Nvidia CPU? Would it dominate AMD & Intel?

[Fishrrr]

what if nvidia made a cpu? your thoughts?

[AndreiArgeanu]

Dominate what? NVIDIA doesn't have licensing to make x86 cpu's, and considering ARM support on Windows is crap, if NVIDIA were to release a CPU to the consumer market it would die as soon as it would launch.

[Zando_]

Just now, AndreiArgeanu said:

Dominate what? NVIDIA doesn't have licensing to make x86 cpu's, and considering ARM support on Windows is crap, if NVIDIA were to release a CPU to the consumer market it would die as soon as it would launch.

^^^ Even if they had the x86 licensing, very doubtful that their first foray would be any good. 
 

Have people forgotten how shitty Zen/Zen+ were core-for-core vs Intel at launch? And that was from AMD who has been making x86 CPUs for what, decades? 

[Chris Pratt]

9 minutes ago, Fishrrr said:

what if nvidia made a cpu? your thoughts?

They do. It's called Grace. It's a data center CPU, though, for AI applications.

[GDRRiley]

6 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Have people forgotten how shitty Zen/Zen+ were core-for-core vs Intel at launch? And that was from AMD who has been making x86 CPUs for what, decades? 

they weren't shitty, it was similar to haswell/broadwell which were only a few gens back

[danalog]

I don't think it would immediately dominate Intel. I mean, other than the fact a wet fart would be better price/performance than the 11900k, it'd be hard for a company to make their first consumer CPU beat a company that's been making CPUs for nearly 40 years.

[svmlegacy]

8 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Have people forgotten how shitty Zen/Zen+ were core-for-core vs Intel at launch?

/cough/ have people forgotten Bulldozer?

 

Just because it's x86 doesn't mean it's comparable in performance.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

11 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Have people forgotten how shitty Zen/Zen+ were core-for-core vs Intel at launch? And that was from AMD who has been making x86 CPUs for what, decades? 

If you thing Zen was bad, you should check out Pentium 4/Netburst. :V

[flibberdipper]

1 minute ago, svmlegacy said:

/cough/ have people forgotten Bulldozer?

 

Just because it's x86 doesn't mean it's comparable in performance.

I'm beginning to realize I'm not going to live to see the day when people stop dragging this completely decayed horse corpse out of the closet and beating it. We get it, FX bad ecks dee XD

[Zando_]

2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

they weren't shitty, it was similar to haswell/broadwell which were only a few gens back

Hmm. As I noted, core for core. Skylake and anything newer were very noticeable improvements over Haswell/Broadwell. I have owned or own Haswell-E, Broadwell-E, Skylake, Coffee Lake, Zen, Zen+, a bunch of even older Intel stuff, and have had the opportunity to mess around with up to Zen 3 as far as benches go. 

 

A 2700X (zen+) could be beaten by an overclocked Ivy Bridge EP Xeon. Ivy Bridge -> Haswell -> Broadwell -> Skylake -> Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake which, fair, were basically skylake reskins. Still 5-6 generations back, and with OC headroom you could still beat a Zen+ chip. Clock for Clock it was between Haswell and Broadwell, which is nice as Broadwell is pretty solid, but Zen+ chips had the same really low clock headroom and you needed a nice RAM kit (oh boy let's not talk about RAM on OG Zen though) to get the chip to run its best. 

For gaming (what I do) 2700X was absolutely trounced in every title I tested by an 8600K (a cheaper chip) on a cheaper board. Handled SLI far better too, though that could have been luck of the draw as SLI was a bit fucky even with 1080s for me, ofc it's been mostly dropped since. 

Zen/Zen+ chips did well because you could get a cheap as shit motherboard and AMD would spam cores at you for the $. If you needed multicore they could be a decent alternative to something like an 8700K for the price, though in a lot of stuff the 8700K was still more useful (better single core for anything not hitting all cores to max all the time, Quicksync for any Adobe stuff). They were not well performing chips at all, they were good enough and cheap. 
 

8 minutes ago, svmlegacy said:

/cough/ have people forgotten Bulldozer?

Fair. Reason I chose Zen/Zen+ is I have personal experience with a decent variety of SKUs on those arches vs their competitors, and it was AMD's full might brought to bear to make a good CPU. 

[Zando_]

17 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

If you thing Zen was bad, you should check out Pentium 4/Netburst. :V

I think y'all are missing the reason I picked Zen as a specific example lol. 

[GDRRiley]

3 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Hmm. As I noted, core for core. Skylake and anything newer were very noticeable improvements over Haswell/Broadwell. I have owned or own Haswell-E, Broadwell-E, Skylake, Coffee Lake, Zen, Zen+, a bunch of even older Intel stuff, and have had the opportunity to mess around with up to Zen 3 as far as benches go. 

 

A 2700X (zen+) could be beaten by an overclocked Ivy Bridge EP Xeon. Ivy Bridge -> Haswell -> Broadwell -> Skylake -> Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake which, fair, were basically skylake reskins. Still 5-6 generations back, and with OC headroom you could still beat a Zen+ chip. Clock for Clock it was between Haswell and Broadwell, which is nice as Broadwell is pretty solid, but Zen+ chips had the same really low clock headroom and you needed a nice RAM kit (oh boy let's not talk about RAM on OG Zen though) to get the chip to run its best.

its not that crazy, less than 10% in many workloads.

 

you don't test IPC with overclocks, IPC is about clock for clock.
I got my 2700x to 4ghz. as well as my 6600k OC

5 minutes ago, Caroline said:

No one will forget the disaster FX was.

which FX issue, the Green one or the AMD one?

[flibberdipper]

15 minutes ago, Caroline said:

 

No one will forget the disaster FX was.

 

It's on par with Windows ME, the hundred refreshes of the 6700K and real-time raytracing on consumer grade cards.

The worst thing out of everything you listed was just the fact that we're on 14nm++++++ (mostly).

 

FX was fine for cheaper builds.

 

ME honestly isn't all that bad if you don't push it to the breaking point. Hell, I've had a few cases where it works better than 98SE.

 

And RT on consumer cards is just a new tech in its infancy. The worst part about it is just the fact that there isn't a whole hell of a lot of adoption for it yet, and on lower tier cards it's still not strong enough. You know, because infancy.

[Zando_]

Just now, GDRRiley said:

you don't test IPC with overclocks, IPC is about clock for clock.

Hmm.

 

> "with OC headroom you could still beat a Zen+ chip"
> "Clock for Clock it was between Haswell and Broadwell"

These are from the section of my post you yourself quoted, confused on how you thought I didn't understand that. 

There is a reason I said core-for-core, as the main reason Zen/Zen+ did well sales wise was packing more cores at a similar MSRP. The arch itself sucked performance wise vs Intel's, which they were able to make up for with a lot of people by throwing in just volume of cores. 

 

4 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

I got my 2700x to 4ghz. as well as my 6600k OC

That's not very good. My 2700X was a bleh bin but it'd still manage almost that on PBO, 4.1 manual, couldn't swing 4.2 but a lot of those chips could. Only getting 4 out of a Skylake chip is weird, most would do much better. Even my 6950X (which is Broadwell-E, noticeably worse arch for clocks) can hit 4.2 on all cores, and that's kinda meh, most Broadwells can hit that and any better bins will do 4.4 or higher, I think some got up to 4.6 or more but not as consistently as Haswell. 

[GDRRiley]

Just now, Caroline said:

 

we thought 220W was a crazy TDP and made fun of it back in the day, oh how little we knew the 11900K would draw almost 380 

Spoiler

 

when I think of FX  its green getting beat by this ATI card

[Blademaster91]

13 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

The worst thing out of everything you listed was just the fact that we're on 14nm++++++ (mostly).

 

FX was fine for cheaper builds.

 

ME honestly isn't all that bad if you don't push it to the breaking point. Hell, I've had a few cases where it works better than 98SE.

 

And RT on consumer cards is just a new tech in its infancy. The worst part about it is just the fact that there isn't a whole hell of a lot of adoption for it yet, and on lower tier cards it's still not strong enough. You know, because infancy.

FX Bulldozer builds usually didn't end up being cheaper compared to say a cheap i3 or i5 build, by the time you got a decent FX chip, like the 6 or 8 core, and a board decent enough that won't blow up under a power hungry FX CPU, and enough cooling to handle an OC, you'd spend as much or more than an i5 that very easily beat an FX in games. I went from an FX 8320 at 4.4ghz to a 6600K at stock and FPS in some games doubled, and no more annoying frame drops. The FX bulldozer chips were awful, AMD got sued over it for good reasons.

 

I never used ME personally, but heard enough how bad it is, and if you can't push the OS without it crashing I don't see the point.

 

Except RT gets so much hype you think it would be a feature worth buying a GPU for, and Nvidia would like it to be a main selling point, not a added feature to play around with.

[Blademaster91]

2 minutes ago, Caroline said:

That's the good FX, there was also the Athlon FX and the FX-XX chips before Bulldozer and the 8 cores that were 4.

IIRC it was an 8 core, but half the cores shared resources so it's 8 cores but not really.

[flibberdipper]

2 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

FX Bulldozer builds usually didn't end up being cheaper compared to say a cheap i3 or i5 build, by the time you got a decent FX chip, like the 6 or 8 core, and a board decent enough that won't blow up under a power hungry FX CPU, and enough cooling to handle an OC, you'd spend as much or more than an i5 that very easily beat an FX in games. I went from an FX 8320 at 4.4ghz to a 6600K and FPS in some games doubled, and no more annoying frame drops. The FX bulldozer chips were awful, AMD got sued over it for good reasons.

 

I never used ME personally, but heard enough how bad it is, and if you can't push the OS without it crashing I don't see the point.

 

Except RT gets so much hype you think it would be a feature worth buying a GPU for, and Nvidia would like it to be a main selling point, not a added feature to play around with.

Fair enough, I guess. Maybe I was just lucky but it seems like I saw FX shit on sale a lot around the Ivy/Haswell era.

 

And by push it, I was more referring to doing some of the slightly more janky shit, like using hardware that had shitty drivers, trying to force real-mode DOS to work, so on and so forth.

3 minutes ago, Caroline said:

That's the good FX, there was also the Athlon FX and the FX-XX chips before Bulldozer and the 8 cores that were 4.

Sweet christ I hope you're just being a smartass and it's just not coming across through text. FX GPUs sucked a hilarious amount of ass.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 hour ago, Fishrrr said:

what if nvidia made a cpu? your thoughts?

They do...

Nvidia tegra, their arm line (they do own arm now), that powers the switch.

[Blademaster91]

4 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

Fair enough, I guess. Maybe I was just lucky but it seems like I saw FX shit on sale a lot around the Ivy/Haswell era.

 

And by push it, I was more referring to doing some of the slightly more janky shit, like using hardware that had shitty drivers, trying to force real-mode DOS to work, so on and so forth.

FX would've been a nice deal when on sale, I remember the FX 9000 cpu's went on sale really cheap for much less than what they launched for, one of those 9590's would be fun to play with.

But yeah that makes sense, drivers and DOS mode is what was worse with ME, probably why most people kept using 98SE or 2000.

[flibberdipper]

16 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

FX would've been a nice deal when on sale, I remember the FX 9000 cpu's went on sale really cheap for much less than what they launched for, one of those 9590's would be fun to play with.

But yeah that makes sense, drivers and DOS mode is what was worse with ME, probably why most people kept using 98SE or 2000.

Yeah I'm definitely in the camp of "ME and Vista got did dirty," and will be to the day I die. My old laptop is a 98 device through and through (I don't think there are even complete drivers for anything but 98 that I'm aware of), and yet ME is vastly superior on it. It's faster and was somehow more reliable when I used it for older games before just moving everything to completely OP modern hardware.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

24 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

Yeah I'm definitely in the camp of "ME and Vista got did dirty," and will be to the day I die. My old laptop is a 98 device through and through (I don't think there are even complete drivers for anything but 98 that I'm aware of), and yet ME is vastly superior on it. It's faster and was somehow more reliable when I used it for older games before just moving everything to completely OP modern hardware.

I actually run ME on my Win9X machine since it has USB Mass Storage support and extra quality of life improvements over 98SE, oh and it does 1GB of RAM without any tricks.  But in looking, I can't find any contemporary evidence that WinME is 'bad'.  It's 'legendarily bad' but any modern retro tech hobbiest who's spun ME up on a retro machine has never seen any real problems.  Now it does lack a real DOS mode but that's not a secret either, if you want a machine mostly for DOS, yeah ME isn't your OS of choice.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

23 minutes ago, Eviljuche said:

Well, the 'consumer desktop CPU' nowadays equals the 'x86 CPU'(sadly). So Nvidia will ether have to create an x86 implementation with all the fancy instruction sets from scratch, or to use some other architecture and add some hardware binary translation to it (like in 128bit(!) portable Transmeta Crusoe from the early 2000's, or like in modern MCST Elbrus CPU's). Both options are extremely hard and costly to be done. And Nvidia's products will have to have some cool properties that would make them competitive against the Intel, AMD, Zhaoxin, Centaur, and MCST - and all of these manufacturers definetely have their niche audience and a set of unique properties. So creating some proper x86 CPU is only half of the quest - you'll also have to find it some use. I do not think that Nvidia is that level of a risk-takers to try something like that...

BRING BACK THE 68K INSTRUCTION SET!  4GHZ AMIGA 10000 WHEN!?

[Middcore]

3 hours ago, Fishrrr said:

Would it dominate AMD & Intel?

 

What gives you any reason to think it would? 

[svmlegacy]

4 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

BRING BACK THE 68K INSTRUCTION SET!  4GHZ AMIGA 10000 WHEN!?

68K never left, my TI-89 has one