SEVERAL TYPES OF DUST

I was watching a very sensible video by JayzTwoCents about Ryzen and I remembered something I saw a lot.

I saw repeated many times an attack on AMD fans by Intel fans and it normally went something like or similar to the following...

Before Ryzen launched ...

AMD Fanboys: Ryzen is going to smash Intel in gaming

After Ryzen launched ...

AMD Fanboys: Oh it still smashes Intel because it beats it in everything but gaming

Although the actual quotes were normally a lot more insulting than that.

This was annoying to remember this, unlike PC's I do have memory problems, lol. No, literally, lol. Anyway ...

They are crowing about these statements before even the first lot of four types of dust settle on the AMD AM4 and Ryzen launch. However let us look at the facts shall we?

Yeah ... AMD only quoted for a very long time that they were aiming for and confident they would achieve a 40% improvement in IPC (Instructions Per Clock). Oh and by the way ... another things I have remembered is everyone goes on about clock speed when talking about instructions per clock.

NO!

It is instructions PER clock. Now if you want to come up with your term of instructions per SECOND then you might have an argument. Dumb-arses. If IPC is identical or very near to each other then it will come down to clock speed. But clock speed has absolutely nothing at all to do with IPC.

Now that is out of the way back to that 40%.

Now for around two years this is what I saw some very prominent Intel fanboys state on all kinds of tech sites ...

Before Ryzen launched ...

Prominent Intel Fanboy: Nope, it is all bullshit. I am telling you [insert lots of technical terms here] is the reason why they are talking bullshit. It wont match Iv Bridge, let alone Haswell.

Hmm did I ever tell you my surname is Haswell, if that is not a reason to be an Intel fan I do not know what is. But I am a tech fan. After being a tech fan a price fan comes second to that. Anything else is beyond common sense and damn right bloody stupid.

After Ryzen launched ...

Intel Fanboys left as the prominent ones disappeared or changed their long term usernames: Oh Ryzen is a failure because despite it being better at everything for half the price or even less it is only getting 120 frames per second instead of 140 frames per second in this benchmark and only getting 200 frames per second in this benchmark instead of 220.

Oh .. my .. God.

That is not even taking into consideration that they are telling everyone that you cannot use this chip for gaming for something your eyes cannot even come close to detecting but promoting a four core chip for ... well it must be future games only.

Yeah there is not a game that you simply cannot play, or even notice a difference, on Ryzen so they must be talking about the games of the future?

Yeah we have gone from ever faster single core processors to dual core, to three core, to four core, to six core, to eight core and to ten core. Forgetting that they have gone up way higher than that in the server market, now to 32 core and 64 thread with Ryzen.

So how about games?

Yeah well they used ever faster cores, then eventually dual core, and dual GPU in some instances of course, then four core and now we are seeing a few six core and eight core uses.

But no ... according to Intel fanboys it is not going to progress any further from now on ... cos Intel. Well you were kind of right but ... cos Intel prices which only ever went up.

The funny thing is as I watched the JayzTwoCents video I could not help but think about all the accusations towards him being an Intel fanboy and shill?

In all honesty despite concentrating on nVidia and Intel it never crossed my mind that he was a paid shill. In fact that never crossed my mind with anyone. Well it did only with Ryzen but then I realised that these people are not as good with tech as they like to think they are and they like to sound.

If people are going to be naive over their brand fanboyism then let them. They are the only ones that are going to lose with face and finances in the long run.

I am certain that the smarter ones will make the correct choices and time will only prove that while all the others follow the prominent fanboys I mentioned earlier and disappear completely or change their names so they wont get called idiots.

Unfortunately I can think of two tech guys that cannot do that.

And this is where experience, especially long term, counts.

When AMD claimed to be targeting a 40% rise I actually thought they would beat this and reach 45% from everything I was reading? I got that wrong as they were and have been hitting 50% and over.

Unfortunately many of the morons of the future allowed recent history to influence their gamble on bragging rights.

Ooooh dear.

SOME FURTHER RYZEN POINTS

I have been reading more and more comments in a very sensible video by Scotsman AdoredTV, nice to see someone actually making some sense.

In the comments I see many people claiming that optimisation because ..... well, bulldozer. I have also seen a lot of comments about how people want to know what is the best to buy right now, not for the future?!

Really?! I mean, REALLY?!

Jesus Christ ... please refrain from being noticed/public in these places as your only going to end up being 'butt-hurt' as everyone likes to call it. God help console buyers when they are first launched as there is never that much out and you have to buy these things with the hope that plenty of stuff comes out over the next few years.

Sorry but your an idiot if you buy a new system purely for games that have already been released, I have NEVER done this in the thirty plus years I have been into computer games!

Now let us clear up something else that ... well, many that are just making themselves sound like idiots are claiming...

Ryzen is not only not bulldozer but you could not get further away form this if you tried. It goes back to the olld way of processing, using simultaneous multi-threading like Intel chips...

Except ... from what is now coming out from a few Linux guys AMD's SMT is actually looking, and is claimed to be, far better than Intel's hyper-threading.

Now if this is the case that SMT is better than HT I can tell you here and now that this could make any optimisations extremely interesting.

One guy also complained about how everything is down to AMD to optimise? Umm..no.

AMD can help in the optimisation process but it is Microsoft with the Windows scheduler, motherboard manufacturers with BIOS updates and game developers with patches that will do most of the work. AMD can do a little tweaking, yes for sure.

Now another list ...

1. AMD need to work in improving Ryzen, no ifs or buts about it
2. Motherboard manufacturers the same as above
3. Game developers have expressed their excitement as things can finally move on now with 8 cores and 16 threads being taken up quickly so they will
4. Microsoft simply has to ... end of story ... or lose more people to Linux for starters

AMD had to have a success on its hands with Ryzen due to the last 5 to 10 years, another factor missed by many.

Now AdoredTV showed something I was not aware of and that over time the bulldozer CPUs actually improved to the point of beating the i5-2500K, or was it 2600K? This actually really surprised me.

In the beginning it was all about how crap the bulldozer was ... when now it is shown that it was nowhere near as bad as everyone made out. I use a steamroller APU currently with Kaveri.

You simply CANNOT call out a microchip of any kind being crap purely because of a software issue and that's it and that's all.

Yes you can blame the manufacturer's software/drivers and all other things but not a CPU if it is capable but has not been realised due to this reason or that reason. The end.

The fact is that Ryzen is not bulldozer anyway and unlike bulldozer, Ryzen has a lot less ground to make up and in far, far fewer areas than bulldozer ever did. Once again another factor that seems to be missed by a great many armchair experts that love to throw around terminologies that make them sound like they know what they are talking about.

Oddly enough on that point one of the reviewers that surprised me with their tone and negativity is now getting a lot of flack over the same review of Ryzen that disappointed me, and that is Gamers Nexus.

Steve Burke had impressed me in recent times and I fully expected him of all people to list out all of the things that I have here and in my last two posts on Ryzen. But he did not.

Instead and like a whole bunch of others he promoted an Intel CPU that has barely got any faster than the chip it was meant to replace. Added to this it is still only using four cores which seems to have been this way for like forever.

I am not one to think that people are paid shills, the thought never crosses my mind, but a great many so called tech reviewers have not done themselves a lot of favours. Also to those attacking people that say this stuff ... well, its what they thought ... the end. Get over it and stop crying for God's sake!

Anyway if you want to be educated some more about whether Rzen is good or bad, a hint it is in no way bad, I suggest you listen to the crazy Scotsman who does a lot of research over periods of time ...

THE RYZEN REALITIES

Well it came a bit quicker than I thought it would.

A sensible set of benchmarks of AMD's Ryzen chips by Australian channel Hardware Unboxed has been uploaded.

In this video and in any set of benchmarks it is important to noted when a CPU, or GPU for that matter, does well...

If your doing very well in half the titles and not doing well in the other half you simply have to take it that it is a software issue. This means that improvements can come, though in rare instances might not be possible, from optimisations.

So as the Ryzen is a new tech, optimisations are obviously needed and bios updates obviously needed we can list a number of things you can expect over the next few months.

Now I am going to list a number of things that will take place over the next few months and the very first is Windows optimisations to their scheduler.

It has been discovered, shown factually by Joker's video, that Windows is seeing the extra threads as actual cores. There is a bit of a kerfuffle their when it comes to using cache memory. The extre simultaneous threads do not have their own so I am going with the fact here that their are some mistakes going on with loading data to cache memory. A number of people have highlighted this fact and kudos to them for spotting that. May or may not have been helped by Joker's video?

1. Windows Scheduler Updates
2. BIOS Update
3. Game Updates
4. Lithography (Node) Maturing
5. And the one that supposed Game and Tech reviewers missed is that FUTURE GAMES will not only be coded with Ryzen in mind but with far more cores utilised as, as of right now, the number of 8 core processors used by gamers (smart gamers) is increasing and probably exponentially over the next 6 months!!

As for some things being reported by the likes of Salazar Studio and going on in the comments there are threats being made. Even some to Gamer Nexus.

Not cool and stupid.

Yeah OK, despite his normally sounding very understanding of technology, and this is where you can get into hot water here, that Steve Burke from Gamer's Nexus did miss a few things which in all honesty surprised me.

I did not automatically think he was being paid off by Intel, as some or many have stated is their belief. I just realised that there were things he did not ... let us say 'see'.

Here is an example ... someone once said to me after I built my last computer rig, simple budget affair, that a friend into PC's told him that building a PC was easy. I said "Anything is easy if you know how to do it" to which he thought about it and said "Well, that's true".

If you know how to chuck around technical info you sound like you know what you are talking about but does not necessarily mean that you do. You can also over analyse things too and end up in a situation where you cannot see the wood for the trees. This can and will be made worse by rushing to get your videos out of the door.

In these situations the best thing to do is to do follow up videos once you have had a chance to do some more thinking, testing and research.

If you do not it does not help your cause if suddenly 300 odd software houses come out and say shit that makes you look or sound even more like you do not know what you are talking about.

Sometimes getting to the right conclusion takes time and not just in computing either.

Also there is this issues of telling people to wait until the games come out optimised for a chip of some kind .. no, just no. It does not work like that. Do you tell people to not buy Playstations or XBoxes until all the games come out?

With cheap 8 and 6 core multithreaded processors you need enough of them out there for PC games to move forwards. Telling people to carry on buying four core processors will only stagnate games coding .... after all can you run Crysis yet?!

EDIT: It has not gone unnoticed that a row might be about to brew up between two famous tech reviewers and I was surprised at the things stated by one about the other ... this was even more of a shock when I suddenly remembered these two doing a video together some months ago.

You simply cannot go around calling out others on what they do not know about tech, or what you think are mistakes, when you yourself have not even seen or quoted the reasons why things are playing out the way that they are.

People do make mistakes and yet someone was called out by someone else, even stating he should not be reviewing tech, when he himself did not fully understand what was going on. Weird and hypocritical to be honest.

As for the video itself ... I mentioned it in my last post and in all honesty I did not concentrate on every number being shown in the testing. I did not really care to be honest, especially  on the Intel side. What caught my attention was the low percentages that Ryzen cores and threads were being utilised. That was the only metric I needed ... well of course in relation to the Intel CPU's cores and threads of course.

This pointed out to me straight away that something was going awry on a software level and since I spotted that many have stated about Windows Scheduling and upon hearing that my brain just said "Of course, you dumb-arse" referring to myself not realising this when I saw the numbers.

I have admittedly been out of all this a long time and have only been back in it ... lightly.

Though I did do a BSs Applied Computing (software) Degree and was into hardware in a big way and spent four years talking about that with other students.

I built an Athlon 64x2 right, I think it was, and with two Geforce 6800GT's in SLI with a Raid 0 array of two WD Raptors long before Custom PC Magazine (spit) did an article on it.

I also dual booted Windows and Linux (RedHat 4.5 I think) long before I built that rig. I remember one lecturer I was friendly with telling me that dual booting was hard and would take me a week to work out and that I should not do it because I was studying. Took me 48 hours.

EDIT:

Warning!

Anyone getting the Gigabyte Aorus X370 motherboard be very careful using G Skills RAM, the one with the fancy RGB lighting.

A dutch guy built a new rig and one RAM stick died. He got ahold of another set and the next morning another set died ... just a warning, Corsair kits seem to be fine ...