Rastor posted:

They are also developing a new x86 core which is "a new design built from the ground up". Rumor has it that for this new core AMD is giving up on the CMT design used in Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller/Excavator and will instead go back to something more like what Intel has been using.

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

AMD always planned on having some sort of new arch. out by 2015/2016 since Excavator was supposed to be the last BD revision. They probably knew they were hosed all the way back in mid to late 2011 since by then they'd have been able to do plenty of testing on samples from the fabs to see what yields they could get and how well power and performance scaled with clocks. It just takes a long time to design a new architecture and K10h was probably out of scaling room so they had to go with what they had and try to make the best of it.

The combo of patent issues, long development times, highly competent competition, and high production costs in making a high end x86 chip are brutally risky from a business perspective which is why no one but AMD tries (tried?) anymore to compete in that arena against Intel.

Alereon posted:

I feel like AMD's biggest mistake in recent years was not crushing Intel in the low-power market. The netbook was born with the launch of the Intel Atom in 2008, and then withered and died because it took Intel six years to release a decent successor. AMD Brazos processors were launched at the beginning of 2011 and were the perfect netbook SoCs, yet AMD devoted limited manufacturing resources to Brazos and availability was poor, so it mostly appeared in low-end notebooks. I believe that if AMD had really pushed Brazos in the netbook segment they would still be considered a viable mainstream form factor today.

Selling cheap netbook SoCs probably isn't very profitable which is likely why they didn't do this versus just making more Radeon GPUs with the TSMC wafers, but it seems like there's value in keeping AMD's CPU division operating outside of consoles.

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

They can't really do much to improve single threaded performance without a major revision (which is what Excavator is supposed to be) which takes a long time (years) to do.

They keep throwing more die space at the iGPU for their APU's because for some reason they seem totally unable to increase the bandwidth to the iGPU and can't do much to improve CPU performance beyond what they're already doing so more iGPU is about the only way left for them to differentiate their product vs Intel's offerings and their own older APU's.

The funny thing is if they could just feed it enough data the iGPU would actually be getting some fairly respectable performance and it would add a lot of value to their products even if they continued to do little to improve single thread performance on the CPU side. Many of their cheaper APU's in the thin n' light category are incredibly hamstrung by single channel DDR3 1333 levels of bandwidth though.

Quad channel DDR3 probably isn't practical for them to do for cost reasons, same goes for on package DDR3, but maybe they could've hung some extra DDR3 or GDDR5 off of the chipset to feed their iGPU's better. They did do something like that for a while back when they were still putting the iGPU in the north bridge in the 780G or some such.

Ozz81 posted:

lack of a heatspreader and the very high likelihood of either damaging the die, or jamming a flathead screwdriver into your motherboard putting the drat heatsink clip in place.

lovely Treat posted:

Imagine those people having to do a CPU pin mod to overclock instead of being able to just raise a multiplier a little and get an extra GHz clockspeed.

Alereon posted:

I did this too, but multipliers kept dropping off after a couple months until I put a square of scotch tape over the L1 bridges. I guess it was due to the graphite flaking off slowly, as it shouldn't have been hot enough for it to evaporate.

HalloKitty posted:

Intel has the money, but at the end of the day, if AMD can push out some CPUs that get recommended in the parts picking thread from top to bottom (much like their GPUs), then that would be a good start.

They'd need to significantly increase single thread performance and significantly reduce power usage to do this.

Crotch Fruit posted:

All this time I thought "better luck next platform" was just a joke. Is there any AMD CPU I should buy for any reason? Or at least an excuse I can tell people for why I didn't just buy Intel? I'm still holding out hope for big green.

Alereon posted:

And this isn't even so compelling now that Intel is including the QuickSync and ClearVideo engines on Celeron and Pentium processors, rather than just the Core i3. A Celeron G1840 for $42 is a pretty capable HTPC CPU now.

HalloKitty posted:

Yeah, read the article earlier, looks pretty decent. No battery life results yet, though.

I'm just expecting there to be no good AMD laptops though, simply because normally AMD laptops are built cheaply, which is a shame. For my money, I'm liking the AMD APU balance for laptops (worse CPU, better GPU) because overall it's better in light gaming use cases, where the lower end Intel graphics still fall apart.

Malderi posted:

The AMD whitebook everyone tested a few weeks ago was apparently quoted at being able to retail at about $700. It was a 15.6" 1080p screen, top of the line FX-7600p, and a 256GB SSD. The build quality was reasonable if not perfect. If someone comes out with a machine that hits those specs and doesn't suck in some other way, I can imagine it selling quite well.

El Scotch posted:

Is any of that going to AMD?

orange juche posted:

AMD APUs in laptops definitely aren't all that terrible as long as you keep in mind what their strengths are. I just recommended my sister buy a 15 inch HP Envy with a Richland A10 in it. It is faster than her old laptop (a 2010 C2D ULV chip) and she can run games on it at an acceptable quality (TF2, other source games)

sweart gliwere posted:

And yeah, Source is crazy versatile, mostly because it was mass-market practically a decade ago.

Alereon posted:

The Source engine (and TF2 in particular) is actually pretty good at scaling across multiple cores, I just tested and during multiplayer combat I had pretty even load across four logical cores, somewhat less load on a fifth, and light load across the other three (I verified all were flat before launching TF2). Multi-core rendering used to be disabled by default due to hitching and freezing issues, though. I think there's room for surprisingly good performance on Broadwell-Y, though "surprisingly good" may not mean playable given that we're talking about single-digit watts. I'd mention some AMD products, but it almost seems like they've given up selling the products they do launch.

Agreed posted:

Anyone feel like helping me gain some perspective on this development if you feel my read is unnecessarily bleak?

orange juche posted:

Oh god, 2 more years without an architectural refresh is really gonna put the hurt on AMD.

orange juche posted:

There's still a year and change between now and Zen

Aleksei Vasiliev posted:

Vine videos on Tumblr in Firefox BSOD me within ~1 minute of watching them, but Chrome is immune. Might want to try switching browsers at least for some content/sites if this is the same for you.

Civil posted:

Anyone else have this friend? He blows $1000+ at Frys and has to show off his build. I tried talking him into exchanging his CPU before opening everything up. He got a r9 270, so the slight benefits of getting an APU are irrelevant.

This is AMD's customer.

Beautiful Ninja posted:

Is you plan to slowly roast a person in his home using an AMD processor?

canyoneer posted:

I used to be a fanboy, but once you take a life in defense of your fandom you become a fanman. No coming back from that.

There are a couple subreddits for building PCs, and people in there recommend AMD stuff all the time. I have no idea why.

keyvin posted:

Its a recurring theme that when people ITT want to look at something positive we start talking about Intel.

Civil posted:

Oh, I dunno. I still love the 1090t machine I handed down to my parents. It even competes favorably against AMD's 2014 parts.

keyvin posted:

You sure its not because you are a techno-masochist?

Menacer posted:

Bloody Antlers posted:

One of my favorite things to daydream about is imagining what the best AMD engineers could come up with if they had the same funding and process nodes as Intel.

Or reverse that situation and take the amount of Intel engineers you could pay with AMD's salary limitations and give them GF or TSMC (when it was struggling with 32nm) to design for with a similar R&D budget.

Given how incredibly mismanaged AMD was under the former CEO and how comparatively little cash they've had for R&D, you just have to KNOW there are some bad assed engineers on board to have gotten AMD to a point where they briefly delivered a superior platform vs Intel and managed to stay alive this long after all the anti-competitive practices Intel used against them.

It reminds me of the space race in a way.

HalloKitty posted:

Oh, nice, didn't hear about this.

It would be amusing if Nintendo, with its forgotten and little-loved Wii U, suddenly had the most powerful of the 3 machines. Maybe they could include a controller designed for human hands with a good battery life!

I am not a book posted:

I run various linux devel channels. I want an AMD proc specifically because fewer people buy them.

Riso posted:

My Athlon II x4 640 is still good enough to play all games I want at 1080p, thanks.

keyvin posted:

When will AMD update their roadmap?