Dark days, AMD share price at lowest ever.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AFAIK AMD is dual sourcing at both TSMC and GF for 7NM Ryzen.

 

[Beren]

Nailing 7nm is absolutely crucial for AMD - they can't be making allowances for foundries not delivering they need to hit the ground running with whoever has the best node :s

I hear you, Lisa Su is already making really public statements about it and production though so I am pretty confident it is not a complete flop.

 

[4K8KW10]

I hear you, Lisa Su is already making really public statements about it and production though so I am pretty confident it is not a complete flop.

You mean complete flop as the Intel's 10nm?!
Well, no, 7nm is OK, up and running, and successful.

It has never been any talk about it being a flop, not to mention complete flop wow

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I also hope AMD improves performance/watt too so all the people on YT/forums who think you need £150 boards to run a £150 Ryzen,can stop worrying!!

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You mean complete flop as the Intel's 10nm?!
Well, no, 7nm is OK, up and running, and successful.

It has never been any talk about it being a flop

I think Beren is trying to be cautiously optimistic which is always a good thing with these things. I suspect AMD will concentrate on moar cores,lower latency caches(which should help performance in games),improved IPC, an improved memory controller and improved performance/watt. I have a feeling clockspeeds might not go up as much as we might think TBH,but I would rather AMD target IPC and cache latency first.

 

[4K8KW10]

I also hope AMD improves performance/watt too so all the people on YT/forums who think you need £150 boards to run a £150 Ryzen,can stop worrying!!

Some people need to get informed that Ryzen's efficiency and power consumption is better than anything Intel has to offer. That's why we will see in no time 32-core Threadrippers with very decent 200ish W TDP.

And Ryzen 2's IPC is already equal to Skylake's.

 

[d_brennen]

AMD are fostering some competition between GLoFo and TSMC. The better process will get the higher value orders, while AMD may be tied to GloFo for a certain number of wafers you can bet if their 7mn isn't up to scratch they will go with the lowest possible purchase contractually and make everything else at TSMC (and China)

 

[Meaker]

I also hope AMD improves performance/watt too so all the people on YT/forums who think you need £150 boards to run a £150 Ryzen,can stop worrying!!

Just because something is lower end in it's VRM design does not mean it will not function at stock or even for some time at overclocking.

What it does mean is that it will run hotter and have a higher chance of failure if you decide to push it, especially as a hardcore enthusiast to the bleeding last 50Mhz edge.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some people need to get informed that Ryzen's efficiency and power consumption is better than anything Intel has to offer. That's why we will see in no time 32-core Threadrippers with very decent 200ish W TDP.

And Ryzen 2's IPC is already equal to Skylake's.

Just because something is lower end in it's VRM design does not mean it will not function at stock or even for some time at overclocking.

What it does mean is that it will run hotter and have a higher chance of failure if you decide to push it, especially as a hardcore enthusiast to the bleeding last 50Mhz edge.

Exactly,especially back in the day when overclocking was less locked down than it is now! There were plenty of lower end boards which would function fine at stock or with a bit of commonsense overclocking,especially if you intend to use the stock cooling which is good for a few 100mhz on certain SKUs(especially the 65W ones). It has always been the case if you want to bump voltage up especially past the voltage wall,you needed a higher end board and much more cooling. This can be proven by what some people have shown with Ryzen MK1,which had some noticeable bumps at certain voltage/clockspeed combinations.

At least its better than what Intel does and lock out any chance of overclocking unless you get higher end SKUs.

 

[humbug]

We cannot have an AMD that is competitive on price, but also performance and power consumption? no no no that just wont do the hardware gospels dictate Intel must be king.

All hail Intel All hail Intel All hail Intel

 

[Kaapstad]

We cannot have an AMD that is competitive on price, but also performance and power consumption? no no no that just wont do the hardware gospels dictate Intel must be king.

All hail Intel All hail Intel All hail Intel

In some areas AMD CPUs have their weaknesses but overall they offer a far better deal than their intel counterparts.

Almost forgot Mesh on the latest intel 7XXX CPUs is really bad compared to the older 6XXX series CPUs like the 6950X which don't use it.

It is almost as if intel had to half bodge the 7XXX series CPUs to get them out the door because AMD are giving them serious competition.

 

[Panos]

All hail Intel All hail Intel All hail Intel

Sacrilege!!!!!! Please someone grab him, the heat boiled his brains....

In some areas AMD CPUs have their weaknesses but overall they offer a far better deal than their intel counterparts.

Almost forgot Mesh on the latest intel 7XXX CPUs is really bad compared to the older 6XXX series CPUs like the 6950X which don't use it.

It is almost as if intel had to half bodge the 7XXX series CPUs to get them out the door because AMD are giving them serious competition.

The Mesh design was the next step for Intel after Ring. It was designed for multi core monolithic CPUs for the server market. Which of course could trickle down to HEDT and mainstream when ever this happened to go over the 8 core CPUs.
But AMD with their far superior design caught Intel with the pants down.
Not mainly on performance per core but scalability and cost.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The reason why mesh performs "poorly" is because just like with Ryzen,a number of games are based on oldish engines optimised for ring bus CPUs using a certain cache arrangement. So unless a dev optimises the games for newer gen CPUs,the performance won't be optimal - look at what happened to ARMA III once the dev optimised things better. OTH,if you look at Intel mesh and what AMD did with Ryzen,for increasing core counts sucessfully it works much better than the Intel ring bus apparently,except too many game engines are way behind the times,and would involve devs either moving to newer engines or spending effort optimising the old ones. That costs money.

Now look at the whole early access crap - the biggest issue is lack of optimisation,so now devs are selling unoptimised games for big money and hence wasting the extra potential of PCs when compared to consoles.

 

[humbug]

In some areas AMD CPUs have their weaknesses but overall they offer a far better deal than their intel counterparts.

Almost forgot Mesh on the latest intel 7XXX CPUs is really bad compared to the older 6XXX series CPUs like the 6950X which don't use it.

It is almost as if intel had to half bodge the 7XXX series CPUs to get them out the door because AMD are giving them serious competition.

The thing is the traditional Ring Bus like what coffeelake still uses eventually breaks down once you have too many cores running on it, this is why both Intel and AMD come up with new systems, Intel's Interconnect Mesh and AMD's Infinity Fabric.
Intel's Mesh still relies on Monolithic dies while AMD's IF can break the die up into Chaplets, what that means is AMD get much higher yields out of the wafer and they can build single packages with more cores than Intel, in fact Intel are on 28 Cores with AMD currently on 32, the 32 core is about to become their HEDT CPU while the server CPU's get 64 cores and 128 Threads, Intel can only dream of that.
Now add to that with this higher intercore latency design necessary for very high core counts AMD still achived an IPC equal to that on the Ring Bused Coffeelake while Intel's mesh is trailing badly as you will see in the chart below.

The only area actually where AMD still fall behind Intel is with outright clock speeds, but that on 7nm will change in a few months on Ryzen 3000, on top of that Ryzen 3000 is rumoured to get another 15% IPC bump putting its IPC way beyond even Intel's Coffeelake.

Note that Skylake-X here is running at 4.6Ghz vs 4.2Ghz on the 2600.

 

[Kaapstad]

The reason why mesh performs "poorly" is because just like with Ryzen,a number of games are based on oldish engines optimised for ring bus CPUs using a certain cache arrangement. So unless a dev optimises the games for newer gen CPUs,you will see a performance drop. OTH,if you look at Intel mesh and what AMD did with Ryzen,for increasing core counts sucessfully it works much better than the Intel ring bus apparently,except too many game engines are way behind the times.

It is bad news though when a 7980XE @4.8 performs worse than a 6950X @4.4 in gaming software.

 

[Kaapstad]

The thing is the traditional Ring Bus like what coffeelake still uses eventually breaks down once you have too many cores running on it, this is why both Intel and AMD come up with new systems, Intel's Interconnect Mesh and AMD's Infinity Fabric.
Intel's Mesh still relies on Monolithic dies while AMD's IF can break the die up into Chaplets, what that means is AMD get much higher yields out of the wafer and they can build single packages with more cores than Intel, in fact Intel are on 28 Cores with AMD currently on 32, the 32 core is about to become their HEDT CPU while the server CPU's get 64 cores and 128 Threads, Intel can only dream of that.
Now add to that with this higher intercore latency design necessary for very high core counts AMD still achived an IPC equal to that on the Ring Bused Coffeelake while Intel's mesh is trailing badly as you will see in the chart below.

The only area actually where AMD still fall behind Intel is with outright clock speeds, but that on 7nm will change in a few months on Ryzen 3000, on top of that Ryzen 3000 is rumoured to get another 15% IPC bump putting its IPC way beyond even Intel's Coffeelake.

Note that Skylake-X here is running at 4.6Ghz vs 4.2Ghz on the 2600.

The real question here is what have intel been doing all these years while they dominated the market, what did they spend their R & D on if AMD can produce something better with a fraction of the resources?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It is bad news though when a 7980XE @4.8 performs worse than a 6950X @4.4 in gaming software.

Its sad when devs are now making totally unoptimised games a "feature",aka,known as early access.

A properly optimised game should have that 7980XE being faster than a 6950X,but devs CBA anymore with PC. More and more are releasing games half finished and half optimised and increasing prices,which run like crap.

Early access is a curse for PCs,as it is wasting the extra power PCs consoles have due to penny pinching by devs.

Now look at consoles. They have potato CPUs,but despite this a number of the exclusives are either hitting 60FPS or having large open worlds. Look at some of videos DF have made on Death Stranding for example,like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RakD29WAlfM

Now consider this is all done on a potato Atom class CPU core and a GPU more akin to an RX470/RX570.

The current consoles are more CPU limited and this is why sometimes they have FPS issues.

The next generation of consoles like the PS5,are rumoured to use Zen based CPU cores,which will be a massive jump over the Jaguar based ones,and wait and see how the next gen consoles will actually improve in FPS and what can be done on screen.

 

[Panos]

The real question here is what have intel been doing all these years while they dominated the market, what did they spend their R & D on if AMD can produce something better with a fraction of the resources?

Indeed especially when they are not Apple to sit on the money.
We know that the 10nm has cost them billions and is three years behind already, but still.

 

[humbug]

The real question here is what have intel been doing all these years while they dominated the market, what did they spend their R & D on if AMD can produce something better with a fraction of the resources?

Yes, i can't answer that, only Intel know but this isn't the first time, AMD have made their own blunders, Bulldozer is one but as you say "with a fraction of the resources" AMD have proven to be very innovative and successful, and i'm not just talking about the several years run of Athlons vs Pentiums, your Intel CPU is running AMD's 64Bit architecture.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The problem with Bulldozer it also happened after AMD had overpayed for ATI,so I suspect they simply did not have any contingency in place due to their finances being in a mess,as it was delayed several times(apparently). With Ryzen AMD actually spent the bulk of their R and D on CPUs,and significantly less on GPUs,ie,they made a difficult choice on what to concentrate on,and I suspect they made the correct one.