AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[badass]

Since the Bulldozer chitchat thread is many, many pages long and is pretty much piledriver related discussion anyway, I thought I'd start a fresh thread.

Based on the current rumour mill, it looks like piledriver modules when compared to bulldozer modules:
- Run at higher base clock speeds
- Run at higher turbo clockspeeds
- Have a higher IPC
- Use less power at full performance. Presumably at idle as well.

AMD are claiming in internal slides that the Piledriver based Trinity CPU's have ~30% more CPU performance and >50% more GPU performance than Llano.

The rumoured release date of the Notebook/portable Trinity CPU's is May 15th.
There is a nasty rumour that the desktop Trinity such as the A10-5800k will be released august

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

First preview of the A10-4600M:

http://translate.google.com/translat...2F2781947.html

It seems a decent improvement over the A8-3500M.

Edit!!

The preview is comparing the fastest 35W parts - there are higher clocked mobile Llano CPUs but these are 45W parts.

[Tifosi]

piledriver or ivybridge, what are the key considerations?

[DanceswithUnix]

There is a nasty rumour that the desktop Trinity such as the A10-5800k will be released august

My guess is that the desktop results aren't as impressive as the low voltage laptop results, so they are trying to release it in the best light possible.

[Noxvayl]

I am looking forward to some interesting reviews of what ever is released this month. I was disappointed with Ivy Bridge so I hope AMD can take advantage of that, I expect better yields for the now mature 32nm SOI process to help them.

My parents could use an upgrade because the system I gave them is 5 years old now and consuming significantly more power than necessary.

[Terbinator]

Don't these release tomorrow?

[badass]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/a...00m-a-new-hope
Anandtech Trinity Review - A10-4600m

[Noxvayl]

I'm having trouble viewing the pictures at Anandtech... I disabled every add-on in my browser, turned my firewall off and tried the same in Firefox.

Is anyone else having the same issue?

EDIT: Checked using other machines in the house and it seems it's only my machine, identical settings... I've been putting off a format for over a year now, I think I need to take some time to do that.

[shaithis]

For me the biggest surprise is how far Intel have caught them up in iGPU performance......although at quite a price premium.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

For me the biggest surprise is how far Intel have caught them up in iGPU performance......although at quite a price premium.

TBH,if you look at the games tested on Anandtech the ones which Intel HD4000 does well even the HD3000 does relatively well in:

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/583...gaming-new.png

So either the games due relatively well on the HD3000 already or are more CPU dependent. It would also be interesting to see if at high settings the AMD IGP will produce playable framerates or not.

OTH,since all the mobile parts have the HD4000 anyway at different clockspeeds,when the IB dual cores are eventually released it will be interesting to see how these will look.

However,the Intel drivers are another question. The filtering quality has improved with the HD4000 though which is a welcome step forward.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems Trinity is much more efficient in its use of the transistor budget. They have only increased the number of transistors by 10% to get the improvements seen. It is a shame they don't have access to a smaller production node ATM.

It will also be interesting to see how the desktop Trinity CPUs perform. The mobile HD4000 is not lower clocked than the desktop version IIRC and the desktop HD7660G is,so there maybe a larger performance difference in this case.

[shaithis]

Yeah, Trinity on 22nm would have opened a world of possibilities.

I just fear for AMD a little now. Intel are already forging ahead with 14nm and road-mapped to 5nm, they have the 3D transistor tech and they are working on NVT.....plus nVidia are holding TSMC at gun-point on the 28nm production.

AMDs options seem to be shrinking.....and I am starting to wonder if their GF spin-off was the right move now

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The problem is that the vast amount of losses AMD had were down to GF,so I think if they had not got rid of it now,the company would have gone bankrupt. AMD also simply did not have the money to go into process R and D and fab expansion too. Remember SOI development is part of a large consortium including IBM,so even with that push Intel is still ahead,so AMD investing in fabs is probably not financially sound any more. Still if you do think about it,AMD is still using the best non-Intel processes available,so it is more of a case why the other companies are still behind Intel in many metrics(although not in all metrics) and these are independent fabs too.

The other thing is that AMD has experience of producing CPUs and GPUs on both SOI and bulk processes,so it means they can be more flexible in who they can use and there are companies like Samsung too entering the fray. However,again this is only useful if they are competitive with what Intel have.

I think it will take some time for the company to adjust,but the cadence of improvements is happening much quicker now - yearly as opposed to what we saw with the Phenom and Phenom II. Mobile Trinity was released around 11 months after mobile Llano and I suspect Vishera should be out a year after Bulldozer.

OTH,you also need to think of it this way. The current CEO was head of Lenovo during the time it rapidly expanded to one of the largest PC makers and the CTO was employed by Apple. Basically both people have experience of what OEMs want unlike the previous AMD people who were engineers. So in this way I can see AMD moving more towards making products which fit to what OEMs want but perhaps at the expense of the higher end enthusiast DIY market especially gamers. Also because of their more OEM focus,they will have to minimise delays.

Remember, a lot of enthusiasts thought Llano and Zacate were average but in the end it was these two products which have helped AMD the most,two OEM focused products.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I am going to do some Moose level calculations here using Moose maths.

CB single thread score:

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5831/46660.png



So,lets assume the worst case scenario that the CPU is at maximum Turbo Core and is running at 3.2GHZ which gives a score of 0.77 points.

An FX8150 which has a maximum Turbo Core of 4.2GHZ gives a score of 1.02 points:

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5626/44768.png



If in both cases Turbo Core is kicking in at maximum,IPC has not changed over BD,but that is with no L3 cache and much lower power consumption. I would expect IPC of Trinity is a tad better in reality on the desktop as a mobile chipset was used in the current Trinity review.

[DanceswithUnix]

Yeah, Trinity on 22nm would have opened a world of possibilities.

I just fear for AMD a little now. Intel are already forging ahead with 14nm and road-mapped to 5nm, they have the 3D transistor tech and they are working on NVT.....plus nVidia are holding TSMC at gun-point on the 28nm production.

AMDs options seem to be shrinking.....and I am starting to wonder if their GF spin-off was the right move now

I don't think it is that bad tbh.

I mean, did they really need to release a successor to Llano? I'm not convinced they did and certainly the AMD of a few years ago would have perhaps just tweaked the memory controller a little or something. Yet just 11 months from the release of Llano they have released a very major update. If they keep releasing updates like this every year I think they will be OK.

I think we just have to accept that really high performance CPU designs are only for companies with really big development budgets and these days that just means Intel. Which historically is fine, just look at the first 64 bit CPUs, oh no that was MIPS wasn't it. But the first 16 bit CPU was, erm , no that wasn't Intel either was it that was Texas Instruments. Well, the best CPU architecture ever, erm, that was DEC Alpha wasn't it which ISTR was killed off at the request of Intel. How about first CPU that was both superpipelined and superscaler, erm, nah that was Fairchild Clipper wasn't it. But Hyperthreading was Intel, or at least would be if Terra and IBM Power hadn't done it first. Well they have a long proud history of design from the old i432 and i860 up to the modern Itanium platform of, well, technical & commercial disasters.

Just how the hell did Intel float to the top???

[Butuz]

I am going to do some Moose level calculations here using Moose maths..

Butuz