AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[DanceswithUnix]

Ooooh, it *is* pretty, isn't it.

I see they have an A8-6500 based one, but it is nearly twice the price (a chunck of which will be Windows 8).

http://www.ebuyer.com/567271-acer-as...c-dt-sr9ek-006

[scaryjim]

Well, there's the extra 2GB RAM and the upgrade from 500GB to 1TB as well. That's not a bad little system for < £300...

Then again, I (well, mostly the wife ) only paid just over £400 for an HP laptop with the A10 4600, 8GB and 1TB. Not to mention the 3 older computers in the house that all have around that level of performance (in real terms, anyway). I really don't need any new computers in the near future...

[Biscuit]

If they were in the net-top style PC box i think i would consider one just to add to my collection of pointless PCs that i will one day find a use for... but thats a bit bigger than i would like.

I wish they would release micro ITX board based ones for us to use in our own cases

[DanceswithUnix]

Rumours of 128 bit ARM cpus? lol.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/33...misses-128-bit

Probably comes from some misunderstanding. I remember people calling the original Pentium a 64 bit CPU just because it had a 64 bit wide front side bus.

[scaryjim]

128bit FPU perhaps? I believe both Intel and AMD have been able to support up to 256bit floating point operations in hardware for some time now...?

[watercooled]

Yeah I read about that here and laughed a bit. Definitely sounds like some sort of misunderstanding, maybe they saw the number 128 in reference to SIMD registers or something?

Edit: or maybe a memory controller? Could be a load of things really.

[watercooled]

BF4 is not "most games". A few recent game engines have started utilising multi-core systems well, but only in the last couple of years. Plenty of people still play and enjoy games that are a lot older than that (after all, my favourite game, NWN, needed a patch to stop it performing significantly *worse* on multicore systems....).

TBF the 'most games' bit is probably literally true, but given the context it sounds misleading IMO. The big games that actually come close to being CPU-demanding are increasingly multithreaded, it doesn't really matter if Solitaire doesn't scale well to 8 threads.

On the subject of MC, I'm not sure if it's MC, the mods, or JVM to blame, but there seems to be some terrible memory leak - regardless of JVM memory parameters, memory use will keep climbing until Windows complains of low memory i.e. easily >6GB, forcing a restart. Of course, performance isn't exactly stellar as-is.

[CountBartok]

Bit-Tech continue too ignore AMD produce cpu's in there battle field 4 performance test:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...nce-analysis/1
Any thoughts on the cpu section: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...nce-analysis/8 disabling one or two cores having little impact?

[watercooled]

I'm loving their wide selection of CPU benchmarks,
3570k
3570k
3570k
3570k
...

[scaryjim]

I guess the point is they claim to have seen no reduction in performance when "disabling" certain cores of the i5. Personally, I suspect either recording error or methodology error, because claiming BF4 runs as well with a 2 thread CPU as with a 4 thread is entirely contrary to everything else that's been written and published about BF4 (AFAIK, anyway).

[ik9000]

Bit-Tech continue too ignore AMD produce cpu's in there battle field 4 performance test:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...nce-analysis/1
Any thoughts on the cpu section: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...nce-analysis/8 disabling one or two cores having little impact?

they state 2 cores prob not a good idea for multiplayer. Which is outside the scope of their test....

benchmarks are for different core configurations of the same CPU so yes, all are 3570k.

[ik9000]

I guess the point is they claim to have seen no reduction in performance when "disabling" certain cores of the i5. Personally, I suspect either recording error or methodology error, because claiming BF4 runs as well with a 2 thread CPU as with a 4 thread is entirely contrary to everything else that's been written and published about BF4 (AFAIK, anyway).

unless the single player just isn't that CPU intensive. Let's see them do it on a 64 player map and see what happens. Sure repeatability a little harder, but I will volunteer to be a warehouse LAN guineapig to help in a large scale test using a LAN server. Assuming BF4 still has that option. They seemed to overlook it for BF3

[Biscuit]

unless the single player just isn't that CPU intensive. Let's see them do it on a 64 player map and see what happens. Sure repeatability a little harder, but I will volunteer to be a warehouse LAN guineapig to help in a large scale test using a LAN server. Assuming BF4 still has that option. They seemed to overlook it for BF3

Exact repeatability is difficult, but that's science! You just need to get enough results to ensure there are no anomalies that seriously impact your results.

I think its an extremely valuable point though because the single player in BF4 is worthless, its all about the multi player!

[watercooled]

http://techreport.com/news/25702/zot...owered-mini-pc

I wonder if we'll start to see Kabini products on the electronic shelf any time soon?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It looks like Intel might be not selling as many tablet SOCs as they want:

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20131127PD207.html

Intel to use TSMC:

https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/conte...l-fail-ii.html

Really??

[watercooled]

Is it just me or does pushing 'free' SoCs to OEMs, and the 'subsidies' mentioned, sound legally iffy? Isn't that the sort of thing that they were successfully sued by AMD for?