2016+ CPU/GPU News

[Oldjim]

and if you want to spend even more dosh

[jaxa]

The GTX 1080 Ti is crap. You need this one instead.

[MoroseTroll]

As for ISA? They make new ones all the time don't they (SSE, SSE2, etc)?

Every x86 extension (MMX, SSE, AVX, FMA, etc.) just extends the x86 ISA, not replaces it. The "xor ax, ax" instruction still has the same byte codes (0x33, 0xC0), as it was in 1978, when 8086 was born. It's a binary compatibility.

If AMD or Intel would implement, say, GVX (let's name it Graphics Vector eXtension ), then all other CPU/GPU vendors should do the same, in order to gain advantage. But AMD would never do that (remember 3DNow!, E3DNow!, XOP, FMA4? Many modern AMD CPUs don't support them anymore due to very serious reasons), nVidia cannot do that (because it hasn't its own x86 CPU), VIA is almost dead, so the only one who's left is Intel. Would Intel implement so named GVX? I don't know, but I doubt. You see, Intel still didn't implement AVX-512 in its desktop and laptop CPUs, whereas that extension has been announced in 2013, i.e. 4 (four!) years ago. So why should Intel bother about GVX?

[jaxa]

Intel is keeping Moore’s Law alive by making bigger improvements less often (10nm node discussion)

Edited March 29, 2017 by jaxa

[jaxa]

Microsoft’s Project Scorpio: More Hardware Details Revealed

 

8 GB of usable RAM (up from 5 GB), 4 GB reserved for the system (up from 3). A total of 12 GB, but with massively higher memory bandwidth than before, allowing them to get rid of the small amount of embedded DRAM that the previous versions had.

 

Likely the same 8 Jaguar cores with 1 thread per core, but at a decently higher clock speed. At least 6 or 7 cores should be usable by games.

 

GPU is nearly 5 times better in claimed TFLOPS, and other enhancements will help it push four times as many pixels (4K resolution) at somewhere between 30-60 FPS.

 

Now that multiple iterations of Sony and Microsoft x86 hardware using "8 cores" are out, will we see this trickle down to modern AAA PC titles? Will gamers start to buy more than quad-cores with the expectation that games will be designed to take advantage of all of the available cores? Will TDM ever be able to use 6-12 cores?

Edited April 10, 2017 by Bikerdude
Moved this to hardware section.

[jaxa]

NVIDIA Announces NVIDIA Titan Xp Video Card: Fully Enabled GP102 for $1200

 

AMD Radeon RX 500 cards coming soon.

 

This is an interesting story. Amazingly enough, there has never been a Chromebook running on an AMD APU. I think we can attribute that to Chromebooks becoming popular during AMD's years-long Bulldozer fiasco, and AMD's lack of a low-power part that could be used in fanless laptop designs (which I believe all Chromebook are, right?). Although the report says it will be a 28nm Excavator (Bulldozer) part. Give me mobile Zen or give me nothing.

 

Edit: forgot to add this: IEEE Unveils Next Phase of IRDS to Drive Beyond Moore’s Law

Edited April 9, 2017 by jaxa

[jaxa]

Ryzen 5 1600X Review

[nbohr1more]

Yeah, pretty good:

 

http://techreport.com/review/31724/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-and-ryzen-5-1500x-cpus-reviewed-part-one/11

 

competitive with the best i5's and older i7's in gaming and a monster in threaded workloads like video encoding.

 

AMD finally has game devs aiming at multi-core workloads so it's also got better prospects on the future-proof side of

things. (I still think the APU's should automagically offload FP work to the iGPU though...)

[jaxa]

Ryzens all support ECC RAM, something people seem to be bleating about more these days as the RAM moves to 16+ GB per module. That alone might be a dealmaker for some people even if Ryzen wasn't the multithreaded workload king.

[jaxa]

"Tech firm AMD says virtual reality will soon be so advanced that humans will choose to live in computer simulations"

 

Nice. 32K per eye and 500 FPS please?

 

Xbox's Project Scorpio will support AMD's game-smoothing FreeSync 2 displays

 

Apple To Develop Own GPU, Drop Imagination's GPUs From SoCs

 

TSMC to start mass production of Apple A11 chip in April ahead of iPhone 8, 10 nm process

 

Apple iOS 11 To Discard Support For All 32-Bit Apps

[nbohr1more]

Apple was waiting until PowerVR's most important patents expired. They can do nominal licensing for

anything their in-house team can't handle to maintain backward compatibility.

 

PowerVR should've taken one of the many buyout deals they were offered over the past few years.

Now they are in dire straights with their best patents expiring and nobody that interested in their

new tech. AMD, Nvidia, Intel, etc are probably all just waiting for them to die so they can pick over

the carcass. Such a shame that such a brilliant technical team is falling victim to poor business decisions.

 

Maybe being under the gun will force them to do something that much more impressive to save their asses?

[MoroseTroll]

If we're talking about the acquisition of PowerVR, I'd imagine that it would be Intel. These two were already co-operating once or twice (who remember those slo-o-ow GMA 500/600/3600/3650?), so maybe Intel would decide to enforce its own GPU team by the PowerVR specialists.

 

About offloading FPU work to the iGPU: I think you, guys, should better find a good Vulkan programmer (Axel Gneiting, Tiago Sousa?), instead of waiting for such a miracle .

[Bikerdude]

competitive with the best i5's and older i7's in gaming and a monster in threaded workloads like video encoding.

But most of what the average user does, me included wont see any multi-core use beyond 4 cores. Even my hyper threading dosen't see much use beyond compressing archives and handbrake (whish there was a way to use the GPU for that)

 

So for me my Core i7 4790k & Msi Z97-Krait -

• spanks the Ryzen 5 on single core and quad core, bar massively multi-core applications (rendering etc)
• The 4790 its actually a tad faster and £100 cheaper than a Ryzen 7 1800x in everything bar massively-multi-core
• Its as fast as the £50 more expensive Core i7 6700k.
• I retain full Win7/8 compatibility
• And every contemporary game I have played with my old GTX970 and now the 1070 runs flawlessly.

The lesson here is the the dynamic between old and new isnt what it used to be, my older & cheaper 4th gen Core i7 based system is spanking all but the hi-end AMD offerings and holding its own against 2 generations newer intel CPu's.

[nbohr1more]

Hmm.

 

i7-4790k = $409 vs AMD R5 1600x = $249 ?

 

Admittedly, it's cheaper than R7 1800 but you shouldn't be comparing an R5 to it unless you know

of a place where you can snag one new for $250?

[Bikerdude]

If we are talking £ then -

 

Core i7 4790k

 

£255 - https://uk.webuy.com/product.php?sku=SCPUINTI74790K

 

Ryzen 1700 non-x and X -

 

£315 - https://uk.webuy.com/product.php?sku=SCPUAMD1700

£360 - https://uk.webuy.com/product.php?sku=SCPUAMD1700X

 

Ryzen 5 1600x -

 

£250 - http://www.ebuyer.com/784314-amd-ryzen-5-1600x-6-core-am4-cpu-processor-yd160xbcaewof?mkwid=sWA3N2WiH_dc&pcrid=51630194939&pkw=&pmt=&gclid=CJmllumrotMCFUkQ0wod_w0HbQ

[jaxa]

But most of what the average user does, me included wont see any multi-core use beyond 4 cores. Even my hyper threading dosen't see much use beyond compressing archives and handbrake (which there was a way to use the GPu for that crap)

 

7zip and Handbrake all day every day! Those were the two examples at the top of my head and then I reread your comment.

 

In 2011, it didn't make sense to get 8 cores (let's not call Bulldozer's 4 modules the equivalent of 8 cores, think Xeon instead).

 

In 2017, You have one and a half generations of two consoles with 8 cores. At least 6 cores should be usable by the games. So today's AAA titles should be able to take advantage of hex/octo cores like never before. It remains to be seen whether it's worth it if you have to take a hit in clock speed, but multithreaded gaming is a reality now.

[peter_spy]

When I'll be changing mobo, I'll definitely take 8 or 12-core Xeon. I wouldn't mind that 14-core model, but it's ridiculously expensive. 4 core CPU with HT is enough for games now, but MR Render to texture function still uses CPU and that's like 20 mins per 2048 texture. xNormal is amazing for it's GPU use, but I have much better control over what I do in modelling software. Good thing MR was bought out by Nvidia and they're making steady progress with swithcing more and more tasks to GPU.

[stgatilov]

But most of what the average user does, me included wont see any multi-core use beyond 4 cores. Even my hyper threading dosen't see much use beyond compressing archives and handbrake (which there was a way to use the GPu for that crap)

 

Well, building C++ projects parallelizes pretty well.

 

Quite often I do some small change and have to recompile whole TDM from scratch.

It is not very fun to do on my Core2Duo CPU.

I hope 6-code Ryzen would make it less annoying =)

[jaxa]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3197147/components-processors/its-official-amds-threadripper-will-bring-a-16-core-32-thread-monster-to-the-desktop.html

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/amd-ryzen-threadripper-price-specs-release-date/

http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-lineup-threadripper/

 

AMD will release Ryzen 9 "Threadripper". The star of the show has 16 cores, but there will be 10, 12, and 14 core versions as well. Each core has 2 threads.

 

Aggressive pricing would put the 16 core version at $1,000, but I would not be surprised if they increase it to around $1,200 instead.

 

This will compete with Intel's upcoming Skylake-X Core i9 enthusiast chips, which will top out at 12 cores and probably cost up to $1,500.

 

With the Ryzen 7 and 9 launches, the upcoming 6-core Coffee Lake from Intel, and the 8-core (but also 8 thread) x86 chips used in PS4 and XBO, PC gaming may finally be moving beyond quad-core. What do you think?

 

Here is AMD Epyc/Naples with 32 cores:

 

http://techreport.com/news/31916/amd-naples-datacenter-cpus-will-make-an-epyc-splash

 

Here is the AMD Vega Frontier Edition:

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11403/amd-unveils-the-radeon-vega-frontier-edition

 

FP16 operations are no longer limited as with previous GPUs like the Radeon Fury X, which you can see in the comparison. 13 TFLOPS FP32, 26 TFLOPS FP16. 16 GB of HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory). It could have 4 "stacks" of 4 GB or 2 stacks of 8 GB, which would be novel since none of the memory manufacturers has sold an 8 GB HBM stack.

Edited May 17, 2017 by jaxa

[jaxa]

This is a big deal.

 

Intel Announces Skylake-X: Bringing 18-Core HCC Silicon to Consumers for $1999

 

Compare to the Broadwell-E flagship, which was 10 cores for about $1700.

 

The 8-core Intel chip is $600, which is similar in price to the R7 1800X.

 

Remember that the Ryzen R7 chips were compared to Broadwell-X chips when they were released. Skylake-X IPC and clocks may be higher. So a $600 Intel 8-core may be a better buy than a $450 AMD 8-core for some people.

Edited May 30, 2017 by jaxa

[jaxa]

AMD CPU Updates: 16 Core ThreadRipper w/64 PCIe Lanes This Summer, Epyc Launching June 20th

 

Threadripper is official, but pricing is still unknown.

 

Ryzen 7 retail prices have dropped

 

Ryzen 7 1800X is now around 75% of the price of Intel's to-be-launched 8-core chip. 1700X is 58% the price but with lower clocks.

 

I would be shocked if the full 16 core Threadripper was as low as $1,000, but there are two 16-core models planned (one of them should be cheaper than the other) and it looks like AMD's chips will definitely beat Intel on price per core.

 

The Threadripper chips have 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes, compared to Intel's 6-18 core chips which will only have 28 or 44 lanes.

 

So although Intel put out an 18-core monster that will certainly outperform the AMD 16-core chips, AMD is still in the game because Intel is still more expensive, and probably more expensive in terms of performance/$ with AMD's lower IPC factored in.

[AluminumHaste]

The current rumour is $849 USD for the 16c/32t monster.

[jaxa]

The current rumour is $849 USD for the 16c/32t monster.

 

That's insane if true. Lower $/core for the 16-core than what the top 8-core launched at ($500)?

 

But come to think of it, the 8-core Ryzen 7 1700 launched at $329 and is now a little cheaper ($315).

 

$849 for 16 AMD cores vs. $1699 for 16 Intel cores. I guess there are hard limits on Intel's ability to pretend to act competitive.

[jaxa]

AMD's Future in Servers: New 7000-Series CPUs Launched and EPYC Analysis

 

Server chips with up to 32 cores. 128 PCIe 3,0 lanes and 8-channel DDR4 support across the board.

 

The Intel Skylake-X Review: Core i9 7900X, i7 7820X and i7 7800X Tested

 

Intel's 10-core Skylake-X is over double the price of AMD's 8-cores, performs about 25-30% better, but has much higher power consumption.

[Bikerdude]

Oh dear, looks like the first two generatations (skylake/kabylake) 'Windows10 only" CPUs from Intel are seriously borked! Motherboard vendors need to provide BIOS/UEFI updates asap, untill then, it would be wise to disable hyper-threading or even shift to AMD.

• http://www.fudzilla.com/news/43964-skylake-and-kaby-lake-cpus-have-broken-hyper-threading
• https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3012605/intels-skylake-and-kaby-lake-cpus-have-critical-hyper-threading-flaw

Bwahahaha...

... yet another reason my 'older 4790k that as fast as a 6900k' is worth sticking with..

Edited June 26, 2017 by Bikerdude