9 ms·

AMD Discloses Architecture Details of High-Performance “Carrizo” System-on-Chip

52 points by matt42 12y ago

seunosewa 12y ago
It's been difficult to take claims of "high performance" from AMD seriously for a while :)
- ewzimm 12y ago
  They may not manufacture the highest-performing cores, but they have consistently provided the best performance for the price. Who cares who's fastest? The consoles went with them because they were fast enough and better priced.
  - api 12y ago
    AMD's problem for a long time has been power consumption. They have had the performance per dollar crown, but their stuff runs hot. Only place I ever see them is gamer market and some servers.
    - engendered 12y ago
      Add that the performance per dollar lead is only if your workload is atypically multi-threaded. Intel has really taken a bite out of AMD's already tenuous market with the "Pentium" variants.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      This somewhat reminds me of the Netburst era, when AMD's Athlons were in the lead while Intel decided to chase after high clock frequencies with much higher power consumption as a result. Then Intel went back to the P6 to produce Core, and rapidly overtook AMD. I still hope AMD will make another sudden leap like that, to keep the x86 market more competitive, but they seem more intent on keeping to the path started by Bulldozer...
      - ewzimm 12y ago
        But you're commenting on a press release about how this architecture's main benefit is gains in performance-per-watt. AMD has a reputation for using more power right now because they slowed down to focus on unifying architectures. I think ARM has proved this strategy works in the long term. Everybody knows power efficiency is king right now.
  - williadc 12y ago
    If electricity were free, you'd have a great point. TCO is something that needs to be considered, and Intel's chips are very competitive.
    - ewzimm 12y ago
      Intel makes 160 wH chips too, but you would probably compare something like a 95 wH Core i7 with a 125 wH FX. That's about $42/year in the USA, but that's assuming running at full power 24/7. Real cost would be a lot lower.
  - mbell 12y ago
    > they have consistently provided the best performance for the price Need a citation on that. For low thread count or FP heavy applications, i.e. the vast majority of cases, Intel's Pentium G series has been the best bang for the buck for several years now. AMD is only cost effective for applications with lots of threads doing integer work which isn't terribly common.
    - ewzimm 12y ago
      You could look at Passmark: http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html Low-end Xeons are on top, but the first you might want are the FX-6300 and 8320, followed by the Pentium Gs. Since you are not comparing equal cores, the cheaper Pentiums do make sense in a lot of cases, but AMD does often have cheaper motherboards. Actual performance is going to depend on use case. I feel like the console situation speaks for itself. AMD is still putting out some good stuff, especially for an undedog.
DonPellegrino 12y ago
Impressive what they manage to do on 28nm compared to Intel.
- olympus 12y ago
  If you forced both companies to use the same die size then AMD compares favorably to Intel. But on the leading edge of performance, AMD lags Intel by quite a bit (Intel was selling 14nm processors at the end of 2014, and AMD isn't planning to release them until 2016). It forces AMD to compete in other ways, because they just don't have it when it comes to raw speed and efficiency. Putting CPU and GPU on the same chip is nice, but I long for the days when AMD and Intel were duking it out and high end users actually had to debate which was better.
  - revelation 12y ago
    I long for the days when AMD had Intel thoroughly beat. That brought us the Core2Duo.
    - cfallin 12y ago
      Intel is not exactly lacking in competition these days, either. The ARM/mobile threat is pushing really hard against Atom.
      - joshuapants 12y ago
        Intel is definitely making a play for the low-powered market (including wearables and embedded) and experiencing an uphill battle, but they're still pretty much uncontested everywhere else. I seem to recall some discussion of ARM trying to move into servers but I haven't heard anything about it since.
      - revelation 12y ago
        I always have this bad feeling when it comes to Atom, like they are intentionally crippling it and are not exactly giving it a proper shot. They are so far ahead on the raw manufacturing that the Atom should have no problem stomping the competition outright, yet it's barely scraping by.
wmf 12y ago
The AnandTech article is probably better: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8995/amd-at-isscc-2015-carrizo-and-excavator-details http://www.anandtech.com/show/8995/amd-at-isscc-2015-carrizo... Calling Carrizo "high-performance" is interesting because AMD reduced peak performance to increase power efficiency. Below ~65W Carrizo's performance should be higher than Kaveri (although still lower than Intel) but at higher power budgets performance would be worse.
danmaz74 12y ago
Honestly, while reading, I couldn't help myself thinking about the "bullshit font" from one of yesterday's (or was it the day before) submissions. prestigious - wealth of - new, advanced - substantial - true ... bleah.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I will be interested to watch how the hUMA stuff works out. Having 100% overlap in memory space between the GPU and the CPU can be useful. Intel tried to go there with Larrabee. Having a collection of specialized processors in the same cache coherent space allows for some interesting data flow architectures to be tried out.
- xorcist 12y ago
  Do they have a common MMU? Have they released information on how that works in practice? I guess this must be a solved problem since there have been many systems with similar memory architectures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's quite a challenge. Cache coherency can also have interesting security properties.

52 points by matt42 12y ago

seunosewa 12y ago

It's been difficult to take claims of "high performance" from AMD seriously for a while :)

ewzimm 12y ago
They may not manufacture the highest-performing cores, but they have consistently provided the best performance for the price. Who cares who's fastest? The consoles went with them because they were fast enough and better priced.
- api 12y ago
  AMD's problem for a long time has been power consumption. They have had the performance per dollar crown, but their stuff runs hot. Only place I ever see them is gamer market and some servers.
  - engendered 12y ago
    Add that the performance per dollar lead is only if your workload is atypically multi-threaded. Intel has really taken a bite out of AMD's already tenuous market with the "Pentium" variants.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    This somewhat reminds me of the Netburst era, when AMD's Athlons were in the lead while Intel decided to chase after high clock frequencies with much higher power consumption as a result. Then Intel went back to the P6 to produce Core, and rapidly overtook AMD. I still hope AMD will make another sudden leap like that, to keep the x86 market more competitive, but they seem more intent on keeping to the path started by Bulldozer...
    - ewzimm 12y ago
      But you're commenting on a press release about how this architecture's main benefit is gains in performance-per-watt. AMD has a reputation for using more power right now because they slowed down to focus on unifying architectures. I think ARM has proved this strategy works in the long term. Everybody knows power efficiency is king right now.
- williadc 12y ago
  If electricity were free, you'd have a great point. TCO is something that needs to be considered, and Intel's chips are very competitive.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    Intel makes 160 wH chips too, but you would probably compare something like a 95 wH Core i7 with a 125 wH FX. That's about $42/year in the USA, but that's assuming running at full power 24/7. Real cost would be a lot lower.
- mbell 12y ago
  > they have consistently provided the best performance for the price Need a citation on that. For low thread count or FP heavy applications, i.e. the vast majority of cases, Intel's Pentium G series has been the best bang for the buck for several years now. AMD is only cost effective for applications with lots of threads doing integer work which isn't terribly common.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    You could look at Passmark: http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html Low-end Xeons are on top, but the first you might want are the FX-6300 and 8320, followed by the Pentium Gs. Since you are not comparing equal cores, the cheaper Pentiums do make sense in a lot of cases, but AMD does often have cheaper motherboards. Actual performance is going to depend on use case. I feel like the console situation speaks for itself. AMD is still putting out some good stuff, especially for an undedog.

DonPellegrino 12y ago

Impressive what they manage to do on 28nm compared to Intel.

olympus 12y ago
If you forced both companies to use the same die size then AMD compares favorably to Intel. But on the leading edge of performance, AMD lags Intel by quite a bit (Intel was selling 14nm processors at the end of 2014, and AMD isn't planning to release them until 2016). It forces AMD to compete in other ways, because they just don't have it when it comes to raw speed and efficiency. Putting CPU and GPU on the same chip is nice, but I long for the days when AMD and Intel were duking it out and high end users actually had to debate which was better.
- revelation 12y ago
  I long for the days when AMD had Intel thoroughly beat. That brought us the Core2Duo.
  - cfallin 12y ago
    Intel is not exactly lacking in competition these days, either. The ARM/mobile threat is pushing really hard against Atom.
    - joshuapants 12y ago
      Intel is definitely making a play for the low-powered market (including wearables and embedded) and experiencing an uphill battle, but they're still pretty much uncontested everywhere else. I seem to recall some discussion of ARM trying to move into servers but I haven't heard anything about it since.
    - revelation 12y ago
      I always have this bad feeling when it comes to Atom, like they are intentionally crippling it and are not exactly giving it a proper shot. They are so far ahead on the raw manufacturing that the Atom should have no problem stomping the competition outright, yet it's barely scraping by.

wmf 12y ago

The AnandTech article is probably better: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8995/amd-at-isscc-2015-carrizo-and-excavator-details http://www.anandtech.com/show/8995/amd-at-isscc-2015-carrizo... Calling Carrizo "high-performance" is interesting because AMD reduced peak performance to increase power efficiency. Below ~65W Carrizo's performance should be higher than Kaveri (although still lower than Intel) but at higher power budgets performance would be worse.

danmaz74 12y ago

Honestly, while reading, I couldn't help myself thinking about the "bullshit font" from one of yesterday's (or was it the day before) submissions. prestigious - wealth of - new, advanced - substantial - true ... bleah.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I will be interested to watch how the hUMA stuff works out. Having 100% overlap in memory space between the GPU and the CPU can be useful. Intel tried to go there with Larrabee. Having a collection of specialized processors in the same cache coherent space allows for some interesting data flow architectures to be tried out.

xorcist 12y ago
Do they have a common MMU? Have they released information on how that works in practice? I guess this must be a solved problem since there have been many systems with similar memory architectures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's quite a challenge. Cache coherency can also have interesting security properties.