AMD Clarifies Why It Uses Intel Core i7 In Its Project Quantum Gaming PC

[N.Broekhuijsen]

What's that? AMD is using an Intel CPU in its Project Quantum SFF gaming PC? Here's why.

AMD Clarifies Why It Uses Intel Core i7 In Its Project Quantum Gaming PC : Read more

 

[usertests]

Even though the GPU is more important for gaming, AMD's CPUs can't keep up or fit the thermal requirements. It's not news that you can use an Intel CPU and AMD GPU, so this is just pure embarrassment for the company.

Excavator is a joke, Zen can't come fast enough.

 

[captaincharisma]

wow, , AMD just admitted they can't compete. what a shocker [/sarcasm]

 

[0VERL0RD]

Hope AMD have plans for full fat Zen cores using HBM 2 & skip DDR4 for CPU & APU's to save more space like Fury aptly demonstrates!

 

[oczdude8]

Its not everyday you see companies swallow their pride in favour of building great products. I think AMD made a great choice.

 

[silverblue]

Even though the GPU is more important for gaming, AMD's CPUs can't keep up or fit the thermal requirements. It's not news that you can use an Intel CPU and AMD GPU, so this is just pure embarrassment for the company.

Excavator is a joke, Zen can't come fast enough.

Except nobody knows how Excavator performs.

 

[clonazepam]

Bah they just didn't include their secret intel killer cpu because they didn't wanna get mugged on the way out! /s

 

[troger5troger5]

For all you younger folk, Radeon and AMD were separate companies. AMD acquired Radeon if I recall correctly. Intel really never came out with any video cards to talk about gaming wise. It's not easy. I own stuff from both so no bios here.

 

[jaber2]

AMD should stick to what it does best, in this case marketing for Intel, I mean if you can't produce top of the line video cards or cpu's just make lots of them at discounted price, that is how Intel did it.

 

[dotaloc]

@troger..

Close -- AMD acquired ATI who made a line of graphics cards called Radeon.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Even though the GPU is more important for gaming, AMD's CPUs can't keep up or fit the thermal requirements. It's not news that you can use an Intel CPU and AMD GPU, so this is just pure embarrassment for the company.

Excavator is a joke, Zen can't come fast enough.

That is if Zen has enough of an IPC boost to keep up with Skylake.

Hope AMD have plans for full fat Zen cores using HBM 2 & skip DDR4 for CPU & APU's to save more space like Fury aptly demonstrates!

I doubt they will ever put memory only on the CPU and not have an expansion option. HBM 2 will allow for up to 8 stacks or 8GB total memory. Even with that there needs to be room for expansion and RAM on the board will be much slower than on package eliminating the benefits when the system has to move to that RAM.

I can see a use for it in APUs but not in enthusiast class CPUs until they can give enough RAM to satisfy the range of memory people use.

For all you younger folk, Radeon and AMD were separate companies. AMD acquired Radeon if I recall correctly. Intel really never came out with any video cards to talk about gaming wise. It's not easy. I own stuff from both so no bios here.

Radeon was never a company it was ATI (Array Technologies Incorporated) who made the Radeon line of GPUs. AMD bought them in 2006 and then incorporated them as AMD Radeon.

Intel has had GPUs but they never released them to the mass market, instead they became powerhouse number crunchers in the HPC market.

 

[captaincharisma]

Intel has had GPUs but they never released them to the mass market, instead they became powerhouse number crunchers in the HPC market.

Intel did have a line of video cards (graphics cards) that they sold commercially in the 90's and early 00'

 

[salgado18]

Hope AMD have plans for full fat Zen cores using HBM 2 & skip DDR4 for CPU & APU's to save more space like Fury aptly demonstrates!

HBM is no replacement for DDR, unless AMD or someone else makes it into an open standard. Right now, HBM is possible only inside an APU, but if you put like 2GB of it and ditch conventional RAM, you have an expensive APU, a weak GPU with too much graphics buffer and a system with too little RAM.

But an APU with 1GB of HBM could destroy so many lower-mainstream GPUs

 

[MyDocuments]

I'm looking at this very website on my laptop using an Intel IGP, the very out-of-date GM945, Intel did do graphics but much of it was in the mobile chipsets.

Fortunately, for any heavy work or modern game compatibility it has a PCI-Express/Cardbus connector where, with a few Taiwanese sourced connectors and mini-HMDI cables, and PCI-slot on a PCB, I can make a full-size PCI-Express slot and plug in a full-size graphics card which Windows 7 automatically detects.

Now for an almost 8 year old laptop, there's utility & reuse for you.
Nowadays I guess all you'll need is a Thunderbolt or USB3 port and the right kind of adaptors.

 

[maxiim]

Regardless of AMD knowing how something performs, and what it does, there are actual consumers who are not fanboys on Toms for either the blue or the red team, that will buy this stuff. And to expand business, AMD is offering Intel CPUs because thats what people want. Its what I would want, so it makes perfect sense.

 

[AS118]

Well, they're honest and consumer-friendly enough to swallow their pride and use competitor's products, so that's cool with me.

Until Zen releases next year, they probably won't have real competition for the high-end i7's anyway.

 

[captaincharisma]

Regardless of AMD knowing how something performs, and what it does, there are actual consumers who are not fanboys on Toms for either the blue or the red team, that will buy this stuff. And to expand business, AMD is offering Intel CPUs because thats what people want. Its what I would want, so it makes perfect sense.

so a good business move to you is to admit your company doesn't make a product as good as someone else but ill make you you an offer if you buy it? seriously?

 

[InvalidError]

HBM is no replacement for DDR, unless AMD or someone else makes it into an open standard.

HBM is simply a faster variant of Wide-IO which is a JEDEC standard.

The problem with HBM replacing DDR is that HBM only works over extremely short distances (on-package) so the amount of HBM is fixed. The only way to upgrade the amount of HBM on your CPU/APU is to replace it. On the other hand, DDR3/4 is designed to work over longer traces from the CPU/APU package, through the CPU/APU socket, over the motherboard, through the DIMM slot connectors, the DIMM PCB and the memory chip packages to make system memory size user-configurable.

Until HBM, HMC and whatever else might follow becomes so inexpensive that more RAM than most people are likely to need in the foreseeable future can be built directly into the CPU package, there will be a need for user-configurable memory. With the bandwidth-intensive or latency-sensitive processes taken care of on-package though, future bulk RAM may end up taking a lower pin count high-speed serial path, possibly in the form of PCIe4 x8/x16 add-in boards... like they used to in the 80s with the 8086-80286 using ISA-based memory expansion cards and their matching EMS drivers.

 

[childofthekorn]

Even though the GPU is more important for gaming, AMD's CPUs can't keep up or fit the thermal requirements. It's not news that you can use an Intel CPU and AMD GPU, so this is just pure embarrassment for the company.

Excavator is a joke, Zen can't come fast enough.

Signed in just to up vote this comment. Don't understand why it got down voted as its true. This is why they stopped producing FX products because this reason. I currently use an FX-8320 and although I don't see the slowdowns first hand, there is an issue with the bulldozer lines and being a bottleneck due to the vary nature of the unique CPU arch. I cannot wait to see some more information regarding AM4 and Zen as it NEEDS to be a game changer.

 

[HideOut]

Hope AMD have plans for full fat Zen cores using HBM 2 & skip DDR4 for CPU & APU's to save more space like Fury aptly demonstrates!

HBM is no replacement for DDR, unless AMD or someone else makes it into an open standard. Right now, HBM is possible only inside an APU, but if you put like 2GB of it and ditch conventional RAM, you have an expensive APU, a weak GPU with too much graphics buffer and a system with too little RAM.

But an APU with 1GB of HBM could destroy so many lower-mainstream GPUs

It is an open standard. AMD just happens to be the first to sell product on that standard, and likely the only company on HBM 1, when HBM2 starts shipping next year or so we'll see more such as nvidia

 

[KenZen2B]

Just announced on the news that AMD is exploring the idea of sell off the CPU division.

 

[littleleo]

For all you younger folk, Radeon and AMD were separate companies. AMD acquired Radeon if I recall correctly. Intel really never came out with any video cards to talk about gaming wise. It's not easy. I own stuff from both so no bios here.

Actually AMD acquired ATI a Canadian VGA manufacturer. ATI called its line of video cards Radeon. ATI had a history of bad driver issues dating back years. They used to offer separate drivers for programs and games for each VGA card. it was horrible. Eventually they copied Nvidia in just making the GPU chips and using a universal driver. They spun off their own factory and that became Sapphire. Their drivers have gotten better over the years but many of us that had a lot of dealing with ATI still have nightmares about them. AMD at one point tried to buy Nvidia but the CEO of Nvidia wanted to run the joint company and AMD wanted control. They paid way way too much for ATI and have been hemorrhaging money ever since.

 

[littleleo]

Intel has had GPUs but they never released them to the mass market, instead they became powerhouse number crunchers in the HPC market.

Intel did have a line of video cards (graphics cards) that they sold commercially in the 90's and early 00'

Yes I remember trying to sell them they were not well received and were eventually discontinued.

 

[somebodyspecial]

Intel's old gpu was i740. They failed with it and larrabee, though i740 at least made it to market. They also had i752/i754 with i752 being released in very limited quantity because it sucked too (i754 just got dropped-another too was codenamed capitola, never made it anywhere and died with timna too).

It's comic to me that AMD tried a new api when a force like Intel couldn't get devs to code for their new gpu (larrabee was never going to get game devs to totally drop the old way and start anew - easier to get that done in HPC market I guess instead of dozens of game devs). They also failed to get people to code for a new cpu (itanic-LOL ok, itanium, whatever). If change is so hard to get devs to code for, it boggles my mind AMD thought they'd ever get Mantle off the ground. One more thing that robbed R&D from cpu/gpu/drivers. On top of that they knew there were two competitors not far away, Vulkan and DX12. Stupid management mistakes are killing AMD (for over a decade now, 7B in losses in 15yrs), it is certainly not the engineers doing it. It is amazing those guys put out what they do in SPITE of management being morons.

Having said that, am I the only one NOT impressed by the size of this supposedly SFF box? Look at it in his hands. It is rather large together and then their external unit has to be figured in too. Doesn't it look about as wide as him and not exactly short to begin with?

I can build my own system and probably take up less space or at least save a chunk of money I'd guess. I though SFF was supposed to take up SMALL SPACE. Why would you want all that wasted space between them and an external unit too? Storing this anywhere makes it a PITA IMHO. Not quite sure why they wasted R&D on this. It wouldn't be a massive money maker no matter how you slice it. Let someone else R&D how to put 2 furys in a box with water. Get back to concentrating on CPU/GPU/DRIVERS period. No more APU (thankfully pulled up ZEN, delayed apu crap that can't make a dime, should've listened to Dirk Meyer ages ago and stayed CORE PRODUCTS), no more crap like this or consoles, just PURE CPU (with high IPC and plenty of die space to hurt Intel with) and pure GPU/drivers.

 

[Frozen Fractal]

I am more impressed to the fact that AMD actually did prioritize customers' choice over an usual pride of a company. Kudos to you AMD, couldn't be more impressed to you than this .

As for HBM on CPU/APU, I think that would be a bad choice. Since PC users want configurable RAMs, like some want 8GB with gaming-grade hardwares, some want 16GB for more room on pro works besides gaming and some may even want more than that for their specific needs, wants without having a mind to change the CPU. However, this choice would be very much lucrative on tablets, mid-range laptops and notebooks, and AiOs excluding high-end laptops, and gaming ones. People don't usually upgrade RAMs on these so it would be a very added advantage to include HBM memory on mobile CPUs and APUs (heck, I think we just stirred up some minds at Intel :O. AMD, you gotta hurry up!).

As for the Quantum SFF PC, I think it's a great idea. Having everything watercooled and maxed out at such a tiny form factor (and very eye-popping aesthetic too), people will be pleased to have a mini-beast beside their sofa or LAN-party gamers for their show-offs. This is another brilliant idea from AMD, and I think we are starting to see the real potential of Lisa Su as CEO.

Oh, did anyone noticed what Quantum's competing to?