Computer History Question

[Deslumo]

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

[GDRRiley]

when the first amd64 bit CPUs came out

April 2003

[Samfisher]

Honestly, when the Intel Core series came out.  It was such a game changer and left AMD lurching around for what feels and probably was 10 years catching up.

[Skipple]

10 minutes ago, Deslumo said:

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

People may disagree with me here..

 

Zen2 wasn't all that big of a deal in terms of technology per-say. It wasn't a massive generational leap or anything. Yes, 7nm is nice and all, but I wouldn't call it a eye watering speed improvement over say a 8700K.

 

What it did do, is provide value. AMD's margins were such that they are able to undercut Intel and make a really good value chip for the average consumer at a price point that couldn't be matched. AMD also proved that they could be trusted to make reliable hardware and software on the CPU side. 

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, Skipple said:

People may disagree with me here..

 

Zen2 wasn't all that big of a deal in terms of technology per-say. It wasn't a massive generational leap or anything. Yes, 7nm is nice and all, but I wouldn't call it a eye watering speed improvement over say a 8700K.

if you aren't going of performance but features/revolutions to how we build chips I think zen 2 is fair

 

[Skipple]

2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

if you aren't going of performance but features/revolutions to how we build chips I think zen 2 is fair

 

Could very well be true. I don't know enough about the manufacturing end to comment on that. 

[GDRRiley]

15 minutes ago, Skipple said:

Could very well be true. I don't know enough about the manufacturing end to comment on that. 

change from 1 big die to smaller is a huge change

[mr moose]

it happens all the  time. 

 

co processor

mmx

athlon

core

zen

??

 

 

 

 

[atxcyclist]

47 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

when the first amd64 bit CPUs came out

April 2003

 

That was huge, probably the biggest jump in consumer computing technology in the last 25 years. Breaking the 1ghz mark was pretty amazing, but 64-bit computing really was a massive shift.

[mr moose]

18 hours ago, mr moose said:

it happens all the  time. 

 

co processor

mmx

athlon

core

zen

??

 

 

 

 

Shit, I just worked out what the ?? is going to be:

 

14nm +++++++++++

[Lord Vile]

18 hours ago, Skipple said:

People may disagree with me here..

 

Zen2 wasn't all that big of a deal in terms of technology per-say. It wasn't a massive generational leap or anything. Yes, 7nm is nice and all, but I wouldn't call it a eye watering speed improvement over say a 8700K.

 

What it did do, is provide value. AMD's margins were such that they are able to undercut Intel and make a really good value chip for the average consumer at a price point that couldn't be matched. AMD also proved that they could be trusted to make reliable hardware and software on the CPU side. 

Would say Zen 2 was big as it rocked intel, made more than 4 cores accessible on consumer hardware with good IPC not just on £1000 HEDT parts and debuted a highly efficient (from a manufacturing standpoint) chiplet design.

 

 

Personal view is that, if it takes off and makes ARM viable as a high end desktop instruction set, Apple Silicon will be orders of magnitude bigger than anything AMD has done or will do over the last/next 5 years. More cores is great but producing a viable competitor to x86-64 chips would be game changing. Especially if it brings performance and efficiency improvements. 

[Roswell]

19 hours ago, Deslumo said:

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

What about Zen 2 is “big” to you in comparison to everything else in microprocessor history? 
 

In the grand scheme of things, Intel and AMD have been leapfrogging each other for decades and decades. I think this moment in time may be less significant than say earlier in the 2010s when AMD was the one stalling in performance. Sandy Bridge came out and just absolutely destroyed everything in its wake. I say this because back then, there actually were obscene differences in performance. Now it’s mainly just differences in price per core. There are IPC differences now, sure, but it’s close enough not to matter. Now it’s all about price and not the FX line being literally 50%+ slower than the competition.

[mr moose]

52 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Would say Zen 2 was big as it rocked intel, made more than 4 cores accessible on consumer hardware with good IPC not just on £1000 HEDT parts

 

4 cores have been accessible on consumer parts (even budget parts) for a lot longer than zen has been around.   My 3550 (2012) has 4 cores, and was a budget CPU and cost $213 on release.

[Lord Vile]

6 minutes ago, mr moose said:

4 cores have been accessible on consumer parts (even budget parts) for a lot longer than zen has been around.   My 3550 (2012) has 4 cores, and was a budget CPU and cost $213 on release.

More than

[Roswell]

5 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

More than

Phenom II x6 SKUs were affordable and competitive at the time, but yeah, I guess that’s the only real example. Intel’s enthusiast chips were definitely outrageous early on, even more so with the silly board costs.

[mr moose]

18 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

More than

My 3550 replaced a phenom with "more than". And it was still a performance upgrade.

 

More cores is not an argument when you are talking about consumer hardware.  Given majority of consumer desktops can still adequately run on as little as 2, it's like trying to argue the necessity of turbo charger for shopping cart.   Even for gaming my 4 core plays everything very well for an 8 year old budget part.

 

 

 

[atxcyclist]

19 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Phenom II x6 SKUs were affordable and competitive at the time, but yeah, I guess that’s the only real example. Intel’s enthusiast chips were definitely outrageous early on, even more so with the silly board costs.

I have a server going at my office with a spare Phenom II X6 in a Dell XPS motherboard that I had sitting around. Power consumption is high, but it still works fine. 

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

I have a server going at my office with a spare Phenom II X6 in a Dell XPS motherboard that I had sitting around. Power consumption is high, but it still works fine. 

The reality is that over the last decade the need for more computing power is exaggerated by marketing more than actual requirements.   Sure there are examples of needing 8+ performance cores, but the reality is they are edge cases not mainstream consumers who would easily get away with 4 mid tier cores without pain.

 

Intel could have put in 8 cores in their CPU's in 2010 if they wanted,  by why would they add that much value and raise the end cost of a product that the vast majority of their customers don't need and thus risks not generating the an adequate ROI.

[atxcyclist]

Just now, mr moose said:

The reality is that over the last decade the need for more computing power is exaggerated by marketing more than actual requirements.   Sure there are examples of needing 8+ performance cores, but the reality is they are edge cases not mainstream consumers who would easily get away with 4 mid tier cores without pain.

 

Intel could have put in 8 cores in their CPU's in 2010 if they wanted,  by why would they add that much value and raise the end cost of a product that the vast majority of their customers don't need and thus risks not generating the an adequate ROI.

Very true. For people that are doing very computational-heavy work all this extra power is nice, but even most gamers and office workers cannot harness more than a mid-range chip these days. The most impressive thing about modern hardware is what you get out of an i3 or a Ryzen 3, more than enough for the vast majority of users, and sometimes they're even under $100 USD MSRP. 

 

I'm still using a 4790k at stock frequency on my workstation at the office. Admittedly it was at the very top of "consumer" hardware when new, but even when I'm doing 3d architectural renders for clients or energy calculations, it gets the job done nicely. There are still a lot of systems running pre-Skylake Intel and even some FX AMD processors that will be useful for quite some time.

[PeachGr]

Bigger than that, was the day that SSD came to consumers. For 25$ you could bring back to life old PC and make new ones significantly faster than old generation. 

And before that, the USB flash drive. CDs died silently after a couple if years, and the whole data transfer changed

[minibois]

On 7/28/2020 at 5:49 AM, Deslumo said:

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

Zen 1 IMO.

I personally even postponed buying my new PC at the time, to not go with Intel 7th gen and instead go for Ryzen.

 

Otherwise, most launches (including video card launches) have felt quite incremental in my opinion. Especially video cards.

[Elvara]

If you take computer as a whole and you are older than Linus, my first computer had a 486DX25 CPU so I remember some of them

the SDRAM DDR was a big deal.
the CD-rom (no more 10 floppy disks to install something, windows 3.1 was 6 or 8 disk iirc).

the AGP slot for graphics card replacing PCI (Riva TNT, my geforce 3 Ti 500 was the most expensive card I bought for a long time)

the switch from PATA to SATA (that old cable was such a pain to manage).

the USB (that's probably the best one for me everything can be plugged to USB now).

the Bios switching to UEFI (big deal for advanced user I guess).

the end of dial up internet for Broadband xDSL, cable (DOCSIS) and FFTx now.

the SSD.

 

There's actually so many the first multi-core processor, the end of CRT and probably a lot more. For the CPU progress in recent years you don't always see a huge improvement from one generation of CPU to the next, sure my first gen I7-860 at 2.8Ghz is clearly outdated by now but if I compare it to a 2nd or 3rd gen core i7, I don't think I had 50% gain at stock in benchmark.

 

Anyway at some point amd vs intel or nvidia vs ati(well amd actually) one of them was way better or added something new then it was almost similar for a few years.

[LAwLz]

Zen 2 wasn't even that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. So last time something that big happened was probably like a year, max, before Zen 2 was launched.

Comparing the launch of Zen 2 (which was like a 15% IPC increase) to such a revolutionary thing as the launch of SSDs (which increased performance by hundreds of percent) is not exactly a good comparison in my mind.

Even Zen 1 was a way bigger change than Zen 2 was.

[Pixel5]

On 7/28/2020 at 5:55 AM, Samfisher said:

Honestly, when the Intel Core series came out.  It was such a game changer and left AMD lurching around for what feels and probably was 10 years catching up.

that is not true, the core series lost HARD in terms of performance to AMD 64, the reason why intel became big is because they paid off big OEM´s like Dell, IBM or HP to never use AMD CPU´s.

heres a short overview, there are tons of articles about this topic out there, this story goes back 30 years and was on going for about 20 years, its the entire reason intel ever had such a huge advantage over AMD.

 

[Samfisher]

3 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

that is not true, the core series lost HARD in terms of performance to AMD 64, the reason why intel became big is because they paid off big OEM´s like Dell, IBM or HP to never use AMD CPU´s.

heres a short overview, there are tons of articles about this topic out there, this story goes back 30 years and was on going for about 20 years, its the entire reason intel ever had such a huge advantage over AMD.

 

AMD64 was released in 2003, Core 2 Duos were released in 2006.  First dual core Athlon64s were released in 2005.  And according to this review on Anandtech, AMD aren't that close.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/2276/16