AMD CPUs Will Gain Performance Boosts Due To Next-Gen Consoles According To John Carmack.

[TechFan@ic]

As we all know by now both next-gen console platforms the PS4 & XBOXONE utilize AMD hardware technologies in the form of a CPU & a GPU, this has lead to a lot of interesting discussion regarding games being optimized for the AMD hardware on the consoles having an effect on PC games & gaming in general.

For almost the last decade the majority of games have been very single thread & operation per clock reliant, an area where intel has excelled and maintained a lead over AMD.
Where traditionally AMD has been always more focused on CPU frequency & parallelism, they were the first to the 1Ghz mark, the first to launch a dual core x86 processor, the first to launch a native quad core (4 cores on a single die) x86 processor & the first to launch an eight core desktop processor.
This is why for the past six years games have favored intel processors, well now things might change a bit.

The PS4 & XBOXONE both sport an eight core AMD Jaguar processor and an AMD graphics processor based on the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture.
This essentially means that the games & game engines developed for this hardware will be very different from what we've had for the better part of the last decade.
In the sense that these new technologies will be developed and optimized to operate in parallel (more cores) and use the AMD optimized instruction sets and microcode.

I have always believed that this will most definitely have a significant effect on PC games, allowing next gen titles to take advantage of a greater number of cores than ever before which will lead to much more sophisticated physics and AI implementations, not only that but because AMD CPUs have traditionally had more cores than intel equivalents (FX 6300 a 6 core CPU at the same price point as a hyper-threaded intel dual core processor ) this will give AMD CPUs at every price point a significant advantage over Intel CPUs.

 

@LinusTech & @Slick have expressed their disagreement with this argument more than once before, believing that these console optimizations will have very little effect on the PC.
Well now it's not only I that believes strongly in the argument for more parallelism and the positive effect it will have boosting game performance of AMD CPUs, but so does the legendary John Carmack, when he gave his keynote at Quakecon yesterday.

@4:12
http://youtu.be/o2bH7da_9Os?t=4m12s

 

You can read more about the performance benefits that AMD CPUs will gain here & here.

[Dravic]

Sadly next-gen consoles are very low power tech already and they didn't even come out yet. Which leads us to the point:

4 i5 cores are twice as fast as 8 jaguar cores.

Bottom line:

Get i7 if you are scared of games using more threads but FX series have little in common with jaguars so optimising for amd processors won't happen.

[carolkarine]

Agreed! I just wish they made mITX boards for AMD. that's the only reason why I run a 3570K. (the prodigy is so damn sexy)

[TechFan@ic]

Sadly next-gen consoles are very low power tech already and they didn't even come out yet. Which leads us to the point:

4 i5 cores are twice as fast as 8 jaguar cores.

Bottom line:

Get i7 if you are scared of games using more threads but FX series have little in common with jaguars so optimising for amd processors won't happen.

The same argument can be made for an AMD 6 core processor, an FX 6300 will be more than twice as powerful as an 8 core jaguar CPU, and an FX 6300 costs less than half what an i5 costs.

Why would you as a gamer in this case buy an i5 ? this is the argument that I'm presenting, for each price point you will get more cores with the AMD processors, and now that games can actually utilize the extra cores these AMD processors become an outstanding choice for PC gamers, in terms of performance and price.

[Dravic]

Also remember that games will have like 5 jaguar cores available to them and not all 8, same goes for memory. This will not have dramatic impact on how intel beats amd to the ground.

[d3nia1]

I have an FX-8350 which is great.  I love it, although its not as good as Intel, its way better for the price... I am planning on OC it soon.  I have heard that it OC's to 4.6 easily (according to Linus).

 

Intel=Better performance - Money in your wallet

AMD=Good performance + The extra money left over in your wallet because you didn't buy Intel.

[Dravic]

FX processors have approx 4 modules and those aren't even clocse to having 8 cores.

Btw intel has a huge edge on single core performance and if a game is CPU bound intel will have an edge, if game isn't CPU bound neither FX or intel will have an edge.

[Dravic]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-core-i7-3770k-gaming-bottleneck,3407.html

[TechFan@ic]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-core-i7-3770k-gaming-bottleneck,3407.html

We're discussing next-gen games and engines, which none of the ones Tom's Hardware tested are.

[Immort]

So we have the game developers choosing the FX 8350 over the 3570K and saying that it's going to be better & will run next-gen games faster.
And now we have John Carmack himself coming and saying exactly the same thing & yet I still keep seeing some people shutting their eyes and covering their ears yelling INTEL INTEL INTEL ?

How dumb and intentionally ignorant people can be really irritates the hell out of me. Not so much the idiocy but the intentional ignorance saying NO! I don't want to listen to the people that know the most about games, the game developers themselves, and NO! I will pay more to get this slower processor because I feel elitist, really disgusting.

[Dravic]

Crysis 3 and you can find benchmarks with FX being on par with i5.

[TechFan@ic]

Crysis 3 and you can find benchmarks with FX being on par with i5.

Next-gen as in games developed for the PS4 & the XONE, that's what we're discussing here.

[carolkarine]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-core-i7-3770k-gaming-bottleneck,3407.html

 

BAHAHAHAHAHA GET THAT BIASED SHIT OUT.

 

toms hardware may know how to do FCAT, but they are EXTREMELY biased for intel when it comes to CPUs. if you want unbiased, go to teksyndicate.

[CarlosRex]

Crysis 3 and you can find benchmarks with FX being on par with i5.

When all cores are utilized an FX 8350 beats an intel i7 3770k

[Dravic]

Sounds good enough for me, considering I am on phenom ii x2 545 and if I upgrade I'd rather get phenom ii x6 or full switch to intel ,Xeon e3-1230v3 than get any FX series seeing how much worse FX are clock to clock than phenoms (phenom ii x6 is 100$ here).

[Dravic]

You can find people from amd commenting how crappy bulldozer/piledriver are. Steamroller may fix it but memory controller will still suck from the rumors.

[Nort]

Also remember that games will have like 5 jaguar cores available to them and not all 8, same goes for memory. This will not have dramatic impact on how intel beats amd to the ground.

 

 

This is what I imagine you as when you make ignorant comments such as this.

 

Saying the games optimized for the way AMD architecture works will not have an effect on "how intel beats amd to the ground" is completely ignorant. Optimization is a very powerful tool. Optimization is the reason why cheap 8 year old consoles can run games that 8 year old PCs of considerably higher price can't. Sorry if I overreacted, but saying that optimization (Sure, you didn't say "optimization, but you basically described it) will have no effect is very annoying.

[Dravic]

Umm do you know that jaguar cores are different than FX cores? Optimising for amd can only happen if FX series is the same as jaguar and it isn't in which case optimising would require developers to optimize games for PCs as a whole and the only thing that amd has which intel doesn't are additional ALUs. But you still forget that intel has superior memory controller and making anything more complicated than decoding/encoding work great with parallelism while scaling great as more threads are used is very hard.

More threads used will make FX look better yes but they won't be better solution than i7.

[Nort]

Umm do you know that jaguar cores are different than FX cores? Optimising for amd can only happen if FX series is the same as jaguar and it isn't in which case optimising would require developers to optimize games for PCs as a whole and the only thing that amd has which intel doesn't are additional ALUs. But you still forget that intel has superior memory controller and making anything more complicated than decoding/encoding work great with parallelism while scaling great as more threads are used is very hard.

More threads used will make FX look better yes but they won't be better solution than i7.

 

Yes, I realise that Jaguar cores are not the same as FX cores. However a game optimized for the utilisation of more cores cores will boost CPUs with more cores. Sure, it won't make a $175 processor as good as a $350 processor, but it'll bring it closer. 

 

Also "better solution" isn't solely based on performance, it's also based on the performance to price ratio.

[Dravic]

Xeon e3-1230v3. Haswell i7 minus iGPU and 100mhz. Can't be overclocked. Goes waaay faster than any FX overclocked even to 5ghz unless we talk about a really integer/encoding/decoding based stuff where sometimes FX 8350 would be slightly faster at price of multiple wattage compared to Xeon.

Price of Xeon is about 250$. I'd be getting it if I didn't care about buying GPU first.

[Beskamir]

the only way that I can see games being "optimized" for AMD is if games are built with more cores in mind from the ground up hence AMD would have an atvantage but Intel will still be better in terms of raw power but will unfortunatly cost quite a bit more than AMD CPUs...

[Katness Everdeen]

the only way that I can see games being "optimized" for AMD is if games are built with more cores in mind from the ground up hence AMD would have an atvantage but Intel will still be better in terms of raw power but will unfortunatly cost quite a bit more than AMD CPUs...

According to John Carmack, code can be optimized for the AMD micro-architecture, so not just optmized for a higher number of cores/threads.

At about 01:34:00 he goes into much more detail explaining that developers only let most of the code run on a single thread, because having to write code that can run in parallel was "terrifying" to them, but he then goes on to explain his personal research project writing the Wolfenstein 3D code to run in parallel was not that bad, saying that it is actually better to write parallel code but that it currently has its difficulties due to lack of game developer experience.

[Kuzma]

FX processors have approx 4 modules and those aren't even clocse to having 8 cores.

Btw intel has a huge edge on single core performance and if a game is CPU bound intel will have an edge, if game isn't CPU bound neither FX or intel will have an edge.

 

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-core-i7-3770k-gaming-bottleneck,3407.html

 

 

Crysis 3 and you can find benchmarks with FX being on par with i5.

 

 

Sounds good enough for me, considering I am on phenom ii x2 545 and if I upgrade I'd rather get phenom ii x6 or full switch to intel ,Xeon e3-1230v3 than get any FX series seeing how much worse FX are clock to clock than phenoms (phenom ii x6 is 100$ here).

 

 

You can find people from amd commenting how crappy bulldozer/piledriver are. Steamroller may fix it but memory controller will still suck from the rumors.

 

 

Umm do you know that jaguar cores are different than FX cores? Optimising for amd can only happen if FX series is the same as jaguar and it isn't in which case optimising would require developers to optimize games for PCs as a whole and the only thing that amd has which intel doesn't are additional ALUs. But you still forget that intel has superior memory controller and making anything more complicated than decoding/encoding work great with parallelism while scaling great as more threads are used is very hard.

More threads used will make FX look better yes but they won't be better solution than i7.

 

 

Xeon e3-1230v3. Haswell i7 minus iGPU and 100mhz. Can't be overclocked. Goes waaay faster than any FX overclocked even to 5ghz unless we talk about a really integer/encoding/decoding based stuff where sometimes FX 8350 would be slightly faster at price of multiple wattage compared to Xeon.

Price of Xeon is about 250$. I'd be getting it if I didn't care about buying GPU first.

Please... Stop... Posting....

Do I have to break down every single one of your posts to show why they're just plain bad?

 

FX processors have 4 modules, each module contains 2 cores that share resources; still 8 cores and due to their very architecture they perform better in general multi-tasking and other things. Apparently due to your logic making optimisations for things using more threads (8) would not apply all the way across the board, if the xeon 8 core has a task that is fully optimised and runs on all its cores then it will run just the same on AMD due to the very nature of computing standards ._.

[SubTract]

FX processors have approx 4 modules and those aren't even clocse to having 8 cores.

Btw intel has a huge edge on single core performance and if a game is CPU bound intel will have an edge, if game isn't CPU bound neither FX or intel will have an edge.

 

I remember this being a huge argument when dual core CPU's were bought in. When Dual core came out multiple Single core CPU's were more efficient and generally a lot faster. Because, especially with early dual cores they shared most of their resources and were had much lower IPC than their single core equivalent. Instead of thinking about it as 4 modules, Think as it as 4 Dual cores on 1 chip. Because essentially it is. Sharing resources only has a noticeable performance decrease when it comes to single threaded applications. AMD's standing on this for a long time has been parallel over serial. As you can see with the 7zip benchmark it performs very well when things are parallel optimised.

 

Please... Stop... Posting....

Do I have to break down every single one of your posts to show why they're just plain bad?

 

FX processors have 4 modules, each module contains 2 cores that share resources; still 8 cores and due to their very architecture they perform better in general multi-tasking and other things. Apparently due to your logic making optimisations for things using more threads (8) would not apply all the way across the board, if the xeon 8 core has a task that is fully optimised and runs on all its cores then it will run just the same on AMD due to the very nature of computing standards ._.

 

The problem with this is Linus said that "its not really 8 cores". As much as I like Linus and agree with most of what he said. The way in which he said it means that all the people watching his videos take his word for it.

 

In terms of Physical cores yes it is an 8 CORE CPU.

 

 

 

Now I've got that over with I am going to comment on the original Topic.

 

I personally think that Multi-threaded optimisation is not going to have a direct advantage to AMD. It is going to advantage Intel aswell. Especially with their Hyper-threaded SKU's. Currently the biggest problem with hyper threading is there isn't really much that uses it. This could be the turning point.

 

Like John says further in though is the Optimisations that can be made for the AMD Architecture.

 

edit: I just saw that @Katness Everdeen

summed this up much better (Can't add quotes after sorry)

 

"According to John Carmack, code can be optimized for the AMD micro-architecture, so not just optmized for a higher number of cores/threads.

At about 01:34:00 he goes into much more detail explaining that developers only let most of the code run on a single thread, because having to write code that can run in parallel was "terrifying" to them, but he then goes on to explain his personal research project writing the Wolfenstein 3D code to run in parallel was not that bad, saying that it is actually better to write parallel code but that it currently has its difficulties due to lack of game developer experience."

[Kuzma]

 

I remember this being a huge argument when dual core CPU's were bought in. When Dual core came out multiple Single core CPU's were more efficient and generally a lot faster. Because, especially with early dual cores they shared most of their resources and were had much lower IPC than their single core equivalent. Instead of thinking about it as 4 modules, Think as it as 4 Dual cores on 1 chip. Because essentially it is. Sharing resources only has a noticeable performance decrease when it comes to single threaded applications. AMD's standing on this for a long time has been parallel over serial. As you can see with the 7zip benchmark it performs very well when things are parallel optimised.

 

 

The problem with this is Linus said that "its not really 8 cores". As much as I like Linus and agree with most of what he said. The way in which he said it means that all the people watching his videos take his word for it.

 

In terms of Physical cores yes it is an 8 CORE CPU.

 

 

 

Now I've got that over with I am going to comment on the original Topic.

 

I personally think that Multi-threaded optimisation is not going to have a direct advantage to AMD. It is going to advantage Intel aswell. Especially with their Hyper-threaded SKU's. Currently the biggest problem with hyper threading is there isn't really much that uses it. This could be the turning point.

 

Like John says further in though is the Optimisations that can be made for the AMD Architecture.

 

edit: I just saw that @Katness Everdeen

summed this up much better (Can't add quotes after sorry)

 

"According to John Carmack, code can be optimized for the AMD micro-architecture, so not just optmized for a higher number of cores/threads.

At about 01:34:00 he goes into much more detail explaining that developers only let most of the code run on a single thread, because having to write code that can run in parallel was "terrifying" to them, but he then goes on to explain his personal research project writing the Wolfenstein 3D code to run in parallel was not that bad, saying that it is actually better to write parallel code but that it currently has its difficulties due to lack of game developer experience."

 

Its 2 cores per module so yes 8 cores but as linus explained; due to the inefficiency it is more like 6 cores at full load :p still > 3770k and 4770k in that benchmark because it's well programmed to take advantage of those 8 cores but >_> programmers are lazy and don't like to multi-thread their processing because they kinda suck. When I program I make sure to split things up as much as possible to make them more efficient on more cores; an example of this would be doing something like:

var float yfunction math(){	if (processor.type = 1)		function single_threaded_math(){			y = (a-1) + (b+2) - (c-3) + (d-4) - (e+5) - (f-5) + (g+6) - (h-7) - (i+8)		}	else		function multi_threaded_math_01(){			y += a-1		}		function multi_threaded_math_02(){			y += b+2		}		function multi_threaded_math_03(){			y -= c-3		}		function multi_threaded_math_04(){			y += d-4		}		function multi_threaded_math_05(){			y -= f-5		}		function multi_threaded_math_06(){			y += g+6		}		function multi_threaded_math_07(){			y -= h-7		}		function multi_threaded_math_08(){			y -= i-8		}

The single_threaded_math would work fine on both multi-cores and single cores but the multiple multi_threaded_math_xx would work better on multi-cores.

The multi-threaded math took me a hell of a lot longer to type simply because I had to make individual functions for each step but this is what game developers are too lazy to do or simply do not think it is worth doing. Once 8 cores begin getting used on consoles developers will be forced into doing the multi_threaded_math_xx approach and AMD processors will see the benefit and Intel extreme processors will also see a benefit ^_^ all in all it's a win-win for everyone.