AMD Confirms Ryzen And Vega Launch Schedule, Developing 7nm Zen Products

[msroadkill612]

Sort of relevant is that:

I was struck by one major benchmark conclusion in the rather old:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ich10r-sb750-780a,2374-14.html

Which shows the level of CPU degradation due to io activity when using onboard raid.

The clear ~recommendation is that such users best performance spend is on professional level raid controllers with dedicated raid hardware onboard.

Dunno, but does it really have to be an expensive professional level card?

There are some awfully cheap 4 port raid controllers out there, no doubt mostly based on well proven generic chips:

A/ shift IO bandwidth use from the niggardly bandwidth allocated to the southbridge; to the ample PCI lanes (on the northbridge?).

& B/, shift a potentially high amount of grunt work from the cpu to a dedicated raid/io chip.

Maybe good bang for buck could be achieved in this way on some rigs for some apps?

Current raid 0 ssdS can demonstrably i/o at almost 1,000MB ps on fancy controllers. Thats a big job for the mobo chipset/cpu. A lesser discrete controller still has a lot of wiggle room to improve system performance cheaply.

 

[msroadkill612]

Separately, i predict a new focus on the efficacy of fancy coolers.

I recall reading that the latest AMD apu/cpuS have hundreds? of temperature sensors, which tightly integrate with an; almost realtime, very incremental, sophisticated turbo management system.

There is a lot of extra power on tap, PROVIDED temp parameters are met.

Available Compute power could remain untapped due to concurrent heavy io/igp usage heat generation e.g.

If such turbo/temp fine management is indeed a fresh development, then, in short, simply keep it very cool, and let the system automatically extract maximum performance possible.

 

[elbert]

New report suggests AMD is working on windows 7 drivers for AM4. My guess is they will not be ready for launch to force only windows 10 benchmarks. IE put their 8 cores in there best light for games. Rolling out windows 7 drivers for business adoption later in March.

 

[blazorthon]

The AMD CPU "driver" is the same for all of their CPUs. The same is true for Intel. There are some Windows updates that can change things like the task scheduler for Bulldozer derivatives, but the driver itself remains unchanged. They might be working with Microsoft to improve performance slightly with the new architecture, but you should still be able to install any version of Windows from Vista onwards no problem.

The only reason there should be issues is if the AM4 motherboards use other hardware (IE the network interface) that lacks drivers for older versions of Windows and that's not something AMD has direct control over.

 

[miroslavhm]

"Joint venture with Chinese government backed funds" means that AMD has no chance selling to infrastructure critical clients. Neither to car manufacturers, anybody related to defense, medias etc. North America, European and Australia markets are lost...

 

[JamesSneed]

"Joint venture with Chinese government backed funds" means that AMD has no chance selling to infrastructure critical clients. Neither to car manufacturers, anybody related to defense, medias etc. North America, European and Australia markets are lost...

Right but I think its smart of AMD. This is where Intel dominates them anyhow so they are taking another path. Will it be the correct choice I have no idea but if they get into the Chinese market then it may be a boon.

 

[TJ Hooker]

"Joint venture with Chinese government backed funds" means that AMD has no chance selling to infrastructure critical clients. Neither to car manufacturers, anybody related to defense, medias etc. North America, European and Australia markets are lost...

IIRC, that was just AMD licensing x86 CPU IP to Chinese company so that they could produce server chips. Don't see how that would affect AMD's products, or people's trust in them.

 

[cmi86]

So theres going to be a bunch of janky chinese zen copies floating around?

 

[InvalidError]

TBH, It's the approach too.... Those who took the Intel approach back in the day (Z80, 808x) had to look forward to approximately four clock cycles per instruction. Motorola, with at least the 680x family (MOS's 65xx family by extension), if not the 68k family too, (I could be wrong on the 68k family,) was able to average one clock cycle... of course this was/is an average as there were instructions that did require more clock cycles to complete.

That was true in the days of single-issue in-order CPUs, it does not really mean anything now that we have superscalar deep out-of-order execution pipelines to hide all the execution overhead. Intel's current CPUs can do about four instructions single-threaded per core, a little more with HT turned on.

 

[JamesSneed]

So theres going to be a bunch of janky chinese zen copies floating around?

ChiZen , Patent pending

 

[Philphoto]

Is this still cheap than Intel??? I am really want return back with AMD. THis new make me so excite to see and listen how Ryzen run! Price ??

 

[lsatenstein]

I am part of the post world war two baby boomers. I am retired, I have a pension and savings, but I have been reluctant to purchase Intel, because my view is that Intel's products are cost inflated, due to AMDs non competitive nature.

When Ryzen comes to market, I will look at Intel's price performance structure, versus AMDs and choose the better deal. Somehow I believe AMD will be forcing Intel to come down to earth with their pricing. CPUs are commodities, as is memory and storage and I welcome competition. No top line consumer desktop or laptop should cost more than a 60 inch flat panel TV with it's bells and whistles.

 

[JamesSneed]

I am part of the post world war two baby boomers. I am retired, I have a pension and savings, but I have been reluctant to purchase Intel, because my view is that Intel's products are cost inflated, due to AMDs non competitive nature.

When Ryzen comes to market, I will look at Intel's price performance structure, versus AMDs and choose the better deal. Somehow I believe AMD will be be forcing Intel to come down to earth with their pricing. CPUs are commodities, as is memory and storage and I welcome competition. No top line consumer desktop or laptop should cost more than a 60 inch flat panel TV with it's bells and whistles.

As long as AMD is competitive and prices the CPU's cheaper than Intel then you should see the competition cause some price adjustments from Intel. However Intel really has not really increased pricing on all there CPU's below the enthusiast grade i.e. x99 platform(Core i7-6950X, i7-6900K, i7-6850K and i7-6800K). In fact they haven't even kept up with inflation over the last decade so I don't expect much to occur pricing wise until you hit the enthusiast level CPU's. We shall see but I don't expect a pricing war on

 

[InvalidError]

In fact they haven't even kept up with inflation over the last decade so I don't expect much to occur pricing wise until you hit the enthusiast level CPU's.

In the past, there used to be considerable performance per dollar improvements every year. Now, we're at the six year mark of negligible performance at rising price points. Performance equivalent to an i7-2600 should be much cheaper by now due to all the process and architectural improvements but it isn't.

That market aberration is entirely thanks to Intel's lack of credible competitors in the upper-mainstream to high-end segments. The lower-end gets priced more fairly because AMD has competitively priced selection and ARM-based platforms based on $10-50 SoCs are also eroding the entry-level PC market.

A successful reasonably priced Ryzen lineup would be a much needed sanity check for Intel's prices. I'd hope to see most of Intel's prices melt by 30-40%.

 

[jasonf2]

Early price leaks look like the high end sku on these things is going to be less than $600 retail. If it can head to head a 6900k with less power consumption ($1000) we have a pretty serious price war coming. Intel's answer to AMD historically is to pull something out of its magical R&D bag and keep its margins. When AMD threatened Intel with its 64 bit processors we got I7 920 and tick tock out of it (now defunct). So.... Do we get cheaper chips or a game changing performance boost?

 

[InvalidError]

When AMD threatened Intel with its 64 bit processors we got I7 920 and tick tock out of it (now defunct). So.... Do we get cheaper chips or a game changing performance boost?

The chip Intel used to steal the x86-64 performance crown back from AMD was the Core2 which had a massive IPC and power efficiency improvements over Netburst/64 but no IMC and the first-gen i-series produced another leap forward mainly from integrating the memory controller into the CPU, halving memory access latency.

Since I strongly suspect that we're pretty close to the end of the road for single-threaded IPC, I doubt we'll see any major leaps there. It will all be mostly pricing and core count in the future, relatively with few people benefiting from extra cores due to the scarcity of efficiently multi-threaded software in general.

 

[ttt_2017]

Intel's 10nm products are supposed to ship this year. If AMD competes against that on 7nm, that won't be before Intel has had a roughly year-long head-start.

In any case, what I'm most curious to know about Ryzen is pricing: if prices fail to provide a significant improvement in bang-per-buck, then most people will have little reason to consider AMD over Intel. Performance from six years ago (i7-2600) shouldn't still cost $250+ today. Especially in a physically IGP-less form as is supposed to be the case with the first wave of Ryzen parts.

For the 10000000th time , CPU is not only for gaming.

8 cores/16 threads running at 3ghz and consuming 65watts only and costing just $320 will destroy Intel CPUs ...

Show me where any Intel CPU can handle 8cores at 3Ghz while consuming just 65 watts ...

not to mention the Overclock able ones X1700 and X1800 ...

 

[JamesSneed]

In fact they haven't even kept up with inflation over the last decade so I don't expect much to occur pricing wise until you hit the enthusiast level CPU's.

In the past, there used to be considerable performance per dollar improvements every year. Now, we're at the six year mark of negligible performance at rising price points. Performance equivalent to an i7-2600 should be much cheaper by now due to all the process and architectural improvements but it isn't.

That market aberration is entirely thanks to Intel's lack of credible competitors in the upper-mainstream to high-end segments. The lower-end gets priced more fairly because AMD has competitively priced selection and ARM-based platforms based on $10-50 SoCs are also eroding the entry-level PC market.

A successful reasonably priced Ryzen lineup would be a much needed sanity check for Intel's prices. I'd hope to see most of Intel's prices melt by 30-40%.

I completely agree. I am an owner of a 2500k and I have built computers a bit over 20 years now so I have seen a bit. For my personal rig I read up on every new CPU release and it has been so ho hum since Sandy Bridge. I not only hope the pricing situation improves but more importantly for me I hope progress stops flat lining. I'm very likely jumping on a new Ryzen build once reviews are out and we have some motherboard reviews as well. I have waited this long to upgrade whats a few more weeks.