Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#41

Post by Symmetry »

dogma1138 wrote: post #12
veebat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely cause of Intel's lagging is a wall of cost/benefit to being both designer and fab. This hit AMD earlier by being smaller(and arguably, with a different management style, AMD could have held on to their fabs longer) but each node only gets more expensive and harder to keep busy with orders which in turn means a greater need for external customers to fund R&D. Intel had a reprieve of almost a decade wit…

Intel's biggest mistake over the past 10 years was not to open it's foundry services sooner now it's custom foundry services are nearly irrelevant outside of a few niche markets. Mobile SoC design and being answerable to a huge number of very large customers forced fabs to evolve their processes in a way where market forces and customer demand forces requirements rather than office politics. Intel has still an edge o…

I'm not sure that's true. Intel has managed to have a higher performance process than their competitors in part by accepting more restrictive design rules. Because their architects can work hand-in-glove with their process engineers as a new node comes up they can have two-way feedback on this and to some extent design their process around their architecture's requirements. But it's very hard for third parties to work with their main process. They do have a separate relaxed rules process for use when acting as a foundry.

Pursuing the foundry route seriously would have meant Intel giving up one of its largest advantages.

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#42

Post by yaschobob »

veebat wrote: post #8
Roritharr wrote: post #2

Am I missing something here or is Intel starting to lag behind on Fab Tech? I thought they were years and billions ahead?!?

The most likely cause of Intel's lagging is a wall of cost/benefit to being both designer and fab. This hit AMD earlier by being smaller(and arguably, with a different management style, AMD could have held on to their fabs longer) but each node only gets more expensive and harder to keep busy with orders which in turn means a greater need for external customers to fund R&D. Intel had a reprieve of almost a decade wit…

This misses the point of where Intel is going. Intel does not see the PC market as a growth sector as a whole. It may grow for individual companies, like AMD, as they take up part of the share, however. That doesn't mean the PC market as a whole is growing. It's actually shrinking.

Intel recognizes this and is focusing on data centric use-cases like supercomputers and clouds.

For example, Intel is leading "Pathforward" with the US Government to develop very high-end solutions to large-scale problems; https://www.ecpannualmeeting.com/

In summary, Intel doesn't care that much about the PC sector because it's shrinking as a whole.

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#43

Post by ajross »

et2o wrote: post #40
bhouston wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point, Apple's ARM chips are huge (and hot) compared to the stock ARM chips and that is because they are throwing transistors at the problem.

Would you have a particular reference for this? I have read that the Apple ARM chips are more power efficient than comparable ARM chips powering Android devices.

They idle really well. In particular the software layer around suspend is really first rate when compared with the Linux BSPs from vendors, which tend to be somewhere between glitchy and awful (c.f. all those times when your off-brand Android phone turned red hot in your pocket, or the fact that a RPi is running a "mobile" SoC that never manages to draw less than 3W).

The power under load is quiet high, apocryphally. No, I don't have numbers.

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#44

Post by wmf »

roel_v wrote: post #11

So there was a rumor last year there might be a dual socket Threadripper/EPYC mobo, and that the CPU's would be capable of it, but now that I search for it, it seems that it only was 'some guy on Reddit says' style rumor. Despite that, anyone knows if there is any chance for that?

That's free lunch thinking. A platform with almost the same specs as Epyc is going to cost almost as much as Epyc and thus there's not really any point.

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#46

Post by Brockenstein »

sandworm101 wrote: post #39
tutanchamun wrote: post #6

I'm really curious if AMD can overtake Intel in single threaded performance. They already have the lead in number of cores (per socket) and multi threaded benchmarks like cinebench (when using same number of cores and clocks). At the moment Intel has a slight edge in IPC and quite a bit better clocks. If they can close the IPC gap or even overtake Intel and GlobalFoundries 7nm process really can clock around 5ghz thi…

I don't want AMD to overtake intel on single-core performance. There are only a handful of things that a chip manufacturer can be best at. If AMD is ahead on per-core and total number of cores, then they can and will demand the premium prices intel does today. I like AMD because they are the underdog who must keep prices low to keep my business. AMD taking the lead could also make them complacent when it comes to the…

Your post is strange in how heavily it reflects your values instead of what's best for AMD or consumers. There's nothing so great about the current status quo that we should actively discourage change or real competition. In the unlikely event AMD were ever to supplant Intel (in market share) it would just force Intel into AMD's position now. OH NO! Your business isn't so valuable that it's incentive for AMD to active try and stay in second place.

We want competition, competition pushes progress. Maintaining the status quo, not so much. And if your biggest argument against AMD upsetting the status quo is you'll have to put a little more effort into shopping, well that's not really a problem for most of us...

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#47

Post by opencl »

et2o wrote: post #40
bhouston wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point, Apple's ARM chips are huge (and hot) compared to the stock ARM chips and that is because they are throwing transistors at the problem.

Would you have a particular reference for this? I have read that the Apple ARM chips are more power efficient than comparable ARM chips powering Android devices.

SD835 was 72mm^2[1], A10 was 125[2]. A11 and SD845 are actually very similar in die area[3]. However Qualcomm integrates their modem on the SoC and Apple does not, and Apple's CPU cores are still significantly larger as can be seen from die shots.

Phone SoC makers don't really publish TDPs and there is a lack of good data about it, but Apple clearly has high peak power draw (and very good idle efficiency). Battery life and thermal throttling observed under a sustained heavy workload is probably the best proxy for measuring SoC power. For example, see GFXBench battery life/throttling results in Anandtech's review[4] of the iPhone 7/plus. Much higher power consumption (and performance, but this is resolution-dependent because it's a graphics benchmark) than the competition.

[1] http://www.techinsights.com/about-techinsights/overview/blog...

[2]https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/236091-new-apple-a10-tear...

[3] https://i.imgur.com/KBw8K8N.jpg

[4] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10685/the-iphone-7-and-iphone...

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#48

Post by kbenson »

Brockenstein wrote: post #46
sandworm101 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want AMD to overtake intel on single-core performance. There are only a handful of things that a chip manufacturer can be best at. If AMD is ahead on per-core and total number of cores, then they can and will demand the premium prices intel does today. I like AMD because they are the underdog who must keep prices low to keep my business. AMD taking the lead could also make them complacent when it comes to the…

Your post is strange in how heavily it reflects your values instead of what's best for AMD or consumers. There's nothing so great about the current status quo that we should actively discourage change or real competition. In the unlikely event AMD were ever to supplant Intel (in market share) it would just force Intel into AMD's position now. OH NO! Your business isn't so valuable that it's incentive for AMD to activ…

> Your post is strange in how heavily it reflects your values instead of what's best for AMD or consumers.

> OH NO! Your business isn't so valuable that it's incentive for AMD to active try and stay in second place.

Not every post is about what's strategically best for a company. They very clearly stated it's what they personally wanted, and why.

What's the point of ripping into someone because they've actually expressed desire for a specific scenario? If you think they won't actually get what they want from the scenario or action they've described, just point out how you don't think it will end up that way.

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#49

Post by tscs37 »

std_throwaway wrote: post #21
spacenick88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering if there are some gains left by dropping the x86 legacy baggage e.g. using RISC-V or ARM64. It seems that there should be some loss due to x86 weirdness and past compromises

What i read was: The instruction decoder would become easier but the instruction decoder is only a small part. Most rare commands are implemented via microcode anyways, so silicon area is not hit too hard. x86 is somewhat efficient due to compact encoding compared to IA64 for example. There is surprisingly little to gain. Maybe somebody who really knows the details can chime in :)

The peeps building Mill CPU are claiming they can do 10x performance over traditional (x86). IIRC in an early talk they explained this is mostly by bringing the IPC on a level with high IPC microcontroller arches. They do VLIW which can do a lot of things more efficiently if your compiler can handle it (Rust should be able to pull a lot of performance out of VLIW IIRC)

Re: AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019

#50

Post by gascan »

tscs37 wrote: post #49
std_throwaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What i read was: The instruction decoder would become easier but the instruction decoder is only a small part. Most rare commands are implemented via microcode anyways, so silicon area is not hit too hard. x86 is somewhat efficient due to compact encoding compared to IA64 for example. There is surprisingly little to gain. Maybe somebody who really knows the details can chime in :)

The peeps building Mill CPU are claiming they can do 10x performance over traditional (x86). IIRC in an early talk they explained this is mostly by bringing the IPC on a level with high IPC microcontroller arches. They do VLIW which can do a lot of things more efficiently if your compiler can handle it (Rust should be able to pull a lot of performance out of VLIW IIRC)

VLIW plus a "sufficiently smart compiler"? Isn't that IA-64 in a nutshell?
Post reply on HN