Gottfried Leibnizzle
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“Why We Need the Power of Intel’s Next-Gen Eight-Core CPUs”
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jnemesh
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Ryzen 7 2700x 8 cores/16 threads. Available everywhere CPUs are sold for approx. $300.
Always the same song:
- Bulldozer will bring eight cores to mainstream. Soon games will require eight cores.
- Piledriver will bring eight cores to mainstream. Soon games will require eight cores.
- Next gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox1) will have eight cores. Soon games will require eight cores.
- Mantle will free multithreading API limits. Soon games will require eight cores.
- DX12 will free multithreading API limits. Soon games will require eight cores.
- Vulkan will free multithreading API limits. Soon games will require eight cores.
- Zen will bring eight cores to mainstream. Soon games will require eight cores.
- Zen+ will bring eight cores to mainstream. Soon games will require eight cores.
- Next gen consoles will have eight cores. Soon games will require eight cores.
Eurogamer seems to forget that when the PS4 and the Xbox1 were in the blackboard phase, game programmers were asked about the core configuration and
Master_shake_
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gotta add more cores to offset the loses.
This is a myth has been debunked by AMD people.
What is him mentioning? He is mentioning that bad decisions taken by AMD managers, including the building of fabs
And what did Raja fear?
It is time to stop repeating old myths again and again. What Intel did was both unfair and illegal, no one can negate that, but AMD finances were more impacted by the dozens of mistakes made by AMD managers and engineers than by Intel illegal practices.
Also it is interesting how this Intel illegal action is mentioned again and again but no one of the illegal actions of AMD are mentioned. What when AMD used illegal reverse engineering practiques to copy Intel chips? What when AMD violated the x86 agreement with Intel?
Another myth spread by the suspect media.
Intel did pay all the money to AMD. What Intel didn't pay was the EU fine to the EU. Intel appealed the EU sentence and won the right to get the whole issue reviewed
https://www.ft.com/content/f460ef98-930f-11e7-bdfa-eda243196c2c
I repeat this is a dispute bettwen the EU and Intel, not between AMD and Intel.
KazeoHin
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I'm sure you want to believe that. But AMD was not struggling to survive, they were fighting and striving to win. If Intel hadn't brought out their "mother of all programs" that was deemed illegal, AMD would have taken market dominance.
Does that red line from 2004 to 2006 look like a company that is struggling? and is it just a pure coincidence that the Intel incentive program started just before AMD was about to overtake Intel, and that an extremely sharp downturn in AMD's share coincided at the exact moment that Intel started its (admitted by you) illegal and unethical program? Live in your fantasy. but numbers don't lie.
Intel was contractually REQUIRED to give AMD their designs for creating x86 processors as per Intel's agreement with IBM. By IBM's contract, Intel had to allow AMD to duplicate the chips as a second source provider. Intel violated this contract, and did not share designs with AMD, and AMD in-turn, reverse-engineered Intel's tech, and actually made it faster.
Source
The lawsuit is between the EU and Intel, Over Intel's anti-competitive actions. you left that part out.
and in a way it changed gaming. When it came out it was far behind a 2500. By then end of their few year, it had closed the gap to almost nothing. Windows 10 had a lot to do with this.
and opengl is now more powerful than ever. Its cross platform metric makes it often preferable to DX. As microsoft barely tips its toes into the arm ecosystem.
You can barely get Visual Studio to compile arm binaries and you have to insert the platform directors directly into the sln files. But I guess you can debug over a network. Yay?
8 cores is mainstream. As much as 4 and 6 are. Even if games use less cores, side applications. streaming and robust chat rooms make it preferable.
So you know more about the issue than people that worked then on key places at AMD as CEO, CFO,...
Now continue to the part that says how Intel sued AMD in 1990 for cloning and finally won in 1996 the right to stop AMD copying its designs. The Am5x86, an Intel 486 clone, was the last clone by AMD. The next chip, the K5, was an in-house design at AMD. And what curious the clones were fast and popular in the market but the first all-AMD desing failed because it "was late to market and did not meet performance expectations" and never gained the acceptance among large computer manufacturers that the 486 clones had.
Also you seem to forget that both companies agreed to pay each other for the damages. Intel had to pay $18 million to AMD for breaching of contract and AMD had to pay $58 million to Intel for cloning 486 microcode.
We know the lawsuit is over Intel anti-competitive action. That part wasn't in dispute. The problem was on the claim Intel still owns money to AMD. No, Intel owns money to the EU.
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If the new consoles are going to have an 8 core, 16 thread CPU, then the new 8 core 8 thread Intel i7 is just not going to cut it, IMO. I'm not quite sure what Intel is thinking with that move. Maybe it's because they don't have a CEO right now? It's a bone headed move. And $450 is too expensive for the new i9. I don't mind I guess. It makes my 8700k relevant for one more year because Intel is getting greedy.
Gaming didn't change in the way that fans claimed. Back then fans claimed that FX-8350 was the future and that i5-2500k would be soon obsolete for gaming. Even today the i5-2500k is better for gaming in AMD-favorable titles as BF1.
We are discussing games.
chameleoneel
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The implication was inside of a Playstation.
*Ryzen 2 isn't a large enough advancement to squeeze 8 cores into a playstation. Heat/power/and price are all working against that.
**I think they will probably shoot for a six core. Albeit cut down/modified, since it will be an APU. And probably clocked around 3 ghz, to keep the power and heat down.
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Master_shake_
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The 6C12T 8700k is faster than 8C16T 2700X. And the new 8C8T is faster than the 8700k. Where is the problem?
Also what kind of CPU do you expect for the next consoles? 8 cores at 4GHz?
Not even close to what I said. Things can be ahead of their time and the industry does not turn on a dime. It evolves. But if you want your little cookie. Yes the 2500 is still better. My point that you seemed to misconstrue, the gap closed significantly!
5% or 10% gap reduction is not something that I consider "significant", Also you seem to ignore my point about the exaggerated expectations of fans: They didn't say that the Bulldozer FX would close the gap with the sandy i5, but that the FX-8000 series would be the minimum required to play forthcoming games and the i5 would be unsuitable to play those games.
History is repeating itself once again with Eurogamer claiming that 8-core will be new baseline, copying flawed arguments used before.
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Red Falcon
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No, it was not - and lord were those expensive (not in a competitive way) CPUs for what they were.
At absolute best, on a good day, it might have matched a single-core Athlon 64 3700+ (San Diego) CPU @ stock speeds, and an Athlon 64 4000+ absolutely crushed it while consuming less power and producing less heat.
Netburst was a turd at best, had far too long of a pipeline (32 stages if I remember right) for the time (only a Microsoft mail-merge was what this was good at doing better than AMD's offerings - by a few seconds, woo), and ran way too hot for what the CPUs were capable of, even at the time.
Pentium D CPUs (basically two Pentium 4 Netburst CPUs glued together via the FSB - hideous latency between cores) also ran far too hot and were not competitive on any front at all compared to the Athlon X2 CPUs and didn't hold a candle to them - essentially, the Pentium D was Intel's last-ditch effort to make Netburst "the answer" to AMD's offerings, and because of their design, they were not a native/monolithic dual-core CPU, where as the Athlon X2 was (much lower latency between cores using the on-die memory controller as a crossbar).
It wasn't until early 2007 that the Intel Core 2 CPUs were released that they started to become competitive on a clock-for-clock basis with AMD due to going back to the Pentium 3's architecture and using the L2 cache as the crossbar between cores for much lower latency.
For all of Netburst's existence, it was a scourge on x86 and computing in general.
I remember, because I was there, and used them in everything from laptops, desktops, shuttles (remember those?), servers, and 2P workstations.
They were all garbage compared to AMD's then-offerings with the Athlon XP, MP, 64, and X2 processors from Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, and to a lesser extent Socket AM2.
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https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/150/Red-Herring
"(also known as: beside the point, misdirection [form of], changing the subject, false emphasis, the Chewbacca defense, irrelevant conclusion, irrelevant thesis, clouding the issue, ignorance of refutation)"
More specifically: no one here claimed that any improvement for any CPU is not good. No one claimed that the 8 core segment will not grow at some rate...
ManofGod
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Ah, pessimism and strawman arguments, anything to defend Intel against the AMD juggernaut.
jnemesh
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And you are totally pulling all of this straight out of your a**. Not buying a single word.
Armenius
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It's important to point out that even though the current generation of consoles have an 8-core APU, only 6 of them are available to games. The PS4 unlocked the ability to use a seventh a couple years ago. I'm not sure if the Xbox One followed suit. Seems to me that the 6C/12T 8700K is the real sweet spot if that is the case.
![Zarathustra[H]](https://cdn.hardforum.com/data/avatars/m/9/9298.jpg?1707758471){kind=avatar}
Zarathustra[H]
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I'm not convinced.
For years now we have heard fanboys decrying all those lazy developers, and claiming that if they would only do their job, and if there were only enough widespread adoption of many core systems, we'd see games and engines that with perfect efficiency could spread across limitless numbers of CPU cores.
Unless we have some major breakthrough in technology (sub instruction processing, chiplets, etc.) I just don't think this will be the case.
True multithreaded coding is simply not possible on a majority of code, no matter how hard you try. It results in threadlocks, performance degradation and crashes. There are some tasks for which it works very well, when you have many small repeatable tasks, like rendering or encoding type activities. In games, graphics rendering is a good example of this, but the GPU is already doing this way more effectively than any CPU could. Physics processing is also an area which could be multithreaded very well. This is why we have seen so many GPU Physics implementations (PhysX, OpenCL based, etc). The rest of the tasks a game engine does are more tricky, because the have dependencies and could result in thread locks. DX12 also does a good job of multithreading the CPU tasks responsible for feeding the GPU with the data it needs in order to render. Main game engine, NPC AI, audio processing, etc. - however - are in most cases not going to be that easy, or even possible to multithread at all.
Of course, there will be some exceptions. Civilization V and VI for instance, are able to effectively multithread the end of turn times, because these can be effectively broken down to subtasks that don't strongly depend on eachother (but even then, the engine sometimes locks, and you can tell it sits there a while not really sure what to do until - presumably - a watchdog timer kicks in, kills the tasks that have been running too long, and re-starts them, hoping it doesn't lock this time.
This is who you see the current patterns in CPU loads in most games. You usually have one core either pinned or with very high CPU load. This is the main game thread. It usually can't be multithreaded due to all the state dependencies. Then you have one or two additional threads that have a a smaller (20-30%) amount of load which are handling other spun off tasks that are single threaded, but separate from the main process. This could be audio processing, AI processing, or poorly coded physics. Then you have a few more cores with low 5-10% CPU loads. These cores are running the code that can be properly multithreaded, like properly coded physics, DX12 draw calls, etc. It's not a significant portion of the load. Sometimes in some titles, these will spread out over all the cores in a system. Other times, depending on how the code is written there will be some sort of max. Either way, this is generally not where the bulk of the CPU load comes from, and thus spreading it out over more cores is unlikely to make a huge difference.
The thing is, many of these limitations above are fundamental to computer science. They are unlikely to change even over the long term. This is why I think for gaming purposes 4-6 big cores are going to be better than a larger quantity of smaller cores indefinitely. I really don't see this changing much. Also I'm not sure we would want it to.
An example is DX12, and Civilization VI as mentioned above. On a lower end, system with small cores DX12 has a distinct improvement. It is able to better spread the draw calls over all cores and better balance the system, but on a high end big core system enabling DX12 actually kills performance, because the big cores are capable of handling the draw calls on their own without multithreading it, so now, all you are doing with multithreeading is thrashing the CPU caches and causing the system to have to go back to RAM for data so much more often, reducing performance.
I know opinions will differ on this, but I feel fairly certain that no, the great multithreaded gaming renaissance is not upon us, and this is due to computing fundamentals. It simply can't get much better than it is today. It doesn't matter if 8 cores gain higher adoption.
The many core chips will still be awesome for rendering and encoding though.
The right tool for the right job.
For years now we have heard fanboys decrying all those lazy developers, and claiming that if they would only do their job, and if there were only enough widespread adoption of many core systems, we'd see games and engines that with perfect efficiency could spread across limitless numbers of CPU cores.
Unless we have some major breakthrough in technology (sub instruction processing, chiplets, etc.) I just don't think this will be the case.
True multithreaded coding is simply not possible on a majority of code, no matter how hard you try. It results in threadlocks, performance degradation and crashes. There are some tasks for which it works very well, when you have many small repeatable tasks, like rendering or encoding type activities. In games, graphics rendering is a good example of this, but the GPU is already doing this way more effectively than any CPU could. Physics processing is also an area which could be multithreaded very well. This is why we have seen so many GPU Physics implementations (PhysX, OpenCL based, etc). The rest of the tasks a game engine does are more tricky, because the have dependencies and could result in thread locks. DX12 also does a good job of multithreading the CPU tasks responsible for feeding the GPU with the data it needs in order to render. Main game engine, NPC AI, audio processing, etc. - however - are in most cases not going to be that easy, or even possible to multithread at all.
Of course, there will be some exceptions. Civilization V and VI for instance, are able to effectively multithread the end of turn times, because these can be effectively broken down to subtasks that don't strongly depend on eachother (but even then, the engine sometimes locks, and you can tell it sits there a while not really sure what to do until - presumably - a watchdog timer kicks in, kills the tasks that have been running too long, and re-starts them, hoping it doesn't lock this time.
This is who you see the current patterns in CPU loads in most games. You usually have one core either pinned or with very high CPU load. This is the main game thread. It usually can't be multithreaded due to all the state dependencies. Then you have one or two additional threads that have a a smaller (20-30%) amount of load which are handling other spun off tasks that are single threaded, but separate from the main process. This could be audio processing, AI processing, or poorly coded physics. Then you have a few more cores with low 5-10% CPU loads. These cores are running the code that can be properly multithreaded, like properly coded physics, DX12 draw calls, etc. It's not a significant portion of the load. Sometimes in some titles, these will spread out over all the cores in a system. Other times, depending on how the code is written there will be some sort of max. Either way, this is generally not where the bulk of the CPU load comes from, and thus spreading it out over more cores is unlikely to make a huge difference.
The thing is, many of these limitations above are fundamental to computer science. They are unlikely to change even over the long term. This is why I think for gaming purposes 4-6 big cores are going to be better than a larger quantity of smaller cores indefinitely. I really don't see this changing much. Also I'm not sure we would want it to.
An example is DX12, and Civilization VI as mentioned above. On a lower end, system with small cores DX12 has a distinct improvement. It is able to better spread the draw calls over all cores and better balance the system, but on a high end big core system enabling DX12 actually kills performance, because the big cores are capable of handling the draw calls on their own without multithreading it, so now, all you are doing with multithreeading is thrashing the CPU caches and causing the system to have to go back to RAM for data so much more often, reducing performance.
I know opinions will differ on this, but I feel fairly certain that no, the great multithreaded gaming renaissance is not upon us, and this is due to computing fundamentals. It simply can't get much better than it is today. It doesn't matter if 8 cores gain higher adoption.
The many core chips will still be awesome for rendering and encoding though.
The right tool for the right job.
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Correct, six cores for gaming was the initial setup. Then Sony and Microsoft unlocked a seven core.
Also to mention those Jaguar cores lack SMT. So games get up to seven threads.
Indeed. There are algorithms are just serial. So they cannot be programmed in parallel. A game has one or two master threads, so single core performance will be the limit.
And even with parallel algorithms, getting an efficient parallel code is hard. I just read
Why Parallelization Is So Hard
it is not about gaming, but highlights the main problems with parallel programing: synchronization, overheads, Amdahl’s Law...https://semiengineering.com/why-parallelization-is-so-hard/
next-Jin
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The Athlon series was awesome and beat out Intel, the Athlon 64 was the first to have an on board memory controller.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/355/24
The Pentium 4 was horrible, iirc they said they would scale past 5Ghz and that never happened. Hell I had my Pentium 4 under phase changed cooling and couldn’t get it past 4.4 GHz.
Intel responded by buying off every OEM.
AMD has been shit the last decade up till Ryzen, but they hit points where they are as good or better than Intel and force Intel do innovate. When AMD is in that cycle most enthusiasts buy AMD because they care about performance not brand.
I guess if you take your statement that some fans back in the day stated that "Soon games will require eight cores" as the sole premise of this thread. I'm guilty of turning the conversation from hyperbole to reality.
Fans said "Soon games will require eight cores"
A "single cause" a "reducto ad absurdum."
I'm sure this was said at some and maybe over and over as your post portrays. But how consequential was it as a driving force in the industry. Is it now the only thing we can argue? Is it a absolute. You made a series of statements punctuated by that one phrase and I expanded on them and pointed out some of their implications.
When you continued to return to a 2500 vs 8350 fans said argument, I conceded it. When you returned to it again, I reiterated my previous points and talked about odd glasses.
My point is the existence of an 8 core at the time helped move the software industry and even if neferious claims were made, the outcome was the same.
Please reiterate your point in a clear and concise manner and I will respect it.
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Is it fair to point out that available exclusively to the game, does not mean they are not doing work?
In an ecosystem, the daemon is in the details.
Red Falcon
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That was an exceptionally good read - much thanks for sharing that article!
Zarathustra[H]
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That's just not accurate at all.
In the 8086, 8088 and 286 era, they performed more or less identically, because AMD was just manufacturing Intel's designs , because IBM required them to have a second source supplier in order to get the contract to supply chips to the original IBM PC contract.
By the time the 386 came around Intel no longer needed to abide by IBM's second source agreements, as the "IBM Compatible" market was booming. Intel cut AMD off and didn't allow them to manufacture their 386's. There was a protracted legal battle, and AMD eventually designed their own AM386, which WAS faster than Intel's 386, but by this time Intel had already launched the 486, so it was moot.
In the Pentium and Pentium II era, AMD's 586, 686, K6, K6-2 and K6-3 chips always trailed Intel in most workloads due - in large part - to their slower FPU units. There were some specialized tasks in which they could tie and sometimes even beat Intel's performance during this era, but in more general tests, they fell significantly behind.
Then when k7 (Athlon / Duron) came along, AMD finally gained rough performance parity with Intel's Pentium 3. Clock for clock they were fairly even. Intel wasn't able to scale up the clocks on the Pentium 3 much beyond 1 Ghz though. We all remember the 1.13Ghz Pentium 3 fail, when they released a chip that wasn't stable at stock clocks, and how Kyle and Tom Pabst of Tom's hardware collaborated to compare their samples.
As I recall, AMD only briefly had the performance crown after this, as Intel was able to compete with the higher clocked early P4's. Intel got made fun of a lot, as it would take a P4 a much higher clock to tie an Athlon, but my memory is that they were fairly equivalent at first. Then in ~2003 or so, Intel hit the 2.8Ghz wall on the P4, and AMD took the performance crown and held it until 2006 when Intel released the Core2 chips.
Ever since 2006, AMD has been behind Intel performance wise. The first Phenom had that TLB bug that sabotaged performance vs Intel's chips. Phenom II fixed it, but never performed quite up to speed with intel's chips, and Intel's performance lead only grew as time went on, right before the Bulldozer fiasco, the Phenom II's were thoroughly being outclassed by Intel's Core chips. The Bulldozer Bulldozer launch was a fiasco and didn't do much to help. (In fact, in many workloads, the FX-8150 was actually SLOWER than their previous Phenom II x6 chips.)
Ryzen has been a welcome addition. AMD has caught up most of the way with Intel at this point. Intel still has a small lead in per core performance, but AMD has mostly closed it. In HEDT highly threaded workloads though, AMD is actually very competitive now though.
I cant wait to see what happens next. With Intel's 10nm woes, it will be interesting to see if AMD can close the per core performance gap in the next gen
You are correct. But this was only for a short time. During most of AMD's history in making CPU's they have been behind Intel in performance, usually by a not so small margin.
The above was for client CPU's as well. Their illicit backroom deals to exclude AMD (and their compiler manipulations) eventually resulted in a $1B settlement to AMD, but that - IMHO - was only a fraction of the damage they did to AMD. If AMD had been able to compete freely during ~1999-2003 when they had performance parity and ~2003-2006 when they had the outright dominant lead, they would likely have had a larger budget for R&D and the Bulldozer/FX fiasco would never have happened.
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Dr. Righteous
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Wow, I didn't know 8 core CPUs were a thing of the future. I've been using AMD FX 8 core CPUs for several years now. I didn't know I was FutureMan !
Zarathustra[H]
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Really depends on what you are doing.
If your PC does nothing other than run games, sure.
If you have a broader level use for an enthusiast workstation there are many applications (and combinations of application) that will take advantage of more cores.
For my needs I haven't gone for anything beyond 6 cores yet. Sometimes when I am doing encode jobs I wish I had a few more, bit I do that so rarely, that it's not worth the sacrifice in clock speed you usually see with higher core counts, in order to keep the thermals in check.
I'm all for more cores, as long as it doesn't mean that I have to sacrifice top overclocked clock speed.
If I can - using ambient custom water cooling - cool a many core design, and get the same top overclocked clock speeds as on a lower core counts chip, I'm all in. That's like having your cake and eating it too!
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Vaulter98c
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Waiting for handbrake or something to do 265 encodes on a shit ton of cores, that happens I'm jumping to 16 instantly. Need those encodes to haul ass
KazeoHin
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Thank you for the insight. Good read.
chameleoneel
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I'm not, really.
Due to heat and power, an 8 core Ryzen 2 is not going to work in something the size of a Playstation, unless it is severely underclocked. A couple less cores, with about 3ghz is probably doable. And makes more sense for individual thread performance.
Also, I doubt AMD is gonna put a CPU in a playstation, which would roughly cost $250 - $300 retail (if it were a standalone chip), in a console which is only supposed to cost $300-$400 at launch. Because, a chip maybe that expensive (according to early speculation it cost between $150 - $230), has only been used in a console once before. Sony's Cell processor. But the days of selling consoles at huge losses are probably behind us. A big goal with PS4 and Xbone was to sell them at cost or even for some profit, from the start.
It will be an APU. Probably with some trimmed down caches to save some cost. and I'm betting 4 - 6 cores.
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or a big little 8 core.
jnemesh
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Yes, it almost certainly WILL be an APU, based on Ryzen, most likely with 8 cores, most likely at 7nm, with Navi integrated graphics. Several stories on the net already theorizing this with solid evidence behind their reasoning. And don't bother quoting retail pricing, because we know that Sony and MS get bulk discounts when you order millions of chips.
Red Falcon
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Console games are all highly-threaded, and while I don't doubt that it will be an APU or based on Ryzen, it will most likely be either a little-core variant (like Jaguar on the current consoles) or much lower-clocked version of Ryzen due to heat, power consumption for the form-factor, and TDP.
This obviously is speculation at this point, but the one thing that would surprise me is if they went backwards on core-count, unless of course the cores had multi-threading like the current Ryzen processors do.
The system RAM is also going to need to be increased to at least 12-16GB, more so for the GPU if they are truly going to start pushing native or near-native 4K resolutions without additional graphical techniques (checker-boarding, super/sub-sampling, upscaling, etc.).
It will be interesting to see what they come up with, but the cost, even for a bulk-discount of millions of components, will still need to at least break-even, as the others above (and you) have stated, since Sony and Microsoft announced years ago that they are no longer interested in selling their consoles at a loss (loss-leader), and including a full-version of Ryzen would be very surprising.
chameleoneel
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I don't think it will be a "little-core" variant, as that would not be a very big upgrade for IPC. And right now, the largest performance issue in consoles, are the weak Jaguar CPUs. I mean, a dual core i3 would spank them, with 6 less cores and 4 less threads available.
I think we will see a basically "full" variant of Ryzen. By the time PS5 goes to manufacture, I think a 6-core approx 3ghz APU with cut down caches, would be cost effective. And such a thing should fit the heat and power envelope for a console. Even a 4 core would be fine. If they can't get a hex to work.
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KazeoHin
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The next generation of consoles will be an 8-core Ryzen design, most likely with SMT. We will see 2.5-3.5GHz speeds, and integration with a HUGE chunk of Navi cores, likely enough to compete with a Vega56, but not nearly as large. The whole thing will be a ~100w chip around about 250-300mm^2. Remember these will be 7nm chips. Regardless of how you feel about GloFo naming schemes, the transistors WILL be half the size of current 'PRO' console chip transistors on 14nm. Whole system power consumption will be less than 200w.