AMD Debuts Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X For Prebuilt PCs (techreport.com) 53
AMD announced two new second-generation Ryzen CPUs this morning. From a report: The Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X bring Precision Boost 2 and XFR 2 to quad-core Ryzens without integrated graphics, but there's a catch: these chips appear to be available exclusively to system integrators and OEMs for use in prebuilt systems. AMD is debuting the Ryzen 5 2500X in cooperation with Acer in the form of the Nitro 50 desktop PC. AMD says the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.
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That's more of an RCA (circa 1980) and they were probably copying some earlier manufacturer.
There are lots of good reasons to split the market that way, and if you don't, prices on the low end will rise considerable, and prices on the high end will drop quite a bit less...I'm presuming you intend the same percentage of profit (though even that's iffy, as the profit at the high end is probably higher as a percentage than the profit at the low end, where you can dump the seconds).
Re:Exactly like with the 2200/2300 then. (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire product line is one chip design. They burn out fuses in the chips to disable features to make the lower end ones.
When you make chips, you produce a big wafer that gets cut into individual chips. There will be defects in the wafer. You can generally predict roughly how many defects there will be, but not where they will be. So you design your chips so that portions of them can be disabled.
You get a perfect chip with no flaws? That gets sold as the top of the line part. You get a chip with defective cores? That one has cores disabled and gets sold as a lower end chip. Maybe the cores are fine, but there's flaws in the L2 cache? Disable part of the cache and put it in a lower end bin. Or maybe everything works, but the chip starts to get unreliable if you clock it too fast. Again, into a lower end bin.
Chips get designed this way because it means you can still sell most of the chips that have flaws in them. You'll still get some unusable chips, but most flaws can be worked around to produce a product you can sell.
If the market wants a lot of low end chips, sometimes you end up disabling working features to meet demand. It's way, way cheaper to do that than it is to set up a separate manufacturing line just for the lower end chips. This is more likely to happen later in the lifecycle of a particular chip, after manufacturing has been running for a while and the flaws have been worked out. It's usually not worth setting up another manufacturing line to make lower end chips when this happens.
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The entire product line is one chip design. They burn out fuses in the chips to disable features to make the lower end ones.
They do that now, but you're kinda beginning with the ending of the story. It used to be that the disabled functionality could often be easily restored because it was either programmable (firmware image) or reversible (reconnect severed connectors). A few hackers did it and sometimes got a free upgrade but it didn't bother anybody. However some shady dealers starting doing this on a large scale, selling cheap products as more expensive ones to unsuspecting customers causing lost profit and angry customers w
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Dear AMD. Please don't do an Intel.
No. Dear AMD please do exactly what Intel and everyone else does across many industries. Please ensure that the expensive products continue to subsidise the cheap and than you keep your production costs as low as possible as a result.
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Shhhhhh. Marketing people and investors might hear you! Do you really wanna screw up months of stealth fixes (if they actually exist at all)?
Gosh darn it, it's people like you that make coders, operating system kernel fixers, and other expensive personnel work overtime-- not to mention people that must fix firmware, patch millions upon millions of hosts, and all for what? So you can have a secure system? What the hell is wrong with you?
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Your preferences are not universal.
It's official (Score:3)
CPUs now have more cache memory than my first PC (8088) had of storage space.
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For me that's been true for 20 years, and I also had an 8088! You must have been some rich kid with a HD, everybody else was booting from floppy.
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For me that's been true for 20 years, and I also had an 8088! You must have been some rich kid with a HD, everybody else was booting from floppy.
No joke. The first time I saw a hard drive in person was on a Packard smell 386SuX many years later. Pretty sure it was 20MB but I might be remembering wrong.
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That's how I would get free HDs in the mid 90s; people would use data compression, a sector would go bad, and the OS would give the user drive errors. In many cases the compression prevented the OS from being able to understand the problem, and it would appear even to the dorks at the local computer store to be a dead drive; or at least, it would take them so long to figure it out that it was cheaper to sell a new one.
Sometimes we could even get free SCSI drives that merely needed a "low level format" and t
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The first HD I saw was in middle school; 10 MB. Parallel interface. Shared by a small group of Apple ][e computers. Took 5-10 minutes to warm up, and if you accessed anything before the flashing light stopped flashing, data corruption was likely.
Multi-user; single filesystem. Due to the wonders of the parallel interface, all the connected computers would completely block while waiting for access; even just a read would block the whole system.
It was nearly useful. The only kids who used it, once the features
AMD making use of otherwise broken chips... (Score:3)
Re:AMD making use of otherwise broken chips... (Score:4, Insightful)
So AMD found a defect and had to bin the part. But instead of throwing to the trash they decided to disable to broken silicon and sell the part for cheap - for computers that will also probably be cheap. Both Intel and AMD have done the exact same thing for years. This is news because? New part numbers one needs to remember to avoid?
Binning, as you say has been going on for years and is actually planned from the beginning.
It is almost guaranteed that whatever the hell chip you used to post this, it was likewise binned with either something on it disabled, or at less than the possible performance level because it wasn't up to snuff.
Telling people to avoid these chips is borderline retarded.
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Telling people to avoid these chips is borderline retarded.
True enough. Most people who are choosing their own hardware components care enough to want something better anyway. To me, the AMD Ryzen 5 2600 would look good if I needed something Right Now.
Corporations that buy those things in bulk better have some IT department who can advise them. If not, their problem. And a cheapskate, 2nd choice CPU might actually be more than sufficient for their office needs.
Besides, they would not listen to us anyway.
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If they promise to only sell it to OEMs on special order then there is no need to remember to avoid it. If you're actually in the position to want a low cost used CPU at some point, you're not going to be as picky as you sound right now. :)
So it much less significant even than that.
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There's no need to remember to avoid anything. You are right now posting using a chip that was sold using the exact same methods. This isn't exclusive to AMD, or even the microchip industry. Part binning and feature disabling has been commonplace for the best part of 40 years. We can largely thank it for low cost devices. Even your high end parts are likely binned in this way unless you bought the absolute top of the line.
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No, I build my own systems from parts. I know exactly what practices were used to sell the CPU, because I bought a discrete CPU.
I paid extra for the part number that represents the bin with higher electrical efficiency at low speeds.
The thing in this story is where they sell it to OEMs, who won't give you enough information about their completed systems to actually tell which bin the CPU was from; that remains true even where they list a very specific-sounding part number in the marketing, and then use an "
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The thing in this story is where they sell it to OEMs, who won't give you enough information about their completed systems to actually tell which bin the CPU was from; that remains true even where they list a very specific-sounding part number in the marketing, and then use an "equivalent" part.
Projection. Most OEMs who don't list the specific part for their models is because they give you a choice of the specific part when ordering. 2500X is enough to tell you everything you need to know about this part.
And if they only sell it OEMs, then it can't matter to an end user.
Not at all. OEM specific parts only mean that a part is exclusively for a different distribution channel. It doesn't have any less impact on consumers.
The whole system will have non-optimal parts, nothing will be running at full speed, and nobody will know any details finer than the benchmark results.
Except this article is literally about none of that. The specs are listed and given and the only "speed" related issues here at play at all is depe
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You did not understand.
I wasn't talking about OEMs not giving you a part number. I'm talking about the fact that they all do give you a part number, but they also substitute other parts that they consider "equivalent." OEMs that don't do that, also don't sell low cost systems, and so won't even be using the nearby part numbers that this would be considered "equivalent" to.
You're very credulous of marketing. But you apparently lack real-world data.
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Again maybe you use shitty vendors. I for one have always gotten the CPU I selected when buying a laptop or desktop. Not an equivalent. Not a similar, but the exact model.
If they did what you were saying, they'd fall afoul of the law in my country. You see in most places of the world if the marketing doesn't match the real world data you end up in the deepest of shits.
America could really do with some consumer protection laws.
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I didn't tell you anything that would lead you to believe that you have information about what vendors I use. I was talking about the products available in the marketplace, and the way the practices relating to CPU part numbers relate to different price levels of completed whole systems. I don't even buy whole systems other than laptops, and for that I buy Thinkpads. And sometimes there is a substitution, but since it is a premium product they only substitute upwards, never across; they might give me an imp
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Catering to the budget PC market, which at the moment is nearly all Intel. The $200 small form factor PC market is a reality, perfectly adequate for the majority of home and business users. AMD apparently wants a piece of it, ideally a large piece.
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Both Intel and AMD have done the exact same thing for years. This is news because?
I don't know, you tell me. As far as I can see it's news because you made it news. TFA and TFS are about a new OEM only part and a comparison of this part to it's retail cousins, and not about the standard practice across many industries you for some reason are talking about in your post.
Remarkable. (Score:1, Funny)
Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.
I can't believe I used to care about this kind of shit.
Market pressure from intel shenanigans (Score:1)
AMD is scraping a little more profit from the binning process at the lower end.
They might as well since intel is playing their silly games with the vendors again to stick it to AMD. Just try to find a properly configured Ryzen laptop nowdays. All the vendors have put R5 and R7s into kit which is not designed to let them run to their best performance, just cheap packaging with crap like soldered-in memory that can't be expanded and thermals the wind up with R5s benchmarking faster than R7s. Doubtless afte