Early Zen2 chips were also basically defective, 3950X and 3900X advertised a very high boost clock that was seemingly impossible to reach in practice. Some chips did, some didn't, and seemingly it came down to silicon lottery whether your chip would miss advertised clocks by as much as 10% like GN's did.

There was a series of patches that didn't really resolve anything or change performance in any notable way, and people proclaimed it not actually a problem in the first place, but definitely fixed after this series of patches to fix the not-a-problem. Later batches did seem to have better silicon quality and everyone kinda forgot about it and moved on, because everyone constantly gives AMD hall passes on this kinda stuff, but the people who had bad chips didn't have their issues resolved, and the same boards ran fine with later chips.

https://youtu.be/M3sNUFjV7p4?t=255 (he is wrong when he says 4.6 GHz, that's the 3900X, 3950X is advertised at 4.7 GHz)

https://youtu.be/JUQ9iUyd0uM

I mean basically they sold you a 3900 non-X for 3900X prices and everyone searched for reasons to give them a pass: "it says up to 4.7 GHz", "it runs 4.7 GHz if I run a loop of NOPs", etc. And this was very unprecedented at the time, we hadn't normalized the culture of boost being this variable thing, every single Zen1/Zen+ and Intel chip would do the advertised clock rates at least.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/cfli2n/i_discovered_ho...

And the whole thing could have been avoided if they had just advertised a more conservative clock and let the people with good silicon be happily surprised that they were hitting 10% over box speeds. Very anti-consumer then too. As GN themselves said in the first link - this surely would have been a massive scandal if Intel had done it but everyone gives AMD passes constantly.

This recently resurfaced a bit with Zen4 again. Silicon quality matters a lot again, der8auer has found that perf/w can vary by as much as 50% (!!!) based on silicon quality. There is a range of performance (~10% let's say) and then bad chips may pull as much as 30% or so more power than a good sample even to get into the bottom of that range, while a great sample will trounce their way to the top of the range while sipping power. Again I would expect this to decline over time as the silicon matures, and there isn't really any direct advertising or promises about perf/w, but... silicon quality is very much in play once again, especially in the lower bins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGbW7orZS-A

Anyway though the Zen1 segfault bug you mentioned was brushed under the rug too, once again. There was nothing Linux-specific about it, compiling in particular seemed to trigger the bug more easily (this is unsurprising: compiling is very cache-intensive and uop-intensive and often shakes out silicon bugs of all kinds!) and people would have random problems/crashes/etc when compiling under windows too. The processors were simply defective (AMD quietly made changes to the uop cache iirc) but they worked well enough that most people didn't notice. Hey, if you randomly crash out of your game once a week, how are you ever going to tie it back to silicon defects? It's a Linux problem, doesn't affect me. Or those crashy RDNA1 drivers that "worked fine for some people" and after much to-do and a bunch of supposed fixes still never quite worked right for some people... :thinking:

(which of course AMD got a pass on the 5700XT too from most people! like, this ryzen 7000 problem is just a bios bug most likely, but they do really ship openly defective products quite often and don't necessarily always fix them fully or make people whole, and they usually get away with it and people defend them while they do it. The criticism is what gets fixes and keeps them honest, they're a company and if they keep getting away with it they'll keep pushing, just like people criticizing NVIDIA for VRAM size or whatever is ultimately what leads to improvements on that in the future. It drives me insane when the AMD crowd just blindly defends and justifies anti-consumer behavior because that makes it harder to get actual improvements!)

Anyway, the rest of this is kind of bitter and jaded, but, the AMD fan club has been kinda awful since forever. It's leftover bunker mentality and chip-on-their-shoulder from the Bulldozer days and early Ryzen days, but like, Steve from GN and der8auer and LTT and others have commented on it repeatedly over the years... like the AMD defense force justifying AMD cutting off all legacy chipsets (B550 had not even launched yet and they wanted to kill X470 and B450 support for Zen3, despite B450 being the "current gen" budget boards!) which triggered this video. And they got away with killing off X399 and doing a single-gen TRX40 socket (despite AMD's promises of it being a long-life platform to justify breaking compatibility) and just abandoning HEDT in general, and doing huge price increases during the pandemic (while Intel cut prices). They doubled ASPs of their 6C within a matter of a few months, they cranked the shit out of it and profiteered during a public health crisis while Intel held prices and in fact cut a lot of them too.

And sometimes they do make people whole (segfault bug you could send in your chip if you cared), but like, other times they don't, 5700XT never really got fixed, Zen2 launch silicon never got fixed, etc. And then people shrug and move on, and keep defending them as inherently and consistently pro-consumer.

Paying studios not to implement (and in some cases rip out existing) DLSS2/3 implementations is another bullshit move lately too. They are betting if they just lean on their console marketshare and stonewall DLSS as much as possible, people will eventually just come to accept a worse outcome, because it's easier for studios to not have to validate two things/etc. Even if the API is open they're not going to accept anything that could be used to plug non-free code, even going as far as pushing for statically compiling FSR2 into everything to prevent DLSS Swapper/DLSS wrapper integration by swapping DLLs around. Anything that could be used to plug something they don't like is bad for them, so it's bad for you.

https://youtu.be/8ve5dDQ6TQE?t=974

Or the Ryzen take-a-way and PREFETCH speculative execution errors... which have vectors which remain essentially unpatched (some were, others weren't) apart from enabling KPTI, which AMD continues to recommend be disabled by default on their architectures. So they're shipping an insecure configuration and "if you care, turn it on". Imagine if Intel did that with Meltdown, shipped an insecure configuration "to win benchmarks"? People would lose their shit.

Like business is business, profit-seekers gonna profit-seek, but people defend their anti-consumer behavior constantly and it ends up hurting consumers because it avoids AMD having to face criticism and actually reform their ways. They'll keep doing it as long as they keep getting passes.

https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo?t=310

https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E

(and specifically der8auer low-key calls out the same integration between AMD marketing with social media later in the video. Intel and NVIDIA don't have a "red team plus", they don't have a "pathfinder program", by application, for their most stalwart social-media defenders. https://youtu.be/x03FyPQ3a3E?t=356 )

https://youtu.be/rscDxMrZmGU?t=1304

https://wccftech.com/enthusiasts-rejoice-amds-new-threadripp...

AMD really also kinda normalized the idea of marketing around base-TDP... this existed for laptops really was not a thing with desktop processors, 5960X and 7700K etc pretty much stayed within TDP while boosting even in prime95 (which shouldn't be surprising given the clocks/core counts! 5960X is like a 3.3 GHz all-core boost, and 7700K gets 91W to boost 4 cores with an AVX offset as well!), then AMD redefined the term TDP and introduced PPT as their "boost TDP" and then spewed a bunch of crap about how thermal watts are not electrical watts (thanks AMD_Robert!) and thermodynamics do not apply to AMD. Anyway, all they had to say was that PPT was their boost TDP and the chips would run above the official TDP as thermals permitted, but they wanted to stay far away from that "TDP" term to build themselves a 30% cheater factor on all their power measurements. To this day people say things like "I have a nice efficient 65W processor and Intel pulls 100W" when the difference is really more like 90W vs 100W or whatever, it absolutely worked and people continue to buy and mentally follow the marketing number instead of actual power.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6svy1a/tdp_vs_tdp/dlg8...

Not that they're worse than anyone else. Intel and NVIDIA say and do some shit too. But people think AMD's shit don't smell and they've kinda done some anti-consumer crap over the years too and the fan club kinda drives me crazy defending it. It's nuts how much people love AMD and will defend pretty much anything they do. If I sound jaded it's because the last 6+ years have been nonstop Narcissists Prayer from the AMD fan club: "that didn't happen, and if it did it wasn't bad. And if it was, it's not a big deal. And if it is... it's not AMD's fault. And they didn't mean it. And if they did... you deserved it."

Even stuff that is pretty clearly AMD like the chipset lockout or brand-locking OEM chips to kill the secondhand market (how does brand-locking prevent swapouts? ok I have to find an asus branded 200GE to swap in when I steal this 5950X, so what?) gets defended with "but partners must have demanded it to sell more motherboards, AMD is just a small family company and can't stand up to the likes ASUS and MSI and Gigabyte!", when the track record pretty clearly supports partners being willing to go much farther on compatibility (like enabling PCIe 4 on some B450 boards that have good enough signal integrity) and AMD being the one putting the foot down to stop them for marketing segmentation.

Or the "the reason AMD can't offer good-value GPU products is because you didn't buy them in the past, they're just matching NVIDIA's pricing because they know they can't take marketshare! you deserve it for not instantly giving AMD 80% marketshare that one time they were ahead for 6 months!", etc. High prices aren't caused by AMD being an amoral profit-seeking entity like every other corporation... it's your fault because the 4850 didn't give them overnight market dominance, they want to do great prices but know that gamers won't buy it!

AMD literally can do no wrong that social media won't minimize, deflect, or shift blame to someone else. It is straight-up Narcissist's Prayer shit constantly. Drives me nuts. It's fine to like AMD, or even think they've been a net positive for the market (they have!) but like, you know that I need to throw in some praise at the end because the fans are unhinged, and that's the whole problem, you can't even complain about outright instances of anti-consumer behavior without polishing AMD's knob afterwards, or someone throws a hissy because I besmirched AMD's e-honor.

And that's crazy, nobody would ever do that for most other tech companies - imagine if criticism of GPP had to be accompanied by similar "kissing the ring" with platitudes of how much NVIDIA had done for advancing graphics tech over the decades, or criticism of Smeltdown had to be accompanied by buttering up Intel. Social media's relationship with AMD is incredibly unhealthy. And people like GN Steve and der8auer have called it out as such too, and it just keeps rolling on.

If Intel did something like brand-locking chips there would be nobody defending it, or saying that OEMs want it, or that it's a security feature (again, how does requiring me to find a Lenovo branded chip prevent swapouts?). Daisychained chipsets, on boards that clearly don't justify it? Some of which literally have a single M.2 slot on the whole second chipset, that could have just been connected directly to the first chipset? Sounds like AMD wants to sell more chipsets. Locking out legacy chipsets for bullshit technical reasons then quietly retracting the whole deal later? Yeah, probably sounds like they wanted to sell more chipsets. But like, you have to meticulously eliminate any possible defense or beneficial motive, how dare you impute a profit motive to any of AMD's actions. Again, just drives me nuts. If it were Intel we’d just call a spade a spade and say brand-locking is pretty obviously being pushed with killing the secondhand market as a strong secondary motive if nothing else. In fact people said exactly that when intel locked xeons out on the consumer chipsets (after Broadwell). No defense or knob-slobbing required - they did it for the money.

https://www.techpowerup.com/304735/asus-rog-strix-x670e-i-ch...

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Socket%20AM5/ROG_STRIX...

Again none of this is really about the Ryzen 7000 bug. I'm sure it will be patched. People with dead CPUs will get them warrantied. This isn't a showstopper. It's just a general trend in the way these crises get handled for AMD vs everyone else, the Narcissist's Prayer routine gets old.