The A in AMD stands for 'Aaaaannnyway...' Q2 is gonna be good, chip biz vows, after dismal Q1 Chip second-fiddle AMD, a day away from its 50th anniversary, delivered better-than-expected Q1 2019 earnings on Tuesday, lifting its share price about four per cent in after-hours trading to $28.66 apiece. And that's better-than-expected in the same way that falling into a quagmire and keeping your head about the mud is …
I am replacing a aging Windows 7 desktop this year before EOL and was planning to get a Ryzen 2700x, but thanks to too early release of info about the 7nm process I am in a dilema. Wait for Ryzen, get a 2700x when the price drops. Neither means buy now.
I currently have a I5 and it has become glacial in the last year thanks to all the patches against the various Intel cache security bugs, no way I want another Intel CPU
i5 is pretty fast. The solution often isn't to throw more computing power at the problem. MS manages to soak most of it up regardless. One solution is to run a streamlined OS with no junk running.
I switched my son to a 4-core (4 thread) Ryzen, and it seems as fast as my 8 core older AMD (FX-8320 I think), with a lot of room for upgrading later. £50 for that processor. (Of course MB was another £50 and we got a good deal for fast 16GB DDR4). This upgrade was prompted by going into the realm of VR.
Unless you have a very specific reason to wait, just go ahead and get a Ryzen 2700X. I benchmarked it against various Xeon and i7, they all come out roughly the same. My benchmarking (HPC centered) measures integer, floating point, and memory performance.
Make sure to get a board that will work with the next generation of Ryzen if you plan to upgrade. However, in the last about 15 years I never upgraded the CPU, it never seems to be actually worth it. Rather plan for RAM upgrades if that could become necessary.
I know a few owners of 8 core Ryzens (both first and second gen.) and they are all really happy with their machines.
There's always a good reason to wait a bit longer before you upgrade, but at some point you have to bite the bullet and just buy something.
If you're lucky it won't be superseded for at least couple of months.
Maybe one month.
Ok, hopefully a week?
(I'm thinking about upgrading my i5 to something AMD this year, but not for six months I think)
> If you're lucky it won't be superseded for at least couple of months.
Erm, no. It would be quite surprising to see any really interesting jump in performance within a year.
Since Ryzen (and intel's price reductions caused by it) you need to intentionally buy a computer crappy enough to need replacement within three years.
Buy something decent and you'll be good for five years or more. My 2010 Phenom (remember those?) machine is slightly lame now, but still good for actual work!
> (I'm thinking about upgrading my i5 to something AMD this year, but not for six months I think)
See?
My I5 is a 2320, pretty ancient.
Intel Hyper threading seems to far more affected by the bugs than AMDs method and Intel seem to have lost speed advantage.
I am guessing that Ryzen 3 will be fairly expensive and likely peak in price at the year end as Win7 dies.
I always prefer desktops, the second memory lane makes a huge difference. Laptops only seem to ever have one ram module fitted.
I decided to have a little "what if" upgrade check and came up with the idea of buying a 1600X (or other high end Ryzen 1 chip) for cheap off ebay, pairing it with a high end AM4 motherboard, and then upgrading to Ryzen 3 when they actually come out.
There's a lot to be said for AMD keeping the same sockets for (*gasp* from the Intel fans) more than one generation of CPU. All I'd have to do is swap out the CPU, which is not a situation I've been in for years.
You can disable spectre and metldown protection in windows tweaking the registry or using the free inspectre program. https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm
On linux you can also pass this line to the kernel pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier
I don’t get it. AMDs more competitive than they've been in years. The speculative exec vulns affected them, but less so than Intel. Intel’s botched its process step to 10nm. Intel inside shouldn’t matter as much to cloud.
Why year-on drop?
Is it just a general trend away from desktop 86 for compute? Are they totally not there in cloud/servers?
"Why year-on drop?"
AMD's revenues over recent years have been propped up by GPU sales for cryptominers. That crashed badly in 2018 following the decline in market value of the output.
In terms of CPU's, outside of the consumer space, take up of gen-1 Ryzen/ThreadRipper/EPYC CPU's was slow, with take-up increasing with gen-2 products. In terms of reasons for the slow take up, it was a new product and people had been burned before by AMD's gen-1 architectures but also Intel had a pretty competitive product range at the time, performance-wise - gen-2 closed the performance gap and Intel was missing a complete product line refresh to answer it with so the AMD features (core count, PCIe lanes, price) have started to figure more prominently in vendors product ranges.
Getting their foot in the door with AWS/Google marks a major step for AMD - these are new markets if they are able to get some success.
Q3 with 7nm CPU's/GPU's will be interesting if they perform as suggested in leaks. Just in time to catch the tail end of the Win10 upgrade while potentially launching them into cloud/enterprise servers as the "premium" product. As always for AMD, time will tell...
At least there are decent AMD chips in laptops now. Forget about the A6/A9 (even saw an A4 though god knows how slow that is), the Ryzen 2500u with at least 8gb of decent speed ram (at least 2400 MHz) and you've got a good alround machine that can handle most tasks (even some light video editing and gaming). AMD in terms of technology is in the best position it has been in for years. If levono had one in a 11" or 13" thinkpad with a removeably battery, I probably wouldn't wait for my current laptop to die to get one.
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