AMD Roadmap Hints At Three GPU Launches By 2018

[uglyduckling81]

Zen coming in October

If writing on the wall is accurate.

The next two questions are: how much of that "better than 40% IPC improvement" will really be delivered and how much of a premium will AMD charge assuming they do deliver on that "40+%" claim.

The last time AMD thought they had one-upped Intel with the FX-9570, they initially priced their space heater chip right out of the market. Will AMD price their 8C16T CPUs near i5k level ($250), i7k level ($350) or i7k/x level ($400-1000)?

If they have any brains they will price their chips as cheap as possible to try and get some market share back. Having such a pitiful market share means no matter how good their chips are they won't sell many comparatively (to Intel) speaking. Drastic action is needed. If they could get their best CPU to match an i5 6600k and sold it for $200 you might see a few people start to buy them. Without a difference like that though only the true loyalist will bother with them.

 

[urishima]

The way Microsoft is aggressively pushing Windows 10 via questionable methods, I am now far more worried about receiving malware directly from Microsoft through Windows Update than websites and other sources. I got tired of uninstalling Microsoft's nagware every time Microsoft decides to re-classify updates and reset the 'hide' setting on unwanted items so I disabled Windows Update.

Same here, only manual Updates from here on out.

I am currently looking to set up a Linux machine for everyday use, my gaming System will then be used for gaming ONLY (inevitably with Win 10 at some point). No browsing, no online-banking, etc.

At this point, I wouldn't trust Microsoft as far as I could toss Steve Ballmer. I mean, I am fairly strong, but that guy is quite heavy.

And I am pretty sure that I am not alone out there, thinking that. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Valve try to push SteamOS harder in the near future, to capitalize on Microsoft pissing so many people off. Not that I trust Valve not to fuck it up in some way as well, but it's the lesser evil of the two.
Plus, Linux in general would probably benefit from that, so at some point you may be able to comfortably game under any Linux distribution.

 

[Guest]

My bet is on NVIDIA this time around as well.

 

[Guest]

Don't get me wrong i got Crossfire R9 390x only because of price, otherwise it would be SLI GTX 980ti.

 

[ern88]

Nvidia better address the DX12 performance fiasco with Pascal. Only thing that sucks is that Maxwell owners will suffer when DX12 becomes mainstream. I just can't wait for the new cards to come out. I have cash right now. But I know if I buy a new card now I will kick my ass for not waiting when Polaris /Pascal hit the market.

 

[10tacle]

Nvidia better address the DX12 performance fiasco with Pascal.

I must have missed something. What DX12 performance fiasco? Are you referring to the AMD-biased DX12 benchmark in Ashes of the Singularity that Nvidia cards were put up on over a half a year ago? Big deal.

There are still people complaining that Project Cars runs better on Nvidia GPUs than AMD GPUs. You've got Nvidia's Hairworks and AMD users claiming that it affects their Witcher 3 performance. AMD GPUs don't do high tesselation factors as good as Nvidia GPUs. Right now the claim with Nvidia being behind AMD in Ashes is that Nvidia GPUs aren't as good at Asynchronous computing.

We have long been seeing AMD cards perform better than Nvidia cards in some games, and vice versa. I'll wait until official DX12 games and Pascal & Polaris are released before making any judgment based on non-official "findings."

 

[alidan]

"how may times have we had to hear all that and nothing to show ?? wheres zen that's been talked up seems like 5 years now ?? come on"

Hrm, i dont think zen has been mentioned for anything close to 5 years, i want to guess about 2 years, but im not sure if its even been that long. The wiki page for zen was created in may of 2015, so thats not even a year ago.

Maybe it just seems like 5+ years because the cpu industry has been so boring for the last 5+ years. Not just amd, but intel as well, nothing exciting for quite some time now.

Same with the gpu industry for the last 3 years or so. Sure nvidia had a nice reduction in power usage with their last set of gpus, but performance wise, being stuck on 28nm for both amd/nvidia has sucked big time. Again the graphics industry has been pretty darn boring the last couple years as well for that reason.

Process node issues as of late have just been so depressing. Its not like the good old days where chips were twice as fast every year or every other year at most. I miss those days!

the architecture was talked about from before (i think it was after the third iteration of bulldozer when we found out there was no fixing it) we knew that one dev went back to amd, the name of the arcetecture was something that we only got more recently though

Its not like the good old days where chips were twice as fast every year or every other year at most. I miss those days!

It might be boring from the hardware enthusiasts' point of view but for the mainstream, it means only having to worry about CPU upgrades every 5-10 years instead of every 3-4. I used to have an itch to upgrade two or three years after building myself a new PC and personally, I am happy that I can now get a more reasonable amount of use out of my PCs before I need to make room in my budget for upgrades. At the rate Intel CPUs have been improving, my i5 will last me 5-7 years instead of 3-4 for my previous PCs: already three and a half years old and there is nothing in the foreseeable future that seems worth upgrading to.

Edit: and when I look at how Intel is jacking up prices on new i3/i5/i7, I am even more glad that I won't need to pay the ticket price again any time soon.

once cpus went quad core there was really no reason to upgrade for normal peoples uses, and once sandybridge came out there was no real reason to upgrade for gamers too. hell, almost any quad core can push games to 60fps, and if you are on a budget that doesn't allow for upgrades every 4~ years, you are definitely budget.

Believe me, once we start hitting limits in silicon around 2020 when the node gets too small, things will move really slow in the PC world of progress.

once we hit the limit we will likely go back several nm node types with something else, likely something that allows for stupidly large clock rates. but we will get maybe 2-3 architectures at the limits of silicon

Zen coming in October

If writing on the wall is accurate.

The next two questions are: how much of that "better than 40% IPC improvement" will really be delivered and how much of a premium will AMD charge assuming they do deliver on that "40+%" claim.

The last time AMD thought they had one-upped Intel with the FX-9570, they initially priced their space heater chip right out of the market. Will AMD price their 8C16T CPUs near i5k level ($250), i7k level ($350) or i7k/x level ($400-1000)?

first, 40% should have put it at sandybridge, so bare minimum you got an 8 core 16 thread sandybridge level cpu, with rumors putting it a hair short of skylake.

second, what amd wants to price it at is mainstream, that 8 core chip will take up half the die area as a 8350 if i remember right, so bare minimum they could charge would be 100-150, but whats more likely is the 300-400 range, because if its going to crap on intel hard, why not force intel to readjust its entire line a little bit at a time.

third, that 9000 line was oem only, and the oems charged 1000$ for it, i don't know what the msrp for it ever was when it came out, but that 1000$ was oem.

 

[kcarbotte]

"how may times have we had to hear all that and nothing to show ?? wheres zen that's been talked up seems like 5 years now ?? come on"

Hrm, i dont think zen has been mentioned for anything close to 5 years, i want to guess about 2 years, but im not sure if its even been that long. The wiki page for zen was created in may of 2015, so thats not even a year ago.

Maybe it just seems like 5+ years because the cpu industry has been so boring for the last 5+ years. Not just amd, but intel as well, nothing exciting for quite some time now.

Same with the gpu industry for the last 3 years or so. Sure nvidia had a nice reduction in power usage with their last set of gpus, but performance wise, being stuck on 28nm for both amd/nvidia has sucked big time. Again the graphics industry has been pretty darn boring the last couple years as well for that reason.

Process node issues as of late have just been so depressing. Its not like the good old days where chips were twice as fast every year or every other year at most. I miss those days!

the architecture was talked about from before (i think it was after the third iteration of bulldozer when we found out there was no fixing it) we knew that one dev went back to amd, the name of the arcetecture was something that we only got more recently though

Its not like the good old days where chips were twice as fast every year or every other year at most. I miss those days!

It might be boring from the hardware enthusiasts' point of view but for the mainstream, it means only having to worry about CPU upgrades every 5-10 years instead of every 3-4. I used to have an itch to upgrade two or three years after building myself a new PC and personally, I am happy that I can now get a more reasonable amount of use out of my PCs before I need to make room in my budget for upgrades. At the rate Intel CPUs have been improving, my i5 will last me 5-7 years instead of 3-4 for my previous PCs: already three and a half years old and there is nothing in the foreseeable future that seems worth upgrading to.

Edit: and when I look at how Intel is jacking up prices on new i3/i5/i7, I am even more glad that I won't need to pay the ticket price again any time soon.

once cpus went quad core there was really no reason to upgrade for normal peoples uses, and once sandybridge came out there was no real reason to upgrade for gamers too. hell, almost any quad core can push games to 60fps, and if you are on a budget that doesn't allow for upgrades every 4~ years, you are definitely budget.

Believe me, once we start hitting limits in silicon around 2020 when the node gets too small, things will move really slow in the PC world of progress.

once we hit the limit we will likely go back several nm node types with something else, likely something that allows for stupidly large clock rates. but we will get maybe 2-3 architectures at the limits of silicon

Zen coming in October

If writing on the wall is accurate.

The next two questions are: how much of that "better than 40% IPC improvement" will really be delivered and how much of a premium will AMD charge assuming they do deliver on that "40+%" claim.

The last time AMD thought they had one-upped Intel with the FX-9570, they initially priced their space heater chip right out of the market. Will AMD price their 8C16T CPUs near i5k level ($250), i7k level ($350) or i7k/x level ($400-1000)?

first, 40% should have put it at sandybridge, so bare minimum you got an 8 core 16 thread sandybridge level cpu, with rumors putting it a hair short of skylake.

second, what amd wants to price it at is mainstream, that 8 core chip will take up half the die area as a 8350 if i remember right, so bare minimum they could charge would be 100-150, but whats more likely is the 300-400 range, because if its going to crap on intel hard, why not force intel to readjust its entire line a little bit at a time.

third, that 9000 line was oem only, and the oems charged 1000$ for it, i don't know what the msrp for it ever was when it came out, but that 1000$ was oem.

Who said Zen is targeting mainstream?
The last thing I heard directly from AMD was that they will finally have a CPU that keeps up with Intel's best.
Nothing about that tells me mainstream.
Will there be mainstream chips? I'm sure there will be, but AMD knows it needs to come out strong with the next CPU.

 

[alidan]

"how may times have we had to hear all that and nothing to show ?? wheres zen that's been talked up seems like 5 years now ?? come on"

Hrm, i dont think zen has been mentioned for anything close to 5 years, i want to guess about 2 years, but im not sure if its even been that long. The wiki page for zen was created in may of 2015, so thats not even a year ago.

Maybe it just seems like 5+ years because the cpu industry has been so boring for the last 5+ years. Not just amd, but intel as well, nothing exciting for quite some time now.

Same with the gpu industry for the last 3 years or so. Sure nvidia had a nice reduction in power usage with their last set of gpus, but performance wise, being stuck on 28nm for both amd/nvidia has sucked big time. Again the graphics industry has been pretty darn boring the last couple years as well for that reason.

Process node issues as of late have just been so depressing. Its not like the good old days where chips were twice as fast every year or every other year at most. I miss those days!

the architecture was talked about from before (i think it was after the third iteration of bulldozer when we found out there was no fixing it) we knew that one dev went back to amd, the name of the arcetecture was something that we only got more recently though

Its not like the good old days where chips were twice as fast every year or every other year at most. I miss those days!

It might be boring from the hardware enthusiasts' point of view but for the mainstream, it means only having to worry about CPU upgrades every 5-10 years instead of every 3-4. I used to have an itch to upgrade two or three years after building myself a new PC and personally, I am happy that I can now get a more reasonable amount of use out of my PCs before I need to make room in my budget for upgrades. At the rate Intel CPUs have been improving, my i5 will last me 5-7 years instead of 3-4 for my previous PCs: already three and a half years old and there is nothing in the foreseeable future that seems worth upgrading to.

Edit: and when I look at how Intel is jacking up prices on new i3/i5/i7, I am even more glad that I won't need to pay the ticket price again any time soon.

once cpus went quad core there was really no reason to upgrade for normal peoples uses, and once sandybridge came out there was no real reason to upgrade for gamers too. hell, almost any quad core can push games to 60fps, and if you are on a budget that doesn't allow for upgrades every 4~ years, you are definitely budget.

Believe me, once we start hitting limits in silicon around 2020 when the node gets too small, things will move really slow in the PC world of progress.

once we hit the limit we will likely go back several nm node types with something else, likely something that allows for stupidly large clock rates. but we will get maybe 2-3 architectures at the limits of silicon

Zen coming in October

If writing on the wall is accurate.

The next two questions are: how much of that "better than 40% IPC improvement" will really be delivered and how much of a premium will AMD charge assuming they do deliver on that "40+%" claim.

The last time AMD thought they had one-upped Intel with the FX-9570, they initially priced their space heater chip right out of the market. Will AMD price their 8C16T CPUs near i5k level ($250), i7k level ($350) or i7k/x level ($400-1000)?

first, 40% should have put it at sandybridge, so bare minimum you got an 8 core 16 thread sandybridge level cpu, with rumors putting it a hair short of skylake.

second, what amd wants to price it at is mainstream, that 8 core chip will take up half the die area as a 8350 if i remember right, so bare minimum they could charge would be 100-150, but whats more likely is the 300-400 range, because if its going to crap on intel hard, why not force intel to readjust its entire line a little bit at a time.

third, that 9000 line was oem only, and the oems charged 1000$ for it, i don't know what the msrp for it ever was when it came out, but that 1000$ was oem.

Who said Zen is targeting mainstream?
The last thing I heard directly from AMD was that they will finally have a CPU that keeps up with Intel's best.
Nothing about that tells me mainstream.
Will there be mainstream chips? I'm sure there will be, but AMD knows it needs to come out strong with the next CPU.

the idea with the zen is to go mainstream prices, die wise its about the same size as an i7, there are 4 cpus that are coming out, 1 32 core which is 2 16 core cpus on one socket, this also told us that there was a 16 core cpu coming, the 8 core that is the one we know most about, and the 4 core apu, amd is aiming for gains in the server space, while not expecting anything out of the home.

due to them replacing the 8350 sku with the zen, the thought was they are going to price it the same way, the rumors we hear from "internal sources" so take this as a lie, also tell the 300-400$ price range.

personally if i was in charge of pricing, i would be putting both middle fingers up in intel's direction for their monopoly practice that screwed me over the last time, and i would price my hardware VERY low, still pulling more profit out of it then what im getting now, but i would want to completely end intel's massive profit margin per cpu. id largely do the same for the server market too, price my cpus lower than intel's equivalent by a sizeable margin.

lets also look at it this way, amd has such an unknown/bad name due to fanboys on the other side constantly lying, almost no brand recognition, and more recently, people are seriously wondering if they will be around in a few years, if they priced it marginally close to what intel charges, that would just shoot them in the foot, "you don't want to be seen as the cheap brand" is what amd said a while back, and after the fury and its price point coming in where it did (remember before the 980ti came and stole the furys thunder, it was fury pitted against titan x, and preformance wise could justifiably charge 800-900$ if it was just scaled on performance, but it didnt) there is a good reason to believe amd is going to drive 8 core to mainstream.

 

[InvalidError]

personally if i was in charge of pricing, i would be putting both middle fingers up in intel's direction for their monopoly practice that screwed me over the last time, and i would price my hardware VERY low, still pulling more profit out of it then what im getting now

AMD's CPU division is making losses, not profits, so AMD needs to considerably increase their prices just to break even. With billions of dollars worth of debt due over the next few years, AMD needs to drastically improve their finances while they can or the next rounds of loan negotiation is going to be painful.

To have a chance of getting out of their spiral toward bankruptcy, AMD cannot afford to price their chips a whole lot lower than similar performing Intel parts. They only need to price their chips low enough to steal a significant volume of sales from Intel.

 

[Poor bill]

Subject to change anyone?