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

dreamcat4 said:
Well loads of people are still happy with Haswell and continue to buy them these days. The bigger problem will be if it turns out later on the Zen actually doesn't match such a hyped-up Haswell performance.
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Will be seriously sad if Zen doesn't beat a 2500k :/ They may as well not bother in that case.
 
I wouldn't be disappointed about sandy level performance, but the trouble is, it will likely be much more expensive given it's a new chip, and that WILL be a problem. Hopefully what they mean is, that SINGLE CORE performance will be same/better as/than haswell.

The problem with all this is that we can't apply what is OK today, but what will likely be the performance levels around release time, and if it only meets sandy performance then that will be rather pants (depending on the price). If it meets haswell or better then maybe it's a decent proposition. Also, in my opinion it will have to OC relatively well, otherwise Intel is still the better option.
 
Running on all threads Vishera isn't far behind an 8 thread Haswell so "As fast as Haswell" had better be per thread performance or its not really much of a step up.

In any case AMD have faster architectures on the market right now, the 8 Core Vishera is the same as the Trinity APU (A10-5800K) only with twice as many modules and L3, Kaveri (A10-7870K) is a good 10% per core faster than Trinity, an 8 core L3 revision of that would be at least as fast as an 8 thread Haswell so with all that in mind my guess is the performance is as fast as Haswell per thread.

dreamcat4 said:
Let's just hope they don't needlessly lock / gimp their CPUs a-la the non-K intel parts.
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AMD used to do this too, the "Black Edition" of old was AMD's unlocked CPU's, Intel are just stuck in 2006.
 
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Ah. It kindda sounds like you are comparing AMD cores to Intel threads there (when Intel HT is in use). At least that appears to be what you're saying. E.g. an 8 core vishera vs and 8 thread Haswell i7. Or something like that. Addmittedly I couldn't quite follow what you were trying to say by that there. We were all talking about single threaded perf. up until you came in with that bit there.
 
I'm responding to the question of whether or not the "as fast as Haswell" comment on Zen is about single or full threading performance. ^^^^^

humbug said:
Running on all threads Vishera isn't far behind an 8 thread Haswell so "As fast as Haswell" had better be per thread performance or its not really much of a step up.

In any case AMD have faster architectures on the market right now, the 8 Core Vishera is the same as the Trinity APU (A10-5800K) only with twice as many modules and L3, Kaveri (A10-7870K) is a good 10% per core faster than Trinity, an 8 core L3 revision of that would be at least as fast as an 8 thread Haswell so with all that in mind my guess is the performance is as fast as Haswell per thread.
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dreamcat4 said:
Presumably you're talking perf / watt there. Otherwise that's not the same performance we've been talking about.
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Its really not a good idea to judge AMD's current perf per Watt by the FX-83## series parts, even by AMD's standards they are old and very greedy.

Trinity A10-5800K (32nm Bulldozer/Vishera) 100 Watts < Again thats what they are.

Today Carrizo is AMD latest CPU arch and thats 35 Watts at higher performance than the old Bulldozer arch, 'Trinity'.

A 28nm 8 core Carrizo @ 4Ghz would probably be around 90 Watts with 5Ghz Vishera performance.
 
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Ah right okay. So when AMD leaks a 40% IPC improvement, presumably they're referencing Carrizo +40% ?

It's almost enough information to try and figure out what they were alluding to then.
 
dreamcat4 said:
Ah right okay. So when AMD leaks a 40% IPC improvement, presumably they're referencing Carrizo +40% ?

It's almost enough information to try and figure out what they were alluding to then.
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AFAIK,Excavator had around a 10% to 25% improvement in IPC over Piledriver which is use in Vishera,and they are talking about a 40% improvement over Excavator.

Anyway,I just saw this over on Hexus:

http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/86714-zen-developers-given-total-freedom-says-amd-engineer/

An Austin, Texas newspaper recently published an interview with Suzanne Plummer, a veteran chip engineer who heads the Zen team, and has worked at AMD since 2002. Plummer had some interesting things to say to The Austin American Statesman about how Zen was developed; "It is the first time in a very long time that we engineers have been given the total freedom to build a processor from scratch and do the best we can do," Plummer said. "It is a multi-year project with a really large team. It’s like a marathon effort with some sprints in the middle. The team is working very hard, but they can see the finish line. I guarantee that it will deliver a huge improvement in performance and (low) power consumption over the previous generation."
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Scougar said:
I wouldn't presume anything unless they have said it.
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I am going by conservative figures for the IPC improvements suggested by AMD(and actually tested by sites) for Kaveri over Piledriver and the 4% to 15% IPC improvement AMD touted for Excavator over Steamroller. The 40% figure for Zen is from AMD.

Personally I think Intel will have better single thread performance and AMD probably will do better in multi-threaded performance for a given price and they might get close to Intel levels of performance/watt.

However,for gamers,DX12 should in full swing by then,so I expect single threaded performance might be less important in the next year or year and a half.

The 2017 APUs should be quite interesting especially if AMD can use things like HBM2.

We will see.
 
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CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
AFAIK,Excavator had around a 10% to 25% improvement in IPC over Piledriver which is use in Vishera,and they are talking about a 40% improvement over Excavator.
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Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying that.

Well in a review I recently read that Vishera (which you say is also known as Piledriver architecture) is about 1/2 the single threaded perf. per watt of Haswell.

So then let's call that 15% + 40% = 55% ---> 0.5*1.55 --> about 80% the speed of Haswell. That's near enough probably. Sorry those numbers look like a complete fudge but it's good enough to see an approximate guesstimate of the Zen performance to being 'in the same league' as Haswell 22nm. Without being too critical about the figures since we won't know anthing for sure anyways until it's eventually released.

It all sounds pretty reasonable.
 
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Lets have some fun with this :)

In Single threaded DrawCalls Haswell is 70% Faster than Piledriver Clock for clock.

Score: 2,260,823. 4770K @4.7Ghz - 980Ti 1530/4000. Robzere31: Link
Score: 1,347,127 . FX-9590 @ 4.7Ghz - 970 @ 1450/1828. Humbug: Link

Add 55% on top of the Piledriver Score = 2.1M DrawCalls add 11% on top of that you get 2.33M DrawCalls.

DX11: Piledriver = 59% of Haswell (Single thread)
DX11: Zen (Piledriver +55%) = 91% of Haswell (Single thread)

DX12. Link in (Link)

Haswell @ 4.7Ghz = 19,802,318
Piledriver @ 4.7Ghz = 15,937,380

DX12: 8 core Piledriver = 76% of 8 thread Haswell

Theoretical.

DX12: 8 core Excavator (Piledriver +15%) = 87% of Haswell
DX12: 8 core Zen (Excavator + 40%) = 122% of Haswell

Edit. ignore the DX12 one ^^^^ Zen is a completely different architecture to Piledriver, Zen is actually a lot like Intel's architecture in that it has 2 threads per core, so a 4 core 8 thread Zen in Multi-threaded would be a bit slower than 8 thread Haswell (about -10%) 6 core quite a bit faster (about +40%) and 8 core a lot faster. (about +60%)
 
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eh.... i can't be _____ to do it again :p

With the touted figures we can safely say Zen Would be very close to Haswell.

That's pretty damned good, Take today's Intel prices:

AMD would probably do.

4 Core 8 Thread £150
6 Core 12 Thread £220
8 Core 16 Thread £350 Halo Product?
 
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