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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Was playing C&C on DOS and Win 95 way back in the day over 28.8K modems. Loved Westwood. Then they got bought out by EA and now C&C is dead, well at least the original series.
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We used to get together and do LAN parties, mostly playing Falcon 3, but sometimes we did C&C. At times it seemed though we spent more time running COMCHECK (a network diagnostic program) than anything else. Coax cables from machine to machine for LAN hookup, oh boy. It was better when we finally got an affordable router, but there still always seemed to be some machine that was misbehaving.
 
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The thing with making stronger single cores is it gets a point where its really diminishing as well. Engineers can spend effort on optimizing micro ops and branch prediction and making a better single threaded CPU or they can stick more cores in and call it done. Of course there is balancing but the well optimized single core cpu will never be as fast as a decently well optimized 2 core cpu when software can use the 2 cores.

CPU has gotten to the point where single threaded performance isn't too useful outside of gaming. Very little software that is single threaded is used professionally that requires extremely powerful cpus. Everyday single threaded tasks are all done very adequately with just about any above minimal CPU. More cores are also not helpful to most people.

So most people would be good with any cpu. Professionals can have multicored setups where software can be highly parallel. And its really only gamers who really need single threaded performance on a few cores.

Once transactional memory gets here, expect multithreading to increase greatly. I would expect games to use many more cores as that becomes the standard. Could be a while tho.
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What some of the posters here don't realize (or maybe they do and just pretend not to) is that the high end enthusiast gamer crowd makes up a tiny fraction of the "PC" market. The majority is the OEM's for both business and home computing, after that is the mobile / portable computing market. Both of those segments only care about running multiple things at once, typically web + OA (Office Automation) + media. Thus a wide shallow performance characteristic is preferred over a narrow deep one. AMD attempted to hit that but failed miserably, if BD was both cheaper and consumed significantly less power then it would of fit perfectly even with its screwed up internals. The high end enthusiasts would still be crying for blood, but the OEM's would be happy. PC's have been leaning towards a smaller and lighter profile for almost two decades, high end enthusiasts / PC gamers will still prefer the more powerful machines, but the overall market will always trend towards the smaller and lighter ones.

So while some people here scream that single thread performance is all that matters, the market disagrees. We are now in the era of four core computing, not too long ago the idea of two CPU's inside a single machine was for super expensive "workstation / servers" only. In the next years we'll move on to eight core computing and people will look back at today as the "stone age". If there's anything history teaches us it's that progress always moves forward, even stupid people can only hold you back for so long.
 
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This is prolly the wrong place to ask, but seeing as there are guys here who are in the know with current Intel boards.

Here's my situation, I'm running a WC loop through my CPU and both GPU's. Soon it will be time for me to drain the water, clean the loop and change out the coolant (going with pure medical water and a silver kill coil instead of treated coolant). Due to the difficulty and work involved I try to minimize the number of times I do this every year. Which means my upgrade cycles are typically locked into when I clean my loops. I'm using a 990FX board (Sabertooth) and looking for an Intel SB board with similar features. I might be going with a I5-2500K when the time comes. I looked but the only boards I see that support 2x16x are for LGA2011 and umm no. Does anyone know a board with comparable features to the one above but that also supports SLI X16x? Wasn't their some sort of bridge chip put out that can turn the 1x16 into a 2x16 for video cards?
 
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Yep, I got a few favorites on my list through but they are old enough for most now days to have never knew they existed. I miss the Drakan series and shame after Sony had bought the rights they pretty much made sure that it never seen the light of day.

Anyone still remember Westwood and their games?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acBnLMRIAD0
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Heh, I used to play the Eye of the Beholder series 5 years before that 😛..

Yeah Westwood did some good work, although EOB3 got panned a lot..
 
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I'm quoting this from another site because I feel the same...

" Considering the 7970 goes for about $560 on average, and both higher end GTX cards are suppose to trump it AMD has some serious price for performance issues. The 7000 series is going to have to drop in price quite drastically and quite quickly to simply have a chance to compete. I'd expect the 7970 to drop to $449-$469 if AMD doesn't want to be obliterated in the consumer market. Even then Nvidia driver performance is usually much better optimized for more games, then its ATI counterparts (Doesn't mean ATI doesn't optimize, just seems all the software guru's are in the nvidia camp.). So in consumer use cases those performance numbers might actually be higher then listed.

Now looking at the GTX680 and that 45% increase over the 7970 just really makes me wonder what the hell is going on over at AMD. Looking at all this i don't even know if i want to purchase a discounted 7970 at $450, i'd feel like am buying last generation tech. I usually buy a new card every 2ish years, and this time around it looks like the GTX 670 is my likely choice. Unless there's some kind of crazy deal on the 7970 that places it below the $449 mark. "

I need to take that over to the GPU / Kepler thread but since we were briefly on the topic..
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Hmm, wonder how many megawatts of a PSU I'd need to buy to run a 680 or 690 😀..

Hopefully these will be out sometime in May, which is when I'm planning on my IB build anyway.

I actually tried to buy three of those 24" Dell IPS 16x10 aspect ratio monitors when THG had the coupon code link, but it didn't work for me. Currently the price is $369 each; the sale had them at $279 apiece IIRC.
 
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This is prolly the wrong place to ask, but seeing as there are guys here who are in the know with current Intel boards.

Here's my situation, I'm running a WC loop through my CPU and both GPU's. Soon it will be time for me to drain the water, clean the loop and change out the coolant (going with pure medical water and a silver kill coil instead of treated coolant). Due to the difficulty and work involved I try to minimize the number of times I do this every year. Which means my upgrade cycles are typically locked into when I clean my loops. I'm using a 990FX board (Sabertooth) and looking for an Intel SB board with similar features. I might be going with a I5-2500K when the time comes. I looked but the only boards I see that support 2x16x are for LGA2011 and umm no. Does anyone know a board with comparable features to the one above but that also supports SLI X16x? Wasn't their some sort of bridge chip put out that can turn the 1x16 into a 2x16 for video cards?
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You'd probably want to go Ivy Bridge on a Z77 board: http://news.softpedia.com/news/MSI-Z77A-GD65-Intel-Ivy-Bridge-Motherboard-Stars-in-Picture-Preview-256313.shtml

The board’s expansion features include three PCI Express x16 slots (two of these are Gen 3.0 compliant), four PCIe x1 slots, as well as eight SATA ports.

Four of these support SATA 6Gbps transfer speeds, two driven by the Intel Z77 chipset, while the other two are controlled by a third-party chip, according to the specs sheet published by eTeknix.

As far as the PCIe x16 slots are concerned, only the first of these can work at full x16 speeds, as the second one has only eight PCIe lanes routed to it. These are however compatible with both CrossFireX and SLI setups.
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Having to clean the WC system and worry about leaks is the main reason I'm not interested in it. Don't see a whole lot advantage over a good to top-end air solution, and for the amount of tinkering required, might as well consider DIY phase-change cooling with a cheap window air conditioner unit 😛.
 
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My main gaming PC is.

Sabertooth 990FX
AMD 970 BE clocked at 4.2Ghz (got to 4.4 stable but didn't like running it much over the 1.5 voltage limit)
2 x EVGA Hydro 580's http://www.evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=015-p3-1589-ar&family=geforce%20500%20series%20family&sw
16GB DDR3-1600 (4x4GB) Corsair Memory.

256GB Samsung 830 SSD
2x 320GB 7200RPM 32MB HDDs (RAID0, Storage Drive)

Acer GD235HZ 1920x1080 @120hz http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009222

The WC loop covers both GPU's and the CPU. I'm using a 360mm RAD on the top of a Corsair 800D case.

I usually game in 3D (thus the two hydros) at 1080p and the OC'd 970 is fine for that. Some games and programs I run don't handle 3D so well and that is when I start to bottle neck (program's process is locked at 25%). Also my 970BE was purchased as a temporary measure to get me off a AM2 platform (940BE) while I wait and see how BD and IB turn out. I went with AMD because the 990FX is such a nice platform.

So basically I'm looking at ~$600 for the NF200 motherboard coupled with an I5-2500K. I wish I could use a 990FX board (or equivalent) with an I5, ohh well. Looks like I'm stuck waiting on PD / IB before my next refit. I'll probably just disassemble the kit and wash everything then reassemble. Wait 6~8 months (next cleaning due) before changing anything. Cleaning is only a PITA if your using dye / prepared coolant, which I was foolish enough to use. Rapid heating / cooling can cause the dye to dissociate from the coolant and it can gum up your blocks. That's why I'm going with medical water (pure water) and a 99.99% silver kill coil (antibacterial agent).

Also you go WC for the better OC ability and the sound reduction. A pair of 580's will sound ridiculously loud once they get loaded, my old 285's used to drive me crazy and thus why I went with WC this time around. Ambient room temperature and radiator surface area will determine your cooling capacity.
 
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That's what i was trying to say, The Radeon 7970 is only 20-30% faster then the 580 their is no way nvidia can't beat that, and now i here Amd is having issues making the 7990 because of the cooler! The 7970 should cost 499.99$ while the 7950 should cost 399.99$, and the 7750 is ok for the money but the 7770 should cost 129.99$. It's almost like Amd wants to go bankrupt. I'm telling you guys when Nvidia does finely get their cards out they are going to beat Amd on price/performance as well as overall performance. Its going to be the 8800gtx all over again, Lets hope amd does not take 3 years to catch up!


http://wccftech.com/amd-sea-island-tenerife-gpu-leaked-features-enhanced-gcn-architecture-450-tflops-raw-processing-power/

 
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What some of the posters here don't realize (or maybe they do and just pretend not to) is that the high end enthusiast gamer crowd makes up a tiny fraction of the "PC" market. The majority is the OEM's for both business and home computing, after that is the mobile / portable computing market. Both of those segments only care about running multiple things at once, typically web + OA (Office Automation) + media. Thus a wide shallow performance characteristic is preferred over a narrow deep one. AMD attempted to hit that but failed miserably, if BD was both cheaper and consumed significantly less power then it would of fit perfectly even with its screwed up internals. The high end enthusiasts would still be crying for blood, but the OEM's would be happy. PC's have been leaning towards a smaller and lighter profile for almost two decades, high end enthusiasts / PC gamers will still prefer the more powerful machines, but the overall market will always trend towards the smaller and lighter ones.

So while some people here scream that single thread performance is all that matters, the market disagrees. We are now in the era of four core computing, not too long ago the idea of two CPU's inside a single machine was for super expensive "workstation / servers" only. In the next years we'll move on to eight core computing and people will look back at today as the "stone age". If there's anything history teaches us it's that progress always moves forward, even stupid people can only hold you back for so long.
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??? Funny Amd is giving us 8 cores for 250$ while Intel is giving us 4 cores and they are also beating the chip 80% of the time. Amd and some amd fans need to learn that when we say Single threading we just don't mean 1 core! It's not like Intel is giving us a 1 core processor for 250$!

 
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??? Funny Amd is giving us 8 cores for 250$ while Intel is giving us 4 cores and they are also beating the chip 80% of the time. Amd and some amd fans need to learn that when we say Single threading we just don't mean 1 core! It's not like Intel is giving us a 1 core processor for 250$!
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Isn't it funny how fanboyism can make smart people put forth dumb arguments?

A nice summary there.
 
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That's what i was trying to say, The Radeon 7970 is only 20-30% faster then the 580 their is no way nvidia can't beat that, and now i here Amd is having issues making the 7990 because of the cooler! The 7970 should cost 499.99$ while the 7950 should cost 399.99$, and the 7750 is ok for the money but the 7770 should cost 129.99$. It's almost like Amd wants to go bankrupt. I'm telling you guys when Nvidia does finely get their cards out they are going to beat Amd on price/performance as well as overall performance. Its going to be the 8800gtx all over again, Lets hope amd does not take 3 years to catch up!


http://wccftech.com/amd-sea-island-tenerife-gpu-leaked-features-enhanced-gcn-architecture-450-tflops-raw-processing-power/
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whens that going to happen and what is the price of the AMD cards when that happens? How can nvidia beat AMD in price/performance if AMD can just lower the price when yields go up?

wcctech and OBR are the most useless tech sites ever. the 7970 doesn't draw much more power than the 6970 and draws less power than the 570 so how is cooling the 7990 going to be hard when they did it with the 6990?
 
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??? Funny Amd is giving us 8 cores for 250$ while Intel is giving us 4 cores and they are also beating the chip 80% of the time. Amd and some amd fans need to learn that when we say Single threading we just don't mean 1 core! It's not like Intel is giving us a 1 core processor for 250$!
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Stickman argument. I never mentioned either company favorably in my comment, and my only AMD reference was that it failed to produce and missed it's market. Your attempting to twist my argument out of context, it's very childish of you.

My comment was in reference to those who believe software will not scale past what we're at now and that what we have now is all we'll need core wise. I was demonstrating that in the past we were at single, then two and now four processing units (aka cores). In the future we'll move to eight and possibly sixteen, by then we will have most likely switched over to heterogeneous computing or some other definition and no longer divide our processing requirements by "cores".

I also stated that the high end gaming segment is very small, a tiny fraction of the much larger business world and low end desktop / mobile world. It is the business, low end consumer desktop and mobile markets that drive technology not high end gaming enthusiasts. Its like telling a sixteen year old girl she's not the center of the universe.

Now take your Intel vs AMD hating and go away.
 
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whens that going to happen and what is the price of the AMD cards when that happens? How can nvidia beat AMD in price/performance if AMD can just lower the price when yields go up?

wcctech and OBR are the most useless tech sites ever. the 7970 doesn't draw much more power than the 6970 and draws less power than the 570 so how is cooling the 7990 going to be hard when they did it with the 6990?
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I don't understand the 7990 issue(fake?) either but i doubt amd is really going to lower prices enough. That's like saying amd is going to lower prices on the 8150 when the 2500K beats it 80% of the time!
 
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Stickman argument. I never mentioned either company favorably in my comment, and my only AMD reference was that it failed to produce and missed it's market. Your attempting to twist my argument out of context, it's very childish of you.

My comment was in reference to those who believe software will not scale past what we're at now and that what we have now is all we'll need core wise. I was demonstrating that in the past we were at single, then two and now four processing units (aka cores). In the future we'll move to eight and possibly sixteen, by then we will have most likely switched over to heterogeneous computing or some other definition and no longer divide our processing requirements by "cores".

I also stated that the high end gaming segment is very small, a tiny fraction of the much larger business world and low end desktop / mobile world. It is the business, low end consumer desktop and mobile markets that drive technology not high end gaming enthusiasts. Its like telling a sixteen year old girl she's not the center of the universe.

Now take your Intel vs AMD hating and go away.
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Once again as long as Amd is pricing their products At Intel their not out of the game! The High-end market may not be big but the server market is if you can't trust Amd in your gaming machine your going to trust them to run your server at Microsoft? I always thought software well continue to use more cores. But not as soon as some people think even when all 8 cores are used on the 8150 it still loses to the 2600K and just barley wins when compared to the 2500K. But when 80+% of all programs don't use 8 cores and probably wont for another 4 years the 8150 is slower then the 2500k while costing more and the 8120 is just sad. I'm not trying to cause a "Hating" but its the truth!
 
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