AMD real talk

[Flowey]

Alright so I'm tired of hearing either Nvidia's or Intel's fan swearing by their products and how much AMD are 2-3 years behind everybody. I myself opted for the R9 390, not because I'm a fanboy, but because for the sake of future proofing my build. So, my question is, are AMD really that far behing in GPU/CPU technology? I know for sure that their GPU's are lacking in the efficiency departement but otherwise I cannot find any explanation of how AMD are lacking behing their competitors. So yeah, thanks for your time!

[DevilishBooster]

Their architecture is several years behind, and that is why they are so lacking in effeciency. Hopefully the new line of AMD products will bring them back into the fighting ring.

[Mohenjo]

AMD in a nutshell 

 

Good GPUs Shit CPUs 

[Flowey]

7 hours ago, DevilishBooster said:

Their architecture is several years behind, and that is why they are so lacking in effeciency. Hopefully the new line of AMD products will bring them back into the fighting ring.

But performance wise I believe, regarding price/performance, they are better right(GPU only). Yeah, CPU I had no hope, even when I started out learning about PC's I knew AMD's CPU weren't the way to go. Gaming wise that is.

[Guest Kloaked]

Their CPUs are garbage for the most part. GPUs are fine.

[ivan134]

Nope, they're not lagging behind in any way at all. The people who think efficiency is the only thing that matters tend to not know what they're talking about, especially if they don't know how Maxwell's efficiency as achieved. The only place that Nvidia beats AMD right now is tessellation performance.

 

CPUs are definitely far behind though. We'll have to wait and see what Zen has in store.

[Flowey]

6 hours ago, Kloaked said:

Their CPUs are garbage for the most part. GPUs are fine.

Sure hope Zen does brings something worth my time to the tables, otherwise their stuck with APU and console chips for another generation

[Mohenjo]

Just now, ivan134 said:

Nope, they're not lagging behind in any way at all. The people who think efficiency is the only thing that matters tend to not know what they're talking about, especially if they don't know how Maxwell's efficiency as achieved. The only place that Nvidia beats AMD right now is tessellation performance.

There lagging behind in business terms. Nvida is DOMINATING last i checked nvidia had 80 percent of the market  

[DevilishBooster]

As with almost anything related to computers, it depends on the application. If you are looking at single core performance Intel will win every time. If you are looking at multi-core, heavy video workloads, AMD will put up a good fight despite being several years behind Intel. As far as video cards go, I'm not really well-versed in the tech so I can't explain it well and guarantee that what I'm saying is true, but it still follows with the "it depends on the application of the hardware".

[ivan134]

Just now, Mohenjo said:

There lagging behind in business terms. Nvida is DOMINATING last i checked nvidia had 80 percent of the market  

The question is about architecture and not market share.

[Mohenjo]

Just now, ivan134 said:

The question is about architecture and not market share.

it seemed pretty relevant to what you said. Its more of a discussion now 

[don_svetlio]

GPU efficiency isn't as clear cut. A 960 uses 120W to power 1024 CUDA cores whereas the R9 380 uses 140W (TinyTomLogan's review measured 140W) to power 1768 Stream Processors. 380X uses 190W to power 2048 Stream Processors.

Fury X uses 250W to power 4096 stream processors vs the 250W used by the 980 Ti to power 2800 CUDA cores.

[KemoKa]

Their GPUs are still closely competitive with Nvidia despite being recycled for 3 years, which is very telling as to how they fare.

Their CPUs are pretty much garbage for anything except running virtual machines under linux. Then they run like greased lightning.

[samcool55]

I would prefer AMD just because nvidia did some things in the last couple of years that i really didn't like and i don't want to give a company my money if they do such things.

But that's my opinion  Apart from that well yes AMD uses an older archtecture, but even tho it is old compared to Nvidia's, it does keep up very well.

 

And i also i don't need 64x tessellation but whatever. I'm happy with 4x or 8x  Not that i can handle any tessellation at all with my current gpu but whatever.

[nullbot]

I tried to use one of their CPU's for a value build, and it was terrible. 

It literally lasted for 2 months and then just broke

[Flowey]

7 hours ago, KemoKa said:

Their GPUs are still closely competitive with Nvidia despite being recycled for 3 years, which is very telling as to how they fare.

Their CPUs are pretty much garbage for anything except running virtual machines under linux. Then they run like greased lightning.

Wow, I chuckled quite a bit here sir, ¨Greased lightning¨

 

Still, if their architecture is so old, how can it still keep up with Nvidia's? 

[ivan134]

2 minutes ago, Flowey said:

Wow, I chuckled quite a bit here sir, ¨Greased lightning¨

 

Still, if their architecture is so old, how can it still keep up with Nvidia's? 

GCN 1.0/1.1 were made to compete against Kepler. GCN 1.2 was made to compete against Maxwell. The reason some uninformed people say their architecture is older is because AMD adopted a different naming scheme, when both companies were just doing the same thing. You brought up a good point though: Why do people care how old an architecture is if it performs fine and beats the "latest and greatest" from the competition?

[Flowey]

7 hours ago, ivan134 said:

GCN 1.0/1.1 were made to compete against Kepler. GCN 1.2 was made to compete against Maxwell. The reason some uninformed people say their architecture is older is because AMD adopted a different naming scheme, when both companies were just doing the same thing. You brought up a good point though: Why do people care how old an architecture is if it performs fine and beats the "latest and greatest" from the competition?

Yeah, that's the kind of discussion I like having, and well let's just say that any other forum where I tried something like that were met by instaneous fanboyic criticism. I just try to keep myself clear of those places, you know.¨shivers¨

[Ryoutarou97]

I think what AMD really tries to do is be ahead of the times, and they try too hard. CPU-wise, there was x86_64 which really demonstrates this philosophy, but nowadays they're looking too far ahead (as CPU's go). There's no need for so many cores one a chip right now and AMD is putting them there anyways. I think we are moving to everything using more cores (DX12 is a good example. I bet 13 uses even more cores if/when it comes out or 12 is updated to use 6+). Intel seems to be moving towards more cores too, albeit on enthusiast-grade ships. This is where AMD went wrong. Not everyone needs the cores yet, and IPC is more important than core count right now.

 

As for GPU's, I think it has worked out very well. Async, for example, has been on GCN for what, 2 years now? It's giving AMD a nice boost that they thought ahead that far so now cards going back to the 200 series (now 300) remain competitive longer. Honestly, this kind of thing could be one of the reasons we got rebrands for 300's though it was probably more financially influenced. HBM is another amazing example of this. AMD/SK HYnix have been working on it for a while (7 years IIRC) which is too long to know how cards nowadays would turn out or even how much VRAM they would use. If the fury/x weren't outperformed by the 980ti  (at 1080 at least) HBM would have probably been an amazing addition that would put the Fury X over the top of the 980ti.

 

It seems to me that AMD is more ahead of the times than behind them, but this strategy has its drawbacks because they cannot predict the future so advancements that they make often miss the mark. Maybe FX chips sort of suck because programs aren't as parallelised nowadays as was to be expected, or true audio isn't taking off because motherboards support a lot more now than when it was designed.

[Flowey]

7 hours ago, Ryoutarou97 said:

I think what AMD really tries to do is be ahead of the times, and they try too hard. CPU-wise, there was x86_64 which really demonstrates this philosophy, but nowadays they're looking too far ahead (as CPU's go). There's no need for so many cores one a chip right now and AMD is putting them there anyways. I think we are moving to everything using more cores (DX12 is a good example. I bet 13 uses even more cores if/when it comes out or 12 is updated to use 6+). Intel seems to be moving towards more cores too, albeit on enthusiast-grade ships. This is where AMD went wrong. Not everyone needs the cores yet, and IPC is more important than core count right now.

 

As for GPU's, I think it has worked out very well. Async, for example, has been on GCN for what, 2 years now? It's giving AMD a nice boost that they thought ahead that far so now cards going back to the 200 series (now 300) remain competitive longer. Honestly, this kind of thing could be one of the reasons we got rebrands for 300's though it was probably more financially influenced. HBM is another amazing example of this. AMD/SK HYnix have been working on it for a while (7 years IIRC) which is too long to know how cards nowadays would turn out or even how much VRAM they would use. If the fury/x weren't outperformed by the 980ti  (at 1080 at least) HBM would have probably been an amazing addition that would put the Fury X over the top of the 980ti.

 

It seems to me that AMD is more ahead of the times than behind them, but this strategy has its drawbacks because they cannot predict the future so advancements that they make often miss the mark. Maybe FX chips sort of suck because programs aren't as parallelised nowadays as was to be expected, or true audio isn't taking off because motherboards support a lot more now than when it was designed.

Wow 100% agree, look at TrueAudio, were is it today? Consoles maybe?

[Coaxialgamer]

39 minutes ago, Flowey said:

Alright so I'm tired of hearing either Nvidia's or Intel's fan swearing by their products and how much AMD are 2-3 years behind everybody. I myself opted for the R9 390, not because I'm a fanboy, but because for the sake of future proofing my build. So, my question is, are AMD really that far behing in GPU/CPU technology? I know for sure that their GPU's are lacking in the efficiency departement but otherwise I cannot find any explanation of how AMD are lacking behing their competitors. So yeah, thanks for your time!

I won't talk about their gpus here ( i'll be mainly covering their bulldozer and piledriver based cpus ),but their cpus are VERY outdated. they use PLANAR 32 nm transistors , on a HUGE die ( Much larger than sandy bridge , even with the igpu ).

Their CMT design failed spectacularly because of poor  software support , and the fact that windows 7 didn't know how to properly use the 2 int + 1 FPU per module setup.

 

It cost much more to produce than competing intel cpus at the time ( much larger die size ).

 

the fact that CMT penalizes performance when software is not optimized for it tanked it's performance heavily ( not like intel's SMT , which only improves performance when software is optimized ).

 

It uses a boat-load of energy and produces a LOT of heat ( again , i'm comparing to sandy bridge here , because of the same process node , but the 2600k had 35 W lesser TDP  compared to the fx 8XXX lineup , let's not even talk about the 9000 series and their 220W TDP ). Heck , even AMD engineers themselves admitted bulldozer ( and bulldozer -based architectures like piledriver , steamroller etc ) were a failure( again , if you know how architecture design works , you know that piledriver , steamroller etc . only added incremental upgrades to bulldozer , while the fundamental architecture stayed the same ).

 

Again , i don't want to go on a rant here, but bulldozer and piledriver failed in so many aspects . There is a reason why the FX series is often compared to the pentium 4.

 

Their gpus are decent though , but they only are fully used months or years after release ( gtx 680 was beating the 7970 when it came out , now the 7970 is leading in a lot of benchmarks,) wouldn't be surprised if the fury X beats the 980ti in a year or two , when nvidia starts abandonning maxwell in favor of pascal , in the same way the 290x is starting to move ahead of the 780ti , even though it struggled to beat the 780 / original titan at launch .

[Ryoutarou97]

Just now, Flowey said:

Wow 100% agree, look at TrueAudio, were is it today? Consoles maybe?

It is used a lot on consoles, but PC doesn't really touch it.

[Flowey]

7 hours ago, Ryoutarou97 said:

It is used a lot on consoles, but PC doesn't really touch it.

Really?What the hell, I said console as, well, (haswell HUHU)all the stuff that's useless to PC's gets crammed in these overrated boxes, guess I was right then!

[branden_lucero]

NVidia developed an asshole attitude which is what made me stick with AMD for GPUs, not to mention the "performance percentage" between  a non TI, a TI and a Titan card recently. 

[Gikero]

12 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Again , i don't want to go on a rant here, but bulldozer and piledriver failed in so many aspects . There is a reason why the FX series is often compared to the pentium 4.

I see a lot of people who express how poorly they consider AMD's FX8XXX series, but I've never seen anyone compare to a Pentium 4. Damn.