New AMD Ryzen 3000 series - Worth considering?

[marurun]

Again, it all depends on what you are doing with that PC. Ryzen also supports more varied technologies in the chipset as well. If you want multi-threaded workloads, Ryzen is the place to be. In that space, you’re talking $500 more to build an equivalent Intel, and at the highest thread counts Intel can’t compete.

[Ziggy]

So if money wasn't an issue, Intel still is the better choice?
honestly I see the price difference of $150-200 is negligible when building a PC, since you will keep it for at least 4-5 years, better go with the best.
But I can see why you would choose the cheaper Ryzen if you are purchasing 100's of units for Schools, Corporations, or Gov's.

"Better" is subjective. There really is no one-size-fits-all answer here. The better choice completely depends on your specifics. I agree, spending $100-200 more on something that will last you ~5 years isn't a big deal. But consider that it might not be a one-time cost. The more expensive CPU might draw more power, which means you'll be paying more on your electric bill over those 5 years. You might want to build a small form factor, super quiet, power efficient PC. In that case, the "better" choice might be a CPU that draws less power and runs cooler (requiring a smaller HSF).

But yeah, if you're after the best performance, then you might be able to justify spending more. But you gotta check out the benchmarks. And when you do, keep in mind that there are benchmarks for GAMES that will yield different results than benchmarks for other applications, like rendering or encoding.

Maybe I am paranoid but it kind of worries me that CPU speeds seem to have been stagnating for the past few years with Intel hitting a wall in that area. Sometimes I think humanity have almost reached the maximum CPU speeds.

Yes, for some time now CPU clock speeds have not been increasing much. The 8-Bit Guy has a relevant video that graphs CPU clock speeds over the years. But clock speed isn't everything. Core count and cache size have been increasing, among other faster tech, and so CPUs have been still getting more powerful on the whole. For example, my 3 GHz Pentium 4 took 1.5 hours to encode a 2 hour video. My 2.6 Ghz i7 (a slower clock speed) took only 15 minutes for the same task. Slower clock speed, but MUCH faster at encoding video.

Apparently emulation relies heavily on a single core, so this is one situation that clock speed becomes important again.

[marurun]

Emulation could benefit from multi-core CPUs, but the emulator would then have to be written to emulate things at the component level rather than more holistically.

[isiolia]

So if money wasn't an issue, Intel still is the better choice?

As it stands right now, as mentioned, it can really depend on the particular workload - something that holds true even within a given brand. For Intel, purely for running Photoshop, a ~$500 9900k running on their consumer platform outperforms ~$2000 i9 9980XEs on their workstation/server platforms. It's one of the best CPUs to date for per-core performance, and since Photoshop doesn't scale across all that many cores, that pushes it ahead. As the same is also true for games. Right now, if you were building a machine entirely focused on the highest gaming performance possible, that'd be the thing to get, and it's far from the most expensive thing you could buy.

On the other hand, if you were entirely optimizing for something like Cinema 4D or other applications that can scale across multiple cores, then no single CPU in Intel's lineup touches a Threadripper 2990WX. Which, again, costs less (it's still an $1800 CPU though, so, it's relative). It's a mediocre CPU for low thread count workloads though.

If you're building a general purpose machine, then tradeoffs are inherent, pretty much regardless of how much you spend. There isn't a single best CPU for all applications. Ryzen isn't just the budget choice. It's legitimately a better performer for a lot of tasks, even if those aren't often games. To be fair, however, it's not often too far behind (a comparison of older parts here) and/or games tend to be GPU limited anyway.

[Sarge]

My understanding is that the 3000 series stuff, especially the high end, is going to compare very favorably with Intel's current offerings, both for gaming and workstation uses. I'd still wait for official benchmarks, but there's a good chance that AMD will actually take the lead in CPU performance this generation. How long that lasts depends on what Intel has in the pipeline, but I would expect it might take them two or three years to reestablish dominance. AMD's definitely gunning for the crown right now, though.

[RCBH928]

Excuse my confusion, I am just so used to the idea that faster CPU is a better CPU. I never knew there were different applications except in areas where you needed something with less power consumption and heat for mobile devices.

I did read though that there were GPUs made for calculation/scientific tasks which are extremely expensive, but suck for gaming.

[But clock speed isn't everything. Core count and cache size have been increasing, among other faster tech, and so CPUs have been still getting more powerful on the whole. For example, my 3 GHz Pentium 4 took 1.5 hours to encode a 2 hour video. My 2.6 Ghz i7 (a slower clock speed) took only 15 minutes for the same task. Slower clock speed, but MUCH faster at encoding video.
.

I knew about this lower clocks speeds but more cores actually out-perform higher clock speeds on a single core, but given its like 2-4 slower engines working together rather than 1 faster engine, sure the clock speed is slower per unit but the CPU as a whole a lot more powerful. In this case, the clock speed is not the proper gauge of performance.
the word "Pentium" scares me
How old are we talking here? I had a machine from 2008 that was core2duo

My understanding is that the 3000 series stuff, especially the high end, is going to compare very favorably with Intel's current offerings, both for gaming and workstation uses. I'd still wait for official benchmarks, but there's a good chance that AMD will actually take the lead in CPU performance this generation. How long that lasts depends on what Intel has in the pipeline, but I would expect it might take them two or three years to reestablish dominance. AMD's definitely gunning for the crown right now, though.

What if Intel never reestablish dominance... interesting outcome.

[Ziggy]

Excuse my confusion, I am just so used to the idea that faster CPU is a better CPU. I never knew there were different applications except in areas where you needed something with less power consumption and heat for mobile devices.

I knew about this lower clocks speeds but more cores actually out-perform higher clock speeds on a single core, but given its like 2-4 slower engines working together rather than 1 faster engine, sure the clock speed is slower per unit but the CPU as a whole a lot more powerful. In this case, the clock speed is not the proper gauge of performance.

For the longest while, the clock speed was really the only thing that mattered. But with the advent of multi core processors, right, the clock speed alone is a not the proper gauge of performance. Even the single core with a lower clock speed can out perform a single core processor with a higher clock speed. The tech has just improved in other areas. Like much larger cache and faster memory interfaces. This is why overclocking these days make me laugh. Overclocking a CPU from around the year 2000 meant a significant performance increase, even if only a few hundred Mhz. Overclocking a CPU today is almost pointless, it's more of a toy/hobby thing than a necessity.

the word "Pentium" scares me
How old are we talking here? I had a machine from 2008 that was core2duo

A lot of people don't realize that the Pentium brand stuck around for a while. In fact, I think it's still around. It just isn't Intel's flagship like it was. After the P4 there were Pentium D, Pentium M, and Pentium Dual Core.

Anyways, my first Pentium 4 was a 1.5 Ghz from the first gen which came out in the year 2000. The first gen P4's all had a 400 MT/s FSB, which is important to note. The Front Side Bus was what connected the CPU to the Northbridge, and the Northbridge interfaced to RAM. So basically the FSB speed meant how fast the RAM and CPU could talk to each other (there's also the speed of the RAM that plays a factor). With this CPU, it took me 3 hours to encode a 4.7 GB DVD. And here's an important part I forgot to mention, the CPU ran at 100% utilization for the entire 3 hours it was encoding. I eventually got a 3 Ghz P4 in the same computer, and it cut my encoding time in half (which I always loved how that math worked out perfectly) and still at 100% utilization. Then I build a new computer around an Intel Core i7-920 (first gen i7) with a 2.66 Ghz clock speed. Intel ditched the FSB interface for QPI (QuickPath Interconnect - just think of it as the new FSB). So the interface speed for me went from 400 MT/s to 4.8 GT/s, which is just an amazing increase in speed. Not even taking into account things like CPU cache and RAM speed, just the raw power of clock speed and FSB/QPI speed. My i7-920 could encode a 4.7 GB in about 15 minutes, and again this is important to note, the CPU utilization at this time was only 5-10%. Meaning that not only could my first gen i7 do the same task in a fraction of the time it took my first gen P4, but it only took a fraction of the CPU's total power to do it!

And it's worth noting that a bench test between (for example) an i7 and a Ryzen 7 will use all similar tech, from the same generation of hardware. Above we are comparing a CPU from the year 2000 to one from 2009 on vastly different hardware. There's factors for the CPU itself (clock speed, cache size, core count, hyperthreading and the like) but there's also 10 years of other advancements. Everything else inside the computer had massive speed increases as well. FSB to QPI, PCI to PCIe, PATA to SATA, and RAM got a lot faster as well.

[isiolia]

The Pentium 4 line was built more around high clockspeed, with parts of its design (like the very deep pipeline) favoring that, but being detrimental in other ways. Ultimately, they ended up being very power hungry and running quite hot. Still, the highest stock clocks those offered was 3.8Ghz, something that the we didn't see most i7s/etc Turbo Boosting past until a couple years ago or so.

The Pentium M line was built for mobile use, starting with the Pentium III rather than 4. With that in mind, doing more per clock cycle was ideal. When the Netburst architecture that the P4 used hit a wall, that's what Intel moved the desktop products to as well as the Core line. Figure, even the lower end E6300s and the like, running sub-2Ghz, beat out P4s running well over 3Ghz.

AMD had been in a similar situation for a while. Athlon and Phenom line CPUs were typically clocked a good bit lower than the Pentium 4s/Ds they were competitive with. They gave Mhz ratings in the model names for a while Once you hit the Core line, Intel shied away from advertising the clockspeeds, and AMD stopped naming stuff like that.

[Ziggy]

LOL, yeah. For the longest while Pentiums were just called by their clock speed because that was basically the only thing worth noting. In the P4 era just before the Core 2 line, I remember having a hard time comparing AMDs because they didn't rely on the clock speeds like P4 did. By now we're all use to just looking up benchmarks since there's too much to consider in the specs, but back then I was stuck in the mindset that higher clock means better processor.

[marurun]

Modern single core CPUs even have a variety of processing components and may be able to issue multiple operations of different types simultaneously. The CPU as we know it is simply not a single-instruction, in-order unit any longer.