Slashdot Mirror
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.
I am glad to see competition, and will consider these for computational requirements in the future.
...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
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.
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!
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.
Threadripper has the pci-e lanes to drive multi cards and yes the X8 does limit the high end video cards.
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. ... 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!
Like games with thousands of actors, millions of physics objects, and more service daemons than your OS couldn't use 32 cores
Live benchmark recorded here versus a dual-socket Xeon Platinum 8180 server: https://hothardware.com/news/a...
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.
Threadripper doesn't help much when PLAYING games, but it'd be a pretty sweet CPU for COMPILING games.
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.