AMD’s 7th Generation APU specifications leaked – 50% faster than Kaveri

[don_svetlio]

2 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

...and the standard core design that is Zen will flog the crap out of it, and let us forget the shite that started with Bulldozer.

Still doesn't stop the 7th gen APUs to compete with quad-core mobile i5s

[don_svetlio]

1 minute ago, Prysin said:

you do know that Intel CPUs in laptops arent exactly the bees-knees either. Like, not at fucking all.

Laptop Pentiums FTW

[Dabombinable]

17 minutes ago, Prysin said:

the issue is that you bought a shitty laptop in the first place. No matter whats inside, its still crap.

 

Get a desktop and a tablet or just a larger smartphone.

When it takes revision of an architecture just to make it match the one it was supposed to replace-it and its derivatives are shite.

17 minutes ago, Prysin said:

you do know that Intel CPUs in laptops arent exactly the bees-knees either. Like, not at fucking all.

They are still far better suited to laptops.....

17 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

Still doesn't stop the 7th gen APUs to compete with quad-core mobile i5s

Oh I know......but these are desktop APU  that will see the 50% jump, not the mobile ones....and when an APU has troubles competing with CPU released by AMD 2 years earlier.......

[Trixanity]

47 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

APU is the POS Trinity thing that ruins my 13.3 inch notebook with its bloody heat . And what is matched by 2 years older and on 45nm P920 on the single and multi threaded side of things, and flogged on the IMC side .

 

Piledriver is bleah, K10 is yeah. 

Oh dear God. You post this every chance you get. We get it. You made an awful purchase. Move on.  

 

As for the APU moniker and its supposed inferiority. People do realize that all mobile Intel products and all socket 11xx products are basically APUs, right? They're just marketed differently. And since most of you probably own desktop i5 and i7 K products, you've bought an APU. Congratulations, you've apparently bought a terrible product (going by your definition). If you don't want an APU, you need to buy X99 motherboards. It's that simple (or wait and buy the upcoming Summit Ridge products). 

[don_svetlio]

3 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Oh dear God. You post this every chance you get. We get it. You made an awful purchase. Move on.  

 

As for the APU moniker and its supposed inferiority. People do realize that all mobile Intel products and all socket 11xx products are basically APUs, right? They're just marketed differently. And since most of you probably own desktop i5 and i7 K products, you've bought an APU. Congratulations, you've apparently bought a terrible product (going by your definition). If you don't want an APU, you need to buy X99 motherboards. It's that simple (or wait and buy the upcoming Summit Ridge products). 

Or FX

[Trixanity]

3 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

Or FX

Wait, FX is an excellent product because it's not an APU. 

[don_svetlio]

1 minute ago, Trixanity said:

Wait, FX is an excellent product because it's not an APU. 

FX6/FX8 isn't as terrible as people like to make it out to be but it's still not worth buying at the time of writing this

[Prysin]

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

When it takes revision of an architecture just to make it match the one it was supposed to replace-it and its derivatives are shite.

They are still far better suited to laptops.....

Oh I know......but these are desktop APU  that will see the 50% jump, not the mobile ones....and when an APU has troubles competing with CPU released by AMD 2 years earlier.......

actually, the APUs, especially excavator, is lower power enough to compete with Intel. Maybe not the best Intel can offer. But if looking at "the average" price range. Like 300-800 USD, sure.

Also, Bristol Ridge laptops are supposedly going to be able to CF the APU and GPU once more. Trinity and Kaveri couldnt do that very well. They could, but not the normal way from what i understand.

[Big-G]

So how would these fare against an i7-6770HQ with Iris Pro 580 graphics?

[Prysin]

4 minutes ago, GidonsClaw said:

So how would these fare against an i7-6770HQ with Iris Pro 580 graphics?

depending on clock speeds. If AMD can hit 3.8GHz Turbo speeds, and thermals are kept under check. With a 512 or 700 GCN 3 (1.2 Tonga) shader cores at around 700-1000MHz, it should be competitive. However ONLY if the OEMs use dual channel memory. If they go with single channel, Intel will destroy them

 

Because Hyperthreading and the eDRAM will make sure Intel can make the best out of any memory configuration. SO they would get less of a hit if an OEM decided to go with Single channel RAM in the intel rig.

 

EDIT:
Bristol Ridge should be competitive on price. And Bristol Ridge should be able to CF with any AMD dGPU. Which is why i think they rebranded the lower end Tonga GPUs for the 400m series.

[don_svetlio]

50 minutes ago, Prysin said:

depending on clock speeds. If AMD can hit 3.8GHz Turbo speeds, and thermals are kept under check. With a 512 or 700 GCN 3 (1.2 Tonga) shader cores at around 700-1000MHz, it should be competitive. However ONLY if the OEMs use dual channel memory. If they go with single channel, Intel will destroy them

 

Because Hyperthreading and the eDRAM will make sure Intel can make the best out of any memory configuration. SO they would get less of a hit if an OEM decided to go with Single channel RAM in the intel rig.

 

EDIT:
Bristol Ridge should be competitive on price. And Bristol Ridge should be able to CF with any AMD dGPU. Which is why i think they rebranded the lower end Tonga GPUs for the 400m series.

So essentially a M460 will CF with an A8 to give better performance than the 1040M?

[Doobeedoo]

Great refresh the product line until new platform hits with high end. Also new AM4 mobos to be shown, that's exciting. As they said 40% IPC improvement for Zen over Excavator I'm sure that will be main interest.

[VerticalDiscussions]

4 hours ago, hoaxy32 said:

-snip-

"trash", as in not usable or appropriate to use for the heavy applications we have intentions of working/playing on, thus related to the power user reference.

[tbake0155]

APUs are not the same as intels integrated graphics.  AMD is implementing HSA technology into their APUs, aka heterogenous system architecture.

 

Although in it's infancy, they have been improving on the technology since the first APUs.  The idea is that when the GPU isn't being fully utilized for graphics processing, the CPU can take advantage of it's compute power and they will work together.  This is why AMD labels their A10 series as having 4 CPU cores and 12 compute cores, the 12 compute cores are GPU cores.

 

Not only that but AMDs APUs wreck intels integrated graphics, especially at price to performance. 

 

It's funny how elevated some peoples expectations are that don't have anything to do with the advancement of technology.  "Oh the APU's can't push 1080p at 60 Hz yet?? They're garbage" ... Alrighty then : )

 

I don't understand why anyone would pick "teams" and label themselves for one side or the other (intel, nvidia, amd).  Thats self limiting.

[dimitriianghelov]

5 hours ago, Prysin said:

the issue is that you bought a shitty laptop in the first place. No matter whats inside, its still crap.

 

Get a desktop and a tablet or just a larger smartphone.

 

pretty much my brother got himself a intel + nvidia 300 $ notebook (even though i told him repeatedly to not buy it)and was complaining that he can't play empire total war because it overheats

 

 

[aisle9]

7 hours ago, Monkey Dust said:

Am I alone in wondering who buys APUs? They seem to occupy a very small niche of people who need more than very basic on board graphics, but still don't need that much.

 

Maybe crossfired with one of the low end Polaris GPUs it will make sense.

SFF HTPCs are the best desktop application for APUs. Otherwise, they really just don't make a ton of sense from a price/performance perspective.

 

Now laptops, on the other hand...

[don_svetlio]

7 minutes ago, dimitriianghelov said:

 

pretty much my brother got himself a intel + nvidia 300 $ notebook (even though i told him repeatedly to not buy it)and was complaining that he can't play empire total war because it overheats

 

 

Let me guess, Pentium + 820M Acer/HP?

[NuclearPeace]

It doesn't really matter how fast the GPU is as long as it isn't fast enough to game regularly well on contemporary titles.

 

This is the problem with APUs. AMD markets the GPU performance a ton, but an average user doesn't care because the most they will be running on their system is probably LoL or CSGO whereas gamers would rather go with a much more powerful dedicated grpahics unit.

 

This is why I personally find it hard to even care about APUs. If I need a cheap GPU just to get the system running than it isn't worth the premium for the better GPU. If I need a strong graphics unit, an APU is the last place I would look.

[Energycore]

Bundled with Wraith cooler and priced at $150, this could be an amazing product

[Energycore]

- Not Zen

- Not GCN 4.0

 

[That Norwegian Guy]

Faster at what. Processing or graphics, if the latter gtfo

[7850OC]

47 minutes ago, That Norwegian Guy said:

Faster at what. Processing or graphics, if the latter gtfo

in all lol 

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, That Norwegian Guy said:

Faster at what. Processing or graphics, if the latter gtfo

According to the slides it's CPU (Cinebench to be more specific).

The problem is that Kaveri was God awful. According to AMD's own slides Carrizo is 40% faster than Kaveri already.

 

Not sure which Carrizo chip AMD is comparing Bristol Ridge to, but the fastest Carrizo was clocked at 2.1GHz (the FX-8800P, same one as they used in the GPU benchmarks). According to the slides this new chip will be clocked at 3.7GHz. That's a 76% increase in clocks, and it seems like it is only yielding them ~14% performance increase. So I would take this info with a few shovels of salt... Or maybe it just scales extremely poorly with higher clock rate.

 

 

DDR4 will be a very nice addition though. With a bit of luck AMD has fixed their terrible memory controller too. It would benefit APUs greatly.

[shdowhunt60]

The fact that they're saying that DDR4 2400 is supported is a good sign. Hopefully it's dual-channel also.

[Prysin]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

According to the slides it's CPU (Cinebench to be more specific).

The problem is that Kaveri was God awful. According to AMD's own slides Carrizo is 40% faster than Kaveri already.

 

Not sure which Carrizo chip AMD is comparing Bristol Ridge to, but the fastest Carrizo was clocked at 2.1GHz (the FX-8800P, same one as they used in the GPU benchmarks). According to the slides this new chip will be clocked at 3.7GHz. That's a 76% increase in clocks, and it seems like it is only yielding them ~14% performance increase. So I would take this info with a few shovels of salt... Or maybe it just scales extremely poorly with higher clock rate.

 

 

DDR4 will be a very nice addition though. With a bit of luck AMD has fixed their terrible memory controller too. It would benefit APUs greatly.

i can debunk the 40% already. Atleast for desktop parts. For 15w and 35w SKUs, yes, it is not unlikely that Excavator is that much faster.

But with my own testing with the 7870k (Steamroller) and x4 845 (excavator) i can tell you that at similar clocks, the x4 845 is about 10-15% faster at best.

 

However, if you OC it (baseclock for x4 845 as it is a locked SKU) then a 4077MHz (turbo speed) x4 845 matches a 4.5GHz 7870k. Single core remains with the "cap" of 100-115 points that most CMT processors reside in.

 

Steamroller scales really badly with clock speeds. According to some old slides/interviews with AMD, one of the trade-offs they had to make to increase the actual IPC of Steamroller, compared to piledriver, was to sacrifice MHz scaling. This is why a 4.6GHz Steamroller CPU will match a 4.5GHz Piledriver CPU in synthetics. It simply scales worse and or leakage could be an issue. I dunno. There is a limit to how much i can test with my limited set of testing tools.

 

I can only imagine scaling for Excavator is worse, as they increased transistor density massively, especially the CPU libraries where they increased density by over 20% according to old slides.

 

What will be interesting to see is if 14nm Excavator APUs will downclock the CPU portion to stay within strict TDP rules. Kaveri does this already. However the memory bandwidth for the GPU is such a huge limit for Kaveri that even the four Steamroller cores doesnt bottleneck it at 3GHz.

 

 

Also, side note:

AMD has confirmed in a interview with PcPer? i think it was, that they will be recycling part of CMT. Namely the Cache structure and some other things for ZEN. The Cache is already 40% slower then Intel (comparing AIDA 64 readouts in bandwidth only) from the get go. So this worries me greatly.