AMD Zen 3 (5000 Series), rumored 17% IPC gain.

LePhuronn · 20 Jul 2020 at 15:14

HACO said:
Wall of text

I'm not sure what you're actually getting at now. Yes, Bulldozer was a major step backwards in terms of performance for AMD, but it was a brave attempt at something new. One could almost say it was an innovation. To that end, AMD have done nothing but innovate for decades, they may not always nail the performance at the end, but they're always forward-thinking.

Your entire stance seems to be clouded by Intel's lazy shenanigans since AMD dropped off the map, and thereby tarring the entire industry with the same brush. Arguably Intel have been the exception in an industry that has done nothing but advance and innovate for decades.

But now that the giant has been caught with its pants down, Intel are fighting back. You say you don't see Intel innovating any time soon, I suggest you actually do some reading then beyond 14nm Desperation Lake rehashes on desktop. Look at Lakefield, look at their 3D stacking, look at their Big Little concepts, look at Willow Cove. 10nm is slowly coming to them now, once 14nm has been put out to pasture Intel will gather momentum again. You use the sun turning red as your timeframe, let's hope it doesn't go nova before 2022 because that's going to be the beginning of Intel's comeback.

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 15:36

LePhuronn said:
I'm not sure what you're actually getting at now. Yes, Bulldozer was a major step backwards in terms of performance for AMD, but it was a brave attempt at something new. One could almost say it was an innovation. To that end, AMD have done nothing but innovate for decades, they may not always nail the performance at the end, but they're always forward-thinking.

Your entire stance seems to be clouded by Intel's lazy shenanigans since AMD dropped off the map, and thereby tarring the entire industry with the same brush. Arguably Intel have been the exception in an industry that has done nothing but advance and innovate for decades.

But now that the giant has been caught with its pants down, Intel are fighting back. You say you don't see Intel innovating any time soon, I suggest you actually do some reading then beyond 14nm Desperation Lake rehashes on desktop. Look at Lakefield, look at their 3D stacking, look at their Big Little concepts, look at Willow Cove. 10nm is slowly coming to them now, once 14nm has been put out to pasture Intel will gather momentum again. You use the sun turning red as your timeframe, let's hope it doesn't go nova before 2022 because that's going to be the beginning of Intel's comeback.

I'm not passing down existential judgements on AMD (or Intel) as a company, they're doing fine. But as you say, the summary of the last 10 years are: Intel lazy shenanigans, AMD dropping off the map and then coming back to catch and slightly surpass Intel. Industry as a whole in the last 10 years? Very unimpressive. I hope next decade will be better, but I'm not going to pretend is already is and the improvements have already happened.

I've done my reading on Intel - All I see are nice ideas. Will they deliver? Who knows. This is the company that's been releasing the same product 5 years in a row now, resulting in the rest of the market (AMD and ARM) catching up to them and even surpassing them (AMD). Am I going to put my faith in them that they're going to be the ones driving the industry forward because they will finally do 10nm or Big.Little?

Intel has lost my trust, and they have to earn it again. They won't earn it by giving me cool ideas, future promises or roadmaps. They do it by releasing actual products. It's curious that you cite 2022 (likely because of roadmaps) is the year the empire will strike back, but Intel hasn't been able to keep up to any of its roadmaps in a very long time. We were supposed to see the real post-Skylake architecture in 2017 if we were judging by Intel's roadmaps back then.

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 15:41

humbug said:
You can always go ARM for your PC if you think they are that good.

I will when they're ready if current trends continue, they've closed down the gap to pretty much nil and they offer 20-30% IPC improvement every single year. Apple has already decided to migrate, Microsoft is trying hard to make Windows milti-architecture, all of linux is already there, there are now 250w ARM workstation chips, ARM servers in AWS and more.

10 years ago nobody would have thought this could ever happen, since Intel and AMD were more than 50x ahead in performance. People expected Intel and AMD to maintain their lead, they didn't. And right now it's happening.

humbug · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:12

HACO said:
I will when they're ready if current trends continue, they've closed down the gap to pretty much nil and they offer 20-30% IPC improvement every single year. Apple has already decided to migrate, Microsoft is trying hard to make Windows milti-architecture, all of linux is already there, there are now 250w ARM workstation chips, ARM servers in AWS and more.

10 years ago nobody would have thought this could ever happen, since Intel and AMD were more than 50x ahead in performance. People expected Intel and AMD to maintain their lead, they didn't. And right now it's happening.

When ARM can do everything Intel / AMD can as well or better i'll switch too, i have yet to see any indication of that.

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:21

humbug said:
When ARM can do everything Intel / AMD can as well or better i'll switch too, i have yet to see any indication of that.

Apple moving to ARM is an indication, so is Microsoft taking Windows on ARM seriously. We're obviously not "100% there" yet, but we're getting there for sure.

We used to have multiple high performance architectures up until mid 2000s. Then x86 pulled ahead of the competition. Now new competition is emerging.

humbug · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:22

HACO said:
Apple moving to ARM is an indication, so is Microsoft taking Windows on ARM seriously. We're obviously not "100% there" yet, but we're getting there for sure.

We used to have multiple high performance architectures up until mid 2000s. Then x86 pulled ahead of the competition. Now new competition is emerging.

Apple moving to ARM is not an indication, Apple are making their own in house CPU's and GPU's to increase profits, that's all.

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:24

humbug said:
Apple moving to ARM is not an indication, Apple are making their own in house CPU's and GPU's to increase profits, that's all.

Their chips are already on par with x86 (ahead on IPC, behind on clock). Apple has been making their own chips for 10 years now, they could have moved to ARM anytime if it was just about profits, but it just happened to be now that their chips are more or less on par with x86 in terms of performance. But I know I know, all about profits. They were just so stupid to figure out "Apple silicon on Mac!" 5 or 10 years ago, nothing to do with performance at all.

humbug · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:30

HACO said:
Their chips are already on par with x86 (ahead on IPC, behind on clock). Apple has been making their own chips for 10 years now, they could have moved to ARM anytime if it was just about profits, but it just happened to be now that their chips are more or less on par with x86 in terms of performance. But I know I know, all about profits. They were just so stupid to figure out "Apple silicon on Mac!" 5 or 10 years ago, nothing to do with performance at all.

I don't suppose you can provide any hard evidence of ARM being on par with X86 CPU's?

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:37

humbug said:
I don't suppose you can provide any hard evidence of ARM being on par with X86 CPU's?

They've been thoroughly compared in benchmarks, whether synthetic or task-based (e.g. video rendering, etc). Not going to do your Googling for you though. Should be easy to find.

welshrat · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:43

A new macbook pro will be my first arm purchase. need to be sure all the software is ironed out, especially xcode, xamarin and android studio. This has stopped my upgrading my haswell based macbook pro, I was going i9 but wont jump now until the arm versions are out and tested.

humbug · 20 Jul 2020 at 16:47

HACO said:
They've been thoroughly compared in benchmarks, whether synthetic or task-based (e.g. video rendering, etc). Not going to do your Googling for you though. Should be easy to find.

You shouldn't have to do any googling, you made the claim so one would assume you know what you're talking about, why would you need look for validations of your claim? The burden of proof is with you and given that you made the claim you should already have the proof to hand, its not my job to provide you with the proof to validate your claim.

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:03

humbug said:
You shouldn't have to do any googling, you made the claim so one would assume you know what you're talking about, why would you need look for validations of your claim? The burden of proof is with you and given that you made the claim you should already have the proof to hand, its not my job to provide you with the proof to validate your claim.

In this day and age, pretending to not know the obvious is a choice, and you've made yours. I'm not gonna make that choice for you. Peace out my friend.

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:04

welshrat said:
A new macbook pro will be my first arm purchase. need to be sure all the software is ironed out, especially xcode, xamarin and android studio. This has stopped my upgrading my haswell based macbook pro, I was going i9 but wont jump now until the arm versions are out and tested.

Upgrading now might be good too, you'll get the best x86 macs, and by the time you want to upgrade the transition will be complete. Bad for resale value though. Off topic as well

humbug · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:13

HACO said:
In this day and age, pretending to not know the obvious is a choice, and you've made yours. I'm not gonna make that choice for you. Peace out my friend.

I base my decisions on provable facts, not hearsay.

Martini1991 · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:15

HACO said:
Apple moving to ARM is an indication, so is Microsoft taking Windows on ARM seriously. We're obviously not "100% there" yet, but we're getting there for sure.

We used to have multiple high performance architectures up until mid 2000s. Then x86 pulled ahead of the competition. Now new competition is emerging.

How are Microsoft taking ARM on windows seriously? They ditched Windows RT and the Surface X is absolutely pathetic because of the state of Windows on ARM.

I don't agree with a lot of what Humbug says (I think most of what he was saying about AMD's performance gains are plucked from thin air, the example that sticks out is Zen to Zen+ lol) but where's the supposed evidence to show me an ARM chip can handle the same as even a 4 core 4 threaded Ryzen?

humbug · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:22

Martini1991 said:
How are Microsoft taking ARM on windows seriously? They ditched Windows RT and the Surface X is absolutely pathetic because of the state of Windows on ARM.

I don't agree with a lot of what Humbug says (I think most of what he was saying about AMD's performance gains are plucked from thin air, the example that sticks out is Zen to Zen+ lol) but where's the supposed evidence to show me an ARM chip can handle the same as even a 4 core 4 threaded Ryzen?

Well ok, 9%

Martini1991 · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:27

humbug said:
Well ok, 9%

The difference is because of the boost, I thought you were on about clock for clock performance or overall performance.

Zen+ over Zen was a poor increase, pretty much added 100-200MHZ on top clocks and ~3% IPC

In fact aren't those clocks wrong? The 1600X is meant to boost to 4GHZ? Seems like it's a slanted benchmark

humbug · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:30

Martini1991 said:
The difference is because of the boost, I thought you were on about clock for clock performance or overall performance.

Zen+ over Zen was a poor increase, pretty much added 100-200MHZ on top clocks and ~3% IPC

Yes. To be fair what i said was;

Further more AMD promised +10% performance over Zen with Zen+

I'm well aware the IPC difference between Zen and Zen + is in the low single digits, they are the same architecture with the later having some low-hanging fruit improvements.

I didn't bother with Zen+, i skipped it.

Martini1991 · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:31

Those clocks look wrong on the 1600X on the boost, I think it's a duff benchmark lol.

HACO · 20 Jul 2020 at 17:33

Martini1991 said:
How are Microsoft taking ARM on windows seriously? They ditched Windows RT and the Surface X is absolutely pathetic because of the state of Windows on ARM.

I don't agree with a lot of what Humbug says (I think most of what he was saying about AMD's performance gains are plucked from thin air, the example that sticks out is Zen to Zen+ lol) but where's the supposed evidence to show me an ARM chip can handle the same as even a 4 core 4 threaded Ryzen?

Microsoft is surely and slowly adding to Windows on ARM. Right now all Microsoft Windows apps (I know, low bar) are available native on ARM. This wasn't the case 6 months ago. Office wasn't available on ARM (it ran through full emulation), now it's hybrid (core functionality is native, extensions are still x86).

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-makes-more-progress-with-64-bit-Windows-on-ARM.465903.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-10-on-ARM-64-bit-app-support-inbound.296430.0.html

You hear about them every month. Microsoft is pushing ahead with Windows on ARM. There are also ARM Chromebooks now and they're excellent products.

As for the "show me the ARM chip" question, there aren't many because we're at the beginning of this transition. ARM servers are already here (AWS) and more will come (Ampere Altra). Fujistu ARM workstations will arrive this year, Apple ARM macs will come this year, and more and more laptops and eventually ARM desktops will come. It hasn't yet at this very moment, but pretending like it's not happening doesn't make it go away, it is happening.

You can also compare Apple's A12 and A13 with Intel. They're simply just not slower when it comes to single-core performance, despite being mobile chips with much lower TDPs and different design priorities. ARM's Cortex-X1 cores should also match Intel/AMD cores.