AMD Zen 2 Update: 7nm EPYC in Labs Now, Launching in 2019 • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by StudentStuff » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 12:59 AM UTC

ajross wrote: post #70

StudentStuff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Broadcom SoC used in the Raspberry Pi hasn't aged terribly well, there is a pretty good thread comparing the various boards out there on the Armbian Forum[1], in it they discuss how much power boards use with different parts enabled. Some Allwinner boards (like the PC2) can use just 1w at idle without disabling anything. Further savings is possible if you disable gigabit ethernet, GPU, etc. More info is in the 2n…

Oh sure. It was more a point about software polish. All these SoC's have hardware support for clock gating and separable power domains and deep idle states, etc... But in general, making all junk work is a huge rats' nest of complexity. And in practice, except for a tiny handful of devices from top-tier manufacturers, it just doesn't. Maybe it works "most" of the time. Maybe there are tuning tricks you can use that g…

All parties that run Linux on these devices should be forced to mainline their kernel patches. The patchwork of shitty BSPs that both Google and Samsung have created were shipped, resulting in hundreds of millions of insecure, poorly supported devices that are actively used.

Look at what Armbian has done with these bespoke chips in spite of limited resources, had Google and Samsung put in a minor amount of effort, akin to what Sony has done, the Android landscape would have many more users running fully patched, slightly less buggy software today.

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

#72

Post by paulie_a » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #56

kbenson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Luckily for them their 10nm was much more ambitious than any of the 7nm designs and they are facing problems that other fabs will not face until their 5nm and beyond processes. I've always wondered about this. What's to keep the hard won experience and knowledge of how to do cobalt from escaping into the wile and being adopted at a much higher rate by their competitors? It goes both ways I guess, and some experienc…

My ex is a process improvement engineer at Intel she told me a story about considerably higher failure rate for silicon that was manufactured in a northern part of a room vs the southern part what’s more odd is that it only affected some products that shared this room in their pipeline. The cause was that the water pipes under that section would impact that part of the process because of mechanical vibration the reas…

Back in the early days when silicon valley actually made silicon, they realized that batches would be effected by the local farms or if someone didn't wash their hands after using the bathroom.

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

#73

Post by tutanchamun » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 7:49 AM UTC

ajross wrote: post #33

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…

The IPC gap is directly related to their smaller cores. If you want to get more work done in a cycle you need to spend transistors to do it. You're asking them to have and eat cake, basically. That's not likely.

But isn't it easier for AMD to close the gap due to their multiple dies on a package design instead of a large monolithic design like Intel? If they make the cores larger the cost for the entire CPU doesn't increase as much as Intels.

Even though Zen+ (cache optimization) is probably not as much of a improvement as Zen2 ("improves Zen in multiple dimensions") over Zen will be, the single threaded gap did shrink quite a bit:

https://i.imgur.com/dpfu5K3.png

But I guess some of these improvements come also from the faster memory that is supported. The benchmarks sadly were not made with the same memory.

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

#74

Post by roel_v » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #44

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.

"That's free lunch thinking."

My favorite kind!

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

#75

Post by et2o » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

opencl wrote: post #47

et2o wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

This is a great answer, thank you.