
AMD's next-gen Zen CPU heading to desktops, servers in 2016 - geoffgasior
http://techreport.com/review/28228/amd-zen-chips-headed-to-desktops-servers-in-2016
======
mreiland
I've been an AMD guy for years, mostly because I was a poor college student
when they were getting their start, and AMD had the best bang for your buck
around.

Fast forward and my last purchase was an Intel for the first time in my life
for no other reason that AMD just couldn't keep up, not even in the same
realm.

Lo and behold if they do this again I'm going to regret not waiting a bit for
the upgrade :) I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for AMD and I'm
rooting for them. Even if that sounds a bit silly :)

~~~
pjmlp
> Fast forward and my last purchase was an Intel for the first time in my life
> for no other reason that AMD just couldn't keep up, not even in the same
> realm.

How happy are you with your Intel GPU?

~~~
kijin
He could be using an nvidia graphics card (or two, or three) for all we know,
making the GPU comparison totally irrelevant.

~~~
pjmlp
It is not irrelevant, because AMD's integrated CPU/GPUs dies still beat
Intel's offering, hence my question.

~~~
reitzensteinm
It's quite hard for me to picture an enthusiast that pays the premium to get
the best single thread performance, does not already own an external graphics
card, and is then unhappy with what Intel HD graphics provides but would have
been fine with the extra sliver of performance of an AMD APU.

If you're maxing out your processor, both graphics options are either going to
be more than sufficient for desktop use or woefully inadequate for games and
compute.

Maybe this will change with AMD's recent HBM announcement.

~~~
mreiland
You're spot on. I still game, although not as enthusiastically as I did in the
past. The extra horsepower of my GPU probably isn't strictly necessary for
what I do, but Tim Allen.

------
vardump
It's been a long time since I was last excited what AMD has to offer.
Hopefully this puts AMD back on the map, the x86 market needs a second strong
contender. I might choose AMD for that reason alone, if they get within 20%
ballpark of Intel IPC. Especially Skylake comparable AVX-512 performance would
be good.

I also hope they'll put some more effort in Catalyst drivers. Had pretty
horrible experience under Ubuntu 15.04 recently...

~~~
tbirdz
Don't get your hopes up about AVX-512. Apparently, full support is not coming
until Cannonlake: [http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-
sky...](http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-skylake-
processors-for-pcs-will-not-support-avx-512-instructions/)

~~~
vardump
That's only true for Intel Skylake mobile/desktop CPUs. I find desktop and
mobile offerings too unreliable for anything serious, due to lack of ECC
support. Data corruption on non-ECC systems has bitten me more than once. I've
learned my lesson.

Skylake Xeons — the only Intel chips I'm interested in anyways — on the other
hand will support AVX-512. The software I'm writing already has rudimentary
support for AVX-512. The prospect of processing 64 of 16 bit elements per
clock cycle per core is pretty exciting. 32x per instruction (512/16) and 2x
comes hopefully from dual issue.

Besides, we're talking about AMD chips here, aren't we?

~~~
tadfisher
How did you verify you were bitten my memory corruption?

~~~
vardump
By analyzing the end result. Apparently single bit corruption is not that
uncommon. It's striking what it does to a CBC encrypted stream...

~~~
raverbashing
It might be (more) common if: your BIOS has a wonky config (memory timings),
not enough cooling or not a great PSU

I wouldn't do 'hard work' on a machine that doesn't pass a Prime95 and Memtest
(or similar programs) run.

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largote
I hope they at least catch up to Intel, we need good healthy competition to
keep things interesting in the x86 CPU market.

~~~
bluedino
ARM is doing a pretty good job of keeping Intel honest, at least in the
portable market.

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PedroBatista
I wish the 40% IPC raise is true and bring their CPUs into i7 territory.

I'm an AMD "fan", but we all know how AMD is all bold claims 1-2 years before
release date, and when the time comes.. well if they deliver half of that it's
already a win.

~~~
tormeh
They deliver half the performance increase at best and they're 6 months late.
It's how they roll...

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manigandham
Has anyone here bought AMD cpus recently? Either for
home/work/enterprise/anywhere? Is there a market they still have an advantage
in currently?

~~~
pjmlp
Yes if you care about 3D programming, their GPUs run circles around Intel,
which still doesn't know how to write proper drivers.

Maybe it fails your definition of recently, but I bought an Asus Netbook
around three years ago and am quite happy with it.

The current generation of the said model is Eee PC 1215B with an AMD Brazos
and integrated ATI Radeon HD 6310* or 6320*.

~~~
fulafel
Maybe on Windows, on Linux the Intel drivers are best by far.

~~~
pjmlp
I guess you don't spend too much time on OpenGL developer forums.

~~~
bandrami
No, but if you spend a lot of times on OpenGL software _user_ fora, you'll see
that Intel is far and away the least headache-inducing graphics option on
Linux and the only realistic option on the BSDs.

~~~
pjmlp
So has Intel stop lying about OpenGL features supported in hardware via the
driver API queries, for example?

NVidia does support FreeBSD quite good.

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dmitrygr
I would love to see some details on how they plan to get their IPC raised by
40%

That is a bold claim!

~~~
leetNightshade
If you see the jump Intel made by switching to HT you wouldn't think it to be
a bold claim. Look at the first gen i7 compared to it's predecessor. So, AMD
added SMT, 3D transistors, improved caching, etc. But yeah, more details would
be much appreciated. I can't wait to see a diagram breaking down the
architecture layout.

I'm not surprised of the jump, I've been waiting for AMD to make such a jump
so they could try to keep up with Intel's horsepower.

~~~
oofabz
Is HT hyperthreading? Why would that help AMD, when Bulldozer already does
hyperthreading?

~~~
the_ancient
Bulldozer is "Clustered Mutithreading". HyperThreading from Intel is SMT
(Simultaneous multithreading)

Zen I believe will be SMT not CMT.

~~~
gnoway
To expand on this - the Bulldozer FPU is supposed to be SMT, but the integer
cores are single threaded; two integer cores share an FPU, making a 'module'.

This is apparently the same scheme that DEC used with one of the Alphas. It's
interesting that as respected as (I think) the Alpha was, both Intel
(Netburst) and AMD (CMT) tried to adapt aspects of the design and it seems
that in both cases it hurt their respective businesses.

~~~
rodgerd
There was a similar distinction between the SPARC T1/T2s and the UltraSPARCs.

------
ant6n
AMD and Intel used to compete. It appeared neck-and-neck at times. Now AMD has
1.1% of the market cap of Intel. And that's with AMD also competing with
Nvidia on graphics. Ouch.

~~~
frik
Both current gen consoles are based on AMD hardware (APU aka CPU+GPU
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit)
).

"PlayStation 4 features an AMD x86-64 Accelerated Processing Unit, in hopes of
attracting a broader range of developers and support for the system. The
PlayStation 4's GPU can perform 1.843 teraflops. Sony calls the PlayStation 4
'the world's most powerful console'." \--
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4)

"The console [XBoxOne] features an AMD processor built around the x86-64
instruction set." \--
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One)

~~~
rsynnott
Both previous-gen ones had consumer-level PowerPC processors made by IBM, a
product category which no longer even exists, so I wouldn't put too much
importance on that.

------
tormeh
I'll buy Intel next time just because my impression is that their motherboards
play nicer with Linux. If you run Linux, intel+nvidia seems unavoidable.

~~~
sambe
nvidia in terms of binary driver? i was under the impression that AMD open
source driver is better than nvidia open source. Also under the impression
that AMD open source approach is much better (releasing much more internal
stuff, co-operating).

~~~
tormeh
I'm not really all that pro-open source when it comes to drivers. I kinda view
that as part of the proprietary product, and I don't care much about whether
it's open source or not.

------
las_cases
AMD's issues have mostly boiled down to single thread performance as well as
power consumption. I am not sure how exactly simultaneous multithreading will
help in single thread scenarios.

As for the 40% performance improvement, I don't know if people remember but
AMD's K10 (Barcelona/Phenom) was so hyped, hardware forums at that time (2007)
exploded with fictional test showing outrages numbers. Bulldozer sadly had
been for quite some time even slower that K10.

I have never owned an Intel CPU and I hope I will never have to buy one just
because there will be no one else to buy from. :(

------
UK-AL
I remember AMD being so good in the Pentium 4 era. Hopefully they get back to
that level.

~~~
frik
I had both Intel and AMD computers in that era. Afaik, AMD K7 Athlon had more
MHz/GHz, run on less power (Watt) and were cheaper at that time than the Intel
Pentium 4. But performance wise both were almost equal and the Pentium 4 3GHz
model introduced the HT (HyperThreading) technology (multithreading
performance). Athlon 64 on the other hand were the first x86-64 CPUs.

~~~
greggyb
The AMD special sauce back in those days was not raw clock speed, but IPC. AMD
would market an Athlon 2400 e.g., clocked significantly below 2.4GHz, but
roughly comparable in terms of performance to a 2.4GHz Pentium.

This, combined with a lower price point, is what made AMD chips so desirable.
I do not recall power consumption.

It's interesting that in the course of <10 years, the positions flip-flopped,
and Intel's architecture dominated AMD in IPC and power consumption, making
price AMD's primary weapon in the CPU battles. There is also a small draw from
AMD's construction equipment being much more clock-happy than Intel's current
offerings, so some enthusiasts only concerned with clock speed still preferred
AMD in recent times.

The primary benefit is that you can put together an entire system based on one
of AMD's top offerings right now for less than Intel's best CPUs cost. AMD is
strictly a budget option currently.

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agumonkey
At this point it's a surprise to see AMD able to bounce again. They're strong
survivors, always late but still going. Impressive and kind of dramatic at the
same time.

~~~
greglindahl
Companies are buying AMD CPUs/APUs for low-end products just to use as a
negotiating tactic with Intel. It sets a floor to AMDs sales.

~~~
agumonkey
The jealousy lever, better than nothing.

------
arthursilva
Hopefully this will put AMD back on the (real) map, nothing good can come from
continuous Intel monopoly.

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jmnicolas
I see a lot of enthusiasm in the comments but until we have real world
benchmarks it's only 'marketeasing'.

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stefantalpalaru
This comes a couple of years too late in the game, but I'll probably use their
new Zen FX in a desktop build just to encourage an alternative to Intel.

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travjones
AMD was the ish back in the day. Remember the Athlon 64?

