4 ms·

Best thing about this is that competition is back (in the high end x86 market) and the winner is the consumer, CPU market have been stale for a while.

antome 9y ago
What's even better (for AMD) is that they can now design a single processor, and scale it across their entire lineup from R3(?) to EPYC. This suggests that they could incrementally improve their entire lineup annually, or deliver huge boosts every couple years.
- dis-sys 9y ago
  As long as AMD can not match Intel on IPC, such one design fits all approach will always attract attacks from Intel. see the latest example here: http://www.techradar.com/news/intel-disses-amds-new-processors-in-what-could-be-an-epyc-fail http://www.techradar.com/news/intel-disses-amds-new-processo...
  - mtanski 9y ago
    Competitors will always find ways of attacking each other. In reality in any kind of engineering in the real world there's always trade offs of different approaches. These choices are often made with cost being one of the factors. AMD's trade of is a one size fits all die that can be used in a lot of products quite effectively. And on a relative basis, IPC wise it's really not that far. As a result it can offer this at an attractive price. Intel on the other hand is making a lot of different dies which comes with lower cross core communication latencies. Also, their more expensive / mature process allows for higher Mhz clocks. This comes with a higher premium MSPR for products in the same class. People can figure out what is more important to their use cases and we can all argue about the benefits/downsides of each approach. I would say the market segmentation with AVX512 (different chips supporting different features) is somewhat maddening. Plus a limited use case of HPC software make effective use of that. Most does not.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  I think I saw an AMD future product roadmap (leaked?) showing 6 cores per CCX for the next iteration. If they managed to do that, suddenly 8C/16T Ryzen becomes 12C/24T, 16C/32T Threadripper becomes 24C/48T, 32C/64T Epyc becomes 48C/96T. That'd be amazing.
  - girvo 9y ago
    So I currently have a 160-thread machine under my command, and it's exactly as awesome as it sounds! The idea of being able to get huge thread counts in a desktop x86-64 processor gets me very excited
  - sitkack 9y ago
    With all the lanes, and the current CPUs not being able to saturate them means that there is headroom to swap the CPUs in the future and retain the same IO peripherals, just being able to push them harder.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
      AMD has said they'll keep AM4 around for a while.
le-mark 9y ago
I kinda missed the boat on this story, I was of the mindset that cpu game was over, and Intel had an insurmountable advantage in 14 nanometer fabrication, and basically their scale meant AMD could never compete again. How has AMD managed to a comeback like this? Edit; reading wikipedia, seems like it was the fact AMD could outsource 14nm finfet fabrication to GlobalFoundries that they're able to do this, since they didn't have to build their own fabrication facility, or could they have done their own fab?
- AlphaSite 9y ago
  We’ll GloFo is AMDs fab after they spun it out a few years back.
- deaddodo 9y ago
  Because AMD doesn't handle it's fabrication any longer. It's all done through third-parties (GloFo and Samsung, particularly) whom are competitive against Intel. Intel still has the advantage in that they are vertically integrated, however Samsung is pushing out far more chips/day than Intel and is the lead fab for cutting edge ARM processors. This makes it much more capable of multiparadigm fabbing.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
    AMD founder Jerry Sanders used to say "Real men have fabs" (i.e. ownership of the whole production chain), and is probably sad that had to be given up for financial reasons. Looking up that phrase gets a history of upsides and downsides, e.g. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OxfqymS01qAJ:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1994-04-10/real-men-have-fabs+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Oxfqym...
- wmf 9y ago
  Yes, Intel was supposed to be on 10 nm by now but they have fallen behind their roadmap which allowed AMD/GloFo to catch up somewhat.
yellowapple 9y ago
Part of me dreads the "Good Ol' Days" when you'd buy a brand new top-of-the-line CPU or graphics card only for it to be obsolete in a month. A different part of me can't wait for that to happen.

antome 9y ago

What's even better (for AMD) is that they can now design a single processor, and scale it across their entire lineup from R3(?) to EPYC. This suggests that they could incrementally improve their entire lineup annually, or deliver huge boosts every couple years.

dis-sys 9y ago
As long as AMD can not match Intel on IPC, such one design fits all approach will always attract attacks from Intel. see the latest example here: http://www.techradar.com/news/intel-disses-amds-new-processors-in-what-could-be-an-epyc-fail http://www.techradar.com/news/intel-disses-amds-new-processo...
- mtanski 9y ago
  Competitors will always find ways of attacking each other. In reality in any kind of engineering in the real world there's always trade offs of different approaches. These choices are often made with cost being one of the factors. AMD's trade of is a one size fits all die that can be used in a lot of products quite effectively. And on a relative basis, IPC wise it's really not that far. As a result it can offer this at an attractive price. Intel on the other hand is making a lot of different dies which comes with lower cross core communication latencies. Also, their more expensive / mature process allows for higher Mhz clocks. This comes with a higher premium MSPR for products in the same class. People can figure out what is more important to their use cases and we can all argue about the benefits/downsides of each approach. I would say the market segmentation with AVX512 (different chips supporting different features) is somewhat maddening. Plus a limited use case of HPC software make effective use of that. Most does not.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
I think I saw an AMD future product roadmap (leaked?) showing 6 cores per CCX for the next iteration. If they managed to do that, suddenly 8C/16T Ryzen becomes 12C/24T, 16C/32T Threadripper becomes 24C/48T, 32C/64T Epyc becomes 48C/96T. That'd be amazing.
- girvo 9y ago
  So I currently have a 160-thread machine under my command, and it's exactly as awesome as it sounds! The idea of being able to get huge thread counts in a desktop x86-64 processor gets me very excited
- sitkack 9y ago
  With all the lanes, and the current CPUs not being able to saturate them means that there is headroom to swap the CPUs in the future and retain the same IO peripherals, just being able to push them harder.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
    AMD has said they'll keep AM4 around for a while.

le-mark 9y ago

I kinda missed the boat on this story, I was of the mindset that cpu game was over, and Intel had an insurmountable advantage in 14 nanometer fabrication, and basically their scale meant AMD could never compete again. How has AMD managed to a comeback like this? Edit; reading wikipedia, seems like it was the fact AMD could outsource 14nm finfet fabrication to GlobalFoundries that they're able to do this, since they didn't have to build their own fabrication facility, or could they have done their own fab?

AlphaSite 9y ago
We’ll GloFo is AMDs fab after they spun it out a few years back.
deaddodo 9y ago
Because AMD doesn't handle it's fabrication any longer. It's all done through third-parties (GloFo and Samsung, particularly) whom are competitive against Intel. Intel still has the advantage in that they are vertically integrated, however Samsung is pushing out far more chips/day than Intel and is the lead fab for cutting edge ARM processors. This makes it much more capable of multiparadigm fabbing.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  AMD founder Jerry Sanders used to say "Real men have fabs" (i.e. ownership of the whole production chain), and is probably sad that had to be given up for financial reasons. Looking up that phrase gets a history of upsides and downsides, e.g. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OxfqymS01qAJ:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1994-04-10/real-men-have-fabs+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Oxfqym...
wmf 9y ago
Yes, Intel was supposed to be on 10 nm by now but they have fallen behind their roadmap which allowed AMD/GloFo to catch up somewhat.

yellowapple 9y ago

Part of me dreads the "Good Ol' Days" when you'd buy a brand new top-of-the-line CPU or graphics card only for it to be obsolete in a month. A different part of me can't wait for that to happen.