2016+ CPU/GPU News

[jaxa]

NVIDIA announced the 16nm Pascal GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs. The $599 GTX 1080 will be more powerful than Titan X, GTX 980 Ti, or two GTX 980s. Neither card uses High Bandwidth Memory like the top Pascal GPU, Tesla P100.

 

Intel's Broadwell-E flagship enthusiast CPU, the Core i7-6950X, is expected to have 10 cores.

 

AMD Zen mainstream desktop CPUs could have 6-8 cores. The architecture has moved from Bulldozer's Clustered Multithreading to Simultaneous Multithreading, which is closer to Intel's design and has two threads per core. Zen desktop CPUs will be released before laptop CPUs. There could be a 16 core APU in 2017.

 

AMD's 14 or 16nm Polaris GPUs will apparently be cheaper and cooler, rather than trying to compete with the GTX 1080's performance. The Radeon R9 490 could cost $300. The Polaris GPUs will not have High Bandwidth Memory, which will instead be added to 2017 Vega GPUs as successors to the Fury series.

 

Sony could launch a "PS4K" console using an AMD Polaris GPU and faster Jaguar CPU capable of playing the current PS4 games in 2160p instead of 1080p. It could also boost frame rates for the PSVR.

Edited May 17, 2017 by jaxa

[Spooks]

It's one year closer to the expected introduction of 10 nanometer chips! Nanoelectronics! The future is now!

[demagogue]

Given our recent spate of spam bot posts, which the OP looks a lot like on first view, I can only conclude that, Jaxa, you have to be the most dedicated and perseverent spam bot in the history of bots, to spend so many years and intelligent posts to set up a post looking like that one. I salute you. o7

 

Just kidding. I stopped following chip advances around 2012 or so, and at this point am curious what we're really pushing for now. What's the golden ring to shoot for now? Games are practically brushing real life fidelity in real time in gaming as it is.

[Bikerdude]

Until Intel or OEMs fix the shit slow boot time(I was seeing 35-45s to desktop, compared to 15 on my Z77 based mobo) issue present on the X99/Z170 motherboard chipsets I wont be upgrading to that Skylake/Kabylakje anytime soon.

[jaxa]

Just kidding. I stopped following chip advances around 2012 or so, and at this point am curious what we're really pushing for now. What's the golden ring to shoot for now? Games are practically brushing real life fidelity in real time in gaming as it is.

 

What is your FPS at a dense point on a large TDM mission, and at what resolution? If it's less than 30-60, it's not great. 90+ FPS for VR and 4K+ resolutions are a golden ring that gamers could shoot for, but are the majority of TDM players even hitting 30 FPS consistently? What about on a laptop? If mappers still have to take into consideration players with slow computers, then we need more of these chip advances to flush out the 5-10 year old computers still out there.

 

This year's GPU releases are particularly important because after years of 28nm GPU releases from AMD and Nvidia, 20nm is being skipped to go straight to 14/16nm. That means a big performance boost, and a big boost in efficiency (FLOPS per Watt). Efficiency is another golden ring. If you increase the energy efficiency of the GPU, you can lower the TDP (power consumption and heat) of desktop GPUs, and deliver better graphics with discrete mobile GPUs or even the cheap APUs found in laptops and tablets. Maybe the GTX 1070M and similar chips are more important to you than a new desktop card, or maybe you like the fact that you can get last year's performance at a much lower cost. AMD appears to be following that strategy by not releasing a high-end Polaris GPU and instead aiming for a $300 GPU as the 14nm "flagship" for the next few months. The power consumption of the card will be lower, so it can be used in smaller PCs with less need for cooling.

 

Even if you have judged graphics to be sufficiently high fidelity and regard 4K/triple display/VR/etc. as gimmicks, the field of high performance computing can always benefit from computing advances, and faster computing helps speed up scientific research. The budgets for the first exascale supercomputers will aim for 20 MW power consumption at best, and up to 50 MW at worst. That golden ring requires 4-10 times more FLOPS/W than current systems on the Green500 (from 5 GFLOPS/W to 20 or 50 GFLOPS/W).

[Bikerdude]

A simple upgrade for any TDM player is to get an nVidia part thats a step up from what they have, and this can be relatively old or older tech. I say this becaise IDtech4 perfs better on nVidia than it does on ATi hardware.

 

For example a maxwell based GTX 750 Ti can be found for a little as £88 and that will give you 60FPS in pretty much all TDM FMs.

[woah]

Will be happy to see the GTX 970 fall in price. I just ordered a Vive but now I need a capable GPU. The 970 is basically the minimum for VR but for the time being it'll have to suffice.

 

According to Valve there will also be a substantial performance increase for multi-GPU setups when games start taking advantage of the multi-GPU stereoscopic rendering extensions.

[jaxa]

According to Valve there will also be a substantial performance increase for multi-GPU setups when games start taking advantage of the multi-GPU stereoscopic rendering extensions.

 

Yes, it's the unexpected benefit of VR: since two slightly different views need to be rendered, one for each eye, SLI can be more efficient by allocating one GPU per eye. The two GPUs don't need to talk to each other (I guess).

[Bikerdude]

Will be happy to see the GTX 970 fall in price. I just ordered a Vive but now I need a capable GPU. The 970 is basically the minimum for VR but for the time being it'll have to suffice.

I might be upgrading to the GTX 1070, meaning my Gigabyte Windforce GTX970 will be up for grabs.

[woah]

I might be upgrading to the GTX 1070, meaning my Gigabyte Windforce GTX970 will be up for grabs.

 

For the time being I'm just watching ebay but let me know what you want to let it go for. Not sure where you'd be shipping out of but I'm in the US.

[Bikerdude]

Shipping to the US us is ok, and you have a PM.

[jaxa]

You should do a before/after FPS on the most intensive mission(s), Bikerdude.

Edited May 13, 2016 by jaxa

[Oldjim]

GTX 970 - recommended GPU for Doom 4

Is the GTX 1070 available for purchase yet

[Bikerdude]

You should do a before/after FPS on the most intensive mission(s), Bikerdude.

Yuppers.

GTX 970 - recommended GPU for Doom 4, and Is the GTX 1070 available for purchase yet

For sure, and no I can only find case stickers

[jaxa]

GTX 1080 is available May 27th. GTX 1070 on June 10th. Although like past launches they will probably be overpriced and out of stock initially.

 

Hey, this upgrade will double your VRAM to 8 GB.

Edited May 13, 2016 by jaxa

[Bikerdude]

Thats one of the things I am looking forward too, having an advertised amount of ram - instead of 3.5+5....

[jaxa]

GTX 1080 review/preview from Tom's and AnandTech.

[Bikerdude]

So what I can take from that is a GTX1070 will be pretty much as fast as a 980Ti, use less power and run cooler under load. So a nice upgrade from my GTX 970

[Oldjim]

Given that I won't be buying Doom anytime soon and it would appear that Dishonored 2 will run fine on my existing graphics card at 1920 x 1080 I will wait for a least 6 months before considering one of the new card series

[Bikerdude]

@Jim, normally I would wait also. But I have my current card for over a year now and  the current contract is paying ok so I done mind the upgrade.

[jaxa]

Nvidia GTX 1070: The Full Specifications

 

Same at Anandtech.

 

ARM Describes 10nm Test Chip

Edited May 19, 2016 by jaxa

[nbohr1more]

5nm is supposed to be the tunneling limit so it looks like one more generation of regular fab scaling. Then they start making other parts of the chip smaller (the size

rating is for the smallest feature, but most chips have a component-zoo with many sizes up to 40nm or more) using new chemistry or possibly EUV (Samsung claims

that 7nm EUV is almost ready). With HBM they've already begun stacking chips too so when they run out of shrinking they'll start stacking.

[lowenz]

With HBM they've already begun stacking chips too so when they run out of shrinking they'll start stacking.

[jaxa]

Radeon RX 480

 

10 core Broadwell-E

Edited June 1, 2016 by jaxa

[Oldjim]

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/nvidia-gtx-1070-review/

although given that my monitor is only 1920 x 1080 this may well be a viable alternative at a much lower cost http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/06/amd-rx-480-polaris-release-date-price-specs/ as referred to in the previous post

Edited June 13, 2016 by Oldjim