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HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Alereon posted:

AMD is actually working pretty closely with ARM. While I don't think they'll make ARM CPUs, there's been talk that they'll produce a licensable GPU block for ARM CPUs, much like PowerVR.

Such as Imageon, which was sold to Qualcomm and became Adreno?

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Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

HalloKitty posted:

Such as Imageon, which was sold to Qualcomm and became Adreno?
Imageon was a media processor SoC, which is exactly the business they don't want to be in right now. Here's an article from SemiAccurate which includes a lot of links to articles about ARM's participation in the AMD Fusion Developer's Summit last summer, which includes ARM pushing heterogenous computing. There's nothing concrete here, but designing an embedded GPU core could be a way for AMD to get back in the mobile game without requiring them to have a lot of expertise in the SoC space, especially if their GPU products offered a compelling OpenCL compute performance advantage over competitors. There may be room here, as nVidia is still not offering unified shader architecture products and PowerVR only makes GPUs that use Tile-Based Rendering, which is good for efficiency but imposes a low performance ceiling. No one really seems to be adopting the ARM Mali either, though this could all shake up when we finally see the next generation of mobile GPUs.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Bulldozer Opterons were launched today, we're waiting for reviews to get written. Basically, AMD will deliver a 16-core Interlagos Opteron at the same clockspeed and TDP that you would have gotten a 12-core Magny-Cours Opteron at. A guy on the Real World Tech forums ran some numbers, the new Opterons are about 7-15% slower per-core at the same TDP, but 5-29% faster on a per-socket basis at the same TDP. A welcome improvement compared to their old Opterons, but not really enough to start to catch with Xeons, especially since Xeons already had the per-core performance crown.

Fuzzy Mammal
Aug 15, 2001

Lipstick Apathy
Is there any news on the 28nm gpu lineup? Southern Islands is the chip family codename right? I haven't heard anything on them in months and thought they were supposed to be out by now? Granted it feels like the next round of nvidia boards are in the same boat.

Longinus00
Dec 29, 2005
Ur-Quan

Fuzzy Mammal posted:

Is there any news on the 28nm gpu lineup? Southern Islands is the chip family codename right? I haven't heard anything on them in months and thought they were supposed to be out by now? Granted it feels like the next round of nvidia boards are in the same boat.

I bet that if anything's holding them up it's yields on the new 28nm process.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Anandtech's Bulldozer for Servers: Testing AMD's "Interlagos" Opteron 6200 Series review is out.

Fuzzy Mammal posted:

Is there any news on the 28nm gpu lineup? Southern Islands is the chip family codename right? I haven't heard anything on them in months and thought they were supposed to be out by now? Granted it feels like the next round of nvidia boards are in the same boat.
The 7800-series (and lower chips presumably) slipped from September 2011 to "some time before the end of the year," with volume in early 2012 (we might not see any at all until next year). The 7900-series will probably be a bit after that.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

If I had to guess, we'll see Southern Islands right before CES.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

What an article title from Ars:

AMD's Bulldozer server benchmarks are here, and they're a catastrophe

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
I'm no AMD fanboy (OP of the Sandy Bridge thread checking in), but that analysis seems really bad. Frankly, Ars Technica is a lifestyle blog, they gave up tech years ago and this article shows they don't have the expertise to draw meaningful conclusions. They're analyzing Bulldozer in terms of per-core, per-clock performance, when it needs to be analyzed in terms of per-socket performance. They're looking at benchmarks from bizarrely configured multi-million dollar server installations, when as Anandtech points out the actual real servers that people would buy give AMD a HUGE price advantage, especially when large amounts of RAM are involved. They also called out Bulldozer for poor power efficiency in virtualized applications, when Anandtech showed that this was an ESX issue. It's not even anything complicated like thread scheduling, just that enhanced C-states are disabled by default. This is something that's pretty easily fixable, either yourself or through an ESX update.

Really, Bulldozer for servers isn't the hit out of the park that people were hoping for, but it IS a tangible incremental improvement over Magny-Cours at the applications that people buy AMD processors for, which are virtualization farms and other situations where you want to cram as many cores and/or RAM into a given power/money/space budget as possible, and don't really care about per-thread performance. It doesn't really change the landscape much, except for the addition of encryption/decryption acceleration.

Mr Chips
Jun 27, 2007
Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?
Maybe I'm not an excitable tech site writer looking for page hits, but 'marginally quicker in some things, a bit slower in others and a bit more power hungry for a given price point' isn't what I'd call a 'catastrophe'.

freeforumuser
Aug 11, 2007

Mr Chips posted:

Maybe I'm not an excitable tech site writer looking for page hits, but 'marginally quicker in some things, a bit slower in others and a bit more power hungry for a given price point' isn't what I'd call a 'catastrophe'.

I think you forgot the "3+ years wait". That makes it one.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

freeforumuser posted:

I think you forgot the "3+ years wait". That makes it one.

More like "today's forecast Intel's foot remains on AMD's throat in the server market" makes it one. If AMD were the only processor manufacturer this would be a disappointing and confusing release, but they're in a starkly competitive environment and they are going to get screwed if they can't put a hell of a lot of these new boondoggles in computers smart buyers probably aren't going to want to stick 'em in.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
AMD has canceled their Wichita and Krishna APUs, the successors to Brazos, because TSMC Global Foundries is unable to get the 28nm process working within a reasonable timeframe. Instead, they'll refresh Brazos on 40nm with slightly improved clockspeeds and turbo. They're renaming the integrated graphics to the Radeon HD 7300-series, but it's still VLIW5 so I doubt there's any meaningful changes. The real changes are in the new chipset, which will include SATA600 (2 ports) and USB 3.0 (2 ports).

Edit: It actually was GloFo and not TSMC, my bad!

Alereon fucked around with this message at 12:47 on Nov 23, 2011

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Alereon posted:

AMD has canceled their Wichita and Krishna APUs, the successors to Brazos, because TSMC is unable to get the 28nm process working within a reasonable timeframe. Instead, they'll refresh Brazos on 40nm with slightly improved clockspeeds and turbo. They're renaming the integrated graphics to the Radeon HD 7300-series, but it's still VLIW5 so I doubt there's any meaningful changes. The real changes are in the new chipset, which will include SATA600 (2 ports) and USB 3.0 (2 ports).

There is always more, and it is always worse, jeeeeesus christ

Is AMD involved in the downfall of humanity in some way we just can't see right now? Is there a time traveler doing everything possible to ensure that AMD fails?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
They're just a bystander. Skynet was built on TSMC's 28nm process.

Mr Chips
Jun 27, 2007
Whose arse do I have to blow smoke up to get rid of this baby?
How much of this is a result of AMD spinning off their fabs?

Mr Chips fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Nov 22, 2011

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
On the plus side (well, minus side for us) Intel's Cedar Trail Atoms are complete poo poo, they have an improved on-die GPU with DirectX 10.1 support, but Intel decided to give up on trying to write drivers. They're releasing DirectX 9 only drivers for Windows 7 32-bit only, there will be no 64-bit support or exposure of the DX10.1 featureset until at least Windows 8. It'll be 2013 and the Silvermont architecture before Intel has anything to answer Brazos with.

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

Mr Chips posted:

How much of this is a result of AMD spinning off their fabs?

28nm has been hard for everyone, and they were having trouble getting 32nm going for Llano so AMD should have saw this coming. That fact gives me pause about the idea that they would go with them for Wichita and Krishna, especially since TSMC built Brazos. It just seems weird to switch like that generation wise.

edit: completing a thought.

Ryokurin fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Nov 22, 2011

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Y'know, one thing that's been bugging my uninformed-about-chip-fab self about Bulldozer has been AMD's recommended overclocking voltages.

In [H]'s Bulldozer review, it quoted AMD as saying to overclock by setting a Vcore from 1.4 to 1.55 V.

It took a little re-evaluation, but Intel recommended a top voltage of 1.38 V for their 32nm processors.

Is AMD's process different, or are overclocked Bulldozer chips going to burn out faster than a fart in a frat house?

VERTiG0
Jul 11, 2001

go move over bro
Wow, these new desktop FX chips are garbage eh? Sad, the $130 FX-4100 had some potential to be a serious overclocker (apparently very easy to get to 4.6GHz with no aftermarket cooling, and 5GHz is relatively easy to attain with some basic gear) but even then they'd still get stomped...

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!

Factory Factory posted:

Is AMD's process different, or are overclocked Bulldozer chips going to burn out faster than a fart in a frat house?

Hard to find good public information but turned this up.

Paul DeMone posted:

AMD slide presentation

Slide 17, does not appear to show a happy looking process.

GF seems to be making alot of 32 nm "James Dean" parts right now.
Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking paperweight.

Not exactly confidence inspiring.

PC LOAD LETTER fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Nov 22, 2011

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

VERTiG0 posted:

Wow, these new desktop FX chips are garbage eh? Sad, the $130 FX-4100 had some potential to be a serious overclocker (apparently very easy to get to 4.6GHz with no aftermarket cooling, and 5GHz is relatively easy to attain with some basic gear) but even then they'd still get stomped...

There are a couple tasks where they are close to the i7 but for 90% of your every day tasks they aren't much faster (or even slower) than the X6

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

VERTiG0 posted:

Wow, these new desktop FX chips are garbage eh? Sad, the $130 FX-4100 had some potential to be a serious overclocker (apparently very easy to get to 4.6GHz with no aftermarket cooling, and 5GHz is relatively easy to attain with some basic gear) but even then they'd still get stomped...

Power consumption makes the question of how good they are at overclocking more complex. For starters, the FX 8150 BE (3.6GHz stock) draws about 240W stock, compared to 130ish for the 2600K and 2500K at their 3.4GHz and 3.3GHz stock speeds. The FX 8150 goes over 400W once you get them to 4.5GHz+, compared to Sandy Bridge which are hanging out around 200W at 4.6GHz.

That's when really loaded down, obviously, but still, the power consumption comparison and clock for clock performance deficit means why would anyone build an FX chip system if they aren't an AMD supporter regardless?

Beelzebubba9
Feb 24, 2004

Mr Chips posted:

Maybe I'm not an excitable tech site writer looking for page hits, but 'marginally quicker in some things, a bit slower in others and a bit more power hungry for a given price point' isn't what I'd call a 'catastrophe'.

Considering that Interlagos is more power hungry, likely more expensive to make (due to the massive die size of each Orochi die), and has the advantage of being a process node ahead of Magny Cours, the fact that it's only sometimes faster is really damning.

Contrast this with Intel's ability to get ~20% performance increases from generation to generation without a process shrink and that makes AMD's failure even more stark. If having a product that's late, slow, hot and costly to make while your competition is moving forward almost without fault isn't a catastrophic design failure then I'm not sure what is.

rscott
Dec 10, 2009
TMSC having process issues? Well I never!

Zhentar
Sep 28, 2003

Brilliant Master Genius

Factory Factory posted:

Is AMD's process different, or are overclocked Bulldozer chips going to burn out faster than a fart in a frat house?

Not that the two conditions are necessarily exclusive, but yes, AMD's process (and many other potentially relevant aspects of the overall design) is significantly different from Intel's.

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

rscott posted:

TMSC having process issues? Well I never!

Looks like it's the opposite. They are droping Global for TSMC. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106217-manufacturing-bombshell-amd-cancels-28nm-apus-starts-from-scratch-at-tsmc

freeforumuser
Aug 11, 2007

VERTiG0 posted:

Wow, these new desktop FX chips are garbage eh? Sad, the $130 FX-4100 had some potential to be a serious overclocker (apparently very easy to get to 4.6GHz with no aftermarket cooling, and 5GHz is relatively easy to attain with some basic gear) but even then they'd still get stomped...

Forget anything from Intel or even the PhII X6s, that thing has trouble beating a ~3 year old X4 955BE, both stock or when overclocked. It makes even the lowly $130 price tag look overpriced.

http://www.legionhardware.com/images/review/AMD_FX-8150_FX-8120_FX-6100_and_FX-4170/Overclocking_02.png

freeforumuser fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Nov 23, 2011

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

freeforumuser posted:

Forget anything from Intel or even the PhII X6s, that thing has trouble beating a ~3 year old X4 955BE, both stock or when overclocked. It makes even the lowly $130 price tag look overpriced.

http://www.legionhardware.com/images/review/AMD_FX-8150_FX-8120_FX-6100_and_FX-4170/Overclocking_02.png

The marketing team that decided to pretend their modules were cores really, really, really screwed up. It makes comparisons look godawful. They should have gone with conventional and comparable marketing to other current and in-production hardware. Nothing to be ashamed of for selling a 4-core processor with nifty hardware-based dual threading per core. They could have really capitalized on how it's not like Hyperthreading where it's barely hardware at all, just presenting 4 real and 4 logical, no, this is real, hardware dual-thread per core!

But instead they went with the deeply misleading modules/cores approach, and so people look at what AMD are calling 4-core processors and expect them to perform competitively with other 4-core processors. Then they don't, because they're actually 2-core processors with a nifty hardware element to their dual threading but it's not the same thing as full blown cores... Which makes them look really awful by comparison.

Even the ad speech about AMD bringing the first 8-core desktop processors to market is baffling and stupid since performance comparisons show the only thing remotely 8-core about the higher end FX-line is their power consumption, which does start to look like octo-core setups.

Horrible idea, way oversold the concept, could have been done with so much more finesse. Aaarrgh AMD you're killing me here.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
It's perfectly legitimate to call a 4-module Bulldozer processor an 8-core processor. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach, it's just that Bulldozer had so much cache that it ran up against the limits of how big you can make a CPU, thus preventing AMD's designers from spending the transistors necessary to actually perform well in the real world. Anandtech's Bulldozer article goes into some detail about the compromises AMD made both for die size and in the pursuit of clock speed, unfortunately the latter couldn't pay off at all because Global Foundries was unable to deliver to expectations on their 32nm process. On the plus side, this does mean that when AMD refreshes Bulldozer for the desktop without the L3 cache (and presumably on a more mature 32nm process), it could see meaningful improvements.

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


Don't worry I know 5 people that are gamers with no clue how computers work. The important factors to them in order are

Number of Cores
VRAM
RAM
HDD Space

I was able to talk 1 out of buying a bulldozer in the upcoming month or when computers will "be on sale" they have no idea how to build, I guess the other 4 I don't know very well so they don't trust my judgement or something. If I was still playing WoW I'm sure the number would be higher because everyone over 30 that plays seems to fall into the I want a new computer each year that has more cores category.

I think AMD will do okay because of the the current more cores is better hype going on with the mainstream. gently caress my dad asked me when 5, 6 and 7 core processors came out because he heard about a new 8 core and wanted it. (He only browses the internet and is using under 10% of everything on that system, its old parts I just threw together to stop him from buying something from a store).

freeforumuser
Aug 11, 2007

pixaal posted:

Don't worry I know 5 people that are gamers with no clue how computers work. The important factors to them in order are

Number of Cores
VRAM
RAM
HDD Space

I was able to talk 1 out of buying a bulldozer in the upcoming month or when computers will "be on sale" they have no idea how to build, I guess the other 4 I don't know very well so they don't trust my judgement or something. If I was still playing WoW I'm sure the number would be higher because everyone over 30 that plays seems to fall into the I want a new computer each year that has more cores category.

I think AMD will do okay because of the the current more cores is better hype going on with the mainstream. gently caress my dad asked me when 5, 6 and 7 core processors came out because he heard about a new 8 core and wanted it. (He only browses the internet and is using under 10% of everything on that system, its old parts I just threw together to stop him from buying something from a store).

I doubt AMD can even sell enough BDs to the unsuspecting retail consumers or AMD fanboys when the FX-8150 is still OOS at Newegg, let alone finding itself into mass-market Dells/HPs.

freeforumuser fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Nov 23, 2011

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
They've landed a number of supercomputer deals for Bulldozer-based Opterons, each of those is a not-insignificant number of dies (thousands of processors, two dies per processor) sold at substantially above consumer price levels. The only thing you're going to see branded as an FX-series processor are either defective dies that couldn't be sold as Opterons or excess supply above and beyond what's needed for their server business. Since yields are still very low it makes sense there wouldn't be much available for consumers.

Devian666
Aug 19, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe
I was looking at the BD cores from a commercial perspective recently. I could easily see the cores working well for niche supercomputer applications or specifically optimised code. I gather that market is priced based on actual performance rather than marketing.

Maxwell Adams
Oct 21, 2000

T E E F S

Alereon posted:

It's perfectly legitimate to call a 4-module Bulldozer processor an 8-core processor.

I wouldn't say it's 100% legitimate. I'd be happier if they called it 4+4 cores or something weird like that.

Alereon posted:

They've landed a number of supercomputer deals for Bulldozer-based Opterons, each of those is a not-insignificant number of dies (thousands of processors, two dies per processor) sold at substantially above consumer price levels.

But does it make any business sense? I can't imagine any deal that would cover the R&D costs of developing a chip like this.

ZeroConnection
Aug 8, 2008
How about deals with Cray?
..the XK6 is capable of scaling to 500,000 Opteron cores...

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E

pixaal posted:

...fall into the I want a new computer each year that has more cores category.

This is not a bad thing IMO. These people will spread their wacky logic to others in their circle of friends and family and hopefully game developers won't be so shy to actually leverage their engines against more cores. Its a catch-22 which needs these people to push things forward.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Shaocaholica posted:

This is not a bad thing IMO. These people will spread their wacky logic to others in their circle of friends and family and hopefully game developers won't be so shy to actually leverage their engines against more cores. Its a catch-22 which needs these people to push things forward.

Thing is, quad-core CPUs are by no means universal: link. About as many Steam users are still using dual-core CPUs as are using quad-cores. Folks with 8-core BD CPUs will be long, long, long in waiting for their market segment to have enough representation for 4 vs. 8 threads to be worth a programmer's time.

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E

Factory Factory posted:

Thing is, quad-core CPUs are by no means universal: link. About as many Steam users are still using dual-core CPUs as are using quad-cores. Folks with 8-core BD CPUs will be long, long, long in waiting for their market segment to have enough representation for 4 vs. 8 threads to be worth a programmer's time.

Its still progress IMO. You'll always have these guys leading the pack. If having one 8+ core zealot means 3 dual core buddies upgrade to quad or above, then I think they are doing everyone a service.

Again, its a catch 22. No developer is going to optimize for quad core if no one has them and not many gamers are going to upgrade unless they can get something out of it.

Shaocaholica fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Nov 25, 2011

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Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

Mr Chips posted:

Maybe I'm not an excitable tech site writer looking for page hits, but 'marginally quicker in some things, a bit slower in others and a bit more power hungry for a given price point' isn't what I'd call a 'catastrophe'.
Well, it's Peter Bright who wrote the article. Judging his shtick on the forums, he absolutely loathes AMD.

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