AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[scaryjim]

Can you think of a better way to revitalise the PC industry than to have lots of cheap-ass Chinese laptops and desktops flood the market?

I guess whether AMD and ARM can get in there will be down to a) how ready they are with reference designs, and b) how good those reference designs actually are. AMD don't have a stellar record in that department, and despite similar TDPs to Intel processors AMD laptops always seem to run hot (mine gets very toasty underneath when I'm gaming on it). Intel's approach seems to be to provide a range of almost modular design components. If AMD can come up with something similar that OEMs trust, they might have a chance to jump back in with design wins and regain some market share. But I think they've got a lot of work to do to persuade OEMs that AMD reference designs are worth implementing...

[DanceswithUnix]

I would hope AMD have lots of Carrizo reference designs all ready to go.

However, I can also see lots of these companies just going back to the ARM platforms they know.

[watercooled]

I wonder if they're also finishing the below-rrp pricing of the Haswell Celerons we've been seeing in things like Chromebooks?

[Biscuit]

I really don't understand how they remain so profitable while continuing this business practice. You would think this part of the market would be so big that the loss would only make sense for so long?

[watercooled]

That part of the business wasn't profitable, but they've recently rolled it into another part which makes it harder to see profit/losses of individual segments. In Q3 2014, the mobile segment lost $1.043 billion: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8615/i...nings-analysis

About the merger: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8731/i...d-pc-divisions

[dfour]

More shady business practices from good old intel.

[DanceswithUnix]

More Zen chitchat at Fudzilla.

32 core opteron will be made up of 4 x 8 core devices in one MCM.

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/process...rts-2p-sockets

That seems odd to me, 8 threaded cores will be bigger than the 8 cores we already have on 8350, but not massively. So if this is on a modern process, then 8 cores is nothing. So I guess the Opteron device will just be 4 APUs stuffed into a single socket.

[shaithis]

That looks nice, 16c/32t, RDIMM support, 64 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes, TPM inbuilt, 14 sata lanes.....that ticks a LOT of boxes.

[scaryjim]

More Zen chitchat at Fudzilla.

32 core opteron will be made up of 4 x 8 core devices in one MCM. ...

I think I'll open a trade account with Maldon

perhaps sticking to 8 cores ensures better yields? Or perhaps they're planning on the basis that they may be stuck on 28nm for a while yet? Or perhaps it'll be a modular system on an interposer rather an MCM - that'd allow a choice between 16 cores + GPU or 32 cores?

*shrug*

yeah, more Maldon please

EDIT: shaithis: the image is of a 16 core HPC APU, and is completely unrelated to the 32-core Opteron discussion in the article!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Supposed leak of Zen core overview:

http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-cpu-core-block/

Edit!!

Another leak:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...&postcount=377

Second Edit!!

Some more info:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...&postcount=341

[watercooled]

10mm2 would make it quite a large core. I've just done some back-of-envelope maths to estimate the size of a Broadwell core including L2 (pixel counting the die shots) and came out with two values depending on whether you count the bit at the top which looks possible non-core area.

The whole core as outlined by Intel is roughly 8.8mm2.
The smaller estimate excluding the top bit is ~7.2mm2.

GF/SS 14nm is less dense than Intel 14nm but denser than Intel 22nm. Haswell on 22nm was ~14.5mm2, so it's probably safe to say we're looking at something in that ball park.

Edit: Oh and those slides mention 6th May as the NDA date, so maybe we'll find out some more then?

[watercooled]

Another slide had appeared: http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-x86-quad...block-diagram/

Overall it looks quite plausible.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The R9 285 beats the R9 280X in GTA V(!):

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/...4#.VUAepZPvaq4

[Noxvayl]

The minimum frame rate is lower by 1FPS and the average is lower by 0.3FPS. Doesn't qualify as beat in my book... Higher maximum frame rate though.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Detailed image of Carrizo chip leaked overviewing the different sections:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...postcount=1040

DDR4 support is confirmed.

The minimum frame rate is lower by 1FPS and the average is lower by 0.3FPS. Doesn't qualify as beat in my book... Higher maximum frame rate though.

The R9 285 is running the game at higher settings though!

[DanceswithUnix]

Detailed image of Carrizo chip leaked overviewing the different sections:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...postcount=1040

DDR4 support is confirmed.



The R9 285 is running the game at higher settings though!

250mm^2, so despite the use of high density libs to make the cores smaller then overall device is bigger than 245mm^2 Kevari.