AMD Says GPUs and CPUs Are Its Top Priority. Wants APUs to Talk to GPUs

[Godlygamer23]

Any AC/DC efficiency details for the cards? A 970 sitting at 50% AC/DC efficiency and a 290 at 90% AC/DC efficiency would pretty much explain the 20-30W difference.

The same power supply is being used in the article.

[Faa]

The same power supply is being used in the article.

I've already explained it, read it again.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/geforce-gtx-970-sli-review,4.html

A 290x won't just pull 30w more than a 970, it's easily twice as much

 

[sgloux3470]

Hawaii's power draw is awful. AMD's been succeeding in compute applications for a while now.

 

And until Maxwell, no one gave a shit.

[Opcode]

yeah the silence is just as bad.

It's exactly what AMD needs to launch a few new big products. You don't get much of a wow factor when you know what to expect before launch.

[TERAFLOP]

I love the new focus on drivers and software. The idea to have APUs and GPUs working together is very neat too. Hopefully we get to see this with the new 14nm products in 2016.

[MarvinKMooney]

AMD's gunna come out swinging, About damn time to if you ask me seems like the new CEO is not dealing with stupid shit any more.

[Brainless906]

As much as I love me some AMD, until I see what Zen does i'm not holding my breath on the CPU market.

Have really good feelings about the GPU side of things though. Hooray stacked memory!

[Humbug]

And until Maxwell, no one gave a shit.

Because it's not awful. It's only slightly more power hungry than Kepler. I can run my R9 290 vapor-x factory overclocked taking more power than a normal 290 with my 3770K CPU and 6 case fans some of them LED, SSD, HDD all on a Seasonic 550 watt Gold certified PSU. And still have room to overclock... it doesn't miss a beat even if I run Intel burn test and furmark at the same time...

 

The reality is that Maxwell was a leap forward for power efficiency, but Nvidia fanboys use it as an opening to attack AMD's 2013 GPU architecture (since performance still holds up quite well).

[Humbug]

As much as I love me some AMD, until I see what Zen does i'm not holding my breath on the CPU market.

We are all hoping that Zen is good, nobody knows what to expect.

I don't think they need to beat Intel. But they need to show some serious improvement so that they can start selling their CPUs at decent margins again. Right now Intel is so far ahead that AMD has to sell everything at budget prices with tiny margins. Which has seriously damaged their cash-flow...

[Brainless906]

Because it's not awful. It's only slightly more power hungry than Kepler. I can run my R9 290 vapor-x factory overclocked taking more power than a normal 290 with my 3770K CPU and 6 case fans some of them LED, SSD, HDD all on a Seasonic 550 watt Gold certified PSU. And still have room to overclock... it doesn't miss a beat even if I run Intel burn test and furmark at the same time...

 

The reality is that Maxwell was a leap forward for power efficiency, but Nvidia fanboys use it as an opening to attack AMD's 2013 GPU architecture (since performance still holds up quite well).

 

 

As i've been plastering over ever other gpu post thats brought up power efficiency 

 

"Again, I don't think the whole "it does ok with less" is a great position to take.

With the reference point being, despite its power efficiency, the pure raw performance of the 980 vs the year older 290x is incredibly unimpressive. 

 

EDIT: and for anyone calling "fanboy" the performance of the 980 vs the older 780 is also pretty damn unimpressive and for the most part right around the same as the 290x vs 980 numbers (a little behind the 290x, but consistently less than 15 fps difference). You gained power efficiency but in most high resolutions testing gained less than 10-15 fps of real world improvement. "

 

The pure performance of the 9xx series hasnt been nearly as good an improvement as anyone wanted so they needlessly attack a 30-40watt difference, pretending that people buying $500+ GPUs care about 20 bucks a year in electric bill over gaming performance.

[Brainless906]

We are all hoping that Zen is good, nobody knows what to expect.

I don't think they need to beat Intel. But they need to show some serious improvement so that they can start selling their CPUs at decent margins again. Right now Intel is so far ahead that AMD has to sell everything at budget prices with tiny margins. Which has seriously damaged their cash-flow...

 

Yah, again, not holding my breath but fingers crossed! Even if its not the "holy sh*tmuffins the 5960x is usless compared to this 300 core amd beastmuffin" I just want something that will be an extremely solid processor that can hold real value to gamer/producers as amd has done in the past. A 6-8 core proc with the single core performance of a 4690k would make me cry tears of joy.

[Humbug]

 

As i've been plastering over ever other gpu post thats brought up power efficiency 

 

"Again, I don't think the whole "it does ok with less" is a great position to take.

With the reference point being, despite its power efficiency, the pure raw performance of the 980 vs the year older 290x is incredibly unimpressive. 

 

EDIT: and for anyone calling "fanboy" the performance of the 980 vs the older 780 is also pretty damn unimpressive and for the most part right around the same as the 290x vs 980 numbers (a little behind the 290x, but consistently less than 15 fps difference). You gained power efficiency but in most high resolutions testing gained less than 10-15 fps of real world improvement. "

 

The pure performance of the 9xx series hasnt been nearly as good an improvement as anyone wanted so they needlessly attack a 30-40watt difference, pretending that people buying $500+ GPUs care about 20 bucks a year in electric bill over gaming performance.

 

Yep, the Maxwell performance gains were certainly much lower than previous generations.

i.e. less than Geforce 580 to 680, less than Geforce 680 to 780.

Less than Radeon 6970 to 7970, and less than Radeon 7970 to R9 290x.

 

The power efficiency gains are certainly a big deal for laptops though.

[Brainless906]

Yep, the Maxwell performance gains were certainly much lower than previous generations.

i.e. less than Geforce 580 to 680, less than Geforce 680 to 780.

Less than Radeon 6970 to 7970, and less than Radeon 7970 to R9 290x.

 

The power efficiency gains are certainly a big deal for laptops though.

 

Oh yah, once again i'll never play off nvidias jump forward with power efficiency as useless, its a fantastic technological feat. That said I would have loved it if they made the 980 perform the same as a 780 with half the power then pushed the power usage back up to the usage of the 780 to push tons of performance out of the new found maxwell efficiency. Obviously its not as simple as a 1:1 power in to performance out but hopefully you get my point.

[MilkyWhite]

I'm of the mindset that AMD isn't focusing too much on the desktop in the meantime because the updated Bulldozer microarchitecture variations like Excavator and Steamroller aren't significantly better than the current flock of FX CPUs.

The way I see it they're saving money to ensure that their future microarchitecture based on Zen is more competitive. I do hope that they hurry up and release it in early 2016. I need more performance and cores than what my Sandy Bridge is giving me and I'm tired of waiting.

[GRJohn]

I'm of the mindset that AMD isn't focusing too much on the desktop in the meantime because the updated Bulldozer microarchitecture variations like Excavator and Steamroller aren't significantly better than the current flock of FX CPUs.

The way I see it they're saving money to ensure that their future microarchitecture based on Zen is more competitive. I do hope that they hurry up and release it in early 2016. I need more performance and cores than what my Sandy Bridge is giving me and I'm tired of waiting.

If Zen is any good the question becomes do you buy a quad core Zen with integrated graphics in an APU product or do you buy an 8-10 core Zen without any integrated graphics in a CPU product ? Sure you'll see a significant CPU performance improvement but you'll miss out on the cool HSA features.

[Humbug]

If Zen is any good the question becomes do you buy a quad core Zen with integrated graphics in an APU product or do you buy an 8-10 core Zen without any integrated graphics in a CPU product ? Sure you'll see a significant CPU performance improvement but you'll miss out on the cool HSA features.

With Zen there is a fair chance that AMD will make the entire line up APUs, including the high end stuff... That would mean the entire product stack is in line with their HSA strategy.

[GRJohn]

With Zen there is a fair chance that AMD will make the entire line up APUs, including the high end stuff... That would mean the entire product stack is in line with their HSA strategy.

Unfortunately that's not the case. They'll make CPU only Zen products for servers which will trickle down to the PC. AMD did also confirm on two occasions that they will refresh the desktop FX products with Zen in 2016. Will use a new socket and a new chipset designed by Asus.

APUs have to be affordable products, so more than 4 cores is a no go.

[MilkyWhite]

Unfortunately that's not the case. They'll make CPU only Zen products for servers which will trickle down to the PC. AMD did also confirm on two occasions that they will refresh the desktop FX products with Zen in 2016. Will use a new socket and a new chipset designed by Asus.

APUs have to be affordable products, so more than 4 cores is a no go.

How about a happy middle like a six core APU, with six powerful cores equal to today's Module/dual core Steamroller. You'll be looking at a 65% increase in single and multi-threaded performance over the current FX CPUs and you will get all the cool HSA features. Win win.

[Humbug]

APUs have to be affordable products, so more than 4 cores is a no go.

That's only true at the current time because

-the current AMD APUs lack in x86 performance

-software which utilizes HSA is not popular

 

It's not a universal truth.

[bowman]

 

....pretending that people buying $500+ GPUs care about 20 bucks a year in electric bill over gaming performance.

 

Thats the point

[GRJohn]

That's only true at the current time because

-the current AMD APUs lack in x86 performance

-software which utilizes HSA is not popular

 

It's not a universal truth.

I'm all for HSA and I'm sure it'll be successful, especially in HPC and specialized applications. But that doesn't particularly interest me as a gamer. AMD has Mantle and it should use it to push HSA into games. It comes down to this, if I get better performance with my GPU paired with an APU than a CPU I would definitely opt for the APU.

[osbios]

HSA could make the iGPU the new coprocessor.

Imagination to still run a dedicated GPU for high end graphics and use the iGPU just for physics only. Unlike stuff like CUDA/Physix you can fully integrate it into the game mechanic because the high latency problems don't exist.

 

But I only expect this to take off when there is full support for HSA(or what ever they want to call it) on Intel, too.

[MilkyWhite]

I'm all for HSA and I'm sure it'll be successful, especially in HPC and specialized applications. But that doesn't particularly interest me as a gamer. AMD has Mantle and it should use it to push HSA into games. It comes down to this, if I get better performance with my GPU paired with an APU than a CPU I would definitely opt for the APU.

I don't disagree but I still think APUs are the best solutions for mobility. Especially once AMD starts packaging them with 3D stacked HBM we're looking at APUs that can easily compete with discrete graphics cards.

[MetroP]

Well I'm glad somebody out there still has CPUs as a priority because obviously Intel just can't be bothered. They've been giving us the same dual and quad core crap for four years now. Better IPC lower overclocking potential = no progress for enthusiasts.

[Deletive]

If Zen is any good the question becomes do you buy a quad core Zen with integrated graphics in an APU product or do you buy an 8-10 core Zen without any integrated graphics in a CPU product ? Sure you'll see a significant CPU performance improvement but you'll miss out on the cool HSA features.

They could be able to keep HSA on a CPU also if they have Dgpu's communicate directly with the CPU and share memory and all that.

 

With Zen there is a fair chance that AMD will make the entire line up APUs, including the high end stuff... That would mean the entire product stack is in line with their HSA strategy.

 

Well it's pretty much the best thing going for them and the computer market till quantum computing.

 

Well I'm glad somebody out there still has CPUs as a priority because obviously Intel just can't be bothered. They've been giving us the same dual and quad core crap for four years now. Better IPC lower overclocking potential = no progress for enthusiasts.

 

They're focusing on power efficiency and the iGPU with OpenCL which is infact improving computing performance. They're pretty much heading in the same direction. Intel just simply doesn't need to improve the CPU by large margins because the Igpu with OpenCL can help carry the workloads.