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AMD Graphics Hardware Technology

AMD Unveils Zen 2 CPU Architecture, Navi GPU Architecture and a Slew of Products (hothardware.com) 167

MojoKid writes: AMD let loose today with a number of high profile launches at the E3 2019 Expo in Los Angeles, CA. The company disclosed its full Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 series microarchitecture, which AMD claims offers an IPC uplift of 15% generation over generation, thanks to better branch prediction, higher integer throughput, and reduced effective latency to memory. Zen 2 also significantly beefs up floating point throughput with double the FP performance of the previous generation. AMD also announced a 16-core/32-thread variant, dubbed Ryzen 3950X, that drops at $750 -- a full $950 cheaper than a similar spec 16-core Intel Core i9-9960X. On the graphics side, AMD's RDNA architecture in Navi will power the company's new Radeon RX 5700 series, which is said to offer competitive performance to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 and 2060 series. The Navi-based GPU at the heart of the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 series is manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process node and features GDDR6 memory, along with PCI Express 4.0 interface support. Versus AMD's previous generation GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, RDNA delivers more than 50% better performance-per-watt and 25% better overall performance. Greater than 50% of that improvement comes from architecture optimizations according to AMD; the GPU also gets a boost from its 7nm process and frequency gains. Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT cards will be available in market on July 7th, along with AMD Ryzen 3000 chips, but pricing hasn't been established yet for the Radeon GPUs.
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AMD Unveils Zen 2 CPU Architecture, Navi GPU Architecture and a Slew of Products

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday June 10, 2019 @11:01PM (#58743094)
    An RX 580. Pretty solid, but I'll admit to a few crashes in Far Cry 3 and there's some known bugs with anti-aliasing in Assassin's Creed 4. Still, it's been overall pretty solid and I paid $100 bucks used for it. I'm also surprised how well older games run on it. I played through Psychonauts on it and a good chunk of Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing Transformed.

    AMD seems to have gotten their act together with drivers, at least as much as nVidia. If they can get power consumption under control they might finally get back some market share.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The RX580 was pretty competitive on power consumption, compared to the equivalent Nvidia cards. The current desktop Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs are very competitive too, although less so for laptops.

      • but I'd generally heard it draws about 65 watts more than the 1060 6gb (the equivalent nVidia). I hate to say it, but nVidia seems to have a big edge there.

        Am I totally off base here? Happy to be proven wrong :).
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I had a quick look at some reviews and they seem pretty similar. I have a 480 which is the same architecture but less power efficient and wouldn't say it's particularly bad either.

    • by sad_ ( 7868 )

      "I'm also surprised how well older games run on it."

      i don't understand, is there a problem with old games on modern gpu's?
      i would assume they only run better as the tech in the gpu advances.

  • by samwichse ( 1056268 ) on Monday June 10, 2019 @11:02PM (#58743102)

    Remember when AMD was stuck on Bulldozer and related cores? Intel does, because they basically didn't advance for that entire period.

    Now AMD is back and killing it and Intel is scrambling again. Competition is heating up and I got to buy a 4-core 8-thread chip that draws peanuts at idle and 65w all-out for $150, AND it includes graphics equivalent to the low end discreet market.

    I missed this rapid progress these last 5 years. Fuck you Intel for riding "good enough" forever.

    • by imperious_rex ( 845595 ) on Monday June 10, 2019 @11:58PM (#58743248)
      I'm usually no fan of inflated CEO pay, but in the case of Lisa Su, she has earned every penny AMD pays her. She has done an absolutely fantastic job of turning AMD around, from a 2nd rate (at best) player in the CPU business to a serious threat to Intel with their Ryzen line of CPUs and approach to CPU performance and pricing. Intel's "good enough" strategy of complacency has provided the opening AMD needed to pull ahead and kick ass. Keep up the great work Lisa!
      • Agreed. Turning AMD around was a bloody miracle! The fact that they are competitive from both a finance AND performance POV with ThreadRipper is almost mind blowing. My next rig is going to be a ThreadRipper one.

        Kudos to Lisa for doing the next to impossible. Almost everyone thought AMD was a goner when they sold their FABS but that thankfully has worked out for them.

        Intel has (historically) almost always been faster but you sure pay through the nose for it! Glad to see AMD giving customers what they want.

        • when Intel isn't "cheating" on benchmarks by detecting they are running on non-Intel chips and defaulting to slower code!

          Or rather, running micro-specific code when an Intel proc is detected.
          It's a subtle, but important difference.

          It's definitely a questionable practice, but I think it does the argument no good by framing it disingenuously.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Not "rather". What he says is exactly what happened [agner.org].

            If the CPU is not from Intel then, in most cases, it will run the slowest possible version of the code, even if the CPU is fully compatible with a better version.

    • intel hooked the mac pro so they can make bank with the mark up on that.

      • What makes you think Apple will share any of that mark up with Intel? Apple has its own shareholders to answer to first and foremost.
      • intel hooked the mac pro so they can make bank with the mark up on that.

        Apple has what percentage of the market? How many of those machines will they be selling? Intel will make jack with the number of sales involved with that. There, FTFY.

      • by RatBastard ( 949 )

        intel hooked the mac pro so they can make bank with the mark up on that.

        At $6,000 for the low end model, how many do you think Apple is going to sell? The Mac Pro (even before the 2013 model disaster) has always been a niche product. Even more so now that they have given the finger to the pro-sumer market.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      It is awfully familiar...

      20 years ago Intel was banking on Itanium and Netburst heavily. Both were highly ill advised moves. AMD came out with a sleek backwards compatible 64-bit architecture with a mainstream NUMA architecture for servers. AMD *should* have been on top of the world, and only curtailed in the market by unfair Intel practices and generally better marketing than AMD could field as well.

      Then AMD went Bulldozer and Intel went Nehalem and fortunes reversed dramatically, as AMD made the dumb m

  • the new Mac pros could use these
    • by jimbo ( 1370 )

      Possibly. I think I read somewhere that Ryzen supports ECC RAM, but it is not part of the official validation testsuite. Though if Apple wanted a workstation class CPU with official ECC support I'm sure AMD could produce something real quick.

      But I'm guessing Apple is happy to be seen as "XEON Premium" as long as the performance is OK. They might also have a (possibly unwritten) exclusivity agreement with Intel, for the time being.

  • This is neat and all but did they fix the issues related to speculative execution, specifically the Spectre class of vulnerabilities? Intel seems to have put off fixing anything in their microarchitecture for a full decade and I was hoping AMD would actually respond faster.

    • on the second line of OP, I read : "...uplift of 15% ... thanks to better branch prediction..."
      If this is not speculative execution...

      • Re:Spectre fixes? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @03:06AM (#58743642)

        It's not the speculation which is the problem, it's what you're allowed to do with it. Intel's problem was that they executed code speculatively before even checking if you were allowed to perform the action, and then tried to win the race to remove the result ex post facto before anyone could read it. IOW, they let you read and copy all the secrets and then tried to shoot you and destroy the copies before you could get away or hand over the information to someone else.

        AMD CPUs first check if the operation is permissible before it executes.

    • Why? What secrets are you hiding from the NSA that makes you worried about something like Spectre? And for which computer? Hopefully not the one you stupidly connected to the internet to make this comment.

      Why don't you take your security seriously? Are you in management chasing buzzwords? "Ooooh Spectre, sounds scary, must be bad"

      Please provide a bit of thought into your risk. In the meantime I'm hoping AMD will start shipping faster CPUs that are vulnerable to Meltdown, because I much like everyone else wh

    • So which vulnerabilities are you claiming that exists on a Ryzen with latest microcode and an updated kernel? Of the 12 available CVE:s that exists for Intel my Ryzen is immune to 9 of them due to hw design and the remaining 3 are patched by the Linux kernel (Spectre V1: Mitigation: __user pointer sanitization), Spectre V2: Mitigation: Full AMD retpoline, IBPB: conditional, STIBP: disabled, RSB filling and Spectre V4: Mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp. None of which affect
  • With all the "high-core" CPUs coming out these days, it seems to me that there would be a major marketing blitz by applications that tout how their applications take advantage of all those cores/threads. You would think that Intel and AMD would want to team up with application developers (on the marketing front) who specifically target higher core CPUs for better performance. I have not heard much on that. Anyone familiar with any efforts in this arena? I am developing a new data management system that is h
  • ...so I'm good, right? I mean, it's 70 better than a 5700, right?

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