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AMD's Zen CPUs to feature up to 32 cores and 8-channel DDR4

undu

Member
Taken from a slide presented at CERN's IT Technical Forum talk:

2016-02-12-image.jpg
http://techreport.com/news/29709/some-zen-cpus-may-pack-32-cores-and-eight-memory-channels

This looks impressive, but it means Zen is catering to the server/supercomputer market, we've yet to see how it fares in gaming performance.
 

Foetoid

Neo Member
As someone who's still chugging along with an FX-8350 and 8gb of DDR3 with a Raptor HDD, i'm really looking forward to my first big upgrade in a few years. Zen FX Cpu, 16gb DDR4, 1tb SSD.

They're just taking so damn long!
 

V_Arnold

Member
As someone who's still chugging along with an FX-8350 and 8gb of DDR3 with a Raptor HDD, i'm really looking forward to my first big upgrade in a few years. Zen FX Cpu, 16gb DDR4, 1tb SSD.

They're just taking so damn long!

Yes, I decided to go with a PS4 for this year, but if AMD is competent enough for a properly priced mid-range Zen and their new GPU lineup, then I will go with them out of sheer respect. My FX-6300 and HD7770 is only good for LoL at this point, and damn do they heat up fast, even not in summer, and with non-stock coolers..
 
Servers and enterprise is where the money is. Consumers only expect cheapo AMD cpus for their budget rigs, that isn't going to save AMD. OEMs can't make the same mistake of buying into Intel's bribes this time since they should know very well what Intel monopoly means for their bottom lines.
 

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
Hopefully Zen works out for the next consoles. Going from Jaguar to something like that would be absolutely HUGE
 

~Cross~

Member
So how does this slide insinuate that AMD is going for server markets and not consumers?

Having all those cores would be great for virtualization, servers inside servers kidna thing. Not so much for the consumer who struggles to find an application that will tax all 4 cores on their system.
 

shark sandwich

tenuously links anime, pedophile and incels
Could this be used on the NX console or is this too expensive.
If AMD is planning on cramming this much into a single chip, then a SOC with 4 or 8 cores + GPU would be very feasible. The question is whether Nintendo would use a CPU/process node that is that cutting edge.
 

Qassim

Member
Having all those cores would be great for virtualization, servers inside servers kidna thing. Not so much for the consumer who struggles to find an application that will tax all 4 cores on their system.

Games do a pretty good job of that these days. Most modern AAA games have been found to have reasonable scaling across multiple cores.
 

V_Arnold

Member
Denial is the name of the game in the cpu front? Have you missed the fact that even Intel admits that single-core performance is not really expcected to improve for now, only core numbers?
 
Could this be used on the NX console or is this too expensive.

Probably too late to make it into a mass market product that's supposed to be on shelves either this year or, at the latest, in 2017. Zen as a standalone product is set for late 2016 and that'd be too late. Whatever goes in what Nintendo intends to launch this year needs to be ready for mass production now.
 

Woo-Fu

Banned
Does any game even use 32 cores?

It isn't for games, at least not for the client part of the architecture. It is for datacenters where packing the most cores into a standard rack is a big deal.

Intel already has 22 core server chips, and by the time 32 core Zen comes out no doubt they'll have at least the same amount.

That's only 1/3 of the equation. Add hardware price/compute unit and operational cost/compute unit if you want a useful number.
 

shark sandwich

tenuously links anime, pedophile and incels
Games do a pretty good job of that these days. Most modern AAA games have been found to have reasonable scaling across multiple cores.
I have seen some benefit to 4 cores + hyperthreading but hardly any scaling beyond that when it comes to games. 32 cores with hyperthreading makes no sense for a consumer-focused CPU.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Intel already has 22 core server chips, and by the time 32 core Zen comes out no doubt they'll have at least the same amount.

Xeon Phi offers up to 61 cores. The family isn't Intel's newest line, sure; my point is merely that you shouldn't read much into theoretical core counts. Intel spends literally billions more than AMD on R&D annually and has had an iron grip over the enthusiast/server markets since Conroe a decade ago -- while it would be nice for competition, in no way is Zen going to be a sucker punch.
 

V_Arnold

Member
I have seen some benefit to 4 cores + hyperthreading but hardly any scaling beyond that when it comes to games. 32 cores with hyperthreading makes no sense for a consumer-focused CPU.

Most highend consumer CPU's already offer 8 cores, if Zen provides 16 or 32, it is not THAT big of a jump, thanks to the smaller chip sizes. And besides, the multicore dependency situation can only improve going forward, not become worse. Add the fact that less-than-4-core cpu's will eventually phase out from the market, and it is clear that multiple cores is the future. Now just a few more issues to solve and it will all be worth it.

Also if you are a professional developer/artist using a pc for multiple tasks, this can be HIGHLY beneficial too.
 

dr_rus

Member
32 core configuration with 8 MCs is two 16 core / 4 MCs CPUs on an interposer. The latter would be the top one chip configuration and it's hardly an overkill considering that Intel is going for 22 cores in one chip with Broadwell-EP. This doesn't say much about desktop and mobile Zen offerings as there will most certainly be chips with less cores for different markets.
 

Woo-Fu

Banned
I don't get all this core disrespect.

The industry needs more cores.

You want better AI in games? Then

The horsepower has been there for better AI for ages. People who can write significantly better AI typically end up working in different industries, though. More cores isn't going to change something that isn't a hardware issue in the first place.
 

Durante

Member
As far as I know (only third hand information), the 32 core version is going to be 2 dies with an n-package interconnect. So not really what most people associate with a single CPU these days.
 

Tworak

Member
I'm super interested in 32 cores but primarily from a virtualization standpoint. the problem with intels current processors is that they are endlessly expensive if you want more than 4-6 cores. hopefully amd can change that if only slightly.
 

Maxey

Member
I really hope Zen places AMD on the road back to proper competition.

Don't really want a world where you only have two brands to choose for CPUs and GPUs.
 

Man

Member
which game engines could take advantage of it?
Many engines use job/task-based multi-threading these days meaning they are very scalable to a high amount of cores.
Jobs are fine-grained atomical tasks that are spread across any core running a worker-thread for the game engine. Unity is moving to job-based rendering (experimental feature) with v.5.4 launching in March. Games like Rage (ID-tech 5) and Bioshock Infinitie had job-based multi-threading. Naughty Dog has been using a job based system since Uncharted 1 and with Uncharted 4 they are doing some pretty unprecedented stuff with fibers (think of it as jobs-within-jobs), they don't even have a main-thread anymore.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Having all those cores would be great for virtualization, servers inside servers kidna thing. Not so much for the consumer who struggles to find an application that will tax all 4 cores on their system.

Must be nice running adesktop OS in single tasking mode without other applications and background services constantly interrupting and stealing precious RAM and disk I/O bandwidth :D. Just adding cores without removing bottlenecks in RAM and disk accesses is not the answer, but you can find plenty of work for other cores to do ;).
 

Sulik2

Member
No idea, but 32 cores sounds excessive for games, would any games use more than a few ?

Games need to start making use of them. With Intel saying they are stopping going for speed gains and moving to efficiency, really the only way to get more power out of processors is going to be by going for massive parallelization. I hope dev houses are starting to realize they need to make this shift in the next 3 - 5 years or we are going to see a lot CPU bound performance metrics.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Games need to start making use of them. With Intel saying they are stopping going for speed gains and moving to efficiency, really the only way to get more power out of processors is going to be by going for massive parallelization. I hope dev houses are starting to realize they need to make this shift in the next 3 - 5 years or we are going to see a lot CPU bound performance metrics.

Thanks to GPU compute and, game engines wise, processors like CELL (and yes the Broadband Engine in the PS3 did push people in the right direction) a lot more of them have moved away from giant threads mainly focuses on rendering, networking, physics, etc... giant discrete areas and into a massive task scheduling system addressing a variable number of computing resources like others have already said.
 

LilJoka

Member
Need clock speeds for it to make any sort of comparison at this point. And really this will be for servers more than consumer.
 
If we believe the 40% IPC improvement would this make the per-core, per-clock performance competitive with Intel?

The assumption is that it would be around Haswell performance, and some believe the Samsung 14 nm node won't clock high. That said, I wouldn't take these bits of information as proof of anything really. The chips are probably a year off still so the +40% IPC number is merely theoretical under certain circumstances, and just a small part of the full equation. I also wouldn't trust AMD's promises of Zen actually releasing before the end of the year. I don't remember the last time they were on schedule. Even Intel delays their stuff constantly.
 

Durante

Member
Yes, it easily would.
Would it? It's hard to find comparative measurements of single-core performance these days, but it seems to me like 40% would close the gap between a Piledriver "module" (so 2 cores) and a modern Intel HT core, not core-for-core.

In any case, if they can maintain high frequencies at least 40% would be good enough to have at least some semblance of competition again.
 

McHuj

Member
I'm only really interested to see how a quad core zen compares to a quad core Intel in both 4 and 8 thread workloads.

I hope AMD's promises of IPC improvements come true and I hope their SMT implementation compares favorably to Intel's hyper-threading. If it does, AMD could really undercut the x99 socket CPU.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Cant wait to see the performance & price of their desktop line CPUs. 40% more performance on instructions seems like a huge huge improvement, without even taking into consideration the number of cores.
 

V_Arnold

Member
We don't know this yet as we don't know much about Zen (frequencies specifically) and we don't know anything about Kaby Lake's CPU changes.

We do know how an intel core compares to an fx-amd core with the same clock, so if you factor that 40% between an FX core and a Zen core, you can easily speculate.

Would it? It's hard to find comparative measurements of single-core performance these days, but it seems to me like 40% would close the gap between a Piledriver "module" (so 2 cores) and a modern Intel HT core, not core-for-core.

In any case, if they can maintain high frequencies at least 40% would be good enough to have at least some semblance of competition again.

Well, there are fringe cases where games that absolutely refuse to use more than one cores, and those are the best exampels to see how an AMD cpu caps performance - I am not saying it is going to outright destroy the Intel competition (highly doubt that it is even possible at this point), but it absolutely should be competing with it.
 

DieH@rd

Banned
This is professional-grade CPU, not really something that will land into general consumer hands [and btw, most likely it will have way lower clocks that regular consumer CPUs].
 
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