AMD CES 2018 Announcement Roundup

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
55,535
AMD CES 2018 Announcement Roundup

We have gone through the multiple slide decks that AMD has shared with us in the last couple of days and picked through those with a focus on desktop and High End Desktop CPUs and a bit on Radeon products. We have boiled it all down to what we see as will be important to computer hardware enthusiasts and gamers.

This article should be published at 11pm CST Sunday night.
 
Seeing Vega at 7nm begs the question, this year? Why even announce it this early - another carrot dangling like Vega previously? Anyways looks to be a very exciting year coming up with AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Hopefully AMD will be more clear at CES upcoming.
 
Seeing Vega at 7nm begs the question, this year?
Early 2019, and that's for Radeon Instinct. Consumer stuff will follow sometime after that.

I kind of suspect Navi may come simultaneously with 'Vega refresh', unless the cost of both HBM2 and interposer production and integration drops dramatically in the next year. AMD may want to cut their losses with Vega for consumers and deploy Navi with GDDR6 instead. They've been ping-ponging between releasing cards based on the '-Island' chips alternating with cards based on Fury/Vega, so if 'Vega Refresh' is delayed and Navi remains on-track they may arrive at the same time. That would put AMD in a similar position as Nvidia, with one line of 'big die w/ HBM' GPUs for the high margin professional market (with plenty of DP FLOPs ECC, etc), and another line of GPUs (with the unecessary professional features chopped off to save money and optimised for consumer SP workloads) for consumer cards.
 
my guess is vega refresh in the summer and navi sometime Q3/4'19. since AIB's seem to have moved on from doing custom cards for vega might be a sign they're prepping for vega refresh instead.

you could be right though EdZ, maybe Navi enterprise cards release at the same time as consumer vega refresh.
 
Since Zen+ pretty much has to be a re-spin of Zen (12nm is really 14nm++ or something like that) I wonder if they will have included any uncore fixes. Higher Infinity Fabric speeds would be a big win and a more robust memory controller would be welcome as well (though latest AGESA has made things less painful at least)made
 
I suppose they will now only have (fill in number)% slower cores now, or something like that. That is if you drink the blue koolaid.
 
I just pray they somehow make the next generation of consumer GPUs DX/Vulkan/OGL only, forcing miners to buy the pricey commercial cards for their commercial enterprises...
At the moment the market is just fucking ridiculous for gamers and I feel sorry for anyone trying to do a build currently.
 
I just pray they somehow make the next generation of consumer GPUs DX/Vulkan/OGL only, forcing miners to buy the pricey commercial cards for their commercial enterprises...
LOL! That is not going to happen. AMD will in no way reduce its market share in mining purposefully.
 
Sadly you're probably right, however if Nvidia does the same thing or they both agree to, it would mean higher margins for both. Nvidia already did this for datacenters, so there is already some prescedent to consider.

If they both agree to it's illegal. They built the datacenter products at request of datacenters, right now miners aren't requesting a separate sku (unless it's cheaper). The solution would be for them to just pump more chips out, but I understand why they don't as if/when crypto falls off a cliff they'll be stuck with inventory. It sucks as a gamer but it's market forces at work. It's actually not too bad, you just can't buy on impulse as the prices fluctuate. They were cheap right around Christmas, now they're back up but if you wait a few weeks then things will change again and you can buy.

10% is pretty decent for Zen+, that'll put top sku's at 4.4ghz boost and probably 4.6-4.7 for top bin parts OC'd with good cooling. A 16 core TR at 4.7 would be a total monster, and AMD chips seem to not lose clock ability when scaled to 16 cores unlike intel's offerings.
 
Sadly you're probably right, however if Nvidia does the same thing or they both agree to, it would mean higher margins for both. Nvidia already did this for datacenters, so there is already some prescedent to consider.

If they both agree to it's illegal. They built the datacenter products at request of datacenters, right now miners aren't requesting a separate sku (unless it's cheaper). The solution would be for them to just pump more chips out, but I understand why they don't as if/when crypto falls off a cliff they'll be stuck with inventory. It sucks as a gamer but it's market forces at work. It's actually not too bad, you just can't buy on impulse as the prices fluctuate. They were cheap right around Christmas, now they're back up but if you wait a few weeks then things will change again and you can buy.

10% is pretty decent for Zen+, that'll put top sku's at 4.4ghz boost and probably 4.6-4.7 for top bin parts OC'd with good cooling. A 16 core TR at 4.7 would be a total monster, and AMD chips seem to not lose clock ability when scaled to 16 cores unlike intel's offerings.
I would suggest that AMD and NVIDIA are working the best they can to support the large miners with bare GPUs in mass shipments at this point. The "big" miners are already building their own PCBs and writing their own drivers.
 
I'm hesitant to believe the 10% bump for Zen+. The cynic in me is saying that the OC ceiling won't move much at all, but the refresh will raise stock/XFR clocks by 10% for most of the product line. Then my inner optimist says if that's true, though, then the refresh of the 1800X would boost to 4.4 stable. To which my inner cynic says, then they just don't refresh the 1800X and tout the improvements of the rest of the product stack as the complete refresh.

Some of the APU slides were a bit of a surprise, though. Techspot had a couple of them (I think it was techspot) where the desktop APUs were a bit nuts. The R5 1400 is being replaced by the R5 APU at $170 and the R3 1200 is being replaced by the R3 APU at $100.

The R5 APU performance slide also had me looking for the catch. Supposedly the APU is as fast as an i5-8400 with a GT1030. Suuuuure. I'll believe that when I see it.
 
x470? wasn't everyone saying/hoping that you'd be able to stick to x370/b350 for a while? I guess there's still hope 'eh?
 
x470? wasn't everyone saying/hoping that you'd be able to stick to x370/b350 for a while? I guess there's still hope 'eh?

You can. It's a chipset update, not a socket update. Kind of like how you were able to drop a Phenom 2 955 BE into almost any board for the last 5 years of AM3(+). The same baseline quadcore worked in a number of chipsets, but the socket was still viable.
 
Interested to see the gains on Zen+, still might end up waiting for Zen2 to consider an upgrade from my 5820k, still chugs along just fine.
 
Thx for the concise post Kyle. As for the older chipsets several other sites confirm they'll be compatible with the new CPU's. Having built a few Ryzen systems recently for friends and relatives I'm looking forward to seeing what Zen+ can do. Being a [H]ard DC'er I'm very interested in the amount of cores for the $ and a 6/12 CPU and cheaper motherboards fits the update and budget profile perfectly. Now if DDR4 would just come down ...
 
You can. It's a chipset update, not a socket update. Kind of like how you were able to drop a Phenom 2 955 BE into almost any board for the last 5 years of AM3(+). The same baseline quadcore worked in a number of chipsets, but the socket was still viable.

As an AMD fan I will add, so long as the manufacturer supports the BIOS.

I'm hesitant to believe the 10% bump for Zen+. The cynic in me is saying that the OC ceiling won't move much at all, but the refresh will raise stock/XFR clocks by 10% for most of the product line. Then my inner optimist says if that's true, though, then the refresh of the 1800X would boost to 4.4 stable.

There would be little point otherwise in releasing it, as it appears they are not making other major changes, hopefully some ram speed fixes and little touch-ups. These clock bumps are not only projected but not out of line from the low power process previously used, which was more efficient than intel.
I'm picking also 4.4 and up to 4.6 maybe touch more for good chips on water. It will certainly muddy the lines more between the two manufacturers in single core.

But really, I'm waiting for 7nm/Zen2 and Navi after Vega left more to be desired, that said with Raja leaving I'm concerned Navi will be much the same. AMD needs to ditch GCN ASAP either way.
 
If the PC gaming market becomes too restrictive with much higher priced cards and lack of availability -> extended period of time as in a generation -> I would say that would be very detrimental to that market and thus that market for Nvidia especially and also RTG PC gaming market (may help them on the consoles).

More cards made, most definitely but there is a very big catch with mining, maybe subtle but true -> almost a never ending pit so to speak: If one card is profitable and will pay itself off, so will 5 cards, 10 cards or 100 cards will pay off in the same time period. The only limitation is how much power the buyer has available to supply all the cards and any cooling needed. In other words the manufacturers will never be able to make enough cards to saturate the market unless Cryptocurrency collapses. The buyer for the past 6 months can make more money than the costs of the card and electrical energy which prompts more card buying.

Unless the dollar is reset, as in backed up with Gold like before 1971, Nixon and the Federal reserves, at 40% (~$10,000/oz some speculate) to give it stability so folks would not loose if they keep it in the bank. In short the world fiat currencies are not stable, unpredictable and you loose if you hold on to them, which I also believe is driving the Crypto mania.

I would think the OEMs would give some mining options for video cards with a discount - maybe one video out port like one HDMI (with an DVI adaptor), specific well tuned bios and lean and mean specialized drivers - options to buy with Cryptocurrency to divert the miners to those cards. Anyways this is the biggest potential threat to PC gaming I've seen or fear.
 
Last edited:
Seeing Vega at 7nm begs the question, this year? Why even announce it this early - another carrot dangling like Vega previously? Anyways looks to be a very exciting year coming up with AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Hopefully AMD will be more clear at CES upcoming.

I would like to speculate on this part for a bit ;)

There are a few options which can hold true is that they will bring another offering for the sake of releasing something and it most likely will not be a true consumer part.

For it to work for consumers they would have had to fix the problems they have with to much power and not scaling with power which and they would have to do a lot of work to make this possible but it will never progress in the way that it will matter for high end consumers.

For the non consumer market(whichever marketing term applies) there are some easy possibilities which will work without to much trouble.

And again I will state this that more then likely won't be a good price performance option either.
 
How will Zen+ stack up to coffee lake? I am thinking of doing a new build this year and going from a 6700k to the new Zen+ chips. I like that there are no socket changes and I can just buy a new CPU when they come out.
 
How will Zen+ stack up to coffee lake? I am thinking of doing a new build this year and going from a 6700k to the new Zen+ chips. I like that there are no socket changes and I can just buy a new CPU when they come out.


Some people here have overlooked the fine print in AMD announcement about Zen+ or Ryzen 2. They did say they had improved cache performance and memory compatibility with higher speed ddr4 dimms. That means IPC has improved probably around 5% over original Ryzen chips and that memory compatibility at least through 3600 mhz dimms with Samsung B die should be a given. I exoect the 2800X will have 4.0 GHZ base speed and and boost speed of 4.4 to 4.5 GHZ on all 8 cores. That should put Ryzen 2 on a par with CoffeLake in performance with lower thermals.
 
  • Like
Reactions: N4CR
like this
I don't realistically see a 4.5ghz all core, running simple hypothetical results on cinebench to hit AMDs 10% you need 4.1-4.2ghz. now i dont say its impossible, i just think given the tidbits it's unlikely to be 4.5ghz, which i think will be the singe thread and max OC limit or slightly under.

Anything is possible and maybe it will surprise but i prefer being more realistic.
 
I don't realistically see a 4.5ghz all core, running simple hypothetical results on cinebench to hit AMDs 10% you need 4.1-4.2ghz. now i dont say its impossible, i just think given the tidbits it's unlikely to be 4.5ghz, which i think will be the singe thread and max OC limit or slightly under.

Anything is possible and maybe it will surprise but i prefer being more realistic.

Well for AMD's defense they did say a 10% increase in clocks. If we look at the 1800x, which hits 4ghz. That would add another 400mhz. So 4.4ghz is totally possible if they hit the 10% better clock marks. Tack on another 5% in IPC Performence (rumors of course), that would give AMD a damn good chip.

This is all speculation of course.
 
Its generally hard to nail this to exact science but It could be reasonable for single thread to be on par with Devils Canyon/Broadwell, with multi threading once again seeing AMD go head to head with Intels latest 10 core parts
 
Well for AMD's defense they did say a 10% increase in clocks. If we look at the 1800x, which hits 4ghz. That would add another 400mhz. So 4.4ghz is totally possible if they hit the 10% better clock marks. Tack on another 5% in IPC Performence (rumors of course), that would give AMD a damn good chip.

This is all speculation of course.
If they tighten memory timings as they said and increase speed a bit it might help that last 5%
 
I'd be sort of excited for Zen+ but since you pretty much can't buy a new graphics card these days what does it matter for games?
 
I'd be sort of excited for Zen+ but since you pretty much can't buy a new graphics card these days what does it matter for games?

It is a good thing that games is just one market and Zen+ targets a good variety of markets.

1) overclockers
2) workstations
3) small LAN
4) content creators
5) Media machines

I mean the options are there for many purposes.
 
It is a good thing that games is just one market and Zen+ targets a good variety of markets.

1) overclockers
2) workstations
3) small LAN
4) content creators
5) Media machines

I mean the options are there for many purposes.

My comment was from the point of view of someone who doesn't do any of that but would like some increased performance in games, but I don't find it sensible to upgrade a CPU for a few % with the way the GPU market is right now. I've been wanting to switch to an AMD graphics card for a little while because of the increased monitor options but I refuse to pay $800+ for 1080 level performance, it seems like that trend will continue well into the future since Vega seems to be about it for high end AMD.
 
I haven't owned a AMD card in many many years, kind of don't see a need as Im happy at the moment. The state of Radeon is sad but the DT Graphics market may end up a one player market as I can see AMD using the brand for custom solutions and IP's which is far more lucrative than anything RTG can muster up.
 
My comment was from the point of view of someone who doesn't do any of that but would like some increased performance in games, but I don't find it sensible to upgrade a CPU for a few % with the way the GPU market is right now. I've been wanting to switch to an AMD graphics card for a little while because of the increased monitor options but I refuse to pay $800+ for 1080 level performance, it seems like that trend will continue well into the future since Vega seems to be about it for high end AMD.

I could see making the jump - even though right now my cpu doesn't limit me much in anything I've tried since I'm doing mostly VR, a jump to a 2800x or similar would be a pretty big jump from my 1700. I'd be looking at all core turbo higher than my single core boost now with maybe some ability to crank the memory up some more (I'm at 2933 cl15). That'd be a nice boost in the few situations where my cpu could be limiting me - like the start of a large race in iRacing where geometry load is high due to having to render 35-40 cars on-screen at once along with pit buildings and pit crew. Right now I limit to 20 cars visible to give solid 90fps at all times, but that's the only cpu limited situation I've seen - and to be honest I don't know that I could see more than 20 cars from the cockpit, so it may be a bunch of money to just feel good about it or to watch replays without seeing any ASW artifacts (wich are there if I look for them), but what the hell, right? It'd make some of my spark jobs complete faster but I usually run them and come back later so it wouldn't influence much.
 
Back
Top