AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#151

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 7:45 AM UTC

RickSanchez2600 wrote: post #124

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 G…

Amiga hardware is what made it special, an generic OS on a generic hardware is just yet another OS.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#152

Post by llampx » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 8:02 AM UTC

twtw wrote: post #120

beerlord wrote: post #109

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…

Nobody is arguing that ray tracing is not going to be good, or that its not eventually going to be supported by more games. I think most people are just saying that the push will come from developers when the fps hit isn't so bad, and when more console hardware supports ray tracing.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#153

Post by llampx » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 8:05 AM UTC

fierarul wrote: post #34

Rychard wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall hearing that certain motherboard manufacturers were disabling ECC for their lower-end AMD boards. Does anyone know if this was ever confirmed or not?

My newly purchased Gigabyte B450M DS3H, says clearly 'Dual Channel Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 4 DIMMs'. https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/B450M-DS3H-rev-10#kf It also mentions that: >Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules (operate in non-ECC mode) Note the operate in non-ECC mode remark. Seems pretty clear to me. The CPU might allow ECC but now it's the motherboard playing tricks.

I also have a Gigabyte motherboard. Pretty disappointed that it doesn't have ECC support. For my next machine I will look more closely.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#154

Post by linedash » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 9:09 AM UTC

ENOTTY wrote: post #100

djsumdog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. I expect both vendors to reach parity with respect to mitigations of known speculative execution vulnerabilities. Whether their architectures have been fundamentally redesigned to make these issues more difficult to exploit is anyone's guess. Variant 1: Both AMD and Intel will continue to rely on OS patches. Variant 2: Both AMD and Intel will fix in silicon. Intel's fix comes in Cascade Lake. Variant 3 (aka Melt…

Don't forget the recent seven additions to meltdown/spectre. It'll be interesting to see if the latest round of hardware protections help there.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#155

Post by apexalpha » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 9:39 AM UTC

ahoka wrote: post #145

Twirrim wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Packet... all have AMD shapes, in bare metal and VM to varying degrees. The list goes on and on. Oracle: https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2018-10-23-amd-and-ora... Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-lv2-se... AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/introduci... Packet: https://www.packet.com/hardware/amd/

LV2 is invite only on Azure, eg. not generally available.

Off-topic but eg = for example, ie = in other words.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#156

Post by atq2119 » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

slededit wrote: post #139

jacquesm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I assume that should be "and can hide latency"?

While GPU offloading is extremely powerful in terms of compute, you have to deal with both bandwidth limitations (de facto ~12 GB/s for x16 PCIe 3.0) and the latency of launching compute kernels and waiting for them to complete.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#157

Post by tutanchamun » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

zymhan wrote: post #96

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…

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

Seperating the analog logic (IO die) from the digital logic (CPU cores). Analog shrinks really bad with smaller nodes wheras digital logic shrinks really good.

New process nodes get more and more expensive - especially if the node is new (bad yields etc.) So you want to get the most out of it as possible, which AMD does with this strategy.

For example Zen 1 8 core chips are 213 mm2 on 14nm. On 7nm these chipse would be > 106 mm2 (because the analog elements don't scale). Zen 2 chiplets should be at most 75 mm2 (while also increasing cache, widen AVX etc.) which is mobile SoC territory which means they are cheaper to produce (better yields etc.). Since Intel uses monolithic dies AMD already had an cost advatage, with Zen 2 it's not even funny.

Especially if the guesses of many people are true and AMD designed the IO chip to be cut down, which means they can reuse it for their desktop CPUs (Ryzen on AM4). Anonther nice advantage of this would be that they can bin the chip even better for EPYC, Threadripper and Ryzen.

AdoredTV does a good job of aggregating all the infos/ideas that are floating around and presenting them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6AG-woscDU

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#158

Post by atq2119 » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 9:58 AM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #142

beerlord wrote: post #109

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.

The hardware raytracing support is a huge step in the right direction for real time graphics. The shaky jenga tower of hacks on top of the rasterization pipeline that is in the current generation of rendering engines is barely sustainable. Fast raytracing provides an alternative that is much closer to the actual physical model of light transport in the real world and does not require as many nasty approximations and…

The currently available generation of hardware based real time raytracing cannot beat the quality of rasterization at the same framerates. NVidia built a cool bit of hardware, but their media blitz was seriously misleading. It's much faster than anything you can do on earlier hardware, but that doesn't mean it's actually fast yet for general game engines.

One of the problems is that raytracing is inherently noisy, so you actually have to shoot many rays (or trace many paths) for each pixel on the screen, and you really need to get into the high double digits for acceptable results purely from raytracing.

Part of NVidia's sales pitch is that you can reduce the number of samples / rays using advanced post-processing filters based on CNNs. But then you're back to building a jenga tower of hacks, just this time on top of raytracing instead of on top of rasterization. You may prefer the raytracing jenga tower perhaps, but truth in advertisement should make it clear that raytracing alone just isn't there yet.

It's true though that this current generation of hardware is promising, and things are bound to get better quickly. For now, the most you're going to get is hybrid techniques where rasterization is used for the bulk of the rendering, and raytracing is used selectively e.g. for parts of a scene or for shadows.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#159

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 10:09 AM UTC

atq2119 wrote: post #156

slededit wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I assume that should be " and can hide latency"? While GPU offloading is extremely powerful in terms of compute, you have to deal with both bandwidth limitations (de facto ~12 GB/s for x16 PCIe 3.0) and the latency of launching compute kernels and waiting for them to complete.

That depends on the problem space. For some problems latency does not need to be an issue, if the problem can be pipe-lined then you can keep all your cores running at a high percentage of their theoretical maximum load even if latency is high.

For real time applications this is usually not an option, there latency > some threshold will kill your proposed solution.

Re: AMD Discloses Initial Zen 2 Details

#160

Post by saiya-jin » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 10:27 AM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #142

beerlord wrote: post #109

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.

The hardware raytracing support is a huge step in the right direction for real time graphics. The shaky jenga tower of hacks on top of the rasterization pipeline that is in the current generation of rendering engines is barely sustainable. Fast raytracing provides an alternative that is much closer to the actual physical model of light transport in the real world and does not require as many nasty approximations and…

For a gamer, Nvidia's latest card offering is vastly disappointing. Technology that is not there and won't be there for maybe next 6 years (if they stick to 3 year release cycle), offering some shiny surfaces at best, at massively increased price. I really hope AMD will come with some good cheaper competition.

Gamers want fast framerates, high polygon count, high textures much more than some currently-useless raytracing. Solve those into near-reality quality in at least 1440p resolution, and then we can talk about these gimmicks. I'll happily skip this (and next) gen and will be OK with some 1080 card.