AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[juanrga]

PS4 GPU has an Effective Bandwidth of 120 to 140 GB/s, Not 176 GB/s As Previously Reported
http://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effective-bandwidth-140-gbs-disproportionate-cpu-gpu-scaling/
i assumed this type of throttling won't happen until amd or arm put 8x arm a57 or carrizo/high clocked jag/puma cores in an apu/soc like that. then again it's wcantcomprehendyetpublishanalysisontech..... sony needs to put in a stronger cooling system in the ps4, if this is true.

any overclocker and bench'er will say that its so pure "dumb"

many months ago, i posted some benches of real world memory transfer speed obtained, which showed that my hd6770 was 80% efficient, and i was complaining that phenom's is very less efficient ( 60% )

theoretical bandwidth does not mean that you will get that much bandwidth in real world, the bandwidth you will get will depend upon efficiency of the components that is accessing memory and and are controlling memory

Everyone knew that 176 GB/s is the maximum bandwidth allowed by the memory. The effective bandwidth depends of lots of factors, including programmer ability to use the hardware. If your code is bad or not optimized the hardware will not optimize it for you.

The geniuses at wccftech took a slide as basis for their typical 'professional' level ruminations.

 

[gamerk316]

PS4 GPU has an Effective Bandwidth of 120 to 140 GB/s, Not 176 GB/s As Previously Reported
http://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effective-bandwidth-140-gbs-disproportionate-cpu-gpu-scaling/

Not shocked; you have the CPU and GPU both fighting for the same memory resources. So when one is getting data, the other is probably blocked from accessing the bus.

 

[noob2222]

Spoiler

AMD graphics shipments grow... thanks to APUs like Kaveri

AMD has seen its graphics part shipments increase 11 per cent quarter-on-quarter, while Intel's shipments have grown 4 per cent. The loser for the quarter was Nvidia, with its graphics shipments dropping 8.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter.

The market for discrete graphics cards is down 17.5 per cent in favor of integrated graphics hardware.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/08/19/amd-graphics-shipments/

I'm honestly scared for Nvidia the last thing i want to see is Amd only with intel trolling the GPU department. Nvidia makes great products even their Arm processors are nice but no one gets them.

nVidia needs a good shake down, so they humble themselves a bit.

Humble and Nvidia are not compatible words. Pride is part of their corporate image.

The reason why AMD and Intel went up but Nvidia was down is because Nvidia doesn't still have competitive enough APUs and still relies heavily in a falling discrete graphics card market. Their Tegra division is starting to rise (it grows 110% per quarter or so), and Denver version of K1 will change the things without any doubt.

AMD and Intel are already in the highway towards integrated graphics, whereas Nvidia needs more time to transform itself (read my signature; Nvidia knows what do).

Or maybe the lack of new parts the past few months is dragging them down? Until the 800 series hits, NVIDIA sales aren't really going to raise, or even remain stable, as those of us who upgrade GPUs for the most part already have.

I'm not sure the release of the 800 series will really change that. The only reasons I ever upgrade are:

1: Hardware failure (which is pretty uncommon unless your OC the hell out of a card, I still have a HD2600 going strong in an old system).

2: I have games I want to play that I can't due to poor graphics performance.

3: I have games I want to play that I can't due to lack of driver support.

The key thing is that at the moment, anyone with a reasonably recent mid range or higher graphics card isn't going to run into these problems. Sure it's nice to get a new card and be able to turn on some extra AA or something, but that becomes a nice to have rather than a requirement which is much harder to justify the expense. I'm running a GTX 560 and I really haven’t played a game that taxes it much at 1080p high settings. Admittedly I tend to focus on RTS which is less graphics bound than other games but there really aren't many games that wont work, unlike 10 years ago when an upgraded graphics board made the difference between the game running or not. Heck you can run most modern games on low settings on Intels integrated graphics now.

Things that will probably change this: The new consoles, although not that powerful do have access to *allot* of memory for graphics work, more than most high end cards. So I can see that the older 1gb models (like I've got) are going to be a non starter for cross platform games in the next few years. Also newer API's will make a difference when they're released (i.e. DX12 and OGL-N) as it's unlikely older boards will get updated drivers (or if they have the prerequisite hardware support for the new features). One reason cards have been lasting so long is the length of time we've been sitting on DX11 class hardware (I mean the old HD5870, first released DX11 card is still perfectly viable for 1080p gaming on high settings and that card came out years ago).

Final thing that will spur need for graphics cards is the return of proper high resolution displays for PC's. The proliferation of 'Full HD' tellies has set computer displays back a decade- I had a Pentium 133 running on a 21" CRT at 1600 x 1200 resolution at 85hz back in the 90s. That works out about the same number of pixels as a 1080p display and frankly the 4:3 ratio was a more useful shape for most applications. Then HD tellies become the norm and PC displays got standardised with them. At least now 4k is becoming a thing and displays may in fact move forward again, so well finally be talking resolutions that can actually tax the modern graphics hardware fully /rant

Oh that was so the wrong thing to say.

Yamaha RX-V3800

That is my receiver and it cost about $1800 when I first purchased it back in 08.



I'm currently in the process of redoing my setup and focusing on hiding all the damn wiring. Been looking for a nice glossy black stereo cabinet to clean up the environment.

The box on the right is my current living room PC, it's a nice low profile mini-itx case but it's still a bit too large and clunky to fit in with everyone else. I plan on going with something smaller that runs on a picopsu with an external power brick that I can hide, and at that level you absolutely can not run an dGPU as your looking at sub 100~120w total system power.

You easily can, just not at that price. Laptops with a 45W quad + 860m will draw about 120W under full load including screen. Its just going to cost more.

He probably doesn't use the rig for gaming much i see now reason to treat a PC as second class almost degrading lol. For 120 watts a Pentium and a 750Ti would be about that limit with a SSD. For 45 watts Amd has a solution that works and would be good enough for his use. If it was me i would use that Coolermaster case and go crazy ha ha would fit in their just fine.

depends on the uses, if its just an htpc, could go with an embedded solution, sapphire has a 4"x4" board with cpus that go from 6w to 25w. with that small you could mount it to the back of the tv and hide all the wires, just depends on the application or use.

http://www.sapphiretech.com/embedded/product.aspx?pid=embedded_boards

pair it with one of these if you need a drive.

http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_intros_wireless_optical_drive_and_portable_bluray_writer

 

[esrever]

PS4 GPU has an Effective Bandwidth of 120 to 140 GB/s, Not 176 GB/s As Previously Reported
http://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effective-bandwidth-140-gbs-disproportionate-cpu-gpu-scaling/

Not shocked; you have the CPU and GPU both fighting for the same memory resources. So when one is getting data, the other is probably blocked from accessing the bus.

The bus is a lot smarter than you give it credit.

 

[8350rocks]

PS4 GPU has an Effective Bandwidth of 120 to 140 GB/s, Not 176 GB/s As Previously Reported
http://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effective-bandwidth-140-gbs-disproportionate-cpu-gpu-scaling/

Not shocked; you have the CPU and GPU both fighting for the same memory resources. So when one is getting data, the other is probably blocked from accessing the bus.

The bus is a lot smarter than you give it credit.

Yes, HTX can have multiple lanes, and the PS4 hardware was already known to have HTX from CPU to memory, and GPU to memory, bypassing the northbridge to get data directly.

Now, the interesting situation is, are developers using the direct route to memory efficiently? That is likely where this generations performance gains will come from. Programming for higher efficiency of the direct route to memory, among other optimizations for the consoles.

 

[gamerk316]

PS4 GPU has an Effective Bandwidth of 120 to 140 GB/s, Not 176 GB/s As Previously Reported
http://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effective-bandwidth-140-gbs-disproportionate-cpu-gpu-scaling/

Not shocked; you have the CPU and GPU both fighting for the same memory resources. So when one is getting data, the other is probably blocked from accessing the bus.

The bus is a lot smarter than you give it credit.

Yes, HTX can have multiple lanes, and the PS4 hardware was already known to have HTX from CPU to memory, and GPU to memory, bypassing the northbridge to get data directly.

Now, the interesting situation is, are developers using the direct route to memory efficiently? That is likely where this generations performance gains will come from. Programming for higher efficiency of the direct route to memory, among other optimizations for the consoles.

Ah, but you forget the case where the CPU/GPU want to access the same data. That will kill your bandwidth in a hurry, since the memory access will fail due to software locks. So one component has to sit and wait for the other to finish.

You're never going to get perfect theoretical numbers anyway, simply due to overhead.

 

[8350rocks]

Agreed, but someone who was willing to optimize to the point of micro managing their processes could theoretically get pretty close...

 

[de5_Roy]

i thought that the throttling was due to the cpu (on load) eating into the igpu's thermal budget and causing clockrate throttling thus lowering the bw. the cpu and the igpu should have full "visibility" of each other's caches so if one could read the other's data, it could do it.

 

[palladin9479]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Guys play nice.

That being said, when did the A6-7600 start showing up in stores? I know AMD announced it but nobody had any and it kinda got forgotten. Now I see amazon offering it for $110 USD which is a stupidly good deal.

AMD A8-7600 at Amazon

A 45/65W single chip solution is ideal for quiet low profile casual gaming devices. There is all sorts of stuff you can build with something like this.

It competes more with the Pentium then a I3. The GPU on it is still only good for 720P low-medium settings in games. But for HTPC and 45 watts well i guess i still see no reason for it when products like the Athlon 5350 exist and its less money and 25 watts and can easily do HD video.

It competes with the i3 because the i3 is what has integrated video. And at $109 USD it crush's any combination of dCPU + dGPU because you can't get a GDDR5 dGPU cheap enough. Graphically its right on par with the 6800/7800 due to 128-bit DDR3 being the limiting factor of all of then. It can play all the media you want along with light gaming, the kinds I do while sitting on the couch in my shorts. If you really want to go crazy, install the A8-7600 in a M350 case with 8GB DDR3-2133 and a HDD and *poof* instant ultra compact light gaming PC.

And btw the "720p" is only for modern games, older games can easily be done at 1080p. I know this because I have a 6800K in a SFF build that runs all sorts of older stuff. I would even go as far as to say that I spend more time playing older games then anything made in the past 4~5 years. It just seems that every new game is made to look pretty but just isn't *fun* to play for very long. This is on a totally different topic and maybe I'm the crazy one here, but the older games really seem more engaging and entertaining to play then the ones made since ~2008.

Pentium has integrated video as well and is good enough for 1080P video as well. " right on par with the 6800/7800 due to 128-bit DDR3" No the A10 alone can barley compete with a 4870 Amd let alone a 6850-7850 you do know the 7770-250x has more GCN cores right? I don't get your point actually just because it runs on slow bandwidth it becomes as powerful as a 6800-7850?
Last paragraph i agree with however

WTF...

You realize the issue here is memory right? The SR iGPU's are currently maxing out the bandwidth on the DDR3 bus. All those cards you listed are GDDR5 cards and at the 90~100$ level. Under that is the "DDR3" variants of those which are the budget products and some are actually worse then the APU's. This was a huge issue I had with people trying to say "just buy a i3 and a X GPU". They use the price of the cheap DDR3 version but the performance of the GDDR5 version. Either way your still looking at a $109 USD price ceiling ($120 on newegg) which simply doesn't have enough room for GDD5 dGPU. Hell those cost 90~100 USD on their own, $80 USD if you get lucky and get one on sale. So your talking $0~30 USD for a CPU that's is better then the A8-7600.

And no you can't build a system with a dGPU that would look good in my living room. Things that look like computers stay in my office / mad scientist lab, I have a policy of keeping the rest of the apartment as geek-free as possible. The current SFF box is a bit too much and I'm looking to replace it soon with something that will be 100% hidden from view. I'm very very picky about looks and sounds in places outside my lab.

I see now you are talking about the APU series and not the GPU series i thought you where saying the A10 7850K is even with a 6800 GPU sorry that is my fault, and yes for the price that APU gives you the best option i just see no use for it myself as its not good enough for gaming except for 720P low-medium and its overkill for HTPC. Also if you are that picky about spaces in your living room why not just get a mini PC with a nice setup that runs on mobile parts, i'm guessing you have no receiver in your leaving room either or have some wimpy one like bose. You could easily without a doubt build a gaming rig that is the same size as a modern receiver such as the pioneer SC-87.

Oh that was so the wrong thing to say.

Yamaha RX-V3800

That is my receiver and it cost about $1800 when I first purchased it back in 08.



I'm currently in the process of redoing my setup and focusing on hiding all the damn wiring. Been looking for a nice glossy black stereo cabinet to clean up the environment.

The box on the right is my current living room PC, it's a nice low profile mini-itx case but it's still a bit too large and clunky to fit in with everyone else. I plan on going with something smaller that runs on a picopsu with an external power brick that I can hide, and at that level you absolutely can not run an dGPU as your looking at sub 100~120w total system power.

Not bad sorry i claimed you owned a bose ,actually looks pretty good i guess the receiver does look like its hanging off the entertainment center a bit. I see the solution get rid of all those consoles except the wii and make a build with this case its your receiver is about the same size and you can fit a ATX psu in it and a SSD and a I5+what ever video card you want.

Did you not read? Why the hell would I "get rid of" consoles that I actually use just to satisfy some internet guys feelings? And no you can't change the parameters of the problem to fit your preconceived solution, the real world doesn't work that way. The living room PC is a cross between a HTPC and a casual gaming box, why in the hell would I over-engineer it by making it some large blockish device just for "internet coolz points!!!". Small, stylish (or hidden), low power and low noise are my requirements. The kinds of cases and cooling have a 65W cap with 100~120W being total system usage otherwise you start to need more airflow which in turn means larger cases and / or more fans. That is what makes the A8-7600 stand out, it provides about 90% of the actual graphics power that the 7800/7850 have but with a low enough TDP to make use of ULP components.

I guess the point I'm making is that I entertain guests and having my living room look nice is a requirement, it can't look like a gamers shack or a geeks den, that is what my lab is for (that picture was when I was testing a bunch of stuff, in day to day stuff those game box's and much of that wiring isn't visible).

 

[palladin9479]

PS4 GPU has an Effective Bandwidth of 120 to 140 GB/s, Not 176 GB/s As Previously Reported
http://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effective-bandwidth-140-gbs-disproportionate-cpu-gpu-scaling/
i assumed this type of throttling won't happen until amd or arm put 8x arm a57 or carrizo/high clocked jag/puma cores in an apu/soc like that. then again it's wcantcomprehendyetpublishanalysisontech..... sony needs to put in a stronger cooling system in the ps4, if this is true.

any overclocker and bench'er will say that its so pure "dumb"

many months ago, i posted some benches of real world memory transfer speed obtained, which showed that my hd6770 was 80% efficient, and i was complaining that phenom's is very less efficient ( 60% )

theoretical bandwidth does not mean that you will get that much bandwidth in real world, the bandwidth you will get will depend upon efficiency of the components that is accessing memory and and are controlling memory

So perhaps a weak memory controller? On my 8350fx with 1866mhz ram i get this although for the theoretical limit should be 32Gb i think. Man running that i can tell Amd needs to redo their L3 cache big time.

Testing memory speeds with a single threaded program is a very bad way to go about it, all it does is test how good the cache is at prediction. Best way to test is multiple independent memory copies happening simultaneously. Create an imaginary 10GB data source, split it into four 2.5GB chunks then do four bulk copies at 16MB block sizes. Should completely bypass all cache and prefetch checks on all systems and give you an absolute memory bandwidth. This is important because while the CPU tends to access memory in a serial fashion, GPU's access it in very large bulk transfers in parallel. So just because a single thread on the CPU gets ~60% cache efficiency doesn't mean the GPU would get the same, especially since the GPU doesn't use the CPU's caching mechanism at all. In the case of AMD uArch's, the limiter on memory access isn't the IMC but the prefetcher. The IMC will sit there idling waiting for the prefetcher to tell it to get something.

 

[jdwii]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Guys play nice.

That being said, when did the A6-7600 start showing up in stores? I know AMD announced it but nobody had any and it kinda got forgotten. Now I see amazon offering it for $110 USD which is a stupidly good deal.

AMD A8-7600 at Amazon

A 45/65W single chip solution is ideal for quiet low profile casual gaming devices. There is all sorts of stuff you can build with something like this.

It competes more with the Pentium then a I3. The GPU on it is still only good for 720P low-medium settings in games. But for HTPC and 45 watts well i guess i still see no reason for it when products like the Athlon 5350 exist and its less money and 25 watts and can easily do HD video.

It competes with the i3 because the i3 is what has integrated video. And at $109 USD it crush's any combination of dCPU + dGPU because you can't get a GDDR5 dGPU cheap enough. Graphically its right on par with the 6800/7800 due to 128-bit DDR3 being the limiting factor of all of then. It can play all the media you want along with light gaming, the kinds I do while sitting on the couch in my shorts. If you really want to go crazy, install the A8-7600 in a M350 case with 8GB DDR3-2133 and a HDD and *poof* instant ultra compact light gaming PC.

And btw the "720p" is only for modern games, older games can easily be done at 1080p. I know this because I have a 6800K in a SFF build that runs all sorts of older stuff. I would even go as far as to say that I spend more time playing older games then anything made in the past 4~5 years. It just seems that every new game is made to look pretty but just isn't *fun* to play for very long. This is on a totally different topic and maybe I'm the crazy one here, but the older games really seem more engaging and entertaining to play then the ones made since ~2008.

Pentium has integrated video as well and is good enough for 1080P video as well. " right on par with the 6800/7800 due to 128-bit DDR3" No the A10 alone can barley compete with a 4870 Amd let alone a 6850-7850 you do know the 7770-250x has more GCN cores right? I don't get your point actually just because it runs on slow bandwidth it becomes as powerful as a 6800-7850?
Last paragraph i agree with however

WTF...

You realize the issue here is memory right? The SR iGPU's are currently maxing out the bandwidth on the DDR3 bus. All those cards you listed are GDDR5 cards and at the 90~100$ level. Under that is the "DDR3" variants of those which are the budget products and some are actually worse then the APU's. This was a huge issue I had with people trying to say "just buy a i3 and a X GPU". They use the price of the cheap DDR3 version but the performance of the GDDR5 version. Either way your still looking at a $109 USD price ceiling ($120 on newegg) which simply doesn't have enough room for GDD5 dGPU. Hell those cost 90~100 USD on their own, $80 USD if you get lucky and get one on sale. So your talking $0~30 USD for a CPU that's is better then the A8-7600.

And no you can't build a system with a dGPU that would look good in my living room. Things that look like computers stay in my office / mad scientist lab, I have a policy of keeping the rest of the apartment as geek-free as possible. The current SFF box is a bit too much and I'm looking to replace it soon with something that will be 100% hidden from view. I'm very very picky about looks and sounds in places outside my lab.

I see now you are talking about the APU series and not the GPU series i thought you where saying the A10 7850K is even with a 6800 GPU sorry that is my fault, and yes for the price that APU gives you the best option i just see no use for it myself as its not good enough for gaming except for 720P low-medium and its overkill for HTPC. Also if you are that picky about spaces in your living room why not just get a mini PC with a nice setup that runs on mobile parts, i'm guessing you have no receiver in your leaving room either or have some wimpy one like bose. You could easily without a doubt build a gaming rig that is the same size as a modern receiver such as the pioneer SC-87.

Oh that was so the wrong thing to say.

Yamaha RX-V3800

That is my receiver and it cost about $1800 when I first purchased it back in 08.



I'm currently in the process of redoing my setup and focusing on hiding all the damn wiring. Been looking for a nice glossy black stereo cabinet to clean up the environment.

The box on the right is my current living room PC, it's a nice low profile mini-itx case but it's still a bit too large and clunky to fit in with everyone else. I plan on going with something smaller that runs on a picopsu with an external power brick that I can hide, and at that level you absolutely can not run an dGPU as your looking at sub 100~120w total system power.

Not bad sorry i claimed you owned a bose ,actually looks pretty good i guess the receiver does look like its hanging off the entertainment center a bit. I see the solution get rid of all those consoles except the wii and make a build with this case its your receiver is about the same size and you can fit a ATX psu in it and a SSD and a I5+what ever video card you want.

Did you not read? Why the hell would I "get rid of" consoles that I actually use just to satisfy some internet guys feelings? And no you can't change the parameters of the problem to fit your preconceived solution, the real world doesn't work that way. The living room PC is a cross between a HTPC and a casual gaming box, why in the hell would I over-engineer it by making it some large blockish device just for "internet coolz points!!!". Small, stylish (or hidden), low power and low noise are my requirements. The kinds of cases and cooling have a 65W cap with 100~120W being total system usage otherwise you start to need more airflow which in turn means larger cases and / or more fans. That is what makes the A8-7600 stand out, it provides about 90% of the actual graphics power that the 7800/7850 have but with a low enough TDP to make use of ULP components.

I guess the point I'm making is that I entertain guests and having my living room look nice is a requirement, it can't look like a gamers shack or a geeks den, that is what my lab is for (that picture was when I was testing a bunch of stuff, in day to day stuff those game box's and much of that wiring isn't visible).

Well its all up to personal preference i guess obviously their is a market for it however unless these steam boxes wouldn't exist or those types of cases, i know some people are however very picky about what is in their living room its usually called WAF. I personally don't care to hide that i'm a geek around others i would feel like i was lying to them, if they didn't like it i would show them a map that i can print out with a layout of my house and the door.

 

[juanrga]

PS4 GPU has an Effective Bandwidth of 120 to 140 GB/s, Not 176 GB/s As Previously Reported
http://wccftech.com/sony-ps4-effective-bandwidth-140-gbs-disproportionate-cpu-gpu-scaling/

Not shocked; you have the CPU and GPU both fighting for the same memory resources. So when one is getting data, the other is probably blocked from accessing the bus.

The bus is a lot smarter than you give it credit.

Indeed! And there are other improvements beyond the main bus, such as the second bus that allow the GPU to read/write directly to system memory, eliminating synchronization with CPU. This second bus can pass almost 20 gigabytes a second.

It is worth to mention that the unified memory pool of the PS4 was the largest piece of feedback the company got from game developers, because this solves "a common bottleneck where data has to be shuffled from main memory to graphics memory and back again in non-unified designs".

 

[blackkstar]

As far as game software and hardware is concerned, we've hit a standstill. We're not strong enough for ray tracing yet we've got enough shader power to let mid range cards perform at desired resolutions. CPUs have no where to go because we've reached the point where single core performance is not really improving drastically while games are stuck running only a few threads.

DirectX has stagnated beyond belief. I remember getting a DX9 card and playing UT2k4 and having my mind get blown at all the cool new effects. That sort of thing hasn't existed in a long time. It's to the point where you can use a 6950 or GTX 480 and not miss out on anything significant while playing games.

There are two things that can happen. Either this market can be abandoned entirely, or the software problems can be solved via things like Mantle. GPUs need to be stressed in a way beyond shader power and CPUs need some task to scale to a lot of cores. PC gaming needs some sort of killer feature that makes people want to upgrade. It's grown way too stagnant as I said before. People are content with mid-range cards and mid range parts. The raw number of pixels a card has to push hasn't really gone anywhere. Adopting LCD was probably one of the worst things to happen to enthusiast GPUs.

I worry about shifting so hard to mobile. We've seen what can happen there. Eventually the smaller, cheaper chips catch up (like mediaTek) and it starts this big race to the bottom with devices with prices. And it's left a lot of ARM markets with small margins. I realize some of you really believe mobile is 100% the future, but Nvidia has spent 5 product cycles trying to push a premium, high performance ARM part and it hasn't gone anywhere. So they can either race with MediaTek and company to the bottom or remain uncompetitive. Yes, the market is growing, but is it the kind of market you want to be in? Competing with a bunch of cheap Chinese companies and anyone else who can buy an ARM license and compete with you? As compared to a high end product like large GPU where the barrier to entry is so massive you can't just flop over and see a new company with a competitive GPU. The fact that ARM and ARM chip makers are pushing for ARM in other things besides servers tells me they want out of the mobile market and they either see the market going downhill as it gets eaten from the bottom up or that demand is going to die down soon.

I do think that if Mantle, OGLNG, and DX12 end up with game developers pushing hardware in ways they couldn't before due to *some things* being able to scale to more cores and pushing existing hardware much harder, that it could turn sales around. If we got games that made the mid range cards cry and run slow instead of run fine at 1080p, sales would change. The market is there but the demand is not. And if ARM mobile devices keep going the way they are going, it will end up the same.

 

[de5_Roy]

amd apus are getting price drops too. not as much as i expected though
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20140821121037_AMD_to_Lower_Prices_of_A_Series_APUs_for_Back_to_School_Season.html

Avexir Readies 3.40GHz DDR4 Memory Modules.
DDR4 Could Hit 3.40GHz This Year
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/memory/display/20140821223332_Avexir_Readies_3_40GHz_DDR4_Memory_Modules.html
this, i wanna see running on a carrizo pc.

AMD Radeon R7 250XE GPU Is Targetted Directly at 1st Generation Maxwell – No Power Connector
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r7-250xe-no-power-connector/

 

[jdwii]

amd apus are getting price drops too. not as much as i expected though
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20140821121037_AMD_to_Lower_Prices_of_A_Series_APUs_for_Back_to_School_Season.html

Avexir Readies 3.40GHz DDR4 Memory Modules.
DDR4 Could Hit 3.40GHz This Year
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/memory/display/20140821223332_Avexir_Readies_3_40GHz_DDR4_Memory_Modules.html
this, i wanna see running on a carrizo pc.

AMD Radeon R7 250XE GPU Is Targetted Directly at 1st Generation Maxwell – No Power Connector
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r7-250xe-no-power-connector/

Yeah the 7850K is still the same price man i have no idea WTF they are thinking. The 250XE seems like a simple downclock i thought they would make a update to their GCN design and go right after the 750Ti. When are we supposed to see a update on their GPU series i'm pretty sure the 290X is noting more than a 7970ghz edition with more cores.

 

[palladin9479]

amd apus are getting price drops too. not as much as i expected though
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20140821121037_AMD_to_Lower_Prices_of_A_Series_APUs_for_Back_to_School_Season.html

Avexir Readies 3.40GHz DDR4 Memory Modules.
DDR4 Could Hit 3.40GHz This Year
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/memory/display/20140821223332_Avexir_Readies_3_40GHz_DDR4_Memory_Modules.html
this, i wanna see running on a carrizo pc.

AMD Radeon R7 250XE GPU Is Targetted Directly at 1st Generation Maxwell – No Power Connector
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r7-250xe-no-power-connector/

7700K to $140 puts it inside the price range where it's actually worthwhile. And WTF at the 7600 going down to $100.

DDR4 going to do very interesting things to APU's. 3400MT/s nets you 27.2GBps per channel so 54.4GBps in a typical dual channel configuration. Of course we won't see that at value pricing for another year or two, that will be when iGPU's get another jump in capability.

Got done reading and do people still not understand the relationship between CL and clock rate?

For those wondering with DDR4 has such higher "latency" its' because physics places a real limit on the refresh of a memory cell in a DRAM configuration. That limit is about 7ns on really good silicon, you can get faster if you go to SRAM but it gets really expensive really fast. Since timings are measured in clock ticks, the faster the clock the higher the CL needs to be to be above that 7ns barrier.

DDR3-1600 CL8 is 10ns, DDR-2133 CL11 is 10.318, DDR3-2400 CL12 is 10ns and so on. So the current advertised latencies are about what you'd see on a new technology and once it matures you'll see the same 10ns for mainstream with ~7ns at the expensive end.

 

[sapperastro]

As far as game software and hardware is concerned, we've hit a standstill. We're not strong enough for ray tracing yet we've got enough shader power to let mid range cards perform at desired resolutions. CPUs have no where to go because we've reached the point where single core performance is not really improving drastically while games are stuck running only a few threads.

DirectX has stagnated beyond belief. I remember getting a DX9 card and playing UT2k4 and having my mind get blown at all the cool new effects. That sort of thing hasn't existed in a long time. It's to the point where you can use a 6950 or GTX 480 and not miss out on anything significant while playing games.

There are two things that can happen. Either this market can be abandoned entirely, or the software problems can be solved via things like Mantle. GPUs need to be stressed in a way beyond shader power and CPUs need some task to scale to a lot of cores. PC gaming needs some sort of killer feature that makes people want to upgrade. It's grown way too stagnant as I said before. People are content with mid-range cards and mid range parts. The raw number of pixels a card has to push hasn't really gone anywhere. Adopting LCD was probably one of the worst things to happen to enthusiast GPUs.

I worry about shifting so hard to mobile. We've seen what can happen there. Eventually the smaller, cheaper chips catch up (like mediaTek) and it starts this big race to the bottom with devices with prices. And it's left a lot of ARM markets with small margins. I realize some of you really believe mobile is 100% the future, but Nvidia has spent 5 product cycles trying to push a premium, high performance ARM part and it hasn't gone anywhere. So they can either race with MediaTek and company to the bottom or remain uncompetitive. Yes, the market is growing, but is it the kind of market you want to be in? Competing with a bunch of cheap Chinese companies and anyone else who can buy an ARM license and compete with you? As compared to a high end product like large GPU where the barrier to entry is so massive you can't just flop over and see a new company with a competitive GPU. The fact that ARM and ARM chip makers are pushing for ARM in other things besides servers tells me they want out of the mobile market and they either see the market going downhill as it gets eaten from the bottom up or that demand is going to die down soon.

I do think that if Mantle, OGLNG, and DX12 end up with game developers pushing hardware in ways they couldn't before due to *some things* being able to scale to more cores and pushing existing hardware much harder, that it could turn sales around. If we got games that made the mid range cards cry and run slow instead of run fine at 1080p, sales would change. The market is there but the demand is not. And if ARM mobile devices keep going the way they are going, it will end up the same.

Be careful what you wish for. When prices were going through the roof and gpus were out dated before the first 12 months had passed, I knew a hell of a lot of people that leaped off them to the consoles and mobile devices. Those people have been streaming back in because of the affordability these days. It used to take a LOT of money to keep up with the top 8+ years ago, and even I used to get frustrated when my 12 month old super pc became a cheap hooker in a year or so time.

 

[szatkus]

Why did AMD, in their A10-7850K, integrated such a limited memory controller (supporting only up to 2133MHz RAM, stock)? The iGPU is more powerful than what memory controller (MC) allows it to be. Is AMD incapable of producing a better performance MC?

I know that it can be overclocked to support higher frequency RAM, like 2400 MHz and a bit more, but I just can't achieve that. I am sorry for using this topic to "promote" my problem, but I know that there are people that are experts on CPUs (or at least "amater" experts) posting in this topic so I am sure that someone will be able to help me. If you would be so kind:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2254599/overclock-a10-7850k-memory-controller.html

Kaveri probably has quite nice memory controller... for GDDR5

http://www.chip-architect.com/news/Kaveri_Trinity_2014-01-07.jpg

Unfortunately, they've never released mobo with GDDR5.

 

[Slobodan-888]

I don't quite understand you.

Someone is planning to release a motherboard with integrated GDDR5 memory that can be used by the APU's iGPU (instead of using system RAM)?

Edit: OK I see what you mean. But why it is so limited for DDR3? And can you, perhaps, help me with my problem?

 

[szatkus]

I don't quite understand you.

Someone is planning to release a motherboard with integrated GDDR5 memory that can be used by the APU's iGPU (instead of using system RAM)?

Edit: OK I see what you mean. But why it is so limited for DDR3? And can you, perhaps, help me with my problem?

I heard that AMD excepted lower prices for GDDR5 in 2014. Maybe they'll release something with GDDR5 in future. For now DDR3 is the only option and A10-7850K can't show its whole potential.

 

[cdrkf]

I don't quite understand you.

Someone is planning to release a motherboard with integrated GDDR5 memory that can be used by the APU's iGPU (instead of using system RAM)?

Edit: OK I see what you mean. But why it is so limited for DDR3? And can you, perhaps, help me with my problem?

I heard that AMD excepted lower prices for GDDR5 in 2014. Maybe they'll release something with GDDR5 in future. For now DDR3 is the only option and A10-7850K can't show its whole potential.

I very much doubt we will ever see Kaveri with GDDR5 on the desktop. There is a slim possibility that it may show up in mobile though (I don't think mobile Kaveri parts are out yet?)...

 

[szatkus]

I don't quite understand you.

Someone is planning to release a motherboard with integrated GDDR5 memory that can be used by the APU's iGPU (instead of using system RAM)?

Edit: OK I see what you mean. But why it is so limited for DDR3? And can you, perhaps, help me with my problem?

I heard that AMD excepted lower prices for GDDR5 in 2014. Maybe they'll release something with GDDR5 in future. For now DDR3 is the only option and A10-7850K can't show its whole potential.

I very much doubt we will ever see Kaveri with GDDR5 on the desktop. There is a slim possibility that it may show up in mobile though (I don't think mobile Kaveri parts are out yet?)...

Mobile parts are out, just no devices on market now.

I have to correct myself:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7702/amd-kaveri-docs-reference-quadchannel-memory-interface-gddr5-option
It's a DDR3 controller, but wider to be compatible with GDDR5 controller.

 

[cdrkf]

I don't quite understand you.

Someone is planning to release a motherboard with integrated GDDR5 memory that can be used by the APU's iGPU (instead of using system RAM)?

Edit: OK I see what you mean. But why it is so limited for DDR3? And can you, perhaps, help me with my problem?

I heard that AMD excepted lower prices for GDDR5 in 2014. Maybe they'll release something with GDDR5 in future. For now DDR3 is the only option and A10-7850K can't show its whole potential.

I very much doubt we will ever see Kaveri with GDDR5 on the desktop. There is a slim possibility that it may show up in mobile though (I don't think mobile Kaveri parts are out yet?)...

Mobile parts are out, just no devices on market now.

I have to correct myself:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7702/amd-kaveri-docs-reference-quadchannel-memory-interface-gddr5-option
It's a DDR3 controller, but wider to be compatible with GDDR5 controller.

Ah so is that to allow it to crossfire with a GDDR5 dgpu then?

 

[juanrga]

The group who designed AMD bulldozer family had problems with both caches and system memory. To get better caches and better memory controllers you need both smart people and money. AMD lacked both, and Bulldozer is what it is.

It is worth mentioning that one of the main tasks made by Keller during last years at AMD has been on the cache subsystem. AMD has developed dozens of new techniques to improve caches. A part of his work on caches will be transfered over Excavator modules, but the whole of the improvements is aimed for the new architectures: K12/Zen.

As other companies, AMD supports official specs for DDR. Last DDR-3300 modules are not part of official JEDEC specs and thus neither AMD nor Intel support if officially. Overclocking is not official support and it depends on silicon lottery.

DDR3 is in its physical limits. AMD wouldn't waste time and money on developing an improved memory controller when the modules cannot scale up enough and when DDR3 is going to be replaced soon. This is why they turned its eyes towards GDDR5 memory. This memory is much faster than DDR3 and a six-core version of Kaveri with a more powerful iGPU and GDDR5 for system memory was planned, but it had to be abandoned in last minute because one of the companies doing the GDDR5 DIMMs was out of business.

The GDDR5 memory controller is still in the Kaveri die, but it was fused out. AMD docs for Kaveri still mention the quad memory controllers: DCT0, DCT1, DCT2, DCT3.

No future APU will use GDDR5 as system memory because the company that would do the DIMMs continues out of business. AMD is now moving to HBM, a new JEDEC standard, which can provide more bandwidth and efficiency than GDDR5.

Finally, I mention that Carrizo officially supports DDR4-2400. Thus DDR4 will not bring any bandwidth benefit to Carrizo APUs and, in fact, Carrizo mobile will probably only support DDR3. DDR4 support makes sense for the server version of Carrizo: Toronto.

We would see improvements however from the new cache subsystem (which it seems that also reduces latencies).

 

[CooLWoLF]

The new 95watt 8370E is a very interesting addition to the FX line. Considering how well the 8320/8350s overclock, I am excited to see how far someone can push the 8370E with that extra room with regards to reduced TDP.