Slashdot Mirror
AMD Set To Launch Ryzen Before March 3rd (anandtech.com)
An anonymous reader shares an AnandTech report: Thanks to some sleuthing from various readers, AMD has accidentally let the cat out of the bag with regards to the official Ryzen launch date. While they haven't specifically given an exact date, the talk to be given by AMD at the annual Game Developer Conference (GDC) says the following: "Join AMD Game Engineering team members for an introduction to the recently-launched AMD Ryzen CPU followed by advanced optimization topics." The GDC event runs from February 27th to March 3rd, and currently the AMD talk is not on the exact schedule yet, so it could appear any day during the event (so be wary if anyone says Feb 27th). At this time AMD has not disclosed an exact date either, but it would be an interesting time to announce the new set of Ryzen CPUs right in the middle of both GDC and Mobile World Congress which is also during that week. It would mean that Ryzen news may end up being buried under other GDC and smartphone announcements.
I hope AMD succeeds.
We need competition on the x86 CPU space. Intel dominates the top end of the x86 space right now, and they have no incentive to come up with better CPUs. Today's top of the line CPU is just last year's top of the line CPU with a few features tacked on and less power consumption (which sounds great on paper, but in practice takes roughly 10 years for the savings to materialize... and by then, you've already swapped your CPU 3 times).
But I don't think AMD can pull it off. It's been about 10 years since I've been excited about one of their products and they've been over-promising and under-delivering for a long time.
But we'll see.
That the older processors probably do a better job of 'respecting your rights', whereas the new ones from Intel, AMD, and ARM licensees all have Clipper Chip on steroid built in and very difficult if not impossible for the end user/hardware owner to disable.
Hackaday just posted an article that claims to be able to disable the Intel ME via firmware hacking, but in order to do it you need either a socketed bios chip, or a programmer with clip leads to read, modify and reprogram a soldered down one.
What that leaves is Broadwell on the Intel side (GPU firmware signing on either Broadwell or Skylake, plus the ME code.) and FM2 (not +) and AM3+ as the max on the AMD side.
Anything newer by either company, or anything touting trustzone that doesn't have an unsigned stage0/1 bootloader is essentially a trojan horse awaiting activation.
There is no sane reason for individuals or companies to be buying processors of newer generations that they cannot guarantee are secure, and yet people are continuing to do so with the weak and extremely dangerous excuse of 'Don't you think if they were going to do that, they would have done it by now?' rather than noting that giving a few generations for complacency before bringing down the hammer always works better to trap people inside technological or institutional oppression, by which point they no longer have a mechanism to get back out.
If you can, buy last generation systems that didn't have it, can be disabled, or can be circumvented while you still can, and hope I and others like me just get proven as unfounded kooks, rather than having our concerns brought to light in the sort of oppressive sweep we might not get another opportunity to step out of.
I'm holding off on buying a new chip until ryzen comes out. Maybe it wouldn't make sense for Intel to do this kind of thing, since they might even prefer you buy one of their existing chips rather than waiting for the new one to clear out some old inventory, but for AMD, you might be holding off on buying a current Intel product to wait to buy a new AMD product. I'm sure as hell not buying an excavator now, and I don't think anyone else is either, and I think AMD knows that.