I believe a Zen-based APU is further down the road.
Intel has the -E CPUs which lack GPUs. Priced high because they can be. Though they actually tend to be slower for games because the per core performance is lower, because of somewhat lower clock speed. Games just don't usually benefit from more than 4 cores.
wrote:After taking it for a test drive, I came away fairly impressed. No, they're not the fastest CPUs out there, but in terms of general usability (Win10, Internet, even high end gaming), I certainly didn't "feel" much of a difference between it and my 4.5GHz i7-4930K.
Is that even a criterion though?
I mean, I still have some old Core2Duo systems, and even they don't "feel" slower with Win10, internet etc. Only with newer games perhaps, but that also depends on what videocard you use and how far you pump up the settings.
I guess the "feel"-factor has gone a few years ago. The OS itself also affected this. Win8 and beyond were also optimized for phones and tablets, so they are more lean-and-mean than Win7 and earlier versions.
I am thinking more of things like performance-per-watt, or performance-per-core... And if you then look at how much power you have to pump into an AMD FX CPU, and how little performance even the 8-core variations yield, I am far from impressed.
The 8-core FX is literally worse than the 6-core Phenom in many scenarios.
wrote:Now what Intel does with chips performing beyond that level of performance, is charge exponentially, because they can. The i7 for example commands a substantial premium. So does 2011 and beyond.
Yup, pricing of CPUs and GPUs has always been like that. I guess the market just works that way.
I suppose it also makes sense...
On a $200 part, it makes sense to have variations that may be $30-$40 more expensive, with small steps in clockspeed, cache or such.
But once you reach the $500-$600 range, you don't want to have such fine-grained pricing. It makes more sense to make the next variation $100 more expensive or such.
wrote:Scali made a good point, sure an i5 or i7 costs more than a typical AMD FX setup, BUT both are very affordable! […]
Scali made a good point, sure an i5 or i7 costs more than a typical AMD FX setup, BUT both are very affordable!
It's not like Intel is $800 and AMD sells for $500. This used to the case in the past. Over here in Australia a Skylake i5 sells for around A$ 300. The top FX goes for just under $300, certainly not a difference that falls in the "You can save lots of money" category.
Now what Intel does with chips performing beyond that level of performance, is charge exponentially, because they can. The i7 for example commands a substantial premium. So does 2011 and beyond.
To me Intel holds all the cards. At ANY time could they decide to clock chips higher, offer more cores, or do a multitude of things to remain competitive.
So what ZEN will do I think is force Intel to offer higher core counts on their mainstream sockets. Which is great for all consumers.
Question:
Is Zen going to have a GPU integrated?
Reason I'm asking is look at a Skylake dies, see how much space the GPU takes up and how easy would it be for Intel to remove the GPU, and add 4 more cores?
Skylake:
Copy paste of 4 extra cores 😀
One of the things I didn't like about Intel in recent years, is their need to socket-hop a lot. Meaning that if a motherboard breaks 5 or 10 years down the road, I will have a harder time to replace it and if I decide I won't replace it, I will be left with spare parts I don't have any use for.
I was kinda disappointed with Bulldozer even before it hit te market, because of its, say, halved amount of ALUs and this turned out to be correct.
A friend of mine and I benchmarked our then-new systems together and even though his Bulldozer was clocked higher than my Phenom II and had more cores, almost all of the programs we ran didn't really seem to run significantly faster at all on his Bulldozer.
I don't know what AMD will be doing with Zen, but I've learned to be patient and to wait it out and see what happens.
For a new rig, I would probably go Intel, but I would do my homework as Intel does goof up from time to time as well.
wrote:One of the things I didn't like about Intel in recent years, is their need to socket-hop a lot. Meaning that if a motherboard br […]
wrote:Scali made a good point, sure an i5 or i7 costs more than a typical AMD FX setup, BUT both are very affordable! […]
Scali made a good point, sure an i5 or i7 costs more than a typical AMD FX setup, BUT both are very affordable!
It's not like Intel is $800 and AMD sells for $500. This used to the case in the past. Over here in Australia a Skylake i5 sells for around A$ 300. The top FX goes for just under $300, certainly not a difference that falls in the "You can save lots of money" category.
Now what Intel does with chips performing beyond that level of performance, is charge exponentially, because they can. The i7 for example commands a substantial premium. So does 2011 and beyond.
To me Intel holds all the cards. At ANY time could they decide to clock chips higher, offer more cores, or do a multitude of things to remain competitive.
So what ZEN will do I think is force Intel to offer higher core counts on their mainstream sockets. Which is great for all consumers.
Question:
Is Zen going to have a GPU integrated?
Reason I'm asking is look at a Skylake dies, see how much space the GPU takes up and how easy would it be for Intel to remove the GPU, and add 4 more cores?
Skylake:
Copy paste of 4 extra cores 😀
One of the things I didn't like about Intel in recent years, is their need to socket-hop a lot. Meaning that if a motherboard breaks 5 or 10 years down the road, I will have a harder time to replace it and if I decide I won't replace it, I will be left with spare parts I don't have any use for.
I was kinda disappointed with Bulldozer even before it hit te market, because of its, say, halved amount of ALUs and this turned out to be correct.
A friend of mine and I benchmarked our then-new systems together and even though his Bulldozer was clocked higher than my Phenom II and had more cores, almost all of the programs we ran didn't really seem to run significantly faster at all on his Bulldozer.
I don't know what AMD will be doing with Zen, but I've learned to be patient and to wait it out and see what happens.
For a new rig, I would probably go Intel, but I would do my homework as Intel does goof up from time to time as well.
Sadly at some point, AMD Bulldozer has worse IPC than both AMD K10 and even Core 2 (Remember Core 2 has sightly better clock per clock than AMD K10). A friend of mine ran a benchmark (Passmark Perfomance Test V8) on his overclocked Q9650 (3.6 GHz) and it got sightly higher single thread score than a FX 8350 at stock clocks.
About Intel, they haven't made so much improvements after AMD Bulldozer's fail, they changed Socket each 2 years (or generations) until Intel changed their scheme (when Tick-Tock was no longer possible) recenrtly to a new "process-architecture-optimization" system and probably, a Socket will last 3 generatuons. I do hope Zen becomes comptetitive because that would push Intel and do more improvements and large IPC increases.
wrote:About Intel, they haven't made so much improvements after AMD Bulldozer's fail, they changed Socket each 2 years (or generations) until Intel changed their scheme (when Tick-Tock was no longer possible) recenrtly to a new "process-architecture-optimization" system and probably, a Socket will last 3 generatuons. I do hope Zen becomes comptetitive because that would push Intel and do more improvements and large IPC increases.
I'm not sure how much further x86 can be pushed, really.
Ever since the Pentium Pro, we've not improved much on peak IPC. Overall performance has improved because of more cache, extra cores, higher clockspeeds, and new instructionsets. But at the basis is still that magic 2-3 instructions per cycle throughput. x86 code just does not lend itself for very efficient decoding and execution.
So I think Intel is already pushing the limits of IPC.
At the same time, Intel also does things like this: http://ark.intel.com/products/93790/Intel-Xeo … -Cache-2_20-GHz
24 cores, 48 threads, 60 MB cache.
That's how far Intel can push things with their current technology. The 4-core desktop processors are just 'toys' in Intel's product line-up.
There's no way AMD can be even remotely competitive with Intel. Intel can easily deliver affordable 6-core or 8-core CPUs at the same prices they sell 4-cores now (those are still 'toys' compared to these monsters, and 6-8 cores on their current 14 nm process is a lot cheaper than the 4-core Core i7s they originally introduced at 45 nm, which had pretty much the same price level as they still do today). Their production technology is capable of so much more. There just isn't enough demand to bring it to the mainstream at this point.
wrote:You gotta put it this way i spent $250 new on the AMD FX8350 and the Intel is normally $600+ range, so you get what you pay for.
You must be looking at Socket 2011 chips if you think that Intel costs $600+
The consumer chips are nowhere near that cost. A 6600K is $250.
wrote:At the same time, Intel also does things like this: http://ark.intel.com/products/93790/Intel-Xeo … -Cache-2_20-GHz 24 cores, 48 […]
At the same time, Intel also does things like this: http://ark.intel.com/products/93790/Intel-Xeo … -Cache-2_20-GHz
24 cores, 48 threads, 60 MB cache.
That's how far Intel can push things with their current technology. The 4-core desktop processors are just 'toys' in Intel's product line-up.
There's no way AMD can be even remotely competitive with Intel. Intel can easily deliver affordable 6-core or 8-core CPUs at the same prices they sell 4-cores now (those are still 'toys' compared to these monsters, and 6-8 cores on their current 14 nm process is a lot cheaper than the 4-core Core i7s they originally introduced at 45 nm, which had pretty much the same price level as they still do today). Their production technology is capable of so much more. There just isn't enough demand to bring it to the mainstream at this point.
Knights Landing is pretty nuts as well. Look out NV. I find it pretty impressive that NV carved out a niche in HPC as they have and now have the juggernaut turning their way.
wrote:Knights Landing is pretty nuts as well. Look out NV. I find it pretty impressive that NV carved out a niche in HPC as they have and now have the juggernaut turning their way.
I can't help but think that Intel completely missed out on the opportunity to get in the GPU market. For the past 4-5 years, nVidia and AMD had been stuck on 28 nm. Intel wouldn't even need a particularly good GPU to become competitive by just leveraging their 14 nm technology. They would just have had to scale up their iGPU and put it on a discrete card.
