
AMD Launches Carrizo - hanifvirani
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9319/amd-launches-carrizo-the-laptop-leap-of-efficiency-and-architecture-updates
======
nimos
I wonder if stagnating CPU requirements might make AMD competitive again.

I have a 4 year old i5 laptop that can handle 100% of general office/home use.
Battery life and gaming are the only two weak points. AMD aren't going to
compete with Intel on battery life but with overall cpu/gpu power consumption
falling it's not as big of a problem as it used to be.

Wish they weren't stuck on 28nm still. It seems like Intel will be pushing 10
before they get down to 20/22... Maybe I'm just nostalgic of my overclocked
Athlon 64 but I'd love to see AMD make a comeback and the nm gap between AMD
and Intel just seems like kneecapping the underdog.

Realistically they are going to be launching this against Skylake and I can't
help but think all the advantages they are promoting are going to get
nullified by that. (HEVC and gaming performance)

~~~
pbowyer
> It seems like Intel will be pushing 10 before they get down to 20/22...

Intel seem to be struggling though, with shrinking not working out as they
planned. They've missed one upgrade-round with the delay to Broadwell, and if
the rumours are correct and they're releasing a couple of CPUs and then
jumping to Skylake - that's quite a hit to ROI given the investment they've
put in to an 'unused' chip family IMO.

~~~
kayoone
Broadwell was delayed but Skylake is well on track. While there are not many
Broadwell Desktop CPUs worth buying right now (Core i7-5775C and i5-5675C
offer superb perf/watt though, especially the iGPU) the new round of mobile
CPUs is still impressive and will certainly sell well before skylake comes
around.

~~~
walterbell
Is Skylake on track for laptop OEMs to ship new devices in 2015?

Lenovo released Broadwell laptops in Q1, it is hard to believe they will
release Skylake before 2016.

~~~
kayoone
For all we know it looks like it
[http://www.3dcenter.org/dateien/abbildungen/Intel-
Prozessore...](http://www.3dcenter.org/dateien/abbildungen/Intel-Prozessoren-
Roadmap-2015-2016.vorschau2.png)

------
ausjke
These days when I read news like this, my first response is that, does AMD
have any chance to survive at all? The technical details for any new chip is
secondary.

Dr.Su did not have a good tracking record and I never got it why she was
picked as the CEO, but it's not all her fault though, AMD has been in decline
for years, I just hope someone will buy it before it totally collapses.

Additionally, Intel is battling with ARM/Samsung etc and the need for AMD as a
competitor(i.e. to avoid monopoly litigation) is gone too.

Sigh.

~~~
lewisl9029
I'd have thought that the XBox One and PS4 GPU deals would have given them
quite a boost, but it seems like they're still struggling these days.

Can anyone enlighten me on why those deals might not be helping as much as I
thought they would?

~~~
SXX
> Can anyone enlighten me on why those deals might not be helping as much as I
> thought they would?

Good explanation may be found there:
[http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-
ps4...](http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4-because-
console-margins-are-terrible) "Two years ago, in January 2011, Nvidia CEO Jen-
Hsun Huang told reporters that the Sony-Nvidia deal had earned Nvidia $500M in
royalties since 2004. The total number of shipped PS3 consoles by March, 2011
stood at 50 million according to data from the NPD group."

~~~
lewisl9029
Thanks for the link.

I did think margins on any console GPU deal would probably be slim, but I
didn't know it could be _that_ slim. Seeing some hard numbers really helped.

------
c3d
Peak 3D performance does not matter.

With Tao3D, I keep pushing graphic cards to their limit, on laptops and
desktops. This raymarching example
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUMqT9W5BG8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUMqT9W5BG8)
runs fine on my Macbook Pro for about 20 seconds. After that, the heat becomes
high enough to throttle the system down. And you end up with a very unpleasant
"fast/slow/fast/slow/fast/slow" experience as the system tries to cool down
its graphic chip.

So you really don't care about PEAK performance. What you care about is
sustained performance, and power consumption in that scenario (not just
running idle).

------
BuckRogers
As a programmer, I have high hopes for HSA. I wish Intel would adopt it or
join the HSA consortium and get onboard. That would push APUs forward for
everyone.

~~~
bjwbell
Intel's pushing OpenCL, which seems to me gives most of the advantages of HSA.

OpenCL 2.0 includes unified CPU & GPU virtual addresses (SVM - shared virtual
memory).

~~~
pmalynin
And so does CUDA, which usually out-performs OpenCL, plus the tooling for CUDA
is just so much better with the Visual Studio integration.

~~~
glogla
Yes, but CUDA is Nvidia only - another trick in their anti-competitive bag.

I always get disappointed when I see something that CUDA specific. "Hey that's
interesting machine learning package! Oh wait, that's Nvidia specific."

With OpenCL, you can develop on laptop, test on workstation and deploy on
actual servers. With CUDA, you're trapped.

~~~
m_mueller
> With OpenCL, you can develop on laptop, test on workstation and deploy on
> actual servers. With CUDA, you're trapped.

GPGPU developers usually prefer hardware with Nvidia GPUs inside, so you can
do all this too. I wouldn't call Nvidia anti competitive, just like I wouldn't
use that word for Apple. They saw a niche (HPC/smartphones) when no one
thought that market to be attractive, jumped in with proprietary technology
that others later tried to reproduce (OpenCL/Android) and they kept the market
leadership in terms of profits by reiterating their product.

------
hippo8
AMD has to stop naming their products like this.

I mean look at Intel, i3,i5,i7. I can at-least guess which one's better.

Yes I do understand that Intel too has many different names that caters to
different markets, yet somehow Intel’s names are far more easier for me to
understand, they are far more shorter, and if I want more details about the
processor I can read what’s after the "Intel-i7-xxxx" and figure what it is.

I really want to see AMD succeed, I want to have more options when I want to
buy a processor.

~~~
_pmf_
> I mean look at Intel, i3,i5,i7. I can at-least guess which one's better.

If you're assuming i7 to be better than i5, you're wrong. Single core clock
matters. Some games are barely playable with a low clock i7, but work
perfectly on a high clocked i5.

~~~
kayoone
yeah, because games are all that matters to people on HN. Besides, a i7 4790K
runs at 4Ghz and up to 4.4Ghz (Single Core Turbo) natively while having 4 full
cores, show me a i5 that can beat it in games (non overclocked of course).
Sure some lower clocked i7 might be slower than some i5s in certain tasks, but
those are obviously still better at multi threaded tasks than an i5.

------
hanifvirani
They are also going to debut their new 300 series GPUs with HBM in two weeks
at E3.
[https://twitter.com/AMDRadeon/status/605938931448737792](https://twitter.com/AMDRadeon/status/605938931448737792)

~~~
kayoone
The 300 Series will be slightly improved repackaged 200 Series chips without
HBM though. They will announce one really new chip (Fiji based) with HBM
memory and a different name to compete with the 980Ti/Titan X enthusiast cards
though.

------
venomsnake
> AMD Secure Processor

Can anyone explain how this works and why should a user want it? It seems like
a DRM on your device.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
You could use it for DRM, yes, but that's not the sole use. The point is to
put cryptographic keys and secret information somewhere out of direct reach of
the CPU, to keep it more secure. An an example: Apple's iPhone stores all
fingerprint data exclusively in its secure module.

~~~
venomsnake
Somebody other than the user to put it there. Because if user puts it there,
he can read it too. Or is there something I don't understand?

~~~
bryanlarsen
No, it's write-only. You can ask "does this fingerprint match the one I stored
earlier?", but you can't read out the original fingerprint.

------
afsina
Lack of VP9 support is bad for Youtube (and Google). I wonder if it would be
too hard to support both codecs.

~~~
threeseed
VP9 was always going to be dead in the water. There are just too many
influential companies part of the MPEG-LA to compete with. With Netflix,
Amazon and Apple moving to HVEC and the PS/XBox refresh rumored to have HVEC
support there is simply too much content: legal and illegal to bother with
adding VP9 support.

Plus is anyone expecting a lot of YouTube 4K content ?

~~~
ac29
>VP9 was always going to be dead in the water.

What? Youtube has >70% of the online video market, and primarily uses VP9 [0].
To be fair, VP9 isnt commonly used outside of google, but to discount the
market leader in online video as "dead" is disingenuous at best.

[0] [http://www.statista.com/statistics/266201/us-market-share-
of...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/266201/us-market-share-of-leading-
internet-video-portals/)

~~~
threeseed
YouTube doesn't primarly use VP9. It uses H.264 on iOS, Safari, IE, Flash,
Consoles, TVs and a lot of Android devices. Those combined are a sizeable
amount of traffic.

And I would argue that the driver of higher end content e.g. 1080p, 4K is not
going to come from YouTube but from Netflix, Amazon, Apple and illegal content
which a lot of people watch on consoles.

Nothing has fundamentally changed to see this being anything other than a
repeat of what happened with H.264/VP9.

~~~
ac29
You're right, it is more complicated than I assumed. I use Chrome/Linux where
nearly 100% of videos are served VP9. According to this [0] 61-69% of browsers
support VP9, but I cant find a good source as to what percentage of youtube is
actually served with VP9.

However, in the last year 25,000,000,000 hours of VP9 video have been served
on youtube [1]. Maybe this is a minority of web video, but its hardly dead.

[0] [http://caniuse.com/#search=vp9](http://caniuse.com/#search=vp9)

[1] [http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better-
bu...](http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better-buffer-free-
youtube.html)

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joelthelion
Not a word on Linux support, of course.

