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Professor Science
Mar 8, 2006
diplodocus + mortarboard = party

Factory Factory posted:

That... would be a significant disappointment compared to how they're selling this. The whole subtext behind HSA and HUMA was that GPGPU programming would become as easy as sufficiently threading your workload. How does this make OpenCL programming any easier?
don't have to copy memory from one pool to another, and in theory you can reuse complex data structures because it's cache-coherent. that certainly sucks when dealing with standard GPU programming but you still have to write some kernels that can handle craploads of parallelism in the first place

(HSA is mostly hype? from a collection of hardware vendors? THEY WOULD NEVER)

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Menacer
Nov 25, 2000
Failed Sega Accessory Ahoy!
Other things that it brings to the table:

User-level task queues that allow you to launch work to the GPU without going through the kernel. Along with removing memory copy overheads, this can help you to accelerate kernels that traditionally would have their GPGPU benefits outweighed by their data copy and kernel launch overheads.

The ability to launch GPU kernels from the GPU itself, without needing to bounce between the CPU and the GPU. Again, reducing overheads and potentially reducing the complexity of porting some codes.

Details without the marketing: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/hsa10.pdf

Mulva
Sep 13, 2011

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 5 days!)

Does this mean inside a few weeks we might...actually have an AMD CPU it is *not* totally insane to buy?

e: Wait no they call it an APU don't they, because there aren't enough tech acronyms for me to remember.

Mulva fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Jan 7, 2014

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
AMD's DockPort connector (formerly known as Lightning Bolt) has been blessed as a royalty-free part of the DisplayPort standard. This allows USB 3.0 + DisplayPort over the same passive cable, offering similar capabilities to ThunderBolt at a fraction of the price. At launch performance will be 5Gbps like USB 3.0, though this will scale to 10Gbps like ThunderBolt with USB 3.1.

GrizzlyCow
May 30, 2011
AMD seems to be doing well. I can't wait 'til we see all these new technology out in the wild. Of course, these could all go the way of AMD's past initiatives.

xarph
Jun 18, 2001


Alereon posted:

AMD's DockPort connector (formerly known as Lightning Bolt) has been blessed as a royalty-free part of the DisplayPort standard. This allows USB 3.0 + DisplayPort over the same passive cable, offering similar capabilities to ThunderBolt at a fraction of the price. At launch performance will be 5Gbps like USB 3.0, though this will scale to 10Gbps like ThunderBolt with USB 3.1.

drat. Make it carry power with that new laptop power standard I heard about recently and they'll have one up on apple.

Wistful of Dollars
Aug 25, 2009

I decided to go browse some of the AMD fan forums.

The urge to troll c/p some of their posts into the building thread is strong. Apparently the 8350 is basically an i6.

Gobbeldygook
May 13, 2009
Hates Native American people and tries to justify their genocides.

Put this racist on ignore immediately!

Factory Factory posted:

That... would be a significant disappointment

New thread title found.

Blorange
Jan 31, 2007

A wizard did it

Anandtech has posted their initial Kaveri APU reviews. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k

It continues the saga of AMD making minor improvements in power efficiency and processing speed while remaining solidly in 2nd place. Surprisingly, they actually pulled out a good 30-50% improvement in the medium (45w) power segment. This is offset by lackluster changes to the A10 line. They managed to increase IPC but had to lower clock rates... :doh:

If you didn't want an APU before, you still don't want one now. The thread title remains true. :smith:

Mulva
Sep 13, 2011

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 5 days!)

Thank God, I don't know if I could live in a world where I actually had to think about CPU purchasing again.

Stanley Pain
Jun 16, 2001

by Fluffdaddy
I don't know why people poo poo on the APUs so much. They are great CPU/GPU combos for the market they are hitting. That being the general consumer laptop market.

Cheap and well performing laptops that fare well in gaming. I don't think a lot of people realize how many people actually game on their laptops and will put up with 15-20 FPS on an Intel IGP.

mayodreams
Jul 4, 2003


Hello darkness,
my old friend
I am planning on getting a Kaveri setup to replace my ancient HTPC, which will do nicely. For low power and low demand applications, these cores are pretty awesome. I am gunning for the 65W one which will be about half of the TDP on my Wolfdale C2D 3ghz and 6670 setup.

That being said, there is no way in hell this would go in my good gamin' rig.

Stanley Pain
Jun 16, 2001

by Fluffdaddy

mayodreams posted:

That being said, there is no way in hell this would go in my good gamin' rig.

Of course not. That would be silly. I'm glad that tech report and hardwarecanuks have put up really good reviews and show its strengths and weaknesses for what they are. A great and cheap multi purpose CPU/GPU for the mainstream laptop market.


I have an older A6 that still surprises me to this day with the games I can play. It'll be interesting to see what the price point on laptops will be with the high end APUs.

Blorange
Jan 31, 2007

A wizard did it

Stanley Pain posted:

I don't know why people poo poo on the APUs so much. They are great CPU/GPU combos for the market they are hitting. That being the general consumer laptop market.

It's really not the APU's fault, and I do think they made a really compelling case for getting an A8-7600 at 45w in your next laptop. The problem is the laptop segment highlights how shittily manufacturers are making use of them. Customize (because nobody has a model by default) any halfway decent APU laptop and suddenly it costs 800 bucks without an SSD, is housed in a brick, and the manufacturer throws in a discrete graphics card for no drat reason. Their main advantage, which is being cheap but effective enough, hasn't been passed to the consumer.

SYSV Fanfic
Sep 9, 2003

by Pragmatica

Blorange posted:

It's really not the APU's fault, and I do think they made a really compelling case for getting an A8-7600 at 45w in your next laptop. The problem is the laptop segment highlights how shittily manufacturers are making use of them. Customize (because nobody has a model by default) any halfway decent APU laptop and suddenly it costs 800 bucks without an SSD, is housed in a brick, and the manufacturer throws in a discrete graphics card for no drat reason. Their main advantage, which is being cheap but effective enough, hasn't been passed to the consumer.

What are you looking for in a laptop? My ASUS trinity A8 system was $270 refurbished and $380 new. There are prebuilt systems out there at an affordable price point that use the APUs the way AMD intended.

Stanley Pain
Jun 16, 2001

by Fluffdaddy

Blorange posted:

It's really not the APU's fault, and I do think they made a really compelling case for getting an A8-7600 at 45w in your next laptop. The problem is the laptop segment highlights how shittily manufacturers are making use of them. Customize (because nobody has a model by default) any halfway decent APU laptop and suddenly it costs 800 bucks without an SSD, is housed in a brick, and the manufacturer throws in a discrete graphics card for no drat reason. Their main advantage, which is being cheap but effective enough, hasn't been passed to the consumer.

I'll second the sentiment of WTF $800?



My A6-3420 with 8GB RAM Was something like $350 nearly 2 years ago. Toss in a $150 SSD and what more are you looking for in? Once you start customizing you're quickly leaving the mainstream consumer market behind. When I was in between "real" jobs I was a district manager for Geek Squad and the one thing that I took away from that is never underestimate how cheap people want to be with their hardware purchases. Be it monitors, laptops, TVs, whatever, people want to spent $100 and have it all. Heck take a look Display thread here. People want it all for $200 ;)

Blorange
Jan 31, 2007

A wizard did it

I stand corrected, you can definitely find these in the $300-$500 range if you're not too picky. I think that's my issue, if you step outside of the 4gb ram, 768p screen and 500gb standard hard drive spec things get expensive quick.

Killer robot
Sep 6, 2010

I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!
Pillbug

Blorange posted:

I stand corrected, you can definitely find these in the $300-$500 range if you're not too picky. I think that's my issue, if you step outside of the 4gb ram, 768p screen and 500gb standard hard drive spec things get expensive quick.

I think 768p is the operative one. Laptop manufacturers still seem locked into the idea that you probably want your 15" laptop to be lower resolution than your 5" phone, and if you don't you must be one of those big spenders after a $1000 machine.

Sure, an APU isn't going to game well at 1080p, but when I'm not gaming I really need that screen space.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Killer robot posted:

I think 768p is the operative one. Laptop manufacturers still seem locked into the idea that you probably want your 15" laptop to be lower resolution than your 5" phone, and if you don't you must be one of those big spenders after a $1000 machine.

Sure, an APU isn't going to game well at 1080p, but when I'm not gaming I really need that screen space.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Basically, the problem with all AMD based laptops is they tend to be 1366x768, 15.4", huge and plasticy.

Get some 13" and 14" slim ones with the higher end APUs in there, with a decent screen, and you're on to something. But I'm not sure that even exists.

PerrineClostermann
Dec 15, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
Intel lets me have a cheap 1368x768 screen. Step it up, AMD :colbert:

movax
Aug 30, 2008

I'd say please legislate the banning of 768p screens, but a lot of people actually desire them, I guess. My parents find it easier to read, though they did finally upgrade to a large 16" dell w/ a 1600x900 screen.

Ignoarints
Nov 26, 2010
I'm just trying to confirm my suspicions, but has AMD made anything awesome for the time since the 965 BE time period?

Twerk from Home
Jan 17, 2009

This avatar brought to you by the 'save our dead gay forums' foundation.

Ignoarints posted:

I'm just trying to confirm my suspicions, but has AMD made anything awesome for the time since the 965 BE time period?

The 965 BE wasn't really awesome for the time that I can think of, their last CPUs I remember that were really above and beyond the competition were the Socket 939 dual-core Athlon 64s.

In more recent years, they've sometimes had a value leader with the Athlon X3 CPUs that overclocked well and could usually have a 4th core unlocked, but now Intel has better options in pretty much any price range.

Ignoarints
Nov 26, 2010

Weinertron posted:

The 965 BE wasn't really awesome for the time that I can think of, their last CPUs I remember that were really above and beyond the competition were the Socket 939 dual-core Athlon 64s.

In more recent years, they've sometimes had a value leader with the Athlon X3 CPUs that overclocked well and could usually have a 4th core unlocked, but now Intel has better options in pretty much any price range.

I thought it was awesome :3 well... when it was $105 and could overclock to 4.0 with no effort and somehow outperform the FX's then. But im probably just biased. I also had one of those 3 cores that I unlocked, was a very awesome $75 at the time.

Nothing since has really inspired me to buy AMD though

SYSV Fanfic
Sep 9, 2003

by Pragmatica
How is Global Foundries doing business wise?

Edit: Does AMD even use Global Foundries anymore?

SYSV Fanfic fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Jan 15, 2014

Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf

Ignoarints posted:

I'm just trying to confirm my suspicions, but has AMD made anything awesome for the time since the 965 BE time period?

Athlon64s kicked the poo poo out of Pentium 4s of the time (At everything but media encoding), but ever since Core2s were introduced it was downhill from there. I don't think there's been a single solid win since the Athlon64 days.

On the server side, there's somewhat frequently been occasions when Opterons were a very good choice, but again, that hasn't been the case since Nehalem era Xeons came on the scene.

Wistful of Dollars
Aug 25, 2009

I've read crowing from AMD fans about more and more games making use of all their cores, etc., but until I see cold, hard data proving performance equality/superiority to the i5's it's all a load of wishful hooey.

All of that not-withstanding the power consumption issues.

e: speaking in references to the FX line only.

Wistful of Dollars fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Jan 15, 2014

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Gwaihir posted:

On the server side, there's somewhat frequently been occasions when Opterons were a very good choice, but again, that hasn't been the case since Nehalem era Xeons came on the scene.
While this is true in terms of CPU performance, Opterons do have some compelling platform advantages. Opterons use Load-Reduced DIMMs rather than the Fully Buffered DIMMs required by Intel systems, delivering far greater memory capacity at lower costs and power usage than Intel platforms. For memory-limited servers this is a huge deal. Additionally the HyperTransport interconnect is more scalable than the QPI interconnect Intel uses, though this doesn't matter until you get significantly beyond the number of sockets found in most servers. There also are some applications that are core-limited and thus run more efficiently on Opterons, though since Xeon cores are faster and more efficient there's not TOO many applications where sheer core count wins.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

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

El Scotch posted:

I've read crowing from AMD fans about more and more games making use of all their cores, etc., but until I see cold, hard data proving performance equality/superiority to the i5's it's all a load of wishful hooey.

All of that not-withstanding the power consumption issues.

e: speaking in references to the FX line only.

If it's multithreaded properly an Intel processor will chew through the workload a hell of a lot faster regardless, kind of a moot point in my opinion. And it would need to be multithreaded properly in order to take advantage of the many slow cores on the consoles as opposed to fewer very fast cores, even compared to AMD's FX processors. Jaguar is not good at quick serial workloads, so they've gotta be spreading out the CPU time in an efficient way (finally) ((thank god)) and if that's done, then until you get to unreasonably high core counts, scaling should be pretty much the same from one to sixteen-ish. Workload coherence and the need to code specifically (and expensively!) for targeted very highly parallel processing pops its head up after two 8-core processors, as I recall.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Alereon posted:

There also are some applications that are core-limited and thus run more efficiently on Opterons, though since Xeon cores are faster and more efficient there's not TOO many applications where sheer core count wins.
We intend to evaluate servers with AMD processors for our next generation VDI farm.

Professor Science
Mar 8, 2006
diplodocus + mortarboard = party
deleted: I'm stupid

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

adorai posted:

We intend to evaluate servers with AMD processors for our next generation VDI farm.

For what it's worth (which isn't much) we use Citrix VDI (on VMware), and we currently have two servers: what makes this interesting (beyond the fact I spec'd them out) is that one is Intel and one is AMD, so I can do a direct comparison. (Bear in mind this is a school, so the following specs of course reflect our budget).

One is a PowerEdge R620 with 2x Xeon E5-2609: 8 Sandy Bridge cores @ 2.4GHz.
One is a PowerEdge R515 with 2x Opteron 4184: 12 Lisbon (last before Bulldozer) cores @ 2.8GHz.

I recall in a virtual Windows 7 session on each the AMD box scored higher in CPU under WEI (two cores each). Which is incredibly unscientific, I realise, but I haven't had the need or time to run anything more extensive. They're both pretty responsive (but that's mainly because all the virtual machines are on SSDs), but I would say the sheer number of cores in the AMD box, despite the archaic architecture, makes it pretty good value.

I do have a Bulldozer based box as well, with a single 3 module Opteron 4234, but it's only set up as a fileserver, pretty much. I've been a bit more sceptical about Bulldozer for VDI stuff, I guess. We'll see how it goes if we need to expand this setup. Basically the choices have been dictated by crippling budgets and the need to get the best performance for said crippling budget. (Those servers were bought at different times).

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Jan 16, 2014

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
Well this is interesting: The AMD Kaveri APU appears to use a similar uncore as the PS4 APU, supporting quad-channel memory and GDDR5. (Note that the first feature table is only for features enabled in shipping Kaveri products.) There's no way this could be supported on current motherboards due to socket limitations, but could lead to some very compelling Steam boxes or gaming laptops. Performance with DDR3 would be similar to a Radeon HD 8830M, which is rather impressive.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Jan 17, 2014

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Alereon posted:

Well this is interesting: The AMD Kaveri APU appears to use a similar uncore as the PS4 APU, supporting quad-channel memory and GDDR5. (Note that the first feature table is only for features enabled in shipping Kaveri products.) There's no way this could be supported on current motherboards due to socket limitations, but could lead to some very compelling Steam boxes or gaming laptops. Performance with DDR3 would be similar to a Radeon HD 8830M, which isn't is rather impressive.

That is very interesting, seeing as the CPU itself uses a totally different architecture to that which resides in the PS4. Huh.

Sidesaddle Cavalry
Mar 15, 2013

Oh Boy Desert Map
Inserting typical :pcgaming: speculative reaction: Theorhetical motherboard with built-in GDDR5 + Kaveri + Mantle + SteamOS + FreeSync = :confused:

Beautiful Ninja
Mar 26, 2009

Five time FCW Champion...of my heart.

Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:

Inserting typical :pcgaming: speculative reaction: Theorhetical motherboard with built-in GDDR5 + Kaveri + Mantle + SteamOS + FreeSync = :confused:

Fez and Stanley Parable would run like gangbusters on that thing!

SYSV Fanfic
Sep 9, 2003

by Pragmatica

Beautiful Ninja posted:

Fez and Stanley Parable would run like gangbusters on that thing!

Which is what I was thinking. Until AMD pushes an APU that rivals at least the x700 series, I don't see why a gamer would buy an APU for their desktop. Laptops I saw the value, but desktops I just don't see it.

Unless someone is still gaming with a 1024x768 monitor. I guess that would be a good use case for an apu in a desktop.

edit: Desktop built for gaming. If HSA takes off, it would be another use case.

Maxwell Adams
Oct 21, 2000

T E E F S
Would it be extra-double-insane for an APU to have a GDDR5 interface for graphics and DDR3 for system memory?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
All DRAM attached must be of the same type on Kaveri.

Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jan 18, 2014

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Professor Science
Mar 8, 2006
diplodocus + mortarboard = party
there are some rumors that Kaveri was going to depend on GDDR5M for better perf, but since Elpida imploded, that's disappeared.

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