AMD Computex Event-Polaris, Bristol Ridge, and ZEN!!!

[DocSwag]

The Past: AMD's Computex event is happening today. It is already official that Bristol Ridge will be announced at the event, along with us getting some "Polaris updates." This probably means that for the first time since CES, we will be getting some information that is actually useful about Polaris. Unfortunately, this isn't a launch for Polaris but it's definitely almost as good as one! If we are very lucky, AMD may even talk about Vega too! And if we are very, very lucky maybe, just maybe, we will even get something about Zen! Chances are against that though, so don't count on it. I will be updating this thread with stuff we learn from the event while it's happening.

 

If you hate my writing skillz, want some great pictures to stare at, or don't want to keep having to refresh the page, Anandtech will probably have a live blog on their site once the event is almost starting. I will post the link to that article once it appears here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10390/computex-2016-amd-press-conference-live-blog

 

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out my earlier post about the event:

Or, if you absolutely hate my writing skillz and are gonna get eye cancer trying to read my article, here's an article for you to read that won't give you eye cancer (I hope) : http://www.anandtech.com/show/10341/amd-announces-computex-2016-webcast

 

The video of the stream is here:

 

I will (luckily) be able to watch the event while it's happening. I will post all information that we learn right down here:

[Last Updated: Past 7 P.M. Pacific Time]-Event has started! Also, here's a countdown @Energycore made! http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?msg=AMD's Thingy&p0=241&year=2016&month=6&day=1&hour=10&min=0&sec=0So here is everything announced at the event:

 

Polaris

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10389/amd-teases-radeon-rx-480-launching-june-29th-for-199

Quote

First off, the RX 480 will include 36 CUs. If we assume 64 stream processors to a CU – the GCN standard – then this brings us to 2304 SPs. AMD has not named the specific Polaris GPU being used here, but given the CU count I believe it’s reasonable to assume that this is a Polaris 10 SKU, as I’ve already seen Polaris 11 and it’s a very small chip better suited for notebooks.

AMD also revealed that the card would offer over 5 TFLOPs of compute performance. Given what we know about the CU count, this allows us to estimate the GPU clockspeed. This puts the lower bound of the GPU clockspeed at 1.08GHz and an upper bound (6 TFLOPs) at 1.3GHz, which would be in the range of 10-30% higher clocked than comparable Radeon 300 series cards.

At the Computex event, Raja Koduri gave us some new info about Polaris. He talked about the new rx 480, which has been rumored about in the past few days. The rx 480 is based on Polaris 10 and contains 36 CUs presumably with 64 SPs per CU, giving a total of 2304 SPs. It has over 5 TFLOPs of compute power and is powered by a 256 bit memory bus with the memory clocked at 8 gbps, delivering 256 GB/S of memory bandwidth. AMD hasn't provided us with any other information, but based on the compute power it is probably between 1.08 ghz and 1.3 ghz. Information ROP count and TMU count was not given. The TDP is 150 watts. The card will be launching on June 29th for 199 dollars.

 

Estimations put the performance around the 390/x level, though we can't be sure of anything as AMD has told us anything about IPC gains. However, it was said it will run DOOM very well on Vulkan. We only got one demo, which was of two rx 480s compared to a gtx 1080 in Ashes of the Singularity. The dual rx 480s beat out the 1080 by around 4 fps (around 58 fps vs 62). Raja stated that the 1080 was a 700 dollar card while the dual rx 480s was only 500. Because a 480 is only 200 dollars, my assumption is that this was a dual rx 480 card that was compared and that that will be launching a little after the rx 480. As well, it was said the 1080 was near 100% utilization, while the 480s only around 50%. I'm not sure what to take from this, but it obviously means more performance could be unlocked in the future through better drivers.

 

This is interesting but also worrying for me. The card has the same TDP as the 1070, but presumably offers much lower performance judging from the price tag. This would, again, but Nvidia in a lead in the performance/watt game, again. However, this could be a very interesting card regardless. If it can deliver r9 fury level performance for only 200 dollars, I would find that to be a 1070 killer. It would offer 80-90% of the performance of the 1070 for only a little more than half the price. Two 480s could destroy the 1070.

 

Polaris seems to be a little worse than Pascal from a performance/watt standpoint, but it might be a killer from the performance/dollar standpoint. We don't know how well it will overclock, though. If Polaris offers good overclocking, however, it may be a real killer. If not, I don't know. I guess we can wait until reviews come out to decided for certain. That's all for Polaris!

Bristol Ridge

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10362/amd-7th-generation-apu-bristol-ridge-stoney-ridge-for-notebooks

Quote

The 7th Generation APU, in silicon, is by and large similar to the 6th Generation platform called Carrizo with some updates to help drive efficiency and improve performance. This is due to the updated Excavator core, primarily supporting DDR4 memory through the controller (similar to the R-series embedded AMD parts announced earlier), but also tweaks to the 28nm Bulk CMOS physical design that improved the voltage/frequency characteristics of the silicon. This combined with new AVFS (adaptive voltage frequency scaling) algorithms via improved through internal sensors enables AMD to offer a higher frequency for the same Thermal Design Power on the 7th Generation. With this, AMD is claiming that a move from a Kaveri ‘15W’ APU in 2014 to a new Bristol Ridge APU in 2016 can afford a 56% increase in raw CPU performance, or +10% over last year’s Carrizo.

Additional 6/1: AMD has shared with us die sizes and transistor counts. The Bristol Ridge dual module die, including the integrated graphics, comes in at 250.4 mm2 with 3.1 billion transistors. The Stoney Ridge single module die (including IGP) is 124.5mm2 and 1.2 billion transistors.

There's not much to say about Bristol Ridge. It's basically just Carrizo with DDR4 and slightly higher clock speeds. That's it. A few new HP and Dell laptops will be featuring it, but it really isn't that interesting IMO. This is only a mobile launch, so no desktop parts. Nothing about AM4. Still pretty crap in my opinion and I still think Zen is the only real interesting CPU architecture from AMD.

 

And now for what you've all been waiting for.....

ZEN!!!

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10391/amd-briefly-shows-off-zen-summit-ridge-silicon

Quote

After an already packed Computex 2016 event with Radeon Polaris and Bristol Ridge/Stoney Ridge news, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su had one final surprise to close out the company’s presentation: Zen, in the flesh.

Zen taped out earlier this year, and AMD is now working on bringing it up in their labs. To that end Dr. Su pulled out a very early engineering sample of what will be AMD’s Summit Ridge CPU, an 8 core Zen-based CPU. Summit Ridge will use AMD’s new AM4 socket – currently being rolled out for Bristol Ridge – making it a drop-in platform replacement.

AMD has now officially confirmed Zen is working and being tested in labs. Along with that, AMD showed a video that was completely created, edited, and rendered on a Zen CPU. Along with that, Dr. Su took out an 8 core 16 thread Zen CPU. Unfortunately, we couldn't see the die as the heat spreader was over it, but it was still an interesting announcement. The 40% IPC is still confirmed, and Dr. Su continued to say how Zen will be scaled across all platforms-embedded, mobile, desktop, and server. Dr. Su again emphasized how Zen will be AMD's return the high end. Unfortunately, we didn't get any benchmarks or anything, but it is still quite interesting. However, AMD did mention they will begin sampling Zen in a few weeks, and wide sampling will commence in q3. Perhaps benchmarks soon....

 

I am definitely hoping that AMD will be able to make a comeback with Zen. The CPU market really needs some competition. At this point it is obvious Intel is taking advantage of the situation my pricing their products very high and slowing down improvements. Broadwell-E is 5-10% faster than Haswell-E.... and it's more expensive. That's not how the market should work. When a new generation of products comes out that's better than the old ones, it's supposed to replace them, not be priced higher than them. At this rate the cost of CPUs will only increase slowly but surely, which is why we need AMD to help sort this out.

 

This event was quite interesting, even if we didn't learn that much. Hopefully we will get even more info on Polaris (maybe reviews) in the next few weeks!

[Energycore]

I made a countdown!

 

http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?iso=20160601T10&p0=241&msg=AMD's+Thingy&font=cursive&csz=1

[awesomeness10120]

Cannot wait.

[Dionyz]

Does anyone have a link in which I can see this news stream? (Like Nvidia launch)

[mariushm]

It should show up on AMD's website: http://www.amd.com/en-us

[Drunk_Klaus]

pumped for this! let's see that stock price go up tomorrow

[DocSwag]

2 hours ago, Energycore said:

I made a countdown!

 

http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?iso=20160601T10&p0=241&msg=AMD's+Thingy&font=cursive&csz=1

Lol awesome!

Do you know if timeanddate.com has a way to copy the html code of the timer itself? LTT has an HTML Code thing that let's you insert HTML Code so if I could insert the code into the post that would be cool....

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

Lol awesome!

Do you know if timeanddate.com has a way to copy the html code of the timer itself? LTT has an HTML Code thing that let's you insert HTML Code so if I could insert the code into the post that would be cool....

The site doesn't have an embed code and I'm not savvy in HTML so I wouldn't know.

[DocSwag]

1 minute ago, Energycore said:

The site doesn't have an embed code and I'm not savvy in HTML so I wouldn't know.

 

I tried copying over the code for the timer via inspect element but it just showed up as a big blob of code...

Whatever

[Energycore]

Just now, DocSwag said:

 

I tried copying over the code for the timer via inspect element but it just showed up as a big blob of code...

Whatever

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

 

I tried copying over the code for the timer via inspect element but it just showed up as a big blob of code...

Whatever

Can you do something with this? http://www.timeanddate.com/clocks/freecountdown.html

[Energycore]

I don't know how to make it work.

[Energycore]

Nope

[Doobeedoo]

Nice. Sad it starts at 04:00AM for me -.-

[DocSwag]

17 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Nice. Sad it starts at 04:00AM for me -.-

lol that sucks.

It's 7 P.M. for me so perfect for me 

Wait a second! So it's 2:30 A.M. for you right now..... And your still up?!?!?

[Doobeedoo]

4 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

lol that sucks.

It's 7 P.M. for me so perfect for me 

Wait a second! So it's 2:30 A.M. for you right now..... And your still up?!?!?

If I don't work I usually go sleep by around 04:00AM lol 
It just comes natural when I don't need to get up early haha.

[DocSwag]

3 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

If I don't work I usually go sleep by around 04:00AM lol 
It just comes natural when I don't need to get up early haha.

I would probably fall asleep long before then....

Wowz

[hex4]

5 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

If I don't work I usually go sleep by around 04:00AM lol 
It just comes natural when I don't need to get up early haha.

We are quite a like, i just woke up and it's 1.41AM, was in bed at 6PM LOL.

[Doobeedoo]

3 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

I would probably fall asleep long before then....

Wowz

Yeah, I just feel totally awake lol
Different when I wake up. My day starts feeling tired and ends feeling rested haha.

Anyways, I go sleep now, coffee date in morning

[Hazorazor]

Of course the event is during my final uni class for the semester today...

[RagnarokDel]

13 minutes ago, Hazorazor said:

Of course the event is during my final uni class for the semester today...

just watch the replay

[Energycore]

50 minutes ago, hex4 said:

We are quite a like, i just woke up and it's 1.41AM, was in bed at 6PM LOL.

I envy you. The only reason I'm getting up early this week is finals.

[BuckGup]

28 minutes ago, RagnarokDel said:

just watch the replay

There is no fun in that

[SteveGrabowski0]

Would you guys bareback Lisa Su?

[Energycore]

We're Laibu! WAAAAA