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AMD’s Zen Summit Ridge 8-core CPUs on Par with Intel I7 5960X Extreme
- smegel 10y agoBreaking news: AMD makes sensational claims about future, unreleased products.
- rubbingalcohol 10y agoBefore you get downvoted it's worth highlighting that AMD's pre-release hype and cherry-picked "leaks" are notorious for being over optimistic, to put it generously. In any case I'm glad to see they're still trying to compete in the desktop space.
- curt15 10y agoIt seems like just yesterday when AMD was claiming in pre-release statements a 50 percent performance advantage over Intel's Core 2 offerings. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926
- daveguy 10y agoWas that when they followed through and kicked butt at the top end? It has been quite a while. Or was that when marketing started writing checks their engineers couldn't cash? (Which has been a theme throughout the bulldozer line)
- phkahler 10y agoI always thought the problem with bulldozer was that marketing considered a module to be 2 cores, while someone in engineering meant for a module to compete with a single Intel core. If you go by the later definition, Bulldozer kicked Intels ass in multithreaded performance and can still compete. It makes sense because they touted a different variant of hyperthreading they claimed was better. The problem of course is that makes for a huge expensive core and only half as many per chip for marketing purposes. It also had shit for single thread performance either way. But I've always felt this difference of interpretation for the architecture was a big part of the failure.
- wmf 10y agoEven if you compare a 4-module Bulldozer/Piledriver against a 4-core Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge, AMD's die size and power consumption were much higher to deliver similar or worse performance.
- mjevans 10y agoThey were also stuck at /least/ a process node back due to earlier anti-competitive practices that Intel didn't get sufficiently penalized for. (Those practices literally forced AMD out of the same /business/ as Intel; which is what cemented the situation they've ended up in.) A fair settlement would have broken up Intel in to isolated fabrication and pattern-design businesses.
- curt15 10y agoNope, ever since Intel's Conroe architecture, AMD never managed to catch up in either raw performance or performance per watt.
- smitherfield 10y agoNo, that's was the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium IV era, circa '04-'05. Since Intel introduced the Core 2 line of processors in '06 Intel took a permanent and growing lead.
- rplst8 10y agoIt was actually earlier than that. Regular Athlon vs. Pentium III. The K7 architecture is where they finally came out on top, which was released in 1999. I'm not sure how deep into the Athlon line they kept their lead, but the Pentium 4 was a miserable line which first debuted in 2000. I don't know any friends that were serious about gaming or performance computing at the time that would have chosen a P4 over an Athlon or Athlon 64 which came out in 2003. I think maybe part of AMDs downfall was their investment in the x86 64-bit micro-architecture extensions they added in the Athlon 64 (which Intel then adopted in their chips). During that time, Intel had refocused on heat and power usage which has paid dividends in the out years. That said, I think the 64-bit extensions came at a necessary time and allowed us to get past the 4GB barrier without having to resort to weird memory paging schemes like PAE.
- gpderetta 10y agoAMD64 and Opteron gave AMD an decent chunk of the server market. They unfortunately lost it again when Intel stopped playing with Itanic and decided to release a non-joke x86 Xeon.
- taspeotis 10y agoIntel® Core™ i7-5960X Processor Extreme Edition (20M Cache, up to 3.50 GHz) Launch Date Q3'14 http://ark.intel.com/products/82930/Intel-Core-i7-5960X-Processor-Extreme-Edition-20M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/82930/Intel-Core-i7-5960X-Proc...
- Rumudiez 10y agoAppreciate the context for that comparison, but imagine that CPU for probably 50% or less the cost and with a DDR4 controller. Sounds like a valuable product to me. Maybe somebody could give us an estimated performance per dollar based on this some previous AMD CPU releases..
- oofabz 10y agoThe i7-5960X has a DDR4 controller. I believe it was the first mainstream CPU with DDR4.
- jschwartzi 10y agoAll the LGA2011 parts in that generation support DDR4. My 5820K does.
- Sanddancer 10y agoThe 5960x already is DDR4. Also, Intel's supposed to be releasing the Broadwell-E 6950X in a few weeks, which will have 10 cores. That being said, the 6950X is also supposed to be $1500. The real fun will be the bang/buck comparison against the 6900K, which is going to have 8 cores and be $1000. Regarding bang/buck, it's hard to say, but I'd probably say that AMD places their part at the $800 price point, which would definitely give it a decent bang/buck. Another wrench in comparing things is that AMD's promising some interesting peripheral support, like 64 lanes of pcie, usb 3.1 and direct nvme support, which will further complicate direct comparisons until release date. Intel's hanging on with the x99 chipset, which is stuck with usb 2.0 and pcie 2 for the support lanes. Fall will be interesting, to say the least.
- largote 10y agoHopefully this is true. We need to have competition in the high-end of the CPU market again.
- tracker1 10y agoI'd settle for a competitive upper-mid range with similar power envelope. That said, I haven't felt "pain" using a computer since I switched to SSDs a number of years ago, last non-ssd was a Core 2 Duo E6600. Followed by i7-860[1], then an AMD FX-8350 and now an i7-4790K I've been very happy with. Thinking of going to dual UHD (4K) displays from my dual 1080p next year, which will mean a video card update... May try to hold out on a CPU/system upgrade for a 5 year cycle this time though... I've tended to go with an upper-mid-range system every 2-3 years. [1] http://frugalcoder.us/post/2010/03/07/new-computer-2010.aspx http://frugalcoder.us/post/2010/03/07/new-computer-2010.aspx
- Infinitesimus 10y ago> Thinking of going to dual UHD (4K) displays from my dual 1080p next year, which will mean a video card update... Do you do any gaming? If so you'll definitely need to pony up for a high-end card at 4k. I'm in the 1440p (x2) camp for now (got QNIX monitors off ebay for ~<300 a pop) and will hold out until 4k displays reach that price. Though I'd trade 4k for 1440p @ 120Hz. Gonna hold out on GPU upgrades until the next generation of cards (after Polaris) comes out and drives prices down some more
- tracker1 10y agoNot much, though Overwatch looks interesting... I don't game much at all. Mostly software development, and casual browsing, I just want the extra space.
- suprjami 10y agoThe comparisons in this article seem rather hand-wavy. "This thing is X% faster than this thing which was Y% slower than this other thing so they're about even." Even if these comparisons are true, AMD equaling Intel 2 years after release is nowhere near the competition we need in the CPU market.
- dman 10y agoOn the other hand Intel hasnt done anything groundbreaking in the last two years either.
- BuckRogers 10y agoNot groundbreaking but they do make steady, consistent progress. Which is more than you can credit their competitor for.
- bubuga 10y ago> Not groundbreaking but they do make steady, consistent progress. Not where it matters, which is the price/performance ratio. It doesn't matter if Intel is able to put in the market their Formula 1 chips at a Formula 1 price, when most of the world deals with a Honda Civic budget. When we factor in the fact that the Formula 1 chip isn't even the bottleneck in the system in most cases, the comparison only gets worse.
- BuckRogers 10y agoThat's not true but if it were: why isn't AMD's marketshare so great? Good products win, AMD proved that with the Athlon. They don't have good products today.
- nisa 10y agoThis is article is pure speculation. The linked source[1] does not make such a statement. Basically they put a graph on the right side without labels. This could be everything. E.g. inverse TDP 1: http://www.3dcenter.org/news/amd-verspricht-fuer-bristol-ridge-einen-15igen-cpu-performancegewinn http://www.3dcenter.org/news/amd-verspricht-fuer-bristol-rid... (german)
- walrus01 10y ago"According to AMD"... yeah. Right. Just like the last generation. I'll believe it when I see the benchmarks run by anandtech, arstechnica and hardocp. It doesn't have to be as fast as the top end core i7, if they can make something faster that sells for the price of a mid range core i5.
- tracker1 10y agoFor me, power usage and heat are pretty big factors... Not having the A/C running as much in Phoenix summers, let alone the power usage itself is pretty significant... couldn't believe the difference in moving from FX-8xxx series in my desktop, home server and htpc to newer intel chips made on my electric bill.
- amluto 10y agoI sincerely hope that AMD doesn't have microarchitectural goofs that slow everything down like the cache coloring thing last time. They would do well to revisit some old design errors, too. Grep a recent Linux kernel for "SYSRET_SS_ATTRS" for a silly one that adds quite a few cycles to many context switches for no particularly good reason.
- Qantourisc 10y agoI don't see an actual benchmark, so it could be theoretical, practical, or only in multi-threaded situation. Hopefully soon we will see some actual product tests.
- vivekchandsrc 10y agoAny competition to push Intel to roll out cheaper and better chips are welcome. :-)
- cm3 10y agoWhich is also why, once available, many people have to buy AMD chips in order to keep Intel in check and everybody's chances of getting ripped off lower. I'll buy AMD because they don't cut out features like ECC. Just recently Intel introduced a non-feature to disallow Xeon chips on most motherboards, while previously you could get a cheap Xeon to surpass the consumer CPU. Market segmentation is what Intel is very good at.
- revanx_ 10y agoThe real question : Is Zen going to pack with AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP)? https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdpsp https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdpsp
- Qantourisc 10y agoI would prefer to have it as an OPTION, and being able to disable or enable this (without any back doors.) Of course you can never be sure.