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AMD Unveils First Zen Desktop Processor Details, Picks 'Ryzen' To Brand Zen CPU (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: AMD has just officially unveiled that desktop variants of its Zen processor family will now be branded RYZEN. Zen-based processors will eventually target desktops, servers, and mobiles device, but the first wave of products will be targeted at the performance desktop market, where gamers and VR continue to spur growth. AMD is positioning RYZEN as a high-performance option and though there will be other core configurations as well, AMD has disclosed that one of the high-end options in the initial RYZEN line-up will feature 8 cores (16 threads with SMT) and at minimum a 3.4 GHz base clock, with higher turbo frequencies. That processor will also be outfitted with 20MB of cache -- 4MB of L2 and 16MB of L3 -- and it will be infused with what AMD is calling SenseMI technology. SenseMI is essentially fancy branding for the updated branch predictor, prefetcher, and power and control logic in Zen. AMD's upcoming AM4 platform for RYZEN will be outfitted with all of the features expected of a modern PC enthusiast platform. AM4 motherboards will use DDR4 memory and feature PCIe Gen 3 connectivity, and support for USB 3.1 Gen 2, NVMe, and SATA Express. Performance demos of RYZEN shown to members of the press pit a stock Intel Core i7-6900K (3.2GHz base, 3.7GHz turbo) with Turbo Boost that was enabled on the 6900K, versus RYZEN with boost disabled running at 3.4GHz flat. In the demo, the RYZEN system outpaced the Core i7-6900K by a few seconds.
In light of their recent APU units with massive DP performance on the iGPU (apparently a 1:2 DP:SP ratio), if they pair those iGPUs with four Zen cores, I'm definitely in! Numericians would approve.
Ezekiel 23:20
Mojo Ryzen...
Table-ized A.I.
Did not announce price. CEO said available next quarter.
The top SR7 is rumored to be around $500. Make of that what you will. Some think that this is very optimistic if the performance levels are what they seem to be. It would be very good for the consumer, though, obviously.
Ezekiel 23:20
Back around 2006 or 2007 AMD made a huge announcement that they bought ATI graphics. Around the same time Intel released the Core series of CPUs and blew AMD out of the water. Instead of investing in r&d they spent all their capital on a graphics card company. AMD has been playing catch up ever since.
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Indeed. It's good to have them around for competition, at least. And AMD systems are usually upgradeable for years to come.
The point is that HSA could more beneficial for this "lower-cost equipment" you (and I) are talking about: the unified virtual memory space on Carrizo and later AMD APUs makes for true zero-copy iGPU code execution! That's the very reason why I'm mentioning this. It could easily replace Intel's AVX advantage, even when considering wider Intel's AVX implementations (AVX512) and shorter-running kernels (because of the very low overhead of in-place data manipulation by the iGPU).
Ezekiel 23:20
"And AMD systems are usually upgradeable for years to come"
That's one reason why I've kept buying their CPUs.
I built an all-new systems in 2006 with an AM2 CPU on an nForce mainboard with 2GB PC2-5300 and kept upgrading it piecemeal over the next 6 years until reaching a FX-8150 system with 16GB DDR3. My laptops and servers (mostly 2ndhand) have all been Intel. Remains to be seen if that changes in the next couple years.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The name "Zen" is awesome. They should have just made the codename the brand name too.
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than a cheap discrete graphics + cpu? The trouble I had with APUs is that for another $20 bucks you could get a regular CPU + a cheap graphics card and get between 30-50% better performance. If you were willing to gamble on a used GPU you could often do a hell of a lot better (but you might get something that had the oven trick done to it). The only folks I saw using APUs were guys in Latin America where strict import rules made it hard to get discrete graphics.
Now, give me 60 fps at 1080p medium for current gen and make it cheap for OEMs and you might have something. Give me a box like that for $400 with a nice profit margin for the OEM and we'll talk. But until then I'll scrounge up that extra $20 and put together a box with better specs.
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Which Intel host CPUs can you buy today with AVX-512? (I say host because Xeon Phi cards are not anyone's idea of "lower-cost equipment".) Has Intel actually stated that any non-Xeon chips will get AVX-512? Right now, AVX-512 seems mostly like marchitecture.
The Neural net stuff isn't entirely new... its been used for awhile for branch prediction apparently.
... lets get X2-4 as well and queue up Y1-4 as well or something of that nature.
Now it could be that using it for larger scale cache prediction is new... brach prediction alone just means you can start executing that branch however the data might get thrown away if it was a misspredict. Whereas cache prediction is likely looking a bit farther ahead... and in the past it was rather simplistic oh you just requested X1
I thought the $500 just came from a redditer who had made up his own spread-sheet with prices and scores (which was guesstimated?), but maybe there was more to it because wccftech didn't abandoned it afterwards. Or maybe there wasn't.
One one hand even at $500 AMD would get lots more money / CPU than with current FX processors.
On the other hand why charge that when Intel charges like $1100?
On the third hand I guess they want to become popular again and hence out-price Intel.
Honestly, there's no real benefit of Intel vs. AMD in the core performance games. They're both fast enough and if you need real performance, that's where Xeons come in with 22 cores per chip and 4 chips per motherboard... if you can afford it.
There is a lot more to CPUs than just CPUs.
Chipsets:
AMD hasn't had a decent chipset on the market for years. Even though all modern CPUs tend to put the majority of the functions within the CPU itself, there are still things like the actual chipset to think about. Add to that that in my experience, the reference platform designs from AMD for their power circuitry are generally horrible and there's a real problem.
Motherboards:
What good is an awesome CPU if the motherboards are generally just crap. Motherboard manufacturers tend to make one or two AMD motherboards per generation as a token gesture. They don't expect to sell the volumes, so they slap together whatever crap they can get running and put some pretty colors into the slots and heatsinks and call it "Blaster" or something else that's horrible and peddle it off without a BIOS update ever to be seen.
Development tools:
AMD's developer website is all graphics and no CPU. To write proper software for modern hardware, it's necessary to optimize code properly. While CPUs are fast enough, good information on CPU tuning can make a huge difference. Intel for example has released extensive information on their architecture that describes the CPU front end instruction set translator well enough that it's possible to write compilers and JITs that will allow inter-core/process communication without the need for spinlocks or mutexes. Intel also documents all the information necessary to fine tune memory access by placing code on the right cores in order and taking advantage of the CPU ring bus to optimize performance and minimize cache coherency issues. AMD does not.
Where is the AMD optimizations to CLANG or Mono, etc? Where's the optimization settings within Visual Studio or GCC for AMD? These are things that they should be working on to ensure the best performance on their platform.
AMD probably made a great CPU... if we can get into a "FlaskMPEG" style performance war like we once had, it would be amazing.
Wow, really? AMD were already making Phenoms in 1071 AD? How did they manage to fall behind Intel then?
To err is human, but to forgive is beyond the scope of the Operating System...
I'll never understand why they went with the name nForce, especially since it was around the time when the battles with nVidia Geforce were the most intense.
I can't have been the only confused as fuck...
nForce *was* an nVidia chipset brand, originally for AMD but extending to Intel in later versions
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Pain is merely failure leaving the body