Scali wrote:Looking great compared to Bulldozer isn't that difficult, especially if you focus entirely on IPC and ignore clockspeeds.
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SPBHM wrote:also we need the reviews to see how it actually performs in a wider range of programs, and how it OCs, but it's all looking great compared to "Bulldozer", and they promised 40% and delivered 52%, so I'm feeling pretty positive about it, quads should be good for gaming.
Looking great compared to Bulldozer isn't that difficult, especially if you focus entirely on IPC and ignore clockspeeds.
Promising something not-even-that-impressive and then delivering more than your original promise is also not that difficult.
Why do they do this?
I don't recall Intel going all crazy on "Look at our IPC gains!!!!11oneoneeleven!" when they went from Pentium 4 to Core2 Duo, and that was more than 52% gain.
I mean, let's take Cinebench single-core here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11
Core2 Duo at 2.66 GHz scores 446.
Pentium D at 3.6 GHz scores 305.
So if we normalize that for clockspeed, that's 446/2.66 = 165.67 vs 305/3.6 = 84.72.
165.67 / 84.72 = 1.96. So they could have marketed it like: 96% higher IPC!!!!
They didn't, because they simply let the product and its benchmarks speak for itself.
With AMD I get the distinct impression that they've cherry-picked some benchmarks (and the Intel CPUs they're comparing against), and then used some very 'creative' number juggling to try and make it sound way impressive.
I'm expecting CPUs that are 'almost' as good as Intel's on IPC and consume 'almost' as little power.
Which you can get for 'almost' as much money, if you like. But not exactly CPUs that will take over the world or anything.
I'm not expecting something like the original Athlon, which was actually better than a Pentium III and Pentium 4 in virtually every way. More like an 'also ran'.
they ignored clockspeed you say, yet they are able to release a CPU with 3.6GHz base and boost up to 4GHz within a 95W TDP, while Intel's 8c alternative is clocked lower (and costs 2x)
IPC talks have always been a thing, even if Intel didn't use them in slides for their Core 2 Duo marketing,
yes C2D IPC gain was far greater, but, I think the improvements are overall harder to achieve nowadays (look at Intel incremental approach), and we are talking about AMD, which is a tiny company compared to Intel, haven't made a decent profit in a very long time, lost a lot of people, and no longer control the fabs,
when AMD publicized their goal of 40% IPC increase, I was skeptic, as most people were, they delivered more, I'm sorry but I'm impressed,
their CPU division looked hopeless with their Bulldozer cores for the past 5 years, this is a big change, their best since K8 (I think k7 and k8 were better at the time, but this is the best since),
Cinebench R15 was considered a totally Intel dominated benchmark and something to be avoided by AMD, and this is the main one they used to present Ryzen, to me it shows they really attacked their main deficiency and are confident with what they have...
I think 4c/6c Ryzen is going to be great for the mainstream (well, what's left of it building desktops, the PC world now is dominated by something else, 15W laptops)