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Alleged AMD Zen 5 Specs Leak: Twice the Cores, 15% Increased IPC over Ryzen 7000
- snvzz 3y agoThe Tenstorrent Ascalon RISC-V microarchitecture is, according to tenstorrent slides, competitive with Zen5. Chiplets TBA in 2024. Same year Zen5 will be. Exciting times.
- Scaevolus 3y agoMany CPUs have claimed to be competitive with x86, but it rarely pans out. Being able to match the IPC on a microbenchmark is good, but they often struggle with poorly tuned, low bandwidth cache and memory controllers.
- snvzz 3y agoI would like to think Wei-Han Lien's (who previously led M1 at Apple) Ascalon team, as well as Jim Keller (CEO), industry veterans as they are, definitely use industry standard benchmarks, and avoid the mistake of extrapolating IPC from microbenchmarks. But maybe I'm too optimistic?
- JustLurking2022 3y agoI'll bet the publicize whatever benchmark looks most competitive to get the next funding. That's no criticism, just the way every business somewhat has to work in a competitive industry.
- sapiogram 3y agoGiven the choice between exaggerating the performance and getting funded, and not exaggerating and running out of money, I think everyone ends up choosing the former.
- vardump 3y agoWatt for watt, Apple's M2 demolishes anything x86 has to offer so far.
- McDyver 3y agoOn the same line, watt for watt, pen and paper demolishes anything Apple has to offer. Now and forever. One single, isolated metric is not the way to compare things
- frutiger 3y agoHow much energy do you need to put into a human for it to calculate a 10 digit multiplication?
- celrod 3y agoWe supposedly consume about 100 watts at rest. Given that my flops are low (less than one!), I don't think I'm an efficient processor. At least for floating point operations. Producing paper and ink cartridges isn't free, either. I might be competitive with an LLM + GPUs, but I imagine it'll demolish me on throughput.
- monocasa 3y agoI run inference pretty efficiently with those 100 watts.
- tails4e 3y agoLatest zen4 is very competitive power wise with M2, M2 still has the crown,but laptop battery life is dominated by other parts of the system when you're down to 1 to 2 W of cpu power for light workloads.
- paulmd 3y agoonly in cinebench or other dense math workloads afaik (especially ones that don't use vector extensions on ARM). SPEC benchmarks have M1 Max demolishing x86 in a lot of real-world applications. Similarly, in things like CFD the M2 Ultra absolutely demolishes server processors let alone laptops. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117494.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117494.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117495.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117495.png http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/ http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/ cinebench really just tests one thing, arithmetic intensity, and it doesn't represent cache performance, branching, reordering, or anything else in a processor. but those are actually quite important to real workloads. let's look at perf/w for, let's say gcc (chrome compiles?) or PGBench or something besides cinebench and see how the picture looks then.
- sapiogram 3y agoI'd say Apple got there with their M1 and M2 chips. But it took 10 years of incrementally improving on an already commercially viable cpu, unlike what tensortorrent is claiming.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoTenstorrent made lots of promises, like the PCIe card ML accelerators which have yet to retail (and are probably obsolete by now). The proof is in the puddin. Ascalon will be exciting when it is sitting on store shelves, and not before.
- jtriangle 3y agoTwice the cores leads me to think we're getting ecores
- _hypx_ 3y agoI think so too.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoDoes Linux have mechanisms in place to properly utilize ecores? Specifically tagging background services so they never jump in priority? Or would it be up to me to manually assign affinity? I read somewhere that part of what makes the iOS experience better is tight control over how much CPU background jobs can steal.
- lights0123 3y agoLinux has had support for cores with different capabilities for ~a decade, when arm introduced big.LITTLE. systemd puts background services in "slices", which can have properties set in bulk. systemctl set-property system.slice AllowedCPUs=16-19 Would set the "system" slice to certain pinned cores, but there's nothing automatic.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoThat’s interesting and easy enough to experiment. While I do not have mixed performance cores, I have been curious if pinning processes results in any noticeable smoothness. I get annoyed at various Gnome garbage that occasionally thrashes.
- noir_lord 3y agoalso has taskset which just lets you say "this PID can run on cores 0 through 13". Not the friendliest mechanism for defining what runs on what but it's what I use to make sure that server software I really want on the P cores stays on the P cores.
- garaetjjte 3y ago
- hinkley 3y agoIs anyone else finding that AWS is overcharging for the Zen 4 CPUS? I get better price performance for m6a vs m6i but the M7 series is too close to call for my workload. This is really dampening my enthusiasm for future AMD hardware. I wonder if AMD is aware of the damage Amazon is doing to them right now.
- singhrac 3y agoYeah, I found this too. For our specific workloads (data science) m7i-flex works well enough that I don’t mind, but it was not an obvious upgrade from m6a like I expected it to be.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- derefr 3y agoSupply and demand, I think — their DCs just don't have that many of that instance-type to go around. On GCP, even to this day, the Zen 2+3 instance type (N2D) doesn't cost more than the equivalent Intel N2 type; but you get very low quotas for N2D CPUs per project, and they aggressively refuse quota increases for them. I assume that AWS here went with the other option for Zen 4, and just raised the price until demand went down enough that nobody was hitting the quotas any more. After all, they can always lower it later.
- hinkley 3y agoThey’ve only been out for six weeks. We’ve just done so many migrations in the last few years that it’s pretty simple for us to upgrade things. Figuring out how many nodes to run is the only part that takes brain cells.
- lend000 3y agoIt makes sense in my case where I want strong single threaded performance, but it doesn't seem compelling to switch from Graviton if single threaded latency isn't important.
- drewg123 3y agoI have an "old" 32c/64t threadripper 2990-WX as my primary dev machine. I'm really looking forward to a consumer grade Zen5 with 32c/64t as an upgrade, as threadripper is now locked to high costs OEMs.. In fact, I wonder how much market there will be for threadripper once we have 32c/64t consumer grade desktop CPUS.
- colejohnson66 3y agoWasn’t Threadripper more of a “because we can” product, not a mainstream one? The price jump from the highest end Zens to the lowest end Threadrippers seems to indicate that.
- drewg123 3y agoYes, it is basically a prosumer version of the Epyc server CPUS, limit to a single socket, and with higher clocks. What frustrates me is that in the last 2 or so generations, you cannot simply buy a CPU. One has to buy an entire system from a vendor like Lenovo or HP. When I built my box in 2018, the 2990-WX was available for ~$1900. Which is a lot, but doesn't match the $5k->10k prices for the entire systems. There just aren't that many affordable, reasonably efficient ways to get >= 32c these days. (and by efficient, I'm excluding used server-class boxes from older generations that are power hungry).
- zamadatix 3y agoYou can still just buy the pieces e.g. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-boards https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-b... or https://www.serversupply.com/PROCESSORS/AMD%20EPYC%2064-Core/2.45GHz/AMD/100-000000799_368308.htm https://www.serversupply.com/PROCESSORS/AMD%20EPYC%2064-Core... or https://servers4less.com/cd8070604480301-intel-xeon-platinum-8380h-28-core-2-90ghz-6-00gt-s-upi-38-5mb-l3-cache-socket-fclga4189-processor/ https://servers4less.com/cd8070604480301-intel-xeon-platinum..., the same is true for the current Threadripper. Most searching for this stuff are expecting to buy a full system with support from the vendor though, so that's what shows up most of the time. The ratio of those trying to build an individual workstation has been decreasing, making piecemeal part builds the less prominent way to order. It's still around though. Price... now that's definitely a story :). The current 32 core Threadripper is around $3,000 itself now. It does have some advantages like the 8 memory channels but even just trying to build a low core count box with a lot of PCIe lanes is an extremely expensive endeavour. I think part of it has to do with the gap between the consumer and server markets widening over time, it becomes harder to justify doesn't something special for the HEDT market.
- zamadatix 3y agoThese will finally cross a (useless and arbitrary) gap we've been at the doorstep of for the last 3 CPU generations: having enough threads in a consumer class CPU to change the task manager from line graphs to bar graphs! In all seriousness, what I like about AMDs approach with the high core count complexes is they aren't completely different cores like the Intel efficiency cores, they're just slower cores. I do wish they'd take that as an opportunity to go crazy with the primary cores though, doing something like 4 or 6 asolutely giant cores and 16 small cores to give it a bit more than a 15% boost for those things which can't take advantage of having a bazillion cores available.
- hulitu 3y ago> to change the task manager from line graphs to bar graphs! With so many svchost.exe processes, i will say this might be a dream. /s
- Lockal 3y ago> having enough threads in a consumer class CPU to change the task manager from line graphs to bar graphs If it will be done with voice recognition using iGPU. And just in case, add AI analysis for anomalies. I could say "take my money", but for now it only will take time of developers; doesn't matter, whatever. Personally, I'm pretty tired of Intel dividing its processors into something for servers, for enthusiasts, and for commoners. Thank you AMD for universal AVX-512 without downclocking or pseudo-cores.
- ksec 3y agoWhile 10-15% IPC increase is great on paper, it is quite far from previous rumoured 20-25%+ IPC increase. To put this in perspective, the A16 / A17 is ~50% faster per clock than Zen 4 in Geekbench 6. And will still be 20% faster than Zen 6 in ~2025/26. Still waiting for 86 to catch up. It is just around the corner.