AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[DanceswithUnix]

Fuad seems to think people will want to install XP onto a Kabini box.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/31...ows-xp-support

Am struggling to see an issue here.

I can't many see home users wanting XP. There is always going to be one, but really...
Would you want XP power management on a modern box?
If a company is backwards enough to still be on XP, they will be unlikely to be buying hardware at all and if they do they will probably buy Intel.

[watercooled]

MIPS seems to be the ISA of choice of the Chinese government, with IIRC two homegrown implementations. ARM has made inroads, but I think MIPS is still the norm in broadband/adsl routers and there are a lot of those around. Will be interesting to see what Imagination do with the company, but overall I don't see them going away.

Just had a google for Chinese mips stuff, seems to be a few laptops/netbooks made and they have added instructions to help emulate x86. Guess that was inevitable, but it seems a shame to taint a proper cpu with x86 related cruft

I was careful to only refer to their IP application cores, not the ISA as a whole. I understand they're still very commonly used in other markets and I don't see that changing soon.

[DanceswithUnix]

I was careful to only refer to their IP application cores, not the ISA as a whole. I understand they're still very commonly used in other markets and I don't see that changing soon.

They seem to target 32 bit. That is unfortunate, given the main improvement I can see over ARM is a very mature 64 bit ecosystem.

Android seems to still have problems with games etc assuming you have an arm-V7 core and shipping native binaries against that.

So overall I can't see MIPS grabbing large consumer market share any time soon, which is a shame.

[scaryjim]

Am struggling to see an issue here.

Less than no issue. MS are also dropping support for Windows XP - perfect time for hardware manufacturers to wrap it for new hardware too. Particularly since Kabini is an entry-level consumer hardware, a market where the vast majority of purchasers will only ever buy an OS with hardware and vice versa, and any new kabini system will come with 8 or Blue. And of those few consumers who would want to put their own OS on it, the vast majority of those - the ones who'll go for Windows, anyway - will go for 7. So you've got a tiny minority of a tiny minority who'd even have to think about it - and both of them will probably go for linux

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Possible HD8970/HD9970 specifications leaked:

http://www.chiphell.com/thread-743744-1-1.html

Edit!!

OTH,the diagram could be for the GPU section of an APU.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This article has the FX8350 tested with the Windows 7 updates:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6934/c...gpu-at-1440p/4

Edit!!

The A8-5600K does surprisingly well.

[HalloweenJack]

omg - read what the `reviewer` has to say - apparently 4FPS with dual 7970`s in dirt 3 (between an i5 and an 8350) is a HUGE gap....

In this case, at two-way 7970s, choosing a quad core Intel processor does the business over the FX-8350 by a noticeable gap that continues to grow as more GPUs are added

so between 2 and 4 fps is a big gap.


/facepalm

A split starts to develop between Intel and AMD again, although you would be hard pressed to choose between the CPUs as everything above an i3-3225 scores 50-56 FPS.

for sleeping dogs - apparently having an 8350 faster than an i7 2600k means nothing to anandtech

[scaryjim]

hmmmmmmmmm...

a) it's not 512bit, whatever the. The diagram shows 8 32-bit memory interfaces (DDR3 ECC?) which is 256bit
b) if it really does have 4096 shaders that a huge jump in the shader/unit count - iirc the current SPUs have 64 shaders in. Looks almost like they've built modular super-units with 4 shader clusters in each unit. Interesting return to modular design if they have.
c) that little cluster of 8 "serial processing modules" hooked into a shared cache is very interesting, don't you think They look almost like CPU cores...

At which point, are we actually looking at the new xbox chip? If you zoom in the serial units have three sections, 2 labelled "SPU Core" and a central one labelled FPU. That's a bulldozer module layout if ever I saw one, and they were circulating Trinity hardware in the dev boxes. Only thing that puts me off that way of thinking is the ridiculous power that thing would have on tap if it were true (and also the ridiculous memory bottlenecking it would suffer with only a 256bit interface).

Naah, I'm calling shenanigans on the actual image. Makes no sense as anything much. It's certainly not a GPU - GPUs just don't need serial processors (that's what a CPU is for!). If it's anything it's an APU, but then it's only sporting about 1/4 of the required memory bandwidth. Someone's taken blocks off old images and stuck them together then blurred everything to avoid close inspection. The fact that you can't clearly read the memory specs is enough to put me off.

[watercooled]

omg - read what the `reviewer` has to say - apparently 4FPS with dual 7970`s in dirt 3 (between an i5 and an 8350) is a HUGE gap....



so between 2 and 4 fps is a big gap.


/facepalm



for sleeping dogs - apparently having an 8350 faster than an i7 2600k means nothing to anandtech

At least they're running at playable settings now - I wonder if they realised people are starting to get wise to the 800x600 CPU benchmarks? Now they've essentially just proved there's very little difference to be seen most of the time when comparing real games at real settings.

I always sigh a little with the amount of decimal places they use on some charts - did any of them do any sciences at school/college? I've seen a few cases where they're using 2 decimal places for human controlled stopwatch measurements. They even acknowledge you should allow +/- 1 second for error margin, yet still rank the results depending on the decimal places...

[watercooled]

Image blur is suspicious, we need a CSI-style reconstruct-a-face-from-4-pixels machine!

It does seem somewhat easier to read rotated clockwise 90 degrees.

I can make out 'Security co-processor (ARM Cortex A5)' in the yellow block, not much else is terribly clear though. If I didn't know better, I'd say the memory blocks almost look like 72-bit??!??!, the first digit doesn't look symmetrical enough for a 3.

I agree about the BD-looking blocks and your post in general TBH.

[HalloweenJack]

ambiguous use of terms `gap` and `split` implys a wide separation...... poor writing choice

[scaryjim]

I... If I didn't know better, I'd say the memory blocks almost look like 72-bit??!??! ...

Hmmm, might actually make sense if it can support fully-buffered ECC, I believe FB memory uses a 72bit interface with 8 bits reserved for the buffering and 64bits for main data transfer. edit: a quick check on wiki appears to roughly confirm this

In which case, you've got an 8(16?) serial core, 4k GPGPU core, 512bit ECC supporting massive APU?

If that's the xbox APU, the new xbox is going to cost upwards of £1k Or be a complete bargain

[kalniel]

If that's the xbox APU, the new xbox is going to cost upwards of £1k Or be a complete bargain

Think how much the cell processor actually cost at point of manufacture for the early PS3s...

[watercooled]

FB doesn't really pass a sanity check for a console.

We've seen a 512-bit bus before with the HD 2900 XT, although IIRC it was massive overkill, but I suppose it's not completely off the table. I'm not sure why they'd want the rumoured eDRAM with that amount of bandwidth though.

[scaryjim]

All a bit funny IMNSHO. Looks more like a high end HPC workstation APU to me. That'd make sense of a 512bit FB ECC memory interface. With 4k shaders you could easily need a 512bit DDR3 interface - don't forget that's the same bandwidth as 256bit GDDR5. Most modern cards respond nicely to memory bandwidth tweaks; my lowly 7750 on a 128bit GDDR5 bus gained performance just from bumping up the memory bandwidth (5000MHz effective from 4500MHz effective). If the specs are to be believed this is 8x the processing power with only 2x the bandwidth. Even if it uses HSA to make memory access more efficient it's hard to imagine it not being bottlenecked by memory if it's a 512bit DDR3 design. Realistically you should be looking at 512bit GDDR5 to feed that much raw processing power....

[scaryjim]

UPDATE:

<Aria>'ve got an 890GX MATX motherboard with 2 PCIe x16 slots.... I could buy a second 7750 and go CROSSFIRE!!!!

EDIT: Sacre Merde the Sapphire LP 7750's gone up to £105 Why am I still tempted to get this motherboard?!

Argh, blurgle godsdammit! Ebuyer have just got a HIS LP 7750 in at £76. Should've got the board while I could: ridiculous low-profile matx desktop gaming powerhouse FTW!!! Can't see me ever finding another 890GX matx crossfire board again *sigh*

AMD need to get on with producing APUs with better graphics so it's worth going hybrid crossfire on them.