AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[colinp]

Man, I hope that 8370e isn't just a figment of wwcftechs imagination. That r9 285 itx card looks nice too, would be very happy if one of them came out with a negative pressure (backward venting - but not reference) cooler. Those would be my rig upgrades for the foreseeable future.

 

[de5_Roy]

I think the 860k would Bottleneck the 285x by a good margin.

yes it will. but amd has no other cpu option. fx platform has no mini itx motherboard and if it did, only more power hungry fx6300 and higher cpus would be viable. mantle and dx12 will help alleviating cpu bottleneck in gaming.
considering intel, you'd have to spend over $180 to get a decent quad core i5 cpu or $120-160 for a haswell-refresh core i3, z97 chipset for overclocking. athlon x4 860k will likely cost under $100-110, offer 2 sr modules, overclockable, cheaper motherboard options will be available. the overall price will be cheap enough and considering intel alternatives the athlon should be a good option. the only intel candidate(cpu) under $100 price range is the pentium g3258, but it's got 2 cores. if you get intel then you'd be giving up non-gaming application performance advantage (at that price range).

@juan: your "updated CPU/GPU/APU roadmap" looks kinda fake. may be it's real... i dunno.. it looks fake to me. where did you get it?

 

[gamerk316]

Translation: Its not much worse, but cheaper.

It is acceptable for basic academic use, but outdated for the industry.

No core based in that ISA will be a relevant competitor for AMD's K12/A57 based products.

In the ultra low power field? RISC and MIPS CPUs are king, because even ARM is too power hungry. Heck, there's a reason why the Z80, 68000k, and i386 are still used a lot in the embedded market: Because they are cheap, low power, and get the job done.

 

[juanrga]

Open-Source AMD HSA Should Come To Fruition This Year

 

[juanrga]

Some more info from SIGGRAPH coverage of OpenGL-Next:

• 
  ■ OpenGL-Next will break compatibility with existing OpenGL implementations.
  ■ The new API seeks to unify OpenGL and OpenGL ES.
  ■ There will be explicit control over GPU and CPU workloads with the application/game expressing to the driver what it wants.
  ■ The new API will be high performance and predictable.
  ■ The new API will be multi-threading and multi-core friendly with great reductions to the CPU overhead.
  ■ There will be a common shading language intermediate representation (IR) for greater reliability and portability.
  ■ The new API will be architecture-neutral with full support for tile-based rendering and direct rendering.
  ■ There will be enhanced conformance testing.
  ■ This new initiative is "NOT" going to be a "multi-year, design-by-committee process."

Besides AMD, the organizations participating in the new OpenGL-Next initiative are Pixar, Qualcomm, Samsung, NVIDIA, Epic Games, Unity, Oculus VR, Apple, ARM, VALVE, Hi Corp, Intel, Imagination, Blizzard, Sony, Broadcom, MediaTek, Google, EA, RTT, TransGaming, Mobica, and Vivante.

 

[juanrga]

Translation: Its not much worse, but cheaper.

It is acceptable for basic academic use, but outdated for the industry.

No core based in that ISA will be a relevant competitor for AMD's K12/A57 based products.

In the ultra low power field? RISC and MIPS CPUs are king, because even ARM is too power hungry. Heck, there's a reason why the Z80, 68000k, and i386 are still used a lot in the embedded market: Because they are cheap, low power, and get the job done.

As mentioned above, their comparison to a Cortex-A5 was invalid because this core has to support lots of extras that were avoided in the Rocket design. A more accurate comparison would be a Cortex-M3 plus MMU and cache.

AMD will be aiming (check above slide) the "ultra low-power client" with Cortex-A57 cores. Those new cores have improved efficiency.

 

[jdwii]

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is-arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient/3

"Companies that try to claim RISC still has enormous benefits over x86 at higher performance levels are explicitly ignoring the fact that RISC and CISC are terms that describe design strategies and that those strategies were formed in response to technological limitations of the day."
Juan lol
"The RISC vs. CISC argument should’ve passed into history a long time ago. It may still have some relevance in the microcontroller realm, but has nothing useful to contribute to the modern era. An x86 chip can be more power efficient than an ARM processor, or vice versa, but it’ll be the result of other factors — not whether it’s x86 or ARM."
http://media.giphy.com/media/vWDrezW0rMjmM/giphy.gif
http://a.disquscdn.com/get?url=http%3A%2F%2Freactiongifs.me%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F08%2Fbreaking-bad-i-won.gif&key=a45RKmSSvGnlvpfkFvALEA&w=800&h=224

 

[jdwii]

You would have to be crazy to claim the I3 is a better choice for gaming in today's world and its easily better for video encoding-rendering-recording gameplay.

It boils down to what the needs of the user are. If you are playing mainly MMO's, Skyrim, and other low threaded games, and i3 actually is the better choice. For example, my 3.5ghz i5 2400 does better in WoW than my FX 8320 @ 4.0ghz. If you are playing more titles like BF4 and Crysis 3, then I could see an FX 8320 making perfect sense, if you never intend to upgrade the CPU in the system. I agree that FX 8320 would be a better choice for gameplay recording as well. I don't look at anything past the FX 8320.

In terms of FPS, the i3 matches the FX-6300 line, sometimes the FX-8300 line. Its main problem is latency, where those two cores hurt it. DX12 and the other new APIs should help that a lot, making the i3's a lot more attractive.

Making it silly to pick over a FX 8 core or even a 6 core.

 

[jdwii]

I noticed after browsing some other forums as well as this one, that FX 8000 series has come a long way. I need like 1.6v on my 8350 to be AVX stable, and I'm noticing a lot of people being AVX stable at my clocks at 1.48v or so (AVX stable for me is high 4.8ghz range, but I run 5.1 in Windows). I bought mine at launch and it's week 37 chip, I believe.

It makes me wonder what I could do with a newer chip. Yet at the same time I don't want to sell this one to someone, I've abused it pretty hard.

It's kind of funny in a way how AMD got a 30% clockspeed increase from 8150 to 9590 and a ~10% IPC increase while Intel spends tons of money on R&D to get 5% IPC increases and no clock speed increases each generation. AMD is stretching their R&D money on HEDT pretty hard.

FX 8370 is probably going to review pretty well. There are enough games out there that will use all those cores now, so it should look good in a review as a gaming chip. If someone whips out a review with Skyrim, Shogun 2, Starcraft 2, etc in this day and age they're going to look a bit foolish. Those games are all awfully old and SC2 is pretty dead.

On a side note, I am about to build a K10 24 core monster from used server parts, so thanks to Murphy's Law, expect some sort of big announcement soon about FX!

Man i agree i can't wait to read the FX 8370 reviews and they better not pick those old games. Better only have games based on newer engines like i said i benchmark the crap out of my CPU and compared it to the haswell i5-4460 and a person would be silly to pick a I3 over this CPU. In all my next gen games the 8350fx beat that CPU or came even, in older games it loses but its still at the good enough level. Under chess it lost though which made me mad a bit.

 

[de5_Roy]

TSMC 16nm wafers coming in Q1 2015
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/35588-tsmc-16nm-wafers-coming-in-q1-2015
16nm, because 14 is considered unlucky.

AMD Announces Heterogeneous C++ AMP Language for Developers
http://www.techpowerup.com/204546/amd-announces-heterogeneous-c-amp-language-for-developers.html
Graphics Add-In Board Market Down in Q2, NVIDIA Holds Market Share Lead
http://www.techpowerup.com/204528/graphics-add-in-board-market-down-in-q2-nvidia-holds-market-share-lead.html
also took the biggest hit q2q due no not having new gpus to sell.

AMD’s Faraway Islands is an interesting story
http://semiaccurate.com/2014/08/26/amds-faraway-islands-interesting-story/

 

[8350rocks]

TSMC 16nm wafers coming in Q1 2015
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/35588-tsmc-16nm-wafers-coming-in-q1-2015
16nm, because 14 is considered unlucky.

AMD Announces Heterogeneous C++ AMP Language for Developers
http://www.techpowerup.com/204546/amd-announces-heterogeneous-c-amp-language-for-developers.html
Graphics Add-In Board Market Down in Q2, NVIDIA Holds Market Share Lead
http://www.techpowerup.com/204528/graphics-add-in-board-market-down-in-q2-nvidia-holds-market-share-lead.html
also took the biggest hit q2q due no not having new gpus to sell.

AMD’s Faraway Islands is an interesting story
http://semiaccurate.com/2014/08/26/amds-faraway-islands-interesting-story/

LOL @ Faraway Islands...

Ha! Pirate Islands is not quite here and they are seriously trying to make something up to replace it? I doubt we see pirate islands very soon, they are just now rolling out more volcanic islands stuff to trickle down the ladder...

 

[juanrga]

AMD Set To Announce New FX Processors

The base frequencies were not mentioned, but can be guessed.

 

[esrever]

TSMC 16nm wafers coming in Q1 2015
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/35588-tsmc-16nm-wafers-coming-in-q1-2015
16nm, because 14 is considered unlucky.

AMD Announces Heterogeneous C++ AMP Language for Developers
http://www.techpowerup.com/204546/amd-announces-heterogeneous-c-amp-language-for-developers.html
Graphics Add-In Board Market Down in Q2, NVIDIA Holds Market Share Lead
http://www.techpowerup.com/204528/graphics-add-in-board-market-down-in-q2-nvidia-holds-market-share-lead.html
also took the biggest hit q2q due no not having new gpus to sell.

AMD’s Faraway Islands is an interesting story
http://semiaccurate.com/2014/08/26/amds-faraway-islands-interesting-story/

Semiaccurate sounds very butthurt that they enable simple things like this because how their business model fails. It is actually quite funny. Anyone with any knowledge would know that PI's sucessor would not be in that time frame and the name faraway island doesn't even make any sense. Tech news has always been dodgy with all the rumors, just gotta avoid sites like wccftech and everything is pretty good. Anything that first gets published on wccftech is probably wrong.

 

[jdwii]

Wow Sims 4 has heavy requirements i thought they where making it easier to play?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/26/the-sims-4-recommended-system-requirements-revealed-hope-you-have-a-core-i5/

 

[UnrelatedTopic]

Wow Sims 4 has heavy requirements i thought they where making it easier to play?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/26/the-sims-4-recommended-system-requirements-revealed-hope-you-have-a-core-i5/

I think they're referring to laptop i5's because it says "or Athlon x4"

 

[blackkstar]

Wow Sims 4 has heavy requirements i thought they where making it easier to play?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/26/the-sims-4-recommended-system-requirements-revealed-hope-you-have-a-core-i5/

I am baffled by how some of you are so surprised to see games started to scale to 4 cores. All of the recommended CPUs are all quad cores.

"we can't go to two cores! It's impossible to sync data!"
"we can't go to four cores! There's not enough tasks to put on 4 cores!"
"we can't go to eight cores! Everything that has made parallel is parallel!"

It's going to keep happening until someone comes up with a better way to get more performance than throwing more cores at the problem. And software developers will kick and scream the entire way.

EDIT: also, if EA is saying they're making the game more accessible to people while targeting quad core, they probably know something that we don't. Either that or they're just idiots. But if there's one thing EA knows how to do, it's make money.

 

[Ags1]

Actually, building a 9590 system over the weekend with the Seidon120 that comes with it...will see what it does with the paired water cooler...

I chucked together a Seidon120 and an FX6300 with a 5850 ... runs sweet. Stickin an R280X on it shortly. Put a fan speed controller off an old Corsair cooler and a more efficient fan ... works a treat Build cost was peanuts.

Yes, it runs well. The 9590 stressed with the water cooler never breaks 45C, and I picked, though I was not aware when I ordered it (did not pay attention to dimensions), a Mid ATX case that runs on the small side, and run 3 case fans in it.

While I had to get creative mounting the radiator, the system itself with 290X and OCZ SSD, Seagate HDD, all runs really well together. Very smooth. I have not bothered to overclock at this point, I really have not needed to do so yet, but I will do that more when I have some time to sit down and tweak it.

As for performance, I ran the headline benchmark yesterday in a bone stock config just to see how it did. It stacks up well to all but the well overclocked i7-2600, and it got the highest single GPU score for the graphics of the bunch...(while, unsurprisingly, coming in lower than an SLI config).

In Thief benchmarks it maxes everything out on Ultra @ 1080p (not surprised), and was only limited by the refresh rate of my monitor with V-sync on.

Tomb Raider was essentially the same result. BF4 on multiplayer was no issue, and mechwarrior online runs like butter.

Have not tried any other games with it yet because I am still having to download and install but will update after I get a chance to do more of that.

EDIT: As a side note...the OCZ Vector 460 120 GB SSD is a fantastic drive. Seriously...if you are looking for a bang for your buck SSD, that would be a good one for you to pick up. I think that bodes well for the R7 SSD AMD is putting out in a partnership. If it is higher perf than the Vertex 460, it will be a great drive too.

Nice to to see a 9590 result on my website! Are you changing your handle to 9590rocks? Anyway, I want to show off, so here is the 9590 stacked up against my awesome new Lenovo A10-5750 laptop:

http://www.headline-benchmark.com/results/d2e23042-10b6-47ed-94c3-a0fee6e31b15/c9538cdf-0f1f-4748-bf31-2779920abd0a

I gave up waiting for the steamroller laptops. They're selling off (dumping) the Richland models cheap, so maybe I should have waited another month. But then I'd have to pay launch prices for maybe 10% more CPU performance and flatlining graphics.

 

[jdwii]

Wow Sims 4 has heavy requirements i thought they where making it easier to play?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/26/the-sims-4-recommended-system-requirements-revealed-hope-you-have-a-core-i5/

I am baffled by how some of you are so surprised to see games started to scale to 4 cores. All of the recommended CPUs are all quad cores.

"we can't go to two cores! It's impossible to sync data!"
"we can't go to four cores! There's not enough tasks to put on 4 cores!"
"we can't go to eight cores! Everything that has made parallel is parallel!"

It's going to keep happening until someone comes up with a better way to get more performance than throwing more cores at the problem. And software developers will kick and scream the entire way.

EDIT: also, if EA is saying they're making the game more accessible to people while targeting quad core, they probably know something that we don't. Either that or they're just idiots. But if there's one thing EA knows how to do, it's make money.

I'm quite happy its using more cores but older PC's are usually the market for these games most users probably play it on laptops. Sims 3 was so unplayable after playing it a few days it just ruined the experience to me so i hope it uses all my hardware well instead of 20% of it.

 

[jdwii]

Spoiler

Actually, building a 9590 system over the weekend with the Seidon120 that comes with it...will see what it does with the paired water cooler...

I chucked together a Seidon120 and an FX6300 with a 5850 ... runs sweet. Stickin an R280X on it shortly. Put a fan speed controller off an old Corsair cooler and a more efficient fan ... works a treat Build cost was peanuts.

Yes, it runs well. The 9590 stressed with the water cooler never breaks 45C, and I picked, though I was not aware when I ordered it (did not pay attention to dimensions), a Mid ATX case that runs on the small side, and run 3 case fans in it.

While I had to get creative mounting the radiator, the system itself with 290X and OCZ SSD, Seagate HDD, all runs really well together. Very smooth. I have not bothered to overclock at this point, I really have not needed to do so yet, but I will do that more when I have some time to sit down and tweak it.

As for performance, I ran the headline benchmark yesterday in a bone stock config just to see how it did. It stacks up well to all but the well overclocked i7-2600, and it got the highest single GPU score for the graphics of the bunch...(while, unsurprisingly, coming in lower than an SLI config).

In Thief benchmarks it maxes everything out on Ultra @ 1080p (not surprised), and was only limited by the refresh rate of my monitor with V-sync on.

Tomb Raider was essentially the same result. BF4 on multiplayer was no issue, and mechwarrior online runs like butter.

Have not tried any other games with it yet because I am still having to download and install but will update after I get a chance to do more of that.

EDIT: As a side note...the OCZ Vector 460 120 GB SSD is a fantastic drive. Seriously...if you are looking for a bang for your buck SSD, that would be a good one for you to pick up. I think that bodes well for the R7 SSD AMD is putting out in a partnership. If it is higher perf than the Vertex 460, it will be a great drive too.

Nice to to see a 9590 result on my website! Are you changing your handle to 9590rocks? Anyway, I want to show off, so here is the 9590 stacked up against my awesome new Lenovo A10-5750 laptop:

http://www.headline-benchmark.com/results/d2e23042-10b6-47ed-94c3-a0fee6e31b15/c9538cdf-0f1f-4748-bf31-2779920abd0a

I gave up waiting for the steamroller laptops. They're selling off (dumping) the Richland models cheap, so maybe I should have waited another month. But then I'd have to pay launch prices for maybe 10% more CPU performance and flatlining graphics.

Was going to upgrade my llano to a steamroller laptop but i think i can hold off until Amd's next design or Amd's last module design for the laptops. Also i tried running that benchmark have 8 and did download the latest java didn't work

 

[de5_Roy]

AMD Athlon X2 450 CPU spotted
http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2014/2014082501_AMD_Athlon_X2_450_CPU_spotted.html
dual core athlon cpu based on kaveri a1 stepping.

 

[Cazalan]

Semiaccurate sounds very butthurt that they enable simple things like this because how their business model fails. It is actually quite funny. Anyone with any knowledge would know that PI's sucessor would not be in that time frame and the name faraway island doesn't even make any sense. Tech news has always been dodgy with all the rumors, just gotta avoid sites like wccftech and everything is pretty good. Anything that first gets published on wccftech is probably wrong.

That was the point of the fake tags to see how quickly the "news" would be "leaked".

 

[juanrga]

Semiaccurate sounds very butthurt that they enable simple things like this because how their business model fails. It is actually quite funny. Anyone with any knowledge would know that PI's sucessor would not be in that time frame and the name faraway island doesn't even make any sense. Tech news has always been dodgy with all the rumors, just gotta avoid sites like wccftech and everything is pretty good. Anything that first gets published on wccftech is probably wrong.

That was the point of the fake tags to see how quickly the "news" would be "leaked".

The whole history is about more than a simple leak. Charlie/Semiaccurate accuse them of false attribution as well.

 

[gamerk316]

Wow Sims 4 has heavy requirements i thought they where making it easier to play?
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/26/the-sims-4-recommended-system-requirements-revealed-hope-you-have-a-core-i5/

I am baffled by how some of you are so surprised to see games started to scale to 4 cores. All of the recommended CPUs are all quad cores.

"we can't go to two cores! It's impossible to sync data!"
"we can't go to four cores! There's not enough tasks to put on 4 cores!"
"we can't go to eight cores! Everything that has made parallel is parallel!"

It's going to keep happening until someone comes up with a better way to get more performance than throwing more cores at the problem. And software developers will kick and scream the entire way.

EDIT: also, if EA is saying they're making the game more accessible to people while targeting quad core, they probably know something that we don't. Either that or they're just idiots. But if there's one thing EA knows how to do, it's make money.

CPU scaling does not infer increased performance though. And the requirement of a quad for a very easy to process title indicates the software is VERY inefficient. If we've gotten to the point where the Sims is computationally more crushing then just about everything else out there, we have significant problems to take care of.

Really, are we at the point where we're excusing poor coding and decreased performance because it "scales to more cores"?

 

[sapperastro]

I am guessing the sims 4 will head to the new consoles? If so, that could be the answer for the multi threading of the game. Perhaps it needs to be set up specifically to operate on X amount of cores, with different operations going to each core out of 4 used for the game.

 

[gamerk316]

I am guessing the sims 4 will head to the new consoles? If so, that could be the answer for the multi threading of the game. Perhaps it needs to be set up specifically to operate on X amount of cores, with different operations going to each core out of 4 used for the game.

Which isn't how threading works, since you don't ever lock specific threads to specific cores; that's just asking for trouble.

I can see how you can make Sims scale; you do have a lot of AI's you need to cycle through, and the majority are fully independent of the rest. It SHOULD scale well. That being said, the TOTAL WORKLOAD should still be trivial enough where a Dual core can handle it; And according to the specs, it can't. THAT'S the issue I have with it.

That's the issue here: What is the new Sims doing under the hood that makes it so Duos will have issues with it? Because if graphics are responsible, then EA really doesn't get their target market here. If its something else, then EA's design is flat out WRONG, because there is nothing under the hood that should be significantly more stressing then the previous title was.

Seriously, a C2D should be way plenty for titles like this; its not that hard to handle CPU side. [And yes, I've written AI simulation software before. For simple behaviors like you see in the Sims, it's not that hard to do.]