years before getting into anything with DDR5. I've blew some money on an AMD laptop in 2021. At the time it was a monster with decent expansion options: RX 6800m, Ryzen 9 5900HX. I've stuck it with maximum 64GB DDR4 and 2x 4TB psi 3.0 nvme. Runs Linux very well.

    But now I'm seeing lots of things I'm locked out. Faster ethernet standards, the fun that brings with tons of GPU memory (no USB4, can't add 10Gbe either), faster and larger memory options, AV1 encoding. It's just sad that I bought a laptop right before those things were released.

    Should had go with a proper PC. Not doing this mistake anymore.

  • by gautamcgoel on 6/3/24, 5:17 AM

    Surprisingly not that much to be excited about IMO. AMD isn't using TSMC's latest node and the CPUs only officially support DDR5 speeds up to 5600MHz (yes, I know that you can use faster RAM). The CPUs are also using the previous-gen graphics architecture, RDNA2.

  • by mmaniac on 6/3/24, 8:24 AM

    AMD seem to be playing it safe this with this desktop generation. Same node, similar frequencies, same core counts, same IOD, X3D chips only arriving later... IPC seems like the only noteworthy improvement here. 15% overall is good but nothing earth shattering.

    The mobile APUs are way more interesting.

  • by ArtTimeInvestor on 6/3/24, 5:46 AM

    Do all CPUs and GPUs these days involve components made by TSMC?

    If so, is this unique - that a whole industry of relies on one company?

  • by gattr on 6/3/24, 2:29 PM

    I normally rebuild my workstation every ~4 years (recently more for fun than out of actual need for more processing power), might finally do it again (preferably a recent 8-/12-core Ryzen). My most recent major upgrade was in 2017 (Core i5 3570K -> Ryzen 7 1700X), with a minor fix in 2019 (Ryzen 7 2700, since 1700X was suffering from the random-segfaults-during-parallel-builds issue).

  • by ComputerGuru on 6/3/24, 5:23 PM

    Interesting unveil; it seems everyone was expecting more significant architectural changes though they still managed to net a decent IPC improvement.

    In light of the "very good but not incredible" generation-over-generation improvement, I guess we can now play the "can you get more performance for less dollars buying used last-gen HEDT or Epyc hardware or with the newest Zen 5 releases?" game (NB: not "value for your dollar" but "actually better performance").

  • by tripdout on 6/3/24, 5:14 AM

    7900X equivalent 9900X has 120W TDP as opposed to 170W. Is it that much more power efficient?

  • by sylware on 6/3/24, 12:17 PM

    Improving avx512 is really good, since this is the data unit sweet spot: a cache line is 512 bits.

    But I am more interested in the cleanup of the GPU hardware interface (it should be astonishingly simple to program the GPU with its various ring buffers, like as it is rumored to be the case on nvidia side) AND in the squishing of all hardware shader bugs: look at valve ACO compiler erratas in mesa, AMD hardware shader is a bug minefield. Hopefully, the GFX12 did fix ALL KNOWN SHADER HARDWARE BUGS (sorry, ACO is written with that horrible c++, I dunno what went thru the head of valve and no, rust syntax is a complex as c++, then this is toxic too).

  • by Sparkyte on 6/3/24, 7:08 AM

    Huge improvement over my 5k series processor.

  • by Pet_Ant on 6/3/24, 1:33 PM

    Does anyone have metrics for some sort of benchmark per transistor? I wonder where the sweetspot is between something like these and SERV [1]. Obviously GPU wins on parallel math, but I wonder how much we are chasing in terms diminishing returns.

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSHasXHvZaQ

  • by adriancr on 6/3/24, 5:51 AM

    Finally, was waiting for this for a new build and it seems decent upgrade.

  • by nubinetwork on 6/3/24, 7:37 AM

    I'd love to replace my 2950x, but most desktop motherboards still don't support 128gb of memory.

  • by Tepix on 6/3/24, 11:38 AM

    It's weird that CPUs tend to use more power every two years now instead of less. Looks like this time, the TDP didn't increase. Yay! i guess. Don't most people think their PCs are fast enough already?

    It's as if our planet wasn't being destroyed at a frightening speed. We're headed towards a cliff, but instead if braking, we're accelerating.

  • by jiggawatts on 6/3/24, 8:32 AM

    I wonder when the PC world will transition to unified memory and more monolithic architectures as seen in the Apple M-series chips, but also in the NVIDIA GB200 "superchip", the AMD MI300 accelerator, the X-Box and Playstation consoles, and even in some mobile phone system-on-a-chip designs. It feels like the PC is the "last holdout" of discrete upgradeable components with relatively low bandwidth between them.

    Sooner or later, AI will need to run on the edge, and that'll require RAM bandwidths measured in multiple terabytes per second, as well as "tensor" compute integrated closely with CPUs.

    Sure, a lot of people see LLMs as "useless toys" or "overhyped" now, but people said that about the Internet too. What it took to make everything revolve around the Internet instead of it being just a fad is broadband. When everyone had fast always-on Internet at home and in their mobile devices, then nobody could argue that the Internet wasn't useful. Build it, and the products will come!

    If every gaming PC had the same spec as a GB200 or MI300, then games could do real-time voice interaction with "intelligent" NPCs with low latency. You could talk to characters, and they could talk back. Not just talk, but argue, haggle, and debate!

    "No, no, no, the dragon is too powerful! ... I don't care if your sword is a unique artefact, your arm is weak!"

    I feel like this is the same kind of step-change as floppy drives to hard drives, or dialup or fibre. It'll take time. People will argue that "you don't need it" or "it's for enterprise use, not for consumers", but I have faster Internet going to my apartment than my entire continent had 30 years ago.

  • by alberth on 6/3/24, 12:40 PM

    > TSMC N4

    Question: Am I understanding this correctly that AMD will be using a node size from TSMC that’s 2-years old, but in a way it’s kind of older.

    Because N4 was like a “N5+” (and the current gen is “N3+”).

    EDIT: why the downvotes for a question?

  • by aurareturn on 6/3/24, 5:18 AM

    15% IPC boost is mildly disappointing.

    It will be significantly slower in ST than M4, and even more so against the M4 Pro/Max.

  • by papichulo2023 on 6/3/24, 5:42 AM

    Meh, I guess still 128 bits memory channel width. Guess they are not even trying anymore.