(pre)Order AMD RyZen NOW!

In just one day the new AMD processors have climbed up to the first, second and fourth place in Amazon.com's best seller list, even though deliveries won't start for at least a week.

The reason for this impressive marketing success is most likely the price, and also the 52% IPC improvement, instead of the promised 40%. At this point Intel is behind AMD on IPC (instructions per clock), so they'll probably release new generation(s) of processors sooner than previously planned.

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X and 1700X come without a cooler, and are performance/overclocking oriented, both with a 95W TDP and that automatic overclocking feature enabled.

The official RyZen 7 1800X review kit

My favorite is the AMD Ryzen 7 1700, which has a slightly lower performance, but requires less power, with a TDP of just 65W.

These three are the high end RyZen CPU models, featuring 16 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes for the video card(s) an a few more for other I/O devices like USB 2.0/3.0/3.1, SATA, LAN ...etc.

This means that AMD did very good market research and targeted one-card users, who represent the overwhelming majority of video card buyers. SLI and Crossfire are supported by the new AM4 platform, but require a specific chipset for allocating those lanes (dynamically?) to both video cards.

In the photo above, you see the ASUS PRIME B350-PLUS, which is a medium price AM4 motherboard (~100USD). If you look closely, you can see the first PCI-Express x16 slot having full 16 lanes worth of contacts, while the second PCI-Express x16 slot only has 8 lanes, which are also shared with the two PCI-Express x1 slots.

From the manufacturer's website we also find out important information about upcoming AMD APUs (7th gen, 28nm, NOT Zen-based!), which will be compatible with this mainboard:

• there will be both APUs and Athlon CPUs on the AM4 platform
• APUs and Athlon CPUs will have less PCI-Express V3.0 lanes: 8 for the main slot, 4 for the secondary slot and only 2 for the M.2. slot
• APUs and Athlon CPUs won't support memory speeds higher than 2400MHz (they don't need more)

Even though these specs may seem slightly worse than Intel's offerings, you have to keep in mind that the most essential features are present and don't bottleneck the system's performance.
For example if you'll buy a 4 core 4 thread processor, you probably won't buy a video card that requires 16 PCI-Express lanes, because the processor's performance would bottleneck most games/apps anyway, even if it would have 16 PCI-Express lanes.

One more important thing to keep in mind when assembling an AMD RyZen PC: for improved stability it's recommended that you use 2 memory modules at up to 3200MHz (OC) or 4 modules at 2400MHz max.

Disclaimer: I get a commision whatever you buy through my affiliate links, so feel free to disconsider everything in this article and go for an Intel Kaby Lake CPU ;)

Toyota, Shell and Hydrogen Fuel Cells

It's interesting how fast good ideas are turned around by extremely irresponsible people. A few years ago Tesla has proven the concept and value of battery electric cars, so other manufacturers decided to try their luck in this new industry. Some of them (like Nissan) followed the vision, while others followed only easy profits.

Tesla Roadster

Tesla is a 100% electric car company (which also makes stationary battery packs and solar panels), while most other carmakers adopted the conservative approach: "ok, we'll make an electric car, but it will still run on gas" wait, what?!

Hybrid electric cars use gas to generate electricity with an internal cumbustion engine. Electricity is directly fed into the electric motor or temporarily stored in a battery pack, which has at least 1kWh capacity. The end result is a 2x more efficient gas car, on which big oil can continue to make huge profits... and continue to pollute the environment.

Plugin hybrid electric cars are a bit more advanced and greener, as they have a larger battery (at least ~8kWh) and can be charged from the power grid and/or filled with gas, but their pure electric range is usually just tens of miles. When the battery is low, the ICE will start up automatically and continue to power the car for ~100 polluting miles.

100% electric cars have one large battery pack, which can be charged from any power outlet and charging station. The battery is used for all energy needs of the car and passangers, so when it's empty, you're stuck, BUT their range is usually at least 100 miles (with AC on), enough for 90% of car owners, as they don't drive more than that in one day.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are also considered 100% electric and have ZERO emissions, like battery-electric cars, BUT unfortunately a lot of energy is wasted with the creation, storage and transport of Hydrogen gas. And did you know that Hydrogen has to be under pressure in your car and needs Oxygen from air to produce electricity? Yeah, it's more dangerous and harder to handle than gas. According to Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, in the absolute best case, the Hydrogen fuel cell system is only 50% as efficient as pure electric systems, which are already mass-produced today (and suffer around 5% improvement each year).

There is one more type of hybrid car, which is obsolete at this point, but worth mentioning:

This design also uses an ICE to charge the battery, but it can also drive the wheels directly with both the internal combustion engine and electric motor. 

Fortunately electric motors have evolved a lot in the past few years, and now even a relatively cheap electric motor can outperform an ICE under any circumstances (maybe except for very high speeds, above ~155mph). Today it makes a lot more sense to use the ICE just as a generator to charge the battery, or combine its power with the battery's, in order to drive the electric motor faster when needed.

Battery technology is also continuously improving. Tesla hopes to reduce 5 to 80% charge time to under 10 minutes for vehicles in just a few years. Right now it takes around 30 minutes to add 170 miles of range to your Tesla Model S/X at a Supercharger station, which is already quite acceptable for long distance travel. 

Mercedes-Benz Electric Truck - Urban eTruck

Skeptics didn't believe (some still don't) in electric cars. Now that Li-Ion battery packs and charging stations are perfected to a decent level, it's time for the truck industry to go elecric.

A recent post on electrek.co talks about the Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck, which is already in "small series production" stage.

From the outside, it looks like any modern truck, but with improved aerodynamics and noticeably smaller cooling vents.

On the inside beats the heart of a high tech transporter vehicle. It's based on an AC motor and 212kWh power pack, which allow the eTruck to transport 26 tonnes around 125 miles (200km). Compared to the Tesla Model X P100D it's a really impressive range, as the Tesla weighs 2.5tonnes and can travel 300 miles on its 100kWh battery pack. The eTruck transports roughly 11 times more weight with a 2x bigger battery pack for 125 miles ... increasing the transport efficiency from 330Wh/mile/2.5tonnes to 160Wh/mile/2.5tonnes (1700W/mile/26tonnes).

According to recent declaration of Stefan Buchner, Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks worldwide, these trucks will be manufactured in "low two-figure" number of units and will be tested for 12 months by interested customers in Germany. In this period the customers will be assisted by the Mercedes-Benz road testing department, so at the end of the testing they can make final tweaks and hopefully start manufacturing on a larger scale.

These fully electric trucks -as the name says- are meant for use in city traffic, and will most likely be fitted with Tesla Autopilot-like safety systems, but the most important aspect will be durability.

As we all know, electric vehicles don't need a gear box or clutch, because the electric motor can turn efficiently in a wide range of RPM and can also spin in the other direction, to move the vehicle backwards. As a consequence, the most frequent maintenance procedure will be replacing the windshield washer fluid. In second place comes replacing the tires. In third place oiling the bearings of the moving parts (main electric motor, airconditioning system's motors, cooling liquid pumps...etc.).

Personally I can foresee only one problem, which is the lack of noise. Regulators will probably require an artificial sound generator for these trucks, otherwise people could suffer heart attacks when a smaller house speeds by with barely any noise.

Only electric SMARTs in 2018?

SMART is owned by Daimler and makes very small two-seater and four-seater cars. At first they were all gas powered, but a visit of the Daimler executives at Elon Musk's electric car factory left it's mark in history, as they really liked the electric prototype and started collaboration with Musk's company, Tesla (Motors). Musk told some of the story in a 3 hour long shareholder meeting last year.

Now with the recent dieselgate scandals Daimler, as many other carmakers caught with their pants down, vowed to make greener cars, so starting in 2018, SMART will make only electric versions of all their small city cars in/for North America.

This isn't a huge hit for consumers, as these small cars are not really for highways and their electric versions are quite easy and fun to drive. Their range is around 100miles and their motor has just 80hp, driven by just a 17kWh battery pack.

These small cars would make excellent taxis in large cities, as they can fit anywhere and are quite reliable. They can be fully charged in 2.5 hours on a 220V outlet, in 22 hours on 110volts or in just 45minutes at a compatible fast charging station.

Even though the electric SMARTs represent a small part of the car market, it's a step in the right direction. As factories ramp up EV production, it would be time to inform the public about them, because as things stand today, the overwhelming majority of car owners don't know that EVs actually exist and have a fastly growing charging infrastructure.

Today the highest percentage of EV owners are in Norway. 30% of all new vehicles sold in 2016 were pure battery-electric and hybrid vehicles. They achieved this by eliminatig taxes on EV's, while keeping ICE car VAT at 100%. Yes, if you buy a 30.000 USD fossil fuel car in Norway, you have to pay 30.000 USD tax on it.

While Russia is far behind on the EV front, they just adopted a law, which forces all gas stations to have at least one working charging station for EVs. This is a very good idea, as most gas stations  have at least 3-4 parking spots' worth of space far from the gas pumps.

My country is even farther behind, as one supermarket chain put out a couple of free chargers in their parking lots. Using these chargers you can go through the whole country from west to east, right to the beaches of the Black Sea. In Cluj-Napoca (population 400.000) I've seen only two Hybrid cars this year, but will hopefully get 25 electric buses on the road soon.

RyZen reviews will be out on 28. february, allegedly

Some tech bloggers/vloggers/tubers consider WCCFTECH to be a tech tabloid publication, but in my experience they've been right or very close to the truth most of the time. In this case, the timeline makes sense, as the mainboards (and some CPUs too) for the new AMD platform are already shipping to warehouses around the world. WCCFTECH has published retail box art, as well as photos with the review sample processors.

This also means that a couple of these chips will surely be available on the black market, possibly for thousands of dollars ... after the the official launch and with worldwide availability, review samples usually lose their value, as they don't benefit of any warranty, nor long term BIOS support. My advice is not to fall for these shady sellers and wait for the official Retail product on amazon.com.

AMD and Intel fanboys are already arguing about leaked test results, which aren't very clear about which one is the winner. The tests are cherry picked, and AMD RyZen wins about 60% of them, but we don't have any results with the most popular benchmarking apps.

Be sure to follow Paulshardware, JayzTwoCents, TweakTown, BitWit, LinusTechTips and others for some real test results on the 28th of february, 2017. These guys have a lot of video cards and Intel CPUs for many different tests. It will be interesting to see how RyZen will handle video editing, live streaming, gaming and synthetic benchmarks with low and high end video cards, from both manufacturers (AMD and nVidia).

I'm guessing AMD will start making massive discounts on the AMD FX processor line and AM3+ motherboards, as they will be completely replaced by the RyZen generation and 28nm Bristol Ridge CPU/APU chips. The cheapest (Quad Core) RyZen CPU will be around 130 USD, so these older technology 28nm processors will fill that void and also replace the FM2+ chips. So be sure to check out these categories at amazon.com, as they still offer impressive performance for the price, and some users may be satisfied with their capabilities for at least another 3 years.

AMD RyZen on the HoRyzen!

AMD's CPU department seemed to be sleeping for 5 years, as they didn't really release any new products, just some slightly optimized versions of the previous -Bulldozer- architecture. In fact most of their engineers were busy working on a new architecture, which will change the CPU market in a massively positive way. They've developed Zen (later renamed RyZen), which has nothing to to with the old architectures and comes in a new unifying socket, called AM4.

The launch&availability date is 3. march 2017 and prices have already leaked for a couple of CPU models. To sum it up, Intel will get such a beating in terms of efficiency and price, even in the high end ;)

This was recently Tweeted by Raja Koduri (Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group). It seems that AMD made new coolers for the upcoming processors with RGB (or at least pink) LED lights.

It's not clear yet, which processor will get which cooler, but my guess is, that most low end 4-6-8 core processors will come with the standard 65W cooler on the left, X models (which have 95W TDP and are more overclockable) will come with the one in the middle or the one on the right.

On the other hand, these new processors have hundreds of sensors inside, which can turn off or overclock parts of the CPU quickly, so in theory any model will work with any cooler ... just a bit slower. AMD has already made this information public - the better the cooling solution, the higher the CPUs will overclock (automatically).

These are the leaked prices, which are quite impressive, even if with all the taxes they'll be about 20-30% more expensive in some countries.

Basically the $490 R7 1800X CPU will challenge Intel's top 8-10 core processors from the LGA 2011-3 enthusiast platform, for about half the price.

IMHO the R7 1700 model is more exciting, as it will come with a very low TDP and price, while running 8 cores / 16 threads at above 3.4GHz at all times.

Here are some more prices, leaked from a Chinese retailer. Prices are around 25% higher than US prices, mostly because of taxes, so keep that in mind when converting from CNY to USD:

What is amazing about the upcoming RyZen chips, is that they are 10% smaller than Intel's Kaby Lake, even though they have 2x more L2 cache and are in fact faster in some tests. Add that to the absence of iGPU on AMD processors, and you get a significant, sustainable price difference.

WCCFTECH also published leaked prices of ASUS AM4 motherboards, which will be available before the end of the month.

If you're thinking about buying a high end gaming PC with a smaller budget, you're probably looking at the 69USD motherboard, which features the most important ports and slots for a fast gaming PC.

The PCI-Express x16 slot will have 16 v3.0 lanes, which is more than enough for anything on the market at this time. 8 PCI-Express v3.0 lanes are reserved for M.2. storage and other on-board i/o devices (like LAN, audio...etc.), while 6 v2.0 lanes are probably for older I/O controllers like SATA-2/3, USB 2.0 ...etc.

This picture of the ASUS PRIME B350M-A mainboard was also leaked by WCCFTECH, probably during CES. Although it may suffer some small changes, there are some key things about it:

• no radiator on power phases
• 4+4 PIN CPU power connector
• 4xDDR4 slots
• one M.2. slot for fast SSD storage, any length supported
• one USB 3.0 header for front ports
• VGA and DVI (possibly HDMI too) ports in the back, although they cannot be used yet, as RyZen Processors don't have integrated GPUs

Equip this mainboard with a 316 USD R7 1700 processor, and you'll have Intel enthusiast level performance, for about half the price.

When it comes to the graphics card, it'll be the same price on both Intel and AMD platforms, but at least you'll have less heat issues, as the R7 1700 8c/16t processor only requires 65W of power and two sticks of RAM vs. 140W and 4 sticks on the Intel side.

Personally I'll probably wait for an even cheaper mainboard, and pair it with the cheapest AMD CPU. As a blogger and casual gamer (I currently play only DOTA 2 in the lowest detail at 1280 x 1024 resolution) I probably won't need anything more than 4 cores. Right now I'm blogging and playing on a Haswell Celeron G1820 and Intel HD Graphics, but not without 8GB DDR3-1600 and a 60GB SSD, to help with loading times and fluid gameplay ;)

Huawei Echolife HG520b - external antenna DIY

A long time ago I was using ADSL internet with impressive 6Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds. Stuck with it for 2 years, then the Modem-Router they gave me became useless, so I stashed it in a box somewhere. I got a cable modem-router from the new ISP. It also had Wi-fi, so I connected one cable to my computer and the other one to my TP-Link TL-WR720N router (for the other room).

It all worked fine, until I decided to buy a new phone, which for some reason doesn't like TP-Link rounter. Sometimes it doesn't even connect to it and can never upload at 25Mbps through one 30cm thick brick wall. So I searched for alternatives, and tried the old 54Mbps Huawei Echolife HG520b ADSL router, with the router part disabled of course.

The results were impressive. Even though I used the same external antenna with both routers, the Huawei router offers the best signal. My phone could upload with max speed, even through two 30cm brick walls.

I'm not sure what's the explanation, as both routers (Huawei and TP-Link) consume the same amount of power, had the same external antenna, same test location ... the only logical explanation would be that the older router simply has a better/stronger Wi-fi module, while on the TP-Link they thought they could get away with a weaker signal and compesate for it with the newer N standard.