Well, @Bob, I've always wondered why your opinion on these rumors has been so negative. Is there some event that led you to think this way? Hopefully, I can learn to be more skeptical before I get bitten when I make the wrong choice in a major decision.

@bwDraco I think I already mentioned the whole Bulldozer incident.

And also the rather suspicious and very very annoying year+ of attempting to raise hype with selective benchmark releases.

I'm well-aware of Bulldozer being a dud.

I never expected Ryzen to beat 4C/8T Kaby Lake processors in single-threaded workloads. It never was meant to.

I've been cautiously optimistic throughout, expecting decent (but not outstanding) gaming performance.

Whether you personally did or did not, I've been hearing claims of Ryzen "killing Intel" for something like half a year now. Maybe longer.

They are the exact same claims I heard with Bulldozer.

Hmm...

Using the exact same strategy (/rationale) of a higher core count.

See, I didn't pay much attention to the Bulldozer prerelease benchmarks.

It's worked out better this time, seeing as IPC isn't atrocious, but it looks oh so very similar to 6 years ago.

@bwDraco we hate most rumours

we'd probably say the same of rumours of the oneplus(NAN) ;p

Anyway. All I've really said is to wait for actual independent benchmarks (which we now have) and that I expected single-thread perf to be worse if only because they focused so heavily on how multi-thread benchmarks performed better.

The idea behind my question is that many times, people only change their behavior when something serious happens and they throw $$$ onto the wrong product or find out that they've been scammed. I realize that there's not many things that are more powerful than actually experiencing it personally, but I'd like to preempt the suffering and have the knowledge to avoid it altogether.

now can via step up and release a new x86 processor plox? ;p

I've long felt that you shouldn't have to suffer to learn major life lessons.

Its a processor.

@bwDraco Eh. I'm pretty sure I said this the other day, but:

It can't be THAT bad

I was looking at buying a new machine in 2011 to replace a 2007 one.

Sandy Bridge was just out.

Bulldozer was maybe a month or two away from release.

Look up benchmarks then, search forums: most people seemed to expect Bulldozer to crush Sandy Bridge.

I've maintained a "wait and see" attitude, expecting a solid all-rounder.

For me, the choice really was between buying now or waiting two months, so it wouldn't have been a great loss. The smarter thing to do might've been to wait the two months (but then of course, why not wait a year for Ivy? etc etc)

Again, I never expected it to beat Kaby Lake.

But I got sick of seeing all the prerelease boasting.

And, eh. If I did go Bulldozer all that might've happened is I might be on Haswell or Skylake now.

I ended up on Kaby because Sandy worked out so well.

It worked out so well I could still be using it now and it wouldn't really be a problem (just the lack of mobo expansion slots... my own fault there)

@Bob except Ashes of the Benchmark AotS :P

Heh.

@allquixotic That's a bit of a special case :P

Though the GPU helped more, for sure.

Well, my requirements are a bit different. I tend to need lots of cores for photo editing.

I also need it to game reasonably well.

Then that's good for you! Go with Ryzen, be happy. etc.

Intel seems to still have some crazy secret sauce that keeps their single thread perf sky high that AMD hasn't figured out yet

But I still maintain that the average consumer only really needs two cores...

probably a lot of different things

@bwDraco Actually. Is that mostly int or FP?

@Bob FP32, actually.

Oh. Yea, that's good then.

@Bob what kind of cores? Rockchip cores? Cortex A51? A10 Fusion? Haswell+ Pentium? Bulldozer? Ryzen? Kaby Lake? :P big difference in single thread perf in that spectrum

rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/The_Floating_Point_Engine

mips R1000!

@allquixotic Average consumer? Needs reasonable single-thread perf, but still only two cores if only because most programs don't even use more than two.

If its good enough for SGI...

@Bob Many games need four hardware threads these days.

There could be four Cortex-A7s available and those programs would still use two. Because they won't/can't use more.

2C/2T often will not cut it.

@bwDraco When I say average consumer, I'm consciously excluding gaming. Most average consumers would also be on the iGPU, and maybe have a console for gaming.

@Bob so for a full-fat OS like Windows 10, would an x86_64 chip with perf comparable to an ARM SoC, like Atom, be sufficient for "average consumer" workloads? or would you say it has to be something more modern like an Ivy+ i3?

Having a beefy gaming rig with a dGPU is the exception.

how weird...

The way I'm looking at it, Intel has the low-end covered with those 2C/4T Pentium processors that were recently released.

@Bob most people will be fine on the sort of atom @allquixotic is talking about

AMD has no response to this just yet. AMD also has no response to the much larger portable laptop processor market that Intel has almost completely covered.

VS2016 managed to magically delete a load of files i needed for this build

@bwDraco Being able to make use of more than two also doesn't necessarily mean it completely pegs four... most I've seen tend to focus most heavily on one or two, and offload some lighter tasks on others if available.

My dad's core 2 duo is roughly as crappy a usable machine as you can use, with of course, the SSD upgrade

@bwDraco The 65W parts are getting there. But, yea, they'd need to come out with 27W or maybe 17W before they can really take on Intel on ultrabooks and similar.

And 5W or lower for tablets/convertibles.

@Bob those ULVs are probably more interesting to me, especially if there's NUC clones

what they really need is low to medium TDP full-size desktop and laptop processors that are cheaper than Intel with good enough performance

@allquixotic Hm. Even that's hard to say, cause Celeron/Pentium-branded Atom are better than Atom-branded. Higher clocks, at least.

that's where AMD can scrape the bottom and get high volume sales

it needs to be able to run V8 to deliver good perf on Facebook and WSJ (with ads, unfortunately, because most people don't know about adblockers), basically

@allquixotic I'd say Atom works fine for light use. Word processing is fine. Browsing is mostly fine, as long as you don't tab-explode :P

@allquixotic seems like their 5 series is "7 series with disabled cores" and 3 series is for volume. and a zen APU would be interesting.

@allquixotic "with ads"

But Core-M is where you'd want to be as a baseline for "not really noticing lag"

got me there ;p

@allquixotic @bwDraco Oh, and the thing about two cores. That makes the assumption of not much multitasking going on. Then again, average consumer just has a browser open and not much else. One place where it suffers is if the machine happens to be, say, installing updates at the same time...

So there's some tangible benefit to 4 cores even for lighter users.

But they'd mostly be sitting idle.

Ryzen operates in 25 MHz steps, which can help their efficiency.

@Bob That's why I said 2C/4T is ideal for entry-level systems.

Ha, efficiency isn't really something I'm considering here... think my mobo actually has all cores at the same multiplier by default.

@bwDraco Also. At most that's a 75 MHz diff vs Intel (100 MHz base). So... not all that significant difference.

Might shave off some 0.25W... :P

@Bob what drives me up a wall is that one of my work laptops, an enormous 15.6"-screened brick of an HP laptop that weighs about as much as 4 Macbooks, has a top-end Haswell i7 (4800MQ), but a completely pedestrian 8 GiB of RAM, and an anemic, slow, 5400 RPM 500 GB HDD.

@bwDraco Hm. Not too sure how HT would work out in that scenario.

one of my other work laptops (sorta) got it right: Haswell i5, 8 GiB RAM, and a 128 GB (yuck, but tolerable) enterprise-branded Samsung 840 Pro.

Can't remember if updates do much heavy processing. I do know the dependency walks can be pretty expensive.

@allquixotic My work machine sits at a 2 GB free of 128 :P

eww

I've been tempted to upgrade the SSD myself at times... but meh, safer not to. OS disk and all.

I did get a RAM upgrade to 16. But, yea, Java IDEs ate that all up.

I technically can upgrade the HDD to an SSD myself even with FDE, tested it with the computer's wifi rocker disabled (for my own safety) and it's fine

NetBeans: "ooh, more RAM? omnomnomnom"

but I don't trust it not to phone home and alert someone, leading to my termination

yeah. we had that conversation

@JourneymanGeek story of RA :P

ZFS: ooh, more RAM? nah, it must just be my imagination; I'm still feeling a lot of memory pressure

;p

lol

my old work laptop...

@allquixotic gitter

L460 I tink

I have a meeting in 4 minutes but ok

with all flavours of dubious crap on it

@JourneymanGeek The one that had a torrent client running when they gave it to you? :P

naw, just 4 copies of winvnc in randomly named folders

not suspecious at all

@bwDraco I wonder how much of that is on the FPU vs using SIMD

and user accounts from half a dozen people

I believe it uses SSE2 instructions for the most part.

> Porting Game Boy Emulators to the Pebble Time

@bwDraco Hm. So some speedup could be had from adding AVX, at the cost of worse processor support. Or just port it to GPGPU (OpenCL, CUDA) :P

I'm going through the reviews right now. It'll be a long day...

@JourneymanGeek Actually, the "wolves" are the Canadian Politicians, killing lots of research funding and closing labs across the country

crickets chirping

@CanadianLuke still.... you hear strange things about winniepeg

@Burgi *Winterpeg

I saw it get down to -72 at the airport before

lol

-72C?

Once it gets below -40 (where it's the same, F and C), it doesn't really matter much, does it?

fair point

Besides very few Canadians can do the conversion to F from C in their head

i thought you were all metric

Having said that... I need to multiply the -72C by 1.8, then add 32. So that should equal around -97F

We are

I just got bored one day on a walk, and figured it out in my head how to do the conversion

my new clock has arrived

i might have made a small error in purchasing it

it only has a single alarm

Was the time in Metric?

no but the angles were

Well, at least ONE part of the clock was built right... 100 time zones, 10 minute-hours....

To convert to metric time, just add 12.

@ThatBrazilianGuy That's how you convert to 24-hour time

So, 9 AM is 21 AM in metric time.

and 22 PM in metric time is 34 PM in non-metric

To convert to military time, it's the same, just add a "SIR!" at the end.

We're equal-opportunists here. You can get away with "MA'AM" at the end sometimes, too. Just not at the same time

Equal-opportunists? Does that mean the distribution of opportunists is equidistant?

So you can't ever escape the opportunists in Canada?

@ThatBrazilianGuy they built a wall around them and everyone paid their fair share

@Burgi I thought the Mexicans would be the ones paying for wall-building, no?

not in canada

You mean North Mexico? The cold one?

@ThatBrazilianGuy Well yea, North of the Wall has always been cold.

And the ruler of the rich kingdom south of the wall is a blonde bastard, or so I heard...

Deep thought of the day: I'd much rather be laid off than laid on.

Shallow thought of the day: Hmmm... Donuts!

@allquixotic Depends... How cute of a person would be laying on me?

@CanadianLuke I think weight is the key factor here.

@ThatBrazilianGuy That may be what you think... But I also care about the gender of who's laying on me. Factors in a way as to the cuteness factor

Well, I'd prefer a 50kg male to lay on me than a 200Kg female.

@CanadianLuke it was more of a personal perspective, not necessarily applicable to most people or necessarily even anyone else but me

@ThatBrazilianGuy Good list

List? What List? No idea what you're talking about. I said nothing...

@allquixotic Understood. I just like making people feel awkward whenever I can :)

reply to (removed) I am so far gone, so completely jaded that I refuse to even acknowledge those or anything remotely in the same category of entity (whether famous or not, poor or not, hell even female or not) as ever laying on me unless we're both standing up in a subway car or a bus aisle and the vehicle crashes/derails

@allquixotic Delete the gym, hit the lawyer, facebook up

wat

delete facebook, hit the gym and lawyer up?

Just a (bad and failed) joke with a popular phrase on reddit.

yeah... "hit the gym"... where am I going to get the (a) money or (b) time or (c) willpower for that, and who's going to do my job for me and pay me my salary when I don't spend every waking hour learning and developing my software skills so I can survive in my job?

But, more serisouly now, just like other regulars here, you sometimes sound as a broken record.

less so

You just need (1) change your attitude and (2) maybe change your appearence.

Probably 80% of the former and 20% the latter.

@ThatBrazilianGuy when I state a fact that something is not possible, I'm building into that assertion that the "change" you refer to cannot / will not happen, because of factors that in my mind are at least 51% out of my control, in my view (charitably - I originally wrote 80%).

But, you see, you can find a gym nearby that is open, say, 7AM and attend before work. That's what I did for a month, it does wonders to your stamina.

if u figure out willpower let me know

nor am I implying that I want my situation to change... if I did, that might be sufficient motivation for me to take my minority share in the ability to affect change and at least do something

@djsmiley2k Well.... about thaaaaat.... hm....

@ThatBrazilianGuy see, the solution to that is easy ... setup a regiment of walking / pushups / situps ... if you can maintain the will power to do it for 3 months ... which requires zero $ ... then you can get a gym membership

@Burgi You mean no snooze?

I'm actually somewhat thankful that I have genes that are extremely conducive to obesity, because I don't want to be miserable in old age in a retirement/nursing home

in all likelihood, within 20 years I will have a massive heart attack and my life will be over suddenly, with no torture... one moment, going to work, the next, gone

no cancer treatment, no dialysis, no bed pans

wow, thats glum

but likely

hmmmmmmm

not so sure myself

plenty of overweight old people

not really

they're the extreme minority of both fat people of any age, as well as old people of any weight

@CaffeineAddiction I still have 3 months left. Next monday I return to work. I'll ride the bike until the bus stop every day and go to the gym before work as well. If I manage to do that the majority of days then I'm paying for a single month of gym when the membership ends.

see america

@djsmiley2k which is where I live... but if you define "fat" as clinically overweight, most people who the doctor considers to be overweight aren't anywhere near morbid obesity, and in fact are essentially 100% normal except that they could survive another day or two without food

@allquixotic I have about 6 or 7 family deaths due to cancer. Including mother, uncle and grandfather.

Yay. .___.

if you define "fat" as morbidly obese, almost no one gets to be old in that category

@allquixotic Yay ... my genes say im going to make it to 100 ... but I will loose my mind by 85

i already lost mine

... assuming I havnt lost it already

no men on my dad's side of the family have ever made it past 50 except for my dad, and he's being seriously propped up by some extremely aggressive medicine that is also wearing away his internals and will soon cause him to go the way of his brothers/ancestors

Well my mind is perfectly fi2ihfnjebdjksdgbjsdgjfdgjdnhfgh

my mom's mother died at 80, not bad, and was functional up to the end, but he was also skinny... I appear to be mostly made of my dad's genes

@allquixotic 50% of your genes come from your mother ...

I'm talking about people who never exercise, eat normal, healthy food, and just become extremely obese no matter how hard they work -- that's me, that's my family

@DavidPostill There's this thing called gene dominance...

compare to other people who never exercise, eat doughnuts, and weigh 100 lbs

> Genetically, you actually carry more of your mother’s genes than your father’s. That’s because of little organelles that live within your cells, the mitochondria, which you only receive from your mother.

@DavidPostill most of the DNA I got from my mom must've been junk DNA, then :P

junk DNA oh and by the way, here's how to make mitochondria

dad: here's how to be fat and have a weak heart

lol

@allquixotic So you're a Jedi!?

@MichaelFrank midichlorians != mitochondria

just saying or typing midichlorians will get you kicked out of my SWTOR guild

@MichaelFrank Depends on the mitochondria count on his cells.

But he still has a father and, I assume, both hands, so I think we're safe.

I'll end out this lovely conversation with a song whose lyrics I basically bump enthusiastically with a "^^^^^^^"

@allquixotic Episodes I-III deniers, huh? :P

meeting bbl

are we decided on ryzen yet btw?

Meetings? What are meetings? What is work? I haven't been at my workplace since feb 24...

@ThatBrazilianGuy Did you get lost in the carnival crowd or something?

@DavidPostill No, the carnaval crowd got diverted directly under my window.

Multiple blocos. Or a single one on various days. Same result.

Noise, mess, drunk people, more noise

Noise at 7 PM, noise at 3 AM, noise at 7 AM, noise, noise.

Oh, and the Marijuana March protest was yesterday at my street.

Noise, pot smoke, noise, drunk people, people high...

I was out of bread and milk and went to the market hoping to not cross any policeman om my way back +_+

tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-6.html

Poor performance in AotS, improves with SMT disabled. Software glitch?

I suppose Microsoft and AMD will work out these issues soon.

BF4:

> Ryzen 7 1800X in its stock configuration (with the Balanced power profile) is the only modern processor that doesn't average 160 FPS or more. It fares better with the High Performance profile activated, pulling in with the rest of the field if you're willing to leave Windows in this mode.

@DavidPostill it has snooze

...that again points to some firmware or software trouble limiting performance.

my old clock had two seperate alarms that could be set to different times

one for school work days, one for the weekend

My cellphone does that.

meh

i prefer an alarm clock

Put your phone where your alarm clock would be. What's the difference?

it beeps and vibrates and flashes at times that are not waking up times

lol

You must have a Samsung Galaxy... Any other Android phone would have implemented Do Not Disturb.

@MichaelFrank ...and here I am looking right at a Do Not Disturb option on my S7...

:(

I guess they don't care about the S5 then.

Oh... so I'm totally wrong. Disregard everything I said. It turns out it was hidden >____>

lol

i just prefer clocks

wtf is going on in the expanse?

@Burgi which part?

ganymede

Ah!

That'll get explained later. Spoilers

If you're OK with that...

Glowing blue guys are protomolecule enhanced supersoldiers

:o

it did look like the UN marines were shooting behind them

it is a show that was designed for watching all in one go rather than weekly

It's a novel as a show.

@JourneymanGeek what's with you and glowy blue things -_-

Oo

@JourneymanGeek "glowy blue crap", "glowing blue guys"

@Bob lol

what game was that? ;p

@JourneymanGeek SR4

ahh right

It was!