AMD done with CPUs?

[jktmstokes23]

Is AMD done with CPUs? I have been thinking about going to 2011 socket on intel but I am wondering what exactly AMD will do if anything? I'd love to see a new line of cpus with pcie 3.0 support...

 

[Dicehunter]

It's all APU based as far as I've been able to see, I've heard no concrete plans for dedicated CPU's but would be a nice surprise if they announced something.

 

[jktmstokes23]

Yea all I've seen is APU news after APU news. Would be said to see them ditch CPUs...

 

[Dicehunter]

I really hope they don't ditch CPU's as Intel will own the market then and that will be horrible as they will start charging a butt load more for their CPU's.

 

[gronf]

I'd love for AMD to bring out just a decently improved 8-core chip with SATA-X + DDR4 and priced to embarrass much of Intel's line.

Even if that means I just end up with an earlier and marginally more affordable less gouged Skylake chip.

 

[OLDPHART]

I'd love for AMD to bring out just a decently improved 8-core chip with SATA-X + DDR4 and priced to embarrass much of Intel's line.

Even if that means I just end up with an earlier and marginally more affordable less gouged Skylake chip.

I would love to see that two but at this moment there's not even any rumours flying about.

Up till 2009 l was a AMD man but was due to build a PC where it had to last at least 3/4 years. At that time the i7 920 was the choice as AMD had nothing to compete with it.

Its still going today as my son got it when l upgrade this year, l turned the OC down from 4.2 to 4.0GHz as he just serfs the net and plays just football manager.

Sorry to say l went Intel again x79 4820K:4.6GHz 1.34v and it indeed runs very cool even though its water cooled.

 

[drunkenmaster]

95% of the industry is apu's, AMD has almost completely made the switch and Intel mostly sell APU's also. CPU's without a gpu is a dead end. Ultimately it depends on definition gpu isn't really a term for graphics processing units but a compute unit focused on highly parallel tasks and a cpu is just a compute unit focused on highly serialised tasks.

Realistically most APU's are just CPU's with two alternative types of compute units but the industry calls parallel compute units gpu's and CPU's with both types used APU's, which is fine.

In those terms, CPU's are dead, Intel is ditching CPU's in the not too distant future and almost the entire industry is now focused on trying to balance workloads and take advantage of gpu acceleration within the APU.

 

[Boomstick777]

95% of the industry is apu's, AMD has almost completely made the switch and Intel mostly sell APU's also. CPU's without a gpu is a dead end.

Expect X79 oh and upcoming X99, that's a new socket and CPU line btw, with no IGPU. Oh and Xeon chips with no IGPU and Mainstream chips with no IGPU, but yeah sure.. Dead end.. Lol. Let's see how many enthusiast jump on X99 before you call it a dead end.

To the OP.

If you want high end CPU for gaming, Intel is only real choice atm.

AMD's APU's are great for budget / space limited builds, but Intel's lower end chips compete well with AMD APU's as well tbh. Intel have an answer at nearly every level for AMD, especially the high end, Intel is less concerned about the very low end of the market.

AMD are focusing on APU's atm, but likely when a new process node / DDR4 are available and cost effective AMD will release some CPU only chips again. Can't come soon enough, Intel are only competing with themselves in this area..

 

[ocmanus]

I can't see them ever returning to dedicated CPUs. The problem that I can see is that the better they get (with DDR4, etc), there's a greater risk they'll end up cannibalising their own DGPU market at the lower and even mid range.

 

[FrankJH]

Expect X79 oh and upcoming X99, that's a new socket and CPU line btw, with no IGPU. Oh and Xeon chips with no IGPU and Mainstream chips with no IGPU, but yeah sure.. Dead end.. Lol. Let's see how many enthusiast jump on X99 before you call it a dead end.
..

and the enthusiast parts probably account for less than 1% of CPU/APU sales every year

I wouldnt be surprised to see Xeon chips to have IGPU's in the near future, this seems to be a match made in heaven to me. Servers rarely need seperate cards, and those (relatively) few workstations that want to use Xeon's can always disable the igp / have a sub cpu line without IGP

 

[drunkenmaster]

I can't see them ever returning to dedicated CPUs. The problem that I can see is that the better they get (with DDR4, etc), there's a greater risk they'll end up cannibalising their own DGPU market at the lower and even mid range.

It already eats away at the low end and basically it doesn't matter. Even if it takes away the midrange they'll be selling the same products just on one die.

Ultimately die size is where the limits are. A midrange gpu is pushing 200-300mm^2 range in die size, a cpu from 100-350mm^2 depending on cores/power/architecture. Sticking a big gpu on a apu when not much performance is required is simply inefficient, expensive and leads to higher cost when lower cost is what a customer will want.

Some gpu on die is essential for almost every future avenue for parallel acceleration. Latency and core logic of on die communication means a small gpu on die can accelerate an application many times faster than a huge gpu accessed across the pci-e bus.

There is a usage for everything and APU's will always be about best average performance going in to the future. Enough gpu on die to make coding for it worthwhile performance gains while the gpu being small enough to not make excessively large or expensive chips. On die gpu's won't get much bigger because financially it doesn't make sense, better on die bandwidth will increase performance further but not enough to really eat into the performance oriented midrange.

and the enthusiast parts probably account for less than 1% of CPU/APU sales every year

I wouldnt be surprised to see Xeon chips to have IGPU's in the near future, this seems to be a match made in heaven to me. Servers rarely need seperate cards, and those (relatively) few workstations that want to use Xeon's can always disable the igp / have a sub cpu line without IGP

Precisely Intel's high end, even the server market is relatively speaking shrinking. ARM becoming more widespread in servers and that will potentially continue to a very high degree. Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, the vast majority of Intel sales are all APU.

Servers are starting to get APU versions, I can't remember if Intel has some with gpu's for accelerating functions or not but they will do in the future.

I tried to point out which Boom missed, that there will be a time likely in not too long at all where the average application will be faster when splitting instructions between serial and parallel compute units rather than just one or the other. HSA, Quicksync, media acceleration, browser acceleration, etc. When that is fairly standard practice across most hardware a serial only cpu will simply be much slower than a "APU".

 

[DazzXP]

Yeah they are all APU's from now one even stream roller Opertons are APU's also with 8 and 12 cores. The market for stand alone processors are dead now.

 

[MM-Seat]

We often forget that we are a very small part of the market.

 

[longplay]

AMD are going to be producing ARM chips I believe, which is basically the next competitor for Intel (and why they're so focused on reducing power consumption). As the ARM architecture gets more capable, desktops will start running them (partly due to price).

Oh, and AMD supply the chips for the Xbox 1 and the PS4, which is why they made a profit this last quarter.

Having spent some time looking recently, AMD's APUs seem to all be multi-core, power hungry nightmares (and not much can use all those cores). The bottom end dual-core Pentiums seem more than capable for all but a few edge cases (gaming, video editing, etc).

 

[almighty15]

As multi-threading takes over the gap between Intel and AMD will shrink anyway.

On games that support 8 threads or more the FX chips do hold there own against the Intel chips and that will only become more common over the next couple of years.

 

[panyan]

We often forget that we are a very small part of the market.

+1

 

[V F]

We often forget that we are a very small part of the market.

+1

 

[drunkenmaster]

Again it's not really that enthusiasts are a small part of the market it's that the entire industry is pushing towards easy to code for languages that leverage "gpu" acceleration. In 2-4 years a quad core + gpu will be faster, maybe significantly, than a pure 8 core CPU. Hell this is already true in dozens of applications, quicksync vs cpu only is just one example, a i5 2500k would tear to pieces the latest hex or next gen 8 core Intel products that don't have a gpu.

The biggest reasons why APU's didn't start off as epic was the hardware was effectively there, but the coding wasn't. There was no fundamental direction which everyone could follow. You can write generic code that could run on most cpu's with little tweaking but writing code that could leverage a gpu meant different code, complex code, for every different type of chip and gpu that code could run on. So normal software was simply too much work to support and bother with for software dev's to invest the time and effort to do so.

That is where APU's are changing, HSA in particular is aiming for compatible code on dozens of different cpu's and gpu's that will allow much simpler to code for acceleration and hardware that means this code can run on eventually pretty much all gpu/cpu systems out there without this extra overhead. So rather than difficult code individual to each platform, we have easy code that is to a certain degree hardware agnostic. Java HSA code will make gpu acceleration easy to write for, and it will run on any HSA compatible hardware without much if any extra work. You've gone from expensive and difficult to cheap and simple.

The reason it will work, power efficiency. Mobile is the biggest driver of acceleration of applications because the faster you can get something done and return to idle, the less wasted power.

The hardware is getting in place, the software is getting in place, that is the end to it.

There will be a point where much like quicksync and several openCL accelerated things, that a apu will spank a CPU only chip very very badly.