AMD: Zen improves IPC by 40%+, AM4 FX CPU Announced

DeathFromBelow

DeathFromBelow

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http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-cpu-radeon-hbm,29053.html

The Zen core is based off of a completely new core design, which is aimed at high performance, offering over 40 percent more instructions per clock than its predecessor. AMD CTO Mark Papermaster said that it would have simultaneous multithreading for high throughput, along with a new high-bandwidth low-latency cache system.
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On the high-end side, AMD will be introducing a new FX CPU with these new cores, which will have a "high core count," drop into a new AM4 CPU socket, and have support for DDR4 memory.
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Also:
AMD did not announce any new high-performance desktop GPUs, but CEO Lisa Su did say that the next GPUs (read: Radeon 300-Series) will come out at an industry event in the coming months and will feature HBM memory. The generation following this will feature the second generation of HBM memory.
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40% IPC boost sounds great. Where would that put them compared to Intel's current chips?
 
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DeathFromBelow said:
40% IPC boost sounds great. Where would that put them compared to Intel's current chips?
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I was thinking the same thing, does 40% IPC increase still make it competitive to what Intel will have when it's released? I am hopeful, I would love to go back to AMD.
 
Where would that put them compared to Intel's current chips?
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I would say 40% would put IPC at around 70% to 80% of Haswell. Although IPC alone does not tell the whole story. We would have to see what frequency Zen will run at.
 
drescherjm said:
I would say 40% would put IPC at around 70% to 80% of Haswell. Although IPC alone does not tell the whole story. We would have to see what frequency Zen will run at.
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Frequency, # of cores, scaling(though I doubt that would be an issue at this point), memory bandwidth, FPU perforfmance, and finally power usage :p

but, 40% is a great step, in the right direction!
 
Please be true, please have decent clocks, please create some competition.
 
This made me realise AMD is so behind I can't even remember what their current IPC is accurately.

But I'm seeing some estimates that are putting it at the level of Ivy Bridge and that would be very good jump.
 
An interesting and fun time to be an AMD fan for sure. I need a new PSU before a new CPU but hopefully I'll be getting some fresh AMD goodies by next spring.
 
If they price this right, I may actually build an AMD rig. It's been over 10 years since my old Athlon 64.
 
http://semiaccurate.com/2015/05/06/amd-puts-goodies-amid-vague-terms/

some other stuff about the same day
On a similar note, AMD’s Skybridge socket compatibility between x86 and ARM SoCs was killed because there was no real demand.

AMD finally gets SMT and that should boost IPC quite a bit, 40% higher according to the company.

If this assumption is accurate, it would mean a very high performance ARM core, on par with current x86 offerings. That would change the game fairly radically if the two ISAs were on par with each other, mix and match indeed. The only problem we see is that K12 appears to have slipped a year to 2017, the more things change…

There will finally be an update to the FX line, that is just CPU cores without GPUs, and they will sport Zen cores. The big news is that there will be an AM4 socket with DDR4 support. On the APU side the 7th Gen parts will also use AM4 and also FP4 on the mobile front.
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Finally some clarification on certain key aspects of what is coming in 2016 and what is not ;) .
 
Well, this at least gives us some hope for these new CPUs.
Too bad they are so far away.

By the time 2017 rolls around, Intel is going to be that much further ahead of where they are now.
Exciting times, let's just hope AMD follows through with this, officially.
 
drescherjm said:
I would say 40% would put IPC at around 70% to 80% of Haswell. Although IPC alone does not tell the whole story. We would have to see what frequency Zen will run at.
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That puts it in line with Ivy Bridge per core. Ivy Bridge released in 2012.

Significant leap in performance and IPC. Wonderful news, except that these are slated for 2017, and since Sandy Bridge was released in 2010 Intel chips have been gaining about 5-10% per generation. By 2017, they will still be 5 years behind in performance just like they are now.

The good news is that these will have high core count and SMT, so significant gains in multi-threading will be had which will make up for some of this remaining deficit. This is great news moreso for the high end workstation and server market which they are hopelessly losing.

A jump like this does leave me hopeful that AMD can keep improving and not have a several year stagnation like they did with FX.
 
Its hard to judge how Zen will stack up. People are throwing around 40% improvement in IPC per AMD's slide entirely too much.

40% over what?

The FX Piledrivers?
The new yet to be released Carrizo/ Excavator cores?
The new yet to be released Godaveri Desktop Apus?
The current Kaveri Apus?

Currently the FX Piledrivers are the fastest per clock thanks to the large l2, and L3 they have access to as well as pure clock speed. Note Kaveri posted an average of 10-12% IPC over Richland. Both Richland and Kaveri Apus are still slower than the Desktop FX Piledrivers in IPC. With Excavator AMD has stated 10-15% over Kaveri, but most of its improvements were done to power consumption. If AMD did actually release a FX Excavator core with L2 and L3 it would be roughly 20-25% faster than the Piledriver FX CPU in IPC. So again its 40% IPC improvement over what? Because if its 40% over a FX Excavator core with L2 and L3 then that's an monster improvement.

Another thing is clock speed.There is no telling what these parts will be clocked at and clock speed matters.

Lastly what sort of platform will it all tie into? AM4 is stated but pci-e lanes and sata support lists are not known yet.

So while they talked about Zen some today they really didn't say much other than our new core is faster than our last one and we are trying to compete back in the High end market again. It is good to know they are currently on track with a 2016 release. I would guess the earlier part of 2016 as well.
 
ebduncan said:
Its hard to judge how Zen will stack up. People are throwing around 40% improvement in IPC per AMD's slide entirely too much.

40% over what?
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One of the 3 slides clearly says 40% over Excavator and shows the IPC progression from Bulldozer to Zen...
 
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If AMD ever gets on the ball I've long known the've got Intel dead to rights. Just think about these two GIGANTIC performance advantages FX chips have over Intel:

1) they run in a 125 watt thermal envelope vs 80 watts or whatever for Intel. This is a LOT of extra headroom Intel doesn't have in theory (and assuming this continues)

2) They dont have an integrated GPU (on the FX line) eating die and power like pretty much all mainstream Intel chips do.

Each of these factors alone is in theory a really big deal if you think about it.

So yeah, if AMD ever gets their act together even a little bit I think they'll pummel Intel handily. Because Intel and Nvidia dont really care about performance anymore just thermals/mobile/performance per watt, theoretically leaving the performance market alone to AMD over the next few years which we see is starting to come to fruition with both these new monster CPU's and GPU's slated from AMD.
 
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CaptNumbNutz said:
That puts it in line with Ivy Bridge per core. Ivy Bridge released in 2012.

Significant leap in performance and IPC. Wonderful news, except that these are slated for 2017, and since Sandy Bridge was released in 2010 Intel chips have been gaining about 5-10% per generation. By 2017, they will still be 5 years behind in performance just like they are now.
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I haven't really noticed Intel increasing in performance at all, it seems like 0-5% per disappointing generation, and basically nothing significant since Sandy Bridge (modest jump to Ivy Bridge, little since, with each successor improving less than the last culminating in Devil's Canyon being almost no improvement).

You kind of wonder if CPU's are topped out really. Frequency is obviously a dead end, and I think by nature IPC is in the long term as well. And CPU's only gain so much from parallelism/more cores, as well.
 
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Where's AMD Gamer with his Bulldozer pictures when you need him? :D

This is great news IMO. It had looked to me as if AMD was completely abandoning the desktop CPU market aside from these weak ass low power chips they keep churning out. Guess I'll be holding off til next year to upgrade my CPU and motherboard.

Best thing is that it doesn't have to be better than Intel, just close enough that it's a viable alternative and that will introduce some much needed competition and that's always great for us.
 
MacLeod said:
Where's AMD Gamer with his Bulldozer pictures when you need him? :D

This is great news IMO. It had looked to me as if AMD was completely abandoning the desktop CPU market aside from these weak ass low power chips they keep churning out. Guess I'll be holding off til next year to upgrade my CPU and motherboard.

Best thing is that it doesn't have to be better than Intel, just close enough that it's a viable alternative and that will introduce some much needed competition and that's always great for us.
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I'm pretty sure AMD said they were out of the high-power CPU race two CEOs ago.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
One of the 3 slides clearly says 40% over Excavator and shows the IPC progression from Bulldozer to Zen...
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Clearly? There are 3 forms of Excavator..... Low power, Mobile, and Desktop. Amd is not releasing a desktop version, so that limits it to 2.

That we don't know if that is an average bench comparison , or a cherry picked benchmark, or what benchmark it is at all.

There is nothing clear about that slide.
 
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ebduncan said:
There is nothing clear about that slide.
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You asked what it was based on, the slide specifically indicates it's 40% faster than Excavator, and I would assume they don't mean the mobile parts since we're talking about a new high-end socket. Obviously we don't have any data yet but if they were comparing to Piledriver cores like you were speculating about the new architecture wouldn't make sense at all. We'll have to see how Excavator performs.
 
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JMccovery said:
Hmm, I wonder if AM4 runs quad channel DDR4.
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I wouldn't be surprised if it ran DDR3 still. AMD is all about cost and DDR4 prices are still high. I doubt they would do quad channel, maybe dual channel DDR4 because of power savings. Using HBM on the APUs will make RAM speeds matter even less.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
You asked what it was based on, the slide specifically indicates it's 40% faster than the Excavator. Obviously we don't have any data yet but if they were comparing to Piledriver cores like you were speculating about the new architecture wouldn't make sense at all, that wouldn't be much of an improvement over Excavator.
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You do know that the Piledriver FX is still AMD's fastest product in terms of IPC right? Kaveri only improved in IPC compared to Richland. APU's lack the large L2 and L3 of the desktop line FX cpus have. Because of this the mobile/apu parts are actually slower per clock in most workloads compared to the Piledriver FX.

Also we have yet to see what excavator can actually do in benchmarks. We have no idea what its IPC is. AMD's slide is very vague and shouldn't really be discussed.
 
BreezeDM said:
I wouldn't be surprised if it ran DDR3 still. AMD is all about cost and DDR4 prices are still high. I doubt they would do quad channel, maybe dual channel DDR4 because of power savings. Using HBM on the APUs will make RAM speeds matter even less.
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Hey, if it somehow runs DDR3, it will save me a ton of cash.
 
ebduncan said:
Kaveri only improved in IPC compared to Richland. APU's lack the large L2 and L3 of the desktop line FX cpus have. Because of this the mobile/apu parts are actually slower per clock in most workloads compared to the Piledriver FX.
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That's why people have been asking for new FX CPUs.

I'm fairly certain that the IPC of the integer cores themselves has improved with each generation even though the newer APU chips are technically slower due to less cache/lower clockspeeds/iGPU taking up space. This will be the first new desktop chip without the design compromises needed for the mobile/APU parts.
 
KazeoHin said:
I'm pretty sure AMD said they were out of the high-power CPU race two CEOs ago.
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They also said that future is APUs and here we are with annoucement of new 8 core cpus with HT and not even single transistor wasted on igpu :D
 
ebduncan said:
You do know that the Piledriver FX is still AMD's fastest product in terms of IPC right? Kaveri only improved in IPC compared to Richland. APU's lack the large L2 and L3 of the desktop line FX cpus have. Because of this the mobile/apu parts are actually slower per clock in most workloads compared to the Piledriver FX.

Also we have yet to see what excavator can actually do in benchmarks. We have no idea what its IPC is. AMD's slide is very vague and shouldn't really be discussed.
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Actually kaveri was an improvement over piledriver in IPC. When I worked on M brothers 7850k it was faster in IPC but overall my FX 8350 was faster, likely more modules enabling more single core per module use attributed to the FX speed overall. But in benching and stability tests his 7850k @4.4 was pretty close to my 8350 @4.6 in ipc.
 
durquavian said:
Actually kaveri was an improvement over piledriver in IPC. When I worked on M brothers 7850k it was faster in IPC but overall my FX 8350 was faster, likely more modules enabling more single core per module use attributed to the FX speed overall. But in benching and stability tests his 7850k @4.4 was pretty close to my 8350 @4.6 in ipc.
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No... Kaveri is an improvement over Richland. (piledriver core apu) Not the FX line of cpus using the Piledriver core. Kaveri would be faster if it had the large L2 and L3 that the FX line has, but it doesn't have those.
 
Shark974 said:
If AMD ever gets on the ball I've long known the've got Intel dead to rights. Just think about these two GIGANTIC performance advantages FX chips have over Intel:

1) they run in a 125 watt thermal envelope vs 80 watts or whatever for Intel. This is a LOT of extra headroom Intel doesn't have in theory (and assuming this continues)

2) They dont have an integrated GPU (on the FX line) eating die and power like pretty much all mainstream Intel chips do.

Each of these factors alone is in theory a really big deal if you think about it.

So yeah, if AMD ever gets their act together even a little bit I think they'll pummel Intel handily. Because Intel and Nvidia dont really care about performance anymore just thermals/mobile/performance per watt, theoretically leaving the performance market alone to AMD over the next few years which we see is starting to come to fruition with both these new monster CPU's and GPU's slated from AMD.
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We would have to wait and see what performance is really doing on this chip because IPC is not everything , given that it is the stick that they beat AMD with but performance in parallel work loads is more important because of the scaling in cores.

NickJames said:
2017!? Fuck it I am out. It's been delay after delay with AMD that I just don't care anymore.
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It is the ARM core not the X86 , if you didn't know the difference why not ask instead of some stupid pretend pissed of comment.

I'm not to sure what people expect of a generic 40% IPC boost statement it is clear that it is going to be better but it does not mean that performance scales by the same amount ;) .

There certain factors that have crippled AMD mainly the manufacturing process been something that was unexpected with phenom and bulldozer. The worst thing is press AMD supposedly should be making something faster then Intel while reality tells us a different story. The R&D funds are way lower for AMD and still in every review this does not get mentioned. There is a reason why AMD really is struggling not just from management past decisions but also that your main competitor have been stacking the deck
 
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Pieter3dnow said:
We would have to wait and see what performance is really doing on this chip because IPC is not everything , given that it is the stick that they beat AMD with but performance in parallel work loads is more important because of the scaling in cores.



It is the ARM core not the X86 , if you didn't know the difference why not ask instead of some stupid pretend pissed of comment.

I'm not to sure what people expect of a generic 40% IPC boost statement it is clear that it is going to be better but it does not mean that performance scales by the same amount ;) .

There certain factors that have crippled AMD mainly the manufacturing process been something that was unexpected with phenom and bulldozer. The worst thing is press AMD supposedly should be making something faster then Intel while reality tells us a different story. The R&D funds are way lower for AMD and still in every review this does not get mentioned. There is a reason why AMD really is struggling not just from management past decisions but also that your main competitor have been stacking the deck
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Eh? Who pee'd in your cheerios? I've heard enough of AMDs delays to jump the gun when I hear anything remotely about AMD delaying their products.
 
NickJames said:
Eh? Who pee'd in your cheerios? I've heard enough of AMDs delays to jump the gun when I hear anything remotely about AMD delaying their products.
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Read Anands article, AMD is pushing back K12(ARM) to put more effort on Zen (X86) coming out sooner / better.
 
I'll have a K12 with SteamOS for my secondary PC. AMD, Valve: make it happen! We need alternatives to Wintel's stranglehold to shake things up. x86 is not a very elegant microarchitecture (just compare x86 assembly code with Lisp). Only with some competition can we hope to replace it with something better eventually.
 
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wyqtor said:
I'll have a K12 with SteamOS for my secondary PC. AMD, Valve: make it happen! We need alternatives to Wintel's stranglehold to shake things up. x86 is not a very elegant microarchitecture (just compare x86 assembly code with Lisp). Only with some competition can we hope to replace it with something better eventually.
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I really doubt K12 will be suitable for gaming. I know that the ARM instruction set could be applied to CPUs just as fast if not faster than what Intel can offer with their x86 stuff, but AMD is not going for that with their first attempt. No way. Maybe a few generations in they'll have a winner. And believe me - I've wanted to dump x86 for years. It seriously bothers me to see so much new tech based on 40-year-old (or whatever) core technology just because some people expect the world of technology to cater to them forever simply because they spent a few hundred or a grand or whatever on a PC. Big whoop.

If Zen's performance isn't a lie, I will almost definitely buy one.
 
Poor AMD. At least they are still trying to be relevant.
 
I cross my fingers for...

IPC between IvyBridge and Hawell
8 cores, 16 hyperthreaded
High 4Ghz+ clocks
120 TDP
DDR4 Quad Channel
PCI-E 3.0 32+ channels
USB 3.1
$100-$150 for enthusiast motherboards
$200-$300 for enthusiast processors
 
I am hoping for a > $500 US 8 core / 16 threaded CPU. Meaning a processor that is AMD believes will compete with Intel's 8 core / 16 threaded processor not something that is the same performance level of 4 core / 8 threaded mainstream chip.
 
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Fingers crossed...

I've got a 1090T which is long in the tooth. (My kids' machine...and my standby.) I've been getting the itch to replace the cpu/mobo w/an i5 or i7. (Leaning...strongly...towards an i7.)

If this new AMD cpu is competitive with the i7, then AMD my get my business.

(Other two rigs have an i7 and an FX8350. So, this one can be a toss-up between the two brands.)
 
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