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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday April 14 2015, @01:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the sound-of-one-hand-clapping dept.

Fudzilla have 'obtained' a slide showing details of a forthcoming APU from AMD based on their new "Zen" architecture.

The highest end compute HSA part has up to 16 Zen x86 cores and supports 32 threads, or two threads per core. This is something we saw on Intel architectures for a while, and it seems to be working just fine. This will be the first exciting processor from the house of AMD in the server / HSA market in years, and in case AMD delivers it on time it might be a big break for the company.

Each Zen core gets 512 KB of L2 cache and each cluster or four Zen cores is sharing 8MB L3 cache. In case we are talking about a 16-core, 32-thread next generation Zen based x86 processor, the total amount of L2 cache gets to a whopping 8MB, backed by 32MB of L3 cache.

This new APU also comes with the Greenland Graphics and Multimedia Engine that comes with HBM memory on the side. The specs we saw indicate that there can be up to 16GB of HBM memory with 512GB/s speed packed on the interposer. This is definitely a lot of memory for an APU GPU, and it also comes with 1/2 rate double precision compute, enhanced ECC and RAS and HSA support.

The new APU sports quad-channel DDR4 support, with up to 256GB per channel at speeds of up to 3.2GHz. No information yet on which processor socket this APU will use, but it's safe to assume the DDR4 support alone will render it incompatible with all AMD's current motherboards. Support is also included for secure boot and AMD's encryption co-processor.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:09AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:09AM (#170746) Homepage Journal

    go look at some Open Source or Free Software source code. Quite a lot of that was written in the nineties, and hasn't been touched much since. Why should it? It works well.

    However it doesn't make use of multicore. A processor like this would work well on a highly loaded server. How would it work for the desktop? While some desktop applications make use of threads many don't, or don't do it well.

    Parallel algorithms have been developed since the very beginning, go look some up.

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  • (Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:36AM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:36AM (#170854) Homepage Journal

    This should improve over time a lot quicker than it has over the last decade of multicore on the desktop. AMD have managed to get their 8-core CPUs into the PS4 and the XB1; devs are being forced to multi-thread their engines, else their games simply don't perform. Unfortunately, this has also had the practical upshot of halving the frame rates we're being told to expect while they get to grips with the poor single-threaded performance and awkward shared FPUs of the Jaguar cores compared to common desktop CPUs - not an entirely fair comparison, but a relevant one nonetheless and it's not done AMD's already tarnished gaming performance credentials any good (again, not commenting on how fairly that reputation was earned).

    As the AM1 platform is so cheap, I've abandoned by idea of building a budget gaming rig around a Pentium anniversary edition and I'm putting the money into an AM1 build with a 5350, spending the budget on the ancillary components that'll survive the inevitable major upgrade, but it'll be fascinating to see what it's really capable of. Seen YouTube vids of the 5350 with a discrete GPU handling Crysis 3 at 1080p/high perfectly well - looks like my folding rig (also AMD - Phenom II X6) might lose a GPU for a while in the near future...

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 15 2015, @11:19AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @11:19AM (#170895) Journal
    Most of the code that worked well in the '90s isn't even remotely CPU-bound. Try looking at things that actually are compute-bound and you'll see things using fine-grained parallelism.
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