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AMD Reveals Zen 2 Processor Architecture in Bid To Stay Ahead of Intel (venturebeat.com)

AMD on Monday revealed the Zen 2 architecture for the family of processors that it will launch in the coming years, starting with 2019. The move is a follow-up to the competitive Zen designs that AMD launched in March 2017, and it promises two-times improvement in performance throughput. From a report: AMD hopes the Zen 2 processors will keep it ahead of or at parity with Intel, the world's biggest maker of PC processors. The earlier Zen designs enabled chips that could process 52 percent more instructions per clock cycle than the previous generation. Zen has spawned AMD's most competitive chips in a decade, including Ryzen for the desktop, Threadripper (with up to 32 cores) for gamers, Ryzen Mobile for laptops, and Epyc for servers. In the future, you can expect to see Zen 2 cores in future models of those families of chips. AMD's focus is on making central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and accelerated processing units (APUs) that put the two other units together on the same chip.

51 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Glad to See Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I am glad to see competition, and will consider these for computational requirements in the future.

    1. Re: Glad to See Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Keep up the good work !

      Now if software design can catch up to 64 Core, 128 thread hardware...

      Not every program benefits from multicore design.

      LOWER PRICES are the most important innovation, along with cooler power saving CPUs.

  2. Looking forward to Intel's response. by OwP_Fabricated · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...which will probably be to just rebrand another golden-bin set of 14nm+++++++++++ Xeons and just push the clocks even harder so they can claim 10% more FPS on some insanely shitty 1-2 threaded benchmark game if you don't mind a processor that draws 350W+ under full load and needs to dissipate more heat per square inch than a nuclear reactor.

    Also it'll have a new socket and cost like $900+, because lol fuck you

    1. Re:Looking forward to Intel's response. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Their response was yesterday, where they said they were going to glue a couple Xeons together to get a 48 core processor.

    2. Re:Looking forward to Intel's response. by OwP_Fabricated · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Remember like 6 months ago when they literally had a presentation saying that Zen was "glued together" processors and that was bad?

    3. Re: Looking forward to Intel's response. by koomba · · Score: 1

      Lol it would be funny if you weren't right. While each successive "generation" from Intel in the last 4 years have always had least some IPC improvement, it's been very small. And they've been on 14nm since Broadwell. Skylake, Kabylake and now Coffeelake are all the same chip, more or less. Any gains have simply come from small clock speed increases, more cache, and general optimizations. I will say though that at least the desktop chips have kept the power draw under control. But the HEDT chips, the most recent being Skylake-E? Yeah they are ridiculously powerful, no doubt. And they will clock almost as high as the lower core count desktop chips. But ONLY with very good cooling. It's kinda ridiculous. You aren't too far off, the 12+ core ones really will pull 300+ watts if you can keep them cool.

  3. The reality is..... by fred911 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "The move is a follow-up to"...

    Attempt to justify a PE ratio of better than 43x when the industry avg is 17x!

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    1. Re: The reality is..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So you are complaining that AMD stock is not as good a buy as Intel? I'd take that bet, but so what?

      If the Intel margins are higher to justify the stock price, that just means AMD chips are an even better value. So go ahead slashies, buy AMD chips and intel stock. Or maybe just buy AMD.

      The new Ryzen laptops for $500 are not bad btw as far as shitbox graphics go. Personally I rock that little $350 tron Lenovo for portability, and an ageing 965 that will tide me over until it dies and then grab a 1060 $900 equivalent.

    2. Re: The reality is..... by fred911 · · Score: 1

      "So you are complaining"
        No, I'm not complaining. I'm just stating a fact that it trades at a much, much higher value than either the industry or Intel (@10.93x). I've been rooting for AMD since my DX40 was priced better and outperformed intel's chip/set.

        But, they've always underperformed as a company. From their pricing, it looks like there's quite the hope they won't blow it yet again (how many times is it now?). From a historical standpoint, and at this point, I don't see any value in them as an investment.

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    3. Re: The reality is..... by ChrisMaple · · Score: 1

      Intel and AMD have nearly identical price/sales.

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    4. Re: The reality is..... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      If their PE is 4x that of Intel's, doesn't that imply the market is betting on them failing, at least 4:1?

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    5. Re: The reality is..... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Nope, I'm and idiot that overthought it...

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    6. Re:The reality is..... by melted · · Score: 1

      PE is largely a factor of potential growth. AMD has _plenty_ of room to grow. If anything, if EPYC really takes off (and it might), their PE might be too low at the moment.

  4. Gamers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "Threadripper (with up to 32 cores) for gamers" Hardly a "gamers" CPU, workstation makes the most sense for threadripper.

    1. Re:Gamers? by edwdig · · Score: 2

      Threadripper doesn't help much when PLAYING games, but it'd be a pretty sweet CPU for COMPILING games.

    2. Re:Gamers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Threadripper (with up to 32 cores) for gamers" Hardly a "gamers" CPU, workstation makes the most sense for threadripper.

      And what a workstation it would be.

      My personal desktop is an AMD 8-core. Right now I have Chrome, Firefox, Opera, a virtual machine, iTunes and a couple of other things running. I need to update to 32GB of RAM because 16GB is getting a little tight, and from time to time I could use more CPU capacity.

      At work I have almost maxed out my memory, and occasionally when I'm using Excel to crunch some big data sets I generate, I can peg all four CPUs on my work machine.

      I don't need gaming performance, but I do need high levels of concurrency and crap loads of RAM.

      I'd take a 32-core workstation in a heartbeat.

    3. Re:Gamers? by mikael · · Score: 1

      There are dual socket motherboards with quad-SLI and up to 128GB ECC memory intended for desktop supercomputing. Dual socket AMD or Intel CPU's. Some will need an extra larger case (EATX).

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    4. Re:Gamers? by Tyger-ZA · · Score: 1

      Maybe you just don't know what you are doing, and a competent person could run the same "big data sets you generate" on a decade old single machine.

      Maybe you just don't know what he is doing, and in your ignorance you can't believe that *anyone* would need so much power for work, because *you* have never needed so much power for anything.

      For example, here's an alternative workload that would benefit from having lots of resources: Compiling Chromium requires at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.

    5. Re:Gamers? by Tyger-ZA · · Score: 1

      There are dual socket motherboards with quad-SLI and up to 128GB ECC memory intended for desktop supercomputing. Dual socket AMD or Intel CPU's. Some will need an extra larger case (EATX).

      A Threadripper based PC would handle this without needing dual socket. link

  5. pci-e 4 or 5? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    pci-e 4 or 5?

    1. Re:pci-e 4 or 5? by LoneBoco · · Score: 1

      The new boards have PCIe 4.0 and are forwards compatible with their "Milan" processors.

  6. Competition by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Whether you love or hate Intel or AMD (or, like me, are neutral and use the right tool for the job), you gotta love that we've finally got some CPU competition again. This will only accelerate the development of better tech and drive prices down.

    1. Re:Competition by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      Despite all the shit Intel has received (and rightfully so), I'm seeing this from a different angle: Intel has some amazing talent to squeeze so much out of 14nm, or they've been holding out on us keeping this in reserve for such an emergency. I'm torn.

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    2. Re:Competition by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      ME is just that, Management Engine. It's not for gamer, it's for enterprise to manage the hardware over the network. Believe it or not, there's value in that. If there wasn't, it wouldn't have had continued development.

      --
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    3. Re:Competition by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Because...non-enterprise laptops are used in enterprise?? Even AMD's Pro series CPUs support DASH (Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware)

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  7. Bring on the New by Only+Time+Will+Tell · · Score: 2

    I'm looking forward to seeing some of the specs and benchmarks that these new cores can reach. My old compy is now just about end of life (it's a second-gen i5, almost 8 years old), so next year is perfect timing for AMD and Intel be in a price and performance war!

    1. Re: Bring on the New by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      Do dey be?

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  8. Re:"Threadripper for gamers..?" by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 2

    Same thought here. Sure there will be a few gamers who have a TR based rig. But that's just for show & boasting "bigger, better, faster" over their peers.

    TR are workstation parts. Think physics simulations, complex 3D modelling, pro-level video processing etc, on a big box under your desk. Where any extra CPU power helps, a regular PC won't do, and (for whatever reason) cloud-based computing isn't desired or practical.

  9. Threadripper has the pci-e lanes to drive muilt ca by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    Threadripper has the pci-e lanes to drive multi cards and yes the X8 does limit the high end video cards.

  10. Re:"Threadripper for gamers..?" by war4peace · · Score: 1

    Streamers, most of them. The serious ones, at least.

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  11. Shitty programmed games aren't AMD's fault. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not even the developers' fault, who have to make their games for consoles and consoles only, which simply don’t have many cores.
    (And yes, games DO use the PS4's eight cores! Every last drip of it!)
    It’s also not the fault of the console makers. They are not forcing developers to only design non-exclusive games for their hardware.
    It's the fault of the thieves who use hardware Digital Restriction Management that is only possible with locked-down devices like consoles, to make their imaginary monopoly seem real, so they can gouge money off victims for a mere copy of the work, that they already had been paid for.
    That is why PC versions are mere afterthoughts, when the console money and hence cocaine money starts drying up but the greed doesn’t, which are outsourced to the cheapest platform conversion sweatshop that can make bake a believable fake.
    Otherwise PC games wouldn’t still look like nearly a decade ago, and their graphics would make any "current" console look like N64 graphics.

    So please stop that ignorant argument.
    Like games with thousands of actors, millions of physics objects, and more service daemons than your OS couldn't use 32 cores ... And then there's graphics, which is so parallel that it uses an entirely separate massive vector computer on a board, just to handle the threads!

    1. Re:Shitty programmed games aren't AMD's fault. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Consoles have been subsidizing PC games. See, artistic assets have been the limiting factor, if you want these thousands objects over square miles you have to pay all these people who do that for years and throw away much of the content. Like, $50 million dollars right there.
      If you don't want to, see the Quake 1 scene, they have fun adding ultra high res texture packs (gigabytes) and per pixel lighting, it might be a better game than recent ones too but it's still Quake 1.

      Consoles may even push hardware PC specs : at one point we seemed to be headed to games that don't require a supercomputer like Warcraft, DOTA, Trackmania, Counterstrike, Minecraft etc., shit that run on laptops and old business computers.
      Come the new consoles with eight core, 8GB RAM and a GPU full of turbo laser atomic space rockets. Now your laptops and desktops you bought for youtube and Internet are worthless again and it takes enough power to run 30fps console games at 60fps or 100fps on PC.

      Don't look better than a decade ago? Perhaps, but it may be the nature of graphics. 1 teraflops don't look 10x better than 0.1 teraflops and 10 teraflops don't look 10x better than 1 teraflops.

  12. Live Benchmark Vs Intel Dual-Socket Xeon Server by MojoKid · · Score: 2

    Live benchmark recorded here versus a dual-socket Xeon Platinum 8180 server: https://hothardware.com/news/a...

  13. Re:"Threadripper for gamers..?" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Some really do, now an i5 2500K, 4670K or 6600K may be considered as "shit tier" for gaming. Four core/eight thread or six core/six thread is better now, and four core/four thread is considered OK but weak.

    Mind you, this is all a bit ridiculous. You can edit video on a weak decade old desktop, but can't run a current game.
    So to play vid games you need some silly powerful hardware, that you'll use to play vid games instead of curing cancer or something else.

    Threadripper for gamers? It's useless. But some may get the 12 or 16 core. One reason is : people believe they'll become youtube millionaires by making video game videos. So they want more threads to not risk framerate drops when capturing video, or may even want to do encoding on the CPU as that has more quality than on the GPU.
    A smaller group may be spending dad and mom's grands on hardware and there's not much else to waste money on, or they go dual graphics cards (or multiple SSDs) and are OCD about their PCIe lanes.

    This Zen 2 will be on Playstation 5 (might be eight cores, perhaps in the form of one CPU chiplet). So, people tired about the upgrade game but with money to spend may buy that. I predict huge sales for it, but for PC hardware too.
    I'd want to say, fuck this shit, make single core games with OpenGL 1.3 (30 fps on Atom CPU), target 1GB RAM use max, 2GB storage size (as if 2^31-1 ought to be enough for everybody) but I doubt anybody will listen.

  14. Re:Superstars by ReneR · · Score: 1

    maybe the bulk of the work is not done by superstars, and maybe the superstars are also eventually over worked and burned out, ..? just a thought, ..!

  15. Re:"Threadripper for gamers..?" by Gabest · · Score: 1

    Asynchronous programming is every major language now. People don't even know how many threads they use, just issue commands and wait for the result.

  16. Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Multi-chip modules are bad. Compared to single pieces of silicon containing many cores. Inter-process communications overhead can be expected to increase with such a design.

    However they are better than dual (or multi-socket) motherboards. Which are themselves bad, except good when compared to single socket motherboards with no options for multiple CPUs.

    Everything is a tradeoff. If an MCM design is required to achieve high(er) core counts, I support it.

    1. Re:Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      pasting multiple CPU modules together is about YIELDS, and getting 64 cores on a single die sucks for yields.

    2. Re:Agreed by djinn6 · · Score: 1

      Does it really matter if it's 64 cores? Just turn off a few dead cores and cut the price a little.

    3. Re:Agreed by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      pasting multiple CPU modules together is about YIELDS, and getting 64 cores on a single die sucks for yields.

      Simple: There will be 48 and 32-core versions which are made from 64-core dies that had bad cores during testing.

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  17. Re:Cool, but... by mandark1967 · · Score: 1

    These already have fixes in place for the recently announced vulnerabilities...unlike Intel.

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  18. Re:"Threadripper for gamers..?" by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Thats why people kept on buying Intel.

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  19. More like Ryzen for gamers and ThreadRipper for by aliquis · · Score: 1

    More like Ryzen for gamers and ThreadRipper for desktops; the people who still need one.

    If you buy just for gaming while you could buy ThreadRipper most won't and it wouldn't give the best performance for your money (but be superior for streaming, then again you could buy say an i5 9600K and a Ryzen 5 2600 for gaming and streaming.

  20. A northbridge by any other name by williamyf · · Score: 1

    Would perform as swift.

    Paraphrazing the Bard*

    The northbridge is BACK BABY!!!!!!!
    Party like it is the early 00's all over again!!!!!!

    On a more serious note:

    I think that AMD's Integrated northbridge is so big not only because is manufactured in 14nm, but also because it houses not only IO and Memory controller, but also a combination of L3 Cache and Integrated graphics.

    I foresee that this northbridge will have two families. One with all L3 and no graphics for Epyc and Threadripper, and one with less L3 and integrated graphics for Ryzen and the APUs. Each family of northbridges will have different sizes of L3, speeds of graphics, number of graphics cores and TDPs depending on target market.

    I'll ask my contact if the northbridge will be manufactured by Glofo, Samsung or TSMC.

    * "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

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  21. Re:Threadripper has the pci-e lanes to drive muilt by Kjella · · Score: 1

    Threadripper has the pci-e lanes to drive multi cards and yes the X8 does limit the high end video cards.

    Just barely, but SLI/CF was niche to begin with and has almost disappeared which makes it often poorly supported/tested. I was foolish enough to try it with two GTX 970s and after annoying crashes and resets back to single card mode in the few games it actually gave a good boost I sold one, re-purposed the other and got a 1080 Ti instead. I'd not recommend dual cards if a single card was at all possible, like anything under a $1500 GPU budget I'd rather get a factory overclocked 2080 Ti.

    Threadripper has some other big disadvantages like clock speed, single-threaded IPC, high memory latency etc. which means it just never makes sense as a gaming system. Even if you wanted to go crazy AMD dropped triple/quad-CF support just like nVidia did for SLI so most of those Threadripper lanes would go unused anyway. Not that I'm sure four Vega 64s could match two GTX 2080 Tis if you could, except maybe on price. Of course that's all for bragging rights anyway, you don't need any of that to game not even at competitive eSports level.

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  22. Re:"Threadripper for gamers..?" by mikael · · Score: 1

    For video editing, they can get by with SSE/AVX instructions with maybe some GPU acceleration using CUDA/OpenCL and OpenGL shaders. Try and run a video game. and they are making use of the latest ARB extensions like sparse textures, multisampling, compute and tesselation shaders.

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  23. Re:Intel's next move? by exomondo · · Score: 1

    I wonder what kind of sleazy tricks Intel will come up with this time now that AMD seems to be getting ahead.

    Make a better processor, just like they did last time this happened. They made a decision on their process shrink that didn't work out so that's put them behind while AMD made a better decision which has put them ahead. This happened with Intel's deep pipeline Netburst architecture while AMD had their really successful Athlon line, then Intel came out with their Core architecture and AMD flopped with their response to that.

    These companies have to make reasonably long term bets on a particular strategy, sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't but you can't get it right all the time.

  24. Re:Threadripper has the pci-e lanes to drive muilt by MrL0G1C · · Score: 1

    Except multiple cards rarely works well for gaming, many games don't support SLI at launch and gamers aren't the kind who like to wait a couple of months just to see if maybe their system gets supported. So SLI is niche even amongst gamers who would happily fork out for it. Not to mention that even when SLI does wortk it often doesn't scale well for anything other than benchmarks.

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  25. Re:Intel's next move? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

    It's Intel that licenses the 64-bit instruction set from AMD.

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  26. Re:"Threadripper for gamers..?" by war4peace · · Score: 1

    Yes, until now. With Threadripper 2, the game is changing.

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  27. Re:Intel's next move? by Agripa · · Score: 1

    I wonder what kind of sleazy tricks Intel will come up with this time now that AMD seems to be getting ahead.

    They still use their old sleazy tricks.