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Zen


raymac46

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Well it looks as if AMD's long awaited desktop architecture will be out in a month or two. From the sound of things there will be some big time improvements:

  • AMD will finally have a modern CPU only chip to pair with a discrete video card.
  • After years of inferior performance AMD might be able to go toe to toe with Intel in single core performance.
  • Performance is said to be at least 40% better than the old Bulldozer architecture.
  • For that matter AMD may have the only non APU chip out there. Intel is pretty much all APU now.

I wonder though is there still a market for a desktop only PC gaming chip what with all the gaming laptops, tablets and game systems now out there?

 

Personally I doubt that I'll be upgrading for a while because:

  • My old school Intel Sandy Bridge/Nvidia GTX950/ Windows 10 box does just fine for my Train Simulator games at 1080p.
  • To upgrade my Linux machine I'd have to junk my APU, motherboard, memory, and probably my video card.
  • The trailing edge technology I have now is (finally) working great with Linux. I believe I'd need to have kernel 4.10 to work with Zen. Right now I am on Kernel 4.4. Who knows how a more bleeding edge video card will work. I have been burned before.
  • I'm not gaming on this desktop system. My grandkids play browser based stuff on it and for that it works fine.
  • What with an SSD, lots of RAM, an old school video card, and a 2nd generation Bulldozer APU this unit has plenty of snap and power for anything I'll ever need outside of the latest games.

Maybe if I have a catastrophic hardware failure someday I'll consider a rebuild with Zen and one of the newer AMD / Nvidia cards. Just not now.

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securitybreach

I forgot that AMD used to call their integrated graphics (on CPU) APUs. I was wondering what you were referring to until I googled APU.

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I believe they still do call them APUs. Sometimes they are referred to as Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA.) Their latest Bristol Ridge versions are still based on the now antiquated Bulldozer design. HP has a few desktops with this chip in them available at Best Buy or Costco.

The graphics is R7 based - similar to my graphics card but next generation. This one would likely use the amdgpu driver.

I don't see this as a big improvement over what I have now and I think if I wanted another APU I'd wait and see what Zen based models come out later on. Both the Zen desktop and APUs will use the new AM4 socket and DDR4 memory.

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  • 4 weeks later...

The Ryzen initial CPUs were launched yesterday - 8 cores 16 threads and competitive with Intel's higher end i7s - at about half the price. Good news for heavy gamers and video renderers.

A lot of chip for what I want to do. I think I'll wait and see how the lower end shakes out.

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