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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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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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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And I never compared either of those two in my statement about performance characteristics and the trend towards wide and shallow. I favor neither company, whichever one gives me the most for my money at the time of purchase and can do what I require it to do. If you look above I'm even considering going to SB / IB during my next upgrade cycle.

Do you ever understand wide shallow vs narrow deep? It's a concept used when designing uArch's and doing performance profiling. Some design's by their nature allow for many simultaneous yet unrelated tasks to be accomplished yet no single task is accomplished at a high rate of speed. Other design's accomplish a much smaller set of tasks at a much higher rate of speed. Every benchmark done at the consumer level is a narrow deep benchmark. Even when utilizing a highly threaded app your still working with the exact same set of instructions and data, thus it all fits into a smaller cache and has less unpredictable branching. The only way to do a wide shallow benchmark is to simulate many unrelated tasks using different data sets. Industrial benchmarks do the second type, PC gamers do the first. You may have forgotten already but I work with this stuff all day long, usually in the Sparc world which is a very scalable and wide uArch.

I could care less about which company is making what, some products are good (SB / APU) while others suck (P4 / BD). It's all a learning experience and the industry is a better place regardless. You learn more from failure then you do from success. Provided you survive your mistakes.

And WTF about gaming vs "server" market? Two totally different performance profiles. Even if it could magically process x86 instructions, you would never want to game on a SPARC T4, it's designed to run 64 simultaneous threads (8 threads per core). It makes an excellent database / web / app server processor, but an absolutely horrendous gaming CPU.

Everything else you stated was just you trying to hate on a company. BD sucks, we all know it, we all have stated it, why the need to resort to that statement as a defense for everything?
 
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Thats not how it works but good try. You deserve a gold star for effort.
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Don't think MM was calling the BD a four core but stating that it looked like four large cores from die shots. Its the same initial reaction I had, thinking that BD was just four overloaded cores. Then the multiple schedulers per module was shown, if there are multiple front end schedulers then each processing unit can be treated separately.
 
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Don't think MM was calling the BD a four core but stating that it looked like four large cores from die shots. Its the same initial reaction I had, thinking that BD was just four overloaded cores. Then the multiple schedulers per module was shown, if there are multiple front end schedulers then each processing unit can be treated separately.
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Hoorah for people who know stuff! [:mousemonkey:1] It's guys like you that let people like me know that we are not that mad or crazy, well maybe a little bit crazy. [:mousemonkey]
 
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I find this interesting regarding the debate or concerns on the usefulness of more that two or four cpu cores.

http://www.x-plane.com/desktop/system-requirements/

"X-Plane will take advantage of as many cores or distinct processors as you can afford. Having 16 cores split among 4 CPUs is not required by any means, but Version 10 would be able to use every one. No more than 4 GB of RAM is necessary, but the more VRAM you have, the better–X-Plane 10 can easily use 1.5 GB of VRAM at the maximum settings."

I think progress is happening.
 
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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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If those transistor counts are accurate (50% > AMD) then Nvidia will certainly have a more powerful video chip but it's not going to be close to the AMD price.

Those transistors aren't free. It means fewer GPU per wafer and lower yields. That can vary the price a lot.

We won't know until the benchmarks come out, and these paper launches are actually available in retail.
 
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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!
Click to expand...

I agree - 8 weak cores is currently a bit much for most DT use, and while software may catch up in the future you are stuck with the current performance in the here and now, when for the same price you could have gotten something much more appropriate for today's software. Eventually 6 or 8 cores will be more useful no doubt, but hopefully they will be on the Intel strong core model and not BD's weak one.

PS - ignore the 'hater' comment - he calls everybody who disagrees with him a "hater" 😛.. And to think you used to be one of BD's ardent supporters a year ago, until reality set in..
 
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I agree - 8 weak cores is currently a bit much for most DT use, and while software may catch up in the future you are stuck with the current performance in the here and now, when for the same price you could have gotten something much more appropriate for today's software. Eventually 6 or 8 cores will be more useful no doubt, but hopefully they will be on the Intel strong core model and not BD's weak one.

PS - ignore the 'hater' comment - he calls everybody who disagrees with him a "hater" 😛.. And to think you used to be one of BD's ardent supporters a year ago, until reality set in..
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+1 Thank you!
 
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/5627/globalfoundries-granted-independence-acquires-remaining-stake-from-amd

GlobalFoundries Granted Independence, Acquires Remaining Stake from AMD

When AMD originally spun off its foundry business in 2008, the resulting Foundry Company (as it was called back then) was 55.6% ATIC owned and 44.4% AMD owned. Since then the Foundry Company has been rebranded Global Foundries and has been on a march towards independence. Plans for additional fabs and the acquisition of Chartered Semiconductor both strengthened GF as a player in the foundry space. A closer relationship with ARM and its partners has also been a key element of GF's strategy.

AMD has been divesting itself from Global Foundries over the past few years and today announced that it has aquired the remaining shares of the company from AMD (approximately 14% of the company). Global Foundries is now completely independent of AMD, and AMD is now a regular partner/customer of GF's.
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So now AMD has zero control over GF but is free to take their business to any other fabs. After what GF has done to them with the Llano and BD delays, I suspect TSMC will see even more business from AMD.
 
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from gallardo's links:
AMD's 32 nm processor shipments increased by more than 80 percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter and now represents a third of AMD's overall processor mix. In fact, GLOBALFOUNDRIES exited 2011 as the only foundry to have shipped in the hundreds of thousands of 32 nm High K Metal Gate wafers.
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iirc amd's biggest expense last quarter was glofo related, they would have made profit otherwise.
this year amd seems to be in a good position.
btw, i just checked wikipedia's bd page and it says that the new fx cpus - fx 4170, 6200 will have b3 stepping unlike 4100's b2. 8170 will have b3 stepping too. the citation link leads to anandtech's article but that article mentions nothing about new stepping. reliable?
 
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but what alterations / changes are made in the new stepping.?
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I haven't seen any new info on it. The B3 rumors were circling even before launch and it was to address power consumption and yields among other things.

I wouldn't expect much of a change though or they probably would have released chips more than +100Mhz. It could bring the prices down further though.
 
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I find this interesting regarding the debate or concerns on the usefulness of more that two or four cpu cores.

http://www.x-plane.com/desktop/system-requirements/

"X-Plane will take advantage of as many cores or distinct processors as you can afford. Having 16 cores split among 4 CPUs is not required by any means, but Version 10 would be able to use every one. No more than 4 GB of RAM is necessary, but the more VRAM you have, the better–X-Plane 10 can easily use 1.5 GB of VRAM at the maximum settings."

I think progress is happening.
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As I said, SOME applications can scale really well; anything involving fully-dynamic physics, for instance. Even then, you are still hit by diminishing returns...
 
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If those transistor counts are accurate (50% > AMD) then Nvidia will certainly have a more powerful video chip but it's not going to be close to the AMD price.

Those transistors aren't free. It means fewer GPU per wafer and lower yields. That can vary the price a lot.

We won't know until the benchmarks come out, and these paper launches are actually available in retail.
Click to expand...

Look at what I spy there
nvidia_geforce_gk104_1.jpg


Interesting odd and very strange 14 pin power connector at the end there.
 
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This thread is supposed to be about Piledriver. Seems like just about everything but Piledriver is being disscused.. PUT GPU stuff in a gpu section, put intel in intel section, even the 7970 stuff doesnt have anything at all to do with Piledriver so don't write about it here. This thread is derailed... Get it back on track. (Something AMD needs to do with its execution of its roadmaps as well!!)
 
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This thread is supposed to be about Piledriver. Seems like just about everything but Piledriver is being disscused.. PUT GPU stuff in a gpu section, put intel in intel section, even the 7970 stuff doesnt have anything at all to do with Piledriver so don't write about it here. This thread is derailed... Get it back on track. (Something AMD needs to do with its execution of its roadmaps as well!!)
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When there isn't updated news on the topic at hand, people like to talk about things semi related to the topic.
 
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This thread is supposed to be about Piledriver. Seems like just about everything but Piledriver is being disscused.. PUT GPU stuff in a gpu section, put intel in intel section, even the 7970 stuff doesnt have anything at all to do with Piledriver so don't write about it here. This thread is derailed... Get it back on track. (Something AMD needs to do with its execution of its roadmaps as well!!)
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I agree some what but all of these things gives us a clue about AMD's future! Such as Amd having no power over GF can mess up trinity or piledriver a bit! Intel is extremely important as its Amd's competition meaning that should give us a clue about pricing, And the Radeon video cards are important as it hints about Amd's marketing/Pricing department and might give us a clue about the company's future pricing on newer products. Amd is making more and more risks these risks can even delay PD so most(70%) of what this thread is about is important!


And as always if you don't like it don't read it!
 
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