AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[iceclock]

we need people to think outside of the box. and make all new software multi-threaded its not acceptable that programs still only run on one core.

 

[Cazalan]

Actually that says that a reported tablet controller was a hoax. The 8-core rumor came from multiple different sources apart from the one claiming to know about the 'X-Surface'.

It may be possible but an 8 core Jaguar would still be about 1/4 to half as fast as an A10.

Why would you start a brand new gaming platform with a crippled CPU?

 

[sarinaide]

So if AMD is making an FX8000 series and it fail at the 8000 and 6000 series, what do you want AMD to do? I would prefer them sell it if it meets the 4000 series specs. I think it should be at an lesser price so the A10 and FX4000 series are different in peoples' minds. I think more people would upgrade to 32nm tech also (yes, your Phenom is old), but I don't know exactly how much it cost to produce the chips.... but it would more than just throwing it away/recycling.

The FX4000 series is priced like $10 less than a FX6000 part and the FX6300 is significantly faster than the FX4300 which is actually slower than the FX4170. The A10's and A8's are matching the FX 4300/4170 in discrete card gaming and in content creation absolutely obliterate the FX4000 for $10-20 less. The A-Series replaces the FX4000 generation and the FX6000 remains the mainstream level chip.

I am actually now more convinced that L2 and L3 cache hurts AMD performance as L3 in particular is very slow with high latency. The A10's and now the Richlands are capable of the same content creation performance and same single threaded performance as the FX8350 and 1100T. Richland had the latencies trimmed and dialled in, the L2 is much faster than that on X6's and FX parts and the performance is there. Its something to consider as AMD already has a lot of L2.

Lots of rumblings about Kaviri making the step into low level mainstream gaming, some mentions of games almost doubling FPS and being playable on med-high settings at 19:10 resolutions.

 

[de5_Roy]

So if AMD is making an FX8000 series and it fail at the 8000 and 6000 series, what do you want AMD to do? I would prefer them sell it if it meets the 4000 series specs. I think it should be at an lesser price so the A10 and FX4000 series are different in peoples' minds. I think more people would upgrade to 32nm tech also (yes, your Phenom is old), but I don't know exactly how much it cost to produce the chips.... but it would more than just throwing it away/recycling.

afaik, fx4000 cpus are higher earners than fx6k and higher cpus. despite amd's repeated efforts and (failed) marketing attempts, people have not picked up 6+ core cpus. phenom iis still sell a lot. imo phenoms will be replaced by fx4k cpus before fx6k+ cpus start selling more. even then they will have to contend with amd's own highest earners - apus like brazos, (future) kabini and on desktops - llano, trinity and (future) kaveri - all quadcores (according to amd marketing). amd is not a company that caters to 'enthusiasts' (anymore). they won't stop making something that earns them money. all these even before you count intel's cpus.
and amd needs money.

It may be possible but an 8 core Jaguar would still be about 1/4 to half as fast as an A10.

Why would you start a brand new gaming platform with a crippled CPU?

if the cpu is customized to meet the consoles' needs, it won't be crippled. besides, if the console gpus handle most of gaming task, the cpu won't be much of a factor apart from running devices like kinect or tablets (as input) or networking.

Five Kabini APUs planned for June 2013
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/30451-four-kabini-apus-planned-for-june-2013

 

[iceclock]

simple answer. kill the 4300 fx. kill 6300. keep 8350. and keep the a8s and a10s as theyre best bang for bucks with nice overclockibility and descrete graphics that are decent.

 

[truegenius]

keep apu
keep fx8
replace fx4/6 with quad core k10 (die shrink and higher clocked) (hex core k10 @4ghz will be too much, i mean it will kick out the fx8 series so leave it for the sake of [strike]crap[/strike] fx8)

why quad core k10 ?
because

truegenius wrote :
also, does it means that newer games will use more core effectively/ efficiently ?

gamerk316 wrote:
As I have said several times for several years now: NO!

and because 4 k10 cores will save much power amd die space, better single and multi core performance and easily cloclable to 4.5ghz

 

[de5_Roy]

keep apu
keep fx8
replace fx4/6 with quad core k10 (die shrink and higher clocked) (hex core k10 @4ghz will be too much, i mean it will kick out the fx8 series so leave it for the sake of [strike]crap[/strike] fx8)

amd makes one die. what are they gonna do with the fx8000 cpus with defects? dump them in the trashbin? that's bad business. that's why they try to sucker people into buying lower fxes. intel, nv do the same thing.
phenoms still sell today. big part of the credit goes to zambezi. without zambezi, phenoms wouldn't have gained their second wind (in reality those were the unsold cpus when people switched to sb ;-P).
i don't think it'd be more power efficient though. with steamroller, there's a slight chance that amd can indeed solve power efficiency issues. with that in the horizon, k10 is even less of a priority. imo, unless amd needs to fully kill off phenoms before sr comes out.

 

[kettu]

As I have said several times for several years now: NO!

Then you have been wrong for several years. We've allready made significant progress on that front. We're utilising atleast six cores effectively, as has been pointed out allready.

 

[Cazalan]

if the cpu is customized to meet the consoles' needs, it won't be crippled. besides, if the console gpus handle most of gaming task, the cpu won't be much of a factor apart from running devices like kinect or tablets (as input) or networking.

Jaguar is like a K10 with things stripped out for low power. That's why an Athlon2/Phenom2 will run rings around a Bobcat/Jaguar.

GPUs don't handle most of the gaming task. They handle the rendering and some physics. The CPU is still very important. Otherwise people could just upgrade their video cards and see major improvements. That doesn't happen though, as you'll see post after post about "will this CPU bottleneck my GPU".

 

[de5_Roy]

Jaguar is like a K10 with things stripped out for low power. That's why an Athlon2/Phenom2 will run rings around a Bobcat/Jaguar.

really? hadn't thought of that. i thought that jaguar was built anew.

GPUs don't handle most of the gaming task. They handle the rendering and some physics. The CPU is still very important. Otherwise people could just upgrade their video cards and see major improvements. That doesn't happen though, as you'll see post after post about "will this CPU bottleneck my GPU".

only in the cases with amd hardware. ;-D
...
okay now i see your point.

 

[iceclock]

amd needs a super performance am3+ cpu that nukes anything intel has. and i bet they can and will cost alot less.

thats whats gonna be a game changer.

 

[esrever]

It may be possible but an 8 core Jaguar would still be about 1/4 to half as fast as an A10.

Why would you start a brand new gaming platform with a crippled CPU?

because CPUs haven't mattered in gaming for 5 years. And 8 core jaguar will be more powerful than the A10. GPU physics will be used as well.

 

[iceclock]

all of that statement makes no sense as some games are very cpu intensive. fail

 

[kettu]

As a rather trivial excercise in futility one might try building a gaming machine with intel atom and then come to a conclusion wether or not CPUs matter....

 

[earl45]

amd needs a super performance am3+ cpu that nukes anything intel has. and i bet they can and will cost alot less.

thats whats gonna be a game changer.

History say's you are wrong, when AMD beat Intel they charge a premium just like Intel.
The cheap prices we are so happy with can from Intel not AMD.
The game changer was FX-52= 1000.00 and up compair to E6600= 300.00.

 

[de5_Roy]

.... when AMD beat Intel they charge a premium just like Intel.
...

that's true, unfortunately. whichever company has the higher performance product, they will charge premium price for it. amd isn't above of it. you don't have to go as far back as the athlon fx. look at radeon hd 7970's(which had higher perf. than nvidia's offering at launch) launch prices. amd had the highest performance hardware and they went to town with the price. with a chainsaw. to cut throats. and they added the card support three !@#$ing months later. and they're still ironing out bugs.

it's justified for amd only, because they are not at all greedy and money hungry just like every other corporation - they're made up of nerdy hardware enthusiasts who sell cheap cpus to nice people. also because amd got screwed over by intel so customers can't blame amd when they screw the customers.

 

[gamerk316]

if its impossible to implement threads spread across cores. How come quad cores are better for gaming than dual cores now and wasn't the case 4 years ago?

Again: LISTEN.

What I've said, many, many, many times now, is this: Developers do not, and will never, hard lock threads to cores on any architecture where you can be prempted by other threads (read: all non-integrated Hardware). The scheduler, not the user, tells the CPU what core to stuff a thread on, and the scheduler, not the user, tells the CPU what thread to run.

Secondly, the overwhelming majority of games are going to run with dozens of threads [they have been for decades], but only 2-4 will do any real amount of processing power, and of those, only 1-2 are able to be run in parallel, and even then, only for small periods of time (example would be the Render thread, which executes fairly late in the processing cycle).

As a result, scaling quickly hits a brick wall.

Remember the E8600 versus Q8xxx debates? How a faster clocked Duo almost always beat the slower clocked quad? Same basic principle applies.

And why is it that some games get half the fps when running a dual core compared to a quad core?

Examples would be nice, preferably on the same CPU arch (none of this i5 versus BD nonsense; give me i3 versus i5 if you want to do a "proper" duo versus quad comparison). In all but a handful of cases, i3's perform close to their big brothers, the i5's. The general exceptions are multiplayer (which makes sense, since you add a relatively process heavy thread to the mix), or games with more advanced physics engines (PhysX, anyone?).

I'm not saying quads don't help to some extent, but for the majority of games, an i3 is more then sufficient. In most cases, you run into a brick wall in terms of scaling after 3 cores or so.

 

[gamerk316]

Then you have been wrong for several years. We've allready made significant progress on that front. We're utilising atleast six cores effectively, as has been pointed out allready.

Funny, I have't seen a single example of that as far as games go...

 

[earl45]

that's true, unfortunately. whichever company has the higher performance product, they will charge premium price for it. amd isn't above of it. you don't have to go as far back as the athlon fx. look at radeon hd 7970's(which had higher perf. than nvidia's offering at launch) launch prices. amd had the highest performance hardware and they went to town with the price. with a chainsaw. to cut throats. and they added the card support three !@#$ing months later. and they're still ironing out bugs.

it's justified for amd only, because they are not at all greedy and money hungry just like every other corporation - they're made up of nerdy hardware enthusiasts who sell cheap cpus to nice people. also because amd got screwed over by intel so customers can't blame amd when they screw the customers.

+1

 

[esrever]

gamerk316 - knows more than the engineers at AMD, sony, microsoft, IBM and intel put together.

 

[kettu]

Funny, I have't seen a single example of that as far as games go...

noob2222 posted this link on page 23 of this thread
http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/14650-prestandaanalys-battlefield-3/5

Looks pretty effective to me.

 

[-Fran-]

gamerk316 - knows more than the engineers at AMD, sony, microsoft, IBM and intel put together.

Don't be sarcastic, not good for the health.

We just have to wait what the new consoles will bring up to the table. It's a win/win for PC gamers, though.

If they fail, PC takes the lead again (or handhelds that have 2+ cores) and if they don't, they seem to be comming with 8 cores CPUs, so we'll see some threading there. One way or the other, haha.

Cheers!

 

[gamerk316]

noob2222 posted this link on page 23 of this thread
http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/14650-prestandaanalys-battlefield-3/5

Looks pretty effective to me.

1: I explicity states that Multiplayer lends itself to better performance with more cores, since you are adding a fairly process heavy thread into the mix.
2: i5 2500k (4 core) > FX-8150 (8 core)
3: As far as the Phenom II X2 goes, I suspect the rest of the system load, combined with the relatively weak processor, is combining to push it under the critical point where it simply tanks in performance. I'd love to see where an i3 sits in comparison to the i5 on this chart.

Basically, you are trying to take a single data point and draw a conclusion without bothering to explain WHY those data points look the way they do. Show me the same exact trend with an i3.

In the case of the X2, I suspect its below the critical point where its ability to process basically goes in the toilet. Basically:

Once it gets too far behind, it gets father behind, then performance just tanks. Clock it up somewhat, and clock the X4 by the same amount, and the performance gap would narrow.

 

[gamerk316]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729045.400-the-computer-that-never-crashes.html

Build me this, and I'll make nearly perfect parallel code. But barring a fundamental redesign of computers, tasks simply aren't going to scale well.

 

[viridiancrystal]

Funny, I have't seen a single example of that as far as games go...

Going way back with this one
Remember this?
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/page-343697_28_4900.html#t2616114
Don't go too crazy with your hyperboles.