Looking forward to it, I'm getting sick of constantly explaining to people why buying AMD processors doesn't make any sense right now (unless you're using the integrated GPU).
If you to render really cheaply, the throughput is oustanding for the price.
And, if you need absolute budget gaming, going FX-4xxx or Athlon might be better than Pentium. Depending on the games being played. Overall still favors pentium heavily.
"If you to render really cheaply, the throughput is oustanding for the price."
No it really isn't anymore. That hasn't been true since the Piledriver based Opteron 6300's first launched, back when they were competing against Sandy Bridge based Xeon E5's. Intel has gone through 2 Xeon generations since, while AMD is still relying on practically the same lineup.
My roommate and I were thinking about putting together a relatively low budget dedicated render box, and after doing some research I came to realize that AMD is no longer performance competitive at practically every price point they're currently competing at. Targeting the 300-$400 price range per processor (for a dual processor build), the two SKU's that currently compete with each other are the Opteron 6344 (12 "core" @ 2.6 GHz) and the Xeon E5 2620 V3 (6-core @ 2.4 GHz). Before even looking at a benchmark I think anyone who's familiar with the current performance landscape between AMD and Intel could figure out fairly quickly that there's no way Piledriver can compete at equivalent module to core counts and similar clock speeds as Haswell. Haswell will outperform it in highly-threaded workloads, and absolutely demolish it in single/lightly threaded workloads. But by how much exactly? After digging a little deeper it turns out that on average the Xeon E5 2620 V3 is ~30% faster than the Opteron 6344 in highly threaded workloads. I checked a few other price points going all the way up to ~$700, and the general story is the same. Intel simply has faster server processors with lower TDP's at competing price points right now.
I would say that's practically irrelevant if you're trying to do any sort of even remotely serious desktop rendering, particularly animation. The time it would take to iterate would simply be too great.
The current Opterons are so old. I don't understand why they don't even try to sell a few more of them, as apparently they're still making them. Give customers a few more cores and someone will bite. If Zen is so much better they won't even hurt their own future sales. But instead it looks like they're not even trying any more (with the current chips).
AMD is concentrating its engineering resources on Zen. Adding more Piledriver based chips to their lineup would not generate significant sales, and would take resources away from Zen.
It really depends on what application as well. Video rendering is still much cheaper on amd if you consider total costs in terms of value. Yes intel will beat it amd. But its more of in terms your paying $250 to get a $700 90% of intels performance. I mean you want to pay that extra $450 to say your king on top you can but for me, I'd day $250 per cpu to get 90% of the performance. Ofcourse not counting electricity costs and such but the trend for tdp is generally going low thats not a really concern for personalized video rendering. If your a big farm house thats a totally different story.
While I certainly would like to see a competitive AMD, and a good focus on a good CPU, I'm curious if their 'single core to rule them' strategy is going to be effective. That would be dependent on the big question: will it scale?
Considering that Intel has decidedly different types of cores for their desktop (Haswell) and mobile (Atom), that has to hint that there can be some serious issues in trying to scale a single design from 2 to 50 watts.
Let's face it, most of people on AT don't care about Atom processors. If AMD can become more competitive in the 15W-95W space, it's what most people on here want. The limited market segments where Intel targets Atoms is not worth competing in anyway since Intel basically uses contra-revenue and gives the Atom away to push certain products (Asus Zenphone 2). You cannot compete in that segment to start with against a company that can lose $3-4 billion a year giving away lower power SoCs.
Intel's already got their big core scaling out of AMD's likely comfort zone, although a Zen derivative with HBM power savings and an agressive price point might make a compelling competitor to Core M. Going for Atom's space against established ARM solutions and strongly financially backed designs by Intel with a chip that is neither seems to be a folly for a company that has to pick battles.
Intel just got the Atom into another important design win, the Surface 3. If you read that review you'd notice AMD did not have a single device that could even be benchmarked in that comparison. They're not even in the game.
While you may think Intel is dealing in a market that isn't even profitable to them, the benchmarks should tell you an entirely differently story. They are competing in that market and breaking even on the chips to PREVENT their competition from completely dominating the low-end, thus preventing any chance of those platforms growing enough to cannibilize their high-end lucrative x86 desktop and server market.
Basically, they are paying a small fee to ensure x86 dominance remains intact. They have billions of PROFITS riding on that, every quarter.
breaking even on the chips and than giving the people who use the chips money isn't breaking even.
I suspect the only reason that the Surface 3 is x86 is because the problem with the original two surfaces was ARM. If Microsoft just wanted to make a tablet/office device, going ARM would have been cheaper, faster and lower power.
However, they are fixing the problems that the original surface and surface two had, not being able to run all the windows applications.
"Basically, they are paying a small fee to ensure x86 dominance remains intact." $3-4 billion losses in that market segment is not a small fee. As mentioned by xthetenth, for us gamers and majority of laptop/desktop markets, the most important segments are 15-95W.
Most people are happy with their iPads anyway so who cares about the Surface Pro. Surface Pro targets just 1 type of a consumer. AMD has limited funds and its better to focus on the core market segments where it has a shot.
AMD is smart enough to know they cannot compete when Intel gives away for free or pays subsidies to Lenovo and Asus to include Atom in their smartphones. You know exactly what my post meant. Atom is making no money for Intel in the smartphones as Intel is basically giving it away to establish the brand. http://www.phonearena.com/news/Lenovo-K80-features...
ZenPhone 2 will have a $100 off discount for 1 day too. AMD could waste $10 billion dollars in trying to get an Atom competitor and would lose.
Fads come and go. What remains is value. Just like testbug00 said; the problem wasn't a stale and "unwanted" market segment, it was Microsoft. Now that Microsoft has their sh!t together, we'll be seeing demand shifting to the low end x86 gradually.
That statement is nonsense anyways, iPad sales are declining every quarter because people are happy with the one iPad they bought, but in general tablet interest is waning because of the limitations of those toy OS platforms like iOS and Android.
That's where the Surface steps in, and that's where Microsoft and Intel stand to profit. There's not 1 person who wants a Surface, they're for anyone who wants something that can do more than a toy tablet.
I like the surface 3s. They are awesome. But for me I have not been able to justify a tablet at all, i'm probably a minority or rational, and so my macbook air (awesome lightweight laptop) and desktop works fine for me. There are a ton of laptop designs AMD can win with zen and even hoping a few for APUs now that the wattage is down with carrizo. Laptop sales are doing fine, and the desktop may even come back who knows. O and surface competition is out there, the Yoga is one example.
For those with Ipads they are great and work in conjunction with another computer which most people have. I even know people who use just IPads with no other computer. I would love to see a full OS like the surface but the surface is the way it is because lets face it the Microsoft app store has all of 50 apps. When they hit page two on the "all apps" page there will be huge celebrations from users. ARM devices are great don't sell them short @chizow. The Atom processor on the other hand is so broken Intel has to give it away, now of course AMD can't compete against that. Free vs. pay for chip. OEMs are greedy and will choose the free/almost free chip for greater profits for themselves. This is not profit for Intel.
Also if Zen can compete against the M cores, i'm hoping they aren't as broken as core M is.
You're better when you type nonsense about GPUs with those clown hands of yours.
Huge celebration by users when Apps hits page 2? LOL, I guess a library of apps that includes EVERY x86 program ever written isn't enough? Users already celebrated when they realized they actually had a functional OS and platform again when they moved off toy junk OSes Android or iOS. And that's before Microsoft recently announced Android/iOS Apps were so trivial they can just emulate them in x86 Windows 10.
But yes, if AMD can produce anything competitive with either the "broken" Core M or Atom in that <15W market within a year, that will be amazing. Even more amazing than AMD still existing in a year from now.
I was talking about surface RT? Windows RT is no longer around because the choice of apps for that was very small(page 2 stuff), people didn't like it and it didn't end well. The surface 3 uses an atom because it is x86 and intel gives them away for free not because it is a good chip.
RT is a great product with the worst timing... It should have been released after the app gap was closed with Universal Apps (NOT Metro) and sold on hardware going for less than $250 to compete with the Chromebook model. Microsoft f'ed up. It would have been the nail in the coffin for every other ARM tablet/hybrid when it comes to value, fluidity, battery life, security, and capability.
Ya the RT wasn't a bad product, it just didn't have the app support it needed and it was pricey. It also didn't really fit into the whole unity thing Microsoft was going for so it makes sense they scrapped it.
Ya once again, any Atom chip that can run x86 is going to be better than any ARM-based toy, for the simple fact it can run more than a bunch of toys from an "app" store.
@chizow true, only problem is they can't fun facebook/flash games on the web. That was an issue with my friends Mom. He got one of those convertible laptops, budget hence the atom, and it didn't run her facebook games so they returned it. So just curious how many other things they have issues running.
Atom-based tablets have no problems at all running Flash games, again, if you're going to just make stuff up at least throw something plausible up there.
Sure $3-4 Bn per year or $1 Bn per quarter is a small fee when they are posting $6-14 Bn in PROFITS per quarter on the strength of their x86 empire. They are simply investing in the rest of their products by pushing x86 into new markets. So while it is true most readers of this site do not care about the Atom, it was exactly this kind of narrow-focus that got AMD in trouble and shut out of the low-end markets to begin with. In the end, its all about relevance in the marketplace, right now Intel is addressing their biggest risk areas with Atom and Core M.
And it is that "empire" that needs competition to keep pushing innovation. Intels performance gains and architecture has been nothing special since bulldozer came out. Intel could lower prices and probably try a bit harder to push performance but they are fine with mediocre steps until AMD is competitive again(you the consumer are losing out). Also the Atom came around for netbooks and I feel is still broken, hence the 0 interest in it until it was given away by intel. Intel has it's bad spots as well and they mainly have that profit margin because AMD was stupid with bulldozer and lost it's competitive edge. So intel is like lets get a 2% performance gain and sell the new chips for more and not bring prices down on older chips. On top of that their naming scheme is terrible. Everything is i3,i5,i7 and thats what consumers see. So selling older chips for the same price is easier, low blow really. Marketing people ruin everything in the tech world...the not so 4G, 4G LTE anyone?
Stopped reading after the 1st sentence. Again, this is more nonsense. Intel has continued to innovate where they are most threatened:
1) Low power markets 2) Graphics
If you look at the gains in these two markets, you will see, they have continued to make amazing steps. Compare an Ultrabook or Surface Pro 3 to the Laptops even from Core i7 and tell me there wasn't a HUGE improvement in size, TDP, portability, and battery life in the years since Bulldozer.
Now also look at the iGPU standpoint. Intel, while still pretty poor at graphics, has made huge advancements with their transistor and TDP budgets with Iris Pro and even their GT products. Every generation they make significant 50+% gains there.
So yes, while they have not pushed the envelope much in that mainstream 80-130W desktop market, they still manage to put out nice updates every few years, and on the high-end they are definitely still pushing things because there are some monster chips out there with up to 16 cores!
A lot of the thinner laptops mostly came not from CPU innovations but Intel getting onto OEMs about a standard for ultrabooks.
Also you touch on some of my later points so you didn't read first line. Way to make yourself look like a jerk.
Yes the iGPU is about the only thing they have made gains in lately. intel HD 4000 to 5000 was only a 50% gain in benchmarks, the real world numbers show something around 15% on average.
How do you think that new standard for Ultrabooks came about? Because Intel was packing MORE performance into SMALLER thermal envelopes. As someone who has spent time troubleshooting and repairing these laptops, it is easy to see, these advancements are made possible mainly through CPU innovations. Lower TDP CPUs, smaller cooling solutions, smaller batteries, thinner laptops.
The only one who looks like a jerk is you when you are comparing Intel graphics in a TDP limited mobile situation. Or were you just trying to look dishonest?
Wow, those AMD APU numbers are nicely above the best intel iGPUs. But this is about just intel's progress form one generation to the next. A lot of the gains you are talking about are very specific to the game. Yes they got a nice improvement in Bioshock: infinite, but not as much in metro: last light. in my experience intel graphics doesn't hold up accept at the bottom line settings and lower res.
Iris pro pulls ahead in some games but the Apus average 68 FPS where as iris pro was averaging 78 in Bioshock, but if you look at minimum frame rate on the same game the minimum for the APUs is 30 and iris pro is 6. Thats terrible so under stress the iris pro becomes unplayable at the performance(low) settings on Bioshock where as the APUs never go below 30 FPS. To add to this the Intel HD 4600 shows average playable frame rates of 45 FPS and minimum frame rates at almost 22 FPS. How is iris pro an improvement on that, it looks like it went wrong somewhere, yeah it can peak when there is no stress but as soon as something happens bye bye frames.
Now to be fair it does seem to be game specific as well, it doesn't perform as poorly in some other games but it does seem to have a higher average - minimum frame rate difference than the 4600 and the APUs, consistency matters.
Yes so now you see exactly where Intel's innovation has been as they address their biggest threat. They are closing in on AMD APU graphics performance while blowing APU CPU performance away to the point they will have both aspects in their favor. That's where Intel's innovation has been regarding desktop CPUs. And as we have seen in mobile, they continue to drive the TDP floor down while maintaining higher performance than anything else in that class. And on the enterprise side of things, they have monstrous 16-core Xeon-EPs. So yes, while it appears things have slowed down on the desktop, that is only because Intel's TDP and transistor budgets are being put towards what they view as their biggest risk markets.
I still can't complain though, in the years since Intel swayed me to their camp with Core 2 Duo, I've still managed to have meaningful upgrades for $300 or less: E6600 > Q6600 > i7 920 > i7 4770K > i7 5820K. All fantastic and meaningful upgrades. Not bad for a monopoly with no competition!
Exactly. Some people are just clueless as they expect a company with 1.77B market cap to compete with Intel with 154B. It's amazing AMD is still alive at this point. AMD's strategy for smartphones/mobile is the K12 not Zen.
No, some people are just clueless and ignorant to the fact AMD wasn't always a 1.77B market cap company (try $12Bn at the time of ATI merger). Many of the decisions they made in the last 9 years since then have led them to their current predicament, including the decision to ignore netbooks and sell off their mobile handheld division to Qualcomm. But they do seem to care, since they keep churning out low-end APUs that are supposed to compete in this <15W market, yet we haven't seen them in any noteworthy devices.
In the future, they'll invest even less in that market. There will be only APUs for Socket AM4 and FP4, not small sockets or cat cores even more. AMD lost market share due to Intel's "contra revenue" program according to Lisa Su.
Which is nonsense, because Intel's contra revenue program couldn't steal market share from a market AMD did not exist in. That's actually quite funny that AMD is blaming contra revenue for their lack of presence in the mobile/tablet market lol.
Those low end APUs (Bobcat, Jaguar) are what has kept the lights on at AMD for the past few years. Without those, AMD likely would have gone under a year or two ago.
Don't forget intel scales down their desktop core down to 4.5W as well (Core M), with some overlap with atoms. This is of course heavily downclocked and comes with its own challenges in terms of heat dissipation (as you can clearly see some designs do far worse wrt throttling than others using the same cpu), but seems to fit into larger tablets just fine. And AMD, unlike intel, doesn't have any aspirations to fit it into phones. So, even though I thought the cat cores were doing quite ok, that probably was because the high-end core wasn't that good... And not having to develop two completely different cpu cores of course saves development resources.
Sadly this "one design from 1W to 100W" philosophy, understood in the context of "... GlobalFoundries, who will be ramping up their 14nm equipment for next year as part of their licensing/partnership with Samsung to implement Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process." means that we won't be seeing any real performance improvements (for at least the next 2-3 years) on AMD's side at least.
Simply put, the escalating costs of semiconductor manufacturing R&D means that investors are only willing to swallow that large initial expense if the primary focus is on developing smaller, lighter and lower-performing products for the mobile market (where all the growth is presumed to be). Even if AMD had the financial reserves to pull off 2 completely difderent designs, Samsung's commitment to a low-leakage and high density 14nm process would immediately kill either the yields or the clock-rates that AMD could achieve with their high-performance design.
The other thing that people tend to forget while they needlessly mumble on about power comsumption and the impracticality of 100W+ CPUs is the fact that we have already been able to quietly and efficiently cool 200W+ GPUs with ambient air for many years now. Sure, it might mean that your PC-case has to have its depth increased by an inch or two (which probably does sound like the end of the world to quite a few fashion-conscious environmental activists), but if both the manufacturing process and the CPU were designed for a 200W TDP and a layout maximizing heat dissipation (not just for maximum transistor density to lower production costs) was allowed, then a 6GHz-7Ghz dual core (perhaps even a quad core with less cache) CPU, with IPC slightly exceeding that of Intel's Broadwell architecture, would be entirely within the realm of possibility. After also taking into account the average expected area cost per transistor for most manufacturer's next-generation "14nm" process nodes and allowing an increase of around 150% in the metal interconnect wire's thickness to help drain parasitic capacitances fast enough for reliable operation at up to 7GHz (especially important in the clock distribution tree, i.e. to minimize skew), a CPU like this would be manufacturable in less than 500mm² if the voltage regulation and some peripheral controllers were moved back off-chip. Even with NVIDIA-style profit margins, a complete GPU board containing a chip of that size would only cost about $699-$799, therefore I am confident that this lone AMD CPU could be brought to market a lot closer to $600 while being more than twice as fast as an Intel Core i7-5960x in today's games and applications.
I do apologise, this has begun to feel a bit like a pointless psychotic rant; It's just that every bit of news that might signal some actual CPU performance breakthrough (from Intel or AMD and that is NOT ARM related) has been a constant dissapointment since the launch of the Sandy-Bridge microarchitecture. With peak clock-rates continually falling as every manufacturer scrambles to develop a less powerfull processor than before, there just really doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to. I have been assembling my own powerfull PCs (as most PC-enthusiasts do) since childhood, replacing my primary system about once a year, and I still haven't seen any reason to replace my 5.3GHz Sandy-Bridge-based system. I don't think that the PC as an industry is in any danger of being replaced or anything dramatic like that, it just seems to have lost its passion and abandoned the quest for picture-perfect virtual reality in favour of "good enough so that most people won't notice at 20-30fps" reality. More compromises to eable thinner and lighter is not much to look forward to or be exited by if you ask me.
Just when I was wondering what the heck they were doing, seems like they have a plan. Can't wait to see how things turn out. I must admit that I wasn't following too much on AMD news though.
Scrapping SkyBridge made sense, it was just logical after they shutdown/wrote off SeaMicro. No market for their micro servers. No market for AMD ARM chips, no point in bridging the platforms with SkyBridge. Just the last obvious domino to fall.
I just wish AMD didn't quantify those IPC gains for Zen before they had working samples...just dangerous to set expectations like that when they don't even have their process set yet. What if it is 40% IPC increase but 50% reduction in clockspeeds, for example? People will only remember that graph with the big 40% increase spike.
In any case, if AMD makes it to 2016, Zen will be without a doubt, the make or break moment for them as a future going concern in the semiconductor industry.
I would like to see Zen destroy Intel in downright performance. This era of Intel's utter domination has gone far too long and I'm a little bit sick of Intel stalling any significant performance updates to their CPUs. All we get is low single-digit percent performance gains with every generation. And the only way to change that is to have AMD back in the game.
Not going to happen. Intel can always drop higher SKUs to lower price levels and negate any performance advantage AMD will have. If Intel needs to, they can drop a 6-core 5820K CPU to $299 and bring out an 8-core at $399. Their profit margins are so sky high, they can easily do it.
At the risk o sounding pedantic, Hyperthreading is Intel's current marketing term for their implementations of SMT. These terms should not be used interchangeably. SMT is any superscalar core architecture that allows instructions for multiple threads to run at the same time. And it doesn't have to only be two threads (HT) there are other SMT approaches that use 4 or even 8 way scheduling.
Technically it doesn't have to be superscalar, but it does help in making it actually useful :P
And yeah, POWER is already there with 4T per core designs shipping and 8T per core in development. Interestingly enough though, IBM decided to go to an in-oder core design rather than the OOO design it previously implemented.. I wish I could get a POWER box to poke around with...
I hate to say this, but the math don't lie. If Ivy Bridge was 10% faster than Sandy, Haswell is 10% faster than Ivy, and Skylake is 15% faster than Haswell (which seems to be what some rumors are saying), then that's a 39% improvement over that time.
Which means Zen vs. Skylake will be roughly comparable to Sandy Bridge vs. Bulldozer!
"Which means Zen vs. Skylake will be roughly comparable to Sandy Bridge vs. Bulldozer!"
I haven't done the math so not sure, but if that is the case then we will be back to the good old clock speed race. Since a lot of that performance gain came from IPC and if AMD is boasting a 40% IPC gain with higher clocks they could beat intel. If similar clocks they may be about the same, but at least competitive again. Hopefully it will bring us more performance at a lower price.
Intels lower priced parts could perform a lot better, but why charge less on a better part when there is no competition? I want to see Intel get a kick in the butt and get in gear.
Also last point I don't think the performance gains are quite as big as you are saying. Maybe in IPC but they have lost a lot of clock speed since then by trying to lower the wattage. So very small gains overall but better performance per watt.
Er, except, the IPC increase is from XV to Zen. XV is 17% more IPC than Bulldozer being super pessimistic. More likely, it's at least 25% higher, possible 30%+.
Given 25% higher IPC in XV, than 40% higher than XV, you get 75% IPC increase from AMD.
I believe the general expectation is between Ivy and Haswell IPC. Possible even with Haswell.
Not necessarily because AMD could position an 8-core against the i5. You only need a certain amount of IPC increase before any extra is diminishing returns. For example today an i7 4790K is hardly faster than an overclocked i7 2600K to the same speeds. The 40% increase in IPC will be huge for AMD if true but if we look overall at where Haswell sits vs. say SB, it's hardly faster in games.
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Flunk - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Looking forward to it, I'm getting sick of constantly explaining to people why buying AMD processors doesn't make any sense right now (unless you're using the integrated GPU).testbug00 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
If you to render really cheaply, the throughput is oustanding for the price.And, if you need absolute budget gaming, going FX-4xxx or Athlon might be better than Pentium. Depending on the games being played. Overall still favors pentium heavily.
Yes, very hard to recommend them overall.
dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
"If you to render really cheaply, the throughput is oustanding for the price."No it really isn't anymore. That hasn't been true since the Piledriver based Opteron 6300's first launched, back when they were competing against Sandy Bridge based Xeon E5's. Intel has gone through 2 Xeon generations since, while AMD is still relying on practically the same lineup.
My roommate and I were thinking about putting together a relatively low budget dedicated render box, and after doing some research I came to realize that AMD is no longer performance competitive at practically every price point they're currently competing at. Targeting the 300-$400 price range per processor (for a dual processor build), the two SKU's that currently compete with each other are the Opteron 6344 (12 "core" @ 2.6 GHz) and the Xeon E5 2620 V3 (6-core @ 2.4 GHz). Before even looking at a benchmark I think anyone who's familiar with the current performance landscape between AMD and Intel could figure out fairly quickly that there's no way Piledriver can compete at equivalent module to core counts and similar clock speeds as Haswell. Haswell will outperform it in highly-threaded workloads, and absolutely demolish it in single/lightly threaded workloads. But by how much exactly? After digging a little deeper it turns out that on average the Xeon E5 2620 V3 is ~30% faster than the Opteron 6344 in highly threaded workloads. I checked a few other price points going all the way up to ~$700, and the general story is the same. Intel simply has faster server processors with lower TDP's at competing price points right now.
testbug00 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
6-8 INT cores for rendering from AMD is ~95-~135 dollars for entry. I'm talking super cheapo rendering.dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
I would say that's practically irrelevant if you're trying to do any sort of even remotely serious desktop rendering, particularly animation. The time it would take to iterate would simply be too great.MrSpadge - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
The current Opterons are so old. I don't understand why they don't even try to sell a few more of them, as apparently they're still making them. Give customers a few more cores and someone will bite. If Zen is so much better they won't even hurt their own future sales. But instead it looks like they're not even trying any more (with the current chips).KAlmquist - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
AMD is concentrating its engineering resources on Zen. Adding more Piledriver based chips to their lineup would not generate significant sales, and would take resources away from Zen.KennyDude27 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
It really depends on what application as well. Video rendering is still much cheaper on amd if you consider total costs in terms of value. Yes intel will beat it amd. But its more of in terms your paying $250 to get a $700 90% of intels performance. I mean you want to pay that extra $450 to say your king on top you can but for me, I'd day $250 per cpu to get 90% of the performance. Ofcourse not counting electricity costs and such but the trend for tdp is generally going low thats not a really concern for personalized video rendering. If your a big farm house thats a totally different story.dysonlu - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Can you explain? They are so cheap compared to Intel. The performance/price should be competitive.garbagedisposal - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
fancy schmancy powerpoints yaSamus - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
I hope Samsung can turn AMD's manufacturing around.bill.rookard - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
While I certainly would like to see a competitive AMD, and a good focus on a good CPU, I'm curious if their 'single core to rule them' strategy is going to be effective. That would be dependent on the big question: will it scale?Considering that Intel has decidedly different types of cores for their desktop (Haswell) and mobile (Atom), that has to hint that there can be some serious issues in trying to scale a single design from 2 to 50 watts.
RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Let's face it, most of people on AT don't care about Atom processors. If AMD can become more competitive in the 15W-95W space, it's what most people on here want. The limited market segments where Intel targets Atoms is not worth competing in anyway since Intel basically uses contra-revenue and gives the Atom away to push certain products (Asus Zenphone 2). You cannot compete in that segment to start with against a company that can lose $3-4 billion a year giving away lower power SoCs.xthetenth - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Intel's already got their big core scaling out of AMD's likely comfort zone, although a Zen derivative with HBM power savings and an agressive price point might make a compelling competitor to Core M. Going for Atom's space against established ARM solutions and strongly financially backed designs by Intel with a chip that is neither seems to be a folly for a company that has to pick battles.chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Intel just got the Atom into another important design win, the Surface 3. If you read that review you'd notice AMD did not have a single device that could even be benchmarked in that comparison. They're not even in the game.While you may think Intel is dealing in a market that isn't even profitable to them, the benchmarks should tell you an entirely differently story. They are competing in that market and breaking even on the chips to PREVENT their competition from completely dominating the low-end, thus preventing any chance of those platforms growing enough to cannibilize their high-end lucrative x86 desktop and server market.
Basically, they are paying a small fee to ensure x86 dominance remains intact. They have billions of PROFITS riding on that, every quarter.
testbug00 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
breaking even on the chips and than giving the people who use the chips money isn't breaking even.I suspect the only reason that the Surface 3 is x86 is because the problem with the original two surfaces was ARM. If Microsoft just wanted to make a tablet/office device, going ARM would have been cheaper, faster and lower power.
However, they are fixing the problems that the original surface and surface two had, not being able to run all the windows applications.
RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
"Basically, they are paying a small fee to ensure x86 dominance remains intact." $3-4 billion losses in that market segment is not a small fee. As mentioned by xthetenth, for us gamers and majority of laptop/desktop markets, the most important segments are 15-95W.Most people are happy with their iPads anyway so who cares about the Surface Pro. Surface Pro targets just 1 type of a consumer. AMD has limited funds and its better to focus on the core market segments where it has a shot.
AMD is smart enough to know they cannot compete when Intel gives away for free or pays subsidies to Lenovo and Asus to include Atom in their smartphones. You know exactly what my post meant. Atom is making no money for Intel in the smartphones as Intel is basically giving it away to establish the brand.
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Lenovo-K80-features...
ZenPhone 2 will have a $100 off discount for 1 day too. AMD could waste $10 billion dollars in trying to get an Atom competitor and would lose.
lilmoe - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
"Most people are happy with their iPads anyway"Fads come and go. What remains is value. Just like testbug00 said; the problem wasn't a stale and "unwanted" market segment, it was Microsoft. Now that Microsoft has their sh!t together, we'll be seeing demand shifting to the low end x86 gradually.
chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
That statement is nonsense anyways, iPad sales are declining every quarter because people are happy with the one iPad they bought, but in general tablet interest is waning because of the limitations of those toy OS platforms like iOS and Android.That's where the Surface steps in, and that's where Microsoft and Intel stand to profit. There's not 1 person who wants a Surface, they're for anyone who wants something that can do more than a toy tablet.
Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
L A P T O P SI like the surface 3s. They are awesome. But for me I have not been able to justify a tablet at all, i'm probably a minority or rational, and so my macbook air (awesome lightweight laptop) and desktop works fine for me. There are a ton of laptop designs AMD can win with zen and even hoping a few for APUs now that the wattage is down with carrizo. Laptop sales are doing fine, and the desktop may even come back who knows. O and surface competition is out there, the Yoga is one example.
For those with Ipads they are great and work in conjunction with another computer which most people have. I even know people who use just IPads with no other computer. I would love to see a full OS like the surface but the surface is the way it is because lets face it the Microsoft app store has all of 50 apps. When they hit page two on the "all apps" page there will be huge celebrations from users. ARM devices are great don't sell them short @chizow. The Atom processor on the other hand is so broken Intel has to give it away, now of course AMD can't compete against that. Free vs. pay for chip. OEMs are greedy and will choose the free/almost free chip for greater profits for themselves. This is not profit for Intel.
Also if Zen can compete against the M cores, i'm hoping they aren't as broken as core M is.
chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
You're better when you type nonsense about GPUs with those clown hands of yours.Huge celebration by users when Apps hits page 2? LOL, I guess a library of apps that includes EVERY x86 program ever written isn't enough? Users already celebrated when they realized they actually had a functional OS and platform again when they moved off toy junk OSes Android or iOS. And that's before Microsoft recently announced Android/iOS Apps were so trivial they can just emulate them in x86 Windows 10.
But yes, if AMD can produce anything competitive with either the "broken" Core M or Atom in that <15W market within a year, that will be amazing. Even more amazing than AMD still existing in a year from now.
Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
I was talking about surface RT? Windows RT is no longer around because the choice of apps for that was very small(page 2 stuff), people didn't like it and it didn't end well. The surface 3 uses an atom because it is x86 and intel gives them away for free not because it is a good chip.lilmoe - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
RT is a great product with the worst timing... It should have been released after the app gap was closed with Universal Apps (NOT Metro) and sold on hardware going for less than $250 to compete with the Chromebook model. Microsoft f'ed up. It would have been the nail in the coffin for every other ARM tablet/hybrid when it comes to value, fluidity, battery life, security, and capability.Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Ya the RT wasn't a bad product, it just didn't have the app support it needed and it was pricey. It also didn't really fit into the whole unity thing Microsoft was going for so it makes sense they scrapped it.chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Ya once again, any Atom chip that can run x86 is going to be better than any ARM-based toy, for the simple fact it can run more than a bunch of toys from an "app" store.Crunchy005 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
@chizow true, only problem is they can't fun facebook/flash games on the web. That was an issue with my friends Mom. He got one of those convertible laptops, budget hence the atom, and it didn't run her facebook games so they returned it. So just curious how many other things they have issues running.chizow - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Atom-based tablets have no problems at all running Flash games, again, if you're going to just make stuff up at least throw something plausible up there.chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Sure $3-4 Bn per year or $1 Bn per quarter is a small fee when they are posting $6-14 Bn in PROFITS per quarter on the strength of their x86 empire. They are simply investing in the rest of their products by pushing x86 into new markets. So while it is true most readers of this site do not care about the Atom, it was exactly this kind of narrow-focus that got AMD in trouble and shut out of the low-end markets to begin with. In the end, its all about relevance in the marketplace, right now Intel is addressing their biggest risk areas with Atom and Core M.Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
And it is that "empire" that needs competition to keep pushing innovation. Intels performance gains and architecture has been nothing special since bulldozer came out. Intel could lower prices and probably try a bit harder to push performance but they are fine with mediocre steps until AMD is competitive again(you the consumer are losing out). Also the Atom came around for netbooks and I feel is still broken, hence the 0 interest in it until it was given away by intel. Intel has it's bad spots as well and they mainly have that profit margin because AMD was stupid with bulldozer and lost it's competitive edge. So intel is like lets get a 2% performance gain and sell the new chips for more and not bring prices down on older chips. On top of that their naming scheme is terrible. Everything is i3,i5,i7 and thats what consumers see. So selling older chips for the same price is easier, low blow really. Marketing people ruin everything in the tech world...the not so 4G, 4G LTE anyone?chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Stopped reading after the 1st sentence. Again, this is more nonsense. Intel has continued to innovate where they are most threatened:1) Low power markets
2) Graphics
If you look at the gains in these two markets, you will see, they have continued to make amazing steps. Compare an Ultrabook or Surface Pro 3 to the Laptops even from Core i7 and tell me there wasn't a HUGE improvement in size, TDP, portability, and battery life in the years since Bulldozer.
Now also look at the iGPU standpoint. Intel, while still pretty poor at graphics, has made huge advancements with their transistor and TDP budgets with Iris Pro and even their GT products. Every generation they make significant 50+% gains there.
So yes, while they have not pushed the envelope much in that mainstream 80-130W desktop market, they still manage to put out nice updates every few years, and on the high-end they are definitely still pushing things because there are some monster chips out there with up to 16 cores!
http://ark.intel.com/products/84681/
Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
A lot of the thinner laptops mostly came not from CPU innovations but Intel getting onto OEMs about a standard for ultrabooks.Also you touch on some of my later points so you didn't read first line. Way to make yourself look like a jerk.
Yes the iGPU is about the only thing they have made gains in lately. intel HD 4000 to 5000 was only a 50% gain in benchmarks, the real world numbers show something around 15% on average.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7072/intel-hd-5000-v...
chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
How do you think that new standard for Ultrabooks came about? Because Intel was packing MORE performance into SMALLER thermal envelopes. As someone who has spent time troubleshooting and repairing these laptops, it is easy to see, these advancements are made possible mainly through CPU innovations. Lower TDP CPUs, smaller cooling solutions, smaller batteries, thinner laptops.The only one who looks like a jerk is you when you are comparing Intel graphics in a TDP limited mobile situation. Or were you just trying to look dishonest?
HD4600 in 4690/4770 is 20 EUs, and is almost 2x faster than the HD3000 with 12 EUs in the 2500K
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-r...
HD4600 in 4770K again is 20 EUs, compared to the 16 in HD4000 in 3770K, only 25% more and you see, in non-TDP limited scenarios, you see nearly 25% scaling.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-...
So yeah, you were wrong again, real world benchmarks scale just fine.
Crunchy005 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Wow, those AMD APU numbers are nicely above the best intel iGPUs. But this is about just intel's progress form one generation to the next. A lot of the gains you are talking about are very specific to the game. Yes they got a nice improvement in Bioshock: infinite, but not as much in metro: last light. in my experience intel graphics doesn't hold up accept at the bottom line settings and lower res.If you look at the Benchmarks here
http://anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a...
Iris pro pulls ahead in some games but the Apus average 68 FPS where as iris pro was averaging 78 in Bioshock, but if you look at minimum frame rate on the same game the minimum for the APUs is 30 and iris pro is 6. Thats terrible so under stress the iris pro becomes unplayable at the performance(low) settings on Bioshock where as the APUs never go below 30 FPS. To add to this the Intel HD 4600 shows average playable frame rates of 45 FPS and minimum frame rates at almost 22 FPS. How is iris pro an improvement on that, it looks like it went wrong somewhere, yeah it can peak when there is no stress but as soon as something happens bye bye frames.
Now to be fair it does seem to be game specific as well, it doesn't perform as poorly in some other games but it does seem to have a higher average - minimum frame rate difference than the 4600 and the APUs, consistency matters.
chizow - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Yes so now you see exactly where Intel's innovation has been as they address their biggest threat. They are closing in on AMD APU graphics performance while blowing APU CPU performance away to the point they will have both aspects in their favor. That's where Intel's innovation has been regarding desktop CPUs. And as we have seen in mobile, they continue to drive the TDP floor down while maintaining higher performance than anything else in that class. And on the enterprise side of things, they have monstrous 16-core Xeon-EPs. So yes, while it appears things have slowed down on the desktop, that is only because Intel's TDP and transistor budgets are being put towards what they view as their biggest risk markets.I still can't complain though, in the years since Intel swayed me to their camp with Core 2 Duo, I've still managed to have meaningful upgrades for $300 or less: E6600 > Q6600 > i7 920 > i7 4770K > i7 5820K. All fantastic and meaningful upgrades. Not bad for a monopoly with no competition!
Novacius - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
AMD doesn't want to get in phones and low cost tablets. Core can scale from 5W up to 140W. Zen could also do that, I suppose.RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Exactly. Some people are just clueless as they expect a company with 1.77B market cap to compete with Intel with 154B. It's amazing AMD is still alive at this point. AMD's strategy for smartphones/mobile is the K12 not Zen.chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
No, some people are just clueless and ignorant to the fact AMD wasn't always a 1.77B market cap company (try $12Bn at the time of ATI merger). Many of the decisions they made in the last 9 years since then have led them to their current predicament, including the decision to ignore netbooks and sell off their mobile handheld division to Qualcomm. But they do seem to care, since they keep churning out low-end APUs that are supposed to compete in this <15W market, yet we haven't seen them in any noteworthy devices.Novacius - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
In the future, they'll invest even less in that market. There will be only APUs for Socket AM4 and FP4, not small sockets or cat cores even more. AMD lost market share due to Intel's "contra revenue" program according to Lisa Su.chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Which is nonsense, because Intel's contra revenue program couldn't steal market share from a market AMD did not exist in. That's actually quite funny that AMD is blaming contra revenue for their lack of presence in the mobile/tablet market lol.testbug00 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Those low end APUs (Bobcat, Jaguar) are what has kept the lights on at AMD for the past few years. Without those, AMD likely would have gone under a year or two ago.Novacius - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
They don't want to get into smartphones and so on, not even with K12, and they said that directly.mczak - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Don't forget intel scales down their desktop core down to 4.5W as well (Core M), with some overlap with atoms. This is of course heavily downclocked and comes with its own challenges in terms of heat dissipation (as you can clearly see some designs do far worse wrt throttling than others using the same cpu), but seems to fit into larger tablets just fine. And AMD, unlike intel, doesn't have any aspirations to fit it into phones.So, even though I thought the cat cores were doing quite ok, that probably was because the high-end core wasn't that good... And not having to develop two completely different cpu cores of course saves development resources.
Xenonite - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Sadly this "one design from 1W to 100W" philosophy, understood in the context of "... GlobalFoundries, who will be ramping up their 14nm equipment for next year as part of their licensing/partnership with Samsung to implement Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process." means that we won't be seeing any real performance improvements (for at least the next 2-3 years) on AMD's side at least.Simply put, the escalating costs of semiconductor manufacturing R&D means that investors are only willing to swallow that large initial expense if the primary focus is on developing smaller, lighter and lower-performing products for the mobile market (where all the growth is presumed to be).
Even if AMD had the financial reserves to pull off 2 completely difderent designs, Samsung's commitment to a low-leakage and high density 14nm process would immediately kill either the yields or the clock-rates that AMD could achieve with their high-performance design.
The other thing that people tend to forget while they needlessly mumble on about power comsumption and the impracticality of 100W+ CPUs is the fact that we have already been able to quietly and efficiently cool 200W+ GPUs with ambient air for many years now.
Sure, it might mean that your PC-case has to have its depth increased by an inch or two (which probably does sound like the end of the world to quite a few fashion-conscious environmental activists), but if both the manufacturing process and the CPU were designed for a 200W TDP and a layout maximizing heat dissipation (not just for maximum transistor density to lower production costs) was allowed, then a 6GHz-7Ghz dual core (perhaps even a quad core with less cache) CPU, with IPC slightly exceeding that of Intel's Broadwell architecture, would be entirely within the realm of possibility.
After also taking into account the average expected area cost per transistor for most manufacturer's next-generation "14nm" process nodes and allowing an increase of around 150% in the metal interconnect wire's thickness to help drain parasitic capacitances fast enough for reliable operation at up to 7GHz (especially important in the clock distribution tree, i.e. to minimize skew), a CPU like this would be manufacturable in less than 500mm² if the voltage regulation and some peripheral controllers were moved back off-chip. Even with NVIDIA-style profit margins, a complete GPU board containing a chip of that size would only cost about $699-$799, therefore I am confident that this lone AMD CPU could be brought to market a lot closer to $600 while being more than twice as fast as an Intel Core i7-5960x in today's games and applications.
I do apologise, this has begun to feel a bit like a pointless psychotic rant; It's just that every bit of news that might signal some actual CPU performance breakthrough (from Intel or AMD and that is NOT ARM related) has been a constant dissapointment since the launch of the Sandy-Bridge microarchitecture.
With peak clock-rates continually falling as every manufacturer scrambles to develop a less powerfull processor than before, there just really doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to.
I have been assembling my own powerfull PCs (as most PC-enthusiasts do) since childhood, replacing my primary system about once a year, and I still haven't seen any reason to replace my 5.3GHz Sandy-Bridge-based system. I don't think that the PC as an industry is in any danger of being replaced or anything dramatic like that, it just seems to have lost its passion and abandoned the quest for picture-perfect virtual reality in favour of "good enough so that most people won't notice at 20-30fps" reality. More compromises to eable thinner and lighter is not much to look forward to or be exited by if you ask me.
lilmoe - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Just when I was wondering what the heck they were doing, seems like they have a plan. Can't wait to see how things turn out. I must admit that I wasn't following too much on AMD news though.chizow - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Scrapping SkyBridge made sense, it was just logical after they shutdown/wrote off SeaMicro. No market for their micro servers. No market for AMD ARM chips, no point in bridging the platforms with SkyBridge. Just the last obvious domino to fall.I just wish AMD didn't quantify those IPC gains for Zen before they had working samples...just dangerous to set expectations like that when they don't even have their process set yet. What if it is 40% IPC increase but 50% reduction in clockspeeds, for example? People will only remember that graph with the big 40% increase spike.
In any case, if AMD makes it to 2016, Zen will be without a doubt, the make or break moment for them as a future going concern in the semiconductor industry.
dishayu - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
I would like to see Zen destroy Intel in downright performance. This era of Intel's utter domination has gone far too long and I'm a little bit sick of Intel stalling any significant performance updates to their CPUs. All we get is low single-digit percent performance gains with every generation. And the only way to change that is to have AMD back in the game./rant
RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Not going to happen. Intel can always drop higher SKUs to lower price levels and negate any performance advantage AMD will have. If Intel needs to, they can drop a 6-core 5820K CPU to $299 and bring out an 8-core at $399. Their profit margins are so sky high, they can easily do it.Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Which means they have been overcharging the whole time...Thank you for pointing out exactly what competition does.SaberKOG91 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
At the risk o sounding pedantic, Hyperthreading is Intel's current marketing term for their implementations of SMT. These terms should not be used interchangeably. SMT is any superscalar core architecture that allows instructions for multiple threads to run at the same time. And it doesn't have to only be two threads (HT) there are other SMT approaches that use 4 or even 8 way scheduling.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Technically it doesn't have to be superscalar, but it does help in making it actually useful :PAnd yeah, POWER is already there with 4T per core designs shipping and 8T per core in development. Interestingly enough though, IBM decided to go to an in-oder core design rather than the OOO design it previously implemented.. I wish I could get a POWER box to poke around with...
ventisca - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
If it isn't superscalar, how does the processor core execute many instruction simultaneously? Just curious. :DKen_g6 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
I hate to say this, but the math don't lie. If Ivy Bridge was 10% faster than Sandy, Haswell is 10% faster than Ivy, and Skylake is 15% faster than Haswell (which seems to be what some rumors are saying), then that's a 39% improvement over that time.Which means Zen vs. Skylake will be roughly comparable to Sandy Bridge vs. Bulldozer!
Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
"Which means Zen vs. Skylake will be roughly comparable to Sandy Bridge vs. Bulldozer!"I haven't done the math so not sure, but if that is the case then we will be back to the good old clock speed race. Since a lot of that performance gain came from IPC and if AMD is boasting a 40% IPC gain with higher clocks they could beat intel. If similar clocks they may be about the same, but at least competitive again. Hopefully it will bring us more performance at a lower price.
Intels lower priced parts could perform a lot better, but why charge less on a better part when there is no competition? I want to see Intel get a kick in the butt and get in gear.
Also last point I don't think the performance gains are quite as big as you are saying. Maybe in IPC but they have lost a lot of clock speed since then by trying to lower the wattage. So very small gains overall but better performance per watt.
testbug00 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Er, except, the IPC increase is from XV to Zen. XV is 17% more IPC than Bulldozer being super pessimistic. More likely, it's at least 25% higher, possible 30%+.Given 25% higher IPC in XV, than 40% higher than XV, you get 75% IPC increase from AMD.
I believe the general expectation is between Ivy and Haswell IPC. Possible even with Haswell.
RussianSensation - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Not necessarily because AMD could position an 8-core against the i5. You only need a certain amount of IPC increase before any extra is diminishing returns. For example today an i7 4790K is hardly faster than an overclocked i7 2600K to the same speeds. The 40% increase in IPC will be huge for AMD if true but if we look overall at where Haswell sits vs. say SB, it's hardly faster in games.Crunchy005 - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
"look overall at where Haswell sits vs. say SB, it's hardly faster in games."Yep.
Also side note, does anyone else here wish they could get notified when they get a reply? Or is that available and I am just failing right now?
kyuu - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Nope, no notifications. We have been complaining about AT's archaic commenting system (no edits? c'mon!) for a long time now.Hrel - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Sounds good, I hope they're able to live up to it, or more! They really need to.