- B350 motherboards support XFR
- All Ryzen CPUs are unlocked, when used with B350 or X370 motherboards.
- We plan for AM4 to be around a long time. Future generations of processors will be delivered into the socket at many price points.
- ECC is not disabled. It works, but not validated for our consumer client platform. Validated means run it through server/workstation grade testing. For the first Ryzen processors, focused on the prosumer / gaming market, this feature is enabled and working but not validated by AMD. You should not have issues creating a whitebox homelab or NAS with ECC memory enabled.
- we have our list of things that we are adding to Zen2 and
Zen3 to get even more performance going forward.
- you will see ryzen mobile parts going into laptops and 2-in-1's in 2H2017. We also like the workstation market and we will be talking more about those plans in the coming months.
- we do see that our memory latency is a bit higher, for most games this is not a huge sensitivity, but we do see this as a place to improve going forward.
- Optimizing a codebase for an all-new microarchitecture is an important aspect of extracting the best performance. We have not had a high-end desktop processor in a while, and nothing remotely like Zen that could be used to inform early expectations. So getting our software development efforts ramped up will be key. Bethesda, Oxide Games and SEGA are already onboard, and we've sampled 300+ devkits with a plan for 1000+ by year's end.
- Yes, I expect faster DIMM speeds to be possible through BIOS updates. Some vendors are already hitting DDR4-3400 pretty reliably. Also we've had best results with Samsung B-Die DIMMs thus far.
Why there is huge discrepancy is gaming benchmarks for reviewers today? Is this something related to BIOS update?
1) Early motherboard BIOSes were certainly troubled: disabling unrelated features would turn off cores. Setting memory overclocks on some motherboards would disable boost. Some BIOS revisions would plain produce universally suppressed performance.
2) Ryzen benefits from disabling High Precision Event Timers (HPET). The timer resolution of HPET can cause an observer effect that can subtract performance. This is a BIOS option, or a function that can be disabled from the Windows command shell.
3) Ryzen benefits from enabling the High Performance power profile. This overrides core parking. Eventually we will have a driver that allows people to stay on balanced and disable core parking anyways. Gamers have been doing this for a while, too.
These are just some examples of the early growing pains that can be overcome with time.
4) there are some games that are using code optimized for our competitor... we are confident that we can work through these issues with the game developers who are actively engaging with our engineering teams, this is strictly CPU scheduling within the game.