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 ...

 

[cgner]

I am very happy with my 4ghz 1100T and plan to wait
the tempation for Ivy Bridge is strong but not needed or justifiable

hehe I can so relate to that. 1100T plays any games just fine.

 

[viridiancrystal]

I'm looking to make an upgrade to something that has much better OCing efficiency. I'm hoping PD does that, but if Steamy is on AM3+ then I will probably end up going for that.

 

[obsama1]

Don't think Steam. will be on AM3+. By that time, the socket will be about 2.5 years old. Steam. will have PCIe 3 and other things just not possible on AM3+. If they can make it so that there's an AM3+ version of Steam. and an AM4 version of Steam., that would be awesome.

 

[jdwii]

hehe I can so relate to that. 1100T plays any games just fine.

I think more people would be happy with a nice SSD over a new processor if they already have a 1100T. I just installed a SSD for my friend and man it makes a difference he had a 2TB drive running windows and all his favorite shows and games man it was so slooow. And he had a Phenom II x4 955 and a Amd radeon 6850. I really don't think most people understand how much a hard drive can affect performance including gaming. For example i noticed both GTA4 and Sims 3 demand a lot from my hard drive and every time it skips its when my hard drive light comes on blinking like crazy. So before spending 300$ on a processor if your running a Phenom II x4 or equivalent you should think about buying a SSD instead. A SSD may not help you get 250FPS but it will help with the random skips which to me is more important.


When i build PC's for my family or friends they get a A8 and a SSD and a basic hard drive their PC's are so fast they cant believe they only spent 500$ not to mention it barley uses any power consumption. Hence why i want Trinity out its been over a year now since Llano's been out.

 

[jdwii]

Don't think Steam. will be on AM3+. By that time, the socket will be about 2.5 years old. Steam. will have PCIe 3 and other things just not possible on AM3+. If they can make it so that there's an AM3+ version of Steam. and an AM4 version of Steam., that would be awesome.

I'm pretty sure as well that steamy wont work on a am3+ board i would really like Amd to put the north bridge on the CPU like their APU's and Intel's CPU's.

 

[cgner]

I think more people would be happy with a nice SSD over a new processor if they already have a 1100T. I just installed a SSD for my friend and man it makes a difference he had a 2TB drive running windows and all his favorite shows and games man it was so slooow. And he had a Phenom II x4 955 and a Amd radeon 6850. I really don't think most people understand how much a hard drive can affect performance including gaming. For example i noticed both GTA4 and Sims 3 demand a lot from my hard drive and every time it skips its when my hard drive light comes on blinking like crazy. So before spending 300$ on a processor if your running a Phenom II x4 or equivalent you should think about buying a SSD instead. A SSD may not help you get 250FPS but it will help with the random skips which to me is more important.


When i build PC's for my family or friends they get a A8 and a SSD and a basic hard drive their PC's are so fast they cant believe they only spent 500$ not to mention it barley uses any power consumption. Hence why i want Trinity out its been over a year now since Llano's been out.

SSD is definitely nice for games, but rarely makes a difference outside of map loading times. Even then, with games like shogun 2 its CPU that determines loading times because the game is single threaded and needs optimization every time you load it. It's stupid but just how it is. On the other hand a demanding game like Metro loads in no time. SSD is really helpful in MMOs and games where whole map is not loaded into RAM but rather when you move to a new section, it starts loading. I am considering a 256 gb dedicated Steam drive while keeping windows on a hard drive because I don't use many other programs.

 

[king smp]

I think more people would be happy with a nice SSD over a new processor if they already have a 1100T. I just installed a SSD for my friend and man it makes a difference he had a 2TB drive running windows and all his favorite shows and games man it was so slooow. And he had a Phenom II x4 955 and a Amd radeon 6850. I really don't think most people understand how much a hard drive can affect performance including gaming. For example i noticed both GTA4 and Sims 3 demand a lot from my hard drive and every time it skips its when my hard drive light comes on blinking like crazy. So before spending 300$ on a processor if your running a Phenom II x4 or equivalent you should think about buying a SSD instead. A SSD may not help you get 250FPS but it will help with the random skips which to me is more important.


When i build PC's for my family or friends they get a A8 and a SSD and a basic hard drive their PC's are so fast they cant believe they only spent 500$ not to mention it barley uses any power consumption. Hence why i want Trinity out its been over a year now since Llano's been out.

I cant agree any more
I use a 60Gb Gskill Phoenix Pro for my OS drive
I run 2 x 500gb Seagate Momentus Hybrid SSD drives
they each use a 4gb SSD in them to preload or prefetch most commonly used files
I get 215 mbps sustained read with <.2 ms access time on HD Tune bench which is equal to a Sata II SSD in performance
the 60gb I bought used for $40 and the two Momentus drives I got for $160 for both on Ebay.
so I have 1tb of storage for $160 that puts out SSD like numbers
$200 for the whole setup
next upgrade is to get two 64gb Crucial M4s Sata III drives in Raid 0 for OS after I get my AMD 990 board
Also doing a new case
I have a Antec 300 now but going with something around a 100 like the Corsair 400R possibly or a CM HAF
but as far as CPUs go the 1100T is really nice for the money
I got it at Microcenter for $165 out the door
It is cool what they are doing with the FX series of chips if they make the improvements
they have potential if they are priced right
should make good workstation class CPUs
I dont worry about gaming
Ido alot of mutlthreaded work involving video and also will run many apps at the same time
so MOAH COARS is important to me
Part of my job is configuring HP servers mainly the Proliant DL and BL series
I have set up servers with 16 cores or even more cores but they only run around 2-2.5 ghz in those setups
serious enterprise software is all about how many cores you throw at it
somebody was saying how we are hitting a ghz or speed wall well the answer is that software is getting more and more multithreaded and eventually IPC wont matter as much as the number of cores
that is alread true in most enterprise environments and will eventually be true in the home market

 

[sarinaide]

Zambezi chips were underclocked from the start. I don't know if it was a marketing trick to leave room for "improvement" but that bump would not be bad. Kinda what intel has been doing for a few years now.



It would need to outdo 1100T in single core performance by a healthy margin to be a gaming CPU.

Again if one goes on synthetic FX 81XX = 8% slower than a 1100T = 7~10% slower than a I5/i7 (around a 15% differential). If you place PD in between the 1100T and SB/IB you will regardless of what is said have a very good gaming chip, consider that the 1100T is a very good gaming processor.

 

[jdwii]

Again if one goes on synthetic FX 81XX = 8% slower than a 1100T = 7~10% slower than a I5/i7 (around a 15% differential). If you place PD in between the 1100T and SB/IB you will regardless of what is said have a very good gaming chip, consider that the 1100T is a very good gaming processor.

The 1100T is a great processor for gaming but i would put it between a Pentium and the I3 ivy in terms of gaming performance. Encoding and other tasks that use more cores puts the 1100t between a I5 and a 4 core I7 ivy. Really a phenom III with Amd's new memory controller and a more up to date scheduler with some other improvements in L1 and L2 cache would of been nice plus if they put a 256bit FPU per core would of helped a bit. Do all of this and we would have piledriver performance and we would of had it 2 years ago.

 

[cgner]

Again if one goes on synthetic FX 81XX = 8% slower than a 1100T = 7~10% slower than a I5/i7 (around a 15% differential). If you place PD in between the 1100T and SB/IB you will regardless of what is said have a very good gaming chip, consider that the 1100T is a very good gaming processor.

yep, those fake cores really threw many people off and the fact that u cant use a single module as a single core for games sucks. Not a gaming chip 🙁

The 1100T is a great processor for gaming but i would put it between a Pentium and the I3 ivy in terms of gaming performance. Encoding and other tasks that use more cores puts the 1100t between a I5 and a 4 core I7 ivy. Really a phenom III with Amd's new memory controller and a more up to date scheduler with some other improvements in L1 and L2 cache would of been nice plus if they put a 256bit FPU per core would of helped a bit. Do all of this and we would have piledriver performance and we would of had it 2 years ago.

Roughly so. Games use 2-3 cores and 1100T provides enough juice for games even with half its capacity. With encoding and production programs, if you unleash all 6 cores, it definitely competes with mid-high end SB i5/i7.

 

[obsama1]

A Phenom II die shrink to 32/22nm with the improvements jdwii mentioned would be awesome.

 

[king smp]

The Phenom III should have happened
the Bulldozer FX series should have been server/workstation CPUs
and the Phenom III shouldve been the desktop model
there was still improvements to PHII that couldve been made
then later the FX series couldve branced off to desktop

 

[obsama1]

AMD has the potential to catch up. Last year, an ex-employee said how they stopped using hand-made designs, and if they kept those, they would had a lot more performance. Since AMD isn't doing so well, they should be doing everything they humanly can, like using handmade designs to catch up.
http://www.insideris.com/amd-spreads-propaganda-ex-employee-speaks-out/

 

[cgner]

derp. whats all the talk about handmade designs?

 

[cgner]

A Phenom II die shrink to 32/22nm with the improvements jdwii mentioned would be awesome.

If they made P II with die shrink, lower power draw, made it cooler, and stock clock was at like 4.2... 😗

 

[obsama1]

Handmade designs are smaller and more powerful.

 

[-Fran-]

I think there's a little misconception with the "handmade design".

The way a CPU is created always starts from a human mind and a computer can optimize some parts of it over time and put some layouts. It's common practice in circuit design boards for the way the interconnections are worked out, for example.

What that engie said, I understood it as "AMD didn't improve the design spit out by the computers, so there were a lot of rough edges".

Just wanted to clear that out, haha.

Anyway, if Steamroflcopter will be AMD's big jump in performance, I want it in a new socket. I don't care if it comes with a GCN based video card slapped into it, but I want a friggin' platform upgrade! PCIe3, eSATA, HyperTransport 9999 and a bazillion native USB3 ports. DDR4 would be nice as well.

I don't know if Intel will try to make stacked RAM a big hit (well, they'll try...), but I don't think it will get a lot of attention (or traction) in the first gen devices/CPUs (Haswell?), since I'm sure it's gonna cost a lot and we're not in "big spending times". Besides, it's been rumored that Haswell will be very conservative IPC-jump wise, right?

Cheers!

 

[gamerk316]

SSD is definitely nice for games, but rarely makes a difference outside of map loading times. Even then, with games like shogun 2 its CPU that determines loading times because the game is single threaded and needs optimization every time you load it. It's stupid but just how it is. On the other hand a demanding game like Metro loads in no time. SSD is really helpful in MMOs and games where whole map is not loaded into RAM but rather when you move to a new section, it starts loading. I am considering a 256 gb dedicated Steam drive while keeping windows on a hard drive because I don't use many other programs.

HDD's really only matter in games for load times. Games aggressively load as much into RAM as early as possible, so aside from games that do a LOT of streaming, you aren't going to be going to the HDD a lot after the game loads. My HDD almost never goes off when in game, so a SSD only matters for me for load times.

yep, those fake cores really threw many people off and the fact that u cant use a single module as a single core for games sucks. Not a gaming chip 🙁

They are stronger then HTT by a long shot, but there is overhead. You basically have to choose between higher Turbo clocks (using only one BD module), or not using the CMT cores (with ~20% performance penalty).

BD was designed for servers. I can NOT stress that point enough.

Roughly so. Games use 2-3 cores and 1100T provides enough juice for games even with half its capacity. With encoding and production programs, if you unleash all 6 cores, it definitely competes with mid-high end SB i5/i7.

This is what I said from day one BD would be like. In parallel tasks, its slightly stronger then even i7's. But thats a minority of tasks, simply because it is NOT easy to make parallel workloads in such a way to not starve performance due to thread overhead. And those types of workloads are already being offloaded to the GPU via OpenMP/OpenCL.

 

[sarinaide]

I know many have said they should have taken a Phenom II x 6 slapped on more cores and be done with it. I don't agree in that first you will increase heat and power and secondly Phenom II cores are 2004 architecture, time to move on.

The only thing that stopped the Zambezi was the fact its cores are starved of workload, this hits it in lightly threaded applications, SR frontside is more something you see in a Intel chips so you will likely have cores fed at all times and well faster. As before if PD is 5% faster than the Thuban it will probably be 5-8% slower than a i5/i7, which is basically better than being 15% slower like it is now.

I know people make this gaming performance issue to be the biggest agenda, the difference between Intel and AMD is not even at noticeable FPS difference the reason, eg: if a 3770/3570 plays at 100FPS, the 81XX plays at 85FPS and the 1100T and 90-92FPS, FPS is unnoticeable if locked over 35FPS the fact that all the Zambezi's are capable of pushing 60FPS plus if the right hardware is installed makes this whole gaming chip thing pointless.

 

[cgner]

I think there's a little misconception with the "handmade design".

The way a CPU is created always starts from a human mind and a computer can optimize some parts of it over time and put some layouts. It's common practice in circuit design boards for the way the interconnections are worked out, for example.

What that engie said, I understood it as "AMD didn't improve the design spit out by the computers, so there were a lot of rough edges".

Just wanted to clear that out, haha.

Anyway, if Steamroflcopter will be AMD's big jump in performance, I want it in a new socket. I don't care if it comes with a GCN based video card slapped into it, but I want a friggin' platform upgrade! PCIe3, eSATA, HyperTransport 9999 and a bazillion native USB3 ports. DDR4 would be nice as well.

I don't know if Intel will try to make stacked RAM a big hit (well, they'll try...), but I don't think it will get a lot of attention (or traction) in the first gen devices/CPUs (Haswell?), since I'm sure it's gonna cost a lot and we're not in "big spending times". Besides, it's been rumored that Haswell will be very conservative IPC-jump wise, right?



Cheers!

I sees nows. We all want to witness AMD do a jump, but they don't. I don't know if their human resources are stretched by video card team or what, but it seems like they just don't try with CPUs.

HDD's really only matter in games for load times. Games aggressively load as much into RAM as early as possible, so aside from games that do a LOT of streaming, you aren't going to be going to the HDD a lot after the game loads. My HDD almost never goes off when in game, so a SSD only matters for me for load times.



They are stronger then HTT by a long shot, but there is overhead. You basically have to choose between higher Turbo clocks (using only one BD module), or not using the CMT cores (with ~20% performance penalty).

BD was designed for servers. I can NOT stress that point enough.



This is what I said from day one BD would be like. In parallel tasks, its slightly stronger then even i7's. But thats a minority of tasks, simply because it is NOT easy to make parallel workloads in such a way to not starve performance due to thread overhead. And those types of workloads are already being offloaded to the GPU via OpenMP/OpenCL.

Thats exactly what I said about SSDs. Bulldozer was designed for highly multithreaded programs of which there are few. let alone games. Sadly. Many games pretty much bottleneck themselves with single core. like really? its 2012 already.

 

[cgner]

I know many have said they should have taken a Phenom II x 6 slapped on more cores and be done with it. I don't agree in that first you will increase heat and power and secondly Phenom II cores are 2004 architecture, time to move on.

The only thing that stopped the Zambezi was the fact its cores are starved of workload, this hits it in lightly threaded applications, SR frontside is more something you see in a Intel chips so you will likely have cores fed at all times and well faster. As before if PD is 5% faster than the Thuban it will probably be 5-8% slower than a i5/i7, which is basically better than being 15% slower like it is now.

I know people make this gaming performance issue to be the biggest agenda, the difference between Intel and AMD is not even at noticeable FPS difference the reason, eg: if a 3770/3570 plays at 100FPS, the 81XX plays at 85FPS and the 1100T and 90-92FPS, FPS is unnoticeable if locked over 35FPS the fact that all the Zambezi's are capable of pushing 60FPS plus if the right hardware is installed makes this whole gaming chip thing pointless.

1- I dont remember anyone saying slap more cores because those who know computers know that more cores dont always result in better results and faster program processing.

2- In games difference can be more than 15%. Check out benchmarks of Deus Ex human revolution. We are talking 50 vs 70 fps or so.

 

[viridiancrystal]

I think there's a little misconception with the "handmade design".

The way a CPU is created always starts from a human mind and a computer can optimize some parts of it over time and put some layouts. It's common practice in circuit design boards for the way the interconnections are worked out, for example.

What that engie said, I understood it as "AMD didn't improve the design spit out by the computers, so there were a lot of rough edges".

Just wanted to clear that out, haha.

Anyway, if Steamroflcopter will be AMD's big jump in performance, I want it in a new socket. I don't care if it comes with a GCN based video card slapped into it, but I want a friggin' platform upgrade! PCIe3, eSATA, HyperTransport 9999 and a bazillion native USB3 ports. DDR4 would be nice as well.

I don't know if Intel will try to make stacked RAM a big hit (well, they'll try...), but I don't think it will get a lot of attention (or traction) in the first gen devices/CPUs (Haswell?), since I'm sure it's gonna cost a lot and we're not in "big spending times". Besides, it's been rumored that Haswell will be very conservative IPC-jump wise, right?

Cheers!

Theories:
1). "Lol, AMD is so far behind, lets do nothing!"
2). "OMG! AMD is so far ahead, we need to do something!"

Both are viable, depending on what your talking about. 😛

 

[king smp]

"Thats exactly what I said about SSDs. Bulldozer was designed for highly multithreaded programs of which there are few. let alone games. Sadly. Many games pretty much bottleneck themselves with single core. like really? its 2012 already"

hmmm many games are using dual cores and a decent amount take advantage of quad cores
look at the benchmarks and the system requirements of new games
also there are a fair amount of apps that use multithreading
Photoshop,Maya,Autocad,Handbrake etc
so that statement doesnt make sense to me

 

[king smp]

Multi-threaded Softwares and Games List
I thought it would be nice to start keeping track of the list...

Softwares
- Adobe Premiere 5.1
- Adobe Photoshop
- AutoCAD 2000i+
- Autodesk 3ds Max 7+
- Avidemux 2.3.0+
- Cakewalk
- dbPoweramp (v12)
- DivX Pro 6.x
- Folding@Home
- LightWave 3D 8.5 x64
- Microsoft Excel 2007
- Need for Speed: Pro Street
- Nero Recode 2.3.1.8+
- Rhinoceros 3D v2 onwards (v1 maybe not).
- Spybots Search & Destroy 1.5.1.15
- Windows Movie Maker 2.1
- WinRAR 3.6+

Games
- Assassin’s Creed
- Bioshock (dual-core only?)
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (?)
- Company of Heroes
- Crysis
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
- F.E.A.R.
- Flight Simulator X
- Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
- Half-Life 2: Episode II
- Medal of Honor Airbourne
- Prey (?)
- Quake 4 v1.2+
- Rainbow Six: Vegas
- Stranglehold
- Supreme Commander
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
- Unreal Tournament 3
- World in Conflict
- World of Warcraft

source-
http://www.sharkyforums.com/showthread.php?299127-Multi-threaded-Softwares-and-Games-List

that is only a forum post but I have seen alot of those games and software being referred to on other sites as being multithreaded

 

[cgner]

"Thats exactly what I said about SSDs. Bulldozer was designed for highly multithreaded programs of which there are few. let alone games. Sadly. Many games pretty much bottleneck themselves with single core. like really? its 2012 already"

hmmm many games are using dual cores and a decent amount take advantage of quad cores
look at the benchmarks and the system requirements of new games
also there are a fair amount of apps that use multithreading
Photoshop,Maya,Autocad,Handbrake etc
so that statement doesnt make sense to me

2 core is more or less mainstream. Try playing Shogun 2. GTA 4. They are single threaded.