AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Trust Bit-tech to put a negative spin on anything AMD:

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=297134

Thats the main editor in the OP BTW.

[watercooled]

10nm following on 'quick' from 14nm seems like foundry marketing TBH, and seems a bit optimistic to put it mildly. Even Intel with their ability to pile money on R&D and eat poor yields on early nodes won't have 10nm until at least 2017. And the first on the node for the contract foundries will likely be for mobile SoCs, same as 20/16/14. Here we are in 2016 and we still haven't seen many large, high performance 14nm processors, even from Intel.

Also, going on old past sales data seems a bit pointless as AMD have likely saturated the market with their 28nm GPUs - if you already have a 290X you probably won't be getting a 390X for example as drivers seem to have kept the two generations pretty close in terms of performance. AMD's only 'new' GPU is Fiji, but that's a very high-end part and addresses a relatively small market vs the mainstream stuff.

But, negativity will be negative...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Its interesting that talk says the Zen APU is a 2016 product though!

[The Hand]

Its interesting that talk says the Zen APU is a 2016 product though!

Yes, I was thinking that.. an Am4 Carrizo-based APU in March and maybe Zen-based APU in Q4?

I noticed on that bit-tech thread a post by Vault-tec:

I was looking at an article about Zen yesterday and one of the APUs had 16gb HBM. It looks like what could be AMD's first true HSA APU. Meaning no GPU, no ram, no VRAM, all from the one pool of HBM.

Seems AMD have plenty planned for Zen at least !

Has anyone heard of this HBM memory only version? The rumours and speculation are getting confusing! What does this mean for DDR4 and APU's? Time will tell I suppose..

[DanceswithUnix]

Has anyone heard of this HBM memory only version? The rumours and speculation are getting confusing! What does this mean for DDR4 and APU's? Time will tell I suppose..

It means you get HBM2 on the device, and if you need more RAM you plug in DDR4 so it will still be around. Apart from things like laptops where the space for ram sockets is better used for batteries or just making the machine smaller.

[scaryjim]

If 16GB is right that's at least 2 stacks of HBM2, giving memory bandwidth of at least 512GB/s.

Or in other words, an APU with the bandwidth of Fury X.

That's just mad.

[DanceswithUnix]

Stacks are not a fixed height, so 16GB could be more than 2 stacks though that would probably up the cost a bit.

[scaryjim]

Stacks are not a fixed height, so 16GB could be more than 2 stacks though that would probably up the cost a bit.

hence my post saying "at least 2 stacks"

But tbh I can't see the extra cost of the larger, more complex interposer and additional logic dies being worth it: they'd have to be building an absolute beast of an APU for it to want more bandwidth than 2 stacks can accommodate. OTOH it would make sense to do a 2-stack interposer, 'cause you can still choose to only stick one stack on there for lower-end products; that's probably cheaper than designing two different interposers for 1 or 2 stacks (much the same way that many of the CPUs use the same silicon but with differing amounts of it fused off/disabled).

[HalloweenJack]

AMD APU`s have shown linear scaling in regard to ram speed on DDR3 , from 1600 up to 2400 and beyond ; they are quite bandwidth starved

[scaryjim]

AMD APU`s have shown linear scaling in regard to ram speed on DDR3 , from 1600 up to 2400 and beyond ; they are quite bandwidth starved

I'll rephrase my comparison then:

In other words an APU with 20x the bandwidth of a dual channel DDR3-1600 interface.

Dual channel DDR3-2400 nets you 38.4GB/s. Quad channel DDR4-4133 (the fastest you can currently buy on Scan) nets you 132GB/s

One stack of HBM2 gives you 256GB/s. Almost twice the fastest possible desktop memory interface currently available to buy - assuming your Haswell-E chip will run it at that speed. Two stacks; four times the peak desktop bandwidth? Yeah, I'm sticking with mad

AMDs APUs are bandwidth limited, yes. But not that bandwidth limited.

[DanceswithUnix]

Assuming AM4 is coming out with Carrizo, and assuming Carrizo benefits from the compression techniques used in Tonga, we may find that AM4 machines aren't so bandwidth limited anyway when coupled with a pair of DDR4 sticks.

So many benchmarks needed when this platform comes out!

[DanceswithUnix]

From the little orange box on this...



We get 128GB/s, a single stack?

[scaryjim]

From the little orange box on this...

We get 128GB/s, a single stack?

A single stack of HBM1 at that. Looks speculative at best. Not that 1GB of onboard HBM wouldn't be interesting, but it's not really enough to run a system. I'm really not sure how to interpret those images: they look like they couldbe cut out of another presentation or slide, so perhaps they're not showing the full picture? It's one of the reasons I'm taking the specifics with a huge pinch of salt...

[watercooled]

Are these supposedly genuine AMD slides? I couldn't tell when I looked at a couple of them on Twitter.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Preview of the Zen and Bristol Ridge stock cooler!

[DanceswithUnix]

At last

That looks to me like the old heatsink but with a 92mm fan installed on top. I used to find it frustrating that you couldn't easily replace the 70mm fan on the old heatsink. Making an adapter was one of the things I thought a 3D printer would be useful for.