AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[watercooled]

I have to agree with you; while the theoretical performance of Cell was meant to be nearly achievable with correct programming, in practice it seemed to be too time consuming for most devs to bother with properly. Not to mention the performance simply doesn't apply to all loads; when reading through arch details a few years ago (so I might be getting some details wrong) there looked to be some serious bottlenecks in the Cell design, e.g. data for the SPEs had to effectively pass through the PPC core, constantly interrupting it so it seemed more like a heavily modified single core rather than a massively parallel chip it was often made out to be. Basically, it was very good given certain workloads, but ended up with effectively a single SMT PPC core for others.

IMO it seems like an early attempt at something similar to GPU compute, albeit heavily bottlenecked and with far fewer execution resources. A lot of what they were hoping to use it for seems to have been done instead with hardware (video decoding for example) and modern PU compute.

For some reason I thought the Power core was rated far higher than that.

[DanceswithUnix]

They give the calc as 4 cores x 8, so yes thats 2 shared FPUs x 16.

But then the Dreamcast could peak 7 per clock and that was a very long time ago, I would hope things have improved

[Terbinator]

The K10 is two GK104s. More information here: http://www.nvidia.com/content/tesla/...jul2012-lr.pdf The difference between single-precision and double-precision flops on the K10 gives you an idea of how compute-stunted GK104 really is. As a comparison, AMD's best single GPU compute card, the S9000, can deliver over 4x the double precision performance of K10...

Odd that they've shipped K20s to ORNL, a high profile HPC customer, but still haven't official announced the specs of it ... makes you wonder if ORNL have got cherry picked dies that can run more SMX than the "standard" K20s...

I knew one was favored for DP, i just couldn't remember which.

Interestingly, to me at least, the bandwidth on the K10 is 320GB/s in that spec sheet One GK104 is 192GB/s so i wonder what the jig is here? If they're stuck with the 256bit interface the RAM would have to be hitting 10GHz. Maybe they're calculating it as 160GB/s per die instead and just claiming it as a total (would make sense given its use/'lower' power usage/heat)?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

http://www.pgroup.com/about/news.htm#54

[Terbinator]

What's a good, cheap board for AM3+ at the minute? I've managed to nab my friend a 955BE for £45 but he's moving from S775 so i want to recommend him a future-proof board.

There is this one on Scan: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-9...e-20-(x16)-atx Looks solid and never had problems with MSI before - has a BIOS out for Vishera too. He lives just around the corner as well so he could pick it up.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

MSI have at times underspecced their VRMs,so if overclocking I probably would not go with one of their cheaper motherboards. I would probably get this one,once Scan gets them in stock:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-%28x16%29-atx

Asus have finally got a BIOS update for Vishera too.

I suspect one of these motherboards should be fine if not overclocking:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigab...-%28x16%29-atx

http://www.ebuyer.com/398364-asrock-...edium=products

[Terbinator]

I'll recommend it when the time comes.

As for overclocking, i doubt it. He's had his current stuff for over three years and has always been at stock. If any O/C'ing is to be done it will be by me. I was considering upping the multiplier to around 18 as i didn't think 3.6GHz would be too demanding even on the MSI board.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My mate has a Asus M5A97 PRO with a 95W TDP Phenom II X6 1045T and has run it for days at nearly 100% when running his work related stuff. The main issue,as you know,is Asus CS which is clueless 90% of the time it seems.

[watercooled]

My board is similar to that and it's a good board, but leaves something to be desired in terms of idle power IMHO, I wouldn't know where to start choosing one based on that though.

[Biscuit]

If you dont mind me asking, how much did you manage to pick up the 955 for? Seem to be going for around £50 on ebay

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Its the problem with more overclocking orientated motherboards,TBH. Probably something like a cheaper motherboard, with a normal 4+1 or 4+2 phase VRM, would be more useful for lower idle power.

[Terbinator]

If you dont mind me asking, how much did you manage to pick up the 955 for? Seem to be going for around £50 on ebay

£45 delivered from Aria Classifieds. I can't decide whether or not it's a good deal now you've said they go for £50 on the bay - there was someone else asking about it so i decided to pay asking to avoid missing out. Compared to his E6300(PDC) its a massive improvement in every way but power-draw, so i haven't gone that much wrong for £45.

[Biscuit]

£45 inc postage is a good deal for sure, there are a few that go for that on the bay but the hassle of ebay vs classifieds on a forum...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Supposedly there is an £85 GTX560TI 448 which is mentioned over on the Aria forums?? What retailer has it for that price??

[Terbinator]

£45 inc postage is a good deal for sure, there are a few that go for that on the bay but the hassle of ebay vs classifieds on a forum...

The other option was trying to net a Q9450+ for £45 but you've got no chance with that.

[Terbinator]

Supposedly there is an £85 GTX560TI 448 which is mentioned over on the Aria forums?? What retailer has it for that price??

Scan did have it for that but they've changed it to "Call" now...