AMD Zen Discussion Thread

ED E

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

AdoredTV veers too much between "interesting techie" and "unapologetic AMD fanboy" though.

Ahhh now, he's a fan of competition and dislikes the sh?te nVidia have pulled in the past. Doesnt make him a fanboy.

Serephucus

He definitely favours AMD, but his content is largely sound. Certainly worth a watch if you haven't.

wotzgoingon

I like his videos. I'd say he does a lot of research before each video as he often refers back to old webpages.

god's toy

He's one of the few tubers that put a hell of a lot of research in before sounding off... This trend of 'intel/nvidia is better cos they had the market to themselves' sound offs from to many a 'tech' tuber needs to stop and at least he'll call it when he sees it.

K.O.Kiki

AMD Threadripper 16core/32thread CPU

Serephucus

"... HEDT CPU: Threadripper."

Damn, that's an awesome name. Maybe they've finally fired that 12-year-old who was naming their-

"... and our Datacenter CPU line: EPYC."

**** SAKE AMD!

Icyseanfitz

really curious at how they will price it tbh, if the go <1000 intel will **** themselves haha

Inviere

Loving what AMD are doing to the stranglehold that Intel have had on the market, this can only be good for consumers.

Cuddlesworth

Clockspeeds and power will be interesting. As the threads go up on the Intel chips the clock rate goes right down. With the CCX cores, I hope they can keep the speed pretty high anyway

ED E

Damnit AMD, going to make my Xeons look really normal. *epeen shrinks*

Gehad_JoyRider

seems as tho Jay2cents is begining to go ryzen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJNRtGo5IMc

BloodBath

The 16 core threadripper is supposed to be only $850. Intel's 16 core is $1700. They really are giving AMD a big chance of getting back in the market in a big way. That 16 core threadripper is rumoured to be only costing AMD around €120 per unit as well so they are making a tidy profit on it even at €850.

AMD also dropped the prices on the R7 range as they are hitting 80% perfect yields. That's 80% of the Ryzen CPU's have perfectly working 8 cores/16 threads.

TerrorFirmer

You have to wonder what Intel's strategy is. Trade on brand name until it stops working?

I can't understand how they're not more aggressive with pricing.

Slutmonkey57b

It's worked for them so far. It worked during the netburst era. AMD isn't enough of a volume-sales threat yet to change course drastically, and their "partner support" programmes will ensure that the likes of Dell, Lenovo, HP are only using AMD in niche machines with low sales visibility.

Core architecture was a side programme that reacted to Opteron, not Athlon. If AMD genuinely starts to get a large share of the datacenter/hedt market then you'll see more of a reaction I think. However both Intel and AMD are probably screwed in that market anyway because they've no answer to ARM on their roadmaps, or indeed in the basic x86 concept. Even power hungry GPU's which were the next big thing are only gaining a foothold, and they're about to be embarrassed by things like Google's tensor. The only people who buy processors are enthusiasts, and they've mostly got that market still covered by ensuring that game engines are optimised for single thread ipc rather than multiple threads. Since game coding is ****, and based on long, expensive timeframes, that's not likely to change very soon either I don't think.

Cuddlesworth

There is loads of demand for high core count CPU's with good power efficiency in the server and workstation market. They might be low volume but they are usually high profit. If AMD are hitting some serious yields, those 1k+ huge die Xeons will be under serious threat. I believe the CCX model lends itself well to multiple sockets too.

deceit

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

However both Intel and AMD are probably screwed in that market anyway because they've no answer to ARM on their roadmaps, or indeed in the basic x86 concept. Even power hungry GPU's which were the next big thing are only gaining a foothold, and they're about to be embarrassed by things like Google's tensor.

I'm not sure where your thinking comes with ARM in the server market. Intel's cpu's have a 99% share in the Server market and all the talk over the years did nothing to change that.
Arm has had very little impact at all. (Everyone was talking for years that ARM would take over the server market but it all seemed to be hype).
OpenPower had a slightly bigger impact using Nvidia cards but still minuscule.
Amd would be the main threat too Intel in the near future. With arm you have to alter the OS/app's to work on it because of everything being designed for x86 which gives it a huge uphill battle to gain mass adoption.

justsomebloke

deceit wrote: »

With arm you have to alter the OS/app's to work on it because of everything being designed for x86 which gives it a huge uphill battle to gain mass adoption.

Microsoft are looking at bringing full windows 10 to ARM with support for x86 via emulation

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/01/qualcomm-snapdragon-835-will-able-emulate-x86.html

Slutmonkey57b

deceit wrote: »

I'm not sure where your thinking comes with ARM in the server market. Intel's cpu's have a 99% share in the Server market and all the talk over the years did nothing to change that.
Arm has had very little impact at all. (Everyone was talking for years that ARM would take over the server market but it all seemed to be hype).
OpenPower had a slightly bigger impact using Nvidia cards but still minuscule.
Amd would be the main threat too Intel in the near future. With arm you have to alter the OS/app's to work on it because of everything being designed for x86 which gives it a huge uphill battle to gain mass adoption.

The same could be said when Intel first started to push x86 in the server market though. What drove that migration was lower cost of ownership (with help from Intel's famous "marketing rebates") and a move to more generalised workloads, where sme's and the like were prepared to build and deploy their own servers in house and run then with a single Microsoft- certified pro. Larger scale operations partnered with Dell or IBM who were persuaded to cannibalise their existing product lines in the name of easy-outsource support contracts.

Intel now dominates the server game but the next move is to the cloud or to more complex workloads (such as ai and statistical modeling etc), where the TCO metric is parallelism, and overall power consumption. Intel were mid scramble to try and counter Nvidia, now Nvidia are being gazumped by Google's tensor.

If you were Google and Facebook, why would you pay a huge cooling and power bill for an x86 farm, when you can get better results with a tenth of the hardware which doesn't guzzle 250w per blade? (Numbers are for illustration only!).

I agree that things will not move overnight, but the shift is there. Pc's were killed off by laptops, laptops started getting killed by tablets, tablets started getting killed by phones. The x86 server market was designed in a different age and I think it'll go, the same way that IBM and Dec went when Intel stole their market.

ED E

Serephucus wrote: »

"... HEDT CPU: Threadripper."

Damn, that's an awesome name. Maybe they've finally fired that 12-year-old who was naming their-

"... and our Datacenter CPU line: EPYC."

**** SAKE AMD!

Cuddlesworth

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

The same could be said when Intel first started to push x86 in the server market though. What drove that migration was lower cost of ownership (with help from Intel's famous "marketing rebates") and a move to more generalised workloads, where sme's and the like were prepared to build and deploy their own servers in house and run then with a single Microsoft- certified pro. Larger scale operations partnered with Dell or IBM who were persuaded to cannibalise their existing product lines in the name of easy-outsource support contracts.

Intel now dominates the server game but the next move is to the cloud or to more complex workloads (such as ai and statistical modeling etc), where the TCO metric is parallelism, and overall power consumption. Intel were mid scramble to try and counter Nvidia, now Nvidia are being gazumped by Google's tensor.

If you were Google and Facebook, why would you pay a huge cooling and power bill for an x86 farm, when you can get better results with a tenth of the hardware which doesn't guzzle 250w per blade? (Numbers are for illustration only!).

I agree that things will not move overnight, but the shift is there. Pc's were killed off by laptops, laptops started getting killed by tablets, tablets started getting killed by phones. The x86 server market was designed in a different age and I think it'll go, the same way that IBM and Dec went when Intel stole their market.

The longer a technology is in place and the more it was build on, the less likely something will just come in and take its place. Arm saw a boom in the webserver market, high core cores, low power makes for perfect web server farms. But there are plenty of use-cases in x86 that will be around for decades.

Gehad_JoyRider

I think any one denying AMD are really just living in cloud cookoo land apple are using them now on there iMac pro, given the large amount of clowns out there who pay over the of for the world's crapest mouse which is also tiny. (I'm a Mac user) as well but I really don't like them.

I think we will start to see huge performance Gaines with AMD in Adobe over the coming months.

BloodBath

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

You have to wonder what Intel's strategy is. Trade on brand name until it stops working?

I can't understand how they're not more aggressive with pricing.

They could be more aggressive but the bottom line is AMD's architecture is far cheaper to produce than intels. Intel are putting all their cores on 1 cpu die. This makes it more expensive to produce and reduces yields. AMD have 4 quad core cpu's basically on 1 die using their infinity fabric to link them all. This is a far cheaper production method and it massively improves yields. It also makes it easier to cool as you can spread the heat out over a larger area meaning AMD's should be clocked higher.



Intel can't compete unless they are willing to sell at a loss to try and stamp out AMD's gains.

Jim Keller strikes again.

wotzgoingon

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

You have to wonder what Intel's strategy is. Trade on brand name until it stops working?

I can't understand how they're not more aggressive with pricing.

BloodBath wrote: »

They could be more aggressive but the bottom line is AMD's architecture is far cheaper to produce than intels.

Intel can't compete unless they are willing to sell at a loss to try and stamp out AMD's gains.

Jim Keller strikes again.

Intel will still sell a fair few high end CPU's though as TF said due to the brand name.

BloodBath

wotzgoingon wrote: »

Intel will still sell a fair few high end CPU's though as TF said due to the brand name.

I meant on pricing. Of course they will compete on brand name but people are waking up.

ED E

Intels shareholders are used to a certain level of return. They could slash prices further and compete aggressively with AMD but they'd go from huge profits to rather normal levels. Still profits, but a lot less.

Kinda like Cisco, bought Linksys, improved profits but not by enough PA to keep shareholders happy, so they shed them again.

BloodBath

AMD's design is also completely scalable. They can keep slapping on more quad core units there and increasing the socket size to accommodate and heat won't be a problem but you will need some custom cooling solutions. As it stands there are 0 coolers on the market to cool that threadripper.

I'm not sure what the naples configuration is. I think it's 2 x 16 core units.

ED E

Cuddlesworth

I'm curious as to the cost. I'd be tempted to purchase one

dazberry

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

I'm curious as to the cost. I'd be tempted to purchase one

There's are rumours floating around as to the "entry level" R9 1998 - 16 core (3.2 / 3.6) coming in around $850. There are also rumours of 9 Threadripper SKUs, so I reckon everything will just follow on to some degree from the Ryzen prices. The cost of the motherboards - that's a whole other ball game!!?

Icyseanfitz

16 core is entry level? id assume thats the highest they go tbh. Although could you imagine the **** storm if they came out with a 20 core/40 thread for 1000 haha. The tech world would implode