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

Got my dual channels still doing me right. AMD are truly trying to run the gamut with Zen. A jack of all trades architecture. I'm very interested in how this works out.
 

dr_rus

Member
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.

You do understand that it won't be as easy as FX+40%? It never is.
 

Nikodemos

Member
Got my dual channels still doing me right. AMD are truly trying to run the gamut with Zen. A jack of all trades architecture. I'm very interested in how this works out.
Hopefully it does. Module-based multithreading in the Earthmover series was a disaster (partly their fault, partly GloFo's) and Cat cores died ignominiously when Intel bribed counter-revenued everybody to take their Atoms (I actually have one in my laptop and it's a very decent core, for a lightweight, but it never had a chance).
 

Skenzin

Banned
NOBODYS goingto stick their neck out in an enterprise environment for AMD, at this point. Theres an old saying nobodys ever been fired for buying Cisco, you could drop Intel into that. Most CTOs are skittish on AMD workstations. In a VMware environment stability is king and theres no trust with amd on 247365 99.99% uptime. Amd had been 'next big thinging' it for 10 years now. I knew selling their fabs would mean a slow death. They have a lot of work to do to regain trust in corporate enviroments.
 

tuxfool

Banned
They'd still be beating amd by an enormous margin in desktop pc performance. :(

Hardly enormous. Skylake had at its best single digit IPC percentage improvements over Haswell. A smaller jump than any previous iteration, worse being the fact that this is Tock for Tock comparison (skipped Broadwell).

If Zen can actually scale properly in frequency, that puts it squarely in Haswell territory.
 

tuxfool

Banned
Got my dual channels still doing me right. AMD are truly trying to run the gamut with Zen. A jack of all trades architecture. I'm very interested in how this works out.

Sure. I assume the 4 channels are only to keep the 32 core monster fed. Consumer class dies won't waste area just to have 4 channels.
 
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Still relevant as ever.

So true.

But with some of the bad press around Intel lately by removing overclocking from certain CPU's within the microcodes that have left some PC's blue screening and their current stance on "slower and more efficient" maybe this is a chance for AMD to reposition themselves a bit with the enthusiastic crowd? Then again, they would still have to make a CPU that is worth getting over an Intel equivalent.

But then again, these 32 core CPU's are for enterprise, it seems. So they are a different market.
 

shark sandwich

tenuously links anime, pedophile and incels
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.

This makes sense. I think we might see a couple 16-core chips in the FX line. They'll still perform worse than Intel quad-core for most workloads, gaming included.

I think the vast majority of Zen CPUs will be 4 or 8 core APUs with integrated graphics. For laptops, a quad-core Zen APU could compare favorably against an Intel i5 (dual core + HT).
 

aeolist

Banned
those have got to be really small cores

not a great look if we're hoping for a design that's competitive with intel desktop/server architecture
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.

that makes more sense, hopefully this is the case
 

tokkun

Member
NOBODYS goingto stick their neck out in an enterprise environment for AMD, at this point. Theres an old saying nobodys ever been fired for buying Cisco, you could drop Intel into that. Most CTOs are skittish on AMD workstations. In a VMware environment stability is king and theres no trust with amd on 247365 99.99% uptime. Amd had been 'next big thinging' it for 10 years now. I knew selling their fabs would mean a slow death. They have a lot of work to do to regain trust in corporate enviroments.

Enterprise is moving to the cloud, and the biggest players there are increasingly nervous about an Intel monopoly on server CPUs. I think that as long as an AMD processor is remotely competitive in performance / watt they will get a certain amount of business just by virtue of being the only credible competitor to Intel.
 
Bring an 8-16 cores consumer CPU with the IPC of Sandy Bridge, and the pricing of old Phenom II, and market -as forum wars- would be fun again.
 

Herne

Member
Seems like a 16 core chip might be an option as a higher-end consumer choice. Will be interesting to see Zen's performance.
 

nubbe

Member
More cores mean more heat and more heat means lower clock speed
Cores aren't a default win
More memory channels is good
 

LordOfChaos

Member
"spread across two 16-core modules"

Not a 32 core die. It's two dies on an interposer. I think a lot of the "do games even use 32 cores" comments are misinterpreting or not reading the article here. These are server parts. We may get more cores on desktop, but I'm thinking 8 rather than 16, let alone two 16 core modules on an interposer.


Now, from the performance estimates it's probably falling short of Skylake, but if they provide Haswell like per-core performance and offer 8 cores to consumers at a price closer to Intels quads, that could have appeal. The Haswell-Skylake jump is far smaller than the Haswell-Piledriver/Excavator jump.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
This is a little off topic, but what do the clock speeds on AMD processors benchmark worse then intels?
.

Clock speed doesn't equal performance. There are hundreds of factors that go into a CPUs architecture that determine how much it can do per clock, what it preemptively does, its memory latency, etc etc.


See the Pentium 4 vs the Athlon 64 for some history there. Intel went for a long pipeline they could clock really high, but then hit thermal limits for scaling, and the longer the pipeline, the less it could do per clock. Now the situation is pretty well flipped.

That's why AMD so desperately needed a new architecture, not just adding clock speed.
 

tuxfool

Banned
Some games have job based multithreading systems which thoretically can scale up to n cores.
Although main game thread is usually limited to single core.

I doubt job systems as currently implemented scale to an arbitrary number of cores and maintain performance.
 

AmyS

Member
Hopefully Zen works out for the next consoles. Going from Jaguar to something like that would be absolutely HUGE

Yep.

I'm hoping for eight Zen or Zen+ cores @ 2.0 ~ 2.5 GHz in XB4 and PS5. Coupled with HBM2 and decent-for-the-time, midrange GPUs, on a 10nm APU.

What' you guys think?
 
I see a lot of people throwing Intels R&D budget in their posts, saying how AMD could never keep up. You guys realize that most of that is going into mobile, and their fabs right? Fab equipment is unbelievably expensive.
 

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
NX going with 8 core Zen architecture. Believe.


Don't think Ninendo would bother going with new cutting edge tech in any sense for their new console which already has had its specs and components likely locked down for a while.

A hypothetical PS5 and XB2 however? I say its common sense, that's why i'm hoping it works out.
 

Genio88

Member
32 cores? When will they understand that 4 cores but with higher single core performance are better than 32 with awful single core performance? At least for the vast majority of softwares and games out there
 

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
Yep.

I'm hoping for eight Zen or Zen+ cores @ 2.0 ~ 2.5 GHz in XB4 and PS5. Coupled with HBM2 and decent-for-the-time, midrange GPUs, on a 10nm APU.

What' you guys think?

I'm going to go for small expectations that should still blow current gen out of the water easily

8 or 10 core semi custom Zen cores at 2.0 to 2.5 GHz....16GB HBM2 at 756GB/s, 6-8TFLOP Polaris(?) architecture at 14nm on an APU
 

tuxfool

Banned
32 cores? When will they understand that 4 cores but with higher single core performance are better than 32 with awful single core performance? At least for the vast majority of softwares and games out there

When will people realise that servers and consumer computers have different workloads and that a 32 core machine would be something people at CERN would be interested in using for HPC?
 

AP90

Member
When is Zen is releasing?

My poor Phenom X4 needs a replacement.


Same with my 2600k... But I think I will not be upgrading for another year or two unless I'm very tempted by the market and it's pricing.

Wonder how Zen's performance will truly fair core for core compared to Intel.
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
Anyone expecting this Zen to be in a console at all is setting themselves up for disappointment. NX specifically is probably going to go for big tablet/small laptop-tier CPU cores just like PS4 and XB1.

When is Zen releasing?

My poor Phenom X4 needs a replacement.

Late this year, IIRC.

Honestly, I'd be happy to move from my 2500k to a Zen CPU, but it depends on the cost and performance improvements. I'm hoping they can hit roughly hit IB-Haswell level per-core performance, while offering an 8 core CPU without integrated graphics at around $200. Doesn't seem unreasonable, and could be a viable alternative to the 6600k or Kaby equivalent I'd get instead, at a much lower price.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
why are intel so dominant? is it just because they have a far larger amount of money to invest in R&D so they can hire better people etc.?
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
why are intel so dominant? is it just because they have a far larger amount of money to invest in R&D so they can hire better people etc.?

R&D budget is orders of magnitude larger, and AMD made a poor decision with their last architecture.

Sprinkle in a few anti-competitive practices back in the day that screwed AMD too.
 

tuxfool

Banned
R&D budget is orders of magnitude larger, and AMD made a poor decision with their last architecture.

Sprinkle in a few anti-competitive practices back in the day that screwed AMD too.

Last I saw it was an order of magnitude higher, ~1bn of Intel to the ~100m of AMD.
 

tuxfool

Banned
So 16 cores for a single die? Still sounds good to me.

I read elsewhere that it 32 cores on one die, but it essentially two ip modules interconnected by a high bandwidth bus.

The processor under discussion is targeted at HPC and servers, it is conceivable to get smaller scale consumer or server dies with 16 cores. But I still think their more mainstream processors will be 8 cores (or smaller).
 
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.

is there anywhere i can read about this because this is fascinating.
 
R&D budget is orders of magnitude larger, and AMD made a poor decision with their last architecture.

Sprinkle in a few anti-competitive practices back in the day that screwed AMD too.

It's mostly stupidity of AMD managment chasing moar cores and frequency instead of IPC- smaller R&D and worse foundries are no excuse when they can't compete with 32nm Sandy Bridge from 2011 in 2016.
 
NX going with 8 core Zen architecture. Believe.

I think there is pretty much zero chance on NX using Zen. The architecture will be too new and too expensive. I would expect something closer to Carrizo cores, which are still a huge upgrade over Jaguar, rather than Zen cores for the NX.
 
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