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Zen gets even with Broadwell-E in Blender
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Nside
Limp Gawd
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Everyone argues about whether Zen will be able to compete with some of Intel's best CPUs... I would honestly hope that they just compete with their mid-grade CPUs at better price points. Also, this time, don't allow laptop OEMs to handicap their APUs, knocking them down just so they don't need a half-decent heatsink and cutting the memory down to a single lane...
I'm not really sure why AMD attempts to compete at the top... Most people (outside of this forum) aren't trying to buy the top-end. Release a good i5 killer for <$200 and they're golden. Should they be able to build on that to later compete with i7's, that would be good too, but it shouldn't be their primary focus...
The bad part is OEMs... I'm pretty sure intel has them locked in with sweetheart deals... I've seen too many new OEM PCs with new i7's in them on sale for only about $100 or so more than the current retail of the CPU alone... Think about that... If Intel has cut prices to OEMs deep enough, AMD can't compete in that market either... Intel overcharges for the retail chips, and undercharges for the OEM chips... AMD gets nudged out because they can't get the enthusiast or the OEM ... Intel are some underhanded bastards, and I wouldn't put it past them because they absolutely hate AMD... Not in a MS - Apple sort of way, more like an Apple - Android sort of way, where most of the "war" is fought with dirty business tactics and courtrooms...
AMD has an uphill battle in front of them, but I'm cautiously hopeful. I would prefer they stick to a 4-core with better performance than an 8-core that just can't keep up, but we won't know for sure until people have the final product in hand... At the very least, I hope for some well performing APUs...
I'm not really sure why AMD attempts to compete at the top... Most people (outside of this forum) aren't trying to buy the top-end. Release a good i5 killer for <$200 and they're golden. Should they be able to build on that to later compete with i7's, that would be good too, but it shouldn't be their primary focus...
The bad part is OEMs... I'm pretty sure intel has them locked in with sweetheart deals... I've seen too many new OEM PCs with new i7's in them on sale for only about $100 or so more than the current retail of the CPU alone... Think about that... If Intel has cut prices to OEMs deep enough, AMD can't compete in that market either... Intel overcharges for the retail chips, and undercharges for the OEM chips... AMD gets nudged out because they can't get the enthusiast or the OEM ... Intel are some underhanded bastards, and I wouldn't put it past them because they absolutely hate AMD... Not in a MS - Apple sort of way, more like an Apple - Android sort of way, where most of the "war" is fought with dirty business tactics and courtrooms...
AMD has an uphill battle in front of them, but I'm cautiously hopeful. I would prefer they stick to a 4-core with better performance than an 8-core that just can't keep up, but we won't know for sure until people have the final product in hand... At the very least, I hope for some well performing APUs...
wonder if making APUs, midrange GPUs and Console hardware will be enough to fulfill that and moving high end CPUs and high end GPUs to another foundary. Just a speculation.
I don't know, they didn't disclose the amount of wafers they have to procure.
well its getting more expensive for these companies to move forward with new tech, and AMD needs to get its butt moving asap, cause there isn't much time left for them to get back into the high end markets. This is their last dance so to speak, if they can't do it here (the foundation has to be there), I don't ever see them doing it again.
well its getting more expensive for these companies to move forward with new tech, and AMD needs to get its butt moving asap, cause there isn't much time left for them to get back into the high end markets. This is their last dance so to speak, if they can't do it here (the foundation has to be there), I don't ever see them doing it again.
Pieter3dnow
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Link it , what was cancelled was the platform that was universal platform for x86 and ARM.
So here by you declare that because you don't know what they have done that anything can be manipulated that it will run well on one platform and the other platform it will just stall. So what is next you get the same discussion about binaries ? Everything has to be compiled by GCC to make it fair for every platform give me a break please...
Why don't you guys say the demo was rigged made to cripple Intel and only run well on AMD Zen ...
Shintai
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AMD turns back to x86 for server reboot as it downgrades ARM
AMD To Drop ARM-Based Servers In Favor Of x86
But it was obvious looking at the last 1½ year.
I don't know that either Pieter, but I'm not going to assume AMD is going to try to make their products look as good as they can. Its stupid not to think AMD would cherry pick.
Come on, they could have shown a game with frame rates if they wanted it right? Or passmark scores or CPU scores from a variety of different suites to get the point accross, yet they chose the one program that is open source to show their prowess. Why not use a more widely used platform, like 3dsmax or Maya? Wouldn't that be great?
Why aren't you asking those kinds of questions?
I just don't know what they showed will be what it ends up at. We have seen it with P10, we have seen it with P11, we have seen it Bulldozer, we have seen it with Fiji, damn there hasn't been a single product in the recent history they haven't done it with. If we go back further yeah the 4xxx series was probably the only one they didn't need to fudge anything with.
if you feel so confident about Zen's performance by that showing, buy a AM4 motherboard? Would you do that if AM 4 motherboards are available right now?
Really it makes no sense to do both x86 and arm CPU's for servers, just creates internal competition that doesn't need to be needed.
Yep to stay fair that kinda does make me think. Either that's the only place it can match broadwell. Or they are having stability issues with early silicon when heavily stressed with other programs. That would suck too lol. I guess it's just a wait game at this point. Only positive I can take out of this is that it does match broadwell ipc in at least one bench for sure rofl.
Thing is, Blender puts my 8 core CPU under 100% load. I'm not sure what instruction extensions or whatever it's using, but when it's running, it's working that thing 100%. I would think if it could handle Blender, it's not unstable. The only part I don't like about Blender is how many variables can be changed by the user, it'd be a nightmare as a CPU benchmark if every submission was tweaked a little by each user.
I'm afraid that there may never be a benchmark that can compare Intel and AMD CPUs. If a benchmark uses an instruction extension that AMD doesn't support, foul. We've already heard how Cinebench 15 is a no-go.
Like anything from AMD marketing, just take it with a grain of salt until official reviews comes out.
High blood pressure guess it goes both ways lol.
Radeon R9 490X 8GB News - AMD Polaris 10 GPU Reportedly Offers Near 980 Ti Performance For 300 USD
When they start showing things like this behind closed doors and people pick it up and think it means something totally different, I get worried.
So they haven't done this with Zen yet, which is a good thing. But what they have done so far is created hype, we don't know if its good hype of bad hype, just hope its good hype and they are creating a realistic expectation of their product, because it can be easily misconstrued by the internet masses and create disappointment. When you have articles saying "Zen beats Broardwell' and yes there are articles with titles like this, people will start to think that, and if that doesn't come out as reality, Zen will be damned to another bad product launch.
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defaultluser
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No, you can quit pretending that being a small chip designer is easy going.
VIA is not making profits. According to this Wall Street Journal page they lost money four years out of the last five:
2388.TW Stock Price & News - Via Technologies Inc. - Wall Street Journal
Scroll down to the "financials and click on "annual."
They made 1 Billion in 2015, but lost 10 billion through 2011-2014. That's pretty fucking volatile.
Also, their sales for that golden year of 2015 were down 27%, so they just managed that profit through cost-cutting.
And you people know exactly where that cuts come from: right from the very heart of the technology company, in the R&D side.
VIA hasn't made a new x86 chip architecture since 2008 (too expensive), and it's been about a decade since Intel and AMD plastered VIA's low-power MiniITX x86 motherboard business with Atom and Jaguar.
Now VIA is forced to be a provider of second-tier parts to motherboard manufacturers, like USB 3 controllers. This second-tier means they can spend less on designing the chips, but they can't command premium prices like the first-responders can. But you can see form those financials that they're just swimming in cash, right?
The key to VIA going down the drain is not being able to charge a premium for their products, like a FINISHED MiniITX motherboard (processor, chipset, other aux chips, all from VIA) selling for several hundred dollars. Once you become just another cog in someone else's chain, you feel the squeeze awful fast, unless you're huge.
The moment AMD ditches the consumer product end of things (GPUs, CPUs, chipsets), the premium they can charge for their parts disappears in a puff of smoke. Parts built to-spec with a standard are interchangeable with others, so now you have to be cheaper/faster/better than a lot of other companies or die. And there's not enough semi-custom console business out there to pay for AMD's running costs, and they're not the only shark in the tank with powerful GPU + CPU.
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Hmm, looking thru the link, they are making operating income, but that gets wipe out from SG&A expenses. Without delving more into SG&A expenses, I don't know whether majority of cost comes from amortization or not, but looking at the balance sheet, I am betting no.
defaultluser
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There's additional data there is you click on the "more" link:
2388.TW Financial Statements - Via Technologies Inc. - Wall Street Journal
It has cash flow and cap expenditures, if you want to delve that deeply. Again, you can switch between annual and 5 year for every section.
Total Debt has skyrocketed in the last few years, and they just staunched the bleeding in 2015. That sounds like a company that's doomed to me, how about you?
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Indeed, people just need to learn to set some realistic expectation and don't let the hype get to them. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, better to set low expectation and be surprise then to set high expectation and be disappointed.
Pieter3dnow
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Since when does this mean cancelled?
That whole thing is a joke how can you ever take these things serious. But this is moving away from the issue. If you look at the article it has nothing to do with expectations it is one clusterfuck of assumptions and nothing to back it up.
Since when has AMD been selling videocards (single gpu) below a decent price performance ratio. Now all of a sudden it drops $200 and performs as a $550 dollar card out of thin air, you got to be drinking a lot of cold medicine to swallow such nonsense ....
I never said I took it seriously, so I am not really sure what is your angle here?
Well it happened man lots of people were drinking cold medicine by the gallons, when AMD showed Polaris or talked about Polaris lol. You remember, I even though it was going to go past the gtx 980, more to the Nano level of performance. All because of the hype.
"Keep it in the pants" AMD should do that, more often
. Swinging it out there for everyone to see. It maybe big but if it can't get hard...... well.Hopefully that last comment doesn't rub any one the wrong way, if it does I will remove it and write up something more appropriate.
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Well it happened man lots of people were drinking cold medicine by the gallons, when AMD showed Polaris or talked about Polaris lol. You remember, I even though it was going to go past the gtx 980, more to the Nano level of performance. All because of the hype.
"Keep it in the pants" AMD should do that, more often
Hopefully that last comment doesn't rub any one the wrong way, if it does I will remove it and write up something more appropriate.
That last comment was perfect, no need to hold back.
luminousone
Weaksauce
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The problem isn't so much that AMD has been whipping it out, Its the damned censor bars that hide all the valuable details that would allow me to properly judge its qualities.
Palladium@SG
Limp Gawd
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Intel says they are selling more i7s than ever, NV having record quarters coinciding where share of $300+ cards are strongly increasing while the low end is dying off, Apple getting ~90% of overall profits with <20% marketshare...
But-but-but really, not having top end for margins isn't important. Maybe AMD wanna ask LG, HTC and the Chinese OEMs how do they feel to ship ~55% of all smartphones to compete for their combined pitiful ~1% overall profit share, where unlike them it doesn't even have the luxury of majority marketshare in a declining volume PC market to begin with.
The only way for that to happen is if Intel was still actively trying to screw themselves politically over like Netburst. The A64 won't be remembered as fondly if Intel chose to use Pentium M for desktop when they then had all the engineering resources to do it.
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Nside
Limp Gawd
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I've seen more i7s in OEM garbage more than ever... I don't think Intel is making much margin on those. They're usually stuffed inside little SFF web-surfer PCs using either integrated graphics or at most R9 360's, I kept seeing Dell models like that pop up on Slickdeals for around $450 - $550 respectively ... I wouldn't doubt they are selling more on the DIY side too, The i5s are overpriced IMHO... If there was a faster CPU than the top i5 that was also cheaper, and had a cheaper motherboard (usually seems like AMD boards always cost less) I bet it would sell well... I'm not saying ignore the top-end, I'm saying get the middle out there first... Samsung didn't start out selling high-end phones right away when they got into the market...
I would honestly prefer AMD focus on APUs, That's somewhere where Intel can't really compete. It also puts them in a position to get some more OEM business, if they don't let themselves get screwed again, that is... Put an APU in those little SFF web-surfing machines, that makes more sense than an i7...
Shintai
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Nside, K sales is up 23% from the last result.
People move up in SKUs. Pascal and Maxwell was other examples of this.
But you are right about the APU. The first Zen chip should have been an APU. Not something that comes a year later and have to fight 10nm chips. (Q4 2017 or later). An APU is the only place they have a chance to compete.
People move up in SKUs. Pascal and Maxwell was other examples of this.
But you are right about the APU. The first Zen chip should have been an APU. Not something that comes a year later and have to fight 10nm chips. (Q4 2017 or later). An APU is the only place they have a chance to compete.
Intels latest iGPUs actually match AMD APUs in most situations; saying Intel can't compete is a bit much.
Shintai
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If that's true, they messed up the last advantage they had. By negligent the APU from the beginning till now.
To be fair, all on-die GPUs are going to be starved by memory bandwidth; that's why AMDs APUs are basically tapped out. They performance limited by the comparatively slow speed of main system memory.
Point being, all on-die GPUs will be limited by the memory bus, so over time, they'll end up with similar performance, as pure computational power is limited by RAM transfer speeds. From there, the winner is the one with the fastest/most on-die memory, and the only memory you can put on-die which won't drive up power requirements is ESRAM, which is EXACTLY what Intel does with the Iris Pro. That's why the IRIS Pro beats all of AMDs current lineup of APUs.
As an aside, this is the EXACT argument I made against HBM: Main memory is the limiting factor in integrated GPU performance, and putting RAM on die is unrealistic. As a result, dedicated GPUs aren't being replaced anytime soon. APU like systems are good for mobile where performance takes a backseat to power requirements, but won't ever replace dedicated GPUs for high-end users.
Point being, all on-die GPUs will be limited by the memory bus, so over time, they'll end up with similar performance, as pure computational power is limited by RAM transfer speeds. From there, the winner is the one with the fastest/most on-die memory, and the only memory you can put on-die which won't drive up power requirements is ESRAM, which is EXACTLY what Intel does with the Iris Pro. That's why the IRIS Pro beats all of AMDs current lineup of APUs.
As an aside, this is the EXACT argument I made against HBM: Main memory is the limiting factor in integrated GPU performance, and putting RAM on die is unrealistic. As a result, dedicated GPUs aren't being replaced anytime soon. APU like systems are good for mobile where performance takes a backseat to power requirements, but won't ever replace dedicated GPUs for high-end users.
Shintai
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AMD had the knowhow to do ESRAM to boost APU performance. They also got knowhow in sideport memory. But its a conflict of interest.
No, they don't. If you are talking about Iris Pro sure. Otherwise no.
Don't you think if it was that Microsoft, Sony, etc would have gone with Intel? There's a reason for that.
Linux doesn't count on the account that OSS drivers simply don't work on Intel, and Intel's official driver isn't much better. And top tier Skylake iGPUs match what AMD has, even discounting Iris Pro (though that's the most obvious win case for Intel).
The primary point remains: Because of the memory bandwidth bottleneck, the performance gap between the two will continue to shrink, so AMDs basically blown it's advantage in that space.
Just because you say it is doesn't make it so.
Just a reminder these are scores on the awful BD core on Kaveri (2 generations old at this point) .If Intel was that competitive don't you think that Microsoft and Sony would have picked them? There's a reason they didn't.
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Linux doesn't count? How so? That would be like saying Direct X11 doesn't count.
lolfail9001
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Unless you can prove that Bioshock is CPU limited in this scenario, CPU core matters little. Btw, Kaveri is only 1 gen old, it's Steamroller.Just because you say it is doesn't make it so.
Just a reminder these are scores on the awful BD core on Kaveri (2 generations old at this point) .If Intel was that competitive don't you think that Microsoft and Sony would have picked them? There's a reason they didn't.
Next: you are comparing apples and oranges, because console APUs are a very different beast to usual APUs AMD taps out.
Third: you don't do anything to address his valid point about bandwidth limitations.
Wait a minute there, the only driver that exists for Intel GPUs on Linux is the open source one. I'll agree that it sucks performance wise though.
Um no it's two generations old. Bristal Ridge just released and Carrizo came before that. You are looking at just the processor core. I will agree that at this level it's unlikely to be CPU bound.
Not really. There's no magical GPU in the consoles.
I never refuted that. Actually since both iGPUs are bandwidth starved exactly how can anyone say that Intel is architecturally equal to AMD's GPU performance-wise? This is why I mention consoles. They aren't bandwidth starved.
lolfail9001
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Bristol Ridge is literally desktop Carrizo with DDR4, that's it.
There is, actually. To start with: it's at least twice larger than largest iGPU in desktop APUs.
Well, since both are bandwidth-starved, you can definitely say that Intel is architecturally equal to AMD's GPU performance-wise. Since they, as you see, perform fairly close in GPU-limited scenarios, nowadays. I mean, you can't predict how would 6970HQ behave if you would lift any power and bandwidth limitations it potentially has.
AMD would say otherwise. You know since they gave it a different name and stuff. But you are free to tell AMD how many generations of a chip they have. BTW considering we are talking about bandwidth you don't think a new memory controller is going to affect performance?
So size to you dictates architectural design..... sounds flaky. Second the APU is based off of Jaguar, which you can buy in desktop form today. The IGPU is based off of the 7850. There's no magic there. If anything the memory subsystems is where the magic is.
Aside from the fact you are comparing a 2014 chip vs a chip that came out this year, I think it probably would be best to have a range of resolutions to make that claim. But you are free to look at one resolution and say something like that.
lolfail9001
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AMD likes different names, they have like 3 different names for Cape Verde GPU, for example.
Next: sure, it is going to play part. Up to you to define how much of a part.
Size and entirely different memory model. Ah, and entirely different APIs to top it off, even if ISA is the same as that of Kaveri/Tahiti/Pitcairn/Cape Verde. Ah, not to mention the fact that "iGPU is based off of the 7850" sounds bizarre to say the least, because you are claiming that iGPU is based off of dGPU.
Range of resolutions would be great, but irrelevant, since really, iGPUs are not suitable for playing beyond 1080p even in relatively lightweight games. So, low settings 1080p in this case is 4k of dGPUs.
JustReason
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Intel drivers for iGPU overall suck royal raunchy donkey nuts. Bandwidth be damned. There is a reason they don't show frametime graphs anymore for Intel iGPU tests.