AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[de5_Roy]

I have a feeling, instead of leading early, it will be an also ran.
Not meaning it wont be good, but going by how the business runs, all the wins will go to Intel, leaving once again little for AMD, but it will be worth it, and once again, the emerging markets will snap them up, such as India and China

amd should focus more on india and china before they take up buying entry level tablets instead of netbooks and pcs. right now, amd can easily sell a lot of apus sole riding on igpu performance. they just need to put more effort behind their marketing.

In India, 90% of the people dont know what AMD is. Because AMD does no advertisement here. We have Intel ads on TV, but no AMD ads in either TV or newspaper.
I am highly sceptical of people buying AMD APU's here, simply because they dont know it exists. And all the major OEM sites dont have AMD notebooks/desktops on their online ordering page.

amd has very little publicity in those countries. intel has a much wider and stronger presence there. hell, even ultrabooks have more p.r. than apus, core2duo cpus still sell, so do coolermaster's psus >_>. intel has already started selling intel-based smartphones in india and has tablets and tablet pcs available.
amd apus have huge potential in countries like india where integrated gfx is all people need, and a lot of time they ask for igpu performance so that they can save money skipping a discreet card.
u.s. and european markets are saturated and those people are taking up smartphones and tablets, in emerging markets, this sort of undercutting would mean lots of sales for amd.

looking at haswell's naming ... wtf ...

I5 4430, I5 4570, I5 4670 ... 3.0 3.2 and 3.4 ghz ...

Interesting enough, one rumor seems to be true, no dual core cpus aside from that I5 4570T (another naming wtf).

The era of 'you just need a dual core' is now ending." -palladin9479

iirc, when sb and ivb came out, intel launched the core i5 T-cpu as part of the launch. the core i3 and other dual cores came out months later. intel will still release haswell core i3 and pentiums.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

amd has very little publicity in those countries. intel has a much wider and stronger presence there. hell, even ultrabooks have more p.r. than apus, core2duo cpus still sell, so do coolermaster's psus >_>. intel has already started selling intel-based smartphones in india and has tablets and tablet pcs available.

You talking about C2D's ? P4's are still widely used.
And CoolerMaster PSU's are the high end PSU. Majority of PSU's use a no name PSU that costs about $7 . A $15 PSU is considerd pretty high end.

 

[drinvis]

http://www.lightreading.in/document.asp?doc_id=228568
hipmaker AMD sees India as a big opportunity to take its overall growth to new levels. The company claims that it has grown 12 times in India as compared to the market growth over the last one year.

According to a recent IDC report, the company recorded its highest ever market share of 20.1 per cent in the Q4 FY 12 in India. The company's biggest gains came in the commercial segment, where it clocked market share of 27.1 percent in Q4 FY12. In the commercial desktops, AMD's market share remained at 22.4 percent in Q4 FY12, compared to 20.6 percent in Q3 FY12. The commercial notebook segment saw it capturing around one-third market share at 31.4 percent.

Well,in India AMD is not doing that well as it could have.
In India they have only released fx8350,fx8320.There are no 4/6 core based piledriver processors till now in India.Even a10-5800k is not that big a hit.The problem is that it arrived a lot later than i3 3220 while costing considerably more.A10 5800k with a good motherboard having sata3 and usb3.0 costs only a very little less than an i5 3470 with a b75 mobo.
Notebook market is similar as well.Though a few trinity a8 notebooks are doing quite well but they still don't have large number of design wins,neither they cover all price points.a10+7670m notebook costs nearly about an i5 3rd gen +7670m.AMD simply have nothing to compete with an i5/i7 mobile processor.
If they had some designs like a10 4600m without a graphic card which would have cost quite lower then that could have been a good hit.It's IGP is nearly as good as gt630m,would have got better battery without a discrete card.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

^ Plus, AMD havent pushed harder at the OEM's to build high quality notebooks, with atleast 1080P displays.
An Intel CPU+ a dGPU doesnt leave much margin for OEM's to incluse a 1080P display. But if they use an AMD APU, adding that dispaly should be easier.

This step can make AMD APU much more attractive for users.

 

[de5_Roy]

You talking about C2D's ? P4's are still widely used.
And CoolerMaster PSU's are the high end PSU. Majority of PSU's use a no name PSU that costs about $7 . A $15 PSU is considerd pretty high end.

ah, lol. i forgot about the biggest hits - iball, diablotek, codegen, raidmax, zebronics and so on. "600-700w iball psu is great for sli with phenom ii x4!!" iirc, gigabyte and thermaltake were the premium brands while cm is mainstream higher end. low end psus sell so many that even corsair started selling vs-series psus.

that thing about laptop pricing is somewhat true as well. i don't research laptops but a10 and a8 laptops are quite costly and comparable to intel i5 laptops.

bottom line is - even now, when tablets are mainstream, amd can tap into the potential in emerging markets. but they don't. i've said this since llano came out. this is not a performance issue.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Its happening.
They need to keep stepping it up, and I believe RR is going to make sure of a few things, anything beyond those things is pure gravy

 

[sarinaide]

I will be honest I had not seen the Haswell benches but collegues had and they were a bit mum in spilling the beans but with superlatives like beast and ultimate been thrown around I think I am left like many with a profound sense of being underwhelmed. I reckoned HD4600 would equate to similarish performance to midline Llanos and Trinities which looks about right, but HD4600 to HD7660D is well short evidenced by the fact that low settings almost matched Trinity's medium+ presets.

I am expecting big things from GT3 so should i wait in baited breath.

 

[gamerk316]

I will be honest I had not seen the Haswell benches but collegues had and they were a bit mum in spilling the beans but with superlatives like beast and ultimate been thrown around I think I am left like many with a profound sense of being underwhelmed. I reckoned HD4600 would equate to similarish performance to midline Llanos and Trinities which looks about right, but HD4600 to HD7660D is well short evidenced by the fact that low settings almost matched Trinity's medium+ presets.

I am expecting big things from GT3 so should i wait in baited breath.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-performance,3461.html

+10% CPU performance. GT2 = crap.

So yeah, about as expected from Intel. Hence why I still have no plans to upgrade my 2600k.

 

[gamerk316]

There is a interesting test. You can use the Windows Advanced Raserizing Platform . It allows all DirectX calls to be executed on the CPU. Can you do a simple check and see which processor does well ?

Not the CPU. Really not meant for that type of workload.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/gg615082(v=vs.85).aspx#advanced_rendering_games

Includes some numbers. Older arches, but still gives you an idea. Specifically, that an Penryn 4 Core @ 3.0GHz (Probably a Q9650 based on era) is about 7 times slower then a lowly 8500 GT. And given how GPU's have increased performance faster then CPU's, I can't imagine that situation has gotten any better [though later SSE calls may help a little].

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Some are hoping (praying) the 1024 AVX will be the answer.
I guess you spend billions, you have to hope in something.

Open up that BW, and the only problem I see is discretes selling for big bucks, as the gap narrows and only the top two tiers will sell.
Tho, Intel will be left with nVidias lower solutiuons, and umm so too AMDs, where I can see APUs having their own growing niche

 

[sarinaide]

I will be honest I had not seen the Haswell benches but collegues had and they were a bit mum in spilling the beans but with superlatives like beast and ultimate been thrown around I think I am left like many with a profound sense of being underwhelmed. I reckoned HD4600 would equate to similarish performance to midline Llanos and Trinities which looks about right, but HD4600 to HD7660D is well short evidenced by the fact that low settings almost matched Trinity's medium+ presets.

I am expecting big things from GT3 so should i wait in baited breath.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-performance,3461.html

+10% CPU performance. GT2 = crap.

So yeah, about as expected from Intel. Hence why I still have no plans to upgrade my 2600k.

There is no need to swap sockets when a Sandy is not theoretically that much slower than the 4770K.

GT2 numbers seen really did disappoint me somewhat, well below the fud that was cooked up for it, at best you are limited to low settings and low resolution as I don't see that iGPU as capable as Devastator in rendering higher texture qualities. I have a number of games with internal benchmark tools which I will run benches on use the 4770 and lower models to see how this scales down. I honestly think you are still looking as high as 25-30% weaker than the devastator.

Games I have tested with the APU;

Batman: Arkham Asylum/City
SW Force Unleashed 1 and 2
STALKER, Clear Sky, Call of the Pripyat
Farcry 2
F1 2010 - 2012
Fifa 12 and fifa 13
NHL 13
MLB2K11/12
Skyrim
Oblivion
AvP
Metro 2033
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead 2
Mass Effect 1 -3
Total War: Napoleon
Shogun 2
Dead Space 1 and 2
Doom BFG
FEAR
Brothers in Arms Hells Highway
Mirrors Edge
Deus Ex
BioShock
BioShock 2
Dirt 3
Need For Speed Shift 2
Dishonored.
BF3
BF Bad Company 2
Crysis/Warhead
Crysis 2
Dragon Age Origins

Most play at full HD resolution and medium or higher settings, AA and AF varies depending on the game engine. Most demanding games DX11 run at HD resolution on medium or lower settings and no AA or AF.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

Edit.

 

[palladin9479]

@mayankleoboy1

You must not understand how "FPU"'s (no such thing now actually) work.

BD uArch contains eight 128-bit SIMD processors, one per core. The two FPU's inside each module are capable of working together to process one 256-bit instruction. This is where lots of people get confused, each core has it's own 128-bit FPU unit but the module shares the 256-bit capability between the two cores.

Intel's core uArch (SB/IB/HW) have one 256-bit SIMD processor per core (2 for i3, 4 for i5/i7, 6 for super i7).

This gives AMD a slight advantage in theoretical SIMD calculations. Please remember that one 256-bit instruction is not the same as two 128-bit instructions, it really depends on the size and type of instruction. Now the difference between them comes in how Intel's SIMD engines work. Intel's "FPU" actually has three different pipelines allowing it to work on up to two simultaneous 128-bit instructions. They do this by dedicating different instructions types to different pipelines, FADD and FMUL are done on two different paths for example.

Intel's design leverages it's amazing cache and branch prediction / instruction scheduling power to extract far more computing capability from existing resources then AMD's design. Depending on the exact mix of instructions and the number of simultaneous executions done will favor one side or another. Mixed single threaded 128-bit instructions have Intel winning by a long shot, four cppies of the same threaded workload still have Intel winning. Its only when you get passed the four mark that AMD starts to look better, until you hit 256-bit instructions.

Profiling the performance characteristics of two vastly dissimilar architectures is pretty complex and can't be broken down in tweet sized bites.

 

[WyomingKnott]

wil reply later to comments.

Please also see the private message I sent you

 

[griptwister]

Keep in mind they hopefully changed the heat spreader on the i7 4770k, so this CPU could be the 3770k how it was supposed to be... I'm still buying the CPU... It doesn't have DDR4, It's almost a totally pointless upgrade from a 3770K. But, If intel keeps pulling this carp, I'm sticking with AMD. Not cool guys.

 

[jdwii]

Wow the numbers of Haswell are around Bulldozer to Piledriver and its around Llano to Trinity improvement on graphics. Seems like their moving as fast as Amd is but at the end of the day Amd still has the better graphics on their current APU's and Intel still has a better CPU.

Now the question is?
Is Intel moving ahead faster then Amd can keep up or is Amd coming closer and closer to Intel?

 

[de5_Roy]

no. the question is, is this the haswell thread or the de facto 'future amd chips discussion until amd and glofo get off their lazy asses and cough up some a/cpus' thread?

 

[-Fran-]

So it's just me that actually thinks Haswell looks good at stock and just needs to be OC'ed to really shine?

The feature cut doesn't bother me at all, to be honest. GT2 is fine in the desktop, since most HTPCs will use a high end APU or Intel + discrete most of the time. Also, I REALLY want to see the voltage and temps for a 4.5Ghz OC in Haswell. I have a weird feeling they're going to be pretty good for Intel, don't know why. Hopefully I'm wrong, for AMD's sake, haha.

Anyway, Kaveri should keep AMD in the game if SR cores improve over what PD has right now. The Haswell jump is very good, since it's not a leap. Should be reasonable to expect AMD to shorten the gap once Kaveri hits the market.

The interesting fight will be in lappy territory. Maybe even some HTPC's from companies with GT3 parts against DIY HTPC's using Richland or Kaveri.

Cheers!

 

[Cazalan]

The Haswell thread got unstickied so it has hijack the Steamroller thread.

 

[griptwister]

jwdii, the fact is, Intel is going to charge a premium for these CPUs over LGA 1156 and they don't even have USB 3.0 working properly yet. That's what pisses me off. Usually the second time around shows a more refined product, like piledriver to bulldozer. PD at least had a 15% increase over bull dozer... and for APUs, 10 percent is pretty darn good in CPU performance... Considering APUs are pretty much low end quad cores with a GPU strapped on their back. The GPU performance is what's key here for lap top users...

Also, 1080p on a laptop? I wouldn't use 1080p on a lap top (or as I like to call them, craptops). Most laptops are 17.3 inches for goodness sake!

I'm with Yuka though on the fact that you'd probably need to OC to see the real performance of the CPU.

 

[Cazalan]

Were are the Richland benches? Didn't it ship already?

 

[Nebby]

3/19 is the date. I thought this was suppose to be when the a10-6800k is suppose to be released but the way people talk it wont be until june 3/19 is the date for mobile as they say

 

[viridiancrystal]

So it's just me that actually thinks Haswell looks good at stock and just needs to be OC'ed to really shine?

The feature cut doesn't bother me at all, to be honest. GT2 is fine in the desktop, since most HTPCs will use a high end APU or Intel + discrete most of the time. Also, I REALLY want to see the voltage and temps for a 4.5Ghz OC in Haswell. I have a weird feeling they're going to be pretty good for Intel, don't know why. Hopefully I'm wrong, for AMD's sake, haha.

Anyway, Kaveri should keep AMD in the game if SR cores improve over what PD has right now. The Haswell jump is very good, since it's not a leap. Should be reasonable to expect AMD to shorten the gap once Kaveri hits the market.

The interesting fight will be in lappy territory. Maybe even some HTPC's from companies with GT3 parts against DIY HTPC's using Richland or Kaveri.

Cheers!

Yes. If Haswell overclocks as well as Sandy did, then it will be a huge success. It is good, as long as the pricing is similar to Ivy. ~10% better at the same speed is pretty nice.

 

[anxiousinfusion]

The Haswell thread got unstickied so it has hijack the Steamroller thread.

CPU news has been so slow lately, I don't mind if we just consolidate the two threads. It might also bring better discussion.

 

[esrever]

The Haswell thread got unstickied so it has hijack the Steamroller thread.

CPU news has been so slow lately, I don't mind if we just consolidate the two threads. It might also bring better discussion.

that doesn't really work well. Intel people don't chat well with AMD people when people don't get their own threads.