AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yeah i have to admit that was wounding, i think i paid £160 for the 3570K and it was pretty grim feeling when i pressed that buy button. I wanted to still be able to overclock because its like a hobby, its an interesting process that helps you understand the components and how they work together, but the main point in doing it is to turn a low end CPU into a higher end one so the whole thing is just a joke.

The other thing that really skews peoples opinion is synthetic benchmarks. People seem to base their purchasing decisions on benchmark results that will have almost zero impact on their experience. In reality the performance difference is actually very close anyway, and its because its very close that Intel often look better as the scales on the tables and graphs are zoomed in.

TBH,I am of the view that once you start going much above £110,a CPU should be great at stock,ie,overclocking should not be required. Any overclock headroom should be a bonus of sorts.

I definitely agree about the cheap CPU part as that is what made me interested in DIY PC building and so did a number of my mates. TBH,I find overclocking cheap CPUs more fun and if anything the enthusiast segment came out of this,ie,modding cheap CPUs to be faster,not making fast CPUs even faster.

It has been the case for years that a £140 to £150 CPU is faster than a £80 to £100 one,but whether it makes it better value I don't know TBH.

I think one of the bargain CPUs missed on many forums in the last few years was the Athlon II X3. I specified many for builds I suggested,and they have been great CPUs,due to their unlocking and overclocking abilities even on a cheap motherboard and yet were around £55 to £65. In one build,one of the them unlocked to a Phenom II X4 with full L3 cache,which was awesome!!

I havent noticed this to be honest, but ARM are right where they should be for the way the world is moving forward.

I have seen this on a number of forums such as Anandtech though,and as mentioned earlier there are enough snobs who seem to be hostile just because the next generation consoles might use Jaguar cores.

Its almost like some hero worship at times.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

BTW,the Intel hype machine has started:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/d...s_in_2013.html

Expect to see the same amount of hype that we had with the 22NM finfets in 2011.

How can ARM succeed now that Intel has 14NM super-duper chips!!??

[watercooled]

Interesting how they've moved off the ITRS sizes and on to the half-nodes. I wonder if it's actually 14nm or if it's purely marketing to make it sound better for longer i.e. even when other fabs start rolling out 14nm?

As a lot of Hexus members were saying around the time, FinFETs are simply a necessity of the node rather than some magical feature; GloFo, Samsung, TSMC are all adopting it in future, but SOI helped planar transistors last longer in some cases.

Slightly off-topic, but ST_Ericksson are apparently using FD-SOI at 28nm at GloFo, so I wonder why AMD have supposedly decided to go with 28nm bulk CMOS, especially if price/performance is as good as that article makes out, and if GloFo will already have lines using it?

[Biscuit]

BTW,the Intel hype machine has started:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/d...s_in_2013.html

Expect to see the same amount of hype that we had with the 22NM finfets in 2011.

How can ARM succeed now that Intel has 14NM super-duper chips!!??

Comments on the page are digging into intel pretty bad though!

[watercooled]

Yeah, unusual for Xbit TBH, there's usually a full-out vitriolic fanboy flame within a few minutes of any Intel/AMD/Nvidia related posts on that site...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Comments on the page are digging into intel pretty bad though!

Yeah, unusual for Xbit TBH, there's usually a full-out vitriolic fanboy flame within a few minutes of any Intel/AMD/Nvidia related posts on that site...

Yeah,your right! I did notice one of their mods having a go at one of the fanboy posters in one of the comments thread,so maybe new mods??

[Terbinator]

Here we go:


http://www.vgleaks.com/world-exclusi...ango-unveiled/

[Terbinator]

Any one got a link for the Jaguar rundown vs Brazos (that is what its replacing, right?)?

4MB cache in total across 2 CU worries me slightly given the performance difference between Axx and FX's related to cache.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That indicates a pair of Jaguar quad core SOCs although with less L2 cache. The graphics card looks to have the same core as that rumoured for the HD8770. So I suspect the core should be comparable to that in an HD5850 with better tessellation abilities. OTH,there is much less memory bandwith for the GPU,although the eDRAM might compensate for this.

[watercooled]

I was wondering why a Northbridge is necessary, but it makes sense on the console - the physically separate GPU needs to access the same RAM, and the CPU might need to access the ESRAM. 768 threads seems too few for a Pitcairn die, but too many to be Cape Verde, but considering they'd likely need custom silicon anyway, it's not surprising they went with a different number of cores IMHO, and the large 'ESRAM' (eDRAM?) bandwidth should help performance.

From that diagram, it also seems they didn't go with GPU cores on the CPU die, but double cores and no IMC, and presumably some crypto hardware.

8GB of system memory does seem a bit much considering existing consoles, IIRC Epic had to fight to get MS to go with 512MB over 256MB on the 360, and even then that wasn't much by desktop standards. Maybe they're working from experience, looking forward? Low RAM prices probably help too.

Also, I wonder what 'HDMI 1.4a in' is for on the Southbridge?

Edit: missed above two posts. I read this a while back but IIRC it's a decent rundown of Jaguar: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/08/28/a...e-jaguar-core/

According to that, and from memory, 2MB was planned for quad core anyway? in terms of size, it's equal to Bobcat, 512k per core. It's a completely different architecture to Bulldozer so the cache issues might not apply equally.

[Terbinator]

I wonder if things could still change spec wise? After all, there was only something like 3 months between full on manufacturing and launch for the 360 IIRC.

[Terbinator]

8GB of system memory does seem a bit much considering existing consoles, IIRC Epic had to fight to get MS to go with 512MB over 256MB on the 360, and even then that wasn't much by desktop standards. Maybe they're working from experience, looking forward? Low RAM prices probably help too.

Also, I wonder what 'HDMI 1.4a in' is for on the Southbridge?

It appears there will be Kinect integration (NUI) with every box and all rumours point towards 3.5GB of RAM being reserved for the - again- rumoured version of 'Win 8' it's going to run on. HDMI-in could be to facilitate MS' push towards it being a set -top box of sorts in the living room; again, this could answer the RAM question.

So 4.5GB left over for games? 32MB ESRAM should hold a 1080p image (No MSAA) at 60Hz IIRC.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I just realised Jaguar basically has 2MB of L2 cache for the quad core version anyway. Having said that,the GPU will have less bandwidth than even an HD7770 though.

[Terbinator]

I just realised Jaguar basically has 2MB of L2 cache for the quad core version anyway. Having said that,the GPU will have less bandwidth than even an HD7770 though.

Yeah that's what i was getting at.

Unless MS are fabbing their own octo-core then it will be a MCM at no native octo-jaguar exists/is planned AFAIK.

There was rumoured to be some 'special sauce' (or "Wizards Jizz" as it's now know on NeoGAF) in the 720 but it appears to be missing from the block diagram unless its that 'data moves engines'?

[watercooled]

3.5GB seems like an awful overhead for a games console, even if it does double up as some sort of media centre.

I wonder if the eDRAM package has any logic on-board, like the 360 one? On that subject, I wonder if that was made with just a few metal layers i.e logic added to RAM, or RAM made on an expensive logic process?

That block diagram looks possible but it still doesn't seem quite right/something missing. It's already been near-confirmed by a few websites, including leaked MS documents, that the next Xbox will use POWER, ARM or x86, so it wouldn't surprise me if it's not completely accurate. I wonder how this ties in with the Xbox Surface, the reported specs of which seem a bit odd, but are on a supposedly official MS document?

Edit: I've just had a quick look at that pdf leaked a while back, and it mentions separate always-on system cores/application cores, DDR4, MLC flash and legacy hardware for backwards-compatibility. On the subject of the latter, I imagine it would be very hard, if possible at all, to emulate the Xenon in x86 Jaguar cores, so I wonder what the deal is?

[shaithis]

Hmmm, I was expecting MS to go with the ARM instruction set....