AMD - Zen chitchat

[lilyx]

https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.ph...t-rekorde.html

The 32 core 2990WX hit 5.3 GHz on ln2

Bernd Das Brot works for MSI

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Looking the AM4 mini-ITX boards they are an utter ripoff TBH especially as I don't really overclock anyway. Its a sad day when an overpriced Intel B series board seems better specced than a "midrange" B450 one.

[DanceswithUnix]

Looking the AM4 mini-ITX boards they are an utter ripoff TBH especially as I don't really overclock anyway. Its a sad day when an overpriced Intel B series board seems better specced than a "midrange" B450 one.

ITX seems to have ended up as a luxury market. Seems a shame, I generally don't want most of the features like wifi that you get on itx boards and can't see me doing another itx build when uATX isn't that much bigger and has such better choice.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

ITX seems to have ended up as a luxury market. Seems a shame, I generally don't want most of the features like wifi that you get on itx boards and can't see me doing another itx build when uATX isn't that much bigger and has such better choice.

That's another thing mini-ITX can be much smaller but idiot companies build stupidly large cases which make no sense,and I also still have a mini-ITX case.

I was looking at motherboards and the B450 are worst specced than B360 ones and cost more! I don't even overclock anymore so it makes no sense why they cost so much especially since AMD chipsets are less complex than the proper ones Intel has to implement.

[DanceswithUnix]

That's another thing mini-ITX can be much smaller but idiot companies build stupidly large cases which make no sense.

If they are after the gaming market and allow for air around a 2 slot graphics card that's got some length as well as girth to it and the full ATX PSU to power the sucker then you have already used quite a few liters of space. Most of the uATX motherboard goes *under* that GPU, so the increase in case size can be minimal. Although some of the uATX cases are also laughably massive.

I was shocked my Vega 56 graphics card didn't fit in my Antec 300 full ATX case until I took a drill to it and removed all the 3.5" drive bays, I guess I'm out of the shoebox market until my next GPU upgrade

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If they are after the gaming market and allow for air around a 2 slot graphics card that's got some length as well as girth to it and the full ATX PSU to power the sucker then you have already used quite a few liters of space. Most of the uATX motherboard goes *under* that GPU, so the increase in case size can be minimal. Although some of the uATX cases are also laughably massive.

I was shocked my Vega 56 graphics card didn't fit in my Antec 300 full ATX case until I took a drill to it and removed all the 3.5" drive bays, I guess I'm out of the shoebox market until my next GPU upgrade

Most of the cases are poorly designed - the ones designed on HardOCP for example are small and have no issues with a card like the GTX1080.

Plus with SFX PSUs things are even more laughable with the lazy mainstream case designers.

My main PCs have been SFF since 2005 including Shuttles. Not had an issue with smaller cases so far!

I still remember having a massively overclocked high VID Q6600 in a Shuttle with an overclocked HD5850,a few HDDs,card reader and an optical drive. Lasted nearly 5 years!

With modern components being more efficient and with smaller drives it makes me wonder why companies are being out thought by people on a tech forum.

Edit!!

Even with mATX cases companies are lazy - they are way too big to the extent you can get small ATX cases like the CR1080 which are a similar size which is one of the few reasonable mainstream efforts and is not made by a mainstream company. The smallest ones seem to be again done by internet collaborations. I also want light and a number of mainstream ones either are way too overweight or use cheap materials.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

On a side note - this year Nvidia is making around 65% gross margins,and nearly 40% net margins which is 2 to 3 times more than during the Fermi days and the start of the Kepler generations. People argued with me on forums saying nodes cost more which meant prices would rise,and the Titan cards were not the normal upper tier of Nvidia large GPU cards rebranded to a luxury tier. Yeah,see how that worked out.

[DanceswithUnix]

On a side note - this year Nvidia is making around 65% gross margins,and nearly 40% net margins which is 2 to 3 times more than during the Fermi days and the start of the Kepler generations. People argued with me on forums saying nodes cost more which meant prices would rise,and the Titan cards were not the normal upper tier of Nvidia large GPU cards rebranded to a luxury tier. Yeah,see how that worked out.

The two are not exclusive though. If the cost of making a big die went up 10%, and Nvidia managed to squeeze people for 100%, they keep the difference. Foundries used to talk about cost per square mm across processes, now they talk about cost per transistor because that doesn't look as bad. But for things like graphics the whole point of moving to a new process is to get more transistors on there so the die size has to stay up.

I think their cheek in releasing a £1000 card and then later saying "but you can have this 'cheap' ti version for 'only' £700" is a stroke of evil genius which I am amazed they got away with.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The two are not exclusive though. If the cost of making a big die went up 10%, and Nvidia managed to squeeze people for 100%, they keep the difference. Foundries used to talk about cost per square mm across processes, now they talk about cost per transistor because that doesn't look as bad. But for things like graphics the whole point of moving to a new process is to get more transistors on there so the die size has to stay up.

I think their cheek in releasing a £1000 card and then later saying "but you can have this 'cheap' ti version for 'only' £700" is a stroke of evil genius which I am amazed they got away with.

People were trying to be clever - like I said at the time lots of other stuff is also made using fabs and consumers should worry about themselves not worry about justifying price increases.

This is why the Titan class worked - people who looked at the die sizes realised a Titan used a GTX580 class GPU but was rebranded as a luxury class,and that the 80/80TI card you got was really the equivalent of a GTX570 class GPU. But even now people argue that the Titan was a new class of GPU,etc and nothing has changed on tech forums then you get even Hexus repeating rubbish like this ignoring the Titan series:

https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics...pus-tabulated/

Its hilarious,especially as you see Nvidia net margin starts to increase more and more.

Doubling of net margins or even tripling them means costs have not increased anywhere as much as people have thought for Nvidia and remember all the people referring to that conveniently leaked slide at 28nm from Nvidia which talked about 28nm. In hindsight it seem a little too convenient that it was leaked the moment they decided to change tiers.

Its probably why Intel wants to make PC graphics cards - they want high margins too,so what worries me is they would rather prod Nvidia and join them. Even AMD wants to join them,but the graphics side of AMD is so incompetent that they can't even make decent money when Nvidia has basically made $1200 cards seem acceptable.

The thing is I wonder how long the PC gaming market can bear this over the next 5 to 10 years,either it means things start slowing down as the mainstream as people have to wait longer and longer for performance to double or more people move to consoles,and keep their PCs longer and longer.

If you look at the small die under 04/14 series cards,the RRP has gone up from $250 for the GTX560TI to $500 with the GTX680 and between $599 to $699 for the GTX1080.

I wonder how long before Nvidia/AMD/Intel start GPU rental plans??

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It looks like you can buy the 35W TDP GE series APUs:

https://www.quietpc.com/amd-2nd-gen-ryzen-cpus

[Bagnaj97]

It looks like you can buy the 35W TDP GE series APUs:

https://www.quietpc.com/amd-2nd-gen-ryzen-cpus

CPU clocks haven't taken too much of a hit and GPU clocks are unchanged. They're impressive chips for a 35w TDP!
If they're binned to select chips with lower VID I wonder if they'll overclock better than the standard APUs?

[scaryjim]

CPU clocks haven't taken too much of a hit and GPU clocks are unchanged. They're impressive chips for a 35w TDP! ...

Just more evidence that the 14nm LPP process was mobile/server oriented, really. The first Gen Ryzen desktop chips and discrete Vega cards were clocked to the very edge of the process capability. These pretty much hit the sweet spot.

EDIT: also good demonstration of the ridiculous performance/watt you can get out of power-optimised Vega, of course

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Having had a thought about 7NM,I just hope AMD making the Rome CPUs at TSMC,does not indicate a problem with the GF process for the desktop CPUs though. The noise is GF does not have capacity,but I do hope it isn't another case of GF saying one thing and doing another and AMD hedging their bets at TSMC instead.

[Biscuit]

EDIT: also good demonstration of the ridiculous performance/watt you can get out of power-optimised Vega, of course

I guess its pretty clear the arch was built for consoles and mobile, but was just about passable for gaming & HEDT.

You look in the AMD enthusiast forums/sections of Reddit and everyone seems to preach undervolting is the best way to get the most out of Vega. I'm sure CTF has highlighted this a few times also.

We know that Vega is not tied to HBM, so its a bit of a surprise we havent seen any lower end Vega cards IMO. You would think it might be a bit more competetive with what Nvidia has to offer in mid and lower mid spaces.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I guess its pretty clear the arch was built for consoles and mobile, but was just about passable for gaming & HEDT.

You look in the AMD enthusiast forums/sections of Reddit and everyone seems to preach undervolting is the best way to get the most out of Vega. I'm sure CTF has highlighted this a few times also.

We know that Vega is not tied to HBM, so its a bit of a surprise we havent seen any lower end Vega cards IMO. You would think it might be a bit more competetive with what Nvidia has to offer in mid and lower mid spaces.

Its probably down to resources - AMD has prioritised CPUs over GPUs according to their own statements regarding Zen,so I suspect big Vega was developed for non-gaming markets first,and they just put a new badge on it to show they had something for gamers. After all the first big Vega based products announced were the Vega based Radeon Instinct based cards.

[Biscuit]

Yeah probably right, but tactically, If AMD release a 7nm mid range Vega type GPU with GDDR6 soon after Nvidia roll out all these untouchable high end GPU's (which seem like we might see bizarro levels of segmentation), they could at least retain what they have with the RX 580 segment of the market and force Nvidia to be a bit more aggressive.