I have become interested in the alleged hardware changes coming down the pipe. I think Intel and AMD may be at odds again (finally), given that Intel has dominated the processor market for the last few years.

It looks like AMD is making superior inroads in the CPU, APU and GPU market with their announcement of the 14nm process and possibly a FM3 socket, among other things. Only time will tell.

Personally, I am an AMD fan. This is mostly due to cost, but also due to habit. I am not an Intel/Nvidia basher.

What do you folks see, is it relevant, is it significant?

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The AMD roadmap for the next couple of years has been "well leaked". It includes a new processor core, the "Zen", and a new socket the AM4, with the FM3 having been dumped over a year ago. The new 14nm core looks to have a one to one ration core to FPU rather than the 2:1 of the excavator family. The core will be used in a number of guises, on its own, with an AMD "graphics" processor and with an APU. Various sources suggest they are looking at a ~40% improvement in operations per clock cycle, and lower power (well it could hardly be higher than an core FX8970 running flat out....).
Time will tell, the first sales are expected late next year, and I think that will be a "simple" processor, with the devices with GPU and APU to follow on in 2017.
Time will tell

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

http://www.maximumpc.com/best-graphics-cards

Wow! I didn't feel I was quite that far behind the times. Good info...I thought...[/url]

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http://www.maximumpc.com/best-cpus-processors/

This one hurt my feelings, I may become an Intel convert after all...

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I'm OK with that....my new build is a 4690K and an R9 390X, so, cost effective.

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Don't take life too seriously, as you'll never come out of it alive!

Polaris? What is this? Is AMD finally making a move?

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Polaris? What is this? Is AMD finally making a move?

AMD normally likes to over hype their offerings. So we will see that they actually bring to the market. The Radeon Fury GPUs claimed to be 2.5 times more efficient prior to launch. The delivered products only provided small efficiency gains.

			GFLOPS		TDP	GFLOPS/Watt	
			SP	DP	Watts	SP	DP
GeForce GTX 950		1573.0	 49.2	 90	17.5	0.5
GeForce GTX 960		2308.0	 72.1	120	19.2	0.6
GeForce GTX 970		3494.0	109.0	145	24.1	0.8
GeForce GTX 980		4612.0	144.0	165	28.0	0.9
GeForce GTX 980 Ti	5632.0	176.0	250	22.5	0.7
GeForce GTX Titan X	6144.0	192.0	250	24.6	0.8

Radeon R7 360		1612.8	100.8	100	16.1	1.0
Radeon R7 370		1945.6	124.8	110	17.7	1.1
Radeon R9 380		3476.5	217.3	190	18.3	1.1
Radeon R9 380X		3973.1	248.3	190	20.9	1.3
Radeon R9 390		5120.0	640.0	275	18.6	2.3
Radeon R9 390X		5913.6	739.2	275	21.5	2.7
Radeon R9 Fury		7168.0	448.0	275	26.1	1.6
Radeon R9 Fury X	8601.6	537.6	275	31.3	2.0

In their power demo they compared the new GCN design to the GTX 950, but I think they should have compared it to the R7 360. However that might have shown the figures for the R7 360 to be inaccurate.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Polaris? What is this? Is AMD finally making a move?

AMD normally likes to over hype their offerings. So we will see that they actually bring to the market.

Oh man, remember when Fermi was being hyped for like.. two years, even with the year+ worth of setbacks? Nvidia said Fermi was going to be THE ATI-killer and was going to revolutionize the GPU landscape forever.

Then after all the delays and the long wait and all the hype... Fermi quietly hit the market and it turned out the best that it could do was about 5% better on benchmarks than the second-best ATI, but was still 20% behind the top ATI card.

What a let-down.

But that taught me to never buy into the hype, especially when they start promising/claiming performance comparisons before they've even made the first functional prototype and tested it in-house.

I think AMD is trying to not claim any absolute performance figures, but merely just stating things like "going back to one FPU per core" and "ground-up redesign of caches and control/management logic" with the only performance claims that I've heard are "40% more IPC than Excavator" and "is meant to compete with Intel's high-end offerings."

That last one is just the way it was written by that journalist, using the power of speculation/assumption to fill-in-the-blanks. There's no doubt AMD is aiming for mid-high i7 territory, but they're not willing to state outright that it will be that good.....or maybe even better.

What I have heard, though, is that the desktop Zens may be delayed a small amount (a month or two, at most) since they are going to focus on getting the Opterons out the door, since the server market has more revenue potential than the desktop market does, since everyone is going to tablets and netbooks these days.



I'm really hoping AMD can pull this one off though. I don't particularly have anything against Intel...except for their ludicrous pricing models. That's why I've always gone with AMD systems, because the CPUs and the boards of them are generally about half the price of Intel CPUs and boards.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Yep, I read up on some of the history. It seems AMD and Nvidia have both hyped their products a bit. I looks though that the possibility of a two new dies(?) and possibly two foundries? http://wccftech.com/amd-polaris/

If this is true and real, my new build will have to wait for this.

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I have an issue with "Polaris".

The article wrote:

As stars are the most efficient photon generators in our universe, thus AMD found it only fitting to call its most ambitious graphics architecture to date “Polaris” after the brightest star seen from earth.

Fun facts:

Polaris: apparent magnitude: 1.98
Sirius: apparent magnitude: -1.46

From Wikipedia:

Sirius is the brightest star in the Earth's night sky.

Of course, they could be referring to absolute magnitude, in which case, Polaris has Sirius beat on that one (-3.6 vs. 1.4), but there are tons of other stars with more absolute magnitude than Polaris (as seen here).

[/OCD nitpicking]

I bet they wanted to call it "Sirius" but ran into trademark issues with that satellite radio brand.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Polaris? What is this? Is AMD finally making a move?

AMD normally likes to over hype their offerings. So we will see that they actually bring to the market.

Oh man, remember when Fermi was being hyped for like.. two years, even with the year+ worth of setbacks? Nvidia said Fermi was going to be THE ATI-killer and was going to revolutionize the GPU landscape forever.

Then after all the delays and the long wait and all the hype... Fermi quietly hit the market and it turned out the best that it could do was about 5% better on benchmarks than the second-best ATI, but was still 20% behind the top ATI card.

What a let-down.

But that taught me to never buy into the hype, especially when they start promising/claiming performance comparisons before they've even made the first functional prototype and tested it in-house.

I think AMD is trying to not claim any absolute performance figures, but merely just stating things like "going back to one FPU per core" and "ground-up redesign of caches and control/management logic" with the only performance claims that I've heard are "40% more IPC than Excavator" and "is meant to compete with Intel's high-end offerings."

That last one is just the way it was written by that journalist, using the power of speculation/assumption to fill-in-the-blanks. There's no doubt AMD is aiming for mid-high i7 territory, but they're not willing to state outright that it will be that good.....or maybe even better.

What I have heard, though, is that the desktop Zens may be delayed a small amount (a month or two, at most) since they are going to focus on getting the Opterons out the door, since the server market has more revenue potential than the desktop market does, since everyone is going to tablets and netbooks these days.



I'm really hoping AMD can pull this one off though. I don't particularly have anything against Intel...except for their ludicrous pricing models. That's why I've always gone with AMD systems, because the CPUs and the boards of them are generally about half the price of Intel CPUs and boards.

Yeah I learned long ago not to buy into the hype & wait for reviews/benchmarks to do the talking.

I have never found the AMD parts to be that cheap vs the Intel ones. Many years ago it might have been a much larger difference, but I think at the time the performance gap was also much larger. Today motherboards with the same features run pretty much the same cost for Intel or AMD. In the $100-140 range you can get a good board for either. Then for the Chips I put their CPUs like the FX 8350 against the i5. Given they are pretty on par in terms of performance. Compared to the equivalent i5 the AMD chips only saves about $50. If used heavily, like running SETI@home 24/7, that savings disappears in the first year from added electric costs.

So hopefully with their plans AMD can actually bring something better to the table for their CPUs. It only benefits us consumers when they are battling it out. We get better parts for less money. No matter which camp you like.

For my next HTPC build I would like something along the lines of my BayTrail J1900 system in terms of power consumption. Its only other requirements will be:
-4k video at 60fps while under full SETI@home load. Granted the GPU may have to be suspending while watching video.
-RAID 5 support for storage. The pseudo fake RAID with current chipsets is fine.
-CPU & MB <=$200

If AMD can manage that before Intel I'll get their hardware.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/single-socket-amd-zen-cpu,30949.html

Quite interesting...

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