AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[watercooled]

I didn't buy 10nm in 2016 for one minute but it seems like Kaby Lake was true after all. http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/201...s-law-falters/

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Wow,14NM Braswell looks crap:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/imprimer/936/

Imagine if AMD had access to a newer process node,and Intel was not literally giving away their Atom CPUs??

[Pullock]

Braswell? Looking at that it's not surprising that I've never heard it.

[ik9000]

Braswell? Looking at that it's not surprising that I've never heard it.

ok, infantile I know, but how the heck did "bra-swell" get through a corporate branding committee?

It will be interesting to see whether the increase in sales from Ann Summers' IT buying dept outweighs the loss of sales from people having it blocked by over-sensitive net nanny firewalls when searching for it online

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

NBC tested the A10-8700P:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Pavi....147794.0.html

Compared to Kaveri it looks a decent improvement,even if the laptop is somewhat bugged and only runs the RAM at 1333MHZ.

It seems AMD is using a configurable TDP of between 15W to 35W with Carrizo and many OEMs are choosing the former.

Plus some benchmarks from The Stilt:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1560230/j...#post_24279106
http://www.overclock.net/t/1560230/j...#post_24282962

Some notes on the power management:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1560230/j...#post_24287228

[stephen0205]

i hope one day amd can go back to the glory days but i don't see it ever happening

[watercooled]

Something I've wondered for a while but don't recall seeing a convincing answer to, is why aren't Atom processors used over their Atom-based (Bay Trail/Braswell) Celeron/Pentium counterparts more often in things like SFF systems and laptops? From what I can see the Atoms tend to have fewer features disabled and are vastly cheaper despite similar clock speeds.

Is it just an artificial restriction put in place that Atom processors simply aren't allowed to be used in those segments or something? I suppose Atom might have things like PCIe lanes disabled but they're not always necessary.

For example have a look at the list of Airmont processors and their prices here (sourced from ARK): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver...ont_processors

It almost seems like Intel are trying to put people off buying the PC versions of their Atom line. Bizarrely, the Haswell Celerons are cheaper than the Atom versions! How does that work?

[kalniel]

Something I've wondered for a while but don't recall seeing a convincing answer to, is why aren't Atom processors used over their Celeron/Pentium counterparts more often in things like SFF systems and laptops? From what I can see the Atoms tend to have fewer features disabled and are vastly cheaper despite similar clock speeds.

Is it just an artificial restriction put in place that Atom processors simply aren't allowed to be used in those segments or something? I suppose Atom might have things like PCIe lanes disabled but they're not always necessary.

For example have a look at the list of Airmont processors and their prices here (sourced from ARK): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver...ont_processors

It almost seems like Intel are trying to put people off buying the PC versions of their Atom line. Bizarrely, the Haswell Celerons are cheaper than the Atom versions! How does that work?

Atoms are available in NUCs and Netbooks, but they really are incredibly slow.

[0100001]

Atoms are available in NUCs and Netbooks, but they really are incredibly slow.

I quite agree I got a foxconn mini pc with an atom processor to use with my TV, but gave up when it couldn't cope with youtube

[watercooled]

Atoms are available in NUCs and Netbooks, but they really are incredibly slow.

Double check what I said; the same Atom-based dies go into both Atom-branded along with Celeron and Pentium branded processors. The architecture is identical and in many cases the clock speed and performance are very similar.

The point is that, despite the similarity, Atom-branded parts are significantly cheaper and yet rarely find themselves in more PC-like devices. More recent NUCs and (most) netbooks actually use the Celeron/Pentium branded parts rather than Atoms - you find Atoms in tablets or convertibles like the Surface.

Edit: OK perhaps I wasn't too clear in my first post - by Celeron/Pentium counterparts I meant the Atom-based e.g. Bay Trail Celerons/Pentiums rather than the big-core ones. Just edited the post for clarity.

[watercooled]

Some news about TSMC (assuming it's all true): http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20150824PD205.html

First, AMD is listed there so I guess that implies the FinFET GPUs. Of course there's also a chance it's console die shrinks or something else.

LG is listed and considering I've been seeing rumours popping up about Nuclun, we could be about to see another competitor pop up in the mobile space. Definitely a bold move by LG.

Also mentioned is Qualcomm going with Samsung for the 820. I've also just read a rumour of Samsung using a Qualcomm application processor again for its next flagship, so that would likely be a mutually beneficial move - Qualcomm gets a big contract back and Samsung gets a large volume of wafers through its fabs. However, the rumours around Samsung's custom cores have been doing the rounds again lately so I wonder where that leaves them? Maybe that's just further away than Qualcomm's 820?

[watercooled]

Back to my posts about Atom vs the equivalent PC parts.

Comparing the specs of say the Atom x7 and Pentium N3700, the only major differences in terms of functionality seem to be that the Atom version has the SATA and Ethernet controllers fused off, and only 2 PCIe lanes instead of 4 (so even adding the functionality back via PCIe controllers would be tricky).

So it looks like that's how Intel is keeping the cheaper Atom SKUs out of things like PCs and laptops, by limiting connectivity options.

[DanceswithUnix]

So it looks like that's how Intel is keeping the cheaper Atom SKUs out of things like PCs and laptops, by limiting connectivity options.

Intel need to do better though, when the Nvidia X1 gets often benchmarks closer to i3 than Atom: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tegra-x1&num=3

... and that isn't the fastest ARM chip out there by a long shot.

[watercooled]

Yeah I was just curious why the cheaper Atom SKUs are so rarely used in PC-type devices. I think I've seen a couple of netbooks using them instead of the more common Celeon/Pentium SKUs but given the fairly significant price difference for what is essentially the same CPU, I expected to see is more often especially in things like the NUC. But I guess we know why now - a PC without SATA/Ethernet and only 2 PCIe lanes (at least one of which would probably be taken up by WiFi) might be a hard sell.

[watercooled]

Interesting, according to David Kanter in this podcast, the client versions of the Skylake core are physically different to the server parts in that the AVX512 unit isn't actually present on-die, it's not just fused off. I guess it must be a fairly sizeable unit and with limited client use in order to create separate cores for the server side.

However, I wonder where that leaves Xeon E3, as it usually shares a die with the client parts?

[DanceswithUnix]

Athlon 880K incoming, 4.0GHz base clock:

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/process...-spec-revealed

Seems I was on holiday when the 7890K leaked out so that was news to me as well!