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Today was Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD) 2015 Financial Analyst Day. The last one was held in 2012. Since then, the company has changed leadership, put its APUs in the major consoles, and largely abandoned the high-end chip market to Intel. Now AMD says it is focusing on gaming, virtual reality, and datacenters. AMD has revealed details of upcoming CPUs and GPUs at the event:
Perhaps the biggest announcement relates to AMD's x86 Zen CPUs, coming in 2016. AMD is targeting a 40% increase in instructions-per-clock (IPC) with Zen cores. By contrast, Intel's Haswell (a "Tock") increased IPC by about 10-11%, and Broadwell (a "Tick") increased IPC by about 5-6%. AMD is also abandoning the maligned Bulldozer modules with Clustered Multithreading in favor of a Simultaneous Multithreading design, similar to Intel's Hyperthreading. Zen is a high priority for AMD to the extent that it is pushing back its ARM K12 chips to 2017. AMD is also shifting focus away from Project Skybridge, an "ambidextrous framework" that combined x86 and ARM cores in SoCs. Zen cores will target a wide range of designs from "top-to-bottom", including both sub-10W TDPs and up to 100W. The Zen architecture will be followed by Zen+ at some point.
On the GPU front, AMD's 2016 GPUs will use FinFETs. AMD plans to be the first vendor to use High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a 3D/stacked memory standard that enables much higher bandwidth (hence the name) and saves power. NVIDIA also plans to use HBM in its Pascal GPUs slated for 2016. The HBM will be positioned around the processor, as the GPU's thermal output would make cooling the RAM difficult if it were on top. HBM is competing against the similar Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) standard.
Although High Bandwidth Memory is on track for 2016, it will actually be featured in an AMD desktop GPU to be released this quarter. AnandTech expects HBM to become a standard feature in AMD APUs, which benefit from higher memory bandwidth:
Coupled with the fact that any new GPU from AMD should also include AMD's latest color compression technology, and the implication is that the effective increase in memory bandwidth should be quite large. For AMD, they see this as being one of the keys of delivering better 4K performance along with better VR performance.
Finally, while talking about HBM on GPUs, AMD is also strongly hinting that they intend to bring HBM to other products as well. Given their product portfolio, we consider this to be a pretty transparent hint that the company wants to build HBM-equipped APUs. AMD's APUs have traditionally struggled to reach peak performance due to their lack of memory bandwidth – 128-bit DDR3 only goes so far – so HBM would be a natural extension to APUs."
AMD's Carrizo APUs will be released beginning this quarter, but it may be worth it to wait:
Badging aside, AMD still will have to face the fact that they're launching a 28nm notebook APU versus Intel's 14nm notebook CPUs, the company is once again banking on their strong GPU performance to help drive sales. Coupled with the combination of low power optimizations in Carrizo and full fixed-function hardware decoding of HEVC, and AMD will be relying on Carrizo to carry them through to 2016 and Zen.
AMD also announced Radeon M300 discrete GPUs for notebooks, promising "refined efficiency and power management" as well as DirectX 12 support.
One of the more interesting chips on AMD's roadmap may be a "high-performance server APU" intended for both high-performance computing and workstations.
Alternate coverage at Tom's Hardware and The Register.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:43AM
AMD hasn't made anything significant since x64 (perhaps the only significant thing they created). AMD fails in comparison to Intel in every way except the price point. For $75 more, why not buy Intel instead of piece of shit AMD.
Fuck you AMD and all you swindlers that bought that junk, built "computers" out of it, and sold it to people. It's shit, and you are shit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:23AM
When Intel went insane with the P4 (tying it to expensive RAMBUS memory and then pushing ahead with a design that assumed that it could be quickly scaled to 10GHz when it was clear that over 2GHz would be problematic) they were amazing in comparison. The K7 was a solid chip and the Opterons (with their on-die memory controllers when the Xeons still had them off-chip in the northbridge) were impressive.
Since the Core 2 launched, AMD has struggled a lot. Their main advantage now is that they don't try to do artificial market segmentation. For example, when I bought the board for my NAS, it had an AMD CPU because Intel wouldn't sell Atom boards with more than 2 SATA ports, AMD would happily sell their equivalent with 4 or 6. Intel would disable the virtualisation extensions on their low-end chips, AMD kept them enabled.
Laptops have almost always been Intel dominated, but since the Pentium M there really hasn't been an AMD chip that's seemed competitive and that's been the largest growth area for the past decade. At the high end, we've been buying Intel systems since the first i7s for places that used to be exclusively Opterons.
Maybe AMD's ARM processors will make a difference to the company. A 40% IPC improvement sounds more impressive than a 10% improvement, but only if you don't consider how far behind they were before.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:38AM
Great minds think alike ;)
I'm building a cheap G3258 rig to tide me over until Zen comes out and give me an LGA1150 upgrade path if it's a performance flop, but I'll give AMD the benefit of the doubt. I'm no fanboi, but over the years I've built systems around the K6-233, Celeron 400, Duron 750, Duron 1400, Ath64 3700+, Pentium E2180 and Phenom II X6. None of them have been high-flyers exactly, but it illustrates how AMD have historically offered better value than Intel; they still do today, even if they don't even compete at the top end of the market any more.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:41PM
Don't forget, AMD was first with 64bit x86.
I've been rooting for AMD for years. Kept getting pushed back into the Intel fold. First attempt was a K6 on a motherboard that could go either way. But, the K6 would hang, and the Pentium would not, so back to Intel. Tried again when Intel released the Pentium III with those unique identifiers burned into each processor. No way was I going to have a computer with a new "feature" that could help rat me out for supposed piracy. But by the time of the Pentium 4, Intel chips did floating point math every clock cycle, while AMD chips were only every other clock cycle, and I needed fast math, so back to Intel I went.
I've also been watching ATI vs Nvidia, ready to go with whichever one would finally allow an open graphics driver for Linux that has decent 3D acceleration. I'm still waiting for that. Meantime, Intel really improved their integrated graphics. Their HD 4000 actually has decent performance, for a low end graphics offering. And they offer open source drivers. I didn't like having to turn back to Intel, again, but Nvidia and ATI/AMD weren't delivering. As for other graphics companies, who is there? Matrox? They don't do fast 3D. 3dfx with the fondly remembered Voodoo line? Long gone, as are many other graphics card companies. SiS? Way more hostile to Linux than NVidia and AMD.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:58PM
You know, I always thought the Athlon had better floating point performance than the Pentium 4 - I guess not. [tomshardware.com]
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:29AM
Haters gotta hate. But there is something to take away from this - AMD's market share is the lowest it's been since the GHz Wars, primarily because the hobbyist/enthusiast system builder market likes to get "The Best, as seen in Benchmarks", and AMD have only had price/performance value products on the market for a while now. Even if AMD's next product is superior to Intel's gear, AMD have to face Intel's entrenched position in the hearts, minds and gaming rigs of this core target market. Let's hope the 40% IPC improvement they're touting doesn't turn out to be overhype like the 50% benchmark lead they claimed pre-release for the FX 8150.