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*** AMD "Zen" thread (inc AM4/APU discussion) ***

Soldato
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Talking of chipsets, one potential difference is SATA/M.2 drivers. Intel have been pretty good with SATA drivers for SSDs, with RST drivers outperforming Microsoft's standard ones pretty much universally. Not sure how good AMD's chipsets and drivers are for this.
 
Soldato
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My experiences with Via chipsets and also the nforce ones was mainly with ABIT boards which mostly had a blindingly brilliant overclocking bios (for the time). Nforce boards (NF7) were overall better clockers but the Via also did a very decent job.
I agree that Intel SATA drivers are good and have a decent margin over the current 900 series AMD. I await to see what the new boards can do.

Are we seriously talking about chipsets from the Socket A/478 days?

All that is, is history.

For some reason, yes.
 
Soldato
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So the fact they are showing these up against the new Broadwell-E chip I'm imaging they will price them similar.

I might be upgrading in Dec. Give my old gaming machine to my sister and upgrade to a 6700k.

Question is should I wait for the new Zen chips or not and do with out gaming for a few months? Not sure I'd buy one if they are similar price to the Broadwell-E series.

Or they will do the same as the did before and price them a bit cheaper and say you get moar cores for your money. I expect Intel to still have the edge in single thread performance,but AMD will close the gap a decent amount.

Also,you also need to consider that AM4 covers everything from BR,the Zen APU and Zen CPU chips,meaning motherboards will be far cheaper,and you will only need to get dual channel memory. Socket 2011 motherboards are not cheap,work best with quad channel memory and if Zen is only a 95W TDP CPU,then that means far less demands on the AMD motherboards when compared to socket AM3.

Generally AMD enthusiast level motherboards start from £70 onwards and you see this with socket AM3 and socket FM2+ motherboards.

Then add the fact AMD actually will ship a decent stock cooler with these chips,will save another £20 or so.

Edit!!

Another thought - BR will be competing with Core i3 chips in the AMD range for the next year or so,and that measn £125 and under or thereabouts.

So,AMD needs chips to service the £125 to £200 range and the £200 to £300 range.Hence,they will need CPUs in that range too,and I expect we will see 4C/4T and 4C/8T Zen chips too.
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
28 Jun 2016
Posts
283
Interesting thought:

Will AMD just leave SMT on for almost every zen CPU? How prone are imperfections in the cores that mean hyperthreading (SMT) can't be used? Obviously Intel really like disabling it but is that just to separate their product stack?

Cause, an i5 is an i7 with hyperthreading physically disabled right?
 
Caporegime
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26 Dec 2003
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25,666
Are we seriously talking about chipsets from the Socket A/478 days?

All that is, is history.

Well if people insist on saying "AMD sales will still be poor even if their processors are better" then it's worth giving some background as to why that was historically the case. I didn't even mention AMD's K6 2/III which often required a memory resident software patch called SetK6 to be loaded in autoexec.
 
Soldato
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Under the hot sun.
Agree with Uriel.

Never had issues with AMD CPUs regardless the chipsets.
Abit NF7 was by far the best motherboard ever had, clocking an 2500MP to 2605Mhz!!!!
Followed by a Via motherboard, which allowed me to clock the 1Ghz Tbird to 1.55Ghz!!!

Ahh good days, where 200hz overclock was huge jump in performance.
 
Associate
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Interesting thought:

Will AMD just leave SMT on for almost every zen CPU? How prone are imperfections in the cores that mean hyperthreading (SMT) can't be used? Obviously Intel really like disabling it but is that just to separate their product stack?

Cause, an i5 is an i7 with hyperthreading physically disabled right?

Kind of. The chips with HT have two sets of registers for the cpu and a scheduler that can intruct the cpu on which set to use, so the cpu can switch between each set of registers to improve throughput, as I understand it. (explained courtesy of some other kind fellow on the forums here iirc). I don't believe the i5s have this on-die.

If the I5s *did* have those additional registers and schedulers simply disabled, I wonder if it would have been possible to unlock them somewhat akin to the am2 tri-cores unlocking to quads a while back via some BIOS magic (that might have been a nice surprise to make up for the crippled overclocking with the introduction of the intel "K" series cpus, but it's a moot point regardless).
 
Soldato
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Scotland
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-prepares-for-zen-clearing-inventory.html

http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-launching-ces-january-2017/

AMD will finally shipping Zen CPUs and X370 chipsets to OEMs and motherboards makers sometime in December 2016 but will it will missed out xmas sales. OEMs will be ready to start selling Zen desktops PCs when AMD will launch both Zen CPU and X370 chipset at CES 2017. Zen was original planned Q4 2016 launch for OEMs but now it pushed to Q1 2017.

We probably look at Spring 2017 for Zen to hit retailers as AMD are busy clearing CPU inventory, it is possible that it could take longer if AMD are in same situation with cleared excessive inventory of unsold Radeon 200 series GPUs for Radeon 300 series or write it off CPU inventory if they cant dump it.

We probably will have to wait until after CES 2017 to find out Summit Ridge benchmarks from OEMs or reviews.

AMD late again. :(
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
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18,257
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-prepares-for-zen-clearing-inventory.html

http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-launching-ces-january-2017/

AMD will finally shipping Zen CPUs and X370 chipsets to OEMs and motherboards makers sometime in December 2016 but will it will missed out xmas sales. OEMs will be ready to start selling Zen desktops PCs when AMD will launch both Zen CPU and X370 chipset at CES 2017. Zen was original planned Q4 2016 launch for OEMs but now it pushed to Q1 2017.

We probably look at Spring 2017 for Zen to hit retailers as AMD are busy clearing CPU inventory, it is possible that it could take longer if AMD are in same situation with cleared excessive inventory of unsold Radeon 200 series GPUs for Radeon 300 series or write it off CPU inventory if they cant dump it.

We probably will have to wait until after CES 2017 to find out Summit Ridge benchmarks from OEMs or reviews.

AMD late again. :(

8 core 16 thread Zen chips and 4 core Bristol Ridge this year. Zen 4 core 8 thread chips later in 2017.

AMD on time again :(
 
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