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AMD Says Upcoming Zen CPU Will Outperform Intel Broadwell-E (hothardware.com)
Reader MojoKid writes: AMD has been talking about the claimed 40% IPC (Instructions Per Clock) improvement of its forthcoming Zen processor versus the company's existing Excavator core for ages. Zen's initial availability is slated for late this year, with lager-scale roll-out planned for early 2017. However, last night, at a private press event in San Francisco, AMD unveiled a lot more details on their Zen processor architecture. AMD claims to have achieved that 40 percent IPC uplift with a newly-designed, higher-performance branch prediction and a micro-op cache for more efficient issuing of operations. The instruction schedule windows have been increased by 75% and issue-width and execution resources have been increased by 50%. The end result of these changes is higher single-threaded performance, through better instruction level parallelism. Zen's pre-fetcher is also vastly improved. There is 8MB of shared L3 cache on board now, a unified L2 cache for both instruction and data, and separate, low-latency L1 instruction and data caches. The new archicture offers up to 5x the cache bandwidth to the cores versus previous-gen offerings. However, after all the specsmanship was out of the way, AMD actually showcased a benchmark run of an 8-core Zen Summit Ridge procesor versus Intel's Broadwell-E 8-core chip, both running at 3GHz and processing a Blender rending workload. In the demo, the 8-core Zen CPU actually outpaced Intel's chip by a hair. Blender may have been chosen for a reason but this early benchmark demo looks impressive for AMD and its forthcoming Zen architecture.
You know, although a tank lager looks big from the outside, there are usually no more than a hundred or so tanks in one. So this doesn't seem like a very large rollout.
On the other hand, if one of the tanks rolled over the editor(s), that would be a service to humanity.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We win, yes so we underclocked the intel processor by 7%. But we managed to beat them just barely.
Pics (benchmarks) or it ain't so.
AMD has been behind Intel for about a decade now ever since Intel released their "Core" processors. Because back in the early to mid 00's AMD CPU finally were considered serious chips in the desktop environment, outpacing intel. Then it just fell further behind.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So, like, beer and hookers at the launch?
But the question is price. To upgrade from an old sandy bridge, it's going to take 500€~ to change the CPU/Mobo and memory if going the Intel route, for what I think is a good performance improvement, but it's not worth it yet.
If they can deliver an 8 core CPU that outperforms a high end 4 Core Skylake and costs around the same, I'll nab it, thought I'm guessing getting 8 Cores for the price of 4 is out of touch with reality at release.
Even if the 4 core chips can't compete with Intel, I'm hoping they force Intel to drop the eye-gouging prices.
Early 2017 will be the perfect time to upgrade my rig but I'm hesitant due to Microsoft making douchebag exclusive deals with chip makers which has already ruled out Skylake for me. Still can't find any word on if Zen will also require Win 10 or not, but that's a make or break issue.
Why does the article's logo show Intel?
Has AMD falling so far that Slashdot can't even be bothered to show their logo anymore?
Bulldozers, Piledrivers, Steamrollers, and Excavators do use diesel engines. Maybe they hired the VW software engineers too late?
...and electricity costs, you more than make up for in heating savings in the winter with AMD processors. With a smart fan arrangement you can even keep your coffee warm as the liquid coolers attempt to keep the chip from melting.
By plugging it into the same circuit as your overhead lights it can also act as a light dimmer.
It's been a while since I had AMD on my main PC.... I got tired of their processors suddenly surging in heat.
Simply put: I don't trust AMD.
Well, if they actually got a CPU that can actually at least don't get shamefully annihilated by the intel offerings, they will do quite well on SoC solutions with their superior GPUs, which means nice laptop deals.
Sounds a lot like the DEC Alpha EV6 (21264)?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21264
Oh, come now. You don't think that Intel has actually achieved a reasonable yield in their manufacturing processes, do you? That's unpossible.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Since the Broadwell-E in question has 8 cores as mentioned, one can assume it's the 6900K, which has a base frequency of 3.2 GHz and turbos to 4 GHz if not overclocked. The 3 GHz referenced in the article means that the 6900K is downclocked, either because the Zen CPU cannot reach 3.2 GHz, much less 4, or because the Blender benchmark used stops favoring Zen as soon as you run Broadwell-E at its native frequency. Either way the "result" is not to be taken seriously.
for, let's see, a couple decades now, I welcome even the whiff of competition in this stagnant space. With Intel delivering practically non-existent top-end growth in desktop CPU performance for 5+ years now (compare an overclocked Sandy Bridge to Intel's latest to see what I mean), it's about time lowly AMD came along to give them a bump.
You're thinking pentium 4. ;p
If Zen is in the ballpark of Intel then people are going to buy it. Intel chips and especially chipsets have become too expensive and frankly, we need some competition. If the Athlon64 hadn't come along goodness knows where we'd be.
So they artificially downclocked an Intel processor, and are able to *barely* beat it clock-for-clock. But that Intel processor should be running at a higher clock speed, and if they have it fixed at 3GHz then they also turned off Turbo Boost - which would have pushed the Broadwell-E chip up to 3.5GHz when all 8 cores are active. At those speeds, presumably, the Intel chip beats the AMD; if not, they wouldn't have bothered to downclock the Intel processor.
To sum up then: AMD's next-gen, unreleased processor still cannot outperform Intel's existing model. This doesn't surprise me, though: ever since Intel caught back up with (and then passed) AMD's performance - starting back with the first Core series processors - AMD has been trying to catch up... and failing. They do have a role in the low-price / budget system market, and maybe this new Zen stuff will cost a lot less than Intel's offerings. It doesn't look like it will truly rival Intel for high performance applications, though, where the fastest speed is worth a few hundred dollars more. After all, in the grand scheme of a several thousand dollar workstation a few hundred dollars isn't a huge deal - and 5, 10, or 20% performance difference could easily pay for itself over time.
William George
There was a time were mentioning problems with AMD processors on Slashdot would have been as dangerous as wearing blue in a red part of the hood in Los Angeles.
lucm, indeed.
AMD's next-gen, unreleased processor still cannot outperform Intel's existing model.
It only needs to get close and offer good value, then I'm in because of the superior GPU.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
This article was worth a laugh. AMD will never match Intel clock-for-clock until they change their CPU's design radically. This article did make me ROFL.
AMD says lots of things, they never actually happen. Well not in the last 10 years, last time they were competitive on price or performance was the original Athlon (Which was a superb chip design for the time).
The new CPU is "Zen", so the new staff might be buddhism monks :-D
AMD can beat an Intel processor from Last year with their processor that is due out next year. By that time Intel will have jumped 2 generations (almost) and where will AMD be?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
So they artificially downclocked an Intel processor, and are able to *barely* beat it clock-for-clock.
In other news, AMD who has been languishing behind severely in the clock-for-clock performance actually beats an Intel CPU clock for clock for the first time since the Core 2 processor.
Matching it clock for clock is a HUGE step forwards. They're beating it, just, but then 3.2 is not much more than 3, so it'd be neck and neck with that taken in to account. And I expect that AMD will do some bin sorting when the volume ramps to get higher clocking parts.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"by a hair". Knowing companies specifically choose benchmarks to make their own products look good, winning "by a hair" makes this product look awful. And AMD is betting everything on this? AMD will be sold next year.
My Athlon certainly heated a room up. I have a FX-8120 that makes a good bit of heat too (compared to my Intel systems (Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge)).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I wonder if it will have AMD's equivalent to Intel AMT, the Platform Security Processor. If so, it may be a no-go for some people.
Only if the engineers implant software which when turned on show the chip at amazing speeds and tiny power consumption but when handed to retailers it's turned off. Then I would believe they are VW engineers.
Matching it clock for clock is a HUGE step forwards.
And here I thought we had finally dispelled the notion that clock speed was all-important.
What matters is throughput per unit of time. It doesn't matter if they get throughput by using higher clock speeds or by more work per tick.
AMD is still being beaten badly at throughput.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
And better open source support with AMD
lolwut
AMD is still being beaten badly at throughput.
How on earth did you work that out? It's marginally faster clock for clock and 7% slower on clock speed. Sounds like a dead heat on throughput to me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Intel doesn't know how to design GPUs .. thats where they need to compete. I need 8K VR gaming at 120 fps.
You AMD-haters are really the most stupid morons around. Don't you realize that the only thing that AMD folding will do is that Intel improvements will vanish and Intel prices will skyrocket? Or maybe you people are into self-abuse?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You DO get the point of an IPC comparison, no?
they are the ryan lochte of chip companies they say all kinds of things then it turns out to be baloney
The high end WS market is a small part of the market. If AMD pulls off 75-85% of the performance in a reasonable power envelope for 45-50% of the price, it is a win-win for a huge segment of the market.
Silence is a state of mime.
I was going to write a long post explaining exactly that. Put simply: AMD now has the same disadvantage as Intel, meaning any chip newer than the AM3+ generation or the 990FX chipset should be considered suspect. Additionally, you cannot get IOMMUv2 support WITHOUT a newer chipset, meaning your only options for 64bit BAR support needed for the Heterogenous systems architecture (Be it AMDs implementation, or the Xeon Phi implementation) are LGA2011/current gen 115x socket, or FM2+/FM3+ AMD socket hardware. Both of which have the signed management engine firmware, and going off the last generation firmware's exploits, probably have all sorts of holes to allow system level memory probing without knowledge of the x86 processors. Completely defeating any trust you would have in those computers for secure computing (not to be confused with Secure ComputingTM, which is only slightly secure and only for content providers DRM.)
The Athlon was very competitive with the P3, which was an exceedingly solid processor. So it wasn't just that Intel screwed up, but AMD had a well performing product to start with.
But then ya, they really slowed down and stopped improving. They kept rehashing the same architecture over and over. They introduced new features, like 64-bit, but the computational architecture was fundamentally the same. Meanwhile Intel was hard at work making the Core series and just continually improving.
Also AMD had a real problem in that while the Athlon was a good performer, the motherboard chipsets for it were fucking garbage. So the experience of owning an Athlon was a real mixed one and turned some people off. I got burned really badly by the original Athlon and compatibility issues with their motherboards and was turned off to AMD for some time because of it.
WOW! What stupid brain-dead comment. I don't hate AMD at all. I have used AMD products repeatedly over the years. This was a joke. It appears the SJW's have taken over the moderation system and the cry babies are coming out of the woodwork. I have even had numerous comments deleted in recent months despite this site claiming it never does. It's a sad, sad day for /.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
That is complete nonsense. You are _really_ clueless. First, you do comparisons at the same clock, anything else is unprofessional. The actual clock-rate does not matter. And second, for this type of architecture-benchmark, you always go for a "round" clock figure. Fortunately, the target for these benchmarks is people with an actual clue.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, maybe entertain the notion that the problem is on your side? Because to everybody else that is rather obvious at this time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Intel chips score twice as much as an equivalent AMD chip on the single-threaded on the Cinebench R15 benchmarks (see http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/1028), so AMD would need much more than a 40% improvement over their present chips to be competitive.
Anything compiled with the Intel Compiler will make AMD performance drop by default. Is there a true benchmarking test that does not provide boosts to any chip maker?
Zen is a new architecture designed by Jim Keller, the same guy who designed the AMD Sledgehammer and Apple A4/A5 mobile processors. It shouldn't run as hot as Bulldozer/Piledriver/etc.
You are seriously taking that line?
That's a pretty massive shift of the goalposts to get price-performance numbers to work the way you want instead of the way they are likely to be.
Intel's biggest competitor has not been AMD for at least 10 years. It has been their own existing base - the new Intel CPUs have been unable to displace the existing Intel CPUs, once they went multi-core. Intel's newer CPUs like Skylake only have a chance if they are priced attractively.
Get back on narrative, knave.
Repeat after me "There is no God but Social Justice. We have nothing to lose but our chains"
Zen probably won't be able to beat the very best chips that Intel has to offer. And it's going to lag a bit more in single threaded benchmarks; part of Zen's strength is in multithread performance. But it's going to be far more competitive then the company has been for years. Combine that with appropriate pricing and they will have a winner. They won't be able to charge $1000 or more for any of the Zen products but they can still enjoy healthier margins than they've been able to get for the FX line or for the current A-series APUs.
As for choosing Blender, they probably deliberately chose something that makes full use of all the cores and that uses the FPU heavily; those are AMD strengths. And also an application that isn't built with an Intel compiler. Intel's compilers are known for producing code that works badly on AMD processors.
Let me put it this way for you: let's say you have a choice of two cars, a Porsche for $60000 and a Ferrari for $100000. A Porsche has a top speed of 260km/h and Ferrari has a top speed of 300km/h. Also, Porsche consumes a bit less fuel. Which one would you choose? Do you go for more expensive car just because you like Ferrari even though you don't need a 40km/h faster car? And it's certainly better to have a car that consumes less fuel, too. That's the problem I have with Intel fanboys. I really, really don't care if my car is a *bit* slower. It's not an earth-shattering difference. But I do care if I save some money and use it for something more important than having a 10% faster CPU, you know? It's a ridiculous pissing competition. What's the really most important thing these days is price and performance/watt ratio, nothing else. I couldn't care less about the 10% more speed. That's the last point people should consider nowadays.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti