AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

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Kaveri/Steamroller is a disappointment according to sources.

Buy a 8320 or 8350 when they drop in price, that already competes with the i5, and it is still a good processor.

 


Java dying? From where I sit in the finance industry, Java is everywhere, is totally dominant, and shows no signs of going away. MSFT pushes nothing in my industry - .NET is the distinct minority, and Apple is totally irrelevant. We do use C where we absolutely need the performance, but Java handles most tasks.
 


Amd's main issue was not working with software companies and only focusing on hardware, what's the point in making 8 core CPU's if the game only uses 4? What's the point in making a API if no one uses it? These are the questions you need to ask yourself. Amd is also not setting still in hardware sure maybe their not making a fx brand CPU and instead focusing on ways to make their current hardware faster while still making steamroller APU's and next gen graphics. Amd needs money their new wins made it where all 3 consoles are using their hardware. If workstations can get APU's for cheap with great graphics power and good enough CPU power then great. Laptops and desktops will be a win for this as well. Amd needs software compatibility to win sales.

Price/Performance
 
Objective C is like 10% of the market now, since Apple is forcing it to develop on iOS. Its been jumping up the usage charts the past few years. And all those app programmers are going to filter down into the other markets, and gradually shift usage back to C based languages.*

*Java is C inspired, since it kept the (horrid at times) C syntax. := should ALWAYS be used for equality; going from Ada back to C leads to all sorts of stupid 'if (x=y)' mistakes as a result...
 


Symmetrical computing was heavily pushed in the 70s and 80s. The real question should be why it never took off in the first place, despite a decade of trying to make the software scale across more then a handful of CPU's.

Symmetrical computing is nothing new, but the problems related to scalability remain.
 


Honestly i can't believe you're saying this, workstations need GPU power and if you can build a cheap workstation with this APU then that is a win for Amd. Mantle is now being supported by other companies besides Dice and if the improvements are big enough most likely others will drop in as well. OpenCL IS gaining attention on software and maybe HSA will to. In todays day and age hardware is not improving at a fast enough rate so software will have to become more optimized to overcome this issue and that even includes games.
 


Disagreeing is fine, but he writing "to save their ass", "a crappy cpu", "and an idle IGP", "weak ass cores"... clearly denotes hate.

Specially when he is plain wrong. As shown in my article about Kaveri a 3.7GHz SR CPU perform like a SB/IB i5 with ordinary CPU workloads, loosing in the FP intensive ones but outperforming in the integer workloads. There I assumed 20% IPC over PD, but some late leaks suggest that the final improvement is >30%. Therefore add to the scores I published if the leak is true.

And with new HSA software that uses all the hardware we can see huge boosts in performance: 200%--500% is not unnatural. I showed one HSA example in my article and we saw more HSA examples during the talk at APU 13.

Similar remarks about the GPU. Everyone is acknowledging how impressive was the BF4 demo with the iGPU providing 2-2.5x the performance of the i7-4770k+GT630. This means about 2x faster than Richland, and better than Iris Pro, and the BF4 performance will be better with MANTLE.

And then we will see dual Kaveri + dGPU as well.
 


Don't forget Java is kind of huge on Android. iOS market share is going nowhere in comparison 🙂
 
Few points......Whys everyone so angry on here? lol
They were never going to release the highest clocked ones first so 3.7ghz now then next summer a 7900k at 4ghz once everythings a little more refined? eg trinity-richland
Juanrga good estimates I read your blog a few times well done seems your spot on.
With hsa it seems this 'performance apu' if paired with dgpu and ony doing cpu work is actually a 12 core cpu, 4 ordinary cores then 8 gpu cores (cus), no? 8 traditional cpu cores it seems were never fully used by enough software so maybe we'll see more use from this setup if the diversity in types of core/cu allows good gains.
 


I am going to chime in here...

Which workstations are we talking about?

Office/basic accounting?
Graphics design/CAD?
Productivity/Media?

If the first one, sure APUs could work for that...along with anything else made since 2009.

For the last 2 though? No...I think not. Run a compute intensive workstation rendering or compiling for long periods of time, and see if the difference between the 8350 and the APU isn't worth 2x what you pay to go to the 8 core FX model. You're talking about rendering times that would literally be on the order of 60% of the APUs time taken to complete the task on well threaded programs.

If you're on an AutoCAD workstation, you could make an argument for the APU; however, you're losing 8% in clockspeed to gain 15-20% in efficiency meaning a net gain of 7-12% over the 8350. That's only because AutoCAD runs on a single core (to my knowledge they have not threaded the rendering engine for it yet...if they have, then nevermind 8350 still wins)

The primary issue here is, the raw compute needed to push a workstation class GPU and do it effectively. If your software is not HSA enabled...productivity will also see the APU lose.

That's my issue. The last 2 types of workstations are the 2 we use most in my industry, and I don't see an APU replacing the 8350/3770k paired with V7900 stations we have now. It would be a ridiculous cost to replace those for minimal gains at best, and a horrible loss of performance at worst.

AMD needs a HEDT platform, and they need it soon. Call it whatever they want, an APU doesn't solve everyone's problems. I would also like to point out: it is typically the power users and companies that pay the most to build their systems for raw performance, because it matters to them. Margins are higher in that segment, because if you really need it, then you will pay for it...and there are no less than 20 separate ~$2000-$2500 workstations within 50 feet of me at work. (7 Coding stations and 13-14 graphics stations)

 


Conversely I'm going to chime in as well.

I'm picking up a Temash laptop because it has AVX, FMA, etc and I can put Gentoo on it and completely rip.

I can only imagine how helpful an HSA enabled laptop will be on the road. A lot of this stuff at APU 13 is making me dream of HSA use flags where you compile parts of your own OS with HSA enabled.

I don't even want to begin to fathom how a Gentoo system with HSA would run.

AMD has been killing Nvidia from the bottom up, and comparing GT 630 to the APU was AMD kind of bragging at how low end Nvidia parts have become useless due to them.
 


The clocks are lower than expected but the showed performance in the demo didn't disappoint.

Apparently, there are two hypothesis about the iGPU clocks. The first is what you say. Power consumption and thermals. There are two problems with this. The former is why would AMD restrict a desktop APU to 100 W (TDP) when its FX CPU achieved 125 W (I am ignoring Centurion beasts). They could raise the TDP to 115W and the clocks. Moreover, the final Kaveri APU is rated to 95W and not the original 100W mentioned in Lisa Su talk of 2012.

The second hypothesis says that is related to memory bottlenecks. The new GCN arch is so fast than a 900 MHz core would be limited by DDR3 memory. This gains some support by the leaked detail that someone said in another forum that Kaveri has a disabled GDDR5 memory controller. The original plan was to unlock the GPU performance with fast GDDR5 memory, but finally this was canceled because the GDDR5 DIMM are not ready for market.

Future OC benchmarks will say which is the correct.

Of course, your pessimism (which curiously is never addressed to Nvidia or Intel) is once again without basis. If the correct hypothesis is heat, as you believe, the solution will be to migrate from 28nm bulk to 14nm FinFET. Have you payed attention to documents mentioning Carrizo? It will be faster than Kaveri but generating less heat.




Thanks.
 


How does this even remotely make sense to you?

The company that sells a 200w+ stock CPU is too afraid to push their desktop APU past 100w?

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/20/overclocking-amds-fx-8350/

Thomas got his FX 8350 to run at 4.5ghz with 1.45v on the stock FX cooler.

Please tell me again why 100w limit needs to exist?

We will known when OCing comes in, but I am leaning more towards it being a frequency issue and the chip just crapping out like Intels do now at a specific frequency as opposed to how FX overclocks now when you can get NaN result in IBT with AMD patches and never crash even though it's clearly show as not stable.

Steamroller APU will have a brick wall of frequency just like Intel CPUs do when it comes to OCing, I guarantee it.
 


AMD needs to accelerate the transition to an all APU/SoC products spectrum. What AMD really needs is an APU SoC that offer Kaveri performance in a 20W package and tons of HAS enabled soft.

Once achieved that they could sell a 150W version (with more performance) for 'enthusiasts'.
 


Thanks juanrga, sence you seen to have the most knowledge, of any of us here, do you think that there will be a steamroller dCPU? like the 8350 of steamroller.
 


Gonna have to deeply disagree with you here. Business's use Java heavily for Line of Business applications for portability reasons. Oracle has entire business model built around offering middle-ware and Weblogic services to host and provide for these Java applications.

For anyone here who works in a corporate environment, you usually have a web portal you log into to do things like update your timecard, check your pay stub or do various administrative tasks. That application is written in java and running on a webserver as a WAR or EAR. Hell damn near everything runs on the tomcat engine these days.

So yeah while java may be "dieing" on your gaming desktop it's huge and growing on your business computer or webserver.
 
This is the BF4 benchmark from the APU demo

amd_kaveri_benchmark.jpg


And a GT 630 is ~ as the iGPU in A10-5800k

IMG0039375.png


This means that AMD has more than doubled the iGPU performance!!!

The Kaveri iGPU seems to be faster than a dedicated 7750
 
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