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This is a pretty bold change and really makes Intel chips less appealing. With the recent kernel changes for Intel's Spectre issues and this chip coming up, I t

This is a pretty bold change and really makes Intel chips less appealing. With the recent kernel changes for Intel's Spectre issues and this chip coming up, I think it's a distinct possibility that AMD will take back a ton of marketshare in the server space. If these chips really do have a ~25% performance gain over Ryzen (not counting IPC gains), I might just upgrade, and I think a lot of other people are in the same boat. This could be a fantastic win for AMD. I was worried that Zen 2 was going to be a moderate improvement, but this seems to be pretty significant. It's been a while since AMD has been first to market with a big winner...

yboris 8y ago
I humbly request in every conversation whenever someone uses "distinct possibility" that they quantify it with a number. This phrase may be worse-than-useless: it creates the impression between people that they agree, but could mean a discrepancy between 0.0001% to 10%. I know this isn't central to what you're saying, I just want a better conversational norm around probabilities during conversations in the world.
celrod 8y ago
Most of what I do is floating point operations, so I'll see >100% performance gains with the avx boost. I will upgrade.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Any chance your workload would see a benefit from porting the code to a GPU?
  - slededit 8y ago
    I work on tech to automate that. The generic answer is yes as long as you overcome the PCIe bottleneck (or can hide the latency).
    - atq2119 8y ago
      I assume that should be "and can hide latency"? While GPU offloading is extremely powerful in terms of compute, you have to deal with both bandwidth limitations (de facto ~12 GB/s for x16 PCIe 3.0) and the latency of launching compute kernels and waiting for them to complete.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        That depends on the problem space. For some problems latency does not need to be an issue, if the problem can be pipe-lined then you can keep all your cores running at a high percentage of their theoretical maximum load even if latency is high. For real time applications this is usually not an option, there latency > some threshold will kill your proposed solution.
        atq2119 8y ago
        In those cases where the latency is not a problem, it tends to be precisely because you can hide it e.g. via pipelining :)
      - slededit 8y ago
        You overcome the bottleneck by doing as much as possible on the GPU. Even things you don’t think are fully suited to it.
astrodust 8y ago
What's disappointing is that none of the major cloud vendors has made any real commitments to AMD, at least none that I've seen. If speculative execution is a problem and you need to give each VM its own exclusive cores, great when you can source parts with 64+ cores on them!
- _wmd 8y ago
  AWS began releasing a new AMD generation a few weeks ago.. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-lower-cost-amd-powered-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-lower-cost-amd-powered-...
  - astrodust 8y ago
    Fantastic news. Thanks for the link!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lugg 8y ago
  How could they? AMD has been off the map for generations. Providers will begin uptake of AMD again, it just takes time for contracts to roll over and the new hardware to reach production.
- dopenmoredope 8y ago
  What's even more disappointing is that Zen 2 doesn't include support for new techs like the upcoming DDR5 & PCIe 5.0 which seems are going to be supported in Zen 4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13578/naples-rome-milan-zen-4-an-interview-with-amd-cto-mark-papermaster https://www.anandtech.com/show/13578/naples-rome-milan-zen-4... IC: AMD has already committed that Milan, the next generation after Rome, will have the same socket as Rome. Can you make the same commitment with Zen 4 that was shown on the roadmap slides? MP: We’re certainly committed to that socket continuity through Milan, and we haven’t commented beyond that. Obviously at some point the industry transitions to PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 which will necessitate a socket change. IC: So one might assume that an intercept might occur with Zen 4? MP: No comment (!)
djsumdog 8y ago
Do the new 8th gen Intel chips finally deal with Spectre/Meltdown issues in hardware or do they still depend on OS level fixes?
- BeeOnRope 8y ago
  8th gen (Coffee Lake) have the same uarch as Skylake and have no hardware fixes for Meltdown or Spectre.
  - shaklee3 8y ago
    And no pcie4 either, unfortunately.
  - GautamGoel 8y ago
    Yes, but 9th gen has fixes: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-i5-9600k-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...
- ct520 8y ago
  Sure they take care of it real well... in the OS.. can’t wait till this comes to windows by default. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-420-stibp&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-42...
- ENOTTY 8y ago
  Yes. I expect both vendors to reach parity with respect to mitigations of known speculative execution vulnerabilities. Whether their architectures have been fundamentally redesigned to make these issues more difficult to exploit is anyone's guess. Variant 1: Both AMD and Intel will continue to rely on OS patches. Variant 2: Both AMD and Intel will fix in silicon. Intel's fix comes in Cascade Lake. Variant 3 (aka Meltdown): AMD was not affected, Intel will fix it in silicon in Coffee Lake Refresh and Cascade Lake. Variant 4: Both AMD and Intel will rely on OS and Microcode patches L1TF: AMD was not affected, Intel will fix in silicon in Coffee Lake Refresh and Cascade Lake. I'll note that for the AMD products, this is my best guess from Lisa Su's comments. I do wish they put out a table like Intel did. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13450/intels-new-core-and-xeon-w-processors-fixes-for-spectre-meltdown https://www.anandtech.com/show/13450/intels-new-core-and-xeo... [2]: https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-2-cpus-fix-spectre-exploit/ https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-2-cpus-fix-spectre-exploit/ EDIT: Replaced the Intel source with a better link
zymhan 8y ago
I was actually underwhelmed by the post, what exactly is the "pretty bold" change?
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  the incorporation of the IO chiplet is a sea change for processor tech. It means many physically separate core-chipsets get the same path to RAM and overcomes the many issues with NUMA, while avoiding massive and expensive cpu dies.
  - loeg 8y ago
    The UMA benefit is a double-edged sword. Best-case RAM latency probably gets worse, all else being equal. But maybe they've made Infinity fabric faster enough in Zen2 to eliminate any additional latency compared against the local memory domain in Zen1.
- tutanchamun 8y ago
  Seperating the analog logic (IO die) from the digital logic (CPU cores). Analog shrinks really bad with smaller nodes wheras digital logic shrinks really good. New process nodes get more and more expensive - especially if the node is new (bad yields etc.) So you want to get the most out of it as possible, which AMD does with this strategy. For example Zen 1 8 core chips are 213 mm2 on 14nm. On 7nm these chipse would be > 106 mm2 (because the analog elements don't scale). Zen 2 chiplets should be at most 75 mm2 (while also increasing cache, widen AVX etc.) which is mobile SoC territory which means they are cheaper to produce (better yields etc.). Since Intel uses monolithic dies AMD already had an cost advatage, with Zen 2 it's not even funny. Especially if the guesses of many people are true and AMD designed the IO chip to be cut down, which means they can reuse it for their desktop CPUs (Ryzen on AM4). Anonther nice advantage of this would be that they can bin the chip even better for EPYC, Threadripper and Ryzen. AdoredTV does a good job of aggregating all the infos/ideas that are floating around and presenting them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6AG-woscDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6AG-woscDU
  - 8y ago
RickSanchez2600 8y ago
Intel has a chip shortage, so AMD might be able to sell their CPUs and motherboards while Intel cannot meet demand. I always wanted to make an Amiga with an AMD chip and get AmigaOS into X86-X64 and away from PowerPC so it can sell cheaper and faster systems. Compete with Apple at least by merging AmigaOS with GNU/Linux work with Valve on SteamOS to run AmigaOS apps and get some classic Amiga games into SteamOS and GNU/Linux.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Amiga hardware is what made it special, an generic OS on a generic hardware is just yet another OS.

yboris 8y ago

I humbly request in every conversation whenever someone uses "distinct possibility" that they quantify it with a number. This phrase may be worse-than-useless: it creates the impression between people that they agree, but could mean a discrepancy between 0.0001% to 10%. I know this isn't central to what you're saying, I just want a better conversational norm around probabilities during conversations in the world.

celrod 8y ago

Most of what I do is floating point operations, so I'll see >100% performance gains with the avx boost. I will upgrade.

jacquesm 8y ago
Any chance your workload would see a benefit from porting the code to a GPU?
- slededit 8y ago
  I work on tech to automate that. The generic answer is yes as long as you overcome the PCIe bottleneck (or can hide the latency).
  - atq2119 8y ago
    I assume that should be "and can hide latency"? While GPU offloading is extremely powerful in terms of compute, you have to deal with both bandwidth limitations (de facto ~12 GB/s for x16 PCIe 3.0) and the latency of launching compute kernels and waiting for them to complete.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      That depends on the problem space. For some problems latency does not need to be an issue, if the problem can be pipe-lined then you can keep all your cores running at a high percentage of their theoretical maximum load even if latency is high. For real time applications this is usually not an option, there latency > some threshold will kill your proposed solution.
      - atq2119 8y ago
        In those cases where the latency is not a problem, it tends to be precisely because you can hide it e.g. via pipelining :)
    - slededit 8y ago
      You overcome the bottleneck by doing as much as possible on the GPU. Even things you don’t think are fully suited to it.

astrodust 8y ago

What's disappointing is that none of the major cloud vendors has made any real commitments to AMD, at least none that I've seen. If speculative execution is a problem and you need to give each VM its own exclusive cores, great when you can source parts with 64+ cores on them!

_wmd 8y ago
AWS began releasing a new AMD generation a few weeks ago.. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-lower-cost-amd-powered-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-lower-cost-amd-powered-...
- astrodust 8y ago
  Fantastic news. Thanks for the link!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lugg 8y ago
How could they? AMD has been off the map for generations. Providers will begin uptake of AMD again, it just takes time for contracts to roll over and the new hardware to reach production.
dopenmoredope 8y ago
What's even more disappointing is that Zen 2 doesn't include support for new techs like the upcoming DDR5 & PCIe 5.0 which seems are going to be supported in Zen 4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13578/naples-rome-milan-zen-4-an-interview-with-amd-cto-mark-papermaster https://www.anandtech.com/show/13578/naples-rome-milan-zen-4... IC: AMD has already committed that Milan, the next generation after Rome, will have the same socket as Rome. Can you make the same commitment with Zen 4 that was shown on the roadmap slides? MP: We’re certainly committed to that socket continuity through Milan, and we haven’t commented beyond that. Obviously at some point the industry transitions to PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 which will necessitate a socket change. IC: So one might assume that an intercept might occur with Zen 4? MP: No comment (!)

djsumdog 8y ago

Do the new 8th gen Intel chips finally deal with Spectre/Meltdown issues in hardware or do they still depend on OS level fixes?

BeeOnRope 8y ago
8th gen (Coffee Lake) have the same uarch as Skylake and have no hardware fixes for Meltdown or Spectre.
- shaklee3 8y ago
  And no pcie4 either, unfortunately.
- GautamGoel 8y ago
  Yes, but 9th gen has fixes: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-i5-9600k-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...
ct520 8y ago
Sure they take care of it real well... in the OS.. can’t wait till this comes to windows by default. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-420-stibp&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-42...
ENOTTY 8y ago
Yes. I expect both vendors to reach parity with respect to mitigations of known speculative execution vulnerabilities. Whether their architectures have been fundamentally redesigned to make these issues more difficult to exploit is anyone's guess. Variant 1: Both AMD and Intel will continue to rely on OS patches. Variant 2: Both AMD and Intel will fix in silicon. Intel's fix comes in Cascade Lake. Variant 3 (aka Meltdown): AMD was not affected, Intel will fix it in silicon in Coffee Lake Refresh and Cascade Lake. Variant 4: Both AMD and Intel will rely on OS and Microcode patches L1TF: AMD was not affected, Intel will fix in silicon in Coffee Lake Refresh and Cascade Lake. I'll note that for the AMD products, this is my best guess from Lisa Su's comments. I do wish they put out a table like Intel did. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13450/intels-new-core-and-xeon-w-processors-fixes-for-spectre-meltdown https://www.anandtech.com/show/13450/intels-new-core-and-xeo... [2]: https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-2-cpus-fix-spectre-exploit/ https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-2-cpus-fix-spectre-exploit/ EDIT: Replaced the Intel source with a better link

zymhan 8y ago

I was actually underwhelmed by the post, what exactly is the "pretty bold" change?

throwaway2048 8y ago
the incorporation of the IO chiplet is a sea change for processor tech. It means many physically separate core-chipsets get the same path to RAM and overcomes the many issues with NUMA, while avoiding massive and expensive cpu dies.
- loeg 8y ago
  The UMA benefit is a double-edged sword. Best-case RAM latency probably gets worse, all else being equal. But maybe they've made Infinity fabric faster enough in Zen2 to eliminate any additional latency compared against the local memory domain in Zen1.
tutanchamun 8y ago
Seperating the analog logic (IO die) from the digital logic (CPU cores). Analog shrinks really bad with smaller nodes wheras digital logic shrinks really good. New process nodes get more and more expensive - especially if the node is new (bad yields etc.) So you want to get the most out of it as possible, which AMD does with this strategy. For example Zen 1 8 core chips are 213 mm2 on 14nm. On 7nm these chipse would be > 106 mm2 (because the analog elements don't scale). Zen 2 chiplets should be at most 75 mm2 (while also increasing cache, widen AVX etc.) which is mobile SoC territory which means they are cheaper to produce (better yields etc.). Since Intel uses monolithic dies AMD already had an cost advatage, with Zen 2 it's not even funny. Especially if the guesses of many people are true and AMD designed the IO chip to be cut down, which means they can reuse it for their desktop CPUs (Ryzen on AM4). Anonther nice advantage of this would be that they can bin the chip even better for EPYC, Threadripper and Ryzen. AdoredTV does a good job of aggregating all the infos/ideas that are floating around and presenting them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6AG-woscDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6AG-woscDU
- 8y ago

RickSanchez2600 8y ago

Intel has a chip shortage, so AMD might be able to sell their CPUs and motherboards while Intel cannot meet demand. I always wanted to make an Amiga with an AMD chip and get AmigaOS into X86-X64 and away from PowerPC so it can sell cheaper and faster systems. Compete with Apple at least by merging AmigaOS with GNU/Linux work with Valve on SteamOS to run AmigaOS apps and get some classic Amiga games into SteamOS and GNU/Linux.

pjmlp 8y ago
Amiga hardware is what made it special, an generic OS on a generic hardware is just yet another OS.