New Zen microarchitecture details

[Ajay]

And, for the most part, why do FMACs on anything other than a GPU these days (for heavy duty use)?

 

[HurleyBird]

That just means f4 stepping has been completed not that it's the final stepping.

That said, I'd still be surprised, pleasantly mind you, if the base clock got much higher from here.

 

[superstition]

One workload i do know that got a big benefit when going to haswell was SAP Hana

Is your list in terms of potential benefit or in terms of what developers have bothered to do? The Stilt's Blender builds show that a huge amount of performance was left on the table by the stock builds.

Now that Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby are on the market it could be that developers might go further than the Blender devs did (by not even leveraging 2011's AVX).

 

[prtskg]

That said, I'd still be surprised, pleasantly mind you, if the base clock got much higher from here.

I'm surprised it reached to this level. I never expected zen to be this good, most of us didn't. I'd love more surprises like this.

 

[prtskg]

Is your list in terms of potential benefit or in terms of what developers have bothered to do? The Stilt's Blender builds show that a huge amount of performance was left on the table by the stock builds.

Now that Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby are on the market it could be that developers might go further than the Blender devs did (by not even leveraging 2011's AVX).

For consumer cpus, isn't it only supported by SL and KL i7's and that also only unlocked ones?

 

[Atari2600]

That said, I'd still be surprised, pleasantly mind you, if the base clock got much higher from here.

Launch might not... but if AMD think there is a decent bit more headroom in respins, what is stopping them from an initial launch (which starts bringing money in the door) and further respins and CPU releases on down the line?

Release a 3.6/4.0 part "now" (at say, $800), then, if they can, 3-6 months later, release a 3.8/4.2 (at $1000).

 

[DrMrLordX]

This is NOT enthusiast chip. SR3, SR5 and SR7 are meant to be Socket 1151 CPU competitors. Putting it on the 500$ price range is outrageous, despite the core counts.

I will pay $500 for the flagship, no question about it. Anything higher and I start to get iffy. Regardless $499 or whatever is a fair prices for what they want to sell, and it serves both their need for margin and marketshare nicely.

Its very telling that Intel will release KLB-X (4C 8T) for the HEDT x2066 socket.

I try not to read too much into it. I think in a world without Summit Ridge, it might have been Intel's attempt to cancel k-class CPUs on the mainstream platform. Those plans are likely in the dustbin now.

They desperately need to maximise profit. That will involve increased market share, but should not be sacrificed for it.

$500 and less for the chips seems to fit the bill of bringing in both.

Stupid and childish chipset naming, having to have a number that's one bigger than Intel.

Really? I hadn't even noticed that.

With the way Intel acted the last time AMD had the performance lead, IMO, f**k 'em.

With the way Intel has acted since . . . 1997 . . .

4 cores is shooting for the apu right? on the die shots we have seen so far where is there room for the igp? I dont recall there is any.. thus it is possible theyre going with another die alltogether for 4 core parts.

Actually, that's a good observation. If you look at FM2+, you will note that the "native" quads on that platform are all (100%) just APUs with the iGPU disabled.

Which means that Zen quads might be Raven Ridge with no iGPU.

 

[Rngwn]

How likely that this will hit Southeast Asia region before mid-April? Having been stuck with i5 3570k for way too long now.

 

[Tup3x]

By the way, why would quad core Raven Ridge APUs be cheaper octa core Summit Ridge? Shouldn't they be about the same size? The Raven Ridge could even be larger depending on how much GPU power they plan to put... If they for some reason sell those APUs for much less then I don't think they have any reason to hurry up with them.

 

[laamanaator]

Guess you need to go back to preschool, because you math doesn't check out.
16x64 is 1024.

Damn, I shouldn't post anything when the clock is 00.00

 

[Thunder 57]

This is NOT enthusiast chip. SR3, SR5 and SR7 are meant to be Socket 1151 CPU competitors. Putting it on the 500$ price range is outrageous, despite the core counts.

That's ridiculous. SR3 will compete with 1151. SR7 will compete with Broadwell-E. SR5, depending on what exactly it even is, will likely be somewhere in the middle. If the numbers we are seeing are accurate, I think it would be a massive failure for AMD to NOT have a $500+ Zen. Even if it is a cheap chip to make, they need to make up for all that money they have been bleeding for years.

Also, think about it this way. If it comes out too cheap, what happens if everyone wants it and they cannot keep up with demand? That would a bad look. Also, remember what happened when Polaris came out? Resellers were the ones making all the money with heavy markups because of the shortage, not AMD. It would be far better for AMD to hold on to that money than Amazon, Newegg, or the OEM's. AMD's hands were a bit tied with Polaris because the 1060 was available at a similar price. Intel's enthusiast chips command a heavy premium. Intel would have to drop their prices considerably for it to be similar to the Polaris scenario.

They desperately need to maximise profit. That will involve increased market share, but should not be sacrificed for it.

This. 100% this.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Yet, as soon as Zen hits suddenly there could be a push to make it important. AVX-2 has been supported since Haswell on the Intel side, right?

Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby — that's quite a large percentage of the higher-end desktop market. Too bad for Intel that they've not had the best relationship with Nvidia. Buttering them up to make GameWorks heavily lean on AVX-2 could put the double hurt on AMD.

Except Intel removed AVX on Pentium and celerons so they can't do that.
Then they have to find lots of concurrency to issues 256bit ops (256bit ops every cycle) to actually hurt Zen which with SP and game engines working around xyza style workloads (just like renders) isn't that easy.

Also remember that whole blending thing i explained to you ( love how you now say blender has a "compiler issue" ) about refactoring of code and then supporting multiple paths which they would have to do other wise no one on a console (even the NX) is going to use gameworks.


edit:

Is your list in terms of potential benefit or in terms of what developers have bothered to do? The Stilt's Blender builds show that a huge amount of performance was left on the table by the stock builds.

Now that Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby are on the market it could be that developers might go further than the Blender devs did (by not even leveraging 2011's AVX).

You really dont get it do you. Where are these super developers who are so good at SIMD programming?

Everything has left performance on the table if you jsut rewrite your code base from scratch, i dont know if you cant comprehend, just a troll or that much smarter then everyone else but what you are talking about isn't easy.

If you think its so easy why don't you give us all a 101 201 301 on vectorisation of scalar code please! I would be more then interested to learn!

 

[krumme]

If amd knew how to sell those sr 3 sr 5 and sr7 cpu at say 300 500 and 700 usd they wouldnt have given them those names.
They sell 8c cpu now for next to nothing. Its a monumental task to market and sell your products just as a general rule in managing a company and it have the cost to follow. It takes brand and manpower in spades in sales to move the stuff. The cost of having the large organization to handle it best way is far far more costly than eg the meager 300 persons that was employed designing the cpu core. People in this tech forum would grasp for air if they knew how many money was invested in marketing and sales vs tech r&d.

 

[Dresdenboy]

I'm not sure people realize how fast this 3.6/4Ghz part will be . It will be brutal across the board and likely good deal cheaper than any 8C intel part.

This should ease the concerns about missing gaming performance (with focus on not so well threaded or DX11 games) compared to Intel's fast quad cores.

 

[Nothingness]

Yet, as soon as Zen hits suddenly there could be a push to make it important. AVX-2 has been supported since Haswell on the Intel side, right?

Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby — that's quite a large percentage of the higher-end desktop market. Too bad for Intel that they've not had the best relationship with Nvidia. Buttering them up to make GameWorks heavily lean on AVX-2 could put the double hurt on AMD.

Many current Intel CPU don't support AVX2, it's fused off. That's called market segmentation; I call that dementia.

The result is that AVX-2 use in software is very likely much lower than it could be, which in this case will help AMD

 

[JoeRambo]

The result is that AVX-2 use in software is very likely much lower than it could be, which in this case will help AMD

Great point, i really hope Intel will get properly burned for this segmentation. Proper AVX2 support and esp proper TSX support would go long way to help them in a lot of workloads.

 

[Dresdenboy]

Yet, as soon as Zen hits suddenly there could be a push to make it important. AVX-2 has been supported since Haswell on the Intel side, right?

Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby — that's quite a large percentage of the higher-end desktop market. Too bad for Intel that they've not had the best relationship with Nvidia. Buttering them up to make GameWorks heavily lean on AVX-2 could put the double hurt on AMD.

Of course, as most GameWorks stuff runs on the GPU, this 1% improvement (if at all) will turn things around.

 

[cytg111]

avx2 aint free either.. IIRC during avx2 loads the voltage ups, the clocks goes down, for sustained avx2 loads many systems with stock cooling will begin to hit temp ceilings and begin to throttle.
avx2 means you have a wide / massive parallel workload that is not suited for the GPU (what would that be? could be AI, traversing neurons? - gpu could do that too, divide and conquor?)

 

[PhonakV30]

AVX-256 in any game?

 

[Nothingness]

avx2 aint free either.. IIRC during avx2 loads the voltage ups, the clocks goes down, for sustained avx2 loads many systems with stock cooling will begin to hit temp ceilings and begin to throttle.

Voltage is upped on Haswell, and I have seen my 4770K reach >90 deg C on Linpack despite a very good air cooler. IIRC more recent CPU lower clock for AVX (or is it only true for Xeon parts?).

avx2 means you have a wide / massive parallel workload that is not suited for the GPU (what would that be? could be AI, traversing neurons? - gpu could do that too, divide and conquor?)

AVX2 can be very useful for small chunks of work you don't want to offload to your GPU. Some of the string instructions are an example.

 

[cytg111]

AVX2 can be very useful for small chunks of work you don't want to offload to your GPU. Some of the string instructions are an example.

Ineterresting. I found this, dont know if its applicable.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ring-instructions-and-mullo-for-unsigned-shor

 

[PPB]

Yet, as soon as Zen hits suddenly there could be a push to make it important. AVX-2 has been supported since Haswell on the Intel side, right?

Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby — that's quite a large percentage of the higher-end desktop market. Too bad for Intel that they've not had the best relationship with Nvidia. Buttering them up to make GameWorks heavily lean on AVX-2 could put the double hurt on AMD.

And also on intel because they gimped the lower spectrum of their procs to not to have avx2, even avx

Sent from my XT1040 using Tapatalk

 

[LTC8K6]

"AVX mode" is becoming common on motherboards to slow the clocks a bit with AVX loads.

 

[LTC8K6]

And also on intel because they gimped the lower spectrum of their procs to not to have avx2, even avx

Sent from my XT1040 using Tapatalk

Two of the $117 i3's have AVX2, though. The other two have AVX.
All of the more expensive i3's have AVX2.

 

[coercitiv]

Two of the $117 i3's have AVX2, though. The other two have AVX.
All of the more expensive i3's have AVX2.

In other words it's an AVX salad