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AMD Unveils Carrizo APU With Excavator Core Architecture
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.
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.
I am intrigued by the potential of HSA, but are there any examples of it in use?
workin on the Linux drivers .. or atleast letting someone else work on them ..
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!
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.'"
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.
Reducing wattage on an APU means more battery life and putting the southbridge on the chip lowers the cost and allows increased customization
options.
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.
Don't you mean "not just two separates dies built into an MCM package"?
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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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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/
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I agree, and I think that people who harrass others online or make inappropriate 'troll' posts should be sentenced to death.
By having smarter designs obviously, Intel has always been about brute forcing it.
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
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/
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
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 ]
I thought you might go for devastator (i.e. from the transformers ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Intel's competition isn't AMD, it's ARM. AMD are pretty much irrelevant to them at this point.
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.
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/
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.
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/...
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.
You can look up the actual legal case.
http://www.ftc.gov/sites/defau...
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.
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.
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?
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
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...