Canard mentions second gen' EPYC, if true, nice!

AndreiD · 2 Nov 2017 at 13:03

@Klo Just clockspeed will do since that's the biggest contributor to the single threaded performance gulf between Ryzen and Intel CPUs right now.
IPC difference is 5~10%, but the clock speed gap is >25%. If Zen+ chips can get to 4.5Ghz, then that's going to be a pretty nice improvement.

jigger · 2 Nov 2017 at 13:07

AndreiD said:
@Klo Just clockspeed will do since that's the biggest contributor to the single threaded performance gulf between Ryzen and Intel CPUs right now.
IPC difference is 5~10%, but the clock speed gap is >25%. If Zen+ chips can get to 4.5Ghz, then that's going to be a pretty nice improvement.

Gulf

opethdisciple · 2 Nov 2017 at 16:23

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
So a single Ryzen 2 chip will be 16c/32t??

IF AMD manage this (AM4 drop in compatibility and at around £300-400 they will completely shock Intel.

The biggest hammer to the face the market has seen imo.

---

Just a thought tho.... Before we get too carried away. AMD needed a different socket to implement Threadreaper so presumably expecting a 16/32 AM4 drop in may be a bit of a fantasy.

jigger · 2 Nov 2017 at 16:36

opethdisciple said:
IF AMD manage this (AM4 drop in compatibility and at around £300-400 they will completely shock Intel.

The biggest hammer to the face the market has seen imo.

Would that be too disruptive to the market?

geordiejc · 2 Nov 2017 at 17:22

Can it play crysis tho

jigger · 2 Nov 2017 at 17:30

geordiejc said:
Can it play crysis tho

No problem. You just compile on the fly to suit the graphics card.

smilingcrow · 2 Nov 2017 at 18:01

I can see 12C and 16C on AM4 from £500 upwards with the 1x nm 8C chips and APUs filling out the gap below that price-wise.
Then Threadripper becomes up to 32C with a ceiling of £1,000 or so.
They aren't going to want to start selling native 16c dies at £400 and under unless their manufacturing cost is lower than for 8C dies and they have to do so due to pressure from Intel which is unlikely.
Why sell a premium 16C product cheaply when there is little true demand as the majority will see no benefit from it?
That would be stupid.
8C at current prices makes sense as 8C isn't complete overkill for the majority whereas 16C is so they'd be shooting themselves in the foot price-wise. This due to having to reduce the price on anything below 16C which would significantly eat into their profits on their bread and butter chips at £300 and well below.
So 16C for £300-400 would be a massive gamble for AMD as they'd need much bigger volumes to make up for the reduced profits on all the 8C and less chips.
It would be amazing if they did of course. :eek:

AndreiD · 2 Nov 2017 at 18:56

They probably can on the current process too since Ryzen is a fairly small die, direct 2x scaling results in a 384mm2 16C die, which would be pretty interesting, but not if it's 4x CCX.

jigger · 2 Nov 2017 at 18:57

At £3-400 im sure AMD would sell all the chips they could make.

Rroff · 2 Nov 2017 at 19:08

AndreiD said:
They probably can on the current process too since Ryzen is a fairly small die, direct 2x scaling results in a 384mm2 16C die, which would be pretty interesting, but not if it's 4x CCX.

Power and thermals would be pretty unmanageable trying to put 4 of those dies on the same substrate though - unless they went significantly larger than the current already large CPU package.

AndreiD · 2 Nov 2017 at 19:21

Fair enough, but after SP3/TR4 I don't think I would be surprised if they come up with an even bigger socket & CPU package

I wonder if they'll deviate from their current strategy of having 1 CCX design and 2 dies as their financials improve.

opethdisciple · 2 Nov 2017 at 20:07

Remember AMD have promised at least 2 (might be 3) more years of AM4 support. So I expect whatever comes next for Ryzen 2 and 3 will need to fit in to the AM4 socket.

AndreiD · 2 Nov 2017 at 20:36

Do we know the pin/contact configuration for AM4? Intel releases their 8th gen data sheets and such that have lots of info on what the pins do, but I'm not sure AMD does.
I wonder how many of those 1331 contacts on AM4 are used/reserved, could give some hints on if AMD can release CPUs with higher core counts for AM4 in the future.
Though, 1331 is probably plenty even for 16 cores, but I'm just speculating.

DragonQ · 3 Nov 2017 at 09:53

I was expecting 6 core CCXs with 7 nm, if they are planning 8 core CCXs that's fantastic. Imagine an 8c/16t Ryzen chip with potentially higher clocks and no inter-CCX latency issues!

smilingcrow · 3 Nov 2017 at 12:17

DragonQ said:
I was expecting 6 core CCXs with 7 nm, if they are planning 8 core CCXs that's fantastic. Imagine an 8c/16t Ryzen chip with potentially higher clocks and no inter-CCX latency issues!

They would possibly keep the 8C chips on the 1x nm processes unless they had too many partially faulty 16C 7nm chips that they could sell as 8C. Even then they might not be sold as 8/0 but as 4/4.
Although they could release a premium 8C chip using the 16C dies if there is enough of a performance jump and use the 8/0 configuration.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 3 Nov 2017 at 12:27

TBH,even though it sounds good,I would rather they spent the transistors on increasing the inter-CCX bandwidth,higher clockspeeds and increasing AVX2 throughput,and having a more modest increase in core count to 6C/12T per CCX.

I do wonder in part if this is down to laptops as apparently Intel will have 10NM 8C/16T CPUs with an IGP,and the AMD APUs only have a single CCX.

jigger · 3 Nov 2017 at 13:06

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
TBH,even though it sounds good,I would rather they spent the transistors on increasing the inter-CCX bandwidth,higher clockspeeds and increasing AVX2 throughput,and having a more modest increase in core count to 6C/12T per CCX.

I do wonder in part if this is down to laptops as apparently Intel will have 10NM 8C/16T CPUs with an IGP,and the AMD APUs only have a single CCX.

Good points, though I'm not sure 8c 16t APU's will be a good fit for the mobile market.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 3 Nov 2017 at 14:20

jigger said:
Good points, though I'm not sure 8c 16t APU's will be a good fit for the mobile market.

I think the problem is AMD does need to keep pace with Intel too,even if its basically a tad pointless in a laptop which would need an IGP.

jigger · 3 Nov 2017 at 15:05

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
I think the problem is AMD does need to keep pace with Intel too,even if its basically a tad pointless in a laptop which would need an IGP.

Maybe although I'm not sure how long it will take Intel to start pushing 8-10 cores into the mobile market when the industry has only just moved away from dual core i7's. What Intel really need is higher performance graphics and maybe 4-6 core APU's that can hit higher performance at sub 25-30watts. As things stand Intel sacrifice CPU performance for graphics.

sandys · 3 Nov 2017 at 15:17

jigger said:
Good points, though I'm not sure 8c 16t APU's will be a good fit for the mobile market.

If the cores are focused correctly and software moves in the right way as it appears to be doing then it will be fine, phones have been using 8 cores for ages.