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AMD Unveils Carrizo APU With Excavator Core Architecture

Posted by Soulskill on from the trying-to-catch-up dept.

MojoKid writes: AMD just unveiled new details about their upcoming Carrizo APU architecture. The company is claiming the processor, which is still built on Global Foundries' 28nm 28SHP node like its predecessor, will nonetheless deliver big advances in both performance and efficiency. When it was first announced, AMD detailed support for next generation Radeon Graphics (DX12, Mantle, and Dual Graphics support), H.265 decoding, full HSA 1.0 support, and ARM Trustzone compatibility. But perhaps one of the biggest advantages of Carrizo is the fact that the APU and Southbridge are now incorporated into the same die; not just two separates dies built into and MCM package.

This not only improves performance, but also allows the Southbridge to take advantage of the 28SHP process rather than older, more power-hungry 45nm or 65nm process nodes. In addition, the Excavator cores used in Carrizo have switched from a High Performance Library (HPL) to a High Density Library (HDL) design. This allows for a reduction in the die area taken up by the processing cores (23 percent, according to AMD). This allows Carrizo to pack in 29 percent more transistors (3.1 billion versus 2.3 billion in Kaveri) in a die size that is only marginally larger (250mm2 for Carrizo versus 245mm2 for Kaveri). When all is said and done, AMD is claiming a 5 percent IPC boost for Carrizo and a 40 percent overall reduction in power usage.

114 comments

  1. Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sure it improves on the previous generation of nobodywantsme type architecture, but unless they go on sale tomorrow for $59, i'm afraid it's mostly harmless.

    1. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 0

      Even if they go on sale for $59 they are harmless IMO. It would only knock a couple hundred off a intel based system and still suck balls compared to them. Even swapping computers every couple years if your time savings isn't worth $200 to you you need a better job.

    2. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Identifiable+Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      An Intel Xeon E5-2690 V2, S 2011, 10 Core, 3.0GHz costs £1500. An AMD 3rd Gen. Opteron 6380 CPU, Abu Dhabi 16 Core, S G34 provides better performance and costs less to run yet only retails for £700. I'd say AMD have plenty of life left in the server market and if they can achieve similar price / performance numbers relative to Intel with these new desktop chips I'd say there is some life in them in the desktop arena too!

    3. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      It would only knock a couple hundred off a intel based system and still suck balls compared to them.

      It's knocking out a whole chip, it could bring the price of the whole PC down to less than a couple hundred.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 1

      I agree. But they haven't really been competitive in the desktop market for about 7 years. I hope they do better because I'm not a fan of monopolies. Strictly on price isn't the way to go IMO. Other than the most basic users (secretaries, store clerks and the like) I think the computer as a tool to do work well it never pays to be (far) off the current best of breed. AMD has been in the bargain basement i7 territory for a while. I'm not convinced this architecture is going to do it though. We'll see.

    5. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 0

      South bridge is pretty cheap: http://www.aliexpress.com/pric... . I guess the mobo would be simpler too giving you more savings but I don't think it would do it. Still say $300 for a crappy AMD based system and $500 for a 2X faster intel system: other than the dirt poor I know which one I'd recommend. Anyone using a computer for more than a glorified smartphone has time with a value. It doesn't take many minutes throughout the year to equal the cost difference. IMO you are almost guaranteed for professional use that all but the top end $5000 gaming rigs will earn their money back in their lifetime in employee productivity/retention.

    6. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      $10/IC is VERY expensive considering other components cost less than a penny. Even more, that IC requires several other components to support it, ya know those really cheap ones taking up space? Eliminating the SB is a very good thing, economy-wise. The boards can be smaller and a non-trivial cost savings is realized. (around 10-25%)

    7. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Guppy · · Score: 1

      It's knocking out a whole chip, it could bring the price of the whole PC down to less than a couple hundred.

      The low end has been sitting at a couple hundred for a while now -- and during that time, the quality of the CPU and GPU you can get have just gotten better and better, to the point that even net-top CPUs can get the job done. I'm amazed at how good even low-end netbook processors are these days.

    8. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In real world server benches, the Opteron 6380, despite being a 16 core part that uses more power, *loses* all-around to a E5-2660 which is slower than the one you mentioned (and also a bit cheaper): http://www.anandtech.com/show/6508/the-new-opteron-6300-finally-tested/14 Not that it matters, because it's the only segment they're even remotely competitive in.

      As for desktops, they're barely competitive with the old Core 2 arch... All of their current CPUs have a terrible IPC, and they kinda suck in the performance per dollar department too. Right now all they have is power hungry monsters that have lots of cores which will sit idle most of the time -- save for the 3 people who will reply to this and who will pretend everybody need 8 cores for everyday things, and that this makes them a good value somehow.

      We don't need a ton of slow shitty cores. We need a better architecture with a higher IPC. A 5% increase is nowhere near enough. Most people are better off with an i3...

    9. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm afraid you have been SCAMMED, as Intel has been bribing the benchmark software companies to rig their tests. there is currently a major investigation in the EU over this and it looks like Intel may get even more in fines than they had to shell out to AMD over their OEM bribery scandal. The latest one caught was Cinebench, if their software detected an AMD APU/APU it would drop ALL SSE optimizations and run ALL the math in X87 mode, a mode that has been depreciated since the P3. yes they were rigging THAT badly.

      If you take the rigged benchmarks out of the equation? Then surprise surprise AMD chips trade blows with chips costing more than twice as much with several tests the AMD outright smoking and in others within a couple percentage points of the i5s. Again we are talking about $120-$150 chips against $300+ chips and when you figure up how much more powerful your hardware could be if you put that extra $150 into the GPU or more RAM? Its really easy to choose AMD over Intel in the sub $700 mainstream price point. Oh and the AMD wrecks your power bill bullshit is just that, with 17 years required to make Intel come out ahead on power savings versus the increased cost.

      So DO NOT BUY THE LIES, Intel has been caught over and over AND OVER committing bribery and outright market rigging to insure they can get the press and benches to say what they want it to. The fact that they have risked so many fines and sunk so many hundreds of millions on bribes should make you ask yourself one simple question.....if they were REALLY so far ahead, why risk it? Why not simply stand on their merits and let the chips fall where they may? Maybe because they are NOT as far ahead as the rigged benches they paid for indicate and they are afraid of losing their jacked up premium if they have to compete in a fair market?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    10. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'd take power reduction over IPC any day, I haven't needed more CPU performance in about 6 years, and it's looking like I still won't need any more performance for another 6 years.

    11. Re: Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It doesn't matter what the power company charges for power. What matters is what your co-location provider charges for power. Which is normally an arm & a leg.

      AMD is great if you have a home server, are selling appliances to people who aren't sensitive to electricity usage, or aren't using the high-end performance chips.

      Otherwise, there's simply no comparison. Intel chips are faster and draw much less power. And that is not experience working at a large company that sells network appliances. I really couldn't care less about the usual benchmarks.

    12. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Do you have a link for that? It's not that I disbelieve you, I strongly suspect that Intel would do that crap. I'd like to read more about it however if you hae a link handy, then stash the link for the next time this benchmark comes up.

      Personally, I like the Phoronix Linux benchmarks. They're more meaningful for me since I use Linux and they're all based on GCC which is trustworthy.

      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

      The i7 4770 ocasionally blows away the FX8350 by a factor of 2, but in many benchmarks they're close, and Intel loses a fair fraction. The 4770 is the best overall performer, but not by all that much. It seems that the choice of CPU is fairly workload dependent.

      For servers, I still prefer the supermicro 4s opteron boxes. 64 cores, 512G RAM, 1U. Nice.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    13. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Informative

      Do you have a link for that? It's not that I disbelieve you, I strongly suspect that Intel would do that crap. I'd like to read more about it however if you hae a link handy, then stash the link for the next time this benchmark comes up.

      Personally, I like the Phoronix Linux benchmarks. They're more meaningful for me since I use Linux and they're all based on GCC which is trustworthy.

      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

      The i7 4770 ocasionally blows away the FX8350 by a factor of 2, but in many benchmarks they're close, and Intel loses a fair fraction. The 4770 is the best overall performer, but not by all that much. It seems that the choice of CPU is fairly workload dependent.

      For servers, I still prefer the supermicro 4s opteron boxes. 64 cores, 512G RAM, 1U. Nice.

      The i7 4770k is a fairly high end chip by Intel. I own one but I would not expect to find one in a sub 700. It is not a Xeon, but it is just 1 notch down from the $900 extreme edition so it is 2nd highest in consumer non server chips.

      Well sites like tomshardware.com make it look like a Pentium or i3 can smoke the latest AMD black edition fresh out of the water. However, biased or not my real world experience says otherwise as many games are optimized for intel and use NVidia specific directX extensions with their studio software which boils a lot of AMD users blood but it is the truth.

      In SWTOR I got a doubling of FPS from moving from a PhenomII black edition to an i7 4770k. True it has less cores but apps are optimized still for single tasking and I do have 4 real and 4 hyperthreaded cores for my VMs.

      Reason being are games are crappy xbox ports. The 360 I think was single or dual core so games were single threaded. Therefore they kick ass on Intel. The only good news is the xboxONE is changing this with 8 cores with an AMD and forcing game makers to optimize more for ATI.

      I expect the newer games to be more competitive as a result as they are more threaded and ATI optimized on tomshardware.com and other sites.

      But damage is done and the power is much better with intel chips as they leave AMD further and further in the dust with lower chip nm sized dies since AMD sold their foundries. Global Foundaries only cares about ARM chips so sorry AMD stay in 2010 ... Intel is going 10nm next year and will finally put the last nail in the coffin. ... I pray NOT!

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    14. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then you must be either a secretary, a store clerks or a the like!

    15. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      Yes, because religious ranting and flailing is somehow going to make AMD competitive. Idiot.

    16. Re: Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by sjames · · Score: 1

      Colo providers also tend to sell power on blocks of 10 or more amps. I know in the last situation I was in, going with Intel would have saved me nothing at all. There was no room to shove another server in and I was below the minimum power they would sell anyway.

      Meanwhile, faster is questionable as long as you don't use the Intel compiler.

    17. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Laxator2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The best evidence I know of is this one:

      http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

      You can see how changing the ID string of the CPU will change the performance of the exact same hardware.

    18. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by hairyfeet · · Score: 0, Troll

      Just type "Cinebench rigs benchmarks" into the search engine of your choice friend, plenty of articles on the subject. You can also go to the channel of the first video I linked to, Tek Syndicate, as he has video up talking about it IIRC. You can trust the guys at Tek Syndicate as they buy their own gear and don't favor one manufacturer over the other.

      You might also want to look up "Intel cripple compiler" as to this day their ICC still puts out code that will cripple any program compiled on it by using CPUID to detect AMD chips and turning off all SSE optimizations if AMD is detected. Considering that both chip makers have had SSE 1-3 for over a decade? Its a pretty big smoking gun. You can also look up "EU investigates Intel" for several articles with the charges laid out, it is shaping up to be as nasty as the OEM bribery scandal which netted AMD 1.2 billion in payoff from Intel.

      I can't speak for the server market as I no longer do corporate but on the desktop? Its pretty dramatic, if you compare chips based on final unit cost then pretty much anything under $1K is gonna favor AMD by a fairly large amount as the money you save by going AMD can be used for more RAM, a bigger GPU, and often an SSD on top. I mean when you can pick up the FX8320 for $140 and if you shop around the FX8300 for less than $120? There really is no comparison, nothing Intel has at that price point even comes close.

      BTW I put my money where my mouth is, as not only do I now sell AMD exclusively at the shop (nothing I hate more than bribery and dirty tricks) but my entire family is on AMD, with me and the oldest boy running Phenom II X6, the wife is happy with my hand me down Phenom II X4, the youngest rocking his games on the FX8300 and dad pulling up the rear with his Phenom I X4 he's had for nearly a decade because "Keep your mitts off my PC, it runs great so don't you dare touch it!" LOL. We couldn't be happier and despite the Phenom IIs being 6+ years old they play all the latest games without issue, hell the oldest is tearing into Shadows Of Mordor right now and its smooth as butter. This is why I have no trouble being an AMD only family, the bang for the buck is just nuts!

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    19. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can Intel actually smoke AMD without having monopoly laws go on a witch hunt for them? At this point in the game I'd be donating millions just to keep them afloat.

    20. Re: Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The xbox 360 was a 3 core PPC running at 3ghz with each core capable of running 2 threads.

    21. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      In SWTOR I got a doubling of FPS from moving from a PhenomII black edition to an i7 4770k.

      I would be surprised if that were not the case. The i7-4770k came out 5 years after the Phenom II - a lot happened in that time, including the entire Phenom line being discontinued and succeeded by newer architectures. I'd be more interested in a comparison between the i7-4770k and its 30%-cheaper contemporary, the FX-9590 (naturally, expecting the i7-4770k still to win to some degree if we focus purely on single-thread performance, but is that worth it? Once SWTOR is no-longer CPU-bound you wouldn't see any difference between the two at all).

    22. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 1

      I guess maybe I should care more about the low end market I guess. I'm not that customer nor are most/all corporate customers. I buy $500 monitors not $500 computers. But I guess a lot of the market goes to ~$700 laptops and $500 desktops so in consumer land they might have a winner.

    23. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by rdnetto · · Score: 1

      Then surprise surprise AMD chips trade blows with chips costing more than twice as much [youtube.com] with several tests the AMD outright smoking and in others within a couple percentage points of the i5s.

      The issue is that the damage is done; AMD hasn't updated their CPU lineup recently. The FX-8350 was originally released in late 2012 and still seems to be the best option from their FX series. (The FX-8370 is just a nicer binning, and the FX-9xxx appear to be ridiculously overclocked, with almost twice the TDP.) I'm planning to upgrade my PC later this year, but buying a 3 year old CPU just seems insane. In contrast, Haswell processors are barely a year old, and a Haswell i5 delivers comparable performance.

      Meanwhile, AMD's APU lines max out at 4 cores, which is a step backwards from my Phenom II hex core, and the APU offers little advantage given that I'd be getting a discrete graphics card anyway. (The main workload for this system is compilation, so believe me when I say that the no. of cores absolutely does matter.)

      I'm the sort of person who should be a shoe-in for AMD's high end, but I can't even tell if the FX line is obsolete or not. I think that says a lot about their execution.

      --
      Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
    24. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just type "Cinebench rigs benchmarks" into the search engine of your choice friend, plenty of articles on the subject.

      Can't find a one. Which is your search engine of choice?

    25. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by imashination · · Score: 2

      Can you provide or link to any proof or information on the Cinebench claim? That's quite a statement which I haven't seen presented anywhere else. I run what I believe to be the largest database of cinebench scores (cbscores.com) so have a somewhat vested interest to look into this. To the best of my understanding, AMD performs poorly in certain tasks and benchmarks because of its shared use of FPUs, despite shipping consumer cpus with 8 cores, they only have 4 FPUs, which given benchmarks like cinebench run almost nothing but floating point math, would rather explain the results. But hey, I could be wrong and there might be a giant conspiracy from intel to artificially slow down their competitors. Feel free to contact me privately if you prefer and I may be able to look into it further. mash at 3dfluff.com. Disclosure: Used to work for Maxon 10 years ago

    26. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      In SWTOR I got a doubling of FPS from moving from a PhenomII black edition to an i7 4770k.

      I would be surprised if that were not the case. The i7-4770k came out 5 years after the Phenom II - a lot happened in that time, including the entire Phenom line being discontinued and succeeded by newer architectures. I'd be more interested in a comparison between the i7-4770k and its 30%-cheaper contemporary, the FX-9590 (naturally, expecting the i7-4770k still to win to some degree if we focus purely on single-thread performance, but is that worth it? Once SWTOR is no-longer CPU-bound you wouldn't see any difference between the two at all).

      Here is the quicker. The half decade old phenom II is faster per clock cycle than the FX series based on the bulldozer architecture?? AMD really messed up as it was optimized for its graphics hoping it would win this way. In other words those mocking it call it Pentium IV 2.0

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    27. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Totenglocke · · Score: 3, Informative

      Except if you bothered to watch the video linked above for actual in-game performance testing (NOT synthetic benchmarks), you'll see that most of the time Intel is neck and neck with AMD - not "smoking" them.

      --
      "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
    28. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Meanwhile, AMD's APU lines max out at 4 cores, which is a step backwards from my Phenom II hex core, and the APU offers little advantage given that I'd be getting a discrete graphics card anyway. (The main workload for this system is compilation, so believe me when I say that the no. of cores absolutely does matter.)

      I'm the sort of person who should be a shoe-in for AMD's high end, but I can't even tell if the FX line is obsolete or not. I think that says a lot about their execution.

      Indeed, especially with your last sentence. I've taken to buying socket 1150 Xeon E3s, which can be had for a bit over what an i5 cost yet are basically Haswell i7s without the integrated graphics. I'd love to give AMD a chance, but I need performance and I really don't have time to screw around figuring out AMD's marketing. Phoronix says the i7 is best for my workload on Linux, so that's what I buy (in the aforementioned Xeon guise).

    29. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't know if facts matter in this discussion on Slashdot. For those interested in facts, see my older reply to the same (wrong) accusations of CineBench preferring Intel cpus here: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=135978&curpostid=136025

      For the current CineBench R15 version there 's no OpenMP usage at all and of course there 's no (cpu vendor) switching code either.

      Best regards,

      Wilfried

    30. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by blackomegax · · Score: 1

      I wish those E3v3's were unlocked. I run my haswell i5 well above 4ghz and being locked would be slower than i've got, even with HT.

    31. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Other than the most basic users (secretaries, store clerks and the like)

      To paraphrase: other than 98% of the market ..

      it never pays to be (far) off the current best of breed.

      .. Intel should be able to totally dominate 2% of the market without any mercy to, or hope for, AMD. Got it.

      I fucking love Intel chips, mainly starting with Sandy Bridge (Nehalem actually didn't impress me as much as it seemed to impress everyone else, so my 2009-2010 machines are AMD, but that's all water under the bridge now) and pretty much every machine I have at home, is in some manner of speaking, an e-Penis. It must be as close to perfect as is reasonably possible, because computers are my thing and I don't half-ass 'em. And for all Intel chips cost, they still aren't really expensive (my $275 Haswell Xeon costs less than the $320 Athlon I bought 15 years ago) so once you decide it's personally important to you, it's easy to justify buying Intel.

      But that's people like us. For most people, a $400 machine is just as good as a $475 machine, even if to a dork, we can run our benchmarks and see that the $475 blows the shit out of the cheap one, and even the $475 one isn't good enough because it's just a Pentium rather than a Core i5, which even then, is pretty bargain-basement compared the Xeon that we'd put into our own machine. All that shit is irrelevant to the person who is about to buy the $400 machine due to it being cheaper than the $475 so they can spend their remaining $75 on things that are important to them, like shoes or cars or whatever-the-fuck they're into, which definitely isn't computers.

      And they look at us, and don't understand why we drive $15000 cars instead of $35000 cars. They think there's no future in $15000 cars. There's no future in $30 shoes and can't imagine wearing shoes that cost less than $200. Yet here I am in my $30 shoes driving a $15000 car with overpowered Intel computers at home.

      People are just funny that way, ya know?

    32. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd take power reduction over IPC any day

      Then you must have a raging boner for Intel, and are pretty excited to upgrade from the energy-sucking beastly 65W part from 2009 (or 45W if you were really leading-edge and dead serious back then) to the stunningly awesome Haswell and Broadwell stuff.

      Intel has been doing both. They're zippy and sippy.

    33. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apparently I wasn't the only who noted a decided lack in talk about performance improvements other than alot of BS about power improvements.

      The only real line I could find was something about a paltry 5% IPC increase... wasn't excavator supposed to focus on IPC performance?

    34. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by hairyfeet · · Score: 0

      Because, surprise surprise, Intel is rigging the benchmarks as badly as Quack.exe.

      You follow the money and who pays for the majority of the ad budgets of the leading benchmark suites, we're talking tens of millions of dollars in free money? Intel. Now does anybody honestly think that when Intel hands the company a rigged all to fuck ICC and says "compile the benchmark software with this" they are gonna reply "No man, you keep your 40 million in free ad revenue, cross site promos, and handing reviewers copies of our software, we have integrity!"

      This is rigging the market folks, no different than MSFT rigging the OEMs in the 90s with those uber nasty contracts. You look at actual games instead of the rigged benchmarks and shock! AMD and Intel trade blows despite the AMD being less than half the price of the Intel. And anybody who buys the shit that Tom's has been shoveling, that a fricking PENTIUM beats a hexacore? To steal a line from Mel Brooks "bullshit, bullshit, aaaaaannnnndddd bullshit!". Notice that those who say that shit ALWAYS use the same benches,even when a couple of those benches are out of date? Wouldn't be because Intel buys a shit ton of ads and making their products look less than stellar would hurt the bottom line, would it?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    35. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't see why not. It's shaping up to be a natural monopoly unless the k8(you know AMD's last worthwhile CPU cores) guy that AMD hired back again can save their sorry asses, in which case they should pay him billions.

    36. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My game is called "make -j 8."

    37. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Probably selection bias I guess since I've worked in 3 different but all well educated/compensated professions. But there does seem to be a lot of people that never buy hardware 1000 and an i5 at least.

    38. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Informative

      Thanks, and for the stupid retard ACs that can't fucking Google? Here ya go, Intel admits to rigging benchmark results by wadda ya know, Tek Syndicate. I really shouldn't be surprised as unlike Anand and Tom's the guys at Tek Syndicate aren't making their money from intel's ads. But there it is, straight from Intel's own lips...what more do ya want? Their CEO to get his pic taken doing the Cash double bird with "yeah we rig so fuck you!" as the tag line?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    39. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      I think for very cheap machines, if you take the cost difference between an AMD CPU + motherboard vs. Intel CPU + motherboard and put that cost difference into an SSD while the Intel box still has a traditional hard drive, then AMD is a good value.

      And in fact, that's what I did with my wife's most recent computer. AMD A8-7600 + 12GB of RAM + 120GB SSD. Extremely cheap and it can still play Minecraft and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 for my sons.

      But if you were going to get an SSD anyway, plus 6+GB of RAM (more for a power user or developer or someone doing video editing or virtualization), then I agree with you. Paying the extra $100 to go from an $80 AMD "APU" to a $120 Intel i3-4160 and compatible motherboard will pay off in spades. Even the $70 Pentium dual core 50 watt G3258 kills any AMD processor this side of the overclocked 220 watt FX series chips for single-threaded performance.

    40. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      Seconded. I'm a near rabid AMD fan, so I'd like to see this. But I'm not finding any results to substantiate it.

    41. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL. AMD fanboys modding this down -1, uncomfortable truth (because they can't contradict facts). So much butthurt.

    42. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      Intel's competition isn't AMD, it's ARM. AMD are pretty much irrelevant to them at this point.

    43. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      Except if you bothered to watch the video linked above for actual in-game performance testing (NOT synthetic benchmarks), you'll see that most of the time Intel is neck and neck with AMD - not "smoking" them.

      Is this the lame old 'look! If I run a game that's GPU-limited, my AMD machine is just as fast as that Intel machine that costs twice as much!' nonsense?

      AMD fanboys have been doing that for years when they can't find any legitimate way to beat Intel.

    44. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I get you, but I think it's a minority PoV. Part of why I'm using a E3 Xeon instead of i7 is for the ECC RAM, and there's a surprisingly small intersection between overclockers and ECC users. Imagine that! ;-)

      And yeah, I love E3 Xeons. Right now, anything I buy that isn't an E3 Xeon, is probably ARM (or even megaAVR!). Screw the midrange; either a computer is "big" or "little." Anybody buying AMD desktops, I might ask: Are you really sure a Raspberry Pi 2 isn't enough?

      No, seriously. Stop and don't reject it as wacky out-of-hand. Because if it's not enough, then just get a damn E3 Xeon and I promise you will love your machine and it actually won't cost a lot. Sure, it'll cost more than an AMD machine, but you probably gave an argument for why it should cost more, when you rejected the Pi 2.

      And yes, I'm ignoring niches. I get why overclocked i7s might be right for some people, and why AMD just might be right for some people where a Pi 2 isn't. But I think the number of people who fall into these groups is really pretty small.

    45. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      AMD was (before haswel) not too bad if you have a multithreaded workload.

      Thanks to the XboxONE with 8 cores games will run better on AMD as they will become more threaded since many are crappy xbox ports.

      For a cheap box to run VM images in virtualbox/vmware workstation, video editing, or compiling code AMD offers a great value and the bios does not cripple virtualization extensions unlike the cheap ones from intel.

      FYI I switched to an i7 4770k for my current system so I am not an AMD fanboy. But I paid through the nose for hyperthreading and 4 cores. I wanted good IPC for single threaded as well.

      AMD dropped the ball twice. Both with abandoning the superior 5 year old phenom II which is still 25% faster per clock ticket than their newest system??? Second selling their fabrication plants to raise the shareprice last decade. They have .28 nm chips while intel is busy switching to .10nm??! How can you compete agains't that? Worse global foundaries are more interested in ARM chips as AMD has too low demand. OUCH.

      Even if you love Intel it is in your best interest for AMD to stick around for competition and lower prices.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    46. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Here's one where the cheating was exposed when leaked benches for new Macs surfaced before Cinebench had been updated to take them into account.
      http://www.tomshardware.com/re...

      Those scores require a bit of context, though. The 32-bit build of Geekbench uses x87 code, for starters, so it isn’t optimized for any of the other instruction set extensions that Westmere-EP or Ivy Bridge-EP support. Getting close to Apple’s claim of doubled floating-point performance requires software compiled with the AVX flag. John Poole, the founder of Geekbench, posted several other reasons why the next-gen and previous-gen Mac Pros might be separated by such a narrow margin.

      The leaked result was run using the free 32-bit build of Geekbench on a pre-release build of OS X Mavericks. Switching over to the paid 64-bit build of the benchmark adds SSE support, though that’s still a pre-Pentium 4 extension. Tab between the 32- and 64-bit runs on Xeon X5675-based systems and you’ll find that the SSE-capable build averages 14%-better performance.

      Curious as to how the very same 12-core Xeon E5-2687 V2 compared in Windows, I ran my own test on a 64-bit build of Geekbench and scored in excess of 30,000 points—more than 25% faster than the leaked number. The individual sub-tests showed both Xeon E5-based platforms trading blows in the integer and floating-point components, but clearly a more real-world comparison was needed in order to establish the new Xeon’s performance in a workstation environment. Fortunately, I have the upcoming Xeon E5-2697 V2, the upcoming Core i7-4960X, an existing eight-core Xeon E5-2687W, and a Core i7-3970X.

      This kind of thing isn't exactly a revelation. Benchmarks have been tainted by Intel and the ICC for ages. The real problem is that a lot of actual software is as well, so in the end the artificially-gimped performance reflected in the benchmarks translates to actual usage. Even among fairly-compiled programs Intel's parts typically maintain an IPC advantage, but it's no where near to a degree that would justify the cost difference. Add in nVidia's moneyhatting and gameworks bullshit, and you've got AMD taking it from both ends. This sort of thing should piss you off regardless of what brand you prefer because it stifles competition, increases prices, and retards progress.

    47. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by sexconker · · Score: 1

      That link talks about 11.5, makes claims with no evidence, and admits to using the ICC compiler.
      We KNOW the ICC compiler is rigged. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

    48. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      they can't find any legitimate way to beat Intel.

      Except on price, where they beat them handily.

    49. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is this "we" a pluralis majestatis? If you have actually worked with ICC you know, that you can configure it either using cpu trampoline code or you can configure it requiring a certain SSE instruction set - the later is done in CineBench. Your cpu either supports this SSE instruction set (and then CineBench starts) or your cpu doesn't support it (the it doesn't start) There 's no fallback code for newer or older SSE (or AVX) instruction sets in the benchmark which would penalize or prefer one or the other vendor.

      CineBench results have been pretty accurate in picturing the strengths and weaknesses of cpus (and also the strengths and weaknesses of older AMD cpus compared to Bulldozer or later APU architectures). Unless you live in lalala land, deal with it.

      Best regards,

      Wilfried

    50. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      so what if they're rigging results.. fact is, intel has had a leg up for years now, their architecture and process is more efficient and significantly faster. choosing amd today means you're flat broke, just 'need something', and speed doesn't matter. until amd shrinks their process size by half, we will never now if amd's architecture can truly compete against intel's... as it stands now, it simply cannot.

    51. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL! You're such a retarded fanboy. No worries, soon you'll be out of business because you sell junk :)

    52. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or course he never backs up any of his claims. His only "proof" is a cherry picked gaming benchmark done wrong by n00bs, on a heavily GPU-limited system, where we see that having a slower CPU makes little difference... DUH! Whatever backs up his AMD religion I guess...

      And yes, programs compiled with ICC are slower on AMD systems. It's not just benches, it's also real-life programs compiled with it that will be slower, so it's quite respective of real-life performance you can expect to get. He happily disregards that in other benches, the AMD CPUs still lose very badly.

    53. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      Not really surprising.

      Getting the most out of any processor requires processor-specific optimization. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel has the lion's share of the market, so developers pay more attention to getting software to run well on Intel processors. Some of the top tier games that get used for benchmarks have been hand-optimized for Intel, as have productivity applications such as video encoders and Photoshop. (The last two have also benefited historically from Intel having better SIMD implementations. That is probably still true. But an A-series AMD processor with properly optimized OpenCL code might be better still.)

      Intel is in the developer tools business as well. They sell a compiler that generates code that is very good for Intel processors and very bad for AMD. Any application that is built with Intel tools is going to make AMD look bad.

      Finally, there is the OS issue. Because of the way AMD used paired cores with some shared elements (cache and FPU), getting the most out of the FX series processors requires changes to the process scheduler. (The simplified version: threads of the same process and multiple instances of the same application should be assigned to paired cores; unconnected applications should be spread to different core pairs whenever possible. That maximizes the effectiveness of the shared cache. The shared FPU is of little concern unless you have applications that do math with long doubles; it can do two 64 bit operations simultaneously but only one 128 bit operation.) The most popular OS on the market, Windows 7, has not made the necessary adjustments, nor has any earlier version. Windows 8 and later have, as have recent Linux kernels. Mac OS probably has not, but Apple has never made a computer with an AMD processor so it isn't relevant unless you own a Hackintosh.

    54. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by 0ld_d0g · · Score: 1

      You can look up the actual legal case.

      http://www.ftc.gov/sites/defau...

    55. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree with your post. However there are situations where having 8 cores is handy, even if they are on the slow side compared to Intel's offerings. I frequently have VM's running on my machine for doing course work and being able to throw each of them at least 2 cores is very beneficial. Being a student with a wife and kid on fairly limited income the 8 core AMD chips are very good for my, admittedly very unusual in the grand scheme of things, use case.

      Having said that if AMD don't pick up their game in the performance end of the market in the next 2 years or so the first computer i build after finishing studying will be Intel based.

    56. Re: Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IMNSHO, Intel's compiler should be outlawed. They've repeatedly shown they can't be trusted to not use it to damage the market in favor of their desired monopoly.

    57. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by stoatwblr · · Score: 1

      Chasing speed gains for their own sake is a fools errand - "most" computing applications don't need better performance and that's underscored by the fact that singlethreaded performance hasn't really changed significantly for the last decade - a lot of office systems are now on a 5-7 year replacement cycle because older systems are still more than enough to run their software.

      Power savings were (and are) a big gain in the server room - cooling systems are expensive to install and expensive to run. The fact that they fall through to domestic computers is also a good thing - better battery life on portables and lower power costs overall, plus longer life due to less thermal cycling stress.

      AMD are doing the right thing in this area. It'd be nice to see them going after Intel's stranglehold on the performance end of the market but the harsh reality is that they don't have the R&D budget to chase both at once.

    58. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by stoatwblr · · Score: 1

      The benchmark I work with is "how fast the software my staff work with runs"

      AMD is generally slower per core, but not much slower - they've generally won on being cheaper and being able to cram more cores in any given box.

      FWIW: Over the last 12-13 years memory bus speed has been a _much_ greater influence on real-world processing results than CPU speed. Internal clock multipliers are only of any use if the CPU doesn't have to step outside the box to grab more data/instructions from the ram.

      As a rule of thumb for scientific computing we've found that spending more money on bigger/faster ram has paid far greater dividends than putting it into processors.

    59. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by DuckDodgers · · Score: 1

      That document is from 2010. So are the other web links about this. What evidence do we have the current published CPU benchmarks still unfairly give an advantage to Intel?

    60. Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

      An Intel Xeon E5-2690 V2, S 2011, 10 Core, 3.0GHz costs £1500.
      An AMD 3rd Gen. Opteron 6380 CPU, Abu Dhabi 16 Core, S G34 provides better performance and costs less to run yet only retails for £700.

      I'd say AMD have plenty of life left in the server market and if they can achieve similar price / performance numbers relative to Intel with these new desktop chips I'd say there is some life in them in the desktop arena too!

      Are you insinuating that Intel's markups are unreasonable? That because they had no competition in the high-end cpu world, would they charge what the market would bear? High cost systems also mean higher profits for retailers too. I would not ever say the word "price gouging" when there is scarcity in the marketplace.

      --
      Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
  2. HSA software environment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I am intrigued by the potential of HSA, but are there any examples of it in use?

    1. Re:HSA software environment by shizzle · · Score: 4, Informative

      There are some results from LibreOffice Calc at the bottom of this page.

    2. Re:HSA software environment by should_be_linear · · Score: 1

      HSA will be integrated into Java 10. JVM is supposed to use HSA without code modification, AFAIK.

      --
      839*929
  3. Excavators! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Excavators!!!! Yipppeeeeee!!!!!!

  4. I hope they are also by invictusvoyd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    workin on the Linux drivers .. or atleast letting someone else work on them ..

    1. Re:I hope they are also by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 3, Informative

      They seem to be doing a pretty good job on the graphics front. Their open source driver is in better shape and has more momentum than the nvidia open source driver.

      My impression is that Intel has better linux support for their IGP but the performance is about a generation behind.

    2. Re:I hope they are also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You do not appear to understand what the subject line is for.

    3. Re:I hope they are also by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      They seem to be doing a pretty good job on the graphics front. Their open source driver is in better shape and has more momentum than the nvidia open source driver.

      And yet neither of the AMD drivers actually have good performance or hardware support.

      My impression is that Intel has better linux support for their IGP but the performance is about a generation behind.

      The support is light-years ahead, unless it's one of the licensed PowerVRs.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:I hope they are also by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 1

      And yet neither of the AMD drivers actually have good performance or hardware support.

      Good performance compared to what? Intel IGP? nouveau, the proprietary Nvidia binary driver?

      The support is light-years ahead, unless it's one of the licensed PowerVRs.

      So are you agreeing with me?

    5. Re:I hope they are also by invictusvoyd · · Score: 1

      you do .

    6. Re:I hope they are also by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      So are you agreeing with me?

      About intel, but not AMD. The AMD drivers are just crap. It's only if you institute artificial restrictions like that drivers must be OSS that AMD even gets a chance to be in the running.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    7. Re:I hope they are also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was playing Flatout and Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl in Wine on Fedora with the open source AMD drives on a 7870. Both played very nicely.

    8. Re:I hope they are also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's particularly obvious when one compares the near daily improvements of the XServer's Intel driver vs. the weeks between commits to the AMD one:

      http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/
      http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/

    9. Re:I hope they are also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you tried using the latest Mesa (> 10.3) + LLVM (3.6) + Xorg (1.6) + kernel(>3.18) releases? AMD is still lacking OpenGL4+ (like all Mesa drivers...) but it already has very good performance compared to fglrx, and if you find bugs, the radeon devs and other contributors are actually interested in fixing them.
      We even have native support for DX9...

    10. Re:I hope they are also by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 2

      I don't think OSS is an artificial restriction when we are talking about linux drivers.

    11. Re:I hope they are also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm afraid I have to agree with you here. I mean I love the GCN chips, and programming the PS4's is simply a joy. But programming the same basic chip on a PC is a fucking nightmare. The drivers, especially the OpenGL drivers, suck complete balls. It's such a shame to see such awesome hardware let down by such crappy software engineering.

    12. Re:I hope they are also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, I haven't had any problems with open source drivers and 7850. Mostly playing games from steam lately: X-PLANE 10, Civ 5, Empire: Total War, X-COM remake, Kerbal Space Program, Wargame Red Dragon, Half Life 2 and others.

    13. Re:I hope they are also by hairyfeet · · Score: 0

      Drinkypoo has a serious grudge against AMD as Drinky made the mistake of buying a laptop with the ATI X1xxx chipset, a dead end that was abandoned when AMD bought the company. Blaming AMD for a bad chip ATI put out before the merger would be like blaming Seagate for Maxtor's crapfest Diamondmax line or Hasbro for the Atari 5200 sticks. It wasn't their company, they didn't put it out, that company no longer exists.

      That said I've offered to help Drinky get a driver working on a newer than XP install, after all I've run Win2K drivers on Win 7, its not that difficult to do, but Drinky just says "don't work" without bothering to post logs, check the dependencies, or give us any error messages so either Drinky is just looking for something to complain about or the hardware is long gone and Drinky is pissed about long gone gear. In either case anybody whose run anything newer than the X1650 knows the AMD drivers are just fine and the FOSS drivers are good up to the HD7xxx.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    14. Re:I hope they are also by aliquis · · Score: 1

      The support is light-years ahead, unless it's one of the licensed PowerVRs.

      Oh trying to decide whatever light-years ahead actually make sense or not when it comes how far one technology is ahead of another one ...

      "This must be what quantum physics is all about!"

    15. Re:I hope they are also by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 1

      I got burned by bad ati drivers a long time ago too. There was a time when I was a "hardcore" nvidia supporter. But I was never so hardcore that my loyalty to one company over another was unconditional. I really do feel like AMD is doing a better job on linux development at the moment, while nvidia is coasting on its past achievements.

  5. Unless you are talking about a laptop by voss · · Score: 1

    Reducing wattage on an APU means more battery life and putting the southbridge on the chip lowers the cost and allows increased customization
    options.

    1. Re:Unless you are talking about a laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      not to mention 50% reduction in power on mass deployments on these, on systems who are pretty much "just" these on a mobo w/ ram & displays/keyboard/mouse hooked up.

      You're looking at 30-40% electricity savings, on top of the hardware savings you get going with AMD.

      Needless to say, these are a no-brainer in office environments (we went from i3's to kaveri across all 3 of our offices, ~400 PCs in total) and are projected to recover the cost of the entire PC upgrade company wide within 2 years. (In other words, assuming we upgrade workstations every 2 years, they almost pay for themselves compared to Intel alternatives).

    2. Re:Unless you are talking about a laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hmm, I wonder how long it will be till we have something like 8-16GB of ram integrated as well. That would make for a very compact, low power and lightweight solution for many tasks. You could possibly make distributed systems more easily if that became a fundamental unit of computing. I.E. perhaps 4 cores, graphics, 8 GB, then stack them to say 4 of them for 16 cores, ~4x the graphics performance and 32GB of ram (i.e. something like NUMA). If you could also, say make the cores where they can be turned off and on, like they apparently already do, then maybe figure out how to make ram that doesn't consume power when it idles, or even less... After that you may not even install an SSD. You could just download an OS instance as needed.

    3. Re:Unless you are talking about a laptop by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

      just download an OS instance maybe in a data center but in your home? even with out an data cap downing an 1GB+ OS IMAGE (uncompressed) and then some.

  6. Ok you large forehead Slashdotters... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    what does this meant to me, the average user?

  7. Not worth buying unless I can get it in 8S/12GPU by Khyber · · Score: 0

    Like this bad mother fucker right here.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  8. You've gotta like these silly dozer names by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bulldozer (2011)
    Piledriver (2012)
    Steamroller (2014)
    Excavator (2015)
    Dildozer (2016, planned), which will feature the Beef Supreme driver

    Disclaimer: This post has not been approved by President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, Brawndo, Mike Judge, 20th Century Fox, or the MPAA.

    1. Re:You've gotta like these silly dozer names by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Dildozer, brought to you by Carl's Jr.

    2. Re:You've gotta like these silly dozer names by mordred99 · · Score: 1

      I thought you might go for devastator (i.e. from the transformers ;)

  9. And? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

    not just two separates dies built into and MCM package

    Don't you mean "not just two separates dies built into an MCM package"?

    --
    Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
  10. Re:Not worth buying unless I can get it in 8S/12GP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    You do realize that is 4 computers in one box right? Like literally the equivalent of 4 1u servers with 2 CPU and 3 GPU but turned on their side. Also that it costs nearly 100k, which is approximately 50 times as much as an _entire_ computer based on this APU would cost.
    Also, considering that with your computer you are getting 12 cores * 4 machines for $100k, where as with an APU based machine you are getting 4 cores * 50 machines, and each of those cores is clocked about twice as fast (4.3 vs 2.4ghz).

  11. Am I the only one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    who thinks the name is horrible?

  12. Re:FUCK LIBERALISM by aaaaaaargh! · · Score: 1

    I agree, and I think that people who harrass others online or make inappropriate 'troll' posts should be sentenced to death.

  13. Re:Intel is killing AMD - 28 NM Process?????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    By having smarter designs obviously, Intel has always been about brute forcing it.

  14. Re:SONY BMG ROOTKIT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    While we're at it, let's revisit the price of eggs in China for a minute...

  15. Linux hybrid driver by DrYak · · Score: 1

    For the record, AMD is also moving toward a hybrid stack for the Linux drivers:
    - the same opensource kernel driver is used every where.
    - the only difference is that either you run the official catalyst OpenGL implementation from AMD on top of it. Ot the opensource Mesa Gallium3D tracker.
    - same goes for video (either a VA-API implemented by catalyst, or the various Gallium video state tracker).

    So except for the 3D and Video, everything else is opensource and work is shared.
    From the development point of view, AMD hardware is faring very well. GP doesn't need to be afraid.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  16. You claim to hate dirty tricks and bribery by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yet you like adblock (paid by google to not do its job fully by default) and your other favorite Comodo has been found fucking up with security faults in PrivDog whom they're tied up with too http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

  17. Re:Intel is killing AMD - 28 NM Process?????? by grimmjeeper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And Intel would still be forcing the Itanium on us had AMD not come out with the Athlon and the x86_64 instruction set, stealing Inel's lunch for a few years until they caught up.

    Sure, AMD dropped the ball and Intel stole the lead back from them years ago. But without the competition, Intel wouldn't have any incentive to have processors as good as they do now. The market needs companies like AMD to keep companies like Intel competitive.

  18. Don't underestimate the APUs... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Steamroller cores are really not that bad. I made a Kaveri system for my brother with an SSD and a relatively cheap motherboard and it runs really, really well while using less than 100W at peak. At $130 for the CPU I got 3 digital video outputs and decent video performance for casual gaming, so I think it's a very good product. We can argue benchmarks all day, but at that price range, I think AMD is a very viable option. We'll see what excavator brings to the table, although I don't think a desktop version is coming.

  19. BS. by DarthVain · · Score: 1

    1) Anyone that uses synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench deserve whatever they get. These things have been rigged since the ATI VS nVIDIA days, and ATI doesn't even exist anymore. Not to mention they don't really prove anything.

    2) Using real world software tests, particularly in gaming, Intel has been blowing AMD out of the water since just after the Athelon64 days. The only places that AMD has has success commercially or in performance has been in A) The server market, and B) the very low end market, the later you wouldn't bother or care about benchmarks anyway. Yes it could be that a lot of software is optimized for Intel, but then again, if one is faster than the other because of the lack of optimization then it is a moot point anyway. AMD is better in some unique situations than Intel, but out of say 20 software tests, it might excel at 2 of them, so it is pretty specific software.

    So stop drinking your own fan boy coolaid. I for one would welcome a more competitive AMD CPU, as Intel has been driving prices up due to a lack of real competition. The buying of ATI by AMD was supposed to re-invent AMD and harold in a level of integration of video and cpu. The only thing that has really happened is that integrated video has gotten slightly better. and AMD has a video card division now...