AMD Piledriver rumours ... and expert conjecture

[Reynod]

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 ...

 

[gamerk316]

Since no one(unless their on a laptop) really games on resolutions under 1080P(or over for most people at least i don't 😉 ) anyways all were doing is stretching my original point which is i can game fine with my 6950+1100T, Sure i have them overclocked and in return this setup is not the best for Performance/ per watt but my PSU is running fine and the electricity bill is cheap.

But you see, you still need to do lower resolution testing in order to determine how much headroom you have before you hit that CPU bottleneck. This lets you know, even if both CPU's give the same exact FPS at a given resolution, how much headroom you have before you run into a CPU bottleneck situation.

The painful truth of this is, not long ago, those averages between res/cpu/gpu were different, where a much smaller res was the tipping point.
GPUs have been outpacing CPUs for their joint usage, and it appears, at least for the next several nodes it will continue, and is but 1 more reason Intel is on this bandwagon as well, as thats where growth/perf/potential resides by wider margins

Makes sense; since rendering is close to massively parallel, the primary driver of performance is NUMBER OF CORES. As a result, even if you can make minimal improvements to IPC or Clock Speed, you can still get large performance bumps by doing nothing but adding more cores.

CPU's, in contrast, do more linear operations that do not scale as easily. As such, to increase performance, you need to either increase IPC, or bump clock speed, both not easily done anymore (IPC is hard to improve, clock speed is limited by voltage/heat).

 

[de5_Roy]

trinity to enter pro market
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/06/21/trinity-to-enter-professional-server-market/
gddr6 in 2014?
http://vr-zone.com/articles/gddr6-memory-coming-in-2014/16359.html

 

[lilcinw]

@MU_Engineer That 'old man' cracks me up, probably because he reminds me of my grandpa.

My most antiquated gaming memories go back to an old DOS box. Load DOS from drive A and your game from drive B. Then make sure you have your WorldBooks on hand to figure out where the heck Carmen Sandiego went this time. Good times.

I wonder how fast ole Carmen could run on PD?

 

[jdwii]

"Old scratch disk in an old player?!" 😱

http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/files/2011/06/Pawn_Stars_-_Old_Man_2.jpg

These damn kids nowdays don't even know what a record player and a turntable are and how they are supposed to be used. The music they used to put on vinyl actually sounded good, not that Auto-Tuned garbage kids listen to nowdays. Next thing they will be saying is that the first computer they'd used was a 2 GHz P4 and that it was "really, really old" and stand around with their jaws dropped when we tell them that cell phones used to actually be used to talk to people instead of texting. Kids these days

I'm 20 and i love old music the most and i know what sounds good or not when it comes to things(i'm picky on sound)! But yeah 95+% of people who are 25 or under Liston to crap or just noise.


Also i love my smartphone and i plan on getting the new galaxy, i think a smartphone is the perfect combination between a 90's phone and a tablet(which i will never buy)

And the pentium 4 was slow. But i used a 386 on windows 95 talk about old computers in crap schools!

 

[sebastien]

Hi guys,

A question about the pildriver and AMD in general.
Is AMD coming back with the piledriver in the game of Workstation or will they continue to ignore its existence?

Thanks,
Seb

 

[MU_Engineer]

Hi guys,

A question about the pildriver and AMD in general.
Is AMD coming back with the piledriver in the game of Workstation or will they continue to ignore its existence?

Thanks,
Seb

Everything I have heard from AMD says that they left the workstation market about the time Barcelona debuted and do not plan to come back. However, they make server chipsets like the SR5690 which work well in a workstation and many C32 and G34 boards are workstation-amenable boards. (Certain boards like the ASUS KCMA-D8 and KGPE-D16 are even marketed as workstation boards- but by ASUS, not by AMD.) Some of their more recent CPUs aren't horrible workstation CPUs either with the addition of some higher-clocked models and enabling Turbo CORE on what are supposed to be high-thread server chips. I suppose they are tacitly saying that people who want to make an AMD workstation can do so, but they are not going to spend (waste) the money to formally market it and face a steep uphill battle to fight against Intel in that market.

 

[MU_Engineer]

@MU_Engineer That 'old man' cracks me up, probably because he reminds me of my grandpa.

My most antiquated gaming memories go back to an old DOS box. Load DOS from drive A and your game from drive B. Then make sure you have your WorldBooks on hand to figure out where the heck Carmen Sandiego went this time. Good times.

I wonder how fast ole Carmen could run on PD?

The worry about running those old DOS games would be that they run too *fast*. Some old games depended on the CPU's clock speed being that of the original IBM PC (4.77 MHz) to get the game element timing correct. That's why there were "turbo buttons" on some old computers- not to overclock the chip, but to return it to normal speed as "non-turbo" was 4.77 MHz. I had Carmen Sandiego running normally on a 12 MHz 80286 that didn't have a Turbo button so timing should not be an issue. If timing came from the CPU PD would have issues unless your emulator put in about 900 wait() cycles for every execute cycle to prevent your UI from being unplayably fast. I think the hardest part would be to find a copy of the 1989 World Book to play the game though...

 

[sebastien]

For Piledriver and the expected outcry's and gnashing of teeth from the blue painted folk, I'll say this. The only thing that matters is performance vs cost vs power. Couldn't care if it's 1Ghz, 3Ghz, 10Ghz, or 1Thz, just provide performance vs cost vs power. Everything after that is just blue vs green warfare.

I am even easier.
All I care is Performance versus price and that is it, as long as it fits and stable in an under 1000 PSU with 1 or 2 graphic cards then I am all happy!

 

[palladin9479]

AMD386sx-20 w/ 2MB RAM 512Kb Tseng Labs video and 20MB HDD. DOS and PC-GEOS

Ahh the days

 

[EXT64]

I've found that some of my old DOS games run better on modern emulators (DOSBox) than on the original hardware/drivers :lol:
Sound drivers were particularly troublesome.

 

[sebastien]

Everything I have heard from AMD says that they left the workstation market about the time Barcelona debuted and do not plan to come back. However, they make server chipsets like the SR5690 which work well in a workstation and many C32 and G34 boards are workstation-amenable boards. (Certain boards like the ASUS KCMA-D8 and KGPE-D16 are even marketed as workstation boards- but by ASUS, not by AMD.) Some of their more recent CPUs aren't horrible workstation CPUs either with the addition of some higher-clocked models and enabling Turbo CORE on what are supposed to be high-thread server chips. I suppose they are tacitly saying that people who want to make an AMD workstation can do so, but they are not going to spend (waste) the money to formally market it and face a steep uphill battle to fight against Intel in that market.

Hi Mu_Engineer,

Thanks abunch for your response.
Yes, I saw that some CPUs are actually capable of handling workstation programs.
I work oin game Design and Animation with Autodesk products 2012
I need a decent CPU that handles well the application multithreads and good load of memory for Mudbox
I also use UDK engine, a bit of crysis engine too.
And of course Photoshop and Corel Painter.
I want a Xeon or Opteron because I am tired of Max crashing on me with a core 2 duo I think e6600 and it all "seems" because of error coding in my understanding because sometimes it crashes when I go up in smoothing iterations among other little instances. I want that xeon or opteron with all necessary feature addition except VT I think because I assume it is only virtual machine specific.

Do you think Opteron 4284 or 4238 for my need?
The reason why I am hesitant to hell with AMD is because so far Autodesk did not come out of certification for AMD opteron CPU, yet I am open to suggestions since Intel litterally pooped on my wallet with their xeon e5-1620 and xeon e5-1650 being sold in tray to select major brands and not to retail and they do NOT have a retail date of release at all!
Let me know if you know some pro or semi pro game designer or VFX who use a lot those opterons mentionned above?
Thanks in advance,
Seb

 

[jimmysmitty]

"Old scratch disk in an old player?!" 😱

http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/files/2011/06/Pawn_Stars_-_Old_Man_2.jpg

These damn kids nowdays don't even know what a record player and a turntable are and how they are supposed to be used. The music they used to put on vinyl actually sounded good, not that Auto-Tuned garbage kids listen to nowdays. Next thing they will be saying is that the first computer they'd used was a 2 GHz P4 and that it was "really, really old" and stand around with their jaws dropped when we tell them that cell phones used to actually be used to talk to people instead of texting. Kids these days

That has already happened. In fact most kids these days have phones only to text/facebook. If they ever use any talk minutes its because their parents are calling them.

As for music, most stuff I listen to is not auto-tuned. Give me some awesome guitar rifts any day of the week.

 

[$hawn]

I wonder how much of a benefit there would be to switching off one set of integer pipes in a module. The big power-hungry things in the module are the decoder and FPU, and there is only one of each of those in the module. I don't work for AMD so I don't know the exact answer, but my guess is that there would be minimal benefit in being able to clock gate off one set of integer pipes. If you could get any increase in single-core Turbo speeds, they would be probably 100 MHz if at all. There would certainly be more complexity in having yet more clock domains to handle, though. And as we all discussed earlier, that would be one more thing for the poor Windows scheduler to goof up.

yup, what u says make sense thanx man....one of the few people in this forum who actually helps clear doubts with meaningful answers

 

[$hawn]

i clocked my old athlon 7750 down to 130MHz 😀 (130x1 : fsbxmulti) on both cores (below 130MHz fsb it is unstable) but still stable and massively slow. but on my 1090t system lowest cpumulti available is x5 with 200mhz base clock


after downclocking my cpu (1090t) to 1.0GHz (C&Q enable) it idles at 0.8GHz and at that clock (.8 and 1.0) the audio from vlc feels like an old scratch disk in an old player
😗

i meant if there were any issues with BD is particular being unstable below 1.4GHz.

 

[jimmysmitty]

i meant if there were any issues with BD is particular being unstable below 1.4GHz.

I think there are many factors and each CPU is different (by CPU I mean arch). Some may have a certain BCLK that its stable to (low and high). Others will have a 54voltage. Voltage will be a major one though and is why Intel is working on NTV (Near Threshold Voltage) which is normally in the mV. Some CPUs will hit a certain low voltage and once you hit that, lowering other parts (BCLK, multi) wont benefit as much as lowering the voltage did.

As well, with Intel CPUs and probably future AMD CPUs as they move the SB to the CPU like Intel is, some components will be tied into the same clock generator and will not work above or below a certain BCLK. Sandy Bridge CPUs have the SATA and PCIe clock generator on the CPU and its tied into the BCLK. Thats why overclocking a SB CPU with the BCLK is near impossible as it destableizes the PCIe and SATA, both which operate at 100MHz. It can go +/- about 5MHz normally and still work fine but too much beyond that tends to cause stability issues.

SB-E does have a seperate BCLK and SATA/PCIe clock generator so they can use the BCLK to overclock. It may change again with Haswell, and depending on AMDs implementation it may also be a problem area.

That said, I think BD should work well at lower frequencies so long as the BCLK stays withing a decent range.

 

[amdfangirl]

That has already happened. In fact most kids these days have phones only to text/facebook. If they ever use any talk minutes its because their parents are calling them.

I still have never sent a text in my life

Don't know how, don't want to know.

 

[dogman_1234]

I still have never sent a text in my life

Don't know how, don't want to know.

Lucky.

Only have one mate to text. He don't wanna text me much.
Get 'fer being a Yank!

 

[amuffin]

My parents didn't get me a texting plan, but i do have a 200mb data plan. All I use my phone for is TH and FB, unfortunately TH sucks on android/mobile

 

[amdfangirl]

Lucky.

Only have one mate to text. He don't wanna text me much.
Get 'fer being a Yank!

My phone is one-way. I only phone people. People never phone me. (I keep it off at all times).

I'm paranoid about phone radiation as much as I am paranoid about wireless internet .

 

[bawchicawawa]

My phone is one-way. I only phone people. People never phone me. (I keep it off at all times).

I'm paranoid about phone radiation as much as I am paranoid about wireless internet .

Radio-waves are non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, why are you afraid of them?

 

[$hawn]

Radio-waves are non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, why are you afraid of them?

errr...apparently they can possibly be harmful !!!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/who-report-cell-phone-radiation-can-cause-cancer/49638

@AMDfangirl Well even if u switch off ur cell phone, what about all the cell phones around that are radiating radio waves?? All the cell towers radiating power all around u ?? and not to mention FM radio and GOD noes what not that is traveling through the air!!!! 😀

 

[MU_Engineer]

Hi Mu_Engineer,

Thanks abunch for your response.
Yes, I saw that some CPUs are actually capable of handling workstation programs.
I work oin game Design and Animation with Autodesk products 2012
I need a decent CPU that handles well the application multithreads and good load of memory for Mudbox
I also use UDK engine, a bit of crysis engine too.
And of course Photoshop and Corel Painter.
I want a Xeon or Opteron because I am tired of Max crashing on me with a core 2 duo I think e6600 and it all "seems" because of error coding in my understanding because sometimes it crashes when I go up in smoothing iterations among other little instances. I want that xeon or opteron with all necessary feature addition except VT I think because I assume it is only virtual machine specific.

Do you think Opteron 4284 or 4238 for my need?
The reason why I am hesitant to hell with AMD is because so far Autodesk did not come out of certification for AMD opteron CPU, yet I am open to suggestions since Intel litterally pooped on my wallet with their xeon e5-1620 and xeon e5-1650 being sold in tray to select major brands and not to retail and they do NOT have a retail date of release at all!
Let me know if you know some pro or semi pro game designer or VFX who use a lot those opterons mentionned above?
Thanks in advance,
Seb

I do not use those particular programs but the benchmarks that some sites run include Photoshop and Autodesk programs. Certification sometimes involves the CPU maker giving the program publisher money to "certify" their CPUs, so I doubt AMD will be willing to do that to Autodesk. That is part of what is required in marketing a workstation CPU and AMD isn't in that game. As a result, those programs are heavily optimized for Intel's CPUs. You can run them on AMD CPUs, they will just run slower than you think they should.

I bet that Piledriver will probably not be a lot different in that regard, it is a mildly tweaked version of Bulldozer and the tweaks do not involve allowing the CPUID() vendor function to return anything other than "AuthenticAMD."

 

[amdfangirl]

Radio-waves are non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, why are you afraid of them?

Because I never took physics.

😉

Take a guess which one I am

errr...apparently they can possibly be harmful !!!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/who-report-cell-phone-radiation-can-cause-cancer/49638

@AMDfangirl Well even if u switch off ur cell phone, what about all the cell phones around that are radiating radio waves?? All the cell towers radiating power all around u ?? and not to mention FM radio and GOD noes what not that is traveling through the air!!!! 😀

Who says I leave the house without a lead mecha suit?

Seriously, we don't get reception of any kind here. Nice and peaceful.

 

[truegenius]

I still have never sent a text in my life

Don't know how, don't want to know.

Lucky.

Only have one mate to text. He don't wanna text me much.
Get 'fer being a Yank!

(message via telepathy: who is [strike]he/[/strike] she 😉 )

My parents didn't get me a texting plan, but i do have a 200mb data plan. All I use my phone for is TH and FB, unfortunately TH sucks on android/mobile

if your mobile support .jar file or can emulate softwares of java enabled phones then you can try operamini 6.5 (java) in which you can easily surf toms hardware flawlessly ( i surf upto 15 tabs on a phone having 1MB ram 😀 ). you can surf facebook and can post your pics of being top for 1year in cpu section 😉

My phone is one-way. I only phone people. People never phone me. (I keep it off at all times).
I'm paranoid about phone radiation as much as I am paranoid about wireless internet .

this will be a good invest for you (too much old fashioned and full of hassle though) 😗
or you are already using it

my phone is working as a modem only.
with main balance=Rs -2.50 (yup negative) and no message packs 😗 means no balance other than 1GB internet

errr...apparently they can possibly be harmful !!!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/who-report-cell-phone-radiation-can-cause-cancer/49638

@AMDfangirl Well even if u switch off ur cell phone, what about all the cell phones around that are radiating radio waves?? All the cell towers radiating power all around u ?? and not to mention FM radio and GOD noes what not that is traveling through the air!!!! 😀

not to forgot the radiation of bigbang 😉

Because I never took physics.

😉

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/purity.png

Take a guess which one I am


Who says I leave the house without a lead mecha suit?

Seriously, we don't get reception of any kind here. Nice and peaceful.

:lol:

Because I never took physics.

no cheating/hint 😉

 

[nforce4max]

:lol:

cell phones used to actually be used to talk to people

Talk what is it? is it fun? 😗

http://i1228.photobucket.com/albums/ee458/realygenius/2.gif


music players
http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/83276_newipod.jpg

Next thing they will be saying is that the first computer they'd used was a 2 GHz P4 and that it was "really, really old"

my first pc was with an athlon x2 7750 (k10) with only 1GB ram and it was tooooo slow 😉

P4= powerstate 4 😗

found this on FaceBook (the only book that i read 😀 ), perfectly fits in the situation 😗
http://i1228.photobucket.com/albums/ee458/realygenius/179171_410197672352596_1384264729_n.jpg

My first pc was an old compaq that ran a 100mhz p1 and only had 16mb ram. The hard drive was only 1gb :lol: