News AMD CTO Mark Papermaster: More Cores Coming in the 'Era of a Slowed Moore's Law'

[bit_user]

That's pretty much what Intel did when it transitioned from P3 to P4 where the 1-1.3GHz Coppermine and Tualatin P3 continued winning benchmarks the 1.6-2.4GHz Willamette P4 until 2.4+GHz Northwood finally pulled away under all circumstances.

A friend of a friend who worked at Intel, at the time, told me that the Pentium 4 was architected & fully expected to reach 10 GHz, by the end of that CPU generation. Intel woefully mis-predicted advances in semiconductor manufacturing technology.

I doubt it was this simple, but I'm reminded of this example, whenever it sounds like someone is predicting the future by simply extrapolating existing trends.

Anyway, the main point is it's a cautionary tale about pursuing clock speed above all else. The fastest the P4 ever got was on the doorstep of 4 GHz. That was in like 2005, and it wouldn't be until almost 10 years later that the i7-4790K eventually seized the 4 GHz crown, and with a much lower TDP and way higher IPC and double the width of P4's SIMD (actually at least 4x, since the P4 had to break every 128-bit SSE operand into two 64-bit words, for processing).

 

[bit_user]

Perhaps you will want to rethink your comment? Facts matter?

I thought we were trying to speculate about the next few years.

Obviously, if you want a CPU to play some existing game with an existing GPU, go ahead and look at the benchmarks, as you just did. There's no point in speculating about what you can just go out and measure.

 

[bit_user]

True , the Smart phones is a proof ... tons of cores and memory and it is just a phone and 90% of the people never need that power in their phones they just use it for Maps , and facebook/whatsup/etc and for cameras.

Really? If the extra cores truly added no value, I doubt phones would have them. Who is to say that maps and web apps don't make use of them? Web scripting and layout engines are well-threaded.

Don't forget that phones typically use two (sometimes even 3) classes of cores, for better power-efficiency. So, that has a tendency to inflate core counts, without a commensurate increase in performance.

And phone Cameras actually do quite a lot of processing, although much of it is offloaded to special image processor or DSP blocks.

 

[nofanneeded]

Really? If the extra cores truly added no value, I doubt phones would have them. Who is to say that maps and web apps don't make use of them? Web scripting and layout engines are well-threaded.

Don't forget that phones typically use two (sometimes even 3) classes of cores, for better power-efficiency. So, that has a tendency to inflate core counts, without a commensurate increase in performance.

And phone Cameras actually do quite a lot of processing, although much of it is offloaded to special image processor or DSP blocks.

The Apps dont need the extra power , and Google Map will act the same using midrange phone or high end phone. I never noticed any difference. yes they are well threaded but the extra power is not needed.

you only feel the difference in games and thats it.

I own all kind of phones ... Samsung Note 9 and Samsung S7 and Samsung A70 and iphone 7... in apps they are the same ...

 

[nofanneeded]

Smarphones and tablets are somewhat of a special case since they are under extreme pressure for highest performance per watt due to very limited battery capacity and more cores is the most power-efficient way of increasing total throughput. You may not need eight full-speed cores to check emails but you can certainly use 4-6 low-power cores to delegate all of the non-performance-critical collateral activity and background stuff so the 2-4 high-speed high-power cores can spend more time in lower-power states.

I agree , but for apps you will never need $1000 phone ... get a snapdragon 660 or 670 you will get the same experience of snapdragon 855 .. the only difference is in games.

 

[InvalidError]

The issue is just that clock speed wins are a lot harder to achieve.

Not necessarily harder to achieve, just that AMD and Intel have discovered through experience that investing all of your process gains and power into higher clocks is stupid, leads to horrible inefficiency and worse overall performance.

What changed though is that process gains aren't as large as they used to be. Shrinks used to bring so much extra switching performance and density that they could more than double both transistor counts and clocks every time, now they only have 30-60% process performance gains to split between doing extra stuff per clock tick and clocks. The power density and associated cooling challenge aren't helping either. At this point, putting most of the process gains into IPC (architectural structures) which makes the cores bigger and easier to cool (or at least not too much worse) makes more sense than investing the gains into clocks that would increase power density to unmanageable levels.

 

[InvalidError]

I agree , but for apps you will never need $1000 phone ... get a snapdragon 660 or 670 you will get the same experience of snapdragon 855 .. the only difference is in games.

Between two otherwise identical platforms and workloads except for SoC-specific scheduler tweaks to steer threads to the most appropriate cores, it should be a safe bet that the 855 would have better battery life. Most people would count thatas better experience too even if they don't see extra performance for what they do.

 

[cryoburner]

Read:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-explains-why-high-frame-rates-matter-in-competitive-games
Then look at the Avg FPS Entire Test Suite chart comparing CPUs on:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-3600x-review,6245-11.html
Perhaps you will want to rethink your comment? Facts matter?

What? You linked me to a page that starts with...

Out of the box, the Ryzen 5 3600X is the best processor in its price range for gaming and productivity, marking a massive shift in the mid-range.

Then goes on to say...

After a few years of staring at gaming value charts that always show Intel in the leadership position, it jumps right off the page that the stock Ryzen 5 3600X topples the Intel Core i5-9600K. The difference is slight in average framerates, a mere 1.1 FPS, but widens to 2.5 FPS in 99th percentile metrics, indicating the 3600X also offers a smoother gaming experience.

Somehow I don't think that is helping your argument. : P

Sure, with an overclock, the unlocked Intel options can still pull a little ahead (for notably more money than a 3600 once cooling is factored in), but that's still ignoring my main point. At the resolutions you would typically run a 2080 Ti at, any performance differences shown in these 1080p results tend to evaporate. And the same goes for running a somewhat more mid-range graphics card at 1080p. The CPU is generally not going to be what's limiting performance in those use-cases, at least in demanding games, and the money would probably be better put toward graphics hardware instead.

And e-sports titles should generally perform well on any of them. There might be some relatively minor differences in frame rates with the settings turned down, but once you start getting well into the 100+fps range, those differences tend to matter less.

Also, I should probably point out that the game Nvidia was using for their example was CS:GO, which happens to be one title that actually performs better on 3rd-gen Ryzen processors compared to Intel's offerings. Any current-gen processor can push more frames in that game than a 240Hz screen can display though, so again, it's not likely to really matter either way.

 

[nofanneeded]

Between two otherwise identical platforms and workloads except for SoC-specific scheduler tweaks to steer threads to the most appropriate cores, it should be a safe bet that the 855 would have better battery life. Most people would count thatas better experience too even if they don't see extra performance for what they do.

High end phones have better battery life because they have larger batteries thats it. mid range phones with the same Battery capacity blows the 855 out of the water,

 

[InvalidError]

High end phones have better battery life because they have larger batteries thats it. mid range phones with the same Battery capacity blows the 855 out of the water,

There are plenty of budget phones with large batteries (4-5Ah) out there, especially if you consider Chinese brands like Umidigi and many of those run pretty close to stock Android. Higher-end phones on the other hand tend to suffer from hardware and software feature bloat. Unless your comparison also matches the amount of active bloatware and extra hardware, the comparison is invalid.