AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It has to cost something, more layers means more patterning. The thing is, the up-front cost of generating and testing masks seems to be vast these days so they have already invested the big money. If they run the old and new lines together, well what if they get a big order and all they have on hand is the other chips? For inventory control it just makes sense to make one chip, and bin the output for best use, but keep some flexibility.

There is an issue that with much reduced power consumption will come boards with fewer VRM phases. That could well make overall product costs neutral or cheaper, but you don't want to put an old chip in a low power board unless you want it to go bang like an EVGA 1070! The BIOS would want to spot that, so I presume new chips will come with a different PCI ID at least.

Hopefully the lessons learnt here have fed into Vega to give that a more impressive launch. The 480 is faster than my 380, but I am thinking for the money not enough of an upgrade so I am waiting for a Vega based 580 now.

Or alternatively,to make sure they had a hard launch they pushed for chips which were not quite there yet(they were probably stockpiling chips for months),and we are now seeing the effects of improved production(its been a few months now since launch). It could explain why we had the issue with the cards breaking the 75W limit and only have a single six pin power connector in the first place.We saw the same with cards like the HD4870 - later cards seemed to consume less power.

Some of the cards like the Powercolor Devil RX480 and especially the XFX GTR RX480 seem more efficient than normal RX480 cards and these had retail availability later than the other ones. The XFX GTR RX480 took ages to get to availability BTW.

The XFX GTR seems to be the best RX480 out there. It appears to need less voltage and also appears to overclock much better than normal RX480 cards according to the few reviews of it.

[DanceswithUnix]

and we are now seeing the effects of improved production(its been a few months now since launch).

I was wondering about that. A few months is nothing in the semi industry, so these new metal layers must have been known about at launch. Perhaps that is why AMD were so bullish, the product they were thinking about wasn't the same one we were seeing?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I was wondering about that. A few months is nothing in the semi industry, so these new metal layers must have been known about at launch. Perhaps that is why AMD were so bullish, the product they were thinking about wasn't the same one we were seeing?

Look at the production steppings - it appears P10 has gone through quite a bit. If anything it does point to AMD having issues with GF. Nvidia is using Samsung,whilst AMD is using GF who are licensing the same process. The launch Polaris 10 cards were on a C7 stepping.

It kind of explains why the reference RX480 was a tad meh - the cooler was obviously designed for a lower TDP card,and the same goes with the card having issues with only a single six-pin power connector too.

Edit!!

Here is a review of the XFX card:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWASNajSdpg

People were initially suspicious that XFX might have sent him a golden card,but as more people buy them it appears to be that it does use less voltage and clocks much higher.

[scaryjim]

... Perhaps that is why AMD were so bullish, the product they were thinking about wasn't the same one we were seeing?

A 1400MHz RX 460 @ 50W would make a lot more sense of those comparisons we saw against the GTX 950 with the massively reduced power draw. I can only assume they had yield issues with the metal layering that stopped them hard launching at those clocks/TDPs.

If they do release the RX 465/475/485 early next year I suspect they'll get flamed by everyone who bought an RX 460/470/480...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A 1400MHz RX 460 @ 50W would make a lot more sense of those comparisons we saw against the GTX 950 with the massively reduced power draw. I can only assume they had yield issues with the metal layering that stopped them hard launching at those clocks/TDPs.

If they do release the RX 465/475/485 early next year I suspect they'll get flamed by everyone who bought an RX 460/470/480...

Not if they sneakily update the RX480!

[badass]

Look at the production steppings - it appears P10 has gone through quite a bit. If anything it does point to AMD having issues with GF. Nvidia is using Samsung,whilst AMD is using GF who are licensing the same process. The launch Polaris 10 cards were on a C7 stepping.

It kind of explains why the reference RX480 was a tad meh - the cooler was obviously designed for a lower TDP card,and the same goes with the card having issues with only a single six-pin power connector too.

Edit!!

Here is a review of the XFX card:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWASNajSdpg

People were initially suspicious that XFX might have sent him a golden card,but as more people buy them it appears to be that it does use less voltage and clocks much higher.

Imagine if that was what the launch cards were like. Whilst in the big scheme of things its not that different, it is the difference between "meh" and "amazing"

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Take with a truckload of salt:

https://m.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/.../?compact=true

Apologies if there's another thread about AMD's upcoming CPU architecture and of course desktop CPUs, if there is, delete or perhaps merge this info. This is the current state of the retail CPUs, which have been improving by the month.

There are some errata issues present in the current testing samples, similar in a way to the TLB bug of the Phenom. The workaround right now is done via the BIOS. The workaround however, strips around 30 ~ 40% of the CPU performance.

The CPUs are well behind schedule and every day there's real progress and bug fixing being done. Unlike with INTEL's E0 CPUs which make it to the wild that are almost completely final silicon. AMD's samples will continue to get bug fixes right up until retail spec sampling to partners.

In August Clock speeds were 3.8GHz, right now 4.2GHz overclocking is possible, with LN2 5GHz is doable. Again this will change of course, but it is just the current silicon that is behaving like this.

AM4/ZEN uses an SOC design, that means even CMOS/BIOS configuration is on package (not necessarily on silicon, I can't confirm this) so it is possible to clear the "BIOS" and still have old value applied 30 minutes later. How this will be addressed remains to be seen. Perhaps it won't be the same scenario for final silicon

Operating voltages (nominal) are 1.3v and all the way up to 1.5v should be fine it seems for AIO cooling. Frequency scaling isn't a strong point but again that may have everything to do with the process at this point rather than an inherent design limitation.

Performance is particularly strong at this point vs. INTEL's latest offerings. Single thread performance is matching Haswell-E and of course multi-threading performance as well. Tests that are memory bandwidth dependent may go to the INTEL platform simply as a result of having more memory channels, but I can't confirm that right now and have no info on that. The important thing here is that the 16Thread/8-Core CPU is minimum 5960X performance if not better actually. (Based on Cinebench R15) with the error fix disabled.

Can't speak to how well the IMC is working as current samples are locked to low DRAM frequencies (2133MHz and lower) and of course this has an impact on performance.

As stated in the beginning, every week is progress and AMD is working at an unprecedented rate to get these ready by March.

You're unlikely to see any high end boards for the CPUs prior to launch or at launch, simply because no vendors can commit to too much right now as plenty is changing at a rapid rate.

All overclocking is done via Overdrive, you can't change any performance features at all in the BIOS (on to that next) at all.

BIOS or UEFI is actually built into the CPU, so only AMD can update the "BIOS" or microcode. All overclocking must take place within the Operating system

Right now it takes up to 30 minutes to clear the BIOS. If you remove the CPU and place it on another motherboard, it'll have the same settings applied as on the previous board. So debugging is a nightmare

6850K SKU (May not be final designation) is wait for it.... $300 roughly. That's 8 Cores and 16 Threads

AMD's Hyper Threading is called SMU and it is ************ good. The same efficiency as Intel's HT.

Performance is really good, be it SuperPi, Cinebench, 3DMark etc, it's FPU performance is incredibly good and easily matching that of what Intel offers.

Current performance is staggering even though it is limited to 2133MHz (as mentioned before) and NorthBridge Frequency is limited to 2400MHz

There will be a nigher SKU than the 6850K, but it is a higher bin so it will certainly overclock better than 6850K and that may carry a premium price, but unlikely to be double.

There's plenty of excitement from all board vendors about the platform, so we will see how it all pans out. (Especially with the hot mess that INTEL has in store for us H2 2017, that we can leave to another thread)

For Gaming, the CPU is neck and neck with INTEL, even at low res where CPU bound.

[watercooled]

That all sounds quite promising, apart from:

As stated in the beginning, every week is progress and AMD is working at an unprecedented rate to get these ready by March.

March? Well, it's still Q1 I guess but it's not what I'd hoped...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That all sounds quite promising, apart from:


March? Well, it's still Q1 I guess but it's not what I'd hoped...

Yeah. BTW,some interesting discussion about Vega on B3D:
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/a....59649/page-16

From what I gathering the PS4 PRO GPU has features probably shared with Vega(!).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A12 9800 compared to the A10 7870K:

http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/c...t/1028597.html
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/t...w/1027503.html

Not sure what to make of it TBH - the Kaveri chip seems to be faster in many cases. Power consumption seems worst than the A10 7870K but the A12 9800 is using a 500W PSU and the A10 7870K based system a Bronze 300W unit.

Having said that,the A12 9800 is using a much worse cooler!!

[DanceswithUnix]

Intel seem to be changing a long term policy, by releasing an unlocked i3 aimed at overclocking:

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/process...r-overclockers

Makes no sense, no amount of overclocking will turn that into an i5. No doubt people will buy it anyway.

Seems an odd thing to do with Zen looming with lots of cores.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Intel seem to be changing a long term policy, by releasing an unlocked i3 aimed at overclocking:

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/process...r-overclockers

Makes no sense, no amount of overclocking will turn that into an i5. No doubt people will buy it anyway.

Seems an odd thing to do with Zen looming with lots of cores.

It will be £171 if launched today.

[DanceswithUnix]

It will be £171 if launched today.

Quite. That is a *lot* for 2 cores. It does get you 4 threads so it won't suck like the Pentium anniversary edition, but that was what, half the price?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Quite. That is a *lot* for 2 cores. It does get you 4 threads so it won't suck like the Pentium anniversary edition, but that was what, half the price?

Closer to one third!!

The Pentium G4260 apparently has HT and looks like a rebadged Core i3 6100. Price has dropped from $117 to $98.

[Xlucine]

It will be £171 if launched today.

I paid less than that for a 4690K just a few years ago

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I paid less than that for a 4690K just a few years ago

We need Zen to be decent and also have reasonably priced SKUs,as its starting to get a bit silly now and the weak pound is adding to things too.