AMD CPUs, SoC Rumors and Speculations Temp. thread 2

[salgado18]

In the consumer space I agree- but for large OEMs? Even if they have a stellar part, a large OEM is going to expect a discount compared to Intel imo as AMD have less brand recognition ('Intel Inside' sells product, an 'AMD' sticker on the other hand has a negative effect more often than not, even when they were ahead).

I personally could see Apple going with AMD for a lot of their mainstream systems, but AMD will probably get pressured on price. The thing is though, if Apple can start shifting a lot of inventory and get a bit of a positive brand recognition for AMD in the process, it'd probably be worth them taking a bit of a hit on the margin.

I mean, performance aside for a minute, the *main* factor that really matters here is the amount of money AMD can get per wafer they have to buy. Zen by all accounts is a fairly conservative core, so a 4 core (8 thread) zen cpu might not actually have to be that expensive. A larger 8 core / 16 thread die obviously will be. I mean looking at Fury, it's *actually bloody cheap* for the amount of silicone involved. They are offering a gpu that is slightly bigger than GM200, + an interposer + brand new HBM memory for the same price. Frankly from a manufacturing cost perspective it should cost more than the GTX 980ti, AMD were evidently forced to keep it price competitive. This is also the down side of their approach of using last gen larger die gpu's vs nvidias smaller Maxwell parts- AMD are giving away high end, expensive to manufacture large dies at the same cost as a comparatively minuscule part from nVidia. You can bet which company is making more money.

Exactly, and I hope AMD prices Zen well enough to turn a nice profit and get high sales volumes. Fury is a mixed bag compared to the 980ti, but in the end it's a great product in itself, with an adequate price, and seems to be selling well. If they manage to repeat it with Zen, then that's all good.

Now, about lowering the price to Apple, yes it's going to be a huge brand boost for them, even if profits are very low, or even negative, depending on the negotiations (and Intel pressure). But can they afford it? I mean, if they get the contract for a too-low profit margin, then the boat is going to keep floating, they can't guarantee they will be around suplying chips for a long time, and they may even not close the contract based on this forecast.

From what I see, they may not get contracts with Apple now; as juanrga said, they didn't get design wins; but if Zen proves to be good enough, all that may change from Zen+ forward. Zen is a last hope atempt right now, and the market is watching if they will deliver. Once they prove they can, then more doors will open.

 

[Cazalan]

The thing with Apple is they could afford to throw 500mil at AMD to design a more competitive APU just give them more leverage against Intel. Apple gets a choice of parts. AMD gets extra funds to offset their operating costs.

 

[Vogner16]

http://wccftech.com/amds-embedded-carrizo-merlin-falcon-socs-launched-amd-platform-support-ddr4-memory/

Carrizo based R series embedded apu's.

Thing to notice here is 3/4 down article shows a development board with ddr4/m.2/sataexpress/ all of the things we have been waiting for! amd will be ready with zen I am sure now.

 

[Guest]

yes it's first batch of apu and cpu from amd to support ddr4.

 

[Vogner16]

yes it's first batch of apu and cpu from amd to support ddr4.

Good news everybody! appears to be a FX8800p with ddr4 support. would like to see perf.

Cheers!

 

[Guest]

can hsa benefit arm servers?

 

[juanrga]

can hsa benefit arm servers?

HSA is native ISA agnostic, but AMD's GCN is not so agnostic, that is the reason why all the ARM products announced by AMD up to now don't include iGPU.

Moreover, HSA doesn't solve any problem is not solved by other techniques. Therefore the impact on servers will be small.

 

[Vogner16]

can hsa benefit arm servers?

HSA is native ISA agnostic, but AMD's GCN is not so agnostic, that is the reason why all the ARM products announced by AMD up to now don't include iGPU.

Moreover, HSA doesn't solve any problem is not solved by other techniques. Therefore the impact on servers will be small.

define native ISA agnostic.

 

[cdrkf]

can hsa benefit arm servers?

HSA is native ISA agnostic, but AMD's GCN is not so agnostic, that is the reason why all the ARM products announced by AMD up to now don't include iGPU.

Moreover, HSA doesn't solve any problem is not solved by other techniques. Therefore the impact on servers will be small.

define native ISA agnostic.

He means that the HSA specification is a general design principal that can be applied to all / any processor design including (but not limited to) x86, ARM, Mips, Power and so on.

 

[Saga Lout]

In plain English, a poster used the word "agnostic" without knowing what it meant and another poster didn't know either and posted to say so.

That makes them both agnostic but they're in good company because I'm agnostic as well.

 

[cdrkf]

Lol saga lout, I know the definition of agnostic... And it isn't something that's really applicable to a microprocessor design philosophy.

Irrespective, in the context Juan used it, he meant as I described. Also Juan is not the first person I've seen use the term like this in relation to tech. I'd wager there's probably an example of this use of the term in one of the many articles on Tom's. Maybe it's an evolution of the term? Language does develop over time after all.

Finally, I'd politely request you don't infer my religious beliefs from a comment relating to a tech discussion. Tech enthusiasts can get into heated arguments, add religion and it progresses to a whole new level which I'd like to keep myself out of thanks.

 

[Saga Lout]

Far be it from me to approach the borders of Tom's GRAPES policy, the R in which refers to religion. I was merely being facetious or attempting to be.

 

[jdwii]

In plain English, a poster used the word "agnostic" without knowing what it meant and another poster didn't know either and posted to say so.

That makes them both agnostic but they're in good company because I'm agnostic as well.

http://s9.postimg.org/68fiyff4f/image.png

http://s22.postimg.org/el7dueglt/dsd.png

 

[juanrga]

can hsa benefit arm servers?

HSA is native ISA agnostic, but AMD's GCN is not so agnostic, that is the reason why all the ARM products announced by AMD up to now don't include iGPU.

Moreover, HSA doesn't solve any problem is not solved by other techniques. Therefore the impact on servers will be small.

define native ISA agnostic.

cdrkf already answered this, thus let me add a bit of context. The HSA specification only requires HSA enabled CPUs and GPUs to support the HSAIL ISA for the purpose of communication/cooperation bettwen both, the native ISA of the compute units is mentioned only in abstract terms. For instance a HSA enabled CPU is only defined as a CPU that supports the HSAIL ISA together the "native ISA". The native ISA don't being specified means that a HSA compatible CPU can be Power, MIPS, x86, ARM,...

 

[juanrga]

In plain English, a poster used the word "agnostic" without knowing what it meant and another poster didn't know either and posted to say so.

That makes them both agnostic but they're in good company because I'm agnostic as well.

English is only my third language, but in this case I am using a common computer science term... jdwii already quoted both the dictionary and the Wikipedia article mentioning that HSA is "ISA-agnostic". For completeness, let me just quote what the HSA Foundation president and AMD corporate fellow Phil Rogers said about HSA:

Rogers took pains to emphasize that HSA is "defined from the outset" to be an open platform, with its specifications owned by the Foundation and delivered by means of a royalty-free standard. "It's designed from the ground up to be ISA-agnostic for both the CPU and the GPU – obviously that's very important," he said, a shared goal that's reflected in the range of hardware, operating system, tools, and middleware companies that have signed on as Foundation members.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/25/heterogeneous_system_architecture_deep_dive/

Let us see how the media treats HSA

Crucially, HSA will be ISA agnostic not just for the GPU, but for the CPU, as well—so an application written for HSA could run just as well on an x86/Radeon combination like Trinity as on, say, an ARM/Imagination Tech combination in a tablet.

http://techreport.com/review/22452/a-closer-look-at-the-new-amd/4

Finally let us see that AMD's fellow says in technical talks (slide 4):

ISA agnostic for both CPU and GPU

https://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb2012/talks/xldb2012_wed_1400_MichaelHouston.pdf

He is Mike Houston, a GPU compute expert:

https://graphics.stanford.edu/~mhouston/

 

[Vogner16]

This thread is broken. posts disappear after a day and go back to the ISA agnostic post. Mods need to take a look into that.

 

[Saga Lout]

The Moderation Team would like to close this thread completely as it's been bnroken for some time. Sadly that isn't possible at this time so certain posts are cherry-picked to be removed before the replies degenerate further.

Anyone who wants to keep it open could set an example in putting up decent and reasoned posts and it may just get the thread back on track and save it from an eternitty in Tom's recycle bin.

Even my pale attempt at linguistic humour over agnosticism was misunderstood. I fear there is little hope for this thread.

 

[Vogner16]

The Moderation Team would like to close this thread completely as it's been bnroken for some time. Sadly that isn't possible at this time so certain posts are cherry-picked to be removed before the replies degenerate further.

Anyone who wants to keep it open could set an example in putting up decent and reasoned posts and it may just get the thread back on track and save it from an eternitty in Tom's recycle bin.

Even my pale attempt at linguistic humour over agnosticism was misunderstood. I fear there is little hope for this thread.

It is understood to close threads that no longer follow their title as AMD (CPU) speculation, but as almost everything AMD does relates to cpu's and as a company "on the verge of returning to the limelight" with its competitor aside from their gpu division everything related to AMD would be discussed here and quite frankly there is a lot to discuss.

Including but not limited to CPU's APU's Chipsets Embeded designs, design crews/staff (aka jim keller), financials of before mentioned topics, block diagrams of new projects and corporate level initiative such as HSA (a direct deritive of APU development)

I asked what ISA agnostic was because it was a relevant post, as it describes amd's initiative and I wanted clarification on a definition much as how somebody might ask what HSA is. If you wish these discussions to be had elsewhere please make us a new thread.

 

[cdrkf]

The Moderation Team would like to close this thread completely as it's been bnroken for some time. Sadly that isn't possible at this time so certain posts are cherry-picked to be removed before the replies degenerate further.

Anyone who wants to keep it open could set an example in putting up decent and reasoned posts and it may just get the thread back on track and save it from an eternitty in Tom's recycle bin.

Even my pale attempt at linguistic humour over agnosticism was misunderstood. I fear there is little hope for this thread.

I've read several posts in this thread that were relevant and as far as I could see perfectly polite.

Why were these removed? Whilst in the past the discussion has got a bit heated, generally most people participating are polite enough and I think it's fair to say all involved are interested in the topics being discussed. I mean even at it's very worst, nothing in this thread has been that outrageous that I've seen, I always view Toms as a very civil place for the most part compared to many other forums.

I'm quite surprised that the recent posts were deemed so bad they had to be removed?!

As for your comments on the meaning of 'Agnostic', it's often hard to get across subtext / sarcasm / satire purely in text. The way I initially read your comment is evidently not how you intended it to be read, I think this in of itself is a large source of friction in some of these discussions....

 

[Guest]

AMD published Zen related patches for linux kernel -
http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Zen-CLZERO-Kernel

 

[ex_bubblehead]

The Moderation Team would like to close this thread completely as it's been bnroken for some time. Sadly that isn't possible at this time so certain posts are cherry-picked to be removed before the replies degenerate further.

Anyone who wants to keep it open could set an example in putting up decent and reasoned posts and it may just get the thread back on track and save it from an eternitty in Tom's recycle bin.

Even my pale attempt at linguistic humour over agnosticism was misunderstood. I fear there is little hope for this thread.

It is understood to close threads that no longer follow their title as AMD (CPU) speculation, but as almost everything AMD does relates to cpu's and as a company "on the verge of returning to the limelight" with its competitor aside from their gpu division everything related to AMD would be discussed here and quite frankly there is a lot to discuss.

Including but not limited to CPU's APU's Chipsets Embeded designs, design crews/staff (aka jim keller), financials of before mentioned topics, block diagrams of new projects and corporate level initiative such as HSA (a direct deritive of APU development)

I asked what ISA agnostic was because it was a relevant post, as it describes amd's initiative and I wanted clarification on a definition much as how somebody might ask what HSA is. If you wish these discussions to be had elsewhere please make us a new thread.

You are free to create your own thread to discuss those topics. They are off topic here and will be removed.

 

[jimmysmitty]

The Moderation Team would like to close this thread completely as it's been bnroken for some time. Sadly that isn't possible at this time so certain posts are cherry-picked to be removed before the replies degenerate further.

Anyone who wants to keep it open could set an example in putting up decent and reasoned posts and it may just get the thread back on track and save it from an eternitty in Tom's recycle bin.

Even my pale attempt at linguistic humour over agnosticism was misunderstood. I fear there is little hope for this thread.

It is understood to close threads that no longer follow their title as AMD (CPU) speculation, but as almost everything AMD does relates to cpu's and as a company "on the verge of returning to the limelight" with its competitor aside from their gpu division everything related to AMD would be discussed here and quite frankly there is a lot to discuss.

Including but not limited to CPU's APU's Chipsets Embeded designs, design crews/staff (aka jim keller), financials of before mentioned topics, block diagrams of new projects and corporate level initiative such as HSA (a direct deritive of APU development)

I asked what ISA agnostic was because it was a relevant post, as it describes amd's initiative and I wanted clarification on a definition much as how somebody might ask what HSA is. If you wish these discussions to be had elsewhere please make us a new thread.

You are free to create your own thread to discuss those topics. They are off topic here and will be removed.

I think instead of just a CPU section AMD thread we should look into maybe a general hardware section AMD thread as this seems to go off beyond just AMDs CPUs.

The Intel thread seems to stay stead though but also is never as discussed because we typically know what Intel is going to be doing.

 

[Vogner16]

The Moderation Team would like to close this thread completely as it's been bnroken for some time. Sadly that isn't possible at this time so certain posts are cherry-picked to be removed before the replies degenerate further.

Anyone who wants to keep it open could set an example in putting up decent and reasoned posts and it may just get the thread back on track and save it from an eternitty in Tom's recycle bin.

Even my pale attempt at linguistic humour over agnosticism was misunderstood. I fear there is little hope for this thread.

It is understood to close threads that no longer follow their title as AMD (CPU) speculation, but as almost everything AMD does relates to cpu's and as a company "on the verge of returning to the limelight" with its competitor aside from their gpu division everything related to AMD would be discussed here and quite frankly there is a lot to discuss.

Including but not limited to CPU's APU's Chipsets Embeded designs, design crews/staff (aka jim keller), financials of before mentioned topics, block diagrams of new projects and corporate level initiative such as HSA (a direct deritive of APU development)

I asked what ISA agnostic was because it was a relevant post, as it describes amd's initiative and I wanted clarification on a definition much as how somebody might ask what HSA is. If you wish these discussions to be had elsewhere please make us a new thread.

You are free to create your own thread to discuss those topics. They are off topic here and will be removed.

The thread we create will not be a sticky. and as a non moderator I don't feel as if its my "job" to make discussion sticky threads. Can you or jimmy or any of the other moderators on this thread make a general amd hardware thread in cpu page for us to continue the thread?

EDIT: or rename this one to include general hardware.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Start your own thread, then PM a moderator and request that it be stickied. Just keep in mind that not all requests for sticky are granted.

 

[vmN]

Should also update this thread, with a link to the new thread. ( When it is created )
I thought this thread was going very well. Especially compared to the old one