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I hope this puts AMD in stable footing for many years to come. Having newer and faster chips is great, but whats even better is long term competition in this s

by koolba 7y ago

I hope this puts AMD in stable footing for many years to come. Having newer and faster chips is great, but whats even better is long term competition in this space.

samfisher83 7y ago
Opteron was crushing it back in the day. I think Tech is just cyclical. It seemed like AMD was in a lull for a while which basically made intel not really compete. Hopefully this forces Intel to step its game up. Competition is always good for the consumer.
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  Intel has such a poor track record in recent years of expanding into new markets and hasn’t had to compete in their core market for so long that it’s questionable if they can.
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    we just got done saying that about AMD, so..
- uncletaco 7y ago
  Was AMD in a lull or just making longterm bets on technology? I've only followed casually in the last decade+ but I was under the impression that the ATI merger was meant to support a long term bet on better chips by AMD and we're starting to see the fruit of that labor.
  - faitswulff 7y ago
    As a layperson, I never understood that merger. How does buying a graphics card company make for better chips in general?
    - addicted 7y ago
      Integrating graphics card into their chips is what Intel seems to want to do as well. So it would appear AMD was ahead of the game. I guess, at the time, the thinking was that GPUs were a core threat to the CPU business itself, since a lot of the buzz was around using the GPU to do CPU activities.
      - sanxiyn 7y ago
        Yes, there was this thing called HSA(Heterogeneous System Architecture). Does anyone remember that now?
        consp 7y ago
        Yes, parts of it now present in IOMMU(v2)
        throwaway2048 7y ago
        Zen in many ways is still moving towards that model, The concept of an IO die that all cores hook into, along with all of PCI-E lanes, no need for complicated cross core linking. It would be relatively "easy" to introduce specialized accelerator cores or beefy GPU chips into this mix on a separate chip, and not massively complicate the CPU design, or massively bloat its cost as a specialist die.
        jorvi 7y ago
        The PS4 is an example of that. It's an APU with GDDR5 acting as both system and video memory. To be honest for a while I thought that was where everything but servers would be going. You can tune your OS and applications around the slower GDDR5 and it seemed a no brainer: instead of 8GB of system memory topping out and then 4GB of VRAM doing jack shit you could have 12GB that could be dynamically assigned to whatever you wanted! Alas, that dream was never meant to be. Edit: I posted about this a while a back and apparently Arch Linux has a hacky way to use your VRAM as system RAM. Good stuff.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    They hired Jim Keller to design the Zen architecture around 2012, and he left in 2015. Many people point to him for their current success. He joined Intel in 2018.
    - Arwill 7y ago
      Is AMD getting ahead of Intel with a superior architecture, or due to the fact that its running on 7nm instead of Intel's 14nm?
      - alecmg 7y ago
        Part chip design, part 7nm being unexpectedly good. But the chiplet architecture, supported by fast Infinity Fabric interconnect is what puts AMD ahead. Intel will have to go same route to stay competitive. And now they are two steps behind.
        sq_ 7y ago
        Chiplets were for sure an amazing bet AMD made that’s paid off big time. The smaller dies and modular setup even on the same die gives them so much flexibility in their binning and package integration and must keep defect rates much lower than Intel’s monolithic high core count chips.
        dralley 7y ago
        And the 14nm I/O die means they can still keep buying chips from GloFo, whom they still have a contract with as part of the spinoff from a decade ago.
        bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Intel has some very impressive chiplet technologies in house, aka EMIB. It's surprising they haven't used it for anything but that weird 8809G yet, but I'm sure it'll be used in more products next year.
        hitpointdrew 7y ago
- cronix 7y ago
  Would it have been a lull if all of intels flaws and security issues were known at the time? Those go back many years but weren't discovered til fairly recently and AMD didn't have most of them.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    Not all of them were known back then obviously, but there were definitely known timing-info-leak flaws with Pentium 4 hyper threading[1], its remarkable on that basis that the modern class of execution timing exploits has taken so long to arise, considering their approach and concept really isn't fundamentally any different. [1] http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf by none other than our resident cpercival!
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Back during the Opteron era, their chips had good compute, but higher heat output and power consumption. I use to run dual AthlonXPs on their older dual-MP boards back in University. It's crazy we now have 8~16 cores on a single board; on consumer (or I guess prosumer/developer) targeted hardware.
- ant6n 7y ago
  In 2016, AMD was near bankruptcy, after many years of mediocre tech and bad decisions. At that time it looked like they were never going to compete with Intel again in any meaningful way, didn't have the resources to pull ahead, had a negative balance sheet, and the best hope was that they could survive on some cheaper x86 niches, on the grace of people wanting some x86 competition to exist.
redleggedfrog 7y ago
"...even better is long term competition in this space." I hope that's the biggest outcome from this. My inside sources tell me that Intel has their briefs in a bind over AMDs latest technology, and are certainly kerfuffling over it, but I'm not sure how quickly they can respond. It seems like the disparity in this cycle has grown wider than in the past. But that is just my subjective take - I'm not really conversant on the manufacturing part. I'm just historically reviewing the power consumption and benchmarks.
- close04 7y ago
  > but I'm not sure how quickly they can respond AMD won't be in the position to just rest on their laurels for years to come. So the fact that Intel is scrambling to come up with a competitive response shouldn't be a concern as far as competition goes in the short-medium term. I'd say we have at least a few CPU generations coming from AMD without worrying that they become complacent, even if Intel still comes up short.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Especially as the top dual socket Epyc BEATS the top dual socket Xeon in a workload heavily optimised for AVX-512 and using the Intel ICC compiler. True, it has more cores, but it seems Xeon's have to clock down when executing AVX-512 ops to stay within their power budget. It's also doing this at almost half the cost and consuming less power ... that's nothing short of astounding. Xeon's do have a benefit for workloads that can stay in L3 cache as their mesh means latency is stable, whereas Epyc is 16MB per CCX. Overall memory latency is also lower, which is the tradeoff with the IO die, but it will be interesting to see what real world numbers for DB's etc. say about that.
  - stochastic_monk 7y ago
    There’s a hit that comes from “frequency scaling” on avx512 and avx2 instructions on Intel (worse for 512), so a total of fewer instructions isn’t always worth it. IIRC, AMD doesn’t pay a cost for avx2, but I don’t know how it works.
ksec 7y ago
> but whats even better is long term competition in this space. One thing missing from discussions as the results of Zen 2 EPYC is ARM on Server is now pretty much dead. I don't think any HyperScaler really want ARM on server per se, they simply want better pricing. And having AMD competing with Intel will provide just that. I don't see ARM Server being a viable alternative in the next 5 years.
- floatboth 7y ago
  Looks like Intel's 10nm is still failing spectacularly, so I can totally see the 7nm Marvell ThunderX3 being EPYC Rome's real competition :P Ampere has a chance too, if they get big gains from 7nm and/or massively improve their microarchitecture while keeping the current prices, they'll be unbeatable in price/performance. > I don't think any HyperScaler really want ARM on server per se There definitely seems to be a concern with the AMD/Intel duopoly, and Amazon clearly just wants absolute control, since they've already deployed in-house chips that mix ARM cores with <s>Bezos Backdoors</s> fancy cloudy networking and verified boot stuff.
- tuananh 7y ago
  why Rome is very impressive, I wouldn't cross ARM from the race just yet.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  5/7 use AMD now ( not facebook and Alibaba). Seems AMD is back

by koolba 7y ago

I hope this puts AMD in stable footing for many years to come. Having newer and faster chips is great, but whats even better is long term competition in this space.

samfisher83 7y ago

Opteron was crushing it back in the day. I think Tech is just cyclical. It seemed like AMD was in a lull for a while which basically made intel not really compete. Hopefully this forces Intel to step its game up. Competition is always good for the consumer.

godzillabrennus 7y ago
Intel has such a poor track record in recent years of expanding into new markets and hasn’t had to compete in their core market for so long that it’s questionable if they can.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  we just got done saying that about AMD, so..
uncletaco 7y ago
Was AMD in a lull or just making longterm bets on technology? I've only followed casually in the last decade+ but I was under the impression that the ATI merger was meant to support a long term bet on better chips by AMD and we're starting to see the fruit of that labor.
- faitswulff 7y ago
  As a layperson, I never understood that merger. How does buying a graphics card company make for better chips in general?
  - addicted 7y ago
    Integrating graphics card into their chips is what Intel seems to want to do as well. So it would appear AMD was ahead of the game. I guess, at the time, the thinking was that GPUs were a core threat to the CPU business itself, since a lot of the buzz was around using the GPU to do CPU activities.
    - sanxiyn 7y ago
      Yes, there was this thing called HSA(Heterogeneous System Architecture). Does anyone remember that now?
      - consp 7y ago
        Yes, parts of it now present in IOMMU(v2)
      - throwaway2048 7y ago
        Zen in many ways is still moving towards that model, The concept of an IO die that all cores hook into, along with all of PCI-E lanes, no need for complicated cross core linking. It would be relatively "easy" to introduce specialized accelerator cores or beefy GPU chips into this mix on a separate chip, and not massively complicate the CPU design, or massively bloat its cost as a specialist die.
      - jorvi 7y ago
        The PS4 is an example of that. It's an APU with GDDR5 acting as both system and video memory. To be honest for a while I thought that was where everything but servers would be going. You can tune your OS and applications around the slower GDDR5 and it seemed a no brainer: instead of 8GB of system memory topping out and then 4GB of VRAM doing jack shit you could have 12GB that could be dynamically assigned to whatever you wanted! Alas, that dream was never meant to be. Edit: I posted about this a while a back and apparently Arch Linux has a hacky way to use your VRAM as system RAM. Good stuff.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  They hired Jim Keller to design the Zen architecture around 2012, and he left in 2015. Many people point to him for their current success. He joined Intel in 2018.
  - Arwill 7y ago
    Is AMD getting ahead of Intel with a superior architecture, or due to the fact that its running on 7nm instead of Intel's 14nm?
    - alecmg 7y ago
      Part chip design, part 7nm being unexpectedly good. But the chiplet architecture, supported by fast Infinity Fabric interconnect is what puts AMD ahead. Intel will have to go same route to stay competitive. And now they are two steps behind.
      - sq_ 7y ago
        Chiplets were for sure an amazing bet AMD made that’s paid off big time. The smaller dies and modular setup even on the same die gives them so much flexibility in their binning and package integration and must keep defect rates much lower than Intel’s monolithic high core count chips.
        dralley 7y ago
        And the 14nm I/O die means they can still keep buying chips from GloFo, whom they still have a contract with as part of the spinoff from a decade ago.
      - bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Intel has some very impressive chiplet technologies in house, aka EMIB. It's surprising they haven't used it for anything but that weird 8809G yet, but I'm sure it'll be used in more products next year.
      - hitpointdrew 7y ago
cronix 7y ago
Would it have been a lull if all of intels flaws and security issues were known at the time? Those go back many years but weren't discovered til fairly recently and AMD didn't have most of them.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Not all of them were known back then obviously, but there were definitely known timing-info-leak flaws with Pentium 4 hyper threading[1], its remarkable on that basis that the modern class of execution timing exploits has taken so long to arise, considering their approach and concept really isn't fundamentally any different. [1] http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf by none other than our resident cpercival!
djsumdog 7y ago
Back during the Opteron era, their chips had good compute, but higher heat output and power consumption. I use to run dual AthlonXPs on their older dual-MP boards back in University. It's crazy we now have 8~16 cores on a single board; on consumer (or I guess prosumer/developer) targeted hardware.
ant6n 7y ago
In 2016, AMD was near bankruptcy, after many years of mediocre tech and bad decisions. At that time it looked like they were never going to compete with Intel again in any meaningful way, didn't have the resources to pull ahead, had a negative balance sheet, and the best hope was that they could survive on some cheaper x86 niches, on the grace of people wanting some x86 competition to exist.

redleggedfrog 7y ago

"...even better is long term competition in this space." I hope that's the biggest outcome from this. My inside sources tell me that Intel has their briefs in a bind over AMDs latest technology, and are certainly kerfuffling over it, but I'm not sure how quickly they can respond. It seems like the disparity in this cycle has grown wider than in the past. But that is just my subjective take - I'm not really conversant on the manufacturing part. I'm just historically reviewing the power consumption and benchmarks.

close04 7y ago
> but I'm not sure how quickly they can respond AMD won't be in the position to just rest on their laurels for years to come. So the fact that Intel is scrambling to come up with a competitive response shouldn't be a concern as far as competition goes in the short-medium term. I'd say we have at least a few CPU generations coming from AMD without worrying that they become complacent, even if Intel still comes up short.
philjohn 7y ago
Especially as the top dual socket Epyc BEATS the top dual socket Xeon in a workload heavily optimised for AVX-512 and using the Intel ICC compiler. True, it has more cores, but it seems Xeon's have to clock down when executing AVX-512 ops to stay within their power budget. It's also doing this at almost half the cost and consuming less power ... that's nothing short of astounding. Xeon's do have a benefit for workloads that can stay in L3 cache as their mesh means latency is stable, whereas Epyc is 16MB per CCX. Overall memory latency is also lower, which is the tradeoff with the IO die, but it will be interesting to see what real world numbers for DB's etc. say about that.
- stochastic_monk 7y ago
  There’s a hit that comes from “frequency scaling” on avx512 and avx2 instructions on Intel (worse for 512), so a total of fewer instructions isn’t always worth it. IIRC, AMD doesn’t pay a cost for avx2, but I don’t know how it works.

ksec 7y ago

> but whats even better is long term competition in this space. One thing missing from discussions as the results of Zen 2 EPYC is ARM on Server is now pretty much dead. I don't think any HyperScaler really want ARM on server per se, they simply want better pricing. And having AMD competing with Intel will provide just that. I don't see ARM Server being a viable alternative in the next 5 years.

floatboth 7y ago
Looks like Intel's 10nm is still failing spectacularly, so I can totally see the 7nm Marvell ThunderX3 being EPYC Rome's real competition :P Ampere has a chance too, if they get big gains from 7nm and/or massively improve their microarchitecture while keeping the current prices, they'll be unbeatable in price/performance. > I don't think any HyperScaler really want ARM on server per se There definitely seems to be a concern with the AMD/Intel duopoly, and Amazon clearly just wants absolute control, since they've already deployed in-house chips that mix ARM cores with <s>Bezos Backdoors</s> fancy cloudy networking and verified boot stuff.
tuananh 7y ago
why Rome is very impressive, I wouldn't cross ARM from the race just yet.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
5/7 use AMD now ( not facebook and Alibaba). Seems AMD is back