Silent.Sin
Gawd
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2003
- Messages
- 969
To everyone harping about AMD concentrating on efficiency and "forgetting" performance...you do realize that is the entire purpose of these ISSCC presentations, right? This conference is for improvements in transistor and logic design, not how fast it runs PiMark Vantage 2012.
Beside that, if you extrapolate what is presented and think about what it can impact it does have huge implications for possible desktop/server performance. What AMD has done is designed a completely new power distribution infrastructure for the cores.
Sure, this results in idle power savings and better power usage under low load which doesn't matter to you hardcore folders or media junkies so much. However, it also means is that they have the ability to crank up the power to very specific parts of the chip when necessary. I think this is why AMD has been so gung-ho about their new turbo in BD and how they will really try to make use of any available headroom if the software needs it.
Think of how far along we've come since the days of warranty voiding BIOS hacking on GPUs to overvolt and overclock compared to now where it is available in the stock driver. More recently in the AMD 6xxx series there is further evolution of built in performance control vs. TDP with Powertune. That's is the type of thing AMD is going for on the CPU side as well here. We might not know how fast it will wind up benchmark wise still, but these blogs at least make you think they have a solid foundation to work with.
Beside that, if you extrapolate what is presented and think about what it can impact it does have huge implications for possible desktop/server performance. What AMD has done is designed a completely new power distribution infrastructure for the cores.
Sure, this results in idle power savings and better power usage under low load which doesn't matter to you hardcore folders or media junkies so much. However, it also means is that they have the ability to crank up the power to very specific parts of the chip when necessary. I think this is why AMD has been so gung-ho about their new turbo in BD and how they will really try to make use of any available headroom if the software needs it.
Think of how far along we've come since the days of warranty voiding BIOS hacking on GPUs to overvolt and overclock compared to now where it is available in the stock driver. More recently in the AMD 6xxx series there is further evolution of built in performance control vs. TDP with Powertune. That's is the type of thing AMD is going for on the CPU side as well here. We might not know how fast it will wind up benchmark wise still, but these blogs at least make you think they have a solid foundation to work with.