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Thread: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by shaithis View Post
    The 6300 should really be the first AMD CPU in that list and is still amazing VFM for a great deal of users.
    I've got a FX6300, it's fantastic for day to day use and has lasted me 3 years with a massive overclock on air cooling with no problems.

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix View Post
    Asrock seem to be doing some new motherboards as well. I have often gnashed teeth at the lack of good uATX motherboards for AM3+, but now I see there is http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970M%20Pro3/
    Nice board but no IGP, of course. It'd take someone like ASRock to have the courage to make an mATX board that *needs* a dGPU. Paired with an 8370e and a Nano that'd make one hell of a DX12/Vulkan gaming rig...

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Looking at those block diagrams properly, I am very happy as a developer to see that we are getting true 8-lane wide hardware in this generation. Whilst Bulldozer onwards have supported the AVX extensions the FP unit was only properly 128-bit wide so only 4 32-bits or 2 64-bit data types at a time. The simulation work i'm involved in wields quite a lot of 3+D vector calculus and while we revert to 32-bit floats where possible to cram one vector per SIMD op it'd be really nice to be able to use doubles and not lose any significant throughput.

    Our standard compute server is a 4 * 16 core Bulldozer chips (we combine up to 4 of these servers) and some of the floating point paths in not frequently parallelised algorithms are frequently beaten by my 15W TDP Haswell MacBook Air which makes me sad.

    Hardware with true 256-bit intrinsic support throughout would push me to using doubles everywhere and let us remove some rather dodgy precision hacks in places. Next wish from AMD: give me something like IACA to give me a way to micro-tune critical algorithm paths please

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    SkyNet Confirmed

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by Goobley View Post
    I believe the FX chips are so high up because they have a high nominal frequency and core count for the cost, which makes them very attractive to people who judge on those numbers rather than benchmarks.
    Hmm, I think you're being a tad unfair there - as I've said above there's definitely still applications where the spread of many, high-clocked cores of an old AMD processor beats the more efficient/modern Intel. Heck, in my own household we've stopped using the SB i5's for Handbrake "rips" because my (much older) AMD 1090T can pretty much do them in half the time. In which case a more contemporary FX8250 would be amazing. I'm sure Cat could do "chapter and verse" on where AMD's offering are better...
    Quote Originally Posted by Goobley View Post
    Looking at those block diagrams properly, I am very happy as a developer to see that we are getting true 8-lane wide hardware in this generation. Whilst Bulldozer onwards have supported the AVX extensions the FP unit was only properly 128-bit wide so only 4 32-bits or 2 64-bit data types at a time. The simulation work i'm involved in wields quite a lot of 3+D vector calculus and while we revert to 32-bit floats where possible to cram one vector per SIMD op it'd be really nice to be able to use doubles and not lose any significant throughput.
    Pardon my ignorance (last time I did vector calculus dev Intel was having trouble getting their chips to add up properly and the ole "Top supercomputers in the world" list was pretty much a Cray exclusive club), but wouldn't using graphics cards as compute engines be better - not only better FP hardware, but also dedicated vector units? Or at least according to the ex-colleagues who are still in that area (CAE). I'm just being nosy... (and a bit nostalgic for better times).

    Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by scaryjim View Post
    Nice board but no IGP, of course. It'd take someone like ASRock to have the courage to make an mATX board that *needs* a dGPU. Paired with an 8370e and a Nano that'd make one hell of a DX12/Vulkan gaming rig...
    A low wattage part? Meh, my wife has a 125W PhenomII 965 BE in a uATX chassis, so cramming my 125W FX8350 in there doesn't seem much worse

    Perhaps one day I will think integrated graphics is worth having, but I won't hold my breath.

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Anything integer/logic the current generation of AMD chips scream through. I love running bits of code like that through them.

    Quote Originally Posted by crossy View Post
    Pardon my ignorance (last time I did vector calculus dev Intel was having trouble getting their chips to add up properly and the ole "Top supercomputers in the world" list was pretty much a Cray exclusive club), but wouldn't using graphics cards as compute engines be better - not only better FP hardware, but also dedicated vector units? Or at least according to the ex-colleagues who are still in that area (CAE). I'm just being nosy... (and a bit nostalgic for better times).
    GPGPU would almost certainly be the best way to go about modern vector work. But we don't really have the kit for it or any programmers trained in it. The majority of our researchers are also tied to IDL which will thread array calculations but not put them into a GPU kernel. It'd be nice to use GPGPU but I don't currently have the time or budget to spend on it. Plus, I can't imagine what the slowdown for 128-bit floating points calculations in GPU code is, given the often at least 4x slowdown going from 32-bit to 64-bit (if the kernels support this at all).

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix View Post
    A low wattage part? Meh, my wife has a 125W PhenomII 965 BE in a uATX chassis, so cramming my 125W FX8350 in there doesn't seem much worse
    I was thinking more for the voltage binning and overclocking potential

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by Goobley View Post
    GPGPU would almost certainly be the best way to go about modern vector work. But we don't really have the kit for it or any programmers trained in it. [...]
    Thanks for the info - so much for those smart alecs who keep telling me that "OpenCL is where it's at". Then again I remember having to hand-parallelize and vectorize code for a Cray Y-MP, so maybe I'm just too old to understand...

    Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    I don't want to buy into the hype yet. It would be very welcome, but high expectations is half the equation to disappointment

    I wonder if AMD has any ambition in challenging Intel in the laptop market though, and whether Zen can do it.

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    The 8350 really isn't a bad cpu - so long as you don't care about its power draw. For the money it's actually pretty ridiculously good value and will handily beat an i5 in a lot of stuff.

    I think the main issue with them is that no gamer with basically any i5 would swap to one, and that's a lot of people. Intel are kinda finding the same issue with those of us who stubbornly refuse to upgrade on Sandy Bridge.

    It's gonna take 8 good cores and a reasonable price, or 4 cores + HT at a reasonable price before I even think about a new CPU, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one thinking that.

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    I do hope Zen brings consumers a major performance boost and AMD some good fortune. AMD of the last 10 years has been about coming late to the party, matching their competition and some cases beating it by small fractions then the competition releases their next gen putting AMD behind by a year again.
    They need to change their philosophy back to early 00's and not only need to meet the competition but smash it. Intel has trickle fed updates since Nehalem and could have quite easily released better CPUs but they've been graced with little competition for too long milking minor updates. 9 years on and they're still only 4 core on mainstream with no sight of change...
    AMD do at least sit closer to nVidia with their GPUs but still always late to the party

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by AGTDenton View Post
    I do hope Zen brings consumers a major performance boost and AMD some good fortune. AMD of the last 10 years has been about coming late to the party, matching their competition and some cases beating it by small fractions then the competition releases their next gen putting AMD behind by a year again.
    They need to change their philosophy back to early 00's and not only need to meet the competition but smash it. Intel has trickle fed updates since Nehalem and could have quite easily released better CPUs but they've been graced with little competition for too long milking minor updates. 9 years on and they're still only 4 core on mainstream with no sight of change...
    AMD do at least sit closer to nVidia with their GPUs but still always late to the party
    Until independent fabs can hit Intel like cadences,AMD will always have one hand tied behind their back when it comes to CPUs.

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    At this point I don't believe a word that AMD says. All the hype and bs coming from them before a new product release only for the product to be meh or just rubbish has made me lose all faith in them. I really hope (and we really need them to be competitive) they can turn it around with Zen but I shall wait until they actually launch before getting interested.

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by DizConnected View Post
    Lets hope they develop an awesome chipset to go along with the amazing CPUs/APUs/GPUs coming next year!
    Last I heard Asmedia where designing future Amd chipsets. http://www.kitguru.net/components/cp...g-deal-report/

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    Re: Zen developers were given "total freedom," says AMD engineer

    Quote Originally Posted by CountBartok View Post
    Last I heard Asmedia where designing future Amd chipsets. http://www.kitguru.net/components/cp...g-deal-report/
    Well, theres the first turn-off already

    I've had motherbaords with ASMedia SATA and USB chips and they have had some of the flakiest drivers ever.....
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