AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[Cazalan]

Not to mention how utterly weak the hardware is, composing an email was excruciatingly painful.

That's your perception having grown up with desktop computers as the norm. My 4 year old nephew emails me from his iPhone and that's just how it's done in his world. He can work an iPad/iPhone better than I can. To him a full size keyboard is awkward. I can't stand touch or on-screen keyboards but the youth of today don't care. They know how to swipe. They take mobility over power any day.

I've composed emails on 90Mhz Pentium PCs. I don't know how it's possible for a 1Ghz+ smartphone to be worse than that. Email is one of the most basic and simple things you can do on a computer. I don't even get personal emails anymore, that's just for work. At home I just get text/IM messages.

I personally can't stand tablets, but that is my perspective. They're still selling like hot cakes. What I hear you saying is they're not up to your standards, but I have cousins that don't even own PCs anymore. Or they have them but they're never turned on anymore. For them the phone/tablet has taken over every aspect they needed.

Five years back at a family get together people would gravitate toward the family PC at some point to share things, or play some games, look at the latest Youtube craze.

Thinking back to Easter people just stayed in the living room or out on the deck. Cell phones, tablets, that is all people looked at. The kids didn't go on the computer anymore. No one even went in the computer room. The kids aren't asking their parents to buy them a PC anymore. They want the latest phone/tablet.

The notion that the traditional desktop/laptop PC is on decline just because of market saturation is a misnomer. There is simply less demand for it.

 

[sarinaide]

AMD has special order of second batch from TSMC and this probably explains why Maxwell will only see the light of day closer to 2015.

I have poor memory. Source ?

I do expect volcanic Islands to be on average 2-3x faster than existing Southern Islands parts across the board with a universal "double em up" through all SKU's.

2-3x seems excessive. I would be happy with 1.6-1.8 perf in the top end parts.

HD7970GE vs HD6970

The HD7970 increased resources over the 6970 but nothing steller in fact it was about 20% more compute resources and on the balance of all the tests the HD7970 was around 45% faster than the HD6970. The HD9970 doubles the HD7970's resources and drops the node to 20nm together with GCN's powergating techniques assuming clock for clock on different process the 9970 should be twice as fast, If AMD clock the card higher, say 1100mhz then it should yield higher gains.

It should be the fastest GPU at least until Maxwell in Q3-4 2014.

 

[palladin9479]

That's the catch of the entire thing, every advancement in miniaturized computing is first done on the desktop level. Every update, advancement or capabilities increase is a result of a desktop innovation. This means that the desktop form-factor will always be more advanced then the handheld. Which in turn means there will always be things you can do on the desktop which won't work on a handheld. So seriously, stop thinking that handhelds are replacing desktops, that reality only exists in your imagination or in the propaganda that pass's for advertising these days.

Do you believe this to be true when it comes to system integration and wireless (3G/LTE) technology? I would tend to say that my cell phone is leaps and bounds ahead of my desktop in these categories.

Most definitely true. There are desktop LTE adapters you can get, their just a very niche market that's rarely seen outside of system integrators. Your mobile is the mass market version of this because there simply is no demand for mobile radio communications on a wired desktop. You can google desktop LTE modems and find several out there, or go to some specialists sites for pci-express versions. I believe embeddedworks.net carries some for mini-itx car computer solutions.

Remember mobile applications require miniaturization of existing technology. The IC's and devices are built on a desktop first then later miniaturized into a mobile application. DT has a much greater power and space budget the mobile.

 

[palladin9479]

Not to mention how utterly weak the hardware is, composing an email was excruciatingly painful.

That's your perception having grown up with desktop computers as the norm. My 4 year old nephew emails me from his iPhone and that's just how it's done in his world. He can work an iPad/iPhone better than I can. To him a full size keyboard is awkward. I can't stand touch or on-screen keyboards but the youth of today don't care. They know how to swipe. They take mobility over power any day.

I've composed emails on 90Mhz Pentium PCs. I don't know how it's possible for a 1Ghz+ smartphone to be worse than that. Email is one of the most basic and simple things you can do on a computer. I don't even get personal emails anymore, that's just for work. At home I just get text/IM messages.

I personally can't stand tablets, but that is my perspective. They're still selling like hot cakes. What I hear you saying is they're not up to your standards, but I have cousins that don't even own PCs anymore. Or they have them but they're never turned on anymore. For them the phone/tablet has taken over every aspect they needed.

Five years back at a family get together people would gravitate toward the family PC at some point to share things, or play some games, look at the latest Youtube craze.

Thinking back to Easter people just stayed in the living room or out on the deck. Cell phones, tablets, that is all people looked at. The kids didn't go on the computer anymore. No one even went in the computer room. The kids aren't asking their parents to buy them a PC anymore. They want the latest phone/tablet.

The notion that the traditional desktop/laptop PC is on decline just because of market saturation is a misnomer. There is simply less demand for it.

This has become like talking to conspiracy theorists. There is nothing anyone can say that would convince you that smartphones and desktops do not compete in the same marketplace and that smartphones will not replace desktops, ever. I've laid out the reasons why they don't compete and the horrific results of attempting to have them replace them.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

For the average Joe, a smartphone+tablet dock does all the things he needs. All his social networking is already there. He can be on the move and still respond to his emails and updates. For the real serious typing work, he has a old notebook that does it.
For the average kid Joe, he has seen a smartphone all his life. All his games are on the smartphone. He doesnt understand why you have to have a desktop. He saw his dad playing some FPS on a gaming desktop, and was apalled to see no touch.


Smartphones cant replace desktops, but a smartphone is much more "Personal" than a desktop PC.
Smartphones are eating heavily in the casual "Personal" computing market, which in developed countries is a significant majority.
In the corporate world, notebooks are eating extremely heavily in the desktop market . Do you think notebooks are the same beast as a desktop ?

 

[palladin9479]

For the average Joe, a smartphone+tablet dock does all the things he needs. All his social networking is already there. He can be on the move and still respond to his emails and updates. For the real serious typing work, he has a old notebook that does it.
For the average kid Joe, he has seen a smartphone all his life. All his games are on the smartphone. He doesnt understand why you have to have a desktop. He saw his dad playing some FPS on a gaming desktop, and was apalled to see no touch.


Smartphones cant replace desktops, but a smartphone is much more "Personal" than a desktop PC.
Smartphones are eating heavily in the casual "Personal" computing market, which in developed countries is a significant majority.
In the corporate world, notebooks are eating extremely heavily in the desktop market . Do you think notebooks are the same beast as a desktop ?

And I'm telling you there is no smartphone docking solution right now that remotely replaces a desktop. Samsung's been working on several for awhile now and they just never work right. Cellphone hardware is really weak, we don't notice it because with such a limited interface there isn't much for it to do. The moment you try to go multi-task it really slows down, neither Android nor iOS is capable of preemptive multi-tasking which is a requirement for Office Automation work. Windows RT is a wildcard as the NT kernel used can technically do that, though there haven't been any solid platforms made to do that.

The rest of your post is pure nonsense unless your talking caffeine fueled social junkies who's idea of an "email" is something to the effect of "Y R U PRN?".

Your also wrong about corporates replacing desktops with notebooks. From a costing point of view you get better value out of low end $500 desktops then an equivalent notebook. Roadwarriors and sales folks tend to get mobile systems issued to them due to them having to frequently work from an alternate location. If you were to walk into the HR department you'd see mass's of cheap Dell / HP / IBM desktops. Each market segment caters to a specific need. As the needs change your preferred solution changes. DT's are simply more cost efficient and will always be so due to economy of scaling. People are seeing new desktop sales decline, well no sh!t, the markets already saturated, you only buy to replace things that are broke. The total number of deployed desktops worldwide hasn't gone down. The ultramobile segment, aka phablets, hasn't hit it's market cap yet so it's going to continue to grow until it does and when that happens it'll look the same as the DT market does now. You want to know a cellphone market that's already hit saturation? It's already happened here in South Korea, cell phone growth has flatlined already though everyone tends to buy a new phone every one to two years (vs every three to five for desktops).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_South_Korea#Cellular_phones

This is a place that you can pay for nearly everything with your cellphone, watch TV, rend movies or play games. Nearly everything happens on the cellphone out here, phones are practically glued them since birth. And yet the desktop market has not gone away here, every home still has a desktop computer, often two to three depending on income and home size. I've had this conversation before with my Korean counterparts and it's pretty much the agreement that each form factor serves a different need. DT is for home use / office work, laptop is for mobile use / office work and smartphone is for mobile communication. Each form-factor can blur over a little into each others area but will never replace them as they can't be specialized into that area.

 

[jdwii]

Yeah the tablet is so amazing tell me again how many people enjoyed windows 8 metro screen? Man i know a lot of casual average non geeks who play games such as LOL or sims and they do it on their laptops. With steam being so epically cheap again i'm telling you guys the desktop and laptop are not going anywhere.
The ONLY reason why smartphones/tablets have been gaining market share is because 1 portability and 2 teens with school and college texting all day(plus it is their own device they're not sharing it). It has nothing to do with them watching Iron man 2 on their phone instead of their xbox/PS3 or Blu-ray player. It has nothing to do with them playing lame games on a smartphone/tablet. Have any of you guys realized that many businesses(users) are not buying new desktops/laptops because they already have ones that can do everything such as word, powerpoint(and because of this it looks like they're losing share when in reality its not true. I always laugh when people say this is going to replace that or businesses want in all in one device??????????? really Mr. Einstein you think business only want you to buy one device? Yeah right.

 

[sarinaide]

Here is just my opinion on things:

1) The PC market is in decline purely because Intel is the only player and Intel are not giving even a Gulftown owner let alone a Nahelem owner any real reason to upgrade, if you happen to have a Sandy well then you are sorted for some time yet. This also works for those with AMD parts, the Phenom II's are more than enough still for high end gaming performance. So yes PC and notably the CPU market is in decline, not the same can be said about the GPU market.

2) Smartphones and PC's are completely different fields claiming smartphones are killing PC is just ludicrous.

3) Smartphones have PC like functionality but just grossly inefficient and batteries degenerate fast. I have a HTC One and that battery with lights on barely lasts 3 hours, if you game on it you get maybe an hour before your battery is depleted.

4) There are many smartphones, not all are conducive to good experience, but you pay a lot for that experience. I can build a $350 PC that does more than any top smartphone rated at over $1000 can achieve, or I can buy a high end notebook and again beat the smartphones utility. Most smartphones sold are affordable by students so we are often talking about small screens and single core processors. I have them for my kids and I can tell you that its not a lot of fun, but I don't believe in distorting boundries. A phone is a phone is a phone it need only function as a phone.

5) buying docks and connectors is pricy for accessories.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

So people are not buying new desktops, but the desktop market is not shrinking ?
And what happens to the profit of the dells, sonys and HP's ? They dont sell new systems, but they can fill their belly with the knowledge that "the desktop market is only saturated, not dying."

 

[mayankleoboy1]

Here is just my opinion on things:

1)

Spoiler

The PC market is in decline purely because Intel is the only player and Intel are not giving even a Gulftown owner let alone a Nahelem owner any real reason to upgrade, if you happen to have a Sandy well then you are sorted for some time yet. This also works for those with AMD parts, the Phenom II's are more than enough still for high end gaming performance. So yes PC and notably the CPU market is in decline, not the same can be said about the GPU market.

Agree. There is no denying that traditional desktop PC market is declining. Numbers speak.

2) Smartphones and PC's are completely different fields claiming smartphones are killing PC is just ludicrous.

They may not be killing, but are surely eating into that market share. Not for everyone, but for a growing larger population.

4) There are many smartphones, not all are conducive to good experience, but you pay a lot for that experience. Most smartphones sold are affordable by students so we are often talking about small screens and single core processors. I have them for my kids and I can tell you that its not a lot of fun, but I don't believe in distorting boundries. A phone is a phone is a phone it need only function as a phone.

5) buying docks and connectors is pricy for accessories.

To reply to this, let me quote VivekGowri from Anandtech : http://www.anandtech.com/comments/6941/toshiba-kirabook-ultrabook-review/302968

Yeah, but from a "what sells" perspective, consumers at large seem hesitant to drop MacBook Pro money on any PC notebook unless it's an Alienware or similar. PCs have inherently less brand value, and so PC manufacturers can't charge equal (or in this case, more) money to a comparable Mac and hope to have a sales success. The PC industry destroyed that part of itself in the race to the bottom, and now nobody wants to pay more than $700 for a general purpose notebook. While it may not be fair, PC manufacturers cannot use Apple's price points and hope to win unless they ship a significantly more compelling product (see Zenbook Prime vs MacBook Air).

point being, you get what you pay for. A $350 PC (prebuilt, because that the bulk of the market) will be comparable in quality to a $150 smartphone from a cheap smartphone maker. You pay $500 for a SGS4/HTC1 .

I can build a $350 PC

Then you already are in the <1% of PC sales.

I can build a $350 PC that does more than any top smartphone rated at over $1000 can achieve, or I can buy a high end notebook and again beat the smartphones utility.

Let me give you $10,000 . Build a PC for me that can fit in my pocket.
Smartphones arent compute workhorses. They are "good enough" computing and mobility. As a lot of things come and go to the internet, "good enough" is enough for many people. Without the internet, i think smartphones would have been meaningless, and desktops would rule supreme because you have to have everything on the device itself, in a raw-er form , and to get meaningful work, you gotta install large softwares. But with net, you dont have to. The servers are the growing market.
Smartphones are getting more powerful, but desktops are not getting any more mobile/portable.

I suspect that if you see the smartphone sales across the world, countries with fast OTA internet will have vastly larger smartphone sales.

 

[sarinaide]

It is a distortion of terminology.

A desktop is build as its name suggests, why would I want it in my pocket. The PC market is divided between Desktop systems and Mobile systems without going into the branches of each the distinction is apt and to the point. Desktops are fixed systems while mobile based notebooks or ultrabooks/tablets are designed for mobility.

Smartphones is a term derived to describe a phone that can do more than a traditional cell phone, send recieve e-mails, use wireless networks, install applications for the users needs, the utility is like and often casual usage. A student needing to do thesis and research is going to struggle on a phone where a lowcost notebook would have been sufficient and practical. Gaming on a mobile is not really a term I am familiar with other than "I am bored and don't have a hand held console or notebook let me play on my phone" thats about as good as it gets. A gamer will consider a phone after desktop, mobile, console and handheld. A person just wanting to chatroom or chatapp with someone will find utility in a smartphone. So again the smartphones practicality is "lite" for anything intensive its completely impractical.

Now there are docks, keyboards and screens for a smartphone, but those accessories cost and again the experience is not efficient, most cellphones have compute performance of the days gone by Pentium 3 like systems, to do any kind of work related activities is impractical and frustrating. To alieviate the problem and get more muscle and RAM you need to spend through your teeth to get what is best called tolerable.

So again my smartphone is a phone, texter, email on the fly and the odd social network app; it does that for me, but I hardly see it stoping me buying PC's or Notebooks for some many years yet.

DT market sales as we are aware are declining not because it is dead but for reasons given, there is no upgradeability that is noteworthy and since the market is saturated with Intel it means we live in a one choice society unless you want to build your own. The other factor is the increase in console sales and sony reporting the highest pre-order rate it has had, next gen consoles will break the console myopia and people may further leave DT for an affordable console setup, the other big factor is now no longer will we have the need for software trying to scale as hardware, now through AMD and partners we will have software to compliment hardware scaling, these are the changing landscapes and once we pass that divide then DT sales will increase again.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Lets do as the government does, even tho youre spending more this year than last, those tax cuts are from projections.
If a market has a projected growth and falls short, even if its growing, itas perceived as shrinking, especially for a company that doesnt forecast this, and say, builds a lot of fabs that are being under utilized.

 

[8350rocks]

Xeon Phi is MUCH more similar to a GPGPU than Kaveri, because Kaveri is a heterogeneous APU with a few powerful x86 cores for serial workloads and many GPU shaders, while Xeon Phi is a homogeneous array of relatively weak x86 cores that are meant to perform massively parallel workloads. Obviously if you think Xeon Phi is equivalent to Kaveri you do not understand what one of them is. I'm guessing Xeon Phi. Please go search Google and read up on Xeon Phi and return when you are more informed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

Seems like you're uninformed...Xeon Phi is a simple coprocessor for math functions...it has compute cores only.

Kaveri is closer to a GPGPU than Xeon Phi, some would even argue it is one...(mayan for example)...though I do not consider it to be one, because it's a more integrated SoC solution in my mind. I do suppose, though, that it technically fits the definition of GPGPU in a broad sense. At least, if you wanted to look at it that way.

 

[8350rocks]

For the average Joe, a smartphone+tablet dock does all the things he needs. All his social networking is already there. He can be on the move and still respond to his emails and updates. For the real serious typing work, he has a old notebook that does it.
For the average kid Joe, he has seen a smartphone all his life. All his games are on the smartphone. He doesnt understand why you have to have a desktop. He saw his dad playing some FPS on a gaming desktop, and was apalled to see no touch.


Smartphones cant replace desktops, but a smartphone is much more "Personal" than a desktop PC.
Smartphones are eating heavily in the casual "Personal" computing market, which in developed countries is a significant majority.
In the corporate world, notebooks are eating extremely heavily in the desktop market . Do you think notebooks are the same beast as a desktop ?

And I'm telling you there is no smartphone docking solution right now that remotely replaces a desktop. Samsung's been working on several for awhile now and they just never work right. Cellphone hardware is really weak, we don't notice it because with such a limited interface there isn't much for it to do. The moment you try to go multi-task it really slows down, neither Android nor iOS is capable of preemptive multi-tasking which is a requirement for Office Automation work. Windows RT is a wildcard as the NT kernel used can technically do that, though there haven't been any solid platforms made to do that.

The rest of your post is pure nonsense unless your talking caffeine fueled social junkies who's idea of an "email" is something to the effect of "Y R U PRN?".

Your also wrong about corporates replacing desktops with notebooks. From a costing point of view you get better value out of low end $500 desktops then an equivalent notebook. Roadwarriors and sales folks tend to get mobile systems issued to them due to them having to frequently work from an alternate location. If you were to walk into the HR department you'd see mass's of cheap Dell / HP / IBM desktops. Each market segment caters to a specific need. As the needs change your preferred solution changes. DT's are simply more cost efficient and will always be so due to economy of scaling. People are seeing new desktop sales decline, well no sh!t, the markets already saturated, you only buy to replace things that are broke. The total number of deployed desktops worldwide hasn't gone down. The ultramobile segment, aka phablets, hasn't hit it's market cap yet so it's going to continue to grow until it does and when that happens it'll look the same as the DT market does now. You want to know a cellphone market that's already hit saturation? It's already happened here in South Korea, cell phone growth has flatlined already though everyone tends to buy a new phone every one to two years (vs every three to five for desktops).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_South_Korea#Cellular_phones

This is a place that you can pay for nearly everything with your cellphone, watch TV, rend movies or play games. Nearly everything happens on the cellphone out here, phones are practically glued them since birth. And yet the desktop market has not gone away here, every home still has a desktop computer, often two to three depending on income and home size. I've had this conversation before with my Korean counterparts and it's pretty much the agreement that each form factor serves a different need. DT is for home use / office work, laptop is for mobile use / office work and smartphone is for mobile communication. Each form-factor can blur over a little into each others area but will never replace them as they can't be specialized into that area.

+1

 

[-Fran-]

Well, here at Experian we just had a PC refresh and they all gave us lappies, replacing desktops... So now we have to take them home and I hate it.

They're slower and came with Win7. Palladin, they can replace a desktop if you have the patience and even more, if it is imposed, hahaha. But we're in a point where a Lappy can replace like 99% of desktop things with no big overhead or inconviniences.

I think, at this point, Smartphones don't cut it to replace even Lappies yet, so never mind Desktop. In this I agree with Palladin.

I tried using my S2 on the TV and it worked fine. User input was OK overall and in the particular case of writing an email, using 720p hdmi, wasn't THAT big of a deal using GMail's app. Watching a movie in 720p wasn't either using MX Player, but 1080p is out of the question. Moving forward, though, the S4 specially, will be so so close to being a good HTPC replacement, that the only draw back will be User Interface problems and less hardware being slow. So, a dock for the living room, to replace a big console for instance, is not out of my scope at all. Gaming would be the only thing that would keep an HTPC or Console in its place for now.

Cheers!

 

[Blandge]

Xeon Phi is MUCH more similar to a GPGPU than Kaveri, because Kaveri is a heterogeneous APU with a few powerful x86 cores for serial workloads and many GPU shaders, while Xeon Phi is a homogeneous array of relatively weak x86 cores that are meant to perform massively parallel workloads. Obviously if you think Xeon Phi is equivalent to Kaveri you do not understand what one of them is. I'm guessing Xeon Phi. Please go search Google and read up on Xeon Phi and return when you are more informed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

Seems like you're uninformed...Xeon Phi is a simple coprocessor for math functions...it has compute cores only.

Kaveri is closer to a GPGPU than Xeon Phi, some would even argue it is one...(mayan for example)...though I do not consider it to be one, because it's a more integrated SoC solution in my mind. I do suppose, though, that it technically fits the definition of GPGPU in a broad sense. At least, if you wanted to look at it that way.

XeonPhi has many of the characteristics of a GPGPU. It's used for the exact same general purpose mathematical workloads, only it doesn't function as a graphics processor. Xeon Phi is a direct competitor to GPGPUs, and to say that the top offering in the Green500 is a completely different approach from the 2nd and 3rd place is incorrect to me, because despite the fact the Xeon Phi is labeled at "math coprocessor," it still functions as a set of weak cores that are meant to perform parallel data sets. The technology behind Xeon Phi is from Larrabee which is described below:

Larrabee is the codename for a GPGPU chip that Intel is developing separately from its current line of integrated graphics accelerators. The chip was to be released in 2010 as the core of a consumer 3D graphics card, but these plans were cancelled due to delays and disappointing early performance figures.[1] The project to produce a GPU retail product directly from the Larrabee research project was terminated in May 2010.[2] The Intel MIC multiprocessor architecture announced in 2010 inherited many design elements from the Larrabee project, but does not function as a graphics processing unit; the product is intended as a co-processor for high performance computing.
Source

If you want to argue semantics that's fine, but the underlying concepts are what really matter.

I would indeed concede that Kaveri's GPU can be considered a GPGPU, and therefore you could consider Kaveri a GPGPU in the same way that you might consider a house to be a bathroom, because it incorporates bathroom into it's design.

 

[Cazalan]

Roadwarriors and sales folks tend to get mobile systems issued to them due to them having to frequently work from an alternate location. If you were to walk into the HR department you'd see mass's of cheap Dell / HP / IBM desktops. Each market segment caters to a specific need. As the needs change your preferred solution changes. DT's are simply more cost efficient and will always be so due to economy of scaling. People are seeing new desktop sales decline, well no sh!t, the markets already saturated, you only buy to replace things that are broke.

What does HR need? A $299 laptop?

I just spoke to a customer yesterday who said he couldn't buy a version of one of our products because their company doesn't procure desktops anymore. They limit to a few laptop models and rackmount Xeon workstations, and he didn't have budget for the higher end workstation for that project. It's not strictly unit cost but IT support costs.

Laptops aren't just bought for roadwarriors and sales people. There's always the notion that an employee with a laptop can work remote when they have to, or do some work on the weekends or when they are sick, or on vacation check emails. When out for training or at a conference. One friend at a gov job was assigned 2 laptops, one for office, one for home. Standard practice in his division.

Desktops are cheap but so are laptops, and the built-in UPS is often overlooked. Ever lose a couple hours work from a power blip and the slight overhead of a laptop can pay for itself.

 

[-Fran-]

(...)
Laptops aren't just bought for roadwarriors and sales people. There's always the notion that an employee with a laptop can work remote when they have to, or do some work on the weekends or when they are sick, or on vacation check emails. When out for training or at a conference. One friend at a gov job was assigned 2 laptops, one for office, one for home. Standard practice in his division.

Desktops are cheap but so are laptops, and the built-in UPS is often overlooked. Ever lose a couple hours work from a power blip and the slight overhead of a laptop can pay for itself.

The slavery of the new era... ~_____________________________~

Oh well, that's for another topic altogether, haha.

Cheers!

 

[juanrga]

By efficiency I did mean performance per watt. The #1 top supercomputer using AMD X86-Opterons plus Nvidia cards offers 20 petaflop using 9 MW of power. Assuming linear scaling 200 petaflop would use 90 MW of power (the power consumption will be higher because is nonlinear). The European project, using ARM CPU + ARM GPU wait to obtain 200 petaflop using only 10 MW.

http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/48193-new-eu-based-supercomputer-arm-based/

Imagine what AMD could offer us with its future ARM-Opteron chips.

You should never assume linear scaling.

Just below the part that you bolded I wrote: "the power consumption will be higher because is nonlinear"

Linearization was used to obtain a lower limit.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Unless productivity on mobile goes way way up, as well as durability, the replacement costs may nlast one purchase, until the number crunchers make comparisons.
Many large corporations do simple upgrades, simple upgrades, once good enough is good enough is cheaper using a DT than going moibile, where those upgrades cant always be done.
No simple answer here

 

[juanrga]

Steamroller will be 28nm Right?

I knew that Intel lies about benchmarks. I have just discovered that Intel also lies about the size of the process/node:

As the world now knows, there’s a nanometre and then there’s an Intel nanometre.

To most of us a nanometre is a nanometre but, to Intel, a nanometre measures 1.182 nanometres.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/mannerisms/general/the-intel-nanometre-2013-02/

Intel’s 22-nm node is really 26 nm

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4403320/Fur-flies-over-FinFETs-and-future-in-IEDM-panel

 

[8350rocks]

So, haswell is, essentially, a 16.54 nm FinFET...hmm...my how they resort to fallacy to maintain an air of supremacy.

Why does it not surprise me though...considering their track record for truth.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Mike Bryant writes:
I’ll repeat some useful numbers I’ve given before at our events. As can be seen for SRAM the Intel 22nm is almost but not quite twice as dense as their 32nm process, whilst TSMC and GF processes fit in roughly to the Intel densities as given by the names of their nodes.

Once upon a time half the metal M1 pitch defined the node but in recent years metal pitch reduction has not kept pace with other features so fabs have tended to reference the node as the ratio to the density of SRAM at 65 or 90nm.
Certainly there is a LOT of market BS taking place as well (Intel included) but in reality Intel does lead the way in density at least.

Of course SRAM density isn’t everything but with BEOL limited by the desire to stay with single patterning, for logic the metal routing now begins to dominate over transistor size.

The drawn gate length is not really a relevant measure any more and in any case has never been the official definition of the node. It is generally used to set the performance of the transistor, shorter is faster whilst longer is slower but less leakage. The move to FinFETs allowed the performance and density of the next node to be achieved without going to shorter gate lengths which would have excessive leakage.

The additional complication of FD-SOI as a competing process technology will prove interesting. Despite the hype, FD-SOI SRAM densities won’t match the densest FinFET SRAMs at the same node, but leakage will be noticeably better, causing a definite process branch applicable to numerous applications.


The stats are :

SRAMs
(HP and special low power versions are larger for all fabs)

Intel 45nm SRAM cell – 0.346um^2
Intel 32nm SRAM cell – 0.171um^2
Intel 22nm SRAM cell – 0.092um^2

TSMC 40nm SRAM cell – 0.290um^2
TSMC 28nm SRAM cell – 0.127um^2
TSMC 20nm SRAM cell – 0.090um^2

GF 28nm SRAM cell – 0.120um^2

ST 28nm FD-SOI SRAM cell – 0.120um^2 (this is believed to be the version with no back-gate and uncompetitive leakage – 0.152um^2 for back-gate and lowest power/leakage but of course LP versions of other processes are also larger)


Metal pitch
(once upon a time half this was the node size but as can be seen the transistors have shrunk a lot more than the metal)

Intel 22nm metal pitch – 64nm
Intel 14nm metal pitch – 48nm

TSMC 28nm metal pitch – 64nm
TSMC 20nm metal pitch – 64nm

GF 14nm metal pitch – 48nm (predicted)


Contacted gate pitch
(this is a key dimension in that it is no point making transistor gates shorter unless you can reduce this number to match)

Intel 32nm contacted gate pitch – 112nm
Intel 22nm contacted gate pitch – 90nm (80nm with special processing)
Intel 14nm contacted gate pitch – unknown

TSMC 40nm contacted gate pitch – 160nm
TSMC 28nm contacted gate pitch – 118nm
TSMC 20nm contacted gate pitch – unknown
TSMC 14nm contacted gate pitch – unknown

GF 28nm contacted gate pitch – 113nm
GF 20nm contacted gate pitch – 80nm
GF 14nm contacted gate pitch – not relevant as BEOL is stated as being the same as 20nm. However this may change in due course.


I hope this helps

Mike Bryant
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/mannerisms/general/the-intel-nanometre-2013-02/

From the comments section below from your link.
The density can no longer be described as the gate length, simple as that, so dont let marketing lead you.

 

[-Fran-]

That's a very interesting read, for sure, JDJ. Thanks a lot for it.

Cheers!

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Well, process is one thing, perf something altogether different.
If you have the time and the money to hone in on the exact combo for your design/s, of course youre going to have great results.
If youre leading in process, youre not only ahead this way as well as giving yourself time to do that tuning, using multiple approaches, and not just those given by sims.
Thing is tho, the fabs are throwing caution to the wind, and while some dont believe, theyll be catching Intel at around 14nm, or close enough it wont matter, as aggregately, theyre much larger than Intel, and OEMs will wait, and only fish with Intel