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[pcgames] Zen engineering samples in the wild. Units up to the 32 core are being tested.

20K views 213 replies 69 participants last post by  B NEGATIVE 
#1 ·
Quote:
There are reportedly four different versions of the Zen CPU architecture doing the rounds at the moment, though only two of them are of any real interest to the likes of us. Despite the exciting headline numbers of 24 and 32 cores, two of the chips are full-on server style, only usable in platforms far away from the humble desktop PC.
http://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-zen-idle-power

This might be the shortest ever tapeout-to-board of a new processor class.

"report" says that the ES's are in the range of 2.8 to 3.2 baseclock but that they idle at 550mhz and about 5w or less (4 and 8 core). The larger 24? and 32 core are server socket items.

An 8 core 16 thread at 2.8 base ain't bad in my book.

tongue.gif
hopefully they won't draw too much from the PCI bus!
 
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#2 ·
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The most interesting part of the report though stems from the idle performance of the Zen chips. They are reported to idle with a clockspeed of just 550MHz delivering a low power state of 2.5W and 5W for the quad and octo-core CPUs. That's a seriously low idle power, especially given that AMD's previous CPU architecture draws some 30W even at idle. The Core i7-6700K looks pretty good at around 3.5W, but Zen's quad-core chip might even better that.
My llano laptop chip from 2011 idles at 400mhz. I havent measured power usage, and I'm sure it doesn't have the C-State magic that Zen and newer Intel chips do, but it'll idle forever on battery with the screen off.
 
#3 ·
never heard of the site but their source is Guru3d on a source of a blogger. Still nothing to see here really since we dont know IPC, actual clocks, or well anything for that matter. BUT if AMD can deliver on the 8/16 core/thread CPU with nice IPC and price it will be a rousing success.
 
#4 ·
God I hope these server chips are great and give Intel a kick in the nuts.

Intel can get away with charging 4000 dollars for their top of line Broadwell-E Xeons (which is the only chip in the new 14nm Xeon line that doesnt have cores disabled) because there is literally zero competition right now.

Broadwell -E desktop is in my opinion just horrible. The 6 and 8 core chips come from a 10 core die, and the 10 core chips come from a 15 core die, and they have the balls to charge 1700+ even though it clocks like garbage and has virtually zero IPC improvement compared to previous generation. To top it off, these are the bad chips they didnt make the grade for the Xeons, so we are getting nothing but leftovers chips. Thats why so many cores are disabled.

Zen being good will be best thing to happen in PC's in last 5+ years. With a 32 core chip priced fairly (2000 or less) intel with lose market share, and that will make me smile. People will support AMD if they have a good product.
 
#8 ·
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Originally Posted by Boinz View Post

AMD, I really really really do not care about multiple cores, work on your IPC and then we can talk.
+1.

FX's kick ass till it comes to single core performance. If it was 30-40% higher I wouldn't mind keeping my overclocked 8320. Hyperthreading and other stuff don't matter to regular users as much as better IPC and SC performance.
 
#9 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Boinz View Post

AMD, I really really really do not care about multiple cores, work on your IPC and then we can talk.
Then why aren't you using Skylake if single thread is all you care about? Get the fastest clocked Skylake, disable as many cores as you can and clock it to the heavens and enjoy your single core uber clock.
 
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#10 ·
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Originally Posted by Liranan View Post

Then why aren't you using Skylake if single thread is all you care about? Get the fastest clocked Skylake, disable as many cores as you can and clock it to the heavens and enjoy your single core uber clock.
wow, why the hostility lol. AMD needs better IPC to better position themselves on CPU market.
 
#11 ·
AMD needs better IPC to appeal to gamers.

It's not about not caring about core count it's about pointing out that you can have a million cores and it's not going to matter to any of OCN's demographic if it can't keep up with modern graphics cards in all games not just some.

That said the rumored 8 core 16 thread chip with Haswell like IPC clocked at 3.2ghz turbo sounds like a real winner if it's real. Price it competitively and you've brought Intel "enthusiast" performance to the masses. Or at least near enthusiast performance.

I really hope it's true.
 
#13 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kpjoslee View Post

Quote:
Originally Posted by Liranan View Post

Then why aren't you using Skylake if single thread is all you care about? Get the fastest clocked Skylake, disable as many cores as you can and clock it to the heavens and enjoy your single core uber clock.
wow, why the hostility lol. AMD needs better IPC to better position themselves on CPU market.
The time of single core performance is over. If you look at the latest games you will see that AMD's awful FX architecture matches and competes with Intel's far more expensive i7's because of their cores. Some games still suffer from developer laziness but a lot of newer games are coded to use up to eight threads. It's years late but finally FX' shine.

I am not saying the BD uArch is a success, it's a failure of both hardware and software as developers are just lazy and have refused to properly thread their software. Saying that, I do hope that Zen can at least match IB or even Haswell's IPS (IPC in itself is meaningless) so that we get advancement in CPU architecture. We've been stuck in this paradigm for too long and it's time we shifted.
 
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#14 ·
I'll be interested to see if / how much the clocks change with a retail sample. If the 8 core can compete with at least Intel's 6 core, is around $400 - $600 AUD and you can overclock the nuts off it AMD will get my money
biggrin.gif
.

Do we know how many PCIe lanes these are gonna have?
 
#15 ·
32cores sounds a lot, i wanna know how big of a die it is.

AMD doesn't really need a cutting edge IPC increase, just above sandy bridge will be fine.
what would be appealing however is superb core scaling at a superb price.

imagine if you could get a perfectly designed 8core/16thread sandy-bridge class processor for $300 or cheaper.
even if its slower than intel's latest, the cost efficiency is enough to make most heavy-workload users want to have one.
just remember, quite a bit of users still has gulftown or SB-E processors running on their rigs, some even buy them 2nd-hand for their raw multi-core performance.
 
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#16 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by epic1337 View Post

32cores sounds a lot, i wanna know how big of a die it is.

AMD doesn't really need a cutting edge IPC increase, just above sandy bridge will be fine.
what would be appealing however is superb core scaling at a superb price.

imagine if you could get a perfectly designed 8core/16thread sandy-bridge class processor for $300 or cheaper.
even if its slower than intel's latest, the cost efficiency is enough to make most heavy-workload users want to have one.
Especially if power consumption is kept low. These chips would be perfect in database servers.
 
#17 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Liranan View Post

The time of single core performance is over. If you look at the latest games you will see that AMD's awful FX architecture matches and competes with Intel's far more expensive i7's because of their cores. Some games still suffer from developer laziness but a lot of newer games are coded to use up to eight threads. It's years late but finally FX' shine.

I am not saying the BD uArch is a success, it's a failure of both hardware and software as developers are just lazy and have refused to properly thread their software. Saying that, I do hope that Zen can at least match IB or even Haswell's IPS (IPC in itself is meaningless) so that we get advancement in CPU architecture. We've been stuck in this paradigm for too long and it's time we shifted.
How does this nonsense still get bandied about here? FX doesn't shine in anything and games will always rely on a primary thread. It's due to their nature you're not encoding a video. Not getting beaten horribly isn't a win.

I'm as excited for good AMD chips as the next guy but let's be realistic about their current state and what we can expect in the future. They need significantly stronger single threaded performance to be a viable gaming alternative to Intel. Period. No amount of fairy dust or "hard-working" developers is going to change that. Frankly the lazy devs throwaway line is offensive considering it's an industry where workers are often forced into 80 hour work weeks for months on end to keep you happy. Considering the hours, burn rate and pay the only people getting into that kind of work are those that are passionate about it in the first place.
 
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#18 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by epic1337 View Post

32cores sounds a lot, i wanna know how big of a die it is.

AMD doesn't really need a cutting edge IPC increase, just above sandy bridge will be fine.
what would be appealing however is superb core scaling at a superb price.

imagine if you could get a perfectly designed 8core/16thread sandy-bridge class processor for $300 or cheaper.
even if its slower than intel's latest, the cost efficiency is enough to make most heavy-workload users want to have one.
just remember, quite a bit of users still has gulftown or SB-E processors running on their rigs, some even buy them 2nd-hand for their raw multi-core performance.
nope nope nope. If it is sandy bridge IPC, that 8 core will need to sell at $200.
 
#19 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by jtom320 View Post

How does this nonsense still get bandied about here? FX doesn't shine in anything and games will always rely on a primary thread. It's due to their nature you're not encoding a video. Not getting beaten horribly isn't a win.

I'm as excited for good AMD chips as the next guy but let's be realistic about their current state and what we can expect in the future. They need significantly stronger single threaded performance to be a viable gaming alternative to Intel. Period. No amount of fairy dust or "hard-working" developers is going to change that. Frankly the lazy devs throwaway line is offensive considering it's an industry where workers are often forced into 80 hour work weeks for months on end to keep you happy. Considering the hours, burn rate and pay the only people getting into that kind of work are those that are passionate about it in the first place.
FWIW, my FX-8370 and my 6700k are essentially indistinguishable without measuring whilst gaming in UHD. Even then, it's been demonstrated before that at 1440p the FX disadvantage is much smaller and at 2160p it's not worth mentioning. That doesn't mean that I'm recommending an older platform, it's just a fallacy to assume that you need Intel's single-thread performance advantage at all times in every gaming scenario.

I'd say that for my purposes, the FX series does shine in performance/£ whilst waiting for Zen and Skylake-e as viable replacements for my various systems.
 
#20 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Stilt View Post

A click bait based on a random rumor from a new forum user (at Anandtech). Also the rumor includes at least some of the users own interpretations and expectations.
...and how is that different than 90% of the content on overclock?

Everybody who uses English to write with adds in speculation and interpretation. What I did was verify that the ES were being tested then found a fairly reliable link that wasn't a "motherless street walking website of the night" to post it here. Posting said title without any kind of link would just get nay-sayers and footstompy harrumphers in here trying to diss because there wasn't a link.

Anyway, we know the release date range of the APU's which aren't in ES yet and AMD has mentioned we'd see the 'FX' Zen's by Q3/Q4. So I'd say AMD is taking their play unbelievably seriously and has got a real winner of a lithography from a production reliability standpoint. We know it's 14nm and as dense as Polaris, plausibly more efficient on a transistor scale than Polaris. Considering the GPU clocks at 14nm the CPU clocks aren't at all unreasonable. What remains to be seen is whether the 4/8 is simply a damaged/bad print 8/16 and plausibly un-lockable and whether the gimped cluster will run at all.

But hey, I saw newsty and I posted it. That's the point of a forum like this!
 
#21 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by SuperZan View Post

FWIW, my FX-8370 and my 6700k are essentially indistinguishable without measuring whilst gaming in UHD. Even then, it's been demonstrated before that at 1440p the FX disadvantage is much smaller and at 2160p it's not worth mentioning. That doesn't mean that I'm recommending an older platform, it's just a fallacy to assume that you need Intel's single-thread performance advantage at all times in every gaming scenario.

I'd say that for my purposes, the FX series does shine in performance/£ whilst waiting for Zen and Skylake-e as viable replacements for my various systems.
I miss my 8350OC's nippiness and I've got a 4930k with 32 running 7pro. Single thread perf at 4.1 on the 8350 was definately superior to everything in the house except my 4.4 4771k, both of them are heatbeast chips... the 4930 doesn't instantly cook hotdogs (in fact I've actually got it's radiator aimed out the bottom of the case, even flat out in folding@home it runs cooler)
 
#22 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Liranan View Post

The time of single core performance is over. If you look at the latest games you will see that AMD's awful FX architecture matches and competes with Intel's far more expensive i7's because of their cores. Some games still suffer from developer laziness but a lot of newer games are coded to use up to eight threads. It's years late but finally FX' shine.

I am not saying the BD uArch is a success, it's a failure of both hardware and software as developers are just lazy and have refused to properly thread their software. Saying that, I do hope that Zen can at least match IB or even Haswell's IPS (IPC in itself is meaningless) so that we get advancement in CPU architecture. We've been stuck in this paradigm for too long and it's time we shifted.
Um, I wasn't downplaying the importance of multicores lol. But what I really meant to say was, they need to catch up to Intel in terms of IPC so their entire line up of CPUs don't get stuck on below Intel's mainstream lineup in terms of prices. They are not going to survive when their highest end CPU is below $200, seriously lol.
 
#24 ·
I would wait for the driver update before buying! Maybe it has 100 more w than intended
tongue.gif
!
 
#25 ·
Quote:
The time of single core performance is over. If you look at the latest games you will see that AMD's awful FX architecture matches and competes with Intel's far more expensive i7's because of their cores
We've gotten to the point where the multithreaded performance of FX is very similar to the multithreaded performance of quad core i5's.

quad core skylake i5 actually beats Piledriver FX for x264 encoding which scales practically linearly with core count at this point.

i5 wins by a mile on everything that's not quite highly parallel by default, i3 often wins when they're not.

The most efficiently multithreaded games and engines show piledriver getting beaten by i5 and walked all over by faster CPU's.



I don't know what world you're living in, but it's nothing like mine
 
#26 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cyro999 View Post

We've gotten to the point where the multithreaded performance of FX is very similar to the multithreaded performance of quad core i5's.

quad core skylake i5 actually beats Piledriver FX for x264 encoding which scales practically linearly with core count at this point.

i5 wins by a mile on everything that's not quite highly parallel by default, i3 often wins when they're not.

The most efficiently multithreaded games and engines show piledriver getting beaten by i5 and walked all over by faster CPU's.



I don't know what world you're living in, but it's nothing like mine
And you believe that graph?
You believe that FX 4320 is x2 faster than A10 7850K.. it is also faster than i3 6100.
- DX11 will never take pure advantages of multicore processors.

We will soon see six core on mainstream.
And also people that use PC also for work will need multicore CPUs... and it is great to have competition.

PS: what was techspot thinking at least they could normalize this graph! And try to tell me that that 8mb of L3will giveyou 2xboost? What a joke... what a joke.
 
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