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posted by takyon on Tuesday November 13 2018, @09:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-on-paper dept.

Naples, Rome, Milan, Zen 4: An Interview with AMD CTO, Mark Papermaster

The goal of AMD's event in the middle of the fourth quarter of the year was to put into perspective two elements of AMD's strategy: firstly, its commitment to delivering a 7nm Vega based product by the end of the year, as the company promised in early 2018, but also to position its 7nm capabilities as some of the best by disclosing the layout of its next generation enterprise processor set to hit shelves in 2019. [...] We sat down with AMD's CTO, Mark Papermaster, to see if we could squeeze some of the finer details about both AMD's strategy and the finer points of some of the products from the morning sessions.

[...] Ian Cutress: Forrest explained on the stage that the datacenter of today is very different to the datacenter ten years ago (or even 3-5 years ago). What decisions are you making today to predict the datacenter of the future?

Mark Papermaster: We believe we will be positioned very well – it all ties back to my opening comments on Moore's Law. We all accept that the traditional Moore's Law is slowing down, and that while process does still matter you have to be agile about how you put the pieces together, otherwise you cannot win. We leveraged ourselves to have scalability in our first EPYC launch. We leveraged our ability in our chiplet approach here to combine really small 7nm CPU dies with tried and proven 14nm for the IO die. That modularity only grows in importance going forward. We've stated our case as to where we believe it is necessary to keep pace on a traditional Moore's Law growth despite the slowing of the process gains per node and the length of time between major semiconductor nodes. I think you'll see others adopt what we've done with the chiplet approach, and I can tell you we are committed.

[...] IC: Where does Rome sit with CCIX support?

MP: We didn't announce specifically those attributes beyond PCIe 4.0 today, but I can say we are a member of CCIX as we are with Gen Z. Any further detail there you will have to wait until launch. Any specific details about the speeds, feeds, protocols, are coming in 2019.

IC: There have been suggestions that because AMD is saying that Rome is coming in 2019 then that means Q4 2019.

MP: We're not trying to imply any specific quarter or time frame in 2019. If we look at today's event, it was timed it to launch our MI60 GPU in 7nm which is imminent. We wanted to really share with the industry how we've embraced 7nm, and preview what's coming out very soon with MI60, and really share our approach on CPU on Zen 2 and Rome. We're not implying any particular time in 2019, but we'll be forthcoming with that. Even though the GPU is PCIe 3.0 backwards compatible, it helps for a PCIe 4.0 GPU to have a PCIe 4.0 CPU to connect to!

[...] IC: One of the key aspects in AMD's portfolio is the Infinity Fabric, and with Rome you have stated that AMD is now on its second generation IF. Do you see an end in its ability to scale down in process node but also scale out to more chiplets and different IP?

MP: I don't see an end because the IF is made of both of Scalable Data Fabric and a Scalable Control Fabric. The SCF is the key to giving the modularity and that's an architectural product. With our SDF we are very confident on the protocols we developed. The SCF protocols are based on the rich history we have with HyperTransport and we are committed in it generationally to improve bandwidth and latency every generation. IF is important when it applies to on chip connectivity, but it can go chip to chip like we did with EPYC, and also with Vega Radeon Instinct in connecting GPU to GPU. For the chip to chip IF, you are also dependent on the package technology. We see tremendous improvements in package technology over the next five years.

See also: AMD Shows Off "Rome" Data Center CPU, Signs Amazon as Cloud Chip Customer

Previously: AMD Previews Zen 2 Epyc CPUs with up to 64 Cores, New "Chiplet" Design


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 14 2018, @04:06PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 14 2018, @04:06PM (#761766) Journal

    Personally I don't see the point of an x86 at that performance range. That kind of hardware can't do any useful client-side tasks other than simple spreadsheets and word processing and that much I can do with android as well.

    I prefer having the larger screen and keyboard. The devices are cheaper than the top-end Android smartphones that would rival them. If I was able to get an AMD APU Chromebook, it could potentially perform a lot better than what I have now.

    You wait 5 years or so, and any particular form factor is going to perform a lot better than it used to. My chip is from mid-2014 [notebookcheck.net]. I'll probably hold out until 2021 for hardware AV1 support and "7nm" with use of EUV.

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:41PM (2 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday November 14 2018, @06:41PM (#761835)

    I prefer having the larger screen and keyboard.

    I think you can attach a powered usb hub via an otg adapter to most smartphones and get the keyboard and mouse going that way. For the screen there's MHL cables (usb-to-hdmi) or casting which should suffice for casual word processing and video viewing.

    If I was able to get an AMD APU Chromebook, it could potentially perform a lot better than what I have now.

    The price will be at the Pixel range I'm afraid. Closest anyone got to that market was Intel with their Atom lines a few years ago. Apparently they gave up after not breaking even and only stuck to it to prevent ARM from entering the low-end laptop segment.

    You wait 5 years or so, and any particular form factor is going to perform a lot better than it used to.

    Not tablets and laptops. Not for the same price at the very least. Well, unless you consider putting windows 10 in an 8" tablet form an improvement... I, for once, don't.

    Btw, point and case regarding why you shouldn't hold off for a speculative vulnerabilities fix: https://www.zdnet.com/article/researchers-discover-seven-new-meltdown-and-spectre-attacks/ [zdnet.com]

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 14 2018, @07:45PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 14 2018, @07:45PM (#761870) Journal

      My CB3-111 [notebookcheck.net] cost about $95 on Black Friday. It gets what I need it to do done and is quite portable. It has a dual-core Intel Celeron N2840, which is a 7.5 Watt Intel Atom chip from mid-2014. Intel has continued to update this line of chips, and the Intel Celeron N4000 from late 2017 is about 40% faster at a lower TDP and base clock. A pretty big improvement for less than 3 years.

      Considering that AMD has put out plenty of 15 Watt A4-series APUs for cheap laptops, I'm sure they could create a 6-7.5 Watt one intended for fanless laptops, using the improved power efficiency of the TSMC "7nm" process.

      Oh, and I said nothing about holding off for speculative execution fixes.

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      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday November 14 2018, @10:56PM

        by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday November 14 2018, @10:56PM (#761954)

        It gets what I need it to do done and is quite portable...the Intel Celeron N4000 from late 2017 is about 40% faster at a lower TDP and base clock. A pretty big improvement for less than 3 years.

        First of all, Black Friday or otherwise, the price doubled in-between the models so that's apples to oranges right there.

        Secondly, it's not a big improvement. It's just scaling production nodes. In fact, it's quite poor compared to ARM's progress between 2014 and 2017.

        Thirdly, the functionality neither increased nor expanded so it's hard to claim an improvement to the form factor. I mean, it's not like the machine suddenly stopped being a word processor and started being capable of some real world practical usage the previous iteration couldn't pull off. It won't edit videos. It won't run games. And considering web pages just got worse javascript and assets wise, I'd argue that 40% figure might actually not be enough to keep up and the real world usage experience only gotten worse.

        Even Apple done better with their latest tablet by comparison: Their price is as ridiculous as ever but now it actually has the horse power to substitute laptops where it previously couldn't.

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