AMD Ryzen

[BertTuyt]

For those who want fast hardware, the new AMD Ryzen 8-core 1700X seems interesting.
I have no clue how this processor compares with Intel , or if it also contains the new BMI instructions Joost uses.
But anyway competition in the high end market is for everyone beneficial.
Especially while Intel so far was no match, and $2000 for a 10-core is out of reach for many.

Bert

[Joost Buijs]

For those who want fast hardware, the new AMD Ryzen 8-core 1700X seems interesting.
I have no clue how this processor compares with Intel , or if it also contains the new BMI instructions Joost uses.
But anyway competition in the high end market is for everyone beneficial.
Especially while Intel so far was no match, and $2000 for a 10-core is out of reach for many.

Bert

Bert,

The Ryzen processor has BMI2 instructions, the previous AMD excavator already has this.

If you believe the benchmarks that AMD is showing the 1800X and 1700X are comparable to a core i7-6900K and i7-6850k for about half the price, AMD has a history of over-promising and under-delivering so I would wait until there are independent benchmarks arriving in march.

If the benchmarks they show are really true it is possible that the Ryzen will outrun Intel for integer calculations, but I first have to see it with my own eyes before I believe it.

Joost

[BertTuyt]

Joost, it sounds indeed to good to be true.
As usual, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
But I would welcome any success from AMD, as Intel processors are (although very good) heavily overpriced.
Especially in the high-end segment (aka the 8 and 10 core).

Bert

[Joost Buijs]

Joost, it sounds indeed to good to be true.
As usual, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
But I would welcome any success from AMD, as Intel processors are (although very good) heavily overpriced.
Especially in the high-end segment (aka the 8 and 10 core).

Bert

Bert,

These prices are crazy, I expect that Intel has to lower their prices now that AMD has something similar for half the price.

I was a bit lucky with the 5960X and the 6950X I have, the first one I bought in the very beginning when the Euro was almost 1.5x the Dollar, and the second one I got for 2/3 of the price from somebody who bought it and regretted it afterwards, and I reclaimed VAT from the tax-office, of course it is still a considerable amount of money.

Joost

[Rein Halbersma]

If you believe the benchmarks that AMD is showing the 1800X and 1700X are comparable to a core i7-6900K and i7-6850k for about half the price, AMD has a history of over-promising and under-delivering so I would wait until there are independent benchmarks arriving in march.

Even 80% performance for 50% of the price is worth it IMO.

[Joost Buijs]

If you believe the benchmarks that AMD is showing the 1800X and 1700X are comparable to a core i7-6900K and i7-6850k for about half the price, AMD has a history of over-promising and under-delivering so I would wait until there are independent benchmarks arriving in march.

Even 80% performance for 50% of the price is worth it IMO.

Yes, you have a point here.

[BertTuyt]

Based upon the first benchmarks 8-core processors, for acceptable prices, and with an interesting performance, become realistic.
And the call them AMD Ryzen....

Bert

[Joost Buijs]

Based upon the first benchmarks 8-core processors, for acceptable prices, and with an interesting performance, become realistic.
And the call them AMD Ryzen....

Bert

Indeed, they come very close to the 6850K and 6900K processors, still with a lower IPC, but AMD compensates for that with a higher clock frequency. Reading through the reviews there seem to be some issues with memory compatibility, the platform is still very immature, as usual these issues will be sorted out over time.

Edit:

The good thing about this is that Intel has to lower their prices as well if they want to stay competitive. My preference still goes out to Intel, just like I'd rather have an nVidia graphics card. AMD usually has many quirks in their software and hardware, in the past I had several systems messed up by AMD graphics drivers which were more difficult to remove as the average virus.

Joost

[BertTuyt]

First Ryzen, now Napels. Who needs 32 cores ?

Bert

[Joost Buijs]

First Ryzen, now Napels. Who needs 32 cores ?

Bert

Not my cup of tea, for the things I'm typically doing a few fast cores are usually better than many slow cores.

I hope that the renewed competition of AMD forces Intel to do something about these weird prices, a top of the line workstation would be a machine with 2x Xeon E5-2667-v4 or E5-2687W-v4, but at current prices is a little bit too costly if you consider that it will be obsolete within a year of 3 to 5.

An alternative could be a machine with 2x8 core AMD Ryzen @ 4GHz., it is however not clear whether the 1800X supports 2p configurations, maybe it will in the future.

Joost

[BertTuyt]

Rumors indicate that also a 16-core Ryzen is in the works

Bert

[Joost Buijs]

Rumors indicate that also a 16-core Ryzen is in the works

Bert

Indeed!

There are also rumors that AMD will add 4 way interleaved memory to Ryzen to make it competitive with Intel HEDP. However one of the lead developers of Ryzen says that there are no intentions to add 4 way memory, so I don't know what to believe.

Intel is the king of memory bandwidth and my draughts program makes heavy use of this, I never tried to run the program on a lesser system, but even without testing it I expect that it will slowdown considerably. Ryzen consists of 2x4 cores coupled by a fast internal bus, it behaves like 2 NUMA nodes, likewise a 16 core Ryzen will consist of 4 NUMA nodes and I have no idea what kind of effect this will have on the type of problems we are trying to solve.

One of my friends is building a system with a 1800X, when he has his system up and running I will try to run my chess and draughts program on it to get a feeling for how it performs.

Joost

[BertTuyt]

Interesting developments.
Assume that Intel might reduce prices or will also introduce higher core count in the high-end desktop segment.
If we really need this power for Draughts programs is another story, which Im trying to find out ...

Bert

[BertTuyt]

And now.....
The Intel i9, with affordable 8 core CPUs, and a 18-core extreme model.
So up to another game, as normal Draughts is going into draw mode...

Bert

[MichelG]

And now.....
The Intel i9, with affordable 8 core CPUs, and a 18-core extreme model.
So up to another game, as normal Draughts is going into draw mode...

Which game do you suggest? I think chess is the only other game left where MC and/or ML haven't taken over (yet...)

There are still some challenges left in draughts. Scan is still capable of losing about 1 in 4 games, at least on the short time scales that i tested (i'll post some test results later)

Here is a challenge for you: consider these two positions:

1) The starting position
2) a 1 king vs 1 king position

Current engines will evaluate both positions as about 0.000

For position 2 that's correct, but for position 1 that's plainly wrong, since it depends on who you are playing against. Maybe it should be evaluated as an 80% win, maybe as low as 40%.

Evaluating to 0.000, current programs give up the fight before they even start their first move, and so cause a too large draw rate against grandmasters and other (weaker) opponents. While with some opponent modeling you might increase your win rate a lot.

Michel