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AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

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Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#121

Post by loeg »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #99
zymhan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually underwhelmed by the post, what exactly is the "pretty bold" change?

the incorporation of the IO chiplet is a sea change for processor tech. It means many physically separate core-chipsets get the same path to RAM and overcomes the many issues with NUMA, while avoiding massive and expensive cpu dies.

The UMA benefit is a double-edged sword. Best-case RAM latency probably gets worse, all else being equal. But maybe they've made Infinity fabric faster enough in Zen2 to eliminate any additional latency compared against the local memory domain in Zen1.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#122

Post by Dylan16807 »

clhodapp wrote: post #91
dopenmoredope wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's even more disappointing is that Zen 2 doesn't include support for new techs like the upcoming DDR5 & PCIe 5.0 which seems are going to be supported in Zen 4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13578/naples-rome-milan-zen-4... IC: AMD has already committed that Milan, the next generation after Rome, will have the same socket as Rome. Can you make the same commitment with Zen 4 that was shown on the roadmap slides? M…

Hoping for DDR 5 or PCI-E 5 support in Zen 2 is equivalent to hoping that Zen 2 is at least a 2020 architecture rather than a 2019 one. This is because: 1) PCI-E 5 isn't even standardized yet 2) Mass production of DDR5 memory chips might begin ramping up in 2019, but it's unlikely that DDR 5 memory sticks will be readily available on the market until 2020. 3) It takes a really long time to engineer a cpu architecture…

> Adding support for a new memory or PCI-E version requires a new socket and a new chipset

Memory, sure, you don't want compatibility issues. Why PCIe, when the important lanes are all driven directly off the CPU?

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#123

Post by pcwalton »

pjmlp wrote: post #76
screye wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Khronos is to blame by focusing too much on C, without convient tooling. CUDA had C, C++ and Fortran support since the early days, followed by the PTX bytecode format for any compiler vendor that wanted to support CUDA on their languages. It was necessary to loose the race for them to focus on C++ and come up with SPIR and SYSCL. And tools still seem not to be on par with what NVidia offers.

Khronos is a standards group. It's their job to make standards, not tooling. Individual vendors that are part of Khronos can make tooling.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#124

Post by RickSanchez2600 »

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…

Intel has a chip shortage, so AMD might be able to sell their CPUs and motherboards while Intel cannot meet demand.

I always wanted to make an Amiga with an AMD chip and get AmigaOS into X86-X64 and away from PowerPC so it can sell cheaper and faster systems. Compete with Apple at least by merging AmigaOS with GNU/Linux work with Valve on SteamOS to run AmigaOS apps and get some classic Amiga games into SteamOS and GNU/Linux.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#125

Post by nabla9 »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #111
nabla9 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

> Tensorflow has ROCm backend support. Why is it a separate repo rather than being contributed upstream to TF?

AMD is planning to upstream their work and some is already there, but are still behind in versions they support.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#126

Post by ianai »

tanderson92 wrote: post #93
ianai wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think this is necessary for exascale computing. The core floodgate would have never opened without Intel getting several kicks in the pants.

You can do the math but my estimates are that the energy costs would still be too high for exascale with pure-CPU compute. Accelerators are the way anyone actually planning to build an exascale machine is getting there.

I think it’s doable with tightly integrated compute nodes, ie specially engineered.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#127

Post by clhodapp »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #122
clhodapp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoping for DDR 5 or PCI-E 5 support in Zen 2 is equivalent to hoping that Zen 2 is at least a 2020 architecture rather than a 2019 one. This is because: 1) PCI-E 5 isn't even standardized yet 2) Mass production of DDR5 memory chips might begin ramping up in 2019, but it's unlikely that DDR 5 memory sticks will be readily available on the market until 2020. 3) It takes a really long time to engineer a cpu architecture…

> Adding support for a new memory or PCI-E version requires a new socket and a new chipset Memory, sure, you don't want compatibility issues. Why PCIe, when the important lanes are all driven directly off the CPU?

Ah, fair. I guess I should say "can require".

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#128

Post by aseipp »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #119
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #102

Given that AMD has introduced their own version of Intel's IME, there's very little incentive for me to consider their CPUs. At least there are workarounds for some of Intel's CPUs.

You can disable the PSP in newer BIOSes. I can do it on my X370 Taichi. The link below is old but accurate. Go AMD and don't look back. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-PSP-...

That doesn't really change much in all honesty; it just disables support for things like the fTPM, secure sleep states, and some communication mailbox primitives (that allow things like offloading encryption to the PSP coprocessor, through the Linux crypto API subsystem -- this is all supported in upstream Linux.)

The PSP is still essential to the boot process and many probably other things (power management, etc), and you aren't going to just magically turn it off with a UEFI option. If your concern is that the PSP is a blackbox covert channel, it probably changes almost nothing.

Both AMD and Intel are functionally equivalent here, as far as I'm concerned.

(My ASRock X399 board also has this UEFI option and specifically calls out that it only disables a few key features.)

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#129

Post by burner222 »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #119
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #102

Given that AMD has introduced their own version of Intel's IME, there's very little incentive for me to consider their CPUs. At least there are workarounds for some of Intel's CPUs.

You can disable the PSP in newer BIOSes. I can do it on my X370 Taichi. The link below is old but accurate. Go AMD and don't look back. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-PSP-...

that doesn't actually disable the PSP. read the Reddit thread

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#130

Post by kllrnohj »

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…

AMD almost certainly knew about it as it's in DirectX. This standard, called DirectX Raytracing (or DXR for short) is actually what the very first game to ship with real-time raytracing uses. This is what Battlefield V is using. Not Nvidia's proprietary extensions.

Since nobody pushes to add a fancy new thing to DirectX unless they plan to ship hardware specifically to do that new thing, AMD would have to have been blind & deaf to not know Nvidia was going to ship RTX this year.

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