• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

First picture of actual Steamroller core??

If AMD brought out an 8 core chip with SB's IPC it'd be the fastest thing available..

It wouldn't be an alternative to Intel, it'd be in a league of its own.
Given AMD's modular approach means they can add cores pretty easy, they could just bring a 10 core out etc, it'd be literally insane.
 
Certainly looks like a big improvement :D

Impossible to say much more at the moment though, but hopefully this will narrow the gap on single threaded performance quite a bit.
 
So we've still got a potential 9 months for SR.
I wonder if AMD are actually going to bring any half way product out to replace the FX83XX.
If not, then again it's evidence of AMD not putting on the pressure.
And I'm still sceptical about SR APU's, Richland isn't even properly out yet and we're a month away from Q3.
I don't see AMD releasing Richland and then bringing out another APU straight after.
 
Last edited:
Martini1991 said:
So we've still got a potential 9 months for SR.
I wonder if AMD are actually going to bring any half way product out to replace the FX83XX.
If not, then again it's evidence of AMD not putting on the pressure.
Click to expand...


"AMD have technology, but lack urgency" - Roy Reed
 
Man, octacore Steamroller with SB+ IPC priced much lower than Haswell 4770* would be amazing... Fingers-crossed.
 
Last edited:
Martini1991 said:
So we've still got a potential 9 months for SR.
I wonder if AMD are actually going to bring any half way product out to replace the FX83XX.
If not, then again it's evidence of AMD not putting on the pressure.
And I'm still sceptical about SR APU's, Richland isn't even properly out yet and we're a month away from Q3.
I don't see AMD releasing Richland and then bringing out another APU straight after.
Click to expand...

humbug said:
"AMD have technology, but lack urgency" - Roy Reed
Click to expand...

Yes and no, some things you can't rush. AMD have had HSA locked down pretty much for a while and could have pushed for HSA and earlier fusion products, but you have to weigh up your options when you're losing cash. You can bring out chips as often as Intel, but it costs a twice as much to release chips twice as often, and it gives you less time between releases to recoup R&D costs, when you sell to 80% of the market, thats easy, when you sell to 20%, you'd only lose money even if you increased sales.

Likewise, the market/world/devs/OS's have to be ready for fusion, and other advances, often they can't support new instructions, or more to the point they often can't get new instructions USED until Intel uses them and pushes new compilers and their partners to use the instructions.

But in terms of Bulldozer > PileDriver > steamroller, full on cpu's tape out to release is a 18 month process, for AMD or Intel, give or take a couple months. They also can't release a 300mm2+ 4Ghz + chip till GloFo can make it, its a 28nm chip, and they can't make it in volume or sell it before the process is ready and can support it.

Also AMD has pretty much said Xbox One will be worth 3billion + to them (I also think this is minimum and will be that even if sales or low, if sales are better they will only bring in a lot more), PS4 is likely to be worth even more to them, potential $250mil per quarter, or a billion a year, maybe more. Putting money/effort/man power into Jaguar over potentially bringing Steamroller forwards was easily the correct decision.

Steamroller the cores will probably be launched this year in APU/Kaveri form, and even potentially(rumours are gathering pace) gddr5, which would not give it Intel style edram bandwidth, but hugely increased bandwidth on current chips, with FAR more powerful cpu's and more bandwidth than any desktop versions of Haswell as well.

octo core Steamrollers have the potential to be significantly competitive with Intel hex core products and potentially leave Intel quad cores in their wake, with Intel potentially not having an awful lot in reply for a year + themselves.

Doing it right is better than doing it earlier and AMD have been doing things right for a few years now, the results just take a significant amount of time to pan out in products in the market.

Bit of a shame for Dirk and a bit lucky for Read, he'll get huge credit for the deals being done now and the products releasing in the next couple years, but these were all products basically taped out(or very very close) before he even joined AMD.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Yes and no, some things you can't rush. AMD have had HSA locked down pretty much for a while and could have pushed for HSA and earlier fusion products, but you have to weigh up your options when you're losing cash.
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm way off base here, but everything I've read about HSA leads me back to the conclusion that it would have been an absolutely perfect feature for the "next gen" consoles?

Seeing as they're likely going to be expected to have a shelf life of nearly a decade, doesn't it seem that MS and Sony have missed a major opportunity to considerably improve their respective consoles by not waiting for another 12 months and building around a 20nm HSA µarch?
 
tbh said:
Maybe I'm way off base here, but everything I've read about HSA leads me back to the conclusion that it would have been an absolutely perfect feature for the "next gen" consoles?

Seeing as they're likely going to be expected to have a shelf life of nearly a decade, doesn't it seem that MS and Sony have missed a major opportunity to considerably improve their respective consoles by not waiting for another 12 months and building around a 20nm HSA µarch?
Click to expand...

The PS4 SOC appears to be an HSA enabled part.
 
I find AMD a lot more interesting than Intel with regards to this sort of stuff, the HSA stuff is very interesting as well, it's just a shame that AMD are lacking the performance at the top end.
 
tbh said:
Maybe I'm way off base here, but everything I've read about HSA leads me back to the conclusion that it would have been an absolutely perfect feature for the "next gen" consoles?

Seeing as they're likely going to be expected to have a shelf life of nearly a decade, doesn't it seem that MS and Sony have missed a major opportunity to considerably improve their respective consoles by not waiting for another 12 months and building around a 20nm HSA µarch?
Click to expand...

HSA isn't a performance thing its a common platform so you can enable various chips from different companies who have commited to make their chips adhere to a few standards so they can "talk" to each other in the same computer, IE stick a arm a15 dual core into a PC mobo alongside and AMD APU, and potentially share memory across all 3 chips. Though its more likely to be used along the lines of someone asking AMD to make a chip that incorporates a more full ARM core on die(it already uses a very small arm chip for trustzone and has done for a while).

IF, and its a big if right now, the PS4 or xbox had an ARM chip involved to do some lower power stuff and attempt to save some power, then HSA would be fundamental to letting them work together, its still important for the unified memory but not "that" important, ultimately they could do that without HSA I'm sure.

HSA is more likely to be great for AMD for more customised parts, Xbox one said to be worth at least $3bil for AMD PS4 is looking set to be worth a huge chunk of change as well(probably more than the Xbox), semi custom apus I think will start to be pretty big.

AMD made a HUGE effort to make Jaguar customisable, you can basically replace the entire memory bus and put in what you want because they designed it to do that in the first place, so you want to put in a edsram + lower bandwidth mem controller, easy, stupid high bandwidth controller, easily done as well.

Either way, Jaguar is ready for HSA though I didn't read all the marketing guff about it, I don't know if the PC version is officially HSA compatible, they might wait for the next revision or simply make it available when required(or they might not call anything HSA unless it implements the features, I'm not sure that Windows can actually support an HSA chip and unified memory which would mean making the "normal" Jaguar HSA would be pointless as yet).

Kaveri is said to be fully HSA compatible, but coming out later, end of the year, maybe some stuff they need ready for it. Again though we might see its easy to make fully HSA, but desktop versions won't be officially HSA compatible because they don't need to be.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom