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 ...

 

[jdwii]

but you have the exception to the rule, 1100T and 980BE are beast and AMD should have stayed in that direction for the most part.
I until recently ran a 980BE and those two chips are still AMD top chips in my book.

are you upgrading (from 1100T?) to Piledriver and the 8350, doesn't seem to be worth it.. :/

At stock Piledriver will be better than a Phenom at stock even though its probably 5-10% weaker in IPC(on average) its going to have 20% higher clocks Plus in some cases Piledriver will easily outperform a Phenom such as in 7-Zip or Winrar as well Aes encryption and anything else taking advantage of the newer instruction sets all doing this with the same 125 watt TDP.

But overclocking performance all depends on how much Amd improved piledriver's power consumption and really i see no improvements beyond resonant clock mesh and possibly a newer stepping at Globalfoundries(or take in the fact that they had 32nm for 1 year and there's improvements i'm sure) and people are "claiming" that at higher clocks the advantage of Clock mesh is smaller but its claimed to be 10% reduction in power consumption OR 10% higher clocks which scares me a bit since the 8350 is clocked 11% higher than a 8150. I know a Phenom II x6 can be clocked at 3.9-4.0Ghz on average on air and 4.2Ghz with water or some advanced heat sink and by looking at the numbers Piledriver needs to be clocked a good 400-500mhz higher to beat a Phenom on average so Piledriver would have to be clocked between 4.4-4.5Ghz on air and 4.7Ghz on water.

But to your question No i'm not upgrading to Piledriver as i see it as a minimal improvement over my processor which does everything i need it to do for now. I'm pretty sure Steamroller will have at least 15% better IPC when compared to the Phenom while having the high clock speeds of Piledriver that is when i'll upgrade.

PD will still suffer from the module scaling over phenom II. That part of the design hasn't changed, we will have to wait till SR to see any changes in that department.

I do see pd as a small improvement, but more of an implementation of RCM wich should reduce power usage.

Currently 4 modules is like having 6.5 Phenom cores i'm pretty sure that the core scaling won't change much but the IPC will with steamroller still not going to touch haswell but it will finally knock out the Phenom and come closer to the original I7 if not beat it.
As for Power consumption i don't see anything beyond a minimal improvement when compared to Bulldozer probably 10% or less but who knows i might be very surprised on the 23rd just like others here.

 

[Chad Boga]

The Australian Minimum Wage Myth
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/07/13/australian-minimum-wage-myth

Most people who earn minimum wage are young, unskilled workers. How are they doing in Australia?

In June, Australia's unemployment rate for workers age 15 to 19 was 16.5%.

Last December, 63% of all jobs lost were jobs for young, unskilled Australians.

It's simple: when the price of something goes up, people buy less. So when the price of labor goes up, employers hire less.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/07/13/australian-minimum-wage-myth#ixzz29xSTV2xn

Youth Unemployment is always higher in every country, than the nation's average unemployment rate.

A meaningful comparison would be to compare Australia's unemployment rate for workers age 15 to 19 to America's, not just throw out the Australian figure, not mention the American one, and hope people are stupid enough to think that the American figure must be lower.

 

[anxiousinfusion]

Not only is the evolution of the APU got greater promise the FM2 parts are able to match Phenom II's and FX 1 parts in discrete graphics performance.

If any APU can eventually beat my 560 TI by ~40% overall performance, I may just be tempted to buy one. But right now there's still nothing in discrete graphics that I would consider enthusiast.

 

[amdfangirl]

AM3+ has been around since what? 2008? I do agree that AMD shouldn't pull another FM1 ever again, but Intel seems to be in the habit of giving a socket form a year more or less before dropping it (they discontinued a handful of LGA1155 CPUs already).

The only native CPU of socket AM3+ was Bulldozer. There have been several cross-compatible CPUs, but it wouldn't really seem fair to AM3+ buyers (9xx series chipset) if the only upgrade they could get was either Bulldozer or a Phenom II (AM3+ released a little earlier than BD, but was supposed to be paired with it).

I don't see the reason to drop AM3+

What will we get with a new socket ??
Better phase power design something better than the actual 8+2 ??
And that's all

PCIe 3.0 is due to CPU and chipset, and there is no real need for PCIe 3.0 since there is no GPU that can use the full bandwich of 2.0

Better change socket when DDR4 becomes mainstream

Native USB 3.0 perhaps?

AM3 came out in 2009, am3+ in 2011. the funny thing about amd sockets is their compatibility direction. all am3+ boards will support all the newest cpus along with the previous gen (AM3) AM2 cpus are not compatible because they don't have a DDR3 controller.

on the other hand, most AM2 boards can support up to the AM3 cpus. for the most part, all AMD cpus are downward compatible except BD wich actually used larger pin diameter, you can actually upgrade from an athlon 64 up to a phenom II without changing motherboards, provided the manufacturer supplied a bios update ... Wich is the reason I dropped MSI as a personal favorite, they decided not to update their 690 boards. Asus and Gigabyte pretty much have full support even on their older 6xx chipset AM2 boards.

longevity is never a bad thing unless your worried about making profits on motherboard sales with each cpu sold, although it would be interesting to see the 4170 difference on a 760g board against a 990fx board.

AMD will probably stick with AM3+
1. If they integrate a GPU, die size/cost will rise, particularly given that is their platform for gamers who tend not to use igps.
2. Changing to a server board would cause FM1gate with AM3+ owners (released in 2011)
3. AMD needs every advantage it can get a hold of. Motherboard longevity is good
4. AMD will likely adopt DDR4 after Intel, since Intel dominates the high end

The Australian Minimum Wage Myth
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/07/13/australian-minimum-wage-myth

Most people who earn minimum wage are young, unskilled workers. How are they doing in Australia?

In June, Australia's unemployment rate for workers age 15 to 19 was 16.5%.

Last December, 63% of all jobs lost were jobs for young, unskilled Australians.

It's simple: when the price of something goes up, people buy less. So when the price of labor goes up, employers hire less.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/07/13/australian-minimum-wage-myth#ixzz29xSTV2xn

$15 AUD is currently equal to $15.50 USD.

http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/

Australia also has a 10% VAT tax.

Still doesn't justify exactly why we pay so damn much for software and music. More than twice the cost of the US version in some cases. Why is that? Do they have to pay more money to computers when they deliver songs from the US? Why is the Adobe suite double in price?

The higher min wage argument is invalid. Eg. China and tech costs pretty much the same as it does in US, give or take 10%. (on the most part with some weird exceptions)

 

[jaguarskx]

Still doesn't justify exactly why we pay so damn much for software and music. More than twice the cost of the US version in some cases. Why is that? Do they have to pay more money to computers when they deliver songs from the US? Why is the Adobe suite double in price?

The higher min wage argument is invalid. Eg. China and tech costs pretty much the same as it does in US, give or take 10%. (on the most part with some weird exceptions)

My comment regarding the $15 minimum wage in Australia was not in response to your question regarding why things costs more in Australia. It was in response to a comment about the difference between minimum wage in the US and Australia. The basic concept is everyone would like to make more money, however, increasing minimum wage has the effect of also increasing unemployment. My comment it was about the 16.5% unemployment rate for 15 - 19 year old people as a result of the $15 minimum wage.

Because employers now need to pay more to teenager, there are fewer jobs available to teenagers since the increased minimum wage adds extras costs to the businesses expenses which means the employer makes less money. A business who may have hire 10 teens in the previous year for a seasonal job would likely hire fewer teens this year. Maybe they would hire none at all and just relay their regular staff to pick up the extra work load, or simply accept the fact they will simply do less business to avoid the extra cost that would eat into the bottom line profits.

The increase of the Australian minimum wage generally do not affect most people in the 20+ year age groups since most of those individuals would have a college/university degree and by default would generally earn more than $15 per hours. Of course, there are also unskilled labor in the workforce where individuals may have made less than $15 in the past but are now earning at least the new minimum wage. Some of those people may have been laid off as well since it increase expenses and lower the net income to businesses.

 

[gamerk316]

having two discreet cards for asymmetrical cfx sounds nice... but amd will have to build a reasonably powerful cpu able to drive two cards or three gpus without bottlenecking them. even if those are low end. i wonder if kaveri's cpu would be that powerful....

But as techreport showed not too long ago, even top AMD CPU's (BD, and even PII to an extent) runs into latency problems (microstuttering) in SLI/CF configs. Hence why I always felt the hybrid CF approach was a silly one to take, because you run into too many latency problems.

 

[gamerk316]

The Australian Minimum Wage Myth
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/07/13/australian-minimum-wage-myth

Most people who earn minimum wage are young, unskilled workers. How are they doing in Australia?

In June, Australia's unemployment rate for workers age 15 to 19 was 16.5%.

Last December, 63% of all jobs lost were jobs for young, unskilled Australians.

It's simple: when the price of something goes up, people buy less. So when the price of labor goes up, employers hire less.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/07/13/australian-minimum-wage-myth#ixzz29xSTV2xn

Allow me to make a counter argument: As the price of labor goes up, people spend more money. People spend more money, demand rises. Demand rises, supply drops. To increase supply, business hires more workers.

 

[gamerk316]

Still doesn't justify exactly why we pay so damn much for software and music. More than twice the cost of the US version in some cases. Why is that? Do they have to pay more money to computers when they deliver songs from the US? Why is the Adobe suite double in price?

"Everything is worth what his purchaser will pay for it." ~ Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

Point being, if business could make more profit through lower prices, they would. If business could make more profit through higher prices, they would. Either that, or they are idiots...

 

[cgner]

3-5% improvement at best. Otherwise higher clock, thats all.

 

[jaguarskx]

Youth Unemployment is always higher in every country, than the nation's average unemployment rate.

A meaningful comparison would be to compare Australia's unemployment rate for workers age 15 to 19 to America's, not just throw out the Australian figure, not mention the American one, and hope people are stupid enough to think that the American figure must be lower.

First of all, the unemployment rate in the US is higher than in Australia. As of Sept 2012, Australia unemployment rate is 5.3%. The unemployment rate in the US as of Sept 2012, is 7.8%; a decrease of 0.3% from August. However, there is some controversy behind those numbers since it excludes people who stopped looking for work after so many years of frustration; if you are no longer looking for work (regardless of why), then you are no longer considered unemployed. Additionally, the number may also includes some seasonal hiring for the upcoming Christmas season. I know someone who works in the HR department of Macy's and she always complained about September since that is when her branch begins to hire for the Christmas season. They are looking to hire around 300 people some of whom have started working in September. These are seasonal jobs since all these people will be let go by the end of the year.

The following link provides a country comparison of unemployment, for youth ages 15-24. Unfortunately, they do not have one just for 15 - 19. The US is listed at #66 with 17.6%. Australia is #93 with an unemployment rate of 11.6%

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=2229

At the moment many businesses in the US are simply not hiring people, especially on a full-time basis because it is an election year. Without knowing what policies will be instated by the next administration it is difficult to determine what impact hiring new employees will have on the businesses bottomline (i.e. net income). Nevermind the impact on current employees.



As an off topic side note, people tend to think that if the stock market is doing well (which it is right now despite the 205 point drop in the DOW on Friday, Oct. 19), businesses are doing well and the economy must be robust. This clearly is not the case in the US. The value of stock prices have been going up because companies in general have been improving their bottomline net revenues. One way of doing so it to lay off people, and then find ways to improve efficiency and / or have the remaining employees work longer hours to pick up some of the slack.

 

[de5_Roy]

GCN is better but it's going to take more than that to rocket the APU speeds up. AMD already has bandwidth limitations with Piledriver seeing improvements up to DDR3 2400.

GCN on the desktop has the benefit of 150+GB/s of local GDDR5 memory.

AMD is running into scaling issues without adopting faster memory or on-die RAM/cache. DDR4 is still looking at late 2014 for mainstream so that's 3 chips away (SR, EX, ??? ).

imo, all they have to do is find a way to feed the trinity igpu some 6-7+ gb/s of memory bandwidth @ ddr3 1600/1866 ram and scale from there. like intel gets 21 gb/s with ddr3 1600. if you take a look at a10 5800k's gpu-z screenshot, you'll notice that that gpu memory bw is rated at 25~ gb/s. this is a screeny from xbitlabs' trinity review pt2 of overclocked trinity:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/picture/?src=/images/cpu/amd-a10-5800k/trinity-4500-1086.png
if the memory bw reading is correct, the igpu can be fed up to a massive 34 gb/s of data. that's higher than the bw reference radeon hd 6670 ddr3 version(@28gb/s) uses. i fear that with sr, the stronger igpu performance might be diminished due to bottleneck.

here's an excerpt from at's latest memory roundup:

We are told that on the Intel side of things, Haswell is DDR3, as will be Broadwell, the Haswell replacement. Reports expect DDR4 to be less than 10% of the market in late 2014 (early adoption in the high end space), but 50%+ across 2015.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/memory-performance-16gb-ddr31333-to-ddr32400-on-ivy-bridge-igp-with-gskill
afaik, haswell xeons will get ddr4 support first and trickle down from there.

.....

But overclocking performance all depends on how much Amd improved piledriver's power consumption and really i see no improvements beyond resonant clock mesh and possibly a newer stepping at Globalfoundries(or take in the fact that they had 32nm for 1 year and there's improvements i'm sure) and people are "claiming" that at higher clocks the advantage of Clock mesh is smaller but its claimed to be 10% reduction in power consumption OR 10% higher clocks which scares me a bit since the 8350 is clocked 11% higher than a 8150. I know a Phenom II x6 can be clocked at 3.9-4.0Ghz on average on air and 4.2Ghz with water or some advanced heat sink and by looking at the numbers Piledriver needs to be clocked a good 400-500mhz higher to beat a Phenom on average so Piledriver would have to be clocked between 4.4-4.5Ghz on air and 4.7Ghz on water.
......
As for Power consumption i don't see anything beyond a minimal improvement when compared to Bulldozer probably 10% or less but who knows i might be very surprised on the 23rd just like others here.

i think that current impressive showing of trinity's power consumption figures is a two tier effort by amd and their motherboard partners. chances are the motherboards contain aggressive power management logic as trinity does (which is a very good thing imo. but for oc'ers, not so much), combined with bios support, trinity shows idle power use lower than ivy bridge (when no discreet card is being used). all that goes out the window though, when trinity is overclocked. i said a while ago that oc efficiency might not change with pd. i haven't yet seen otherwise.

But as techreport showed not too long ago, even top AMD CPU's (BD, and even PII to an extent) runs into latency problems (microstuttering) in SLI/CF configs. Hence why I always felt the hybrid CF approach was a silly one to take, because you run into too many latency problems.

i agree on the latency problem.
hybrid cfx (amd dual gfx) enhances the value attraction the apus have. you have an entry level, dual gfx compatible discreet card, you can extend it's life by putting it in a desktop apu pc. otoh, you have an apu pc, you're looking for ways to get more gfx power but you can't/won't buy a higher end gfx card - in that case, a dual gfx compatible gfx card can get you a modest amount of gfx performance increase. However. like crossfirex, dual gfx depends a Lot on driver support. i've read two reviews with where trinity's dual gfx was tested. the performance was highly inconsistent. where improvement did show, it was big. which means that dual gfx has promise at the entry level. amd would be arrogant to think that they would provide trickled-down driver support for trinity and dual gfx because those are entry level. arrogance has cost them dearly already. and no, having smaller financial resources is not an excuse. it's about efficiently using those resources on products that will earn them money.
p.s. i used 'trickle down' because of blue mountain state...

 

[sarinaide]

If anything is to be taken from the steamroller architecture and its fixes, latency reduction of over 35%, 30% less branch mispredicts, wider execution. At no point did AMD ever say that the focus was not to improve the APU on the X86 and iGPU side.

With Vishera showing enough improvement over Zambezi on the same process and same arch it is not like AMD is going to stay at the same x86 level forever, took intel 3 generations of processors to get to Conroe after PIII, the simple fact is AMD in the same position have to roll through and rid it out until they make the architecture efficient, they committed to that and the 15% performance increase per generation and so far its a good step. Despite all that is bad in AMD there are plenty in the company that actually do good things under pressure and with resource limitations.

As before the A10 @ 4ghz / 7970 delivers same or slightly better FPS than the 8150 at the same clocks running BF3 fraps bench for over 1 hr. What Piledriver achieves over Llano is 2 piledriver modules handsomely beat 4 stars cores in 9/10 metrics, it also crushes it in memory bandwidth, in IGPU its around 20% on average and CPU around 15-20% on average, the arch can work but like above AMD have to ride it out.

 

[jdwii]

3-5% improvement at best. Otherwise higher clock, thats all.

their is benchmarks to state that IPC went up 7% on average which sounds more like it but we will know for sure in just a day or so.

 

[sarinaide]

IPC doesn't have direct performance corrolations, in some instances performance in a app goes up by 20-30% other occassions it is less pronounced, so a rough 7% Instruction per clock increase doesn't equate to 7% performance increase.

 

[amdfangirl]

"Everything is worth what his purchaser will pay for it." ~ Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

Point being, if business could make more profit through lower prices, they would. If business could make more profit through higher prices, they would. Either that, or they are idiots...

Most people don't, it's either iTunes or piracy. Monopoly 😛

It's why we have higher rates of piracy in Australia.

Allow me to make a counter argument: As the price of labor goes up, people spend more money. People spend more money, demand rises. Demand rises, supply drops. To increase supply, business hires more workers.

Interesting...

More money in the hands of the poor tends to be spent.

 

[amdfangirl]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20120921231354_AMD_Sets_the_FX_Vishera_Launch_Date.html

The old rumour that Vishera is launching tomorrow. I'm quite excited - it's a chip I can actually use!

 

[Dangi]

Yep is supposed to come out tomorrow, and then I will grap one to upgrade my old Phenom 9650

If they behave like BD I will get the 8320 since I won't OC it that much, no watercooling for the moment

 

[Cazalan]

Still doesn't justify exactly why we pay so damn much for software and music. More than twice the cost of the US version in some cases. Why is that? Do they have to pay more money to computers when they deliver songs from the US? Why is the Adobe suite double in price?

I'm sure you have other things in AUS that are cheaper, like health care.


With digital downloads you could probably order through a proxy in the USA.

 

[Cazalan]

More money in the hands of the poor tends to be spent.

Yes that is why trickle down economics fails.

Rich people hoard it. Poorer people spend it to increase their quality of life.

 

[de5_Roy]

c.a.l.f. should save up for the upcoming consoles 😛
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/22/amd-opens-up-a-little-during-the-q3-analyst-call/

 

[gamerk316]

At the moment many businesses in the US are simply not hiring people, especially on a full-time basis because it is an election year. Without knowing what policies will be instated by the next administration it is difficult to determine what impact hiring new employees will have on the businesses bottomline (i.e. net income). Nevermind the impact on current employees.

Logical fallacy. You are not seriously going to argue that business stops hiring for a year, every other year, because of elections. Especially when its clear government is going to be split in power (and thus unable to do anything.

Business hires to meet consumer demand, in order to maximize profit. Period. Don't read too much more into things. The interaction of supply, demand, and price ALWAYS runs the business cycle.

Business aren't hiring for one reason and one reason alone: Flat consumer demand. With people saving rather then spending, there simply isn't enough spending left in the middle class to get business hiring enough to really dent UE much. Its enough to keep things from getting worse, but not enough to make things better.

Most people don't, it's either iTunes or piracy. Monopoly 😛

It's why we have higher rates of piracy in Australia.

Hence why the free market fails without government interaction.

Interesting...

More money in the hands of the poor tends to be spent.

Not "tends to", IS. The lowest 30% or so tends to spend twice of what they actually make. Want economic growth? Throw money at the lowest 30%. By contrast, the top 30% spends only a smaller percentage of what they make (mostly because of how MUCH they make), thus you gain a much smaller bang for buck by giving them money.

Hence why "trickle down" fails: The top doesn't spend enough of what you give then to effect economic growth to any significant degree, while also decreasing the relative share of the middle, with eventually decreases economic growth.

I've just described why the past 40 years of economic policy of the US, Clinton aside, has failed.

 

[blackkstar]

Please stop with this minimum wage *** no one cares. This isn't "AMD Piledriver rumors and expert conjecture about ecomics", it's about chips.

First FX 8350 review: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_fx8350_vishera&num=1

 

[de5_Roy]

AMD FX-8350 Cracks 7.443 GHz
http://www.techpowerup.com/174150/AMD-FX-8350-Cracks-7.443-GHz.html
AMD Opteron "Piledriver" Processors Arrive Mid-November
http://www.techpowerup.com/174153/AMD-Opteron-quot-Piledriver-quot-Processors-Arrive-Mid-November.html
i was under the impression that piledriver opterons launched already. guess i was wrong...

 

[ctbaars]

iCare ...

 

[esrever]

Looks like a decent chip for a workstation given its much cheaper than the i7. I doubt gaming performance will be much better than bulldozer.