AMD Launches Enthusiast A10-7860K APU, New Mainstream CPUs and Wraith Cooler (hothardware.com) 81
MojoKid writes: AMD apparently wasn't done making announcements back at CES 2016. Today the company has shared news of new APUs, processors, fansink coolers, and motherboard updates. The company has been working with motherboard makers to enable a new wave of socket AM3+ and FM2+ motherboards with support for technologies like USB 3.1 (some with type-C and M.2 solid state drives (SSDs). Many of the updated motherboards are already available. AMD also has a trio of new APUs / processors coming down the pipe --the A10-7860K, the A6-7470K, and the Athlon X4 845. The Athlon X4 845 is a quad-core part, featuring four Excavator-class cores clocked at up to 3.8GHz. The processor has 2MB of L2 cache, 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and a TDP of 65W, but no built-in graphics. The A6-7470K is a dual Steamroller-core APU (clocked at up to 4GHz), with 8 GPU cores (at up to 800MHz), 1MB of L2 cache, 16 PCIe lanes, and a 65W TDP. The A10-7860K is a little beefier with four Steamroller cores (clocked up to 4GHz), with 8 GPU cores (clocked up to 757MHz), 1MB of L2 cache, 16 PCIe lanes, and a 65W TDP. Both the 7860K and 7470K are unlocked for more flexible overclocking. Finally, the FX-8370 bundled with AMD's new Wraith cooler will be arriving today at the same price point as the previous edition. According to AMD, the Wraith cooler offers 24% more surface area than the previous PIB cooler and the fan pushes 34% more air.
Mini ITX (Score:2)
A change in the Ax meaning? (Score:3)
I thought A4 = 4 cores, A8 = 8 cores. I guess they're getting rid of that in favor of bigger numbers because marketing reasons?
Re:A change in the Ax meaning? (Score:5, Funny)
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How do you get 4 + 8/2 = 10?
Re:A change in the Ax meaning? (Score:5, Funny)
How do you get 4 + 8/2 = 10?
You have to use Congressional Math.
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A5 = 4+M/2 / pi squared. A4 + A8 = 640k out to be enough for anybody. The steamroller core has been downclocked and upscaled from 9398587874 Mhz to the new F-35 Pratt & Whittney GPU afterburner core. East : Pass. Which TOTALLY pales in comparison to the new Intel HectaCore GigaQuad, 19th generation.
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This chip should technically be an A12 due to that reason, i have an A10 - 7300 in my laptop and it's true to the naming convention with 4 CPU + 6 GPU cores.
I'm not sure what happened here though.
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Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losing a (Score:3)
Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losing and this is a bad idea.
Re:Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losin (Score:5, Informative)
AMD didn't technically "cut" PCIe lanes since the underlying chip never had the PCIe lanes to begin with. That Athlon is a rebranded version of "Carrizo" that technically launched last year as a soldered-on mobile only part. It's available in a relatively small selection of notebooks but hasn't taken the market by storm.
Anyway, the Athlon part is just Carrizo put into a socket instead of being soldered to a board. Since Carrizo was only a mobile part designed for low-end systems, it never had 16 full lanes of PCIe connectivity to begin with.
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AMD had a brief period of success in the x86 market in the early 2000's Until between the Pentium 4 and the Intel Core 2. Where people actually wanted AMD Chips not as a chip ripoff of Intel Chips, but because they were a serious competition with many good features that were valued by end use desktop users.
Re:Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losin (Score:5, Informative)
AMD still make machines that people actually use (I'm running an FX-8320E eight core now, and for my needs it's a great CPU).
I'll also point out that x64 was created by AMD.
It's a little bit on the bullshit side to claim they had a "brief period of success in the early 2000's" ... they're still a company with multi-billion dollar revenues.
They're doing just fine.
Re:Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losin (Score:4, Insightful)
And you called out the parent for bullshit? Oh wait, you said the parent had a little bullshit, so I guess you went for the full monty.
Even if Zen actually does what it is supposed to do, there's a very real possibility that AMD won't exist after 2019 when their crippling bond obligations come due.
Anybody who has seen AMD's financials with 6% and 7% interest rates on notes that were issued when the Fed was basically giving money away for free knows that AMD is far, far from "doing just fine." There are plenty of former AMD employees who could tell you that as well.
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And you called out the parent for bullshit? Oh wait, you said the parent had a little bullshit, so I guess you went for the full monty.
Even if Zen actually does what it is supposed to do, there's a very real possibility that AMD won't exist after 2019 when their crippling bond obligations come due.
Anybody who has seen AMD's financials with 6% and 7% interest rates on notes that were issued when the Fed was basically giving money away for free knows that AMD is far, far from "doing just fine." There are plenty of former AMD employees who could tell you that as well.
Only because Intel payola [1] during those years didn't really get punished (sure they paid a fine, but honestly they got off pretty easy) while AMD spent all that time developing x86 and Intel just embraced it.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Intel will not allow AMD to die (Score:2)
Re: Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losi (Score:2)
If losing billions is considered "doing just fine", then sure they're doing just fine. I mean, when was the last time they had a profitable year? Not to mention their revenues keep falling. Yes they're doing just fine.
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Yeah they did great last year.
They lost less profit than the year prior. PROGRESS!!!!!
Sort of. (Score:3)
AMD is a large company with many divisions. Some are "doing just fine", others not so much. Pointedly in the context of this particular thread, the previous poster is correct, in that AMD had "brief period of success in the early 2000's", however in terms of mid-range to enthusiast retail CPU market. At the low end they do fine, and for the server market they do even better.
You're right, the x64 was created by AMD, during that period of time, and was cutting edge and way before its time. Too far, in that no
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I am not sure if they are doing well on the business side but their CPUs and GPUs are more than good enough for many users (if not most users). The market in general is mature and saturated. My aging AMD box performs well enough that ANY full system upgrade would seem gratuitous.
Intel may be the big bad monopoly but it's GPUs are less than exciting.
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However, my new laptop is a core i7-4720HQ, it runs circles around the FXs. So, they are sufficient, but as good 3rd and 4th gen i5s steadily decrease in price, the price/performance ratio swings ever more in intel's favor.
I like AMD. I really do, but they are not in a good spot. I really hope the zen CPUs later this year help stem the bleeding.
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Did you try, cough, playing games with it?
The only RUNTIME demanding (i.e. "just wait a bit longer" won't cut it) tasks that I can through at my notebook are games.
And at that kind of tasks, AMD Carrizo notebook chip pwns most things Intel has offer (bar Iris Pro, which is much more expensive)
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Yeah! They're losing money on almost every sale [ycharts.com], but they're making it up through volume...
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If my aging brain remembers correctly, AMD was the first to push the x86_64 in the AMD64 architecture when all Intel had for 64 bit chips was IA-64; and they were also the first to bring AMDV/VT-x to midrange desktop chips (for a while it was only available on Xeons from Intel). They also had better performance per watt than the Intel Chips at the time. It was a good time for AMD but they fell behind when Intel came out with Core2 (based on Pentium M). Since Core2 (and subsequently the iN series) they've
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It wasn't just being able to run more than 4GB of RAM. It was being able to "use" all 4GB of your RAM. You used to be capped around 3.25GB due to hardware I/O mapping. If you had more than one video card at the time you could have under 3GB of RAM available.
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It was never the hardware only the way a consumer OS mapped it into memory. Microsoft didn't have this problem with their server operating systems (not even Win2k) and neither did anyone else. It was nothing but a design flaw in a small number of consumer operating systems by a single vendor.
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A 32bit OS can address 4GB of memory. Hardware devices overlay memory addresses to allow I/O with the OS, and something like a dedicated graphics card will have its own memory that also takes up addressing space. The hardware wasn't just a graphics card but everything, serial/parallel ports, PCI controller and slots, IDE controller, etc.
There was a fix to allow addressing more than 4GB with 32bit hardware with something called Physical Address Extension (PAE). This was active in Microsoft's server OSes,
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Is the dongle an external one? VMWare and VirtualBox will let you directly access a physical USB, serial port, and parallel port device.
Yes, thankfully it can now (Score:2)
Anyway the point is the 32 bit server line of MS stuff didn't have the design flaw, for a brief period the server and desktop line was the same thing, and that I have an example to hand
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I think the AMD64 architecture was probably the most significant in those days because it meant that you could run more than 4GB of RAM without PAE overhead.
They were also the first x86 vendor to utilize an on-die memory controller, which was a huge advancement for its time. This gave a noticeable performance improvement over systems using on-board controllers.
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That is true, but as the saying goes, you can only perform that trick once. What do you do for an encore?
Intel did it awhile later and negated the benefit, from a competitive point of view.
AMD has been very helpful in pushing Intel along, I would not want to see the x86 CPU business without them. But that day may be coming soon, AMD is in a lot of trouble.
Re: Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losi (Score:2)
Which is odd since Core 2, without an on-die memory controller, had higher IPC than K8. I never really understood how that was possible.
Re: Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is los (Score:2)
Re: Athlon X4 845 why cut pci-e lanes? amd is losi (Score:5, Informative)
I would have had to buy an i7 at 2x the price to match the FX8350, and why do that when I could use that money to upgrade my graphics card to the point that no Intel processor could have matched the performance increase?
Not everyone is a Saudi Prince, after all. I have a job and a family to feed, and with only $1500 to spend on a gaming rig, why waste money on Intel?
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It also depends on when you want to spend the money: Intel is currently a lot more power efficient.
I'm excitedly awaiting Zen though.
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That FX has its place, for some people it makes sense.
However, don't let benchmarks fool you, the i5 is better than you think, at least the new ones are.
AMD's big problem is that Intel keeps cranking out new chips that are a bit faster and consume less power every year, while AMD's chips have largely not changed in three years.
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We shall see... even if AMD gets chips out this year on the 14nm GF scale, that doesn't mean they'll solve their issues. Intel has been on 14nm for how long now? 10nm is coming in a year or so?
I honestly wish AMD the best of luck, we need them to keep Intel honest, I have no desire to pay monopoly prices... but the future isn't pretty for AMD.
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AMD doesn't have 5 years left, there is a reason their stock is where it is. The investors know the company is on borrowed time.
It essentially has no value, beyond its patents and deal with Intel, the rest of the enterprise is worthless, according to Wall Street. (who isn't always right, but can be right from time to time)
AMD is burning cash, racking up debt, and has a lot due in the next three years. They won't have any income to pay it off and likely can't finance it anymore.
This is sad, since we need
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Side note:
AMD has less than $1 billion in cash left, bleeding a bit more each year, with $600 million in cash needed Jan 1, 2018 or they default on the 2020 bank debt.
AMD has a market cap of $1.6 billion. Intel is nearly $150 billion. Intel has over $25 billion in cash on hand.
Intel could buy AMD with cash more than 10 times over.
This is not a battle of equals, sad to say. AMD has done a bunch of tricks in the past few years to survive, but they are running out of them.
Example: AMD recently sold its head
I hate to say it (Score:2)
"Enthusiast"?? (Score:1)
Where's the "enthusiasm" over a retread of parts that they launched in 2014 that weren't even very high end [by AMD standards of "high end"] back in 2014?
I don't think you could find anybody who looks at a Core i3 or Pentium -- which compete with these parts on performance and price at much lower power envelopes -- as "enthusiast" parts.
Why is AMD even announcing these parts when they are re-launching what are basically the same 28nm process parts in 3 months with a tweaked memory controller in the AM4 plat
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Why is AMD even announcing these parts when they are re-launching what are basically the same 28nm process parts in 3 months with a tweaked memory controller in the AM4 platform?
Because AMD hasn't released anything substantial in the 'enthusiast' realm since 2012(!), and Zen isn't going to show its head until sometime in Q4 of this year. They've put a lot of eggs into this APU basket need to do something to try to remind people that they're still alive, still releasing new products, etc. Even though everything they've released in the last year or two has been retreads of retreads and nothing really 'new'.
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I suspect AMD knows that all too well, but they don't have the money to do it.
A 15 min review of Intel and AMD's financials will tell you all you need to know about why AMD is in a massive pile of trouble.
I remember thunderbird with great fondness, but the world moved on and AMD could not afford to keep up. Between buying ATI and the cost of shrinking nodes going up and up, they just couldn't keep up with Intel.
It remains a real question if AMD can remain a going concern beyond the next few years, their re
How do they compare? (Score:2)
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You mean that they need to produce a CPU at a price point that NO ONE here would have any intention of buying?
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*we* are not the market AMD is shooting for. AMD is still a big player in the low end desktop and laptop segment and one way they differentiate themselves from the low end Intel chips is better graphics for the same price. For $300 at Best Buy (yeah I know..) you can get either a laptop with a cheap i3 mobile Intel chip with UMA graphics or a comparable laptop with an AMD A8 and passable Radeon APU. The processors are in the same ballpark on ops with the Intel part taking the win:
http://www.cpubenchmark.
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hmmm... what i see is that intel cpu's CPUmark/$Price is only half of amds
Down the PIKE! (Score:2)
PIKE, you "editors," not PIPE.
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I did not know this. Now I do, and I will harangue others about it. Thank you.
X4 845 Is A Nice Chip For $70 (Score:2)
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Getting paid how much per Intel CPU sold? Because it appears to be doing jack shit in terms of getting them out of a hole.
https://www.google.com/finance?cid=327 - Switch to the 5 year view
If they don't make a killer CPU with Zen, they better think long and hard about which branch of industry they want to remain in.
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While the share price is bad, a bigger issue is the total market cap.
AMD is only worth $1.86 billion. Intel could buy them with th spare change in their couch cushions.
The market sees what is going on, and has priced AMD properly. The company is worth maybe it's patents and nothing else. Everything it sells just burns cash and has no net enterprise value.
It is a real question if AMD can remain a going concern in three years when it's bonds become due, it likely won't be able to replace them.
Yeah, right (Score:2)
Can't really trust AMD and their "core" counts any more. Used to buy AMD CPUs almost exclusively in the past. Then got a top of the line, supposedly 8-core, FX-8350 (two of them in fact). When tried running 8 processes in parallel, got about 40% performance drop. After reading the fine print, turns out it has only 4 independent units, and pairs of "cores" sharing resources, effectively making it a 4-core CPU in reality. Fuck you, AMD!
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However, the FPU is powerful enough that it is unlikely that you can saturate it with only a single APU handling the integer side of things. It is possible that wwalker hit the FPU limit, but I would guess that it was some other scaling problem instead. Memory bandwidth or cache perhaps, or simply hitting TDP and throttling.
Getting 60% per-core performance on a 16-way isn't that terrible anyway.
Not that I would recommend AMD for anything serious these days, sadly.
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Wraith Cooler (Score:3)