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AMD Hardware Technology

AMD Declares Ryzen Will Be a Four-Year Architecture (extremetech.com) 67

Posted by BeauHD from the tick-tock-tock-tock dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech : Having spent over four years designing the architecture, the company plans to keep it around for at least that long. That's according to CTO Mark Papermaster, who was on-hand to discuss the chip. First things first -- AMD is promising a hard launch for Ryzen, without any paper launches, limited availability, or limited product introductions. When Zen debuts it'll debut in multiple (still unknown) configurations, not a single eight-core part. As PCWorld details, Papermaster also confirmed the four-year target and emphasized that it didn't mean AMD wouldn't iterate the core. "We're not going tick-tock," Papermaster said. "Zen is going to be tock, tock, tock." There are several ways to read this sentence. Tick-tock refers to Intel's previous practice of introducing new CPU architectures in one product cycle and new manufacturing nodes in the other. AMD has never strictly deployed an equivalent approach over multiple product cycles. I wouldn't necessarily conclude that Papermaster is saying AMD won't deploy Zen on new manufacturing nodes over time, but that AMD intends to implement an aggressive series of tweaks and improvements to the current core as time goes by. There's a significant lag between when a design tapes out and when it ships to consumers. This means AMD's CPU design team is almost certainly hard at work on Zen's successor already, even though Zen hasn't actually shipped yet. While I can't make any concrete predictions about how Zen will compete against specific products in Intel's lineup, the demos we've seen and the product information already available has convinced me that Ryzen will be at least a meaningful and significant improvement on AMD's overall power efficiency, performance, and performance-per-watt.
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AMD Declares Ryzen Will Be a Four-Year Architecture More

AMD Declares Ryzen Will Be a Four-Year Architecture

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  • tock or tick (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wouldn't it be tick, tick, tick?

  • how do marketers manage this (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Huge paragraph, does create tension in each phrase, yet amazingly 0 information on what the bloody CPU actually does.

  • ..and send some freaking samples to reviewers!

    I'd appreciate it if Jay and Linus got their hands on the thing.

    • Re: AMD get your act together... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Look, they're not going to do a paper launch, or ship vaporware, so they're not going to hype up the processor before you can buy the multiple configurations, at least one of which will have eight physical cores and be faster than some Intel processor. They showed benchmarks, they're talking up the marchitechture and particular configurations, what part of "no paper launch" don't you understand?

    • Re:AMD get your act together... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by supremebob ( 574732 ) <themejunky AT geocities DOT com> on Saturday January 07, 2017 @08:14AM (#53623005) Journal

      I fear that their top end chip is still getting stomped by the Core i5 in most benchmarks, so they are still making last minute tweaks to improve performance. They can only do so much at this point, though.

      I'd like to be wrong about that, but until we start seeing reviews I'm going to be a skeptic.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lumpy ( 12016 )

        Except you now need to define what i5 and i7 chip. right now intel is selling i5 and i7 labelled chips that are actually slow as hell M chips with iProcessor branding.

        • So you're saying that the AMD chip is being stomped by slow as hell M chips with iProcessor branding?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            As I understand it, Lumpy is claiming that Ryzen beats rebranded Core M CPUs but not enthusiast-class i5 and i7 CPUs.

            • They must not have watched the New Horizon Event and paid attention. they explained it all. Then again this is slashdot. Where you defend what you feel not whats fact!

      • Re:AMD get your act together... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday January 07, 2017 @09:29AM (#53623145) Homepage

        I fear that their top end chip is still getting stomped by the Core i5 in most benchmarks, so they are still making last minute tweaks to improve performance. They can only do so much at this point, though. I'd like to be wrong about that, but until we start seeing reviews I'm going to be a skeptic.

        What AMD will do that Intel won't do is release a mainstream chip with no graphics. If you look at the Skylake quadcore die [techpowerup.com] you'll see something like 40% of it is graphics, 40% CPU cores and 20% miscellaneous. You could put four more CPU cores in the same space. Obviously you won't have built in graphics but for gamers you'll have a dGPU anyway, so nothing much of value was lost. Intel has force bundled this so they can kill the low end graphics market, but as a dGPU gamer you're paying an "GPU tax" for something you don't use. Of course you could move to the X99 platform and "enthusiast" CPUs, but then you're paying an even bigger premium for that. I don't know if they'll match an i5 single threaded, but it's a long time since games started to have to work with dual and quad cores. If games scale well to eight cores I'm sure a Zen octo-core will beat an i5 quad-core by a considerable margin. Of course Intel could just "mainstream" their enthusiast platform to compete, but that would mean lowering prices a lot. Either way it's a pretty big win for the consumer.

        • Not sure nothing is lost though. AMD have their hsa thing which lets you pass pointers between the cpu and you. Gives very low latency calculations on gpgpu stuff. The weedy APUs managed to completely stomp the top end i7 on a few benchmarks optimized for HSA. Obviously not everything is applicable, but more is when your latency is low.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by guises ( 2423402 )

          Intel has force bundled this so they can kill the low end graphics market

          Is that really the objective? Why would Intel want to kill the low end graphics market? It competes with none of their products.

      • Flight Simulators (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Having built 3 flight simulators around the i7 we took a risk on the AMD 8350 for the next machine. The risk paid off. The savings in the CPU allowed us to use dual Nvidia 1070s as opposed to the 970s that are in the other machines.

        Since the majority of the workload falls on the Nvidia GPU (3 screens at 5760x1080), for our purposes the AMD based machine is far superior to its Intel counterpart for significantly less money. I would be willing to recommend it for any gaming rig.

        The lesson to be learned is

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

          Having built 3 flight simulators around the i7 we took a risk on the AMD 8350 for the next machine. The risk paid off. The savings in the CPU allowed us to use dual Nvidia 1070s as opposed to the 970s that are in the other machines.

          Or you could simply back off to an i5.

          Since the majority of the workload falls on the Nvidia GPU (3 screens at 5760x1080), for our purposes the AMD based machine is far superior to its Intel counterpart for significantly less money. I would be willing to recommend it for any gami

          • But the 8350 is cheaper than an i5. And AMD motherboards are also cheaper than Intel motherboards. Between those two factors the cost saving can be as much as $100, which the OP spent on upgrading the GPUs.

    • Re:AMD get your act together... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 07, 2017 @08:26AM (#53623025)

      You mean, make their newest product available to people so they can sabotage their launch by "benchmarking" it with synthetic software which doesn't really support it and is specifically tuned to run well on Intel hardware and compiled with a compiler which specifically [techreport.com] sabotages [github.com] AMD CPU's? Why would they want to do that?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Linus and Jay usually use real world applications and games to test PC configs... sooooo no.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
          And how much of the consumer market reads anything by Linus or Jay? They see click-baity articles: "AMD trounced again, find out how Intel surprised everyone"

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
            To extend that further, for 99% of the population, tape-out simply means a trip to the office suply store.

      • You mean, make their newest product available to people so they can sabotage their launch by "benchmarking" it with synthetic software which doesn't really support it and is specifically tuned to run well on Intel hardware and compiled with a compiler which specifically [techreport.com] sabotages [github.com] AMD CPU's? Why would they want to do that?

        Intel does not have exclusivity on intelligence, though for a few years they have had exclusivity on marketing. So, AMD is leap-frogging over Intel. In the future, ARM systems will leapfrog over the two. Technology moves on. Time to buy AMD shares.

    • Yeah... the new Intel Kaby Lake launch was a flop in terms of performance increases, but at least they managed to get product out to reviewers in time for CES.

  • They should talk to the old Romans (Score:5, Funny)

    by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Saturday January 07, 2017 @09:07AM (#53623109)

    Their architecture is still around two millennia later...

  • Dear AMD..... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Saturday January 07, 2017 @09:09AM (#53623113) Homepage

    Give us real 8 cores with 8 FPU's. none of this cheap ass corner cutting. Intel has lost their way and you have a chance to become a real contender once again.

    8 cores 4 ghz, 8 FPU's and make it faster than hell. go to 5ghz if you want, but some of us do real work and need high speeds in the cores and multiple cores.

    • You can get 2 Xeon E5 2670 CPUs for about $100 nowadays. Sure, Sandy Bridge is 6 years old, but they have great performance even today.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DreadCthulhu ( 772304 )
      That is exactly what AMD is doing with Ryzen; top models will have 8 cores, each with a integer & FPU. A French PC magazine benchmarked a low-clocked engineering sample (3.15ghz base, 3.4 ghz boost) and found for productivity work it was faster than an Intel 6800k. The one AMD was showing off at CES is clocked at 3.6 ghz, with 3.9ghz boost.

    • Re:Dear AMD..... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Saturday January 07, 2017 @02:38PM (#53624545)

      Give us real 8 cores with 8 FPU's. none of this cheap ass corner cutting. Intel has lost their way and you have a chance to become a real contender once again.

      Your FPU wish is granted [anandtech.com] (sort of?). Two complete FPUs per core, implemented as two each parallel Fadd and Fmul units, capable of simultaneous scheduling and simultaneous floating point register access, per the detailed diagram here [anandtech.com]. The loader is 128 bits wide, so it does look like it can suck in, calculate, and shove out two 64 bit floating point instructions simultaneously, indefinitely, no bottleneck, with fancy dedicated instruction scheduling of its own.

      As for 8 "real" cores (whatever a "real" core is these days), this [anandtech.com] makes mention of a "CPU Complex" of 4 cores. The implication being, you might see more than one CPU complex on the same chip. But that diagram should be telling you why Intel has been reluctant to give you 8 "real" cores. With four cores, your L3 cache already has to be 16-way associative to behave reasonably. You want to jam 4 more cores into that diagram. Looks like there's room, top and bottom, right? And double the cache size, to 16 MB. If you want it to behave as efficiently as the 4 core version, you're wanting 64-way associativity. Which is ridiculous, and probably doesn't scale as well as you'd hoped. What it sounds like AMD will be doing is plunking two of those CPU Complexes down side by side, then linking them to each other via the modern version of HyperTransport. The CPUs become ccNUMA within a single chip.

      I'm afraid you're doomed to disappointment with Intel and AMD both. Without sandwich stacked circuits, building an L3 cache for 8 cores is just infeasible. You can fit all the transistors you need, but hooking them all together in a useful arrangement requires an absurd number of paths.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      Is there a reason your floating point kernels can't be written in OpenCL to execute on pixel shaders?

    • Yes, zen does have full fpu's in each core (2x 128 bit add and mul), or can be scheduled as a single 256 bit FMA operation. A good micro-op cache, and two threads per core possible when SMT is enabled. (should be unless you turn it off, as some unusual chache intensive and context sensitive processes perform better with it disabled. )

  • Shut up and take my money... (Score:3)

    by BlueCoder ( 223005 ) on Saturday January 07, 2017 @02:31PM (#53624509)

    What I'm looking for right now is motherboards! Where is ASUS in all their lineup? They have a B350? Where is their X370's? It's going to be Gigabyte and ASUS so I need all various iterations of the motherboards to be in reviews hands now so that I can decide and have it a couple weeks before the processors come out. Then the processor can arrive by overnight mail and voila. I might have even bought they old processor in the new AM4 package to bootstrap with.

    • So, Ive wondered the same. I currently switched to ASUS for my motherboards gpu's and more. They seem to have good quality at a decent price. The only thing i can come up with, hoping its true. Now this is not official this is my crazy brain. Theyre waiting to get their hands on the top end competition enthusiast board, and going to try to kill them. then they will create their boards at 2x the durability and grab the late but brilliant "let me see what they fucked up on release and wait for them to fix it"

    • What I'm looking for right now is motherboards! Where is ASUS in all their lineup? They have a B350? Where is their X370's? It's going to be Gigabyte and ASUS so I need all various iterations of the motherboards to be in reviews hands now so that I can decide and have it a couple weeks before the processors come out. Then the processor can arrive by overnight mail and voila. I might have even bought they old processor in the new AM4 package to bootstrap with.

      I don't have your discretionary spending, therefore, my purchase will be with constraints of budget and expandability. I may choose a high end motherboard, and a low end cpu and in a years time, go for the top end cpu. Or I may wait while Intel prices fall and choose one of their give-aways. Competition leads to squeezing profits, while encouraging major research into better architectures.

      I am not a hardware geek, but I recently read a detailed ARM configuration, that is x86_64 compatible, with shared memory and on the one mother board, the I/O processor. The I/O processor can be upgraded, without having to buy a new system. Without hard disks, keyboard, power supply and monitor you are looking at around $300.00 price range.

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