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AMD Announces 7nm Rome CPUs and MI60 GPUs
- doctorsher 8y agoNon-AMP link: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-new-horizon-7nm-cpu,38029.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-new-horizon-7nm-cpu,38...
- sctb 8y agoUpdated. Thanks!
- ccwilson10 8y agoGood call, thanks
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoFictional process geometries are the new MHz wars.
- gruez 8y agoIs that really the case? I'm not seeing process node sizes being plastered over computers as a selling point.
- etaoins 8y agoIt's being mentioned more during product launches than it used to be. For example, Apple heavily promoted the iPhone XS's 7nm SOC where previously it wouldn't have been mentioned. I would guess this is due to other vendors starting to surpass Intel and wanting to highlight their process lead.
- tambourine_man 8y agoWhat happened to Intel? Have they given any official explanations yet? How does a company, who for decades has been 1-2 node processes ahead of the industry, suddenly gets 1-2 node processes behind everyone else. There must be an amazing story behind this that no one seems to be digging into.
- aw1621107 8y agoThe explanation I've seen most frequently is that process sizes aren't really comparable between fabs any more. In this case, that would mean that Intel's 10nm process is equivalent to another fab's 7nm process.
- berbec 8y agoI'm not trying to be snarky; I actually don't understand. Isn't a nanometer the same between fabs?
- wolf550e 8y agoRead this and follow links: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process
- the8472 8y agoThose differences seem enormous. SRAM bitcell, High-Density (HD) A Intel 14nm: 0.064 µm² B Intel 10nm: 0.0312 µm² C TSMC 7nm: 0.027 µm² A is what most current intel chips use, B is in limited production. C is what AMD will be using in 2019
- PedroBatista 8y agoIs B even in production at all?
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- berbec 8y agoWith AMD closing the gap with Intel competition in the CPU market is back after a ten year abscense. What I'm waiting for is an AMD GPU that can compete with a top-tier NVidia offering. Vega is nice, but not really a contender on the mid to top end. The G series cpus with vega inside are great, but where is the 2080ti, or even 1080ti, killer? Even something a bit slower, but close, would be great. Is it too much to ask of AMD to handle both? I am unsure, but I would love to see NVidia in a price and performance war at the same time Intel is. Competition makes the resulting products better. Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen?
- marmaduke 8y agoIsn’t AMD well positioned to make a hybrid unit which works well as a CPU and GPU? > Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen? Recently got a new work laptop, a 12” with a 4C/8T i5. I definitely wouldn’t have expected that without Ryzen on the market, which also is available in business laptops from Dell in a 4C/8T config.
- mamon 8y agoBut is Ryzen really on the laptop market? There are just few low-end models, nothing that I would consider buying, so for laptops I'm kind of stuck with Intel.
- atq2119 8y agoI saw some pretty slick business models come out from HP. Actually held one that somebody showed me, it seemed well built. It'll obviously take time for high quality AMD-based laptops to become a normal thing, but with the CPU being en par and the GPU clearly being better than Intel's offering, it should really only be a matter of time.
- marmaduke 8y agoI think though with Dell offering laptops, desktops, and servers with AMD components the time is already here. OTOH maybe this Dell stuff isn’t on consumer market yet.
- sergiotapia 8y agoVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwX13bo0RDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwX13bo0RDQ Dr. Lisa Su is so inspiring when she speaks - very clear, sure of her product and confident. Hopefully I get there one day!
- at1as 8y agoOne slide noted that their 7nm processor had 13.28 billion transistors per 331 mm^2. Although 7nm/10nm have mostly become marketing terms, is this something directly comparable between fabs/companies? Does anyone have a comparison for Intel? Best I can find is this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count (and if that's accurate and up to date, it looks as though AMD will be well ahead).
- at1as 8y ago^ err. Actually, those figures are for the GPU. Nevermind.
- fermienrico 8y agoThe best way to compare CPUs would be performance/watt benchmarks which is what matters ultimately to the customer; in this case, data center customers. Let me clarify - we are not talking about Geekbench type benchmarks. Each customer has their own validation & qualification process for new datacenter chip procurement. Public gets hung up with all kinds of marketing terms (7nm, 7nm+, 10nm, 10nm+, 10nm++, etc). What does 7nm+ even mean!? It is purely a marketing term and large datacenter customers know this. They run their workloads on test samples and make a decision to go with Intel or AMD. Furthermore, there is also the aspect of maintainability, servicing and infrastructure inertia that is priced into Intel's server chips. Apple-to-Apple chip comparison (sorry for the pun, not intended) from Intel & AMD would not be priced the same since Intel knows that there is a giant amount of switching inertia for a customer to switch to AMD Epyc. Furthermore, datacenter customers want predictability and proven performance. In this case, Intel again wins with its history and you betchya its modeled in the pricing. So, this is all business as usual. HN loves beating on Intel but their numbers in quarterly reports depict a different story. Let me repeat: No sane customer gives a shit about 7nm or 10nm. My comments are only applicable to datacenter customers. Desktop/Client chips are a whole another enchilada where marketing plays a bigger role (have you seen the ridiculous packaging from AMD & Intel? This is to please the RGB Gamer crowd).
- Dylan16807 8y agoThe feature size is relevant for understanding how the chips progress over time. It's not relevant for a point-in-time purchase, but it's not a marketing thing to ignore either. The plus means a generation of optimization on how to use roughly the same lithography tech, which can give you a big difference when they're so hard to use.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- utternerd 8y ago64 core EPYC chips based on Zen 2 is what really blows my mind.
- bitL 8y agoThreadripper 3 with 64 cores is going to be mindblowing! Not that long ago since Parallella board advertised 64 slow cores and soon we can get all x86/x64 high-end cores like that!
- uep 8y agoIt is pretty crazy. I felt the same way. Individual x64 cores tend to be so much more powerful than other architectures, and now single chips will effectively have 128 logical cores. For my purposes (large builds and rendering), I think RAM prices are holding back AMD here. To feed that many cores, you want really big RAM sticks. The CPUs have become a comparatively small cost compared to the RAM these days.
- bitL 8y agoI've recently built a TR-based DL/ML workstation and bought 128GB ECC 2,667MHz UDIMMs for ~$1600, roughly the same price as 2990WX, but would have vastly preferred to get 256GB instead. Unfortunately, only Samsung is now sampling 32GB ECC DDR4 UDIMMs - I haven't seen them anywhere yet, and I expect the price is going to be insanely high :-(
- stevesimmons 8y agoSpeaking of insanely high RAM prices, I just came across receipts for a PC I built in 1992. So 26 years ago, I paid $495 for 4MB. Yup, that's MB, not GB. Admittedly these were AUD rather than USD. So maybe halve that for the USD cost. When we complain about how expensive memory and compute, a slightly longer term view shows it's still pretty good value!
- uep 8y ago
- airstrike 8y agonm is the new megapixel
- jandrese 8y agoIt's the Mhz. Intel went down the Mhz rabbit hole with NetBurst and it gave AMD a temporary advantage (P4 vs. Athlon 64). Are we seeing the same thing again with 7nm vs. 10nm?
- Symmetry 8y agoWell, looks like Semiaccurate was right about Rome's architecture. Personally I'm excited about the wider vector units.
- 51lver 8y agoThis is really fun to watch. AMD is giving people EXACTLY what they want (again), and intel is having to fight dirty (again). Possible example (not at all out of character for intel): why are so many people parroting that 10nm technical superiority junk without supplying sources?
- gameswithgo 8y agoI have seen people supply sources at least twice, frankly I'm amazed given this comes up 5 times per day here that we have to keep explaining it. Here is one source, again: https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/attachments/content/attachments/21824d1529099818-slide4.jpg https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/attachments/content/attachmen... https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/7544-7nm-5nm-3nm-logic-current-projected-processes.html https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/7544-7nm-5nm-3nm-logi...
- 51lver 8y agoThese are very nice and detailed feature figures, but I do not see that intel has any advantage from them (possibly my reading comprehension is failing here...). Can you cite a source that clearly shows intel is manufacturing and selling something better than the competing fabs?
- gameswithgo 8y agothey aren't selling anything at the 10nm yet, who knows how it will perform! but they can fit more on their chips at their process they call 10nm than the others can fit on their chips that they call 7nm. So it is correct to say that assigning a single size to a node is misleading. There are many dimensions you can measure.
- akvadrako 8y agoThey are selling something on 10nm: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/269270-intels-first-10nm-cpus-have-been-spotted-in-the-wild https://www.extremetech.com/computing/269270-intels-first-10...
- stagger87 8y agoIncreasing the vector width to 256 bits (assuming no crazy thermal throttling) is a pretty big deal and would get me to move off Intel, unless Intel can figure out 512 bit widths without massive throttling.
- hajile 8y agoThat's really a matter of Intel's 10nm process (which is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7nm). AMD used 128-bit and simulated 256-bit by doing 2 passes. This reduced peak power consumption and allowed them to keep clock consistently high. That matters because while your AVX is going slowly, your non-AVX is also going slowly. There was simply no way x86 could do vectors that wide on 14nm without throttling. With the 7nm shift, AMD can use the reduced size to increase to native 256 at full speed (and they may do 512 in 2 parts). I expect Intel to do the same when they get replace their 10nm process with something that works. It'll probably be a couple more shrinks though, before 512 can be run at full-speed.
- lxcid 8y agoI have a feeling this is not a AMD vs Intel or Apple vs Intel. This is TSMC vs Intel. TSMC basically make the 7nm chip for Apple and AMD. It looks like this company HQ at Taiwan provided the bragging right for Apple and AMD…
- zamadatix 8y agoI don't think it's one or the other rather both. TSMC is definitely starting to lead the foundries but e.g. nobody expects the next gen Qualcomm Snapdragon chip to beat the Apple A12X even though both are coming out of TSMC. IMO Intel is lagging on both fronts, AMD is catching Intel a bit, ARM is steamrolling year/year perf increases compared to x86, and Apple remains +25% ahead of every other ARM chip.
- arnon 8y agoThis AMD card can compete with NVIDIA's high end Tesla V100 accelerator. At 7.4 TFlops of double-precision, it is smack in the middle between the PCIe version of the V100 at 7.0 and the NVLink version at 7.8. Memory bandwidth for the MI60 is a bit better at 1000GB/s, compared to the Tesla V100's 900GB/s. However, AMD's problems are usually not the actual hardware, but the software around it. NVIDIA has done amazing work with CUDA and the surrounding frameworks, while AMD has not really. They really need to catch up on software that makes writing code for their GPUs more trivial.
- tmd83 8y agoIs anyone knowledgeable to comment about the memory bandwidth. I thought Zen-1 was eight channel with 32 core, now the Zen-2 is the same eight channel with 64 core. Wouldn't that cause issue or can the new memory system be that better? The other interesting thing is that they said the memory access would be more uniform kind of like NUMA independent given that the controller is no longer part of the individual chip but a common element. Which definitely makes good performance easier with such a beast of cheap but does it do so at the cost of the lowest possible latency as in when in Zen-1 the memory access was from a channel in the same CPU. I would hope that a massive single piece of IO chip would allow them to design the thing better but does anyone know or care to guess?
- zamadatix 8y agoProbably bodes for worse memory performance for (most) VM hosts and better memory performance for (most) bare metal workloads. I don't think anyone is concerned with many-VM class workloads not having the highest possible memory throughput though and I doubt going to even 16 channels would make a big differences anyways. It'll be somewhat easy to find out if memory bandwidth needs to scale linearly or you hit massive perf losses in the real world though as Intel's competing 2x24core die was announced to have 12 channels. There was a longstanding rumor that the IO chip was going to have ~512mb of l4 cache. Considering it wasn't announced I'm thinking that turned out to not be true but from a pure performance perspective that is probably more useful than a couple more memory channels (though likely more complicated).
- tutanchamun 8y agoI'm really curious about cache on the IO die. Ian Cutress of Anandtech said Rome is ~ 1000 mm² in total. [0] Based on that and the pictures of the Rome die that were shown some users [1] estimated the size of the IO die to be 387 - 407 mm². - Zen 1 (8 cores) with IO is 213 mm². - the Zen 2 core only chiplets are estimated to be around 70 mm². - if we assume IO scales as well as the rest (which it doesn't) Zen 1 would be ~106 mm² on 7nm. - let's just say the difference between Zen 2 core only chiplets and the imaginary Zen 1 on 7nm is the size of the IO per Zeppelin die => ~36 mm² - now double the area again because the IO die is on 14nm => 72 mm² - now quadruple the size because we have 8 memory channels and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes => 288 mm² Going by my flawed layman estimation this would mean we still have a budget of ~100 mm² for additional functionality. Either PCIe 4.0 takes much more space than PCIe 3.0, they have some secret sauce in there, or maybe just a large L4 cache. If they use EDRAM instead of SRAM like Intel did with some of their Broadwell and Skylake CPUs they could probably fit quite a bit cache in this area. Intel used 128 MB EDRAM fabbed on a 22nm node which required 84mm ² [2] [0] https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1059924863014653958 https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1059924863014653958 [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9uscqu/epyc_and_epyc_2_dies_compared/e96m4yv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9uscqu/epyc_and_epyc_2... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-grap...