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I gotta give AMD massive credit...while I have mainly used intel in my setups, AMD has really pushed their offerings. First I remember everyone driving the pri

I gotta give AMD massive credit...while I have mainly used intel in my setups, AMD has really pushed their offerings. First I remember everyone driving the price up of an AMD video card just because bitcoin mining. Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware. Now an Arm 8-core CPU...although I find the clock speed (2GHz) kinda underwhelming, still AMD's pricing would entice me to buy 2 for the price of 1 Intel i7

ekianjo 13y ago
> Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware. Does not mean much. Their APU used in these consoles is very weak compared to what we have in mid to high end PC graphics cards. They were obviously chosen for their price there, not for the performance (which is MEH at best).
- corresation 13y ago
  It's approximately equal to a 7870 (the PS3 variant), which is anything but "weak". Indeed, it's what's in my play PC, and plays any current game with ease. As to AMD generally, well they have by far the leading compute cards, and hold their own in the high end, so certainly not "meh".
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Well the performance on 1080p games has been less than stellar so far, compared to my gaming PC. Laughable, even, since my PC graphics card is already almost 2 years old. These consoles are really a joke, and they are making money on the hardware this time around, that tells you how cheap they are.
    - lotso 13y ago
      The games at launch are always notoriously not representative of the full capabilities of the console. Compare any game from the launch of the previous generation to games that are being released now. There is a huge difference. Also, I'd like to see your source for the statement that they are making money. I'm sure they aren't as huge loss leaders as they were in the past, but I'd be surprised to know if they are making money on them. If Microsoft could cut the MSRP, they would have.
      - quackerhacker 13y ago
        I totally agree...this time around Sony and Microsoft really were under inventory constraints to launch for the holiday season.... If Microsoft could have, I think they would've offered their subsidized consoles (like they did the 360), and launch with Halo as their premiere title.... (this will probably get a lot of hate) then again Playstation actually decided to play video games this time and xbox one is trying to be a super Roku.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        > Also, I'd like to see your source for the statement that they are making money This was clearly mentioned by Sony before the launch of the console. As for the Xboxone, Microsoft also mentioned that if someone buys one game with the system, they are already making a profit overall. They are NOT selling their systems cheap compared to the previous generations, in terms of what's inside the box. I'll have to find the quotes, but I'm sure you can find them as well if you have 5 minutes.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        > The games at launch are always notoriously not representative of the full capabilities of the console Sorry but let me call BS on this one. We're not talking about PS3 kind of hardware here, where the architecture was unknown and new and developers had to learn a lot. The PS4 and Xboxone are using basically PC hardware under the hood, and the learning curve should be close to zero for most developers involved.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        > Compare any game from the launch of the previous generation to games that are being released now. There is a huge difference. My point is that when the Xbox 360 came out, for example, the games running on it at launch were very impressive versus what the PCs could do at the time. In this generation, watching the launch games on PS4 and Xboxone just feels MEH at best. They are way too late in the game vs the power they are packing in.
    - quackerhacker 13y ago
      I don't feel any console can really compare to a custom built gaming PC...for a while I was hosting my website and ffmpeg compression server on my gaming rig. In regards to the latest consoles, I have a ps4...and while most "anticipated," games are still on preorder, I don't think it's fair yet to call the hardware a joke, I don't feel the studios have taken full advantage of the hardware.....now the games offerings right now....yeah I agree, but I think the studios really compiled their games (at least the ones I play :: COD: Ghosts, and Battlefield 4) for previous gen consoles. I am interested to see how the new halo plays though...just can't get past the fact that the xbox one requires kinect to be...ummm, connected to play.
    - corresation 13y ago
      The language that you're using (weak, joke, etc) gives the impression that you aren't really evaluating from a rational perspective, but instead have chosen a side. Why? What's the point of doing that? Though it is an interesting segue from this article about AMD supporting ARM chips (one of the biggest problems facing data centers is power density and with that heat removal) -- the PS4 has a total power consumption of 137W. That's the eight cores, GPU, 8GB of DDR5, blu-ray player...the entirety of the box consumes 137W. The nvidia GTX770, undoubtedly a higher performance card, not only costs almost as much as a PS4, alone it consumes significantly more power than the PS4. That's excluding the rest of the box around it. That just isn't tenable for a living room gaming machine, which is exactly why consoles represent a necessary compromise. Similarly, several of the most interesting Steam boxes have GPUs significantly less powerful than the PS4's 7870, because you just can't drop a 450W device in the living room and call it a day.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        > The nvidia GTX770, undoubtedly a higher performance card, not only costs almost as much as a PS4, alone it consumes significantly more power than the PS4. I don't care if it costs more. It's available. Hardware better than the PS4 in consoles is NOT. That's the whole point. If I want to have better hardware than the PS4, I'll have to wait another 10 years for another console cycle to come. No way. In 2 years time the PS4 and XBoxone will be extremely weak even compared with low-end PC gaming rigs. And you bet I'll want a high performing card (no matter what it costs) when the VR headsets come around (whether Occulus Rift or Valve).
        sliverstorm 13y ago
        The trouble is while you might be chomping at the bit to buy a $2,000 PS4, most of the world is not. It would not sell.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        > Similarly, several of the most interesting Steam boxes have GPUs significantly less powerful than the PS4's 7870, because you just can't drop a 450W device in the living room and call it a day. Then these makers are missing the point. It will be more interesting to build your own Steam Machine then, and install SteamOS on it if no one is willing to put power in the living room. PC market is not console market.
    - kayoone 13y ago
      Thats a bold claim. Care to name what you are using in your gaming PC ? Two years old i would guess a HD6870 or equivalent, thats about half the performance of the PS4/XB1 GPU which is on the 7870/R9 270X/660Ti level. Add an 8 core CPU and 8GB of extremely fast DDR5 to the mix and i highly doubt Sony/MS are making any profit on the hardware right now.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        > i highly doubt Sony/MS are making any profit on the hardware right now. Seriously did you miss that? http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/11/19/report-sony-near-to-profit-on-ps4-hardware/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/11/19/re... ANd that's just a third party evaluation, I have no doubt Sony gets way better hardware price deals when ordering millions of parts through their purchasing contracts, so of course they are making some kind of profit on each PS4 sold. They actually want to avoid what put them in the red with the PS3 sales.
        e12e 13y ago
        From the article: > IHS iSuppli, having totted up the parts costs, has come up with a total of $372, with an estimated $9 labor cost bringing it to $381 – $18 below the recommended retail price. So retail price is 399, out of which retailers make how much? 199 ? Tell me again how Sony is making a profit.
        kayoone 13y ago
        Correct, but retailers make nowhere near 200 from a sale, still enough for Sony to not make a profit though.
- coldpie 13y ago
  I suspect this is a different argument from yours, but the console sales have actually been a huge boon for AMD: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/amd-reports-second-consecutive-quarterly-profit-on-xbox-one-ps4-sales/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/amd-reports-second-c...
NolF 13y ago
> although I find the clock speed (2GHz) kinda underwhelming Remember that the clock speed is not necesarely everything. AMD may be able to get more work done with those 2Ghz than a Snapdragon 800 might using similar or less energy.
- userbinator 13y ago
  And clock speed can't be compared across (micro)architectures either - remember the days of NetBurst P4s? As far as I know, x86 (P6-based) is still king in IPC.
  - na85 13y ago
    I remember thinking my 966MHz Coppermine was blazing fast. Then, a few years later I tried to install Gentoo on it. With X. And OpenOffice. It chugged for days.
    - mitchty 13y ago
      You compiled it? Why? Why not compile on a different architecture thats faster or use distcc to make a compile farm? Last times I used Gentoo I just used the packages, took no longer to install than an rpm based distribution.
      - na85 13y ago
        >You compiled it? Why? Learning exercise >Why not compile on a different architecture thats faster or use distcc to make a compile farm? Last times I used Gentoo I just used the packages, took no longer to install than an rpm based distribution. Well this was 10 years ago. I was 17 or so and I didn't know about distcc. I was young, dewy-eyed, and a huge noob.
        brubaker 13y ago
        Learning exercise What did you learn watching code compile?
mmanfrin 13y ago
They got that Mac Pro spot, as well; half the price of the base model is from the GFX cards.
SwellJoe 13y ago
How about also comparing the power usage? At 25 watts, you can get three of these for one six core Intel CPU; so you're at 24 cores at 2 GHz vs 6 cores at 3 GHz (and probably still at a lower price). The GHz can't really be directly compared, though. Even comparing GHz across Intel product generations isn't useful. I have a 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo in my desktop that I think (I haven't really benchmarked, but I've run a Litecoin miner on both for testing) does about half the work of the 3.2 GHz i7 in my laptop. All that said, I have a 16 core AMD server in colo that is running at about 3% usage across all CPUs, and yet it is slow as hell because the disk subsystem can't keep up (replacing the spinning disks with SSDs as we speak). The reality is that CPU is not the bottleneck in the vast majority of web service applications. Memory and disk subsystems are the bottlenecks in every system I manage. So, I love the idea of a low power, low cost, CPU that still packs enough of a punch to work in virtualized environments. Dedicate one of each of these cores to your VMs; would be pretty nice, I think.
- brigade 13y ago
  Well, Intel vaguely sells a 4-core Xeon at 1.8/2.8 GHz with 25 W TDP [1], then between the hyperthreading and higher IPC you've mostly made up for the fewer cores relative to this ARM part. [1] http://ark.intel.com/products/75053/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1230L-v3-8M-Cache-1_80-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/75053/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-...
- hhw 13y ago
  The Avoton Atom C2750 which is already out now is also 8 cores, but at 2.4GHz and with the entire SoC at 20W. It's supposed to have comparable performance to a Xeon E5520 quad-core/8-thread 2.26GHz CPU from 3 generations back, or about half the performance of a current quad-core/8-thread Xeon E3 1230v3. And it supports virtualization extensions. I agree that I/O and not the CPU is usually the bottleneck though.
  - SwellJoe 13y ago
    That's pretty impressive, actually. I just built a new server, and was comparing 80W and 95W packages. I didn't realize Intel had sorted out power so effectively that they could compete with ARM architecture. (Though, to be fair, this new ARM from AMD is a beast...ARM's grown up and Intel has shrunk down.) Three generations back is still plenty fast for me. I'm running a Core 2 Duo on my desktop, as mentioned, and I don't see any reason to upgrade. I can't imagine needing vastly more in a web server. I think it'd be interesting to see how these two product lines stack up on all the variables: cost, performance, power under load, etc.
gaius 13y ago
Clock speed is only relevant when comparing the same CPU. I have been having this argument since the 1980s in the school playground when kids with Spectrums would claim their 4Mhz Z80s were faster than 2Mhz 6502s...
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Retrocomputing enthusiasts keep debates like this alive even today. With single-byte addressing, I'd say even a 1 MHz 6502 can make a 4 MHz Z-80 sweat. ;-) And, for the MSX crowd, having to do 3 OUT's, one IN and an OR just to set a pixel is definitely ludicrous.
  - gaius 13y ago
    For pure computation a Spectrum can match a C=64, but as soon as any of the Commodore's hardware assist kicks in, game over for the Speccy.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      And the QL-inspired Spectrum+ and 128 remain some of the most beautiful 8-bit computers ever built. I love that keyboard. Commodores and Ataris of the time had very clever ideas about expansion. The intelligent peripherals are a brilliant idea and we should have done more of that.
blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago
@ 2Ghz they can probably produce large quantities. It sounds like they went for a "safe" fabrication process so that the initial rollout is as defect free as it can. I really hope MS ports windows server to it...

ekianjo 13y ago

> Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware. Does not mean much. Their APU used in these consoles is very weak compared to what we have in mid to high end PC graphics cards. They were obviously chosen for their price there, not for the performance (which is MEH at best).

corresation 13y ago
It's approximately equal to a 7870 (the PS3 variant), which is anything but "weak". Indeed, it's what's in my play PC, and plays any current game with ease. As to AMD generally, well they have by far the leading compute cards, and hold their own in the high end, so certainly not "meh".
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Well the performance on 1080p games has been less than stellar so far, compared to my gaming PC. Laughable, even, since my PC graphics card is already almost 2 years old. These consoles are really a joke, and they are making money on the hardware this time around, that tells you how cheap they are.
  - lotso 13y ago
    The games at launch are always notoriously not representative of the full capabilities of the console. Compare any game from the launch of the previous generation to games that are being released now. There is a huge difference. Also, I'd like to see your source for the statement that they are making money. I'm sure they aren't as huge loss leaders as they were in the past, but I'd be surprised to know if they are making money on them. If Microsoft could cut the MSRP, they would have.
    - quackerhacker 13y ago
      I totally agree...this time around Sony and Microsoft really were under inventory constraints to launch for the holiday season.... If Microsoft could have, I think they would've offered their subsidized consoles (like they did the 360), and launch with Halo as their premiere title.... (this will probably get a lot of hate) then again Playstation actually decided to play video games this time and xbox one is trying to be a super Roku.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      > Also, I'd like to see your source for the statement that they are making money This was clearly mentioned by Sony before the launch of the console. As for the Xboxone, Microsoft also mentioned that if someone buys one game with the system, they are already making a profit overall. They are NOT selling their systems cheap compared to the previous generations, in terms of what's inside the box. I'll have to find the quotes, but I'm sure you can find them as well if you have 5 minutes.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      > The games at launch are always notoriously not representative of the full capabilities of the console Sorry but let me call BS on this one. We're not talking about PS3 kind of hardware here, where the architecture was unknown and new and developers had to learn a lot. The PS4 and Xboxone are using basically PC hardware under the hood, and the learning curve should be close to zero for most developers involved.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      > Compare any game from the launch of the previous generation to games that are being released now. There is a huge difference. My point is that when the Xbox 360 came out, for example, the games running on it at launch were very impressive versus what the PCs could do at the time. In this generation, watching the launch games on PS4 and Xboxone just feels MEH at best. They are way too late in the game vs the power they are packing in.
  - quackerhacker 13y ago
    I don't feel any console can really compare to a custom built gaming PC...for a while I was hosting my website and ffmpeg compression server on my gaming rig. In regards to the latest consoles, I have a ps4...and while most "anticipated," games are still on preorder, I don't think it's fair yet to call the hardware a joke, I don't feel the studios have taken full advantage of the hardware.....now the games offerings right now....yeah I agree, but I think the studios really compiled their games (at least the ones I play :: COD: Ghosts, and Battlefield 4) for previous gen consoles. I am interested to see how the new halo plays though...just can't get past the fact that the xbox one requires kinect to be...ummm, connected to play.
  - corresation 13y ago
    The language that you're using (weak, joke, etc) gives the impression that you aren't really evaluating from a rational perspective, but instead have chosen a side. Why? What's the point of doing that? Though it is an interesting segue from this article about AMD supporting ARM chips (one of the biggest problems facing data centers is power density and with that heat removal) -- the PS4 has a total power consumption of 137W. That's the eight cores, GPU, 8GB of DDR5, blu-ray player...the entirety of the box consumes 137W. The nvidia GTX770, undoubtedly a higher performance card, not only costs almost as much as a PS4, alone it consumes significantly more power than the PS4. That's excluding the rest of the box around it. That just isn't tenable for a living room gaming machine, which is exactly why consoles represent a necessary compromise. Similarly, several of the most interesting Steam boxes have GPUs significantly less powerful than the PS4's 7870, because you just can't drop a 450W device in the living room and call it a day.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      > The nvidia GTX770, undoubtedly a higher performance card, not only costs almost as much as a PS4, alone it consumes significantly more power than the PS4. I don't care if it costs more. It's available. Hardware better than the PS4 in consoles is NOT. That's the whole point. If I want to have better hardware than the PS4, I'll have to wait another 10 years for another console cycle to come. No way. In 2 years time the PS4 and XBoxone will be extremely weak even compared with low-end PC gaming rigs. And you bet I'll want a high performing card (no matter what it costs) when the VR headsets come around (whether Occulus Rift or Valve).
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        The trouble is while you might be chomping at the bit to buy a $2,000 PS4, most of the world is not. It would not sell.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      > Similarly, several of the most interesting Steam boxes have GPUs significantly less powerful than the PS4's 7870, because you just can't drop a 450W device in the living room and call it a day. Then these makers are missing the point. It will be more interesting to build your own Steam Machine then, and install SteamOS on it if no one is willing to put power in the living room. PC market is not console market.
  - kayoone 13y ago
    Thats a bold claim. Care to name what you are using in your gaming PC ? Two years old i would guess a HD6870 or equivalent, thats about half the performance of the PS4/XB1 GPU which is on the 7870/R9 270X/660Ti level. Add an 8 core CPU and 8GB of extremely fast DDR5 to the mix and i highly doubt Sony/MS are making any profit on the hardware right now.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      > i highly doubt Sony/MS are making any profit on the hardware right now. Seriously did you miss that? http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/11/19/report-sony-near-to-profit-on-ps4-hardware/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/11/19/re... ANd that's just a third party evaluation, I have no doubt Sony gets way better hardware price deals when ordering millions of parts through their purchasing contracts, so of course they are making some kind of profit on each PS4 sold. They actually want to avoid what put them in the red with the PS3 sales.
      - e12e 13y ago
        From the article: > IHS iSuppli, having totted up the parts costs, has come up with a total of $372, with an estimated $9 labor cost bringing it to $381 – $18 below the recommended retail price. So retail price is 399, out of which retailers make how much? 199 ? Tell me again how Sony is making a profit.
        kayoone 13y ago
        Correct, but retailers make nowhere near 200 from a sale, still enough for Sony to not make a profit though.
coldpie 13y ago
I suspect this is a different argument from yours, but the console sales have actually been a huge boon for AMD: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/amd-reports-second-consecutive-quarterly-profit-on-xbox-one-ps4-sales/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/amd-reports-second-c...

NolF 13y ago

> although I find the clock speed (2GHz) kinda underwhelming Remember that the clock speed is not necesarely everything. AMD may be able to get more work done with those 2Ghz than a Snapdragon 800 might using similar or less energy.

userbinator 13y ago
And clock speed can't be compared across (micro)architectures either - remember the days of NetBurst P4s? As far as I know, x86 (P6-based) is still king in IPC.
- na85 13y ago
  I remember thinking my 966MHz Coppermine was blazing fast. Then, a few years later I tried to install Gentoo on it. With X. And OpenOffice. It chugged for days.
  - mitchty 13y ago
    You compiled it? Why? Why not compile on a different architecture thats faster or use distcc to make a compile farm? Last times I used Gentoo I just used the packages, took no longer to install than an rpm based distribution.
    - na85 13y ago
      >You compiled it? Why? Learning exercise >Why not compile on a different architecture thats faster or use distcc to make a compile farm? Last times I used Gentoo I just used the packages, took no longer to install than an rpm based distribution. Well this was 10 years ago. I was 17 or so and I didn't know about distcc. I was young, dewy-eyed, and a huge noob.
      - brubaker 13y ago
        Learning exercise What did you learn watching code compile?

mmanfrin 13y ago

They got that Mac Pro spot, as well; half the price of the base model is from the GFX cards.

SwellJoe 13y ago

How about also comparing the power usage? At 25 watts, you can get three of these for one six core Intel CPU; so you're at 24 cores at 2 GHz vs 6 cores at 3 GHz (and probably still at a lower price). The GHz can't really be directly compared, though. Even comparing GHz across Intel product generations isn't useful. I have a 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo in my desktop that I think (I haven't really benchmarked, but I've run a Litecoin miner on both for testing) does about half the work of the 3.2 GHz i7 in my laptop. All that said, I have a 16 core AMD server in colo that is running at about 3% usage across all CPUs, and yet it is slow as hell because the disk subsystem can't keep up (replacing the spinning disks with SSDs as we speak). The reality is that CPU is not the bottleneck in the vast majority of web service applications. Memory and disk subsystems are the bottlenecks in every system I manage. So, I love the idea of a low power, low cost, CPU that still packs enough of a punch to work in virtualized environments. Dedicate one of each of these cores to your VMs; would be pretty nice, I think.

brigade 13y ago
Well, Intel vaguely sells a 4-core Xeon at 1.8/2.8 GHz with 25 W TDP [1], then between the hyperthreading and higher IPC you've mostly made up for the fewer cores relative to this ARM part. [1] http://ark.intel.com/products/75053/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1230L-v3-8M-Cache-1_80-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/75053/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-...
hhw 13y ago
The Avoton Atom C2750 which is already out now is also 8 cores, but at 2.4GHz and with the entire SoC at 20W. It's supposed to have comparable performance to a Xeon E5520 quad-core/8-thread 2.26GHz CPU from 3 generations back, or about half the performance of a current quad-core/8-thread Xeon E3 1230v3. And it supports virtualization extensions. I agree that I/O and not the CPU is usually the bottleneck though.
- SwellJoe 13y ago
  That's pretty impressive, actually. I just built a new server, and was comparing 80W and 95W packages. I didn't realize Intel had sorted out power so effectively that they could compete with ARM architecture. (Though, to be fair, this new ARM from AMD is a beast...ARM's grown up and Intel has shrunk down.) Three generations back is still plenty fast for me. I'm running a Core 2 Duo on my desktop, as mentioned, and I don't see any reason to upgrade. I can't imagine needing vastly more in a web server. I think it'd be interesting to see how these two product lines stack up on all the variables: cost, performance, power under load, etc.

gaius 13y ago

Clock speed is only relevant when comparing the same CPU. I have been having this argument since the 1980s in the school playground when kids with Spectrums would claim their 4Mhz Z80s were faster than 2Mhz 6502s...

rbanffy 13y ago
Retrocomputing enthusiasts keep debates like this alive even today. With single-byte addressing, I'd say even a 1 MHz 6502 can make a 4 MHz Z-80 sweat. ;-) And, for the MSX crowd, having to do 3 OUT's, one IN and an OR just to set a pixel is definitely ludicrous.
- gaius 13y ago
  For pure computation a Spectrum can match a C=64, but as soon as any of the Commodore's hardware assist kicks in, game over for the Speccy.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    And the QL-inspired Spectrum+ and 128 remain some of the most beautiful 8-bit computers ever built. I love that keyboard. Commodores and Ataris of the time had very clever ideas about expansion. The intelligent peripherals are a brilliant idea and we should have done more of that.

blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago

@ 2Ghz they can probably produce large quantities. It sounds like they went for a "safe" fabrication process so that the initial rollout is as defect free as it can. I really hope MS ports windows server to it...