AMD Zen sneak peak and technical analysis at Hotchips 2016

[Coaxialgamer]

Amd recently attended an event at hotchips 2016, where they revealed more info on zen :

Quote

AMD today gave us a sneak peek of the AMD Zen processor architecture. AMD Senior Fellow and Design Engineer, Michael Clark, gave a 26-minute long technical briefing on the AMD Zen architecture at the Hot Chips Symposium in Cupertino, California.

 

Here are the key takeaway points :

 

Zen delivers 40% more instructions per clock than the current Excavator core.

 

Zen is highly scalable and will be used in every future AMD mobile, desktop or serverprocessor.

 

Zen has a better core engine that handles two threads per core, and boasts a large Op Cache, wide micro-op dispatch, as well as larger instruction schedulers, Retire Queue, Load Queue and Store Queue.

 

Zen has a better cache system too, with almost double the L1 and L2bandwidth, and 5X better L3 bandwidth.

 

Zen is the first AMD microarchitecture to emphasise low power design, using aggressive clock gating with multi-level regions, as well as other microarchitecture tricks to greatly reduce power consumption.

 

 

Now obviously,  we still need independent testing before we can conclude anything,  but AMD does seem confident,  which is a good sign. 

 

 

Source: http://www.techarp.com/articles/amd-zen-sneak-peek-hot-chips-2016/

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

AMD does seem confident

if at this point amd themselves wouldnt be confident that would be a recipe for disaster.

 

if a company cannot be confident about a product they're putting to market, it can only be because deep inside they know the product is a failure.

 

lets just hope AMD's confidence is worth it, and that it'll launch before my old server kicks the bucket, so i can go zen. no reason why i want zen in my server, i just want zen in my server

[AresKrieger]

6 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

AMD does seem confident,  which is a good sign

They always seem confident since they like to hype up products, so long as it's priced well and can compete with at least haswell then it will be good for the market though.

 

[Coaxialgamer]

8 minutes ago, AresKrieger said:

They always seem confident since they like to hype up products, so long as it's priced well and can compete with at least haswell then it will be good for the market

 

I don't know,  back when bulldozer was going to launch,  amd was being super mysterious about it  and employees were abandoning the company left and right,  which isn't the case now anyway. 

[AresKrieger]

3 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

I don't know,  back when bulldozer was going to launch,  amd was being super mysterious about it  and employees were abandoning the company left and right,  which isn't the caee now anyway. 

Well yeah that is true, we'll see how it performs eventually (2017 if I remember correctly) until then I don't know what the fuss is about tbh. If people get their hopes up too high it will be almost impossible for AMD to deliver on those expectations but they are bringing this on themselves......again.

[Coaxialgamer]

8 minutes ago, manikyath said:

if at this point amd themselves wouldnt be confident that would be a recipe for disaster.

 

if a company cannot be confident about a product they're putting to market, it can only be because deep inside they know the product is a failure.

 

lets just hope AMD's confidence is worth it, and that it'll launch before my old server kicks the bucket, so i can go zen. no reason why i want zen in my server, i just want zen in my server

Yeah,  but at least we can be pretty sure that its not another bulldozer.  Before that launched,  AMD were being super secretive and mysterious about it,  and many employees were downright fleeing the company 

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Yeah,  but at least we can be pretty sure that its not another bulldozer.  Before that launched,  AMD were being super secretive and mysterious about it,  and major employees were downright fleeing the company 

wasnt there something along the lines of bulldozer being meant to be server chips, and someone in marketing decided it had to be a desktop part?

[RGProductions]

13 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

 

I really hope that AMD can have this work out, and the software is there to support it. If that happens it could disrupt intel, who has been, on at least the consumer side, doing nothing since ivy bridge to price/performance.

[Coaxialgamer]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

wasnt there something along the lines of bulldozer being meant to be server chips, and someone in marketing decided it had to be a desktop part?

I didn't read anything about that,  but i think it was meant for desktop,  as they didn't have any other architecture planned and they couldn't scale phenom any further. 

[The Benjamins]

7 minutes ago, AresKrieger said:

Well yeah that is true, we'll see how it performs eventually (2017 if I remember correctly) until then I don't know what the fuss is about tbh. If people get their hopes up too high it will be almost impossible for AMD to deliver on those expectations but they are bringing this on themselves......again.

They said it should be out in limited supply before 2017, so that should mean we would see benchmarks before 2017.

[manikyath]

Just now, The Benjamins said:

limited supply

remember skylake launch?

 

i feel like my retailer of choice will be once again the only one that doesnt hike up prices to stupid levels.

[AresKrieger]

Just now, The Benjamins said:

They said it should be out in limited supply before 2017, so that should mean we would see benchmarks before 2017.

So they'll at least have finished samples meeting their specs by then I assume, well so long as some third parties do some testing at that time that's good, though it does mean you won't be able to by any realistically for a while after the paper launch.

[Doobeedoo]

Yeah with all new info and diagrams along with that one demo it's looking quite promising. Though, still need more info. But even though being ES aside, what is exciting is retail unit. How much they'll improve it over ES and what will the final clocks be. 4.0Ghz - 4.5Ghz seems possible to me for Zen quad-core.

[Coaxialgamer]

Fixed formatting 

[Rune]

2 hours ago, manikyath said:

i feel like my retailer of choice will be once again the only one that doesnt hike up prices to stupid levels.

Microcenter ahoy!

[Dabombinable]

3 hours ago, manikyath said:

if at this point amd themselves wouldnt be confident that would be a recipe for disaster.

 

if a company cannot be confident about a product they're putting to market, it can only be because deep inside they know the product is a failure.

 

lets just hope AMD's confidence is worth it, and that it'll launch before my old server kicks the bucket, so i can go zen. no reason why i want zen in my server, i just want zen in my server

My old server never will. Its Pentium III (and the motherboards caps) refuse to die even with a 20% overclock on the Pentium III. Then again, there are 2 phases for both CPU, when most single or dual socket motherboards at the time only had 1 phase per CPU.

[Energycore]

3 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

I don't know,  back when bulldozer was going to launch,  amd was being super mysterious about it  and employees were abandoning the company left and right,  which isn't the case now anyway. 

To be fair Bulldozer was an actual downgrade

 

It looks like the conference didn't give us anything new, unless the bits about architecture help give an idea about how it's similar and different to Haswell / Skylake.

[Coaxialgamer]

19 minutes ago, Energycore said:

To be fair Bulldozer was an actual downgrade

 

It looks like the conference didn't give us anything new, unless the bits about architecture help give an idea about how it's similar and different to Haswell / Skylake.

That's what i meant,  if zen was a disaster like BD,  we would be seeing a very different reaction from them

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, Coaxialgamer said:

That's what i meant,  if zen was a disaster like BD,  we would be seeing a very different reaction from them

Fair enough. It's not hard to have Zen be better than the absolute worst architecture of the decade

[Nineshadow]

3 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

That's what i meant,  if zen was a disaster like BD,  we would be seeing a very different reaction from them

Who knows these days.

AMD's marketing department is...well, what marketing department? Don't think fanboys count as a marketing department.

 

Anyway, I did notice a slight improvement over the past few months or so; I guess they're trying to do something about that.

[Okjoek]

Worst case scenario I see is that Zen only competes with Intel's less well optimized 14nm processors and that the competition marker is only redrawn at say last generation.

 

TBH I just want a Zen CPU because it's a Zen CPU to go with my new AMD 14nm GPU. I'm enthusiastic, but that doesn't mean I'm a "fanboy". If AMD did simply vanish off the face of the earth I wouldn't really be that moved and I would find alternatives. I just like to know more pieces of my hardware are from the same provider and were in a sense designed to be used together. IDK if AMD has always been like this, but I like how much more "open sourced" they seem to be. I like my dirt cheap freesync monitor and entry level GPU. When it comes to luxury items like PCs I like to upgrade incrementally from at or near entry level platforms which AMD is really nice to do with. It's certainly going to be nice to use my first AMD CPU since my Athlon B28.

[Trixanity]

What's interesting is how AMD has a long list of things that had to be postponed to launch on time. So we should see somewhat substantial improvements on subsequent Zen iterations. It appears like Zen+ will have a fairly large IPC improvement along side big improvements that didn't make it into the initial launch. The launch of Summit Ridge and Raven Ridge will also give them a good idea of where to focus their efforts to improve it afterwards.

 

Considering that, I do think there is an expectation problem with this launch. People are expecting them to either 1) overthrow Intel 2) be competitive with Intel but at half the price 3) flop hard and fail to deliver.

 

Given what we know now, I expect them to be somewhat competitive with Intel. Probably a match in a lot of scenarios but there are hints that some areas could have a performance deficit that would see them trailing Intel by a potentially significant amount. Price will be according to how it stacks up with Intel just like how AMD GPUs are priced after performance and how it stacks up vs Nvidia. So there's that. 

 

There are still a lot of missing information such as final clock speeds (very important - remember clock speed is not IPC. The Blender benchmark was a way to show IPC improvement and with a huge asterisk of course), memory controller and interconnects, TDP and thermals, IO. That's just some of the things I can think of right now.

 

I don't think AMD will reach Intel in clock speed and that's going to be a problem especially in many gaming scenarios where clock speed trumps cores. Intel's also got a good advantage in their process node. There is no question it's significantly better than GloFo's 14nm.

 

With all this is mind, I suspect that AMD will have bigger improvements on each new generation of Zen than Intel will have especially considering that Intel is reaching a ceiling whereas AMD will probably have a lot of headroom for improvements in various areas. Zen is AMD's Sandy Bridge (not talking performance, talking in significance to the company). They will built upon this foundation and the improvements will be bigger for the first few generations unless they simply don't have enough time to catch up on their big list of improvements that they know they need to work on and which they'll probably add to after seeing how Summit and Raven does when completed.

[Orcblood]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

What's interesting is how AMD has a long list of things that had to be postponed to launch on time. So we should see somewhat substantial improvements on subsequent Zen iterations. It appears like Zen+ will have a fairly large IPC improvement along side big improvements that didn't make it into the initial launch. The launch of Summit Ridge and Raven Ridge will also give them a good idea of where to focus their efforts to improve it afterwards.

 

Considering that, I do think there is an expectation problem with this launch. People are expecting them to either 1) overthrow Intel 2) be competitive with Intel but at half the price 3) flop hard and fail to deliver.

 

Given what we know now, I expect them to be somewhat competitive with Intel. Probably a match in a lot of scenarios but there are hints that some areas could have a performance deficit that would see them trailing Intel by a potentially significant amount. Price will be according to how it stacks up with Intel just like how AMD GPUs are priced after performance and how it stacks up vs Nvidia. So there's that. 

 

There are still a lot of missing information such as final clock speeds (very important - remember clock speed is not IPC. The Blender benchmark was a way to show IPC improvement and with a huge asterisk of course), memory controller and interconnects, TDP and thermals, IO. That's just some of the things I can think of right now.

 

I don't think AMD will reach Intel in clock speed and that's going to be a problem especially in many gaming scenarios where clock speed trumps cores. Intel's also got a good advantage in their process node. There is no question it's significantly better than GloFo's 14nm.

 

With all this is mind, I suspect that AMD will have bigger improvements on each new generation of Zen than Intel will have especially considering that Intel is reaching a ceiling whereas AMD will probably have a lot of headroom for improvements in various areas. Zen is AMD's Sandy Bridge (not talking performance, talking in significance to the company). They will built upon this foundation and the improvements will be bigger for the first few generations unless they simply don't have enough time to catch up on their big list of improvements that they know they need to work on and which they'll probably add to after seeing how Summit and Raven does when completed.

I would go with 2 but maybe not half the price. Amd needs the money. More like 2/3s or 1/4. 

[manikyath]

6 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

My old server never will. Its Pentium III (and the motherboards caps) refuse to die even with a 20% overclock on the Pentium III. Then again, there are 2 phases for both CPU, when most single or dual socket motherboards at the time only had 1 phase per CPU.

My server is a modded acer prebuilt that's running an i7 4770 off one good choke, i've had to frankenstein extra sata power cables onto the mobo, and my storage drives are taped in place with double sided tape.

 

Recently two fans also started to act up, so the end is near.

 

The only reason it ended up being my server was that my actual server had an i3 560, and 4GB ram, and it straight up did not suffice.

[Castdeath97]

6 hours ago, Energycore said:

Fair enough. It's not hard to have Zen be better than the absolute worst architecture of the decade

NetBurst wants its status back!