AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016

Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by yorak on Thursday May 07, 2015 @02:52AM (#9503627)

I did, a year and a half ago. I decided upon FX-8320, as for me, more cores was better. In my PhD I'm doing automatic parameter tuning of optimization algorithms, and I thought it would be handy to have as many cores as possible also back home (the actual runs are of course run on a monstrous computation server somewhere in the basement of the university). To have 8 separate cores has proven to be handy every once in a while. Just yesterday I did some parameter tuning on a machine vision side project.

Back then the difference in bang-per-buck was even more striking than it is now: http://paulisageek.com/compare/cpu/

Also, by choosing AMD I avoided the minefield of missing virtualization and overclocking support of some mid level Intel models.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by therealunreal on Thursday May 07, 2015 @05:30AM (#9503967)

I got the A10-7850K APU on release and I couldn't be happier. I built my main dev PC with it. The integrated graphics adapter is more than enough to drive 3 monitors (it can do 4 as well) running Gnome Shell. All that using the free drivers, which is important to me because I need it to be hassle-free.

I've never noticed any slowness but then I don't do heavy video processing or hours of compiling C. Light gaming and WebGL demos are no problem either.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by rwmj on Thursday May 07, 2015 @06:09AM (#9504039)

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/caseless-virtualizatio...

I used AMD for the cluster because AMD's nested virtualization is still better supported in Linux than Intel's. This comes down to the fact that AMD virt is simply better architected.

Single thread performance sucks, but if you are able to use all the cores, then price/performance of the whole chip is great.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by creshal on Thursday May 07, 2015 @03:31AM (#9503726)

Their embedded APU series are actually competitive – mainly because unlike their Intel equivalents they aren't artificially crippled by disabling a bunch of useful instruction sets.

Other than that? Nope. Not since the first Phenom came out.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by lucian1900 on Thursday May 07, 2015 @05:44AM (#9503988)

They also have much better GPUs. I've been playing quite a few games on one with few issues.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by creshal on Thursday May 07, 2015 @08:22AM (#9504512)

No doubt. But I'm not doing anything with OpenCL while I do have a dedicated desktop machine for gaming (with a dedicated AMD card), so I never found an use for their desktop/notebook APUs.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by StillBored on Thursday May 07, 2015 @12:11PM (#9506107)

About a year and a half (maybe two?) ago we purchased a dual socket opteron 4386 for use as a build machine. A lot of this was based on the fact that we only had like $1500 to spend and we wanted the most bang for the buck. The spec gcc benchmarks showed the CPU doing quite well against significantly more expensive intel machines. So, we jumped on it, and haven't regretted it for a minute. Its a good combination of lots of cores and fast single threaded performance (for the linking and packaging). Combined with the SSDs and ECC RAM, its quite a screamer.

We have a number of intel machines for other purposes, and it still costs probably about 2x in intel land to get a machine to beat it. Maybe closer to 3x if you buy the machine from HP/IBM.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by szatkus on Thursday May 07, 2015 @03:27AM (#9503709)

Their small cores are quite great. Both CPU and GPU part are competetive with Intel Atoms.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by ptaipale on Thursday May 07, 2015 @05:28AM (#9503962)

I recently needed a new home/carry-around laptop, and got myself an HP Elitebook 725 which has AMD A10-7350B CPU. It cost me 900€ (incl. 24% VAT) with 8G RAM and 256G SSD.

At work, I have used Elitebook 820 which is Intel i5 with otherwise similar configuration. That costs 1350 €, with similar RAM and SSD.

The two machines are completely identical in appearance and behaviour. So far I am very happy with the AMD version - no perceivable difference in performance. It could be that the 725 with AMD CPU eats the battery somewhat faster, but when the Intel version of same hardware is almost exactly 50 % more expensive, I'm not complaining.

If I'd need i7 performance, then the AMD offering wouldn't be there.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by ryanjshaw on Thursday May 07, 2015 @04:27AM (#9503851)

I bought an HP MicroServer N40L (AMD Turion II Neo N40L dual core) two years back, and added in a low-profile AMD Radeon 6450. The combination is powerful enough to host a media server, play some older games and stream more modern Steam games from my Intel desktop, but low-power and cheap enough to make me very happy with my purchase.

The new generation MicroServers are Intel Celery pieces - more powerful but far more expensive (although I can't say for sure whether the price tripling involves other factors).

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by pizza234 on Thursday May 07, 2015 @03:08AM (#9503665)

I have a home+working desktop. I wanted it to be as compact as possible, so no GPU card, while still retaining 3D capabilities.

I think in this use case, AMD's APUs are still competitive.

For the sake of precision though, this assumes that any Intel+GPU card combination consumes more (and it's more noisy) than a comparable AMD CPU, for 3D workloads.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by saint_fiasco on Thursday May 07, 2015 @08:53AM (#9504654)

They have an advantage in the admittedly small niche of poor gamers with laptops. I could play relatively modern games in my old laptop with AMD integrated GPU (I think it was an A6-something) much better than with my newer low-end laptop (with an Intel HD 4400)

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by Already__Taken on Thursday May 07, 2015 @08:11AM (#9504473)

I have a nearly couple hundred AMD stations soon all A8-A10 6 or 7 series APUs.

Any one metric intel can beat but factor in price and as a whole package I think AMD are a better choice to cover doing all kinds of work. Good enough CPU and free GPU as far as I'm concerned.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by pjmlp on Thursday May 07, 2015 @03:00AM (#9503642)

Yes if you care about 3D programming, their GPUs run circles around Intel, which still doesn't know how to write proper drivers.

Maybe it fails your definition of recently, but I bought an Asus Netbook around three years ago and am quite happy with it.

The current generation of the said model is Eee PC 1215B with an AMD Brazos and integrated ATI Radeon HD 6310* or 6320*.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by fulafel on Thursday May 07, 2015 @05:16AM (#9503938)

Maybe on Windows, on Linux the Intel drivers are best by far.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by pjmlp on Thursday May 07, 2015 @05:31AM (#9503970)

I guess you don't spend too much time on OpenGL developer forums.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by bandrami on Thursday May 07, 2015 @06:49AM (#9504132)

No, but if you spend a lot of times on OpenGL software user fora, you'll see that Intel is far and away the least headache-inducing graphics option on Linux and the only realistic option on the BSDs.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by pjmlp on Thursday May 07, 2015 @08:06AM (#9504449)

So has Intel stop lying about OpenGL features supported in hardware via the driver API queries, for example?

NVidia does support FreeBSD quite good.

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Re:AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 by stefantalpalaru on Thursday May 07, 2015 @06:25AM (#9504073)

4-5 months ago I bought a FX-8320E to replace a Phenom II X6 1090T in a custom built desktop. Here are some benchmarks comparing the CPUs: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1412036-KH-MERGE588570

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