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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

If the Zen 2 / Rome series brings down the power/heat a bit, that will probably be around the time I'm seriously considering another upgrade... my i7-4790 desktop has been really good to me for a couple years, but within another 2, may be looking around again. Though, the consumer variant will also be up for consideration.

Nice to see AMD competing again, knew they would get some ground in the server space looking at the Zen benchmarks on the consumer CPUs.

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The bottom of the article mentions a supposed leak of a 2018 server chip with 48 cores. I wonder if that's just an MCM with 6 chips, made feasible by the smaller die size and reduced thermals?

Or maybe each die will be 12-core. It looks like AMD is trying to draw Intel into a core war.

Ah, yes, that's perhaps a more sensible way to go about it.

Kind of curious: How much lower you want them to go on the power/heat metric? Your current CPU is an 84W TDP part. A Ryzen 7 1700 has twice the number of cores and draws 65W with stock settings. The 1700 can get hot, but really only if you overclock it.

Of course more performance per watt is always better and I too hope Zen 2 can be even better. But right now, in certain scenarios, Ryzen is already leading in both performance per watt and per dollar.

Right now, the Ryzen 1800 isn't enough for me to jump ship, the 1700 is slower for most workloads, so sticking where I am for now. Though if the equivalent to an 1800x were closer to the 65W mark (Rome generation), I'd probably consider switching.

My workload is mixed, but definitely advantages to more cores/threads, I have several VMs in the background for development, docker, database, etc. And do some video re-encoding though that's mostly GPU bound.

I've had my 4790K for about 2.5-3 years now (iirc), and my last few upgrades have been around the 3 year mark... will probably push my current setup towards 4-5 years. I did upgrade to a GTX 1080 video card, well worth it, but don't see the point in much else, other than more cores, and getting past 32gb ram.

Keep in mind AMD and Intel measure TDP differently - AMD give average for a particular workflow / scenario, and Intel give absolute maximum, so you can't compare them apples-to-apples.

Intel's TDP is not the absolute maximum, but also a maximum-typical value, measured differently from AMDs methodology.

Remember the TDP for AMD is for the whole SoC. While with Intel you should include the PCH as well. At any rate you should compare the whole system with exact same components apart from the CPU. And the difference is minimal.

I understand that, but I have a few reasons for my concerns on TDP... The biggest is noise level, while my case now isn't absolutely quite, it's not bad, I don't want to have to have more noise, or resort to a full water cooling setup (I currently have a closed kit for my CPU, and stock on the GPU, with 4x 120mm case fans (including water block).

The other is the relative compute power... I'm pretty happy with what I have, could always be faster, but if my typical use only sees another 5% of performance, I'm unlikely to notice the difference. And I know that compute will expand some of the backend/unexpected delays on occasion, not sure the real world impact. So seeing similar TDP would be nice so I know noise won't be an issue combined with expanded cores, and similar single-core or slightly slower is okay.

A lot of this comes from farther back when I could upgrade every 18-24 months and see huge gains. It's been relatively stagnant the past decade now. I went from i7-860 to FX-8350 to i7-4790K that I have now, and frankly the changes have been mostly marginal. The extra ram and SSD has probably been more of an impact. 8gb, 16gb, 32gb respectively, and the first SSD was too small (many symlinks to HDD directories), and now running 3x 480gb ssds, and may switch to a 2tb nvme on the next upgrade cycle.

The GTX 1080 was offset by moving to a 4K display. So it's gains and balances... nothing slow by any means (I remember being able to make tea before my first XT with an MFM hdd would boot). But ever the more impatient with things. LOL, aside: at work, I have processes that I have to slow down, because the connected systems can't keep up.

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