THE LONG PAUSE

I have had a serious issue going on for seven months now.

It should have not gone on this long but it did.

There was delay after delay and I am not even sure why, with most if not all of them.

As I stated on my corruption blog .. it will mean some big changes when it occurs and will mean that I can buy a shed load of things that are for professionals, like camera equipment.

But before I could buy anything else I needed something that would help me acquire these other tools, of which there is a long list.

Of course one of the other issues I have had is that I use my mountain bike for a lot of work and .. well the weather has been dreadful for me and my health condition. My condition does not like it when it is hot and humid and it was exactly that of late.

Well .. that is until it turned to rain and last night I could heard this horrendous and loud noise and I thought 'That sounds like really, really heavy rain but that kind of rain I have not witnessed before!'

I got up and looked out my window and I think many local Indian people could be forgiven for thinking they had been teleported back to India in he middle of a monsoon!

Anyway yeah so I needed the bike and as has been the case for years now .. if it is really hot, raining or even just a wind stronger than 10mph then getting anything done wildlife wise, or anything else for that matter .. is impossible!

But ..

.. not anymore!

As I stated previously .. many tools to come! Lol! Hmm .. Threadripper?!

THE WAR FOR THE WAGES

I burst out laughing ... at that. It is not even mine but someone put it in a comment on one of Gamer Meld's recent video about the 18 Core Intel HEDT chip they announced.

In the comment he simply said "Walletripper v Threadripper" and he might as well as added 'Sideripper' because I thought my sides were going to burst open I laughed that hard!

Heh, jokes aside I had watched a couple of things on CPU stuff tonight and engaged in a long conversation with an Apple fanatic.

It was funny when he put all these new expanded cores in Threadripper and ... Walletripper, hehe, down to Apple! I stopped in the conversation and went ... "Errr what?!"

No, son. Just no.

He put all these things down to Apple because he had just watched an announcement that Apple were introducing new Power Mac Pros, or whatever they are called, with up to 18 core Intel chips that start, not 18 core, at $5,000!

I said "No, son. Apple do not make CPUs so this has nothing to do with them ... look? I was going to build an AMD PC Rig when Ryzen came out but I was not that bothered that I couldn't because I believed strongly that they would announce 10 and 12 core Ryzens a few months later. They have. I also stated that Ryzen was far better than they were stating and that 95% of tech journalists proved in a matter of days that they do not know what they are talking about. Hang on? Did I not tell you 6 months ago that this was going to happen? I told you that there was going to be an explosion in power and core count along with artificial intelligence in 2017?"

I then remembered that when I told him this he simply would not have it.

Now we have this announcement, he gets excited and thinks it is all thanks to Apple?! Jesus!

I then explained that AMD announced a new platform for HEDT and that they announced not only 10 and 12 core CPUs but also 14 and 16 core ones for this platform too.

I then explained that Intel reacted like they had shat themselves in a way, that would make Stewie Griffin proud, and that what has happened is that Intel rushed to Apple and said ... "Oh you know those server CPUs we would not let anyone have for less than a telephone number? DO you want them now at a cut down cost?!" and that this was purely to stop AMD approaching Apple of vice-versa.

I had a mate that thought Apple created the smartphone. That they invented the WIMP system and when I pointed out that they did not has answered "Oh I suppose your going to say Microsoft invented it?!" to which I smiled and said "Well, no. It was Rank Xerox actually". Before you wonder my friend was not aware it was known as a WIMP system, though technically ... I am not sure Apples iOS can be classified as a WIMP? Is it not all about icons? Lol.

If you do not know WIMP simply stands for ... not not that skinny scrawny bloke in the corner, it stands for Windows, Menus, Icons and Pointers. See?

That leads me onto the two videos I saw ...

One stated that Intel's 18 core chip that they announced wont be available until next year, 2018? Umm, what? Apple will have it in their system in December? Ooooh!

The other one stated that Ryzen has had yet another update and that now the games that performed badly, this time Rise of the Tomb Raider, got a massive speed boost of like 30%.

Ugh, told yah!

You cannot claim that something is slow or too slow when other figures show that it is more than capable. The end.

AdoredTV showed in a very clear and easy to understand way that Ryzen was in fact fast and that the ... umm Tech reviewers had totally missed that and that everyone and his brother wanted the slow numbers of a badly coded game to the the best case scenario when it clearly wasn't.

So now and if your dumb enough to be brand loyal all those brand loyal Intel fanboys are getting this Basin Falls platform that will be known as X299 and get up to 18 cores .. though it seemingly is becoming rapidly debatable when it comes to when this will actually take place?

Also Intel has become .. animated .. or just orally so, lol. But the way they are talking seems to strongly point to the fact that they are going to pull their thumbs out of their arses and I hope they end up feeling this in a strong way to the point it is almost painful. Then maybe in future they wont keep ripping people of for tiny increments in speed? Though in all honesty they used to do this many years ago in the days of the 286, 386 and 486 chips so ... it is not likely.

Which reminds me ..

'Walletripper'?! So funny, lol.

Oh wait? I do not think I was supposed to mention that I will be building a Ryzen based PC? I am sure I was supposed to only hint at a big change and not state what it was?

Oh wait? Did I say 'What it was'? Sorry the 'it' in that sentence is so very much an understatement it simply ain't true!

LOL!

Now where exactly is Whitehaven?

Hmm I wonder when I will start seeing people rip into these so called PC tech journalists because they went and bought an Intel CPU with only four cores and now realise it is going to be too slow before very long?

Hmm probably with most of them I will have to wait until their PC's actually physically slow down and that is when they realise, go back to these tech journalists and rip them one in the comments sections?

LOL.

THE PLOT THICKENS .. THEN TWISTS AND TURNS

Well .. it seems that since its launch the number of videos about AMD's Ryzen CPU, which was crazy before launch, ,has actually increased in frequency.

I guess I should have seen that coming with new technology, architecture and lithography?!

However it has actually had more subjects attached to it than even I could have dreamed up. I was also encouraged to make this video after, not one but, two new subject areas concerning Ryzen cropped up.

First off was an extremely interesting rumour that stated that part of the issue of Ryzen's performance, though it was not an issue in my mind, had something to do with nVidia cards and more precisely nVidia's driver. Despite my complete lack of concern about performance in existing games, being a new architecture and NOT optimised for in any way, this particular issue is a problem. Because it will affect the performance of future games if not addressed.

Now this makes things quite interesting and what should take place is that when AMD's Vega becomes available the performance should increase. Well unless nVidia resolves the driver issue in the meantime.

Of course this problem was compounded by the lack of a high end graphics card from AMD which is why everyone will have to wait until either AMD RX Vega is launched or nVidia fixes their drivers, whichever comes first. As nVidia would now realise that they will lose a shed tonne of sales for everyone buying Ryzen I would imagine they will fix the issue pretty quick.

From now on, those that do theiur research like me and many others, everyone that is about to or planning a Ryzen build, like me, will either buy an AMD RX 480 and then an RX Vega when launched. Or they could purchase two RX 480's or wait a few days for the RX 580 and buy one or two of those or wait until May and just get the RX Vega.

As for the sudden jump from RX 480 to RX 580 .. I am not sure I agree with that AMD. I am not sure because .. well the RX 580 has not been out or its performance fully tested and out there in the wild. Yet.

The RX 580 is reported to be a refined Polaris chip so an improved RX 480. What I find, as do many others, odd about this is .. how much of a refinement and improvement did they get to justify calling it an RX 580? For me it would have to be damn close to the nVidia Geforce 1070 to be called an RX 480. I mean after all, leaving aside models ending in 'X' which was obviously never going to happen, you still have the '590' as well as 'Vega'.

In other words now announcing the RX 580 suggests to me that the RX 590 and the RX VEGA would be better than the Geforce 1070 and 1080 respectively...and are there not two Vegas coming out? So if the RX 590 is a cut down Vega I am wondering if there will be a huge gap in performance between the RX 580 and the RX 590? Bit weird.

The other thing that has cropped up is the re-emergence of the Ryzen Pro name. In that recent post I did with the leaked list of a head spinning 17 models of Ryzen I first called the list a pile of crap. But then later I gave it some thought and realised that the chances are that the Ryzen Pro models with be mobile parts.

Well the name has cropped back up and I still believe they will be mobile parts. I mean the desktop line up looks pretty tied up to me and introducing more models will just make everything confusing to many.

Blimey. This comes literally mere days after something no one expected with the leak and now almost confirmed rumour that AMD plans on doing a high end desktop platform, HEDT, and planning a 16 core processor followed by a leak of a 12 core processor!

Bloody hell. Along with improvements to be made we did expect, plus one that evaporated with Windows scheduling, plus some we did not expect, nVidia driver, faster RAM improving performance and now with these two Ryzen rumours and launches Ryzen is going to be talked about for a fair old while yet.

AMD has managed to raise the talk about Ryzen pre-launch and still managing to do this post launch in a way that, in my memory, has been better than anything they did in the past. Maybe this was part of their planned marketing strategy? If so ... well they are now looking to have outdone themselves here?

A common complaint among tech enthusiasts is AMD's marketing and claiming that their difficulty is most people do know Intel but do not know AMD. Well Ryzen has been heavily talked about for the last year or two that has increased to a peak lately and likely to stay in that peak for at least one year?

In other words recently almost all everyone has talked about it Ryzen and we cannot predict precisely when it will end. Now considering that there is also the Ryzen based APU's yet to come, the launches of the Pro models and these 12 and 16 core models over the next 6 months or so I would imagine that before everyone has even stopped talking about that engineering samples of the next Zen core will be doing the rounds and it may well continue on?

Hence why I said 'at least one year'.

I was planning to build a new rig based on Ryzen and Vega at the end of May or sometime in June but now I am like 'Oooh wait a minute ... 12 cores? Maybe I should wait and see the benchmarks on that?!' Lol. Well you have the final clock frequencies to consider as well as improvements and optimisations between now and then?

To those that said that 2017 was going to be a great year for PC tech mostly said it just about the launch of the known Ryzen CPUs, Vega GPUs and nVidia's 1080Ti.

Now I am wondering how many are sitting at their monitors frozen in place with their eyes wide and their chins resting on the floor with a pool of dribble gradually increasing its radius? Lol.

You do know water and electronics don't mix, right? Lol.

We do not know, fully at any rate, exactly what nVidia and Intel is going to do, launch or indeed leak this year either!

MY FOREHEAD HURTS - RYZEN

OK then ...

Many, many people still making idiot mistakes, still quoting stuff like they know what they are talking about and still quoting crap that is simply not the case at all. All the cues are there already but for some reason people are blind to them.

Let us take one simple comment I saw on Tom's Hardware in the Ryzen 1700X review I have seen over and over again elsewhere ...

Some people have correctly stated that more cores will be needed in gaming in the future while naysayers without the intellect have stated that this will be years away ... if ever?!

If ever ... I just love some of these statements.

Games are coded based on what the mainstream is .. not the top end so sorry to all those that base, ,and even buy, everything on the top end. It is just simple economics.

Everyone has been purchasing Intel 4 core CPU's, that may or may not be hyper-threaded, and have done for years and simply because 6 and 8 core CPUs were not worth it if you were just gaming.

Right now two things are happening and the first is that the 8 core Ryzen's have been selling ... a lot. You also cannot base things on what your bloody friends do or say ... gaming is a global thing. The second thing is that more and more gamers are streaming and so much so that even Google and YouTube are trying to cater for those that want to stream there games.

That is two very good reasons for the Ryzen 7's and games being coded for more than four cores already and before I get to the next and best reason of all...

Every single rumour out there, forgetting the fact that gaming consoles already use 8 cores, is stating that the up and coming XBox Scorpio is going to use Ryzen cores as well as a Vega GPU.

That was Ryzen cores.

Did no one notice how quick game developers came out and said that they were both excited and working with Ryzen in mind? Did no one realise why this was?

Yeah ... when consoles are on their way they already have games being coded for them, which is why there is always a few titles available at launch. The Nintendo Switch not withstanding. Which only had two ... or one and a quarter from the sounds of it?

The XBox Scorpio is supposed to be coming out this year, 2017, and before the end of the year and we are already a few months into this year. Games do not get coded in a few months, not even indie bloody titles, lol.

Which likely means that games are already well into development for Ryzen.

Though none of this matters to myself personally.

I do not build a PC to play games on with three year old titles in mind and nor have I ever and nor will I ever do this. I really do not see how anyone does ... unless they are these die hard fanboys for old titles that just keep on playing them, not matter what.

The only game in recent memory that had me play through it far more than any other is Alien Isolation. Played through that around 6 times and the next closest title to that was three times and Call Of Juarez Gunslinger. The first was over atmosphere and the latter because playing it on its hardest setting, no cross-hairs at all, was a fun challenge. So fun I did it twice, lol.

As much as I loved, ,and completed, games like Skyrim, Fallouts, Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3 ... I have never been tempted to play them again. With the exception of Deus Ex Human Revolution that was far shorter than those others so did not mind going through it two, might have been three, times.

But I will get excited about the future RPG's along with other titles ... if they look good though of late that looking good a year or so before launch has not amounted to much. Despite all the raving about nVidia's latest GPUs, pre 1080 and 1070.

If things go according to plan I am building a Ryzen PC with a Vega card in a couple of months time when Vega is released. This might now get pushed back a little because of the news that a 12 and 16 core Ryzen might be coming. Something I thought would happen if I am honest but as there was absolutely no talk about this, or foresight, ,from any of the tech professionals I thought it was not going to happen.

I should know better than to ignore my instincts based on what tech journalists are or are not talking about!

Whether I go this route for more than 8 physical cores I am not sure right now. It would all rather depend somewhat on clockspeeds as well as RAM speed scaling, as is being noted with Ryzen 7.

Despite the whiners as well as those speaking about things they do not have the intellect to speak of I for one am very happy with what AMD have released. Because for the next 3 to 5 years things are going to be extremely interesting. Not 'might be' but 'will be'.

I thought it would be good to get on the AM4 platform as the next iterations of Ryzen should be pretty good. New node and new architecture alone are two areas where things will improve.

In all honesty the only negative point right now is the dual core RAM and the PCI-E lanes, though I am not entirely sure this is an issue. AS unlike so many armchair experts I cannot see into the future and am not sure whether those PCI-E lanes of 16x will be swamped by the next generation of cards?

Dual channel RAM is not really an issue as long as its frequency keeps increasing but will it get to a point whereby it cannot be increased? Which means to feed data faster you have no choice but to go quad channel, at which point you need a new motherboard.

But if a new motherboard is not need until, say, Zen 4, for arguments sake, and this is 3 years or more away then ... it is a non issue.

Oh I also find it hilarious that every single person that states that Ryzen is NOT a gaming CPU, even the ones trying to make excuses for it. Really?! I mean, REALLY?!

I wonder if they then go and play games on an XBox or a Playstation at 30 frames per second after hitting that return button and stating that Ryzen is not a gaming CPU because 140 frames and not 180 frames per second.

Now if I was a dedicated console owner I would get pretty irate at all these snobs going on about differences of ten or even twenty frames per second when there close to or above 100 frames per second by a fair old margin.

In fact I am amazed that console owners have not ripped into these people just yet.

I also mentioned about optimisations of current and slightly older games in a recent post on AMD's Ryzen? Yeah ... do not really care about that either ... unless it happens to be a game that I will go back to AND it is getting less than 40fps minimum.

Why?! Unless you are MMO'ing and doing it for money ... just, WHY?!

I also find it hilarious that everyone is scrambling to get Ryzen 5's performance metrics from Ryzen 7's, lol. Really?!

Oh dear.

You might get it right, you have a 50/50 chance, or you might get it wrong but you have no way of knowing. That is NOT, however, what some of them are stating. The are stating that they have tested by switching off cores and stating this is what will happen. I do not know and I do not care as outside of going for a 6 core Ryzen I have no interest.

I am aware, however, that there is no way of knowing how the cores will overclock and no way of knowing how the shared cache memory will make a difference. Will there be more cache memory available to cores because the other cores that would otherwise share this memory are no there? Or would it be that it remains the same depending on how cores are switched off, or failed in the production process? Who knows? I presently do not and I am damn sure no one else does.

Buuut ... if they get it right and there is no difference watch how all of them that predicted no change will crow about it, which will likely lead to irate people telling them to feck off and go and design CPU's as they are obviously engineers? Lol.

I get so annoyed when I read some of the comments. Hands over my face with my uttering "Oooh for the love of God, man!" Lol.

I am doing something I find funny ... I am going to hold off buying a laptop until they come out with Ryzen APU's. I do not bloody know why? Lol.

Well I have always been aware that despite all the crap everyone talks about then CPUs come out they fail to see that ... if something is faster in just one single thing then anything else that is slower comes down to a software issue.

Sorry but that's it and that's all.

If it was a hardware issue then it would show in every single thing tested and I imagine that, without bothering to go back and check, this would be the case with AMD's previous bulldozers. Not quite as bad as everyone made out but clearly slower in everything ... CLOCK FOR CLOCK.

This is not the case with Ryzen and so things are very, very different.

Yet I have very literally and a long time ago lost count of the number of remarks like "AMD has failed again" and "It is bulldozer all over again". Oooh boy, oh boy.

There is an old saying ... you cannot see the wood for the trees.

If you want to remain blind then go and be blind. Do NOT go around on the Internet trying to blind others because .. the Internet is NOT forgiving and it may come back to bite you in the arse?

EDIT: Oh and some so called tech journalists and reviewers might want to seriously change their tone too ... because what I hear a lot is "Oooh Ryzen was supposed to be sooo good at gaming and it is SOOOO NOOOT!"

Your giving out the wrong impression, maybe intentionally without having to actually state it, when that is simply NOT the case at all.

I for one never expected ANY Ryzen CPU to beat out the fastest Intel CPU on any level ... but it has or come close on all of them.

I expected 35% improvement but hoped they, AMD, were being honest when they stated a 40% improvement and we got over 50% improvement. It has worked out better than I had hoped so I actually find all of the negativity somewhat surprising, if I am perfectly honest.

THE NEW WAVE

Along with the D:Wave we seem to have a crest of yet another wave heading towards us?

So .. shed loads of Ryzen leak then?

Lol.

So it also seems that AMD are going with what my memory tells me is an old ATI Radeon name, 1800XT, minus the 'T', for the Ryzen model names? Strange choice.

I am still willing to bet that you will not get those 17 different chips at launch and I would wager you wont see all of them until around the end of the year?

I have also been listening to a lot of talks concerning AMD's Ryzen chip and its early benchmarks from people seen as old hat at all this and knowledgeable. Hmm perhaps a fair few should not have done that?

I have seen people worried about a Physics score that do not seem to be aware of AMD dropping the AVX side of things and this being the reason, needing two clock cycles for Intel chips single clock cycle. Yeeeah that is not going to make a lot of difference though at least one was claiming that it will. I was not sure whether or not one of the three I saw were unsure about this simply did not understand CPUs as much as he put out or whether or not he was being paid by Intel to cast doubts in potential buyer's minds?

I even saw one guy comment complaining how AMD failed because their new Ryzen CPU did not support Windows 7?! What?! Since when did CPU's start getting designed FOR operating systems?! Lol!

No sunshine, that would be down to Microsoft and your expecting them to update an operating system that is now several versions old! Get real.

Another funny one is a bunch of people complaining about Windows 10 with their one major gripe being it is spyware?! Really? No, REALLY?!

Jesus H. Christ does no one know Windows history at all? Windows has been spying on people for bloody years and I do mean bloody years! In fact many stated when ex-military guy Steve Bullmer had a say, when Bill Gates was still Microsoft's head guy, that it started happening then. Now how long ago was that?

Back to Ryzen I quickly realised that the 'X' in the models was to do with that XFR technology where the CPU can 'sense' the cooling headroom and overclock itself in 25mhz increments. I am extremely interested to see how that works in testing.

Of course another thing I did not take into account when I saw that list of 17 models is that if you was to take laptops into account then, yeah ... feasibly you could have 17 separate CPUs?

Your still not going to get 17 models launched at the initial release. I would wager that the 6 cores alone would take a very long time to come as these would be binned, i.e. faulty 8 cores set aside, 8 cores and would take a fair while to build up their numbers.

Unless of course 50% of the 8 cores were faulty but could still be used as 6 core chips? Remember all the information coming out stated that there would not be any 6 core Ryzen chips and was stated to be hard to impossible due to the way the cores are grouped?

Laughable that Intel is rushing out a couple of higher clocked CPUs as well as talking about the next generation when the present one was only launched a few weeks before.

Of course there are those saying Intel will suffer and lose money and then those idiot fanboys that state this will never happen who are obviously clueless when it comes to business and do not even bother to look at what Intel has been getting up to. Yeah I would normally say the same except for a couple of things ...

• It takes years from the start of designing a CPU to actually manufacturing it so they cannot respond immediately and Ryzen would have had its next iteration long before a new architecture appears from Intel and ...
• Yeah ... turns out Intel have been buying ... crap for many billions of dollars and that does not include them wasting their time and money trying to get into ultra mobile, like tablets and phones and ...
• If they are as untouchable as everyone ... sorry every fanboy states then why the hell have they laid off thousands of workers?

I have followed CPU technology for absolutely effing years even before AMD split off from Intel, what you did not know this either? Tut-tut. I would not even predict what would happen with either company ...

Hmm yeah OK so I called many people idiots that stated year after year that AMD would go out of business. I knew they would not though if Ryzen had not been the processor it now appears to be I might have started to think they might?

By the time the dust has settled on Ryzen, if indeed it ever does, we will be staring AMD's new GPU, Vega, in the face.

From the very first day of March right up to some point in May it is going to be a very interesting and exciting time. It was a very long time ago then things were this exciting and this may continue on if ...

The predictions of going form the current lithography of 14nm and 16nm to 10nm and/or 7nm are correct?

By the time this comes around I would have expected some major breakthroughs in manipulating Graphene into a whole list of technology that would and should include the manufacturing of both CPUs and GPUs.

Of course there are the other benefits of the cheaper prices, price wars and that would mean that all of the much more powerful CPUs and GPUs filtering down into everywhere and everything.

I think that by the time 2020 comes around many things are going to be very, very different and it just might mean that kind of breakthroughs and wow factors to get many a economy moving again? Well much depends on various governments pulling their heads out of the sand, or their arses and whatever the case may be, and making a few other changes when right now they are going in the opposite direction?

Because some half-wit that thinks themselves intelligent because of money and/or power keeps telling them so.

Lol.

For me I am looking at the top 3 SKU's for Ryzen or all the 8 cores and I am particularl leaning towards the Ryzen R7 1800X but interested to see how it performs in comparison to the Ryzen R7 1700X as well as this automated overclocking compared to doing this manually on the Ryzen R7 1700 non-X variant?

I am also wondering about something else I should really do a search for ... are the Virtual Reality headsets, namely the Vive, as good as they claimed and is there going to be a second generation at some point in the foreseeable future?

I read somewhere for the first time recently something about being able to see pixels on a headset and not sure if this was one particular one or all of them?

I am asking a lot of questions about a lot of different things and looking at a whole bunch of different technologies, am I not?

Well anyone would think that I am a couple of months away from something major happening?

Now that ... would be telling as well as possibly putting a bock on what it might be that ma or may not happen?

Well there just might be a video or 24 in a couple of months to answer those questions?

Fingers firmly super glued into a crossed fashion!

Unless a particular thief or thieves do a runner with the best part of three quarters of a million?! Lol.

Except if the do they may encounter a certain ... road-block?! Metaphorically speaking.