AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[scaryjim]

... I've read a couple of rumours about Coffee Lake which sounds something like a 6 core Skylake still on 14nm? ...

According to wikipedia (and it's a stub article so I'd treat it very much as a rumour rather than fact) yields at 10nm are so low that cannonlake will only be used for low power SoCs (presumably limited to 2-core 4-thread?). The linked coffee lake article (also very much a stub) only mentions mobile-oriented SKUs, although it does claim that the H variants will be up to 6 core (impressive in a 45W TDP limit).

That may mean that come the end of 2017 we have coffee lake going up against raven ridge in the mainstream consumer space, in mobile at least. If coffee lake is just a further tweaked Kaby Lake with not much going on on the CPU side, the two product stacks could be very evenly matched...

[DanceswithUnix]

According to wikipedia (and it's a stub article so I'd treat it very much as a rumour rather than fact) yields at 10nm are so low that cannonlake will only be used for low power SoCs

According to Charlie, the cost per wafer for Intel is really high just for 14nm.

http://semiaccurate.com/2016/10/31/i...new-atoms-iot/ (Fight fire with smoke)

As new processes seem to be hard and take time to ramp, I expect 10nm will be more expensive than 14 for a while yet even if the yields are decent.

[badass]

Next? Why make another thread - could just rename this one...

Actually, I'm rather tempted, although it'd be bad form to do it without the OP's approval, I think....

I'm not bothered. Probably best being called AMD semiconducter chitchat as there's GFX discussion here too

[badass]

Interestingly enough - Zen looks like the first CPU architecture that will just be faster across the board than what it replaces. The last one to not regress in certain workloads was.........Piledriver!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

First Gigabyte X370 motherboard picture:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1617227/a...#post_25723234

[scaryjim]

Only one PCIe x16 slot...? Presumably a board from lower down the product range then...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Only one PCIe x16 slot...? Presumably a board from lower down the product range then...

Probably a 970 equivalent?? Also it appears to use a 6 phase VRM.

[scaryjim]

I guess, although that'll give the X370 boards a fairly wide market to cover, given it's the top end chipset! AMD's own slides reckon it should replace the 990X/FX chipsets, and the B350 is the replacement for 970.

AFAIK we don't have many details for what the X370 chipset provides, while we've got some fairly detailed slides about B350/A320. I assume it has some significant advantages compared to B350 if Gigabyte think it's worth making X370 boards that don't support multi-GPU setups...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I guess, although that'll give the X370 boards a fairly wide market to cover, given it's the top end chipset! AMD's own slides reckon it should replace the 990X/FX chipsets, and the B350 is the replacement for 970.

AFAIK we don't have many details for what the X370 chipset provides, while we've got some fairly detailed slides about B350/A320. I assume it has some significant advantages compared to B350 if Gigabyte think it's worth making X370 boards that don't support multi-GPU setups...

It might be that the lower end chipsets are limited to the I/O in the Ryzen SOC?? I suspect the A320 and B350 will have similar features but the latter will have motherboards with more capable VRMs. Overclocking is not possible on the A320 for example??

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Looks like QNAP has partnered with AMD:

https://www.qnap.com/en/news/2016/qn...?ref=news_list

[scaryjim]

Strange niche it's aimed at though - people who want to use a NAS for AV applications?

It's a bit disingenuous to claim that the powerful GPU is for 4k decode & playback too, since (afaik) that's handled in the UVD and display blocks, and doesn't even touch the shaders. Now, if it's got the capability to transcode on the fly that might be helped by a more powerful GPU, but that's not on the feature list. All in all a very odd choice of processor for a NAS, IMNSHO...

[chinf]

You might want to do video processing locally on this box rather than pipe it over the network to/from a dedicated station; if you've got fancy video effects or otherwise generating graphics for the video then the GPU will be of benefit.

[DanceswithUnix]

Strange niche it's aimed at though - people who want to use a NAS for AV applications?

It's a bit disingenuous to claim that the powerful GPU is for 4k decode & playback too, since (afaik) that's handled in the UVD and display blocks, and doesn't even touch the shaders. Now, if it's got the capability to transcode on the fly that might be helped by a more powerful GPU, but that's not on the feature list. All in all a very odd choice of processor for a NAS, IMNSHO...

I believe the GPU is used for things like de-interlacing and filtering. There was an article on Anandtech years ago showing if you cared about image quality you wanted at least a certain level of gpu grunt. That was around Radeon 4760 level from memory, requiring discrete graphics but the sort of level you can get in an APU these days.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I saw this posted on AT forums:

news.zol.com.cn/620/6203956.html

Apparently a competition to win a Ryzen CPU which ends on the 18th of January.

Also,the first passively cooled RX460 is tested too:

https://translate.google.co.uk/trans...%2F&edit-text=

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A poster on SA forums has spotted a mention of an Opteron X3000 APU in this document:

http://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/fi...0134_3.1.0.pdf

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

WTF:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_Stock/c..._there_you_go/

Intel is going to integrate an AMD GPU with an Intel CPU??