AMD says seeding of dev kits will boost Ryzen gaming performance

[kompukare]

Jaguar is a low power construction core, right? So with everyone optimising games for a jaguar based SOC, construction was easily beaten by intel's core

No, Jaguar (and its predecessor Bobcat and successor Puma) were not construction cores. Totally different design. Similar to how Atom is not Core. I think Bobcat had better perf/watt than Atom (as AMD were not that concerned with artificially crippling it) and that even on a worse node, but they had trouble getting any decent OEM wins and then Intel started the 'contra-revenue' thing where they dumped $billions in an unsuccessful attempt to get into mobiles. AMD could obviously not afford to give stuff away at a loss.

Still, now that Zen is out and has presumably caught Intel's attention all this dumping will stop (Intel already announced they were pretty much abandoning Atom), and the ARM vendors must be happy to not have Intel ruining their business with profits from desktop, laptops and servers.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Jaguar is a low power construction core, right? So with everyone optimising games for a jaguar based SOC, construction was easily beaten by intel's core

Jaguar is a derivative of Bobcat which was a design more akin to newer generation Atoms and one of the most successful designs AMD had for years - Bobcat was a low cost Atom competitor which destroyed the in-order Atom CPUs at the time. Jaguar was an evolved version of Bobcat which was designed to be ported to different fabs. However,Intel contra-revenue limited its success in the PC market.

They are both much smaller cores than what a BD derived CPU had. If AMD actually gets Zen into a console,it will be a totally different kettle of fish as it would the same core design being shared between consoles and desktops.

[Xlucine]

Ah, I stand corrected

[scaryjim]

... I think Bobcat had better perf/watt than Atom ...

I'm not sure about this, tbh - maybe against the in-order Atoms it was true, although it was because 'cat' ran at higher power but with much higher performance, however Bay Trail - particularly for tablets - was a higher performance part at lower TDPs/SDPs. Most 'cat' processors - and certainly the most common ones - ran at mainstream 15W - 25W TDPs and ended up competing with the U-variants of Intel's big cores, which were a lot faster at the same power.

Interestingly, at one point 'cat' (Jaguar) and 'construction' (Piledriver) has very similar IPC. However, the Puma and Puma+ revisions of the 'cat' cores didn't increase IPC (they focused on lower power and higher clock rates), whereas as Steamroller and Excavator both increased IPC and reduced power usage for the 'construction' cores. That meant that AMD could put 'construction' cores into those 15W and 25W thermal envelopes that 'cat' cores used to occupy, essentially cannibalising their own low-power processor sales.