Live data from Hacker News

AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

fuse.wikichip.org

131–140 of 207 posts

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCIE 4.0 was just standardized last year, it's not surprising that Zen 2 won't support 5.0, which is expected to be introduced mid next year. Zen 2 will be the first CPUs supporting 4.0.

Release date for PCIe 5.0 is Q1 2019 Furthermore... On June 5th, 2018, the PCI SIG released version 0.7 of the PCIe 5.0 specification to its members. PLDA announced the availability of their XpressRICH5 PCIe 5.0 Controller IP based on draft 0.7 of the PCIe 5.0 specification on the same day https://www.plda.com/products/xpressrich5 and... Historically, the earliest adopters of a new PCIe specification generally begin…

Yes. AMD could have simply switched the chip over to non-finalized standards between June 5th and now. Clearly

No possible way that could backfire or be impossible

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#132
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…

[deleted]

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#133
From a desktop/casual system builder/potential new macbook pro buyer question but will these surpass Intel's core i5/i7 offerings in single thread + power efficiency, given Intel is stuck on 14 nm for a while?

Thinking of upgrade my 2014 era stuff due to massive improvements in SSD, memory etc. but not sure its worth dropping so much money for coffee lake or just waiting for something better x86 (or ARM...)-wise.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#134
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?

PyTorch has AMD support in the main repo: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/tree/master/tools/amd_bui...

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#136
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), a…

Sources are conflicting, but the general consensus I've seen is that the Intel ME has direct access to your networking hardware, while the AMD PSP does not, and basically just exposes interfaces to the CPU.

If accurate, this is a significant functional difference as far as I'm concerned.

But, what's the old saying again? "The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts."

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#137
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all accounts RTX delivers negligible visual improvement for games, for a huge performance hit. The technology is a lot more interesting in professional 3D modelling where light baking and rendering can be done much faster.

Can't help but think of this: > The only real performance advantages the GeForce3 currently offers exist in three situations: 1) very high-resolutions, 2) with AA enabled or 3) in DX8 specific benchmarks. You should honestly not concern yourself with the latter, simply because you buy a video card to play games, not to run 3DMark. > The GeForce3 is consistently a couple of frames slower than the older GeForce2 cards…

"between now and the release of the successor" being about a year, so that sounds pretty accurate.

It would help if there was more explanation of what the RTX units are actually good at. Not every GPU innovation actually ends up widely used. It would be amusing if they lost out by being not programmable enough...

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat as you.. me_cleaner.py

Yeah, I've got a Libreboot'ed X200 and an X230 that I've Coreboot'ed+me_clean'ed. My desktops aren't in such good shape w.r.t. BIOS firmware though.

Talos using POWER is about the only option for us.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#139
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what I do is floating point operations, so I'll see >100% performance gains with the avx boost. I will upgrade.

Any chance your workload would see a benefit from porting the code to a GPU?

I work on tech to automate that. The generic answer is yes as long as you overcome the PCIe bottleneck (or can hide the latency).
Post reply on HN