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AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

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Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#61

Post by lozaning »

djsumdog wrote: post #47

I hope AMD has something on their video chip line-up against nVidia as well. I'm curious if they knew nVidia was working on ray-tracing and plan to implement the same API or if they have some other tech they have up their sleeve they've been working on vendors with. I hate how nVidia has such a monopoly on the video chip market. Who knows, maybe Intel will finally get back into the gamer 3D market and we might finall…

IF you hadn't heard Intel actual has thrown its hat into the GPU ring again. Set to launch in 2020.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#62

Post by bpye »

snuxoll wrote: post #16
s3cur3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benchmarks on the 32-core TR are... disappointing, to say the least.[1] If you’re purely compute bound, it can be a win over the 16-core version, but if memory access is a factor, it’s a wash due to the extra hops to memory. And to my mind, there are very few pure-compute applications that wouldn’t benefit more from AVX2 and the like... in which case a cheaper Intel CPU would still wipe the floor with the 32-core chi…

Threadripper’s 4 die variant had to be “neutered” to remain compatible with the TR4 socket without splitting memory bandwidth. The new I/O chiplet would solve that issue entirely, assuming it comes to Threadripper 3.

I was just thinking this. Yes it'll have half the lanes of EPYC still, okay, but now the lanes will be connected to all the dies equally rather than to just 1/2 the dies. This hopefully means Threadripper 3 can perform almost as well as EPYC with just 1/2 the memory bandwidth - that isn't insignificant but it's a big improvement on Threadripper 2.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#63

Post by coder543 »

hmottestad wrote: post #56
mbell wrote: post #54

Anyone know why we aren't seeing Intel/AMD go the 'ultra-wide' route that we've seen in ARM processors? (Apple's in particular) e.g. we've seen Apple's A12 processor expand ALU's from 4->6 and what seems like a strong focus on cache latency and these changes seem to be rather beneficial in real code. Why aren't we seeing the same from Intel / AMD? As someone whom isn't particularly well informed on the topic my guess…

Is Apple ahead of x86/64 on width? The A10X article on anandtech seemed to imply that every other ARM architecture was far behind on width while Apple was mostly on par (or slightly behind) x86/64.

A10X or A12X? But there are a number of benchmarks showing the A12X outperforming most of Apple's laptop lineup and many competitors. The A12X doesn't have the liberty of a desktop form factor, so it is definitely a mobile part, but it seems reasonable that Apple could make another chip that scales the performance up even further if they wanted to, without really altering the underlying architecture.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#64

Post by bpye »

tolien wrote: post #6
throwaway2048 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All AMD processors have supported ECC for a very long time, its trivial to support it, Intel have just decided to gate it as a premium feature.

Sort of - they let mainboard vendors decide whether to support it or not, which means it can be a crapshoot. For example, MSI's been known in the past to kill ECC support with a BIOS update; some vendors have tested that you can use ECC RAM but won't enable any of the error correction (for example, Gigabyte say this in [1]: "non-ECC mode".) Selfishly I really wish they would make it easier, because I'm in the market…

Asrock have been good in my experience at enabling all features on their boards. Back when Intel's Vt-d support depended on your board they reliably had support, and I believe they support ECC on all their new AMD boards.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#65

Post by nabla9 »

screye wrote: post #51
djsumdog wrote: post #47

I hope AMD has something on their video chip line-up against nVidia as well. I'm curious if they knew nVidia was working on ray-tracing and plan to implement the same API or if they have some other tech they have up their sleeve they've been working on vendors with. I hate how nVidia has such a monopoly on the video chip market. Who knows, maybe Intel will finally get back into the gamer 3D market and we might finall…

I hate the Cuda monopoly in machine learning right now. I hope some of the mature libraries (TF, Pytorch) start officially supporting AMD GPUs. Nvidia is looting customers that want to use GPUs for Machine Learning on the cloud (like AWS, GCP)

Nvidia is cashing in their investments for software and integration.

It's AMD's job to make machine learning work in their GPU's. If they don't believe in it and spend the necessary time and effort, nobody else will. Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) has existed for years but apparently it's not good enough.

ps. Tensorflow has ROCm backend support. https://hub.docker.com/r/rocm/tensorflow/ but is MI25 competitive? https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/instin...

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#66

Post by coder543 »

s3cur3 wrote: post #21
5436436347 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those (Anandtech) benchmarks were performed on Windows. All threadripper benchmarks on Linux show that it is nowhere near as awful a performer as on Windows and most compute workloads do scale okay. Seen multiple ideas thrown around like Windows not being NUMA aware with this processor or just plain bad core scheduling

They did a follow up changing the scheduling policy for thread 0 (again, still on Windows) and it didn’t make a difference for almost all their workloads: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13446/the-quiz-on-cpu-0-playi...

AnandTech really needs to hire a Linux-focused editor to do some benchmarks there too, especially for these large systems that are unlikely to be running Windows anyways.

The Phoronix benchmarks are quite clear,[0] I don't know why you keep linking to AnandTech's Windows benchmarks. I say this as someone who reads tons of AnandTech reviews because they're great, but Windows just doesn't do well with high core count hardware at all.

[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2990wx-l...

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#67

Post by lugg »

astrodust wrote: post #41
beatgammit wrote: post #12

This is a pretty bold change and really makes Intel chips less appealing. With the recent kernel changes for Intel's Spectre issues and this chip coming up, I think it's a distinct possibility that AMD will take back a ton of marketshare in the server space. If these chips really do have a ~25% performance gain over Ryzen (not counting IPC gains), I might just upgrade, and I think a lot of other people are in the sam…

What's disappointing is that none of the major cloud vendors has made any real commitments to AMD, at least none that I've seen. If speculative execution is a problem and you need to give each VM its own exclusive cores, great when you can source parts with 64+ cores on them!

How could they? AMD has been off the map for generations.

Providers will begin uptake of AMD again, it just takes time for contracts to roll over and the new hardware to reach production.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#68

Post by BeeOnRope »

djsumdog wrote: post #43
beatgammit wrote: post #12

This is a pretty bold change and really makes Intel chips less appealing. With the recent kernel changes for Intel's Spectre issues and this chip coming up, I think it's a distinct possibility that AMD will take back a ton of marketshare in the server space. If these chips really do have a ~25% performance gain over Ryzen (not counting IPC gains), I might just upgrade, and I think a lot of other people are in the sam…

Do the new 8th gen Intel chips finally deal with Spectre/Meltdown issues in hardware or do they still depend on OS level fixes?

8th gen (Coffee Lake) have the same uarch as Skylake and have no hardware fixes for Meltdown or Spectre.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#69

Post by BeeOnRope »

mbell wrote: post #54

Anyone know why we aren't seeing Intel/AMD go the 'ultra-wide' route that we've seen in ARM processors? (Apple's in particular) e.g. we've seen Apple's A12 processor expand ALU's from 4->6 and what seems like a strong focus on cache latency and these changes seem to be rather beneficial in real code. Why aren't we seeing the same from Intel / AMD? As someone whom isn't particularly well informed on the topic my guess…

Well AMD has gone wider - to 5 or 6 wide depending on how you count it in Ryzen. Intel hasn't really been able to make any changes to make any major uarch changes in years, since they've been stuck on Skylake (and all the various Skylake++ variants that followed which were Skylake in name only).

In Skylake, most of the effort seemed focused on bringing AVX-512 to bear, and outside of that the basic design is largely the same as Haswell.

Here's hoping that Apple's chips portend an increase in width in mainstream x86 chips as well.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#70

Post by esistgut »

screye wrote: post #51
djsumdog wrote: post #47

I hope AMD has something on their video chip line-up against nVidia as well. I'm curious if they knew nVidia was working on ray-tracing and plan to implement the same API or if they have some other tech they have up their sleeve they've been working on vendors with. I hate how nVidia has such a monopoly on the video chip market. Who knows, maybe Intel will finally get back into the gamer 3D market and we might finall…

I hate the Cuda monopoly in machine learning right now. I hope some of the mature libraries (TF, Pytorch) start officially supporting AMD GPUs. Nvidia is looting customers that want to use GPUs for Machine Learning on the cloud (like AWS, GCP)

Isn't ROCm a viable alternative?
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