Steamroller

[PCZ]

Look at BD/PD years in the making by AMD's finest.
So yes lack of talent.

Perhaps you think the engineers were constrained by finances or politics ?
I don't buy into that I think the best CPU engineers were either layed off or left the company.

 

[Smoogels]

Well Bulldozer was a flop as I'm sure most people will agree but Piledriver was somewhat a respectable improvement over Bulldozer. Lack of talent? Maybe. It's worth noting that Bulldozer was a new architecture which was most likely created using less funding than what Intel would have which could cause more problems. It's also very likely that Intel has a bigger development team and better talented engineers (mainly because of being a bigger company/more funding). I do not know for certain, it's just what I would imagine. Additionally the new architecture AMD has offers decent multithreading performance so it shows them at least doing something right.

I don't think the FX line will die though, yet. It may change socket or even name but I suspect there will be "high performance" Steamroller CPU's from AMD. With them having 8 core chips in consoles it seems like a good marketing technique to say that their 8 core chips are powering the new consoles and that their architecture is the number one choice. In my opinion I can see them trying at least another generation but I also think it's to soon to say they will not make any more competitive FX or high performance CPUs.

As for the sockets I am totally unsure. They said something after Piledriver would be released on AM3+ but could that be their 5GHz processors?

 

[teppic]

They said a new CPU following Vishera would be on AM3+ - the 9590 is still Vishera (as we all know, it's nothing but a faster clocked 8350).

 

[Martini1991]

We'll just have to wait and see.

 

[Kobi]

i REALLY hope they pull something out the bag with this next one. I'd love to go back to AMD.

 

[almighty15]

AMD really need to ditch AM3+.... It's really holding the chips and designers back...

 

[Marine-RX179]

AMD really need to ditch AM3+.... It's really holding the chips and designers back...

I sort of have to agree.

Many people praised the AMD platform being backward compatible as a advantage, but the actual reason behind it was that they haven't truly innovated in years between the launch of the original K6 and the Bulldozer...all they did was tweaked and modified the architecture in years. Which is why despite initially they had Intel's rear handed to them back in the Athlon 64 days, they gradually slipped away and eventually got left behind in the ditch on performance.

One of the reasons why Intel was able to recovered so quickly and over taken AMD despite their failure of Pentium 4 was that they went back to the drawing board and then brought out Core2 series. Let's hope the Steamroller is AMD's version of "going back to the drawing board", rather than clinging onto the old design of the Bulldozer and Piledriver FX series and insisting on tweaking/modifying it.

 

[teppic]

We already know that Steamroller is going to be a refinement of the current architecture rather than a new generation. I wouldn't be surprised if a new chipset is launched if they stick to AM3+, since the 900 series is looking old compared to FM2.

 

[=XDC=FluphyBunny]

Cool.

So we know bugger all then


What enthusiasts need is an 8 core AMD chip competing clock for clock against an i5 4670k for the same price with tons of overclocking. Competetion is never a bad thing for the end users.

It might well be a question of does AMD have the money to throw at what is probably a small niche market compared to the console parts they are currently churning out.

 

[teppic]

If they can get Steamroller to boost very high on 1-2 cores and have the others with this 20-25% touted IPC increase, it'll easily compete with a 4670K, and will do brilliantly with multi-threaded things. I just hope they don't put it off until everything's unified in APUs.