Ryzen Release Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.techpowerup.com/257817/amd-r...-gen-ryzen

AMD today addressed multiple issues with its 3rd generation Ryzen processors through a highly-recommended update to its Chipset Driver software.
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AMD is currently testing and validating AGESA ComboAM4 1.0.0.3ABB and will push it to motherboard manufacturers to encapsulate into their BIOS updates in the coming weeks.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/29...-in-market

Several weeks after AMD launched its new Ryzen 7 3700X, 3800X, and 3900X, we have some indication of why the company took this step. The Ryzen 7 3700X appears to be broadly in-market, but the Ryzen 7 3800X and particularly the 3900X are scarce. Prices on the 3900X have spiked on eBay, up to $800 or more in some cases. Don’t pay spiking eBay prices.
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So why isn’t this a paper launch? Two reasons: First, a review of sites like NowInStock.net shows that Ryzen 9 3900X’s are available — just not for very long when they show up in stock.

The second factor is time. We historically give companies more than just three weeks to demonstrate product availability. I took both AMD and Nvidia to task back in 2016 for their mutual failure to bring 14/16nm GPUs to-market in sufficient quantities to avoid the appearance of a paper launch. In that instance, however, far more time had passed.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/29...-all-cores

Tom’s Hardware has done a significant deep-dive into this issue and came away with a number of key findings. In the past, AMD CPUs were capable of hitting their top-rated boost frequencies on any CPU cores. Intel chips are designed similarly. With Ryzen 3000, apparently only up to one core needs to be capable of hitting its maximum or near-maximum boost frequency. The scheduler updates baked into Windows 10 were said to speed power state transitions (which they do), but they also assign workloads specifically to the fastest cores capable of hitting a given clock.

These findings may explain why all-core overclocking headroom on these new Ryzen 7 processors is so low. On the Ryzen 7 3600X, only one CPU core proved capable of hitting 4.35GHz, for example, with other cores on the same chip boosting to 75-100MHz lower. AMD has not released exact specs for what frequencies its cores need to be able to hit to satisfy its own internal metrics for launch, which means we don’t really “know” which frequencies these CPU cores will operate at. This is definitely a change from previous parts, where all cores could be more-or-less assumed to be capable of hitting the same boost frequencies, and it may have implications for overclockers — but it doesn’t really change my opinion on AMD’s 7nm Ryzen CPUs. If anything, I suspect it’s a harbinger of where the industry is headed in the future.
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According to AMD, roughly 25 percent of the performance improvements of the past decade have come from better compilers and improved power management. That percentage will likely be even larger 10 years from now. Power consumption at both idle and load is now the largest enemy of improved silicon performance, and variability in silicon process is a major cause of power consumption. Improving performance in the future is going to rely on different tools than the ones we’ve used for the past few decades, and one of the likely consequences of that push is the end of overclocking. Manufacturers can’t afford to leave 10, 20, 30 percent performance margins on the table any longer. Those margins represent a significant percentage of the total improvements they can offer.