AMD Piledriver rumours ... and expert conjecture

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Reynod

Reynod

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Mar 26, 2007
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We have had several requests for a sticky on AMD's yet to be released Piledriver architecture ... so here it is.

I want to make a few things clear though.

Post a question relevant to the topic, or information about the topic, or it will be deleted.

Post any negative personal comments about another user ... and they will be deleted.

Post flame baiting comments about the blue, red and green team and they will be deleted.

Enjoy ...
 
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now all we need is some "leaked" benchmarks.
Click to expand...
NEW LEAKED AMD PILEDRIVER BENCHMARKS!!!!!! 😗
LeakedPDbenchies.png

WOW! AMD's new Piledriver architecture powers past all its competition! Scoring nearly 8 points in Cinebench, and amazing core scaling! Intel's Ivy Bridge has met it's match!
:lol:
 
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slow down.. :pfff:
😛
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I see what you did there.

on a realistic note, If the flagship PD is clocked at 4.2 Ghz, and has a 10-15% boost in IPC, that makes it 20% better than the current flagship, while probably using less power.

I feel like i've said that way to many times already, but it's not like there is news to talk about. Someone has got to throw us a bone sometime soon.
 
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I am almost positive the FX-8350 will have a 4.2 GHz clock speed with Turbo Boost (I think it is 2.0 maybe 3.0) to bring it to 4.7 GHz. I am not sure if that is the regular Turbo Boost or Max Turbo Boost.
 
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duly note:
I am keeping my last AMD unit and awaiting PD for it.
then I'll decide what to do.
so I do hope PD is a worthy upgrade from Deneb..

(call this my disclaimer..)
I'm not anti AMD just anti Bulldozer, FX-8150 slight exclusion.
slight..
Click to expand...
I think the 8120 at sub $170 fits in... okay. Good as a budget private server chip, or a budget workstation. That being said, a locked i5 still serves as good competition.
 
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I see what you did there.

on a realistic note, If the flagship PD is clocked at 4.2 Ghz, and has a 10-15% boost in IPC, that makes it 20% better than the current flagship, while probably using less power.

I feel like i've said that way to many times already, but it's not like there is news to talk about. Someone has got to throw us a bone sometime soon.
Click to expand...
REMEMBER Cinebench doesn't show the actual clock speed of the processor, it might have been OC'ED!
 
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i think amd has better motherboard chipset and specs. more sata ports, usb 3.0 ports, x16+x16 pcie 2.0 crossfire/sli on 900x and 990fx chipset motherboards, cheap price (thanks zambezi). amd used to have wider cpu selection as advantage, intel is currently even in that area with sb and ivb. apu mobos have amd dual gfx, usb 3.0, more sata 3 (6 gb/s) ports etc. i noticed that atx mobos with amd's chipsets tend to be cheaper.
Click to expand...

You can get a Z68/Z77 mobo with dual x16 you just have to look. The P8Z77-V Pro Thunderbolt has Thunderbolt along with 3 PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 lanes and up to 8 USB 3.0 ports (4 from the chipest and 4 from a ASMedia chip). The Premium has 4 full x16 PCIe 3.0 lanes. That though depends on what you plan to do. If you plan a single card, then two full x16 lanes are pointless. If you are doing CFX/SLI then it will benefit you in a few years when the GPUs start to take advantage of the faster bus since they can't saturate even x8 fully yet.

Its all a matter of looking. As for USB 3.0, I haven't seen any 990FX boards with more than 4 as the 990FX does not support USB3.0, much like the Z68 does not. The first chipset to support USB 3.0 is Z77. I like mine (I have 4, two in back and two in front using ASMedia) but I don't have anything that can use them. Kinda like Thunderbolt. While I would love to have it, nothing can truly use it yet.

The extra SATA 6 are nice but unless you plan to do more than two SSDs, pointless as most HDDs can't even saturate much beyond a SATA I connection. Once SSDs become the norm and cheaper it will make a difference.

As for the cheaper part, some are and some are not. It depends on which mobo maker and which series you get. As for the CPU, its cheaper right now just because the performance is not there. AMD will price accordingly, not based on the consumer. Thats why the HD7970 hit at $550 and was about $600 for a few months. AMD wants to make more money and when they can, their CPUs will be priced more like Intels are for their low to high end lineup.

Then again I just spent over $400 on a GPU which I haven't done since about 2004.......
 
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You can get a Z68/Z77 mobo with dual x16 you just have to look. The P8Z77-V Pro Thunderbolt has Thunderbolt along with 3 PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 lanes and up to 8 USB 3.0 ports (4 from the chipest and 4 from a ASMedia chip). The Premium has 4 full x16 PCIe 3.0 lanes. That though depends on what you plan to do. If you plan a single card, then two full x16 lanes are pointless. If you are doing CFX/SLI then it will benefit you in a few years when the GPUs start to take advantage of the faster bus since they can't saturate even x8 fully yet.

Its all a matter of looking. As for USB 3.0, I haven't seen any 990FX boards with more than 4 as the 990FX does not support USB3.0, much like the Z68 does not. The first chipset to support USB 3.0 is Z77. I like mine (I have 4, two in back and two in front using ASMedia) but I don't have anything that can use them. Kinda like Thunderbolt. While I would love to have it, nothing can truly use it yet.

The extra SATA 6 are nice but unless you plan to do more than two SSDs, pointless as most HDDs can't even saturate much beyond a SATA I connection. Once SSDs become the norm and cheaper it will make a difference.

As for the cheaper part, some are and some are not. It depends on which mobo maker and which series you get. As for the CPU, its cheaper right now just because the performance is not there. AMD will price accordingly, not based on the consumer. Thats why the HD7970 hit at $550 and was about $600 for a few months. AMD wants to make more money and when they can, their CPUs will be priced more like Intels are for their low to high end lineup.

Then again I just spent over $400 on a GPU which I haven't done since about 2004.......
Click to expand...

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/06/07/asus_sabertooth_990fx_motherboard_review/

I have 4 as well with my sabertooth which is 179.99$
 
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I dislike thunderbolt... It needs two cards on the mobo and peripheral, and an expensive cable to work; the cable gets even more expensive when it's optical...

Thunderbolt was interesting when it was lightpeak@100gbps; now it's partially lightpeak@20gbps with the right cable.

I'll stick with cheap USB 3.0 and displayport(a faster version than light-ning-bolt) tyvm.
 
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I dislike thunderbolt... It needs two cards on the mobo and peripheral, and an expensive cable to work; the cable gets even more expensive when it's optical...

Thunderbolt was interesting when it was lightpeak@100gbps; now it's partially lightpeak@20gbps with the right cable.

I'll stick with cheap USB 3.0 and displayport(a faster version than light-ning-bolt) tyvm.
Click to expand...


+1 stick with 3.0 not to mention USB has a great rep.
 
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I dislike thunderbolt... It needs two cards on the mobo and peripheral, and an expensive cable to work; the cable gets even more expensive when it's optical...

Thunderbolt was interesting when it was lightpeak@100gbps; now it's partially lightpeak@20gbps with the right cable.

I'll stick with cheap USB 3.0 and displayport(a faster version than light-ning-bolt) tyvm.
Click to expand...

TB was just Intel wanting to take over as a replacement for USB / FW and make a generic all-in-one high bandwidth cable, propriety Intel only of course. It's not going to take off though. HDMI 1.4 / Display Port both solve the display bandwidth issue and USB 3 solves the external "all in one" peripheral issue.

I really never understood the need for USB 3, only things that remotely use up that much bandwidth are external drives and they made eSATA for that. USB has extremely high latency and is very chatty (for external bus's anyway). Makes it fine for run of the mill peripherals but not very good for disks / displays and such.
 
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I dislike thunderbolt... It needs two cards on the mobo and peripheral, and an expensive cable to work; the cable gets even more expensive when it's optical...

Thunderbolt was interesting when it was lightpeak@100gbps; now it's partially lightpeak@20gbps with the right cable.

I'll stick with cheap USB 3.0 and displayport(a faster version than light-ning-bolt) tyvm.
Click to expand...

That is the downside to TB right now as it was with USB. USB was once pretty expensive and USB 3 is still more expensive than USB 2.0 for say a thumb drive or a external HDD as are the cables. As it becomes more of a normal the price will drop.

The thing I like about TB is that it is trying to create a single standard for everything instead of USB for peripherals, DP/DVI for screens and so on. The idea is great as it also allows to daisy chain devices with one port vs having a single port per device or having a hub, like USB.

I see nothing bad out of it right now except the price plus the speed seems to scale faster than USB does. USB 3 is 5Gbps, but has a lot of drop off due to 8b/10b encoding, and there is no idea when USB 4 will come out. TB is 10Gbps and is supposed to scale to 50Gbps by 2014, in two years. I don't see a downside to that.

Add in that it also supports PCIe standards it may allow for those with a laptop with a IGP use a xternal GPU to get maximum performance for games without having to worry about heat. That is theory of course.

TB was just Intel wanting to take over as a replacement for USB / FW and make a generic all-in-one high bandwidth cable, propriety Intel only of course. It's not going to take off though. HDMI 1.4 / Display Port both solve the display bandwidth issue and USB 3 solves the external "all in one" peripheral issue.

I really never understood the need for USB 3, only things that remotely use up that much bandwidth are external drives and they made eSATA for that. USB has extremely high latency and is very chatty (for external bus's anyway). Makes it fine for run of the mill peripherals but not very good for disks / displays and such.
Click to expand...

USB is also partly Intels work. PC tech always moves forward and for external devices like flash drives that keep getting bigger, USB will become saturated very quickly.

USB 3.0 is pointless as newer mobos are coming standard with eSATA 6.0 which is much faster than USB 3.0. Then again unless you have a RAID0 eHDD, thats more than enough bandwidth.

I have a USB3 hard drive, and what I like about it is that it is faster when I have USB3 available, but still compatible with my older USB2 computers. I only have eSATA on a few of my computers, but all of them have some flavor of USB.
Click to expand...

I do like USB 3 drives, especially when working for customers as it takes a huge chunk out of transfer time of their data compared to USB 2.0.
 
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Issues with USB is that it's not DMA capable. The USB protocol was designed to replace PS/2, RS232 and LPP, it was never designed to handle large amounts of random data access. It's got plenty of bandwidth now, but with high latency and frequent interrupts for the CPU to fork lift the data from the device's I/O into main memory. This was the big difference from IEEE 1394 and USB, 1394 could stream data from it's peripheral devices to the host's memory without needing to frequently interrupt the CPU whereas USB needs to issue a CPU interrupt at every buffer copy request (CPU must copy from USB controllers I/O buffer to main memory). The lack of DMA requirements means the devices can be much cheaper but at the expensive of performance.

Not an issue with mouse / keyboard / printer stuff, hella big issue with mass storage devices and other latency sensitive peripherals.

eSATA on the other hand is just the SATA specification that's been speced for better shielding and higher signaling for longer cables, it's identical to SATA in all other ways. As of SATA 2.0 hotswap support is mandated thus every SATA 2 or higher port is also an eSATA port. Every SATA 3.0 port can also be an eSATA port. So if you guys are running high speed mass storage, do yourselves a favor and use eSATA. If your box doesn't have an eSATA 3.0 port, then get a converter bracket for $5~10 USD and *poof* eSATA 3.0 port. The most you'll have to worry about is that you plug it into a port that's controller is set to AHCI.
 
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I agree that these new technologies are definitely better, however I think adoption will be moderate (unless they come with a USB adapter too) for mobile external devices because the majority of computers out there don't have the proper connections (laptops, older desktops, etc.). For permanently attached drives, eSATA and the new technologies are great, as you don't need to worry about compatibility with other people's computers.
 
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