I'm looking forward to it. I enjoyed my FX 8120 and have since upgraded to an FX 8370. My only hope is that they make at least one chip for the G34 server socket.

I had several AMD machines over the years (386 DX, K6-2, Phenom) but as soon as I switched to Core i7 I forgot about AMD. I am not a fanboy, but Intel has got the performance crown right now, even if it's a lot more expensive. I really hope AMD's ZEN to be a good alternative, because competition is good.

PS - I think AMD must design from scratch some sort of competitive chipsets. I don't know very much about current ones, but I had a lot of issues with older AMD chipset implementations (nForce, SB600), either the hard disk performance was lackluster or there was memory controller issues, you get the picture. I think newest AMD chipsets (from the Phenom II era onwards) are a lot better, though.

Kahenraz wrote:

I'm looking forward to it. I enjoyed my FX 8120 and have since upgraded to an FX 8370. My only hope is that they make at least one chip for the G34 server socket.

+1 also it would be awesome if they made a Zen chip for am3+, I doubt it will happen but man I would love the opportunity to drop a new Zen chip into my 990fx board. In all honesty the 8350 in my system will last me another 5 years minimum.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

I had several AMD machines over the years (386 DX, K6-2, Phenom) but as soon as I switched to Core i7 I forgot about AMD. I am not a fanboy, but Intel has got the performance crown right now, even if it's a lot more expensive.

Indeed, in absolute terms, Intel is 'more expensive'... But if you factor in that AMD's top-of-the-line is only about $199 these days, there's a ton of Intel CPUs that may be 'more expensive', but are well within reach of the average guy's budget.
If your budget is say $299, then you're better off getting an Intel Core i7 with very decent performance, than getting that $199 AMD, saving $100, but getting performance of 3-4 years ago (of course, if you bought a Core i7 3-4 years ago, the AMD isn't even an option to begin with, because it'd be a downgrade).
That's a pretty bad situation to be in for AMD, and I guess Zen has got to be good, because it is probably their last chance to do something about it.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

PS - I think AMD must design from scratch some sort of competitive chipsets.

You know, I have been thinking about that as well... Back when AMD was a reasonably large player, it made sense to acquire ATi and take over their chipset business. But now that AMD is struggling, perhaps it would have been better if they could concentrate only on the CPU, and have a third party like VIA or nVidia develop some competitive chipsets, like in the old days.

re:chipset, this is what we'll soon be having with Zen (outsourced to ASMedia):
http://techreport.com/news/26591/report-amd-t … sign-to-asmedia
http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-s … ng-deal-report/

We need AMD to be competitive now more than ever, Intel has become far less competitive and seem to be okay with releasing a new platform once every two years that's about 15% faster, even if you hate AMD , we need competition, intel only innovate if there is good competition, so far performance has taken a back seat to power consumption because they just don't see any need to compete when their so far ahead of AMD, look at the socket 7 days or the early Pentium 3 days where AMD was right at their heels,and eventually took lead with the Athlon, ideally we need another x86/x64 manufacturer as well to spur things along but that wont ever.

Same could be said for the video card industry, while the 480rx appeared good on paper it seems that a lot of normal users arent happy with it.

PS and dont get me started on the whole -k only for overclockers.

FaSMaN wrote:

We need AMD to be competitive now more than ever

What are we going to do about it?
Hoping that AMD becomes competitive isn't magically going to make them release great products.
AMD has been fighting a two-fronted war for years, against Intel and nVidia, and it has taken its toll.

FaSMaN wrote:

Intel has become far less competitive and seem to be okay with releasing a new platform once every two years that's about 15% faster, even if you hate AMD , we need competition, intel only innovate if there is good competition, so far performance has taken a back seat to power consumption because they just don't see any need to compete when their so far ahead of AMD, look at the socket 7 days or the early Pentium 3 days where AMD was right at their heels,and eventually took lead with the Athlon, ideally we need another x86/x64 manufacturer as well to spur things along but that wont ever.

That image is skewed because you aren't taking Intel's server-oriented line of CPUs into account.
Look at this monster for example: http://ark.intel.com/products/91317/Intel-Xeo … -Cache-2_20-GHz
22 cores, 44 threads, 55 MB cache. And all that in 'only' 145W TDP.
Intel certainly is still pushing for performance as well. This is WAY outside of reach of anything AMD offers. And if what you claim would be true, nothing even remotely similar to this CPU would exist, since 4-core/8-thread CPUs are enough to keep AMD at bay.
The thing is just that the desktop market is not asking for this kind of performance. Hence they remain niche-products for organizations with deep enough pockets. If the demand increase from the desktop market, then Intel could scale up their operation, and the higher volumes would result in significant pricedrops for CPUs with more than 4/6-cores.

FaSMaN wrote:

Same could be said for the video card industry, while the 480rx appeared good on paper it seems that a lot of normal users arent happy with it.

If anything, RX480 only proves how much nVidia has innovated in the past few years, despite no serious competition from AMD at all. AMD has huge problems trying to keep up even with nVidia's last generation, and nVidia's current generation is an incredible leap from that.

I don't think we need AMD for competition at all, actually. Both Intel and nVidia have mainly been competing against their own older products for the past few years, and both are still innovating at a pace that AMD can't follow.

Scali wrote:

What are we going to do about it?
Hoping that AMD becomes competitive isn't magically going to make them release great products.
AMD has been fighting a two-fronted war for years, against Intel and nVidia, and it has taken its toll.

Your right, hoping wont do any good, I didnt say we should all hope, rather I made a comment about the current state of things, competition will do us good, the product isnt out yet so I cant comment on it.

That image is skewed because you aren't taking Intel's server-oriented line of CPUs into account. Look at this monster for examp […]
Show full quote

That image is skewed because you aren't taking Intel's server-oriented line of CPUs into account.
Look at this monster for example: http://ark.intel.com/products/91317/Intel-Xeo … -Cache-2_20-GHz
22 cores, 44 threads, 55 MB cache. And all that in 'only' 145W TDP.
Intel certainly is still pushing for performance as well. This is WAY outside of reach of anything AMD offers. And if what you claim would be true, nothing even remotely similar to this CPU would exist, since 4-core/8-thread CPUs are enough to keep AMD at bay.
The thing is just that the desktop market is not asking for this kind of performance. Hence they remain niche-products for organizations with deep enough pockets. If the demand increase from the desktop market, then Intel could scale up their operation, and the higher volumes would result in significant pricedrops for CPUs with more than 4/6-cores.

As per the thread I am talking about consumer level hardware, and this only proves my point , if AMD did release a killer CPU or a new competitor enters the market, it will force intels hand in getting there Enterprise level CPUs to the consumer quicker, there is also the whole argument on software utilization , having 22 cores is great for virtualization , but doesnt really add as much performance when the software isnt optimized to make use of it.

If they can apply more resources to optimizing their 8 core consumer cpus it will be far more beneficial than going past the 8 core mark on a consumer computer.

If anything, RX480 only proves how much nVidia has innovated in the past few years, despite no serious competition from AMD at all. AMD has huge problems trying to keep up even with nVidia's last generation, and nVidia's current generation is an incredible leap from that.

I don't think we need AMD for competition at all, actually. Both Intel and nVidia have mainly been competing against their own older products for the past few years, and both are still innovating at a pace that AMD can't follow.

I don't think nVidia has innovated as much as you believe, they have however been playing a very dirty game with things like Nvidia GameWorks, to cripple performance on their older colds, while making the newer cards shine more, not that AMD is completely innocent either "hairworks" comes to mind.

Once again a third player who can produce premium cards will do us good here.

PS I am not a fanboy of either company, call me cynical but I feel that back when there was more players in the market we saw better achievements or maybe its just my rose coloured nostalgia glasses.

FaSMaN wrote:

As per the thread I am talking about consumer level hardware, and this only proves my point , if AMD did release a killer CPU or a new competitor enters the market, it will force intels hand in getting there Enterprise level CPUs to the consumer quicker, there is also the whole argument on software utilization , having 22 cores is great for virtualization , but doesnt really add as much performance when the software isnt optimized to make use of it.

Or if consumers would start buying these Xeon CPUs en-masse...?

FaSMaN wrote:

If they can apply more resources to optimizing their 8 core consumer cpus it will be far more beneficial than going past the 8 core mark on a consumer computer.

What makes you think they don't? They have a single architecture, and it has by far the fastest per-core performance ever for x86. The fact that you can get the same architecture with 22 cores is a nice bonus.

FaSMaN wrote:

I don't think nVidia has innovated as much as you believe

You don't?
I don't 'believe' anything. What I *see* however, is that nVidia singlehandedly put GPGPU on the map with CUDA. All this talk about 'compute shaders' and 'async' are things that NVidia has offered in CUDA for many years. Likewise, NVidia introduced a scalar-based architecture with the 8800-series. AMD had to throw their architecture around to GCN a few years ago to match that, because VLIW was a dead end, and scalar-based is the future. nVidia just knew that years before, and innovated in that direction.
Likewise, nVidia innovated with PhysX, G-Sync, and Conservative Rasterization to name a few things.
Aside from that, Maxwell was incredibly innovative in how efficient it was for the performance it delivered. Pascal only took that further.

It is exactly nVidia's innovation over the years that put AMD in such a difficult situation. A few years ago, AMD and nVidia were still closely matched in terms of technology.

I think if AMD can make an 8 core Zen that runs at 4ghz and has Haswell performance,
and that can overclock to 5ghz on air cooling (wishful thinking there probably)
and also have it support dual socket motherboards, I think if they came out at
a $200-$300 price point it might make Intel sweat a bit. I know I'd be thinking
about it for a workstation build. Surplus 8 core Xeon CPUs are so cheap though
it might still not be competitive. But I guess we will see.

Scali wrote:

Or if consumers would start buying these Xeon CPUs en-masse...? […]
Show full quote

FaSMaN wrote:

As per the thread I am talking about consumer level hardware, and this only proves my point , if AMD did release a killer CPU or a new competitor enters the market, it will force intels hand in getting there Enterprise level CPUs to the consumer quicker, there is also the whole argument on software utilization , having 22 cores is great for virtualization , but doesnt really add as much performance when the software isnt optimized to make use of it.

Or if consumers would start buying these Xeon CPUs en-masse...?

FaSMaN wrote:

If they can apply more resources to optimizing their 8 core consumer cpus it will be far more beneficial than going past the 8 core mark on a consumer computer.

What makes you think they don't? They have a single architecture, and it has by far the fastest per-core performance ever for x86. The fact that you can get the same architecture with 22 cores is a nice bonus.

FaSMaN wrote:

I don't think nVidia has innovated as much as you believe

You don't?
I don't 'believe' anything. What I *see* however, is that nVidia singlehandedly put GPGPU on the map with CUDA. All this talk about 'compute shaders' and 'async' are things that NVidia has offered in CUDA for many years. Likewise, NVidia introduced a scalar-based architecture with the 8800-series. AMD had to throw their architecture around to GCN a few years ago to match that, because VLIW was a dead end, and scalar-based is the future. nVidia just knew that years before, and innovated in that direction.
Likewise, nVidia innovated with PhysX, G-Sync, and Conservative Rasterization to name a few things.
Aside from that, Maxwell was incredibly innovative in how efficient it was for the performance it delivered. Pascal only took that further.

It is exactly nVidia's innovation over the years that put AMD in such a difficult situation. A few years ago, AMD and nVidia were still closely matched in terms of technology.

nVidia didn't innovate with PhysX. They bought it then converted it to shaders.

gdjacobs wrote:

nVidia didn't innovate with PhysX. They bought it then converted it to shaders.

That *is* the innovation. PhysX ran on a separate PPU when they bought it. NVidia was the first and still only one to deliver a practical realtime physics solution that is GPU-accelerated.
They also didn't just 'convert them to shaders'... They did this in the DX10-era, when OpenCL and Compute Shaders were not even available yet.
They did this using their own CUDA solution, which pioneered modern GPGPU, on their revolutionary GeForce 8800 architecture.
Regular shaders as found in DX10 or OpenGL at the time weren't capable of this in the least.

Just hoping AMD can get rid of the boycott Intel pushed into laptop/desktop OEMs for the last 5 years or so. A mobile RX480 would fare great on high-end notebooks.

I'm counting on AMD to deliver at least Sandy Bridge level performance level with this new chips. Intel needs to face some competition, even if not on a 1:1 scale.

Snayperskaya wrote:

A mobile RX480 would fare great on high-end notebooks.

You think? The biggest problem the RX480 has at this point is poor performance-per-watt.
Something that's even more important in notebooks than in videocards.
This generation will be a total walk-over for nVidia in the notebook market.

Scali wrote:

You think? The biggest problem the RX480 has at this point is poor performance-per-watt. Something that's even more important in […]
Show full quote

Snayperskaya wrote:

A mobile RX480 would fare great on high-end notebooks.

You think? The biggest problem the RX480 has at this point is poor performance-per-watt.
Something that's even more important in notebooks than in videocards.
This generation will be a total walk-over for nVidia in the notebook market.

I remember someone citing nVidia would use the same desktop-class GPU on mobiles a while ago. I wonder if they are really going with this. Too bad MXM isn't user-friendly. 🙁

Snayperskaya wrote:

I remember someone citing nVidia would use the same desktop-class GPU on mobiles a while ago. I wonder if they are really going with this.

Haven't both AMD and nVidia been doing that for ages anyway?
At least the Maxwell-based mobile parts are using the same GM20x chips as the desktop parts. They are just configured slightly differently (less cores enabled, lower clocks, that sort of thing).
So a 980M doesn't have the same specs as a regular 980.
From what I gathered, that rumour is mostly about dropping the confusing naming scheme. Which they already did, there's a 980 non-M used in some notebooks, which is equal to a regular 980: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/notebook-gpus … geforce-gtx-980

Scali wrote:

Haven't both AMD and nVidia been doing that for ages anyway? At least the Maxwell-based mobile parts are using the same GM20x ch […]
Show full quote

Snayperskaya wrote:

I remember someone citing nVidia would use the same desktop-class GPU on mobiles a while ago. I wonder if they are really going with this.

Haven't both AMD and nVidia been doing that for ages anyway?
At least the Maxwell-based mobile parts are using the same GM20x chips as the desktop parts. They are just configured slightly differently (less cores enabled, lower clocks, that sort of thing).
So a 980M doesn't have the same specs as a regular 980.
From what I gathered, that rumour is mostly about dropping the confusing naming scheme. Which they already did, there's a 980 non-M used in some notebooks, which is equal to a regular 980: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/notebook-gpus … geforce-gtx-980

IIRC a GTX 960M is on par with a GTX 750, and so on. Vastly inferior performance for GPUs at the same price point (MXM cards are more expensive if bought separately).

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.

Would i also like to have an intel as well? I sure would.
Do I like my 8350? sure.
Does it have its problems? you bet, but not enough for my to hate it.
Does AMD have pretty good value for their performance? you betcha it does.
Do you think AMD will make comeback? Im hoping it does, sure it wont be as fast as an intel or as expensive, but if it was..... then it would be an intel now wouldn't it?

Oldskoolmaniac 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. […]
Show full quote

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.

Would i also like to have an intel as well? I sure would.
Do I like my 8350? sure.
Does it have its problems? you bet, but not enough for my to hate it.
Does AMD have pretty good value for their performance? you betcha it does.
Do you think AMD will make comeback? Im hoping it does, sure it wont be as fast as an intel or as expensive, but if it was..... then it would be an intel now wouldn't it?

The 8350 isn't bad at all. A friend of mine built a system around one of them and has it overclocked to something like 4.4GHz.

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. Really, the only thing I did notice right away was that his machine wasn't loading games as quickly as mine. That could've been caused by his slower Crucial SSD though. Once games were loaded, frame rates were high enough that there just wasn't a perceptible difference between his FX and my Intel.

Point is, even the current AMD CPUs really aren't as bad as the Internet makes 'em out to be. And ZEN will only make things better. 😀

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 😀