Which by the way is one of the reasons why the argument that "Intel would never allow AMD to be sold to another company" is so STUPID. If they do something like that and somehow retract their own licensing to AMD, let's see how well Intel does in the market without the 64-bit support licensed from AMD......
That's why I believe AMD could easily sell itself to Qualcomm or Samsung if it wanted to. Intel may throw a hissy fit, but at the end of the day there's nothing they can do about it. Worst case scenario, whoever buys AMD, has to pay a little more for Intel's IP, but nothing that would break the company.
If intel wasn't licensed then it would be monopoly for AMD in no time, ever wonder why they licensed intel?
Guess what intel licensed x86 to AMD before that for the same reason. It is funny how few people understand why AMD, and Intel before that 'had' to essentially give up something that would destroy their biggest competitor.
Actually the way I last read the licensing agreement worked is as long as AMD licenses x86, Intel has exclusive use of any AMD innovations in x86. That's how Intel essentially "licensed" x86-64 for free.
It's like Mazda licensing a platform to Ford to build, and in return Mazda is allowed to monitor improvements to the platform to use on their own vehicles. This is commonly referred to as a joint venture technology agreement, and although AMD and Intel don't call it that, it's what it appears to be because the fine print of Intel licensing permits them to peak inside architectural improvements.
Note that this has nothing to do with the manufacturing end, unlike my Mazda>Ford analogy which is exclusively manufacturing based.
"Actually the way I last read the licensing agreement worked is as long as AMD licenses x86, Intel has exclusive use of any AMD innovations in x86. That's how Intel essentially "licensed" x86-64 for free."
I doubt this, as this would mean that terminating AMD would terminate Intel x86-64 license. Think IBM, Samsung, Oracle or Apple buying AMD and stop making x86. Then Intel would not have x86-64 license anymore. So by paying 5-10B$ for AMD you could stop Intel's current 64 license which is >70% (?) of their revenue or use this as ransom.
All past-tense licensed innovation is grandfathered in upon a technology agreement termination. Legally. For instance, Mazda and Ford can use each others previous platforms indefinitely.
I like AMD and a fan. The agreement with Intel products Intel regardless if the allow someone else that would buy AMD from keeping X64 available to Intel
I think the point was in response to the OP, who was suggesting that AMD only ever copies Intel. The example of AMD64 is one where AMD was the innovator, though that's ancient history now.
Nobody's disputing that AMD invented it. But what do you want Intel to do? Create their own and then all software companies have to support 32-bit, AMD64, and Intel64?
Intel was close to releasing their own and gave up on consumer Intel64 when AMD beat them to market. Though I believe Intel still implemented it in some form in their Itanium brand?
Microsoft was already in the process of creating a 64bit version of Windows based on AMD's 64bit implementation (hence the reason you see AMD64 everywhere in 64bit Windows). Microsoft basically told Intel they were not going to support two competing implementations of "x64", so Intel caved and adopted the AMD64 implementation.
They license the ISA's ie. use of instructions and the expected output. The whole silicon designs are not cross-licensed. There probably have some IP of the silicon cross-licensed but the major point was they could handle the same instructions and be mostly compatible. AMD could only fully copy 486 and earlier designs. You can copy and implement the same ISA without having the same silicon. Intel had started a design for x86-64 but the front-end decoding and instructions were changed to be cmpatible. With micro/macro ops and microcoding there can be a lot of abstraction between ISA and execution. Intel made at least 1 mistake with their early AMD64 implementation that had to have work arounds and a later fix.
Opposite. Intel was vehement at the time that 64 bits needed to be a clean break from x86 and were pushing for their Itanium processors, implementing IA64 (completely incompatible with x86). The market followed AMD, especially sice they had the better architecture at the time (Athlon64, with 64 bits and in processor memory controllers, faster interconnect, better server scaling...). Intel then licensed AMD64 and and rebranded it EMT64 or x86-64.
wow. finally someone who remembers that time correctly. Intel pushed for Itanium for too much time, even after they adopted amd's 64bit implementation. They eventually had to drop it as it never got enough market.
Microsoft did make an IA64 edition on NT and 2000 but without x86 compatibility there were no apps. The genius behind AMD's 64 bit implementation is it is simply a memory extension of x86 with 64 bit integer registers, maintaining complete 32-bit compatibility with no real impact on 32 bit performance, while costing very little die space for the extensions.
Microsoft and software developers saw this and basically told Intel their Itanium dreams were not going to come true.
No, the IA64 architecture of Itanium does not try to keep any backwards-compatibility with x86, so any mention of it even being considered as an alternative to AMD64 is absurd. At that time the world was just not ready for a compatibility-breaking switch.
The ISA didn't directly try to keep backwards compatibility but Intel did put some x86 functionality into the first few generations of Itanium. This was later removed in chips post 2006.
Original x86 (32-bit) was Intel-AMD developed. AMD then developed x86-64, or x86 64-bit, and then Intel continues to license it to this day.
There's no copying here. Someone did it first, then others are licensing that IP from them.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 >x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64 and AMD64) is the 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set. >The original specification, created by AMD and released in 2000, has been implemented by AMD, Intel and VIA.
That's why sometimes you might see driver versions labeled AMD64, and you might be puzzled as to why despite being on a Intel 64-bit CPU that the 64-bit driver you downloaded states AMD64 in the name. It's because it was an AMD-first technology, but it's usable on any x86-64bit processor.
Actually, not exactly correct. Intel was forced by Microsoft to adopt AMD's solution, despite Intel having parallel own implementation which was different. And Intel's version is still bit different from AMD's. (Some instructions are different between implementations, mostly relevant only to OS)
In many ways, Intel's 64-bit was superior to AMD's, but x86-64 was more backward compatible. I can see it both ways....different solutions to the same problem. Both companies have pushed each other...
How is IA64 superior to AMD64? AMD64 can run 32-bit software without performance hit and still run 64-bit software comparatively equally to Intel counterpart. IA64 Itanium runs 64-bit software much slower than a Pentium 4 64-bit at the same clock and has a massive performance hit in 32-bit emulation (1/3 as fast). Aren't both of them based on Netburst? EMT64 only has more codes than AMD64 as it also implement both AMD64 and IA64, which is no longer used in modern server software anymore.
Wasn't Itanium based on "Very Long Instruction Word" architecture? Hence the long pipelines and reliance on clock speed? The Pentium M from Intel Israel righted Intel's ship and allowed them to take leadership of the x86 architecture back from AMD.
Given how quickly they were able to implement x86_64, my bet is Intel already thought about extending x86 to 64bits, they just didn't want to do it because they were pushing Itanium hard at the time.
But then AMD comes out with AMD64, and (rather predictably) the market loves it, which puts a real damper on Intel's Itanium push and eventually they are forced to capitulate and follow suit.
Well, it's not a complete copy. There are some difference which should make it interesting to see how the chips line up against each other. x2 L2 cache on Zen vs x2 L3 cache on Intel, the larger core/thread counts (let's hope they offer the 8c/16t to consumers), and of course, the big one being how this all affects the integrated graphics in APU form.
Will the change to 16nm FinFET allow them to put in more GPU? What kind of clocks and/or power envelope will this run at? A lot of this makes a huge difference in the types of systems which can be made - a powerful hex-core CPU with a beefier IGP in a 60-80w TDP would be nice to see.
you'll get more cores but not more IPC. all signs point to skylake being at least 2 years ahead of zen, although since intel has barely increased performance in 2 years, it shouldnt make to big of a difference, in gaming at least.
Disagree, the performance boost of each generation is always less than 5% in the last designs by intel. Only a few tests show really higher performance per clock.
Value of top end K chips actually don't really go down that much. If you want to look for a Haswell devils canon, you still have to pony up around $300, maybe you can find a used one for $250ish, but same can be said for a Skylake. Even a 4770k or 3770k is hard to find for under $250 used. Even a 2770k i sold one not too long ago for $245.
Prices for computer hardware isn't dropping very fast because performance has barely increased. A two year old CPU now is for all intents and purposes is just as good as a brand new one. There may be some marginal situations where the 5% difference in performance matters, but for the most part they perform identically.
Compare this to the heyday of the late 90s when a two year old CPU might be half as fast as a new one. It was no surprise that upgrade cycles were shorter and resale values much less.
While I agree with Nagorak, I have moved from a 2yr cycle to a 4+ cycle on CPU/platforms, I think the Apple folks have a right to gripe about the lack of updates - some of them are a few gens back at this point and prices haven't dropped enough to make up for that IMO.
1. Intel's X64 is based on AMD's license.....so what !? (remeber the Itanium disaster?) 2. AMD also hold X86 licenses which are used by Inte - both x86 and x64 are cross-licenses
So in the end they both license/copy another -- so what!?
And I am pretty sure after the recent Intel/Nvidia rattle that the next Intel GPUs are being build via AMD's license
There’s a massive difference though. AMD only has a license due to IBM insisting on Intel allowing a second manufacturer for its patented x86 CPUs. So AMD has been a parasite living on Intel patents with a degree of symbiosis in the relationship. That makes their various successful phases all the more noteworthy and hopefully Zen leads into another long awaited successful phase.
I think you are jumping to conclusions much to quickly over a mere PR spat with Nvidia.
He's right tho. AMD was a licensee of Intel to produce bulk Intel products, because intel couldn't keep up with the demand. Then AMD reverse engineered Intels products and brought their own line out and Intel didn't like that, thus they broke the agreement, which in the end didn't help much since AMD had already all they needed.
That being said, what AMD did anyone would, so it's just business as per usual. Then they actually stepped up and made great own CPUs to combat intel and made a great dual core and AMD64. AMD did a lot for computing, but the early days were pretty much a contractor and pirate.
I wish them all the best with Zen and future, and I hope they get Vega right, by that I mean don't fucking gimp the chip by power delivery, cause you can't get that under control, everyone knows nvidia is ahead in that game, just give a great performing GPU on the market and let it eat 250W if need be.
Yeah, they matched Intel on the CPU front, and Intel responded by abusing their stronger market position to limit AMD's gains. I'll be happy to get an AMD processor back in my machine just based on principle.
Correction: IBM forced Intel to license number of CPU manufactures. (At least two suppliers, similar to rule sued by militaries) And there was lawsuit or two. Fun stuff.
Maybe you are too young to remember, but AMD has historically been a primary driver in processor innovation.
They created the first native multi-core dies, broke the Ghz barrier, first to debut dynamic clock speeds, invented the seamless x64 transition and AMD64 instruction set, created CMT, created HSA, created the APU, and so much more. And I'm only focusing on CPUs, here.
Intel uses a great deal of AMD tech, and vice-versa.
I used to buy AMD exclusively but they have been second rate for 10 years now. I don't buy innovations I buy products and AMD have really struggled for a decade to offer decent products unless your main criteria is value. Value is fine but for mobile products where power consumption is very important and for workstations where performance is king AMD have had nothing to compete. I'm very glad that Zen is looking as if it will compete at the higher end although I think they will find it harder to compete with Core M. Just because I don't view AMD through ten year old rose tinted glasses doesn't mean I don't want them to succeed. I have been feeling confident for Zen as an 8c/16t chips for ages but it's how it does as a 4c/8t chip that may well be more important in the consumer space unless the 8c/16c chip is unusually cheap for its performance level which it could even be.
Some people here can't tell the difference between someone who is critical of AMD's failings and an Intel fanboy. Intel have their issues but they have delivered decent chips in the decade that AMD fell into disarray. I'm not loyal to incompetent companies.
It's been hard for anyone to stick with AMD for the last decade. Phenom and Phenom II came up short, and then Bulldozer turned out to be a total disaster. In retrospect AMD should have tossed Bulldozer in the trash and started work on a new processor design immediately. Trying to iterate on that failed design is what almost killed AMD.
Dynamic clock speeds existed in mobile (think ARM/MIPS) designs back in the 90's.
Seamless x86 transition could be credited to Transmeta for thei VLIW based Crusoe line of chips running x86 code. Runner up could be the FX32! emulator that ran unmodifed x86 Windows binaries in Alpha based hardware back in the 90's.
CMT was done beforehand in Sun's Niagra chip. There designs even before that did unit sharing for CMT.
Elements of HSA came from 3Dlabs and their cards supporting a unified virtual address space.
Sorry, wrong. Multicores weren't AMD''s invention, dynamic clock speeds were parallel execution, x64 transition si AMD win only thanks to Microsoft who killed Intel's own development, CMT is not AMD¨s invention (and I would say it is nothing to be proud of), HSA is just label for preexisting technologies, APU was done before AMD's own (in fact, Intel had APU-like chip in late 80s),. AMD didn't invent much as most of technologies were bought in previous acquisitions like HyperTransport (See DEC Alpha)
Sorry, to tell you, but what you posit is pure fantasy. AMD inveted very few things and fewer of them were of much importance or use.
HyperTransport was an AMD creation though they were not the first to use it. Former DEC engineers did help create it but they were employees by AMD at the time. AMD did license the EV6 bus for the the first Athlon (not Athlon 64). The first chip to that used the HT bus was Transmeta due to delays on the first generation Athlon 64/Operton.
thats the thing, Did AMD actually learn something from their ARM inc partners and put in a real up to date interconnect or two that can lower overall latency and massively improve data throughput (ready with HBM2 perhaps) or did they cheap out again and rehash the usual antiquated suspects
AMD was first with CPU + GPU = APU. Intel has the laughably poor performing Intel IGP LOL. And to get it Intle had to poach technology from NVidia and then NVidia sued them!!!! LOL
AMD owns X86-64.
SO your point?????
AMD has a license to copy Intel and if like Frank Sinatra chooses to do it their way, it can only be good for the consumer.
So smarten up. Without AMD Intel would have killed the PC 10 years ago with $2000 CPU's!!!
I don't live in the past from a decade ago. When AMD finally release their first decent CPU in 10 years wake me up. Even with negligible competition from AMD Intel has chosen to keep the prices of chips for the mainstream socket at low levels for 10 years. It was 2009 with Lynnfield that they last had a $1,000 Extreme chip for consumers and there were plenty of good chips in that range starting at under $300 so the Extreme chips were for rich fools really.
intel created a entire artificial market segment with the i5's because of lack of competition. they still sell dual cores for christ sake, and havent offered anything above 4 cores on the main stream market, which AMD's had for over 6 years already.
On 22nm, let alone 14, there is no way they couldn't have made a affordable 6 core. but all we get are ridiculously priced -E variants on a ridiculously overpriced platform.
that is still at most ~20 years back, AMD is on the face of the earth for 47 years and more as half of that they spend innovating nothing, but being contractors and priates of technology.
and they went from that to creating the athlon64 and royally kicking intel's ass with superior innovations in just 14 years (counting from the first k5).
to bad intel's monopoly abuse has already done its damage leaving AMD wofully short on production capacity meaning 80% of people still had to buy intel's crummy shit for too much money. and with AMD not making nearly as much money as it should have from the athlon64, intel could one again copy everything AMD did and then brute force outspend them.
Heck, people are forgetting some significant firsts for AMD--the first to bring the IMC and hypertransport to x86. Both were big for the server world, too.
Innovation is good and AMD have had many moments in the sun but let's not forget that Core 2 duo lacked an IMC and still trounced the AMD competition. Good products matter more than innovation and the trick is to turn innovation into good products.
and lets not forget the first with a on-die memory controller for a x86 CPU. a huge improvement on both the desktop and the server space. it basically is what made more then 2 socket motherboards viable at all.
Pretty sure they did not, they had memory management techs built-in, but not memory controllers. The 286 had memory management capabilities as well, and so did all of AMD's comparable CPUs, naturally.
Llano came out June 2011. Intel had Westmere (January 2010) and Sandy Bridge (January 2011) before Llano. Even if you discount Westmere since they were separate dies on the same package, Sandy Bridge still got there before Llano.
Intel and AMD have a cross-licensing agreement which covers patents and technologies from both firms allowing both firms to use a rather generous amount of patents from their competitor.
Nobody copied nobody. The two companies are quite intertwined tbh.
"Advanced Micro Devices has clarified terms of the cross-license agreement with Intel Corp. on Thursday. As it appears, if either AMD or Intel change their control (i.e., gets acquired), the cross-license agreement between the two companies is automatically terminated for both parties. AMD and Intel have a cross-licensing agreement, which guarantees that the companies will not pursue litigation for any potential patent infringements. The agreement covers entire patent portfolio for both companies, which includes general-purpose processors, graphics adapters and other intellectual property. For example, AMD can design and sell microprocessors compatible with Intel’s x86 instruction set architecture and featuring a variety of extensions, whereas Intel can develop and ship central processing units that utilize IP and extensions initially created by AMD . The cross-licensing agreement has a number of terms and limitations. For example, the chip designers are not allowed to build processors that are compatible with competitor’s infrastructure (e.g., sockets, mainboards, etc.). Besides, if AMD and Intel change their ownership , the agreement terminated."
Intel uses a unified scheduler, and it looks from the diagram that AMD is using seven schedulers... which is just insane. Beyond both using SMT schemes and executing x86, they are very different designs.
Zen is actually an enlarged evolution of the Jag Cores with doubled up pipelines and SMT. Don't take my word for it either, study the link below and pay attention to what we learn about Zen. Jag/Puma+ are actually better Cores than their intel competitors despite a huge node disadvantage. AMD is back. http://www.realworldtech.com/jaguar/
AMD did not copy anything from Intel, because Intel did not invent the SMT technique. The SMT was developed by IBM in '60, while CMT was by DEC in '90, and both are processor design techniques, something like Risc or CISC.
like intel copied the short pipeline of the athlon64, the on die memory controller, and the larger l1 and l2 caches, in addition to the already mentioned AMD64.
Doubt about that. Somebody is just pumping AMD stock. Typical bluff, none of these 200 journos have a clue about all these cache speed exchange etc, they understand only cash speed exchange. The 40% increase in processor performance they claim will actually be 20% or even 10%. And compared to Intel in 2017 - 0%. You can not jump factor of 2 anymore, the Moore's law is dead. And 10-20% difference in computing means EQUAL, and all that Zen noise means NOTHING.
of course they copied intel. its just a dual socket system shrunk to fit on a single die. and thats exactlyw hat they should have done. its exactly what intel should have done when they made the p4. they should have copied themselves. you dont try to push a new arch like p4 or fx when another desing is so dominate. you have to make the cpu fit the software not the other way around. also intel learned that lesson again with epyc (well i guess at the same time as the p4 thing). you have to have something that will run todays software, if you can add functionality to become the new standard in the future then great but it must fit todays software first and if the compeitions cpu fits todays software better then they will set the trends not you
Hmm...interesting news to say the least, but I'm reluctant to make any assumptions until after Zen is out there being tested. A lot of us were interested in AMD's construction equipment series processors and were disappointed by the final product.
Hmm....nice timing with IDF. Besides the fantasy of getting XPoint in a consumer drive in 5 years, I agree: most people are more interested in AMD. Cautiously (remember the RX 480 presentation?) optimistic.
At the very least, we'll have some competition around the $300 CPU range. Fairly sure the i7-6700K is priced a little too much higher than the i5-6600K.
In the most basic way possible: reading the news, hehe. I think most people (who aren't interested in X-Point) even realize IDF2016 is happening right now, where Intel showed off Kaby Lake silicon inside a Dell laptop running Overwatch.
"The fantasy of getting XPoint in a consumer drive in 5 years."
Firstly, as a replacement purely for NAND in storage most consumers might find it irrelevant. Secondly, it will be available for consumers but at prices that only prosumers might be interested in. I think the bigger shift for consumers will be with later products that remove the distinction between memory and storage.
I want this chip (or a semi-low priced i7 with the graphics removed and 4 more cores in its place) with HBM[2-3] memory (and presumably all the DRAM that fits. Hopefully in 5 years that doesn't imply a transition die) and xpoint as "main memory - SSD buffer/cache/'SSD dram'"
No, I think it theoretically is very relevant. If those QD1 numbers are to be believed, we should see noticeable performance increases in day-to-day usage, right?
Exactly: it's a fantasy at the price points that are palatable to *consumers*, hehe. Prosumers are also buying $1000+ GPUs, hehe...not the same market.
Right....and that transition is still many years away.
So, what I meant....IDF16 is not very interesting for consumers. AMD timed this presentation quite well.
I am not sure that the QD1 numbers will really make a noticeable difference for general consumer usage patterns. Have to wait for real world benchmarks.
I was very meh about Zen, but now I am actually kind of anticipating it. Even with some of the early engineering sample leaks and rumors that it will be improved IPC, possibly even right up on Skylake, but with much lower clocks. meaning it'll still be lower single threaded performance doesn't bother me too much. BD and it's kin are generally extremely poor single thread compared to Intel's latest Core processors. If Zen comes a fair amount closer...but does it while having 8 cores and 16 threads...that to me says it might actually have a good shot at being in between Skylake/Broadwell and Broadwell-E. If it can do that at a lower price point and being in spitting distance of single thread performance AND manage vaguely reasonable power consumption figures, you could count me as a buyer (if AM4 socketed boards have decent bus support).
Give me a Zen with 80-90% of the single thread of Broadwell-E and 80-90% of the mutlthreaded performance of an Octocore Broadwell-E at the price of an entry level Broadwell-E Hexacore, or even a little less ($250-350) and you could count me as a buyer, so long as it isn't some 150TDP monster.
Intel rates Broadwell-E at 140W while Zen 8 cores is supposed to be 95W. We'll see about base clocks and Turbo clocks but power might end up being very interesting. Ofc die size will be interesting too and they should have 4 cores 65W with no GPU.
Keep in mind that the TDP for the E range tends to be the same for the whole range so in practice the chips below the top of the stack may in reality be capable of using a lower TDP.
For me, a performance comparable to i3 skylake, with power requirements at max over 20% of i3, with a good gpu integrated and at around 70% of i3's price. And My boat will sail AMD....Ho yaa
Weren't "8-core" Bulldozer/Excavator chips sold around $200-250? Maybe it's not so crazy to say that AMD will sell Zen real 8-cores in that price range.
80% single threaded of Broadwell-E, 80% multithreaded performance, $225. How does that sound?
Recognising and acknowledging that AMD's CPUs were in the doldrums for 10 long years doesn't make you an Intel fanboy but a realist. Ignoring that inconvenient truth does though make you an AMD fanboy. Come on Zen although the amount of crap that the fanboys on both sides will spout when it is released will be immense. I will keep off the forums.
There are no volumes above 350$, anything above that might as well not exist. Zen more or less needs to compete with Skylake while offering 2x the cores. If they have some higher clocks SKU above 350$, that could work but people need to be able to afford Zen,otherwise what's the point. Zen shouldn't be a huge die so AMD should be able to offer reasonable prices. Ofc there is no need to offer 8 cores high clocks at 200$ ,that's too far.
if AMD cant get far better throughput than skylake with twice the zen cores , then they have no right to stay in business after all these missteps and the clammer of Jim Keller PR a DEC engineer who helped design the Alpha 21164 and 21264 processors then how can you ever expect to get a UHD1 rec.2020 capable CPU/GPU by even 2020.
A lot of people are hoping that will be their strategy but it depends also on yields and final clock speeds. If they have low yields for the high clock speed parts they might well push that as an FX part and price it at $500 or more. It would still be a good halo product. Also if they have a really good 8 core at $350 or under it will impact how much they can ask for the higher volume quad core parts. If they sell too cheap they might have trouble matching the demand. It's quite a juggling act to balance all that.
It sounds very good in fact. My biggest thing is overall system cost. Next is performance and finally noise and power consumption. Sure, I've love what a 10 core Core processor can level, but I don't really need it. I can get by with my Ivy Bridge i5-3570, but if I am going to upgrade, I'd like it to be for a nice boost in performance. Compared to my Ivy Bridge, I could be okay with a very small loss in single threaded performance, but I'd like a big gain in multithreaded performance. That to me says that Zen needs to bring, compared to my i5-3570, at least 90% single thread performance and at least 70-80% of the per core performance under multithreaded workloads. Then deliver it with roughly a $400 overall platform cost (between an "entry" mid-grade board and the CPU, ignoring RAM costs). Do that and they have a buyer from me. Don't and I'll probably look at the lowest level Hexacore Skylake-E processor once they come out next year.
Basically I need 8 core Zen to be at least a little faster, averaged out, than current 6 core Broadwell-E, yet come in somewhat under the price of 6 core Broadwell-E. That would be enough extra performance to justify an upgrade from my current system early next year.
I am disappointed that they are only releasing Zen in 2017 as I really am looking to upgrade my PC towards the end of the year. But hey, what's another few months, I guess? *siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*
Just to be clear, I'm not waiting /to buy Zen/, I'm waiting for it to come out so that proper, independent tests can show what CPU would be better suited to my pocket and my needs.
The micro ops cache is a bit of a surprise; I believe the Steamroller preview mentioned that particular design was getting such a cache. Perhaps it didn't in the end.
I'd be cautious about that. If AMD was expecting to be extremely competitive, I think the company would be keeping a closer hold on architectural details so as to catch Intel more by surprise. Instead, they're leaning more toward full disclosure which means they're looking to build hype with consumers. One could read into that openness as a harbinger of a mediocre product launch for which Intel might already be well-prepared to meet.
And if that's true, I'd be disappointed. We need a more competitive market to kick things along a little even if it won't last for very long thanks to the ever-increasing difficulty in developing smaller transistors.
Zen is getting a one time massive boost in IPC due to correcting the failed architecture.
The scientists and engineers working at AMD aren't high school dropouts. It's not crazy to think that they can put out something 75-90% as good as Intel, and undercut them on price. Namely because Moore's law is almost dead and Intel has stalled out, delaying 10nm by a year. Let's see 14nm vs. 14nm. The ever-increasing difficulty in developing smaller transistors works to AMD's benefit.
One thing to remember is that GoFlo can't supply more than 10% of the marketshare. Even during AMD's glory days when Intel was floundering with Pentium4 and the Itanic disaster, there simply was no way to take over the market due to the simply inability to supply enough chips (which Intel was able to exploit with exclusive deals to the likes of Dell).
Now with no chance of meeting, let alone exceeding the power of Intel (who has vastly more smart guys who have been literally refining this overall architecture for more than 10 years (the current uarch might not be the same as core2, but it is vastly more similar than Zen is to Bulldozer). AMD's only real chance is to find some niche they can beat Intel at, and convince the customers that want it to buy AMD (and yes, the latter is often harder than the former).
Obviously, it looks like AMD is going for the full-thread power. The catch is that *everybody* looks at full-thread power (IBM Power and any competition popping up from the ARM world), so Intel has probably spent more R&D researching how to combat that than AMD spent making the Zen. Intel already wastes enough transistors in the more expensive chips on built-in graphics (chips that will *never* use it considering the relative cost of a GPU to the CPU itself), so they can easily add more cores (which will improve benchmarks and presumably decrease AMD sales, even if they do almost nothing else in the real world than those unused graphics).
Of course, Intel seems to have hit a 10 year plateau (possibly through AMD's, IBM's and ARM's complete inability to compete*). They should certainly not be as surprised by any Intel counters as they may have been with the 1060.
* It must be said that Intel finally admitted that while ARM can't eat Intel's lunch, they can't eat ARM's lunch either. If only this was true for AMD.
There are diminishing returns on everything. Having ten times as many "smart people" maybe gives you a 10-20% advantage. AMD can see what worked for Intel and basically reverse engineer it too. The process disadvantage has been pretty much narrowed. It would not surprise me if Zen was competitive with Intel at this point.
I'm not sure that I agree with Intel's decision to give up on mobile. Sure they haven't made much headway, but it made sense they were going after it, and I don't think just throwing in the towel was necessarily the right thing to do.
Reverse engineering Intel products and then incorporating those technologies into new AMD products would cause AMD to ALWAYS remain behind Intel because of the latency between reverse engineering and production. To get into that sort of a situation means AMD would never achieve a technological parity or be in a position to rise above the competition. In a competitive market, that's a path to bankruptcy and nothing else. In order to survive, AMD must be innovative, nimble, and aggressive.
If AMD becomes popular again, they can port the design to TSMC for additional volume. They do have a minimum order agreement with GloFo but it isn't truly exclusive.
I'm not so sure about that. It's not like the GPU market where there is lots of fluidity in the technology. Intel is pretty much locked in for features/improvements for the next few years. A few details about their competitor, coming this close to release, isn't going to change anything Intel does. It's not like Intel is in the position to radically redesign Kaby Lake or Cannon Lake, and after that is so far out that it is irrelevant to Zen's launch.
I think AMD is doing a smart move by releasing more details. Perhaps they feel the sting of hyping up Bulldozer so much, but releasing few details, and getting trashed in real-world performance. For Zen, release more details so the hype doesn't dwarf the reality, and give people the desire to purchase the product.
"Unlike Bulldozer, where having a shared FP unit between two threads was an issue for floating point performance, Zen’s design is more akin to Intel’s in that each thread will appear as an independent core and there is not that resource limitation that BD had. With sufficient resources, SMT will allow the core instructions per clock to improve"
Ian, this section makes no sense! The reason Bulldozer and kids were slow was not the module design, but simply the cores being too weak. What helps Zen is not SMT but rather the fatter cores and the power optimization. If Zen had only 2 FP execution units, the maximum FP throughput per clock would be the same as for Bulldozer, independent of whether 1 or 2 threads run on a core / module. Or similarly if a Bulldozer module would have gotten 4 FPUs.
You list Broadwell-E L3$ at 1.5MB per core but they got 2.5.
AMD with less cache and likely 2 mem chans might get away with substantially lower power and smaller die as well as lower BOM for system builders and only a minor perf penalty in consumer.
OMG, SO excited for this. Gotta say that the FinFet GPU's and Zen are some of the most anticipated releases in a long time! I remember when I used to get excited about Intel releasing new arch's but these days that's so boring!
"We’ve got another couple of pieces detailing some of the AMD internal/live benchmark numbers during the presentation, as well as the dual socket server platform, the 32-core Naples server CPU, and what we saw at the event in terms of motherboard design. "
Please hurry up and publish these benchmark numbers!! :)
Ian - I think there's a mistake on the first page. As far as I know, AGUs do not perform loads and stores, they calculate load/store addresses. It strikes me as interesting that Zen can perform memory operations more quickly (3 per cycle) than it can generate addresses for them (2 per cycle, per the diagram).
Did anyone else notice AMD's Zen has 2x GCN CUs? LOL, this is how they managed to trump broadwell-e in Blender. Slightly dishonest since they didn't mention that, but I'm proud of them for showing some competitive fire!
For me, a performance comparable to i3 skylake, with power requirements at max over 20% of i3, with a good gpu integrated and at around 70% of i3's price. And My boat will sail AMD....Ho yaa
Assuming no major bugs, or I/O ( AMD has ALWAYS HAD problem with I/O controller ), Zen should do very well in Server market. Yes there is Pref/ Watt, but when you compound it in the Server power usage from other component, I think Zen should be favourable to many. ( Assuming Intel dont massively drop price )
What's all this bickering about AMD and Intel. Open your eyes people. There is only one master x86 cpu company and it is VIA. Soaring on their successful acquisition of the Cyrix remains, they've forged ahead to make blisteringly fast products like their 64 bit QuadCore E-Series. It beats everything but my wife. Geez. You guys are CLUELESS.
Ofcourse they did.. just not on the highest end of the scale. The PII was a great chip. The FX line is decent but hasn't really seen much love.. and their APU is an excellent product.
If that is true then why haven't Intel prices increase substantially in the last 10 year where AMD has not been competitive?
Maybe because Intel competes with their own previous gen chips. AMD being the reason for Intel's keeping prices in check only works when they have a product that competes and forces them to.
Lets hope this isn't another one of AMD's empty claim that we've all seen like 8 times over the last 10 years on both CPU, GPU and the nonsense APU.
The stock tripled over the last 12 months but that's only if Zen can deliver. If Zen is another <fill in AMD product for the last 10 years>, AMD will be a dollar stock again.
All it really needs to be is competitive on the performance front. It doesn't need to beat Intel but hey if it can well shoot.. that would be interesting. Not expecting that or even hoping for it since I think that would be unrealistic.
If Zen is good enough, it'll take some market share away from Intel, but not much since Intel CPU's are pretty much state of the art. However, the real advantages will come with their APU's (Zen + Polaris). The upcoming PlayStation Neo and Xbox Scorpio will use them. AMD will also go after mobile since they have no completion there with their APU's. Intel has some powerful iGPU's but they are nowhere near AMD APU's in performance. With the node disadvantage gone away, performance and power consumption should be up there. I know the desktop diehards will disagree, but desktops sales have been falling for years. Likely causes are a move by many to mobile devices and cheap, powerful gaming consoles. I don't see that trend changing. The ARM ecosystem is also rolling along and now it's beginning to creep into so far, exclusive x86 server markets. VR will also force ARM designers to come up with more powerful hardware. The next 5-10 years should be interesting.
Problem is, mobile itself has reached saturation and isn`t so attractive anymore. Plus, what AMD is to go there with, x86? Intel tried already. Node disadvantage will come back at some point, simply because it`s a matter of survival for intel.
Where things should get interesting is the server side. ARM is hardly a threat, but AMD might have a good product here with GPU+CPU compute, likely at lower price.
My mistake. By mobile, I meant laptops and not tablets. It's still a big market. Intel regaining node advantage ? Mmm, from I have seen in tech reports ( and I am not a big expert ), both 10nm and 7nm will be a tough nut to crack and will cost huge amounts. Compared to years past, Intel is now up against big giants ( Samsung and TSMC ) who are making billions every year selling tons of ARM SoC and have the deep pockets needed for new nodes. The South Koreans and the Chinese are a smart bunch. I mean, look at the SSD market. Intel had a lock on that until Samsung decided that one was too many. Remember Thunderbold ? Nice tech, but now the market is moving away from it. Sadly, even for mighty Intel, the landscape has changed. I hope you're right about the server market. AMD can use any sales they can get, but then again, Intel has a lock on that and they will get aggressive and mean if necessary ( it's big bucks, you know). ARM not a threat ? Architecturally speaking, they have advantages, after all, x86 is a dinosaur and ARM business model is one of their biggest strengths. But you're right, the installed base for x86 is huge and it will take time. There are some big names, however ( Qualcomm and others ) pouring some serious money in it. Should be interesting.
x86 is a very functional dinosaur with A LOT of companies standing behind it. ARM can license all they want, to actually break in and make those huge server monies, you need a full sw/hw/oem stack. I`d look at IBM`s last hooray POWER thing as the real competitor for intel right now, with AMD hopefully coming in soon as well.
Google has announced their intention to open up competition in the server space by fully adopting IBM's POWER chips over their entire server software/hardware stack and is working with AMD and others to make sure they can do the same thing with the ARM based server chips in development.
Google is porting their internal software but they're not moving production system unless there is a clear reason. (And for some specific applications, there are some clear reasons.)
Google doesn't want to be married to any particular architecture.
As of April, they seem to have already ported their software stack to POWER and to be in the process of designing server hardware with Rackspace with the intention of making those designs public under the Open Compute Project.
I should be clear that I'm not saying Google intends to abandon x86. They are simply talking about POWER based servers becoming a first class citizen in their infrastructure.
Crossing fingers for a great 35 watt APU. The iGPU space in laptops has been stagnant since trinity. and it is abundantly clear that intel cant supply iris pro parts in any meaningful capacity.
Now that AMD supports linux properly with polaris, all we need is a polaris+zen APU for laptops, and I can finally move off of windows altogether.
Why would you even need a gpu in a laptop running specialized OS in the first place? Games aren`t being ported outside of token cases and rendering/drawing/general office applications are a sad joke. Networking is where it`s good at, and you don`t need anything over perfunctory graphics there.
I see it being said a lot, but what`s the point if software is so bad with no hope of improvement? You can`t reasonably compete with Adobe if there are three people on your team doing this in their spare time, same goes for Zbrush and any other professional content creation tool. Much better to focus where you actually can lead.
"with no hope of improvement" is nonsense for one tracking the Linux world even if only casually.
First of all the open source applications have matured a lot. E.g. I could do everything I wanted with Kdenlive as good as the built in movie editor of OSX. (Consumer level, bit still)
For certain niches, oss is now as good as the commercial competition (eg Krita for digital painting)
A lot of newer applications now have proper Linux support (E.g. Slack) because they were created with platform independent toolkits.
As for the base OS and desktop, I find desktop Linux way more powerful and sophisticated than either Windows or OSX. My ws runs KDE Plasma 5 on an Ubuntu base and it is better looking , faster and more stable than my OSX ElCap laptop.
Check Steam. The last time I looked, about 2,700 games of the 11,000 were supported under Linux. Then there's quite a few that play nicely under WINE + PlayOnLinux. Native gaming on Linux has dramatically improved in the last 4 years. It seems as though momentum is building still rather than declining. Office applications have come a long way as well thanks to the folks behind LibreOffice. I've been using it as a personal office suite since the fork from OpenOffice and it's made impressive progress. Formatting MS Office documents is still a minor sticking point, but the number of differences I see when moving files between office suites now are very small with most cases being oddball outliers that require obscure capabilities of Microsoft's suites. Rendering has never been a problem on Linux platforms. Drawing though, in my opinion is still a shortcoming. GIMP is a miserable piece of software to work with and remains one of the only image editing options for Linux users.
However, I doubt my comment will change your mind. Much like the people who use a $ when they talk about Microsoft, you insist on using the word "loonix" in many of your posts. It shows a very strong bias supported by a framework of childish emotional investment in something as meaningless as software on a computer someone else owns.
>2700 indie nongames Uh-uh. Wake me up when AAA comes in any significant number. >WINE Are you joking. >Libre Okay, now I know you are. >GIMP At least here we can agree.
So many people here are defending Intel. Yes AMD has floundered. They have been poor competition to Intel. They are are struggling and maybe even a dying company. It will be a miracle if this chip will be successful, yet I do believe in miracles. I just hate having an Intel CPU in my notebook.
Why is this so? Intel is the bully in town and they bullied AMD to death (almost). I have been in this business at that time. Companies were basically forced not to sell AMD. Intel was found guilty of it and got a slap on the wrist for it. $1B is nothing for them. For this I would welcome the day Intel dies a slow (make it rather quicker) and painful death. But this will probably not happen.
People say it it is just business, well it is in my books not ethical business even though it might be legal. It was even found to be illegal, yet with it they killed their opponent. These days many contractors do the same. When they build a building, the law requires a certain amount of parking space (in our country). If they do not do this, they are fined. Parking brings in little compensation and therefore they rather pay the fines, even if the fine are relatively high. This is what Intel did. They new they did wrong, but also new that the repercussions will be minimal. It was worth it for them to kill the competition by breaking the law and be fined. Intel might be your hero, not mine.
This is sickening. Intel makes me sick. I really hope AMD has some success with Zen, even though I think Intel will find another devious way to curb AMD's success. I even hope ARM will eventually dethrone Intel.
AMD have surpassed intel in the past . Some of us are old enough to remember 1800 Mhz Athlon 64's smashing intel P4's running at 3000+ MHz . We also remember intels response that saw them bribe oems to continue using their crappy processors by sending back bags of cash to people still buying from them . We also remember the fines and penalties intel eventually paid for their price fixing. Price fixing that cost their fanboys because it kept the prricee of theeir processors aartificiaally high eveen though they were junk .
A strong AMD is in everyones benefit . We will get more powerful processors and we will get them at a reasonable price . Lets hope ZEN is even better than it seems
The Problem with AMD is that being a technical company, they should have realized lying repeatedly in the name of marketing about the performance of their products, is akin to crying wolf. For now, it does not matter if they actually have a good product or not. The General assumption is that this is going to be another falsehood, and likely their chip can match intel at 3 ghz only when one core is running (That too when turbo is disabled on intel). And will fall far behind both in single and multithread when there is no trubo restriction on the intel chip
Bulldozer and Piledriver have a write-through L1D cache. Pentium4 has a write-through L1D cache. Zen has a write-back L1D cache. Skylake has a write-back L1D cache.
I would be happy to see AMD succeed and be relevant in the desktop/tablet/laptop space again. I have stuck with AMD over the years because of the low price to performance ratio and good multithread performance (I use photo editing apps which multithread well) and because Intel is a mis-leading, monopolistic company.
no avx2 ? After excluding the Micro-OP cache, the four instruction per cycle are to feed 2 x 128 bit, right ? i.e. 4 x 64 bits / cycle. If I'm not wrong AMD is lacking serious parallelism in SIMD than Intel AVX2.
I have read both In depth Zen reviews, however something huge is missing! No one or any tech site that I'm aware of has went in depth about Global Memory Interface. The best I got out of it was a variant of a PPC on Wikipedia? There needs to be coverage of this. I believe it critical to Zen & AM4 in general. Since there is no more NB&ORSB. Shocked not even Wikipedia has an article. A double edge sword more or less...
The comment that "some put [a micro-op cache] as a major stepping stone for Conroe" is wrong on a couple levels:
First, Conroe didn't have a uop cache. Like many other micro-architectures before and since it could use its uop queue to buffer small loops, but had no uop cache as such.
Second, Intel cores had uop caches long before Conroe. The first Intel x86 microarchitecture with a first-level I-cache that stored decoded uops was Pentium-4. The oft-maligned trace cache was in fact a uop cache. The fact that it went a step beyond and stored superblocks of decoded uops doesn't change the fact that it was a uop cache.
The uop caches first appeared in the "non-Pentium-4" Intel x86 line in Sandy Bridge, two full tocks after Conroe.
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Zingam - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
AMD realized finally that there is nothing better in the x86 world than copying Intel.tarqsharq - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
The same way Intel copied x86-64 from AMD? Or how AMD put out a superior dual core solution?Copying has gone both ways.
Stuka87 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Intel did not copy x86-64, they licensed it from AMD.Krysto - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Which by the way is one of the reasons why the argument that "Intel would never allow AMD to be sold to another company" is so STUPID. If they do something like that and somehow retract their own licensing to AMD, let's see how well Intel does in the market without the 64-bit support licensed from AMD......That's why I believe AMD could easily sell itself to Qualcomm or Samsung if it wanted to. Intel may throw a hissy fit, but at the end of the day there's nothing they can do about it. Worst case scenario, whoever buys AMD, has to pay a little more for Intel's IP, but nothing that would break the company.
Kvaern1 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
The licensing agreement is automatically terminated if either part goes through a change of control.Piraal - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
If intel wasn't licensed then it would be monopoly for AMD in no time, ever wonder why they licensed intel?Guess what intel licensed x86 to AMD before that for the same reason. It is funny how few people understand why AMD, and Intel before that 'had' to essentially give up something that would destroy their biggest competitor.
Morawka - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
IIRC if was part of a settlement between AMD and Intel that lead to the x64 getting licensed. i could be wrong thoSamus - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Actually the way I last read the licensing agreement worked is as long as AMD licenses x86, Intel has exclusive use of any AMD innovations in x86. That's how Intel essentially "licensed" x86-64 for free.It's like Mazda licensing a platform to Ford to build, and in return Mazda is allowed to monitor improvements to the platform to use on their own vehicles. This is commonly referred to as a joint venture technology agreement, and although AMD and Intel don't call it that, it's what it appears to be because the fine print of Intel licensing permits them to peak inside architectural improvements.
Note that this has nothing to do with the manufacturing end, unlike my Mazda>Ford analogy which is exclusively manufacturing based.
Anato - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
"Actually the way I last read the licensing agreement worked is as long as AMD licenses x86, Intel has exclusive use of any AMD innovations in x86. That's how Intel essentially "licensed" x86-64 for free."I doubt this, as this would mean that terminating AMD would terminate Intel x86-64 license. Think IBM, Samsung, Oracle or Apple buying AMD and stop making x86. Then Intel would not have x86-64 license anymore. So by paying 5-10B$ for AMD you could stop Intel's current 64 license which is >70% (?) of their revenue or use this as ransom.
Samus - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
All past-tense licensed innovation is grandfathered in upon a technology agreement termination. Legally. For instance, Mazda and Ford can use each others previous platforms indefinitely.Jleppard - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I like AMD and a fan. The agreement with Intel products Intel regardless if the allow someone else that would buy AMD from keeping X64 available to Intelfoobaz - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Wouldn't the patents from their prior dispute be expired by now? That was a long time ago.Gigaplex - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Some of them may have expired, but there are newer ones that haven't.wiak - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
AMD created AMD64 in 2000 and then released it in Athlon 64/Opteron then intel copied and called it EMT64 then everyone started calling it x86-64there is alot of references to amd64 in windows and ubuntu (amd64 isos etc)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#History
owan - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Again, not a copy. They licensed it and branded it as their own thing.StormyParis - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
a legal copy is still a copy ?ianmills - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Intel licensed the technology so they could copy it. I'm not sure what distinction you are tying to make :PMaybe you are trying to say Intel didn't steal the technology?
sorten - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I think the point was in response to the OP, who was suggesting that AMD only ever copies Intel. The example of AMD64 is one where AMD was the innovator, though that's ancient history now.joex4444 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Nobody's disputing that AMD invented it. But what do you want Intel to do? Create their own and then all software companies have to support 32-bit, AMD64, and Intel64?Ej24 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Intel was close to releasing their own and gave up on consumer Intel64 when AMD beat them to market. Though I believe Intel still implemented it in some form in their Itanium brand?DigitalFreak - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Microsoft was already in the process of creating a 64bit version of Windows based on AMD's 64bit implementation (hence the reason you see AMD64 everywhere in 64bit Windows). Microsoft basically told Intel they were not going to support two competing implementations of "x64", so Intel caved and adopted the AMD64 implementation.tygrus - Thursday, September 8, 2016 - link
They license the ISA's ie. use of instructions and the expected output. The whole silicon designs are not cross-licensed. There probably have some IP of the silicon cross-licensed but the major point was they could handle the same instructions and be mostly compatible. AMD could only fully copy 486 and earlier designs. You can copy and implement the same ISA without having the same silicon. Intel had started a design for x86-64 but the front-end decoding and instructions were changed to be cmpatible. With micro/macro ops and microcoding there can be a lot of abstraction between ISA and execution. Intel made at least 1 mistake with their early AMD64 implementation that had to have work arounds and a later fix.frenchy_2001 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Opposite.Intel was vehement at the time that 64 bits needed to be a clean break from x86 and were pushing for their Itanium processors, implementing IA64 (completely incompatible with x86).
The market followed AMD, especially sice they had the better architecture at the time (Athlon64, with 64 bits and in processor memory controllers, faster interconnect, better server scaling...).
Intel then licensed AMD64 and and rebranded it EMT64 or x86-64.
wifiwolf - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
wow. finally someone who remembers that time correctly. Intel pushed for Itanium for too much time, even after they adopted amd's 64bit implementation. They eventually had to drop it as it never got enough market.Samus - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
Microsoft did make an IA64 edition on NT and 2000 but without x86 compatibility there were no apps. The genius behind AMD's 64 bit implementation is it is simply a memory extension of x86 with 64 bit integer registers, maintaining complete 32-bit compatibility with no real impact on 32 bit performance, while costing very little die space for the extensions.Microsoft and software developers saw this and basically told Intel their Itanium dreams were not going to come true.
anubis44 - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
And the genius behind that 'genius' was none other than Jim Keller, the man who also just designed the upcoming Zen processor family.Visual - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
No, the IA64 architecture of Itanium does not try to keep any backwards-compatibility with x86, so any mention of it even being considered as an alternative to AMD64 is absurd. At that time the world was just not ready for a compatibility-breaking switch.Kevin G - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
The ISA didn't directly try to keep backwards compatibility but Intel did put some x86 functionality into the first few generations of Itanium. This was later removed in chips post 2006.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-32_Execution_Laye...
Gigaplex - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Which is a legal term to describe "copying with permission".pikunsia - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
AMD cannot copy ``TM'' Intel technologies as this is a crime with criminal consequences. All is managed through licenses and royalties.JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
The ignorance... It hurts...Original x86 (32-bit) was Intel-AMD developed.
AMD then developed x86-64, or x86 64-bit, and then Intel continues to license it to this day.
There's no copying here. Someone did it first, then others are licensing that IP from them.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
>x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64 and AMD64) is the 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set.
>The original specification, created by AMD and released in 2000, has been implemented by AMD, Intel and VIA.
That's why sometimes you might see driver versions labeled AMD64, and you might be puzzled as to why despite being on a Intel 64-bit CPU that the 64-bit driver you downloaded states AMD64 in the name. It's because it was an AMD-first technology, but it's usable on any x86-64bit processor.
Bateluer - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Intel simply paid for the license to copy the technology AMD designed. They still copied it, just legally paid for the right to do so.Klimax - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Actually, not exactly correct. Intel was forced by Microsoft to adopt AMD's solution, despite Intel having parallel own implementation which was different. And Intel's version is still bit different from AMD's. (Some instructions are different between implementations, mostly relevant only to OS)xenol - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
IBM made the dual-core on a single die design.ExarKun333 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
In many ways, Intel's 64-bit was superior to AMD's, but x86-64 was more backward compatible. I can see it both ways....different solutions to the same problem. Both companies have pushed each other...TheMightyRat - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
How is IA64 superior to AMD64?AMD64 can run 32-bit software without performance hit and still run 64-bit software comparatively equally to Intel counterpart.
IA64 Itanium runs 64-bit software much slower than a Pentium 4 64-bit at the same clock and has a massive performance hit in 32-bit emulation (1/3 as fast). Aren't both of them based on Netburst?
EMT64 only has more codes than AMD64 as it also implement both AMD64 and IA64, which is no longer used in modern server software anymore.
Klimax - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
He was talking about Intel's x64 which was backup plan in case Itanium fails.Myrandex - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
I don't think Itaniums were Netburst in architecture, it seemed to be a totally different architecture.Gigaplex - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Itanium was novel but turned out to be a poor performer. It relied too much on good compilers optimising the instruction order.KPOM - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Wasn't Itanium based on "Very Long Instruction Word" architecture? Hence the long pipelines and reliance on clock speed? The Pentium M from Intel Israel righted Intel's ship and allowed them to take leadership of the x86 architecture back from AMD.Jleppard - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
OR the first to 5 GHzKevin G - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
IBM hit 5 Ghz back in 2008 with the POWER6.JlHADJOE - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
Given how quickly they were able to implement x86_64, my bet is Intel already thought about extending x86 to 64bits, they just didn't want to do it because they were pushing Itanium hard at the time.But then AMD comes out with AMD64, and (rather predictably) the market loves it, which puts a real damper on Intel's Itanium push and eventually they are forced to capitulate and follow suit.
hansmuff - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Everyone copies success, what's new?bill.rookard - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Well, it's not a complete copy. There are some difference which should make it interesting to see how the chips line up against each other. x2 L2 cache on Zen vs x2 L3 cache on Intel, the larger core/thread counts (let's hope they offer the 8c/16t to consumers), and of course, the big one being how this all affects the integrated graphics in APU form.Will the change to 16nm FinFET allow them to put in more GPU? What kind of clocks and/or power envelope will this run at? A lot of this makes a huge difference in the types of systems which can be made - a powerful hex-core CPU with a beefier IGP in a 60-80w TDP would be nice to see.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
There is definitely gong to be a consumer 8c/16t chip.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
The 8c will be coming to consumers in the AM4 chipset in Q1. :)Flunk - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I wonder what the resale value of my 6700K and Z170 board will be in Q1 ;).Morawka - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
you'll get more cores but not more IPC. all signs point to skylake being at least 2 years ahead of zen, although since intel has barely increased performance in 2 years, it shouldnt make to big of a difference, in gaming at least.tamalero - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Disagree, the performance boost of each generation is always less than 5% in the last designs by intel.Only a few tests show really higher performance per clock.
m1ngky - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
It could be the performance boost is only 5% each generation because there wasn't a need for more due to the monopoly Intel has in the CPU market.Once decent competition from AMD emerges I'm betting we see more of a % boost then.
sonicmerlin - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
I seriously doubt it, Intel needs performance boosts to sell new products every year. If they could've then they would've.Byte - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Value of top end K chips actually don't really go down that much. If you want to look for a Haswell devils canon, you still have to pony up around $300, maybe you can find a used one for $250ish, but same can be said for a Skylake. Even a 4770k or 3770k is hard to find for under $250 used. Even a 2770k i sold one not too long ago for $245.Nagorak - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Prices for computer hardware isn't dropping very fast because performance has barely increased. A two year old CPU now is for all intents and purposes is just as good as a brand new one. There may be some marginal situations where the 5% difference in performance matters, but for the most part they perform identically.Compare this to the heyday of the late 90s when a two year old CPU might be half as fast as a new one. It was no surprise that upgrade cycles were shorter and resale values much less.
KPOM - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Tell that to all the people on MacRumors complaining that the 13" rMBP still has a Broadwell processor.Icehawk - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
While I agree with Nagorak, I have moved from a 2yr cycle to a 4+ cycle on CPU/platforms, I think the Apple folks have a right to gripe about the lack of updates - some of them are a few gens back at this point and prices haven't dropped enough to make up for that IMO.smilingcrow - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Their whole CPU business is based on an Intel license to copy; ignoring the ARM stuff.blublub - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
1. Intel's X64 is based on AMD's license.....so what !? (remeber the Itanium disaster?)2. AMD also hold X86 licenses which are used by Inte - both x86 and x64 are cross-licenses
So in the end they both license/copy another -- so what!?
And I am pretty sure after the recent Intel/Nvidia rattle that the next Intel GPUs are being build via AMD's license
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
There’s a massive difference though. AMD only has a license due to IBM insisting on Intel allowing a second manufacturer for its patented x86 CPUs.So AMD has been a parasite living on Intel patents with a degree of symbiosis in the relationship. That makes their various successful phases all the more noteworthy and hopefully Zen leads into another long awaited successful phase.
I think you are jumping to conclusions much to quickly over a mere PR spat with Nvidia.
ddriver - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
you are such an obvious intel troll fanboy that its just sadFMinus - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
He's right tho. AMD was a licensee of Intel to produce bulk Intel products, because intel couldn't keep up with the demand. Then AMD reverse engineered Intels products and brought their own line out and Intel didn't like that, thus they broke the agreement, which in the end didn't help much since AMD had already all they needed.That being said, what AMD did anyone would, so it's just business as per usual. Then they actually stepped up and made great own CPUs to combat intel and made a great dual core and AMD64. AMD did a lot for computing, but the early days were pretty much a contractor and pirate.
I wish them all the best with Zen and future, and I hope they get Vega right, by that I mean don't fucking gimp the chip by power delivery, cause you can't get that under control, everyone knows nvidia is ahead in that game, just give a great performing GPU on the market and let it eat 250W if need be.
Nagorak - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Yeah, they matched Intel on the CPU front, and Intel responded by abusing their stronger market position to limit AMD's gains. I'll be happy to get an AMD processor back in my machine just based on principle.Klimax - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Correction: IBM forced Intel to license number of CPU manufactures. (At least two suppliers, similar to rule sued by militaries) And there was lawsuit or two. Fun stuff.looncraz - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Maybe you are too young to remember, but AMD has historically been a primary driver in processor innovation.They created the first native multi-core dies, broke the Ghz barrier, first to debut dynamic clock speeds, invented the seamless x64 transition and AMD64 instruction set, created CMT, created HSA, created the APU, and so much more. And I'm only focusing on CPUs, here.
Intel uses a great deal of AMD tech, and vice-versa.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I used to buy AMD exclusively but they have been second rate for 10 years now.I don't buy innovations I buy products and AMD have really struggled for a decade to offer decent products unless your main criteria is value.
Value is fine but for mobile products where power consumption is very important and for workstations where performance is king AMD have had nothing to compete.
I'm very glad that Zen is looking as if it will compete at the higher end although I think they will find it harder to compete with Core M.
Just because I don't view AMD through ten year old rose tinted glasses doesn't mean I don't want them to succeed.
I have been feeling confident for Zen as an 8c/16t chips for ages but it's how it does as a 4c/8t chip that may well be more important in the consumer space unless the 8c/16c chip is unusually cheap for its performance level which it could even be.
Some people here can't tell the difference between someone who is critical of AMD's failings and an Intel fanboy. Intel have their issues but they have delivered decent chips in the decade that AMD fell into disarray. I'm not loyal to incompetent companies.
Nagorak - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
It's been hard for anyone to stick with AMD for the last decade. Phenom and Phenom II came up short, and then Bulldozer turned out to be a total disaster. In retrospect AMD should have tossed Bulldozer in the trash and started work on a new processor design immediately. Trying to iterate on that failed design is what almost killed AMD.Gigaplex - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"Created the APU".That's not entirely accurate. Intel was actually first to market with their "APU" type CPUs, even though AMD announced theirs first.
KPOM - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
These days ARM (soon SoftBank) is the company that keeps Intel management up at night. Intel missed the boat on mobile.Kevin G - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
The first dual core chip was POWER4 from IBM.Dynamic clock speeds existed in mobile (think ARM/MIPS) designs back in the 90's.
Seamless x86 transition could be credited to Transmeta for thei VLIW based Crusoe line of chips running x86 code. Runner up could be the FX32! emulator that ran unmodifed x86 Windows binaries in Alpha based hardware back in the 90's.
CMT was done beforehand in Sun's Niagra chip. There designs even before that did unit sharing for CMT.
Elements of HSA came from 3Dlabs and their cards supporting a unified virtual address space.
Integrating a CPU and GPU was first done by Intel though they never shipped it due to relaying on a flawed RDRAM to SDRAM buffer chip:
http://m.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/06/forgotten_te...
Thus the only innovation on your list is the 1 Ghz clock rate for a CPU, which isn't that innovative.
Klimax - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Sorry, wrong. Multicores weren't AMD''s invention, dynamic clock speeds were parallel execution, x64 transition si AMD win only thanks to Microsoft who killed Intel's own development, CMT is not AMD¨s invention (and I would say it is nothing to be proud of), HSA is just label for preexisting technologies, APU was done before AMD's own (in fact, Intel had APU-like chip in late 80s),. AMD didn't invent much as most of technologies were bought in previous acquisitions like HyperTransport (See DEC Alpha)Sorry, to tell you, but what you posit is pure fantasy. AMD inveted very few things and fewer of them were of much importance or use.
Kevin G - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
HyperTransport was an AMD creation though they were not the first to use it. Former DEC engineers did help create it but they were employees by AMD at the time. AMD did license the EV6 bus for the the first Athlon (not Athlon 64). The first chip to that used the HT bus was Transmeta due to delays on the first generation Athlon 64/Operton.slyronit - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
Ah! Good old days! I used to read all this in "Chip" magazine back in the day. Cyber cafes those days used "Cyrix" CPUs. Cheap.BMNify - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
thats the thing, Did AMD actually learn something from their ARM inc partners and put in a real up to date interconnect or two that can lower overall latency and massively improve data throughput (ready with HBM2 perhaps) or did they cheap out again and rehash the usual antiquated suspectsnandnandnand - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Good. I want Zen to perform well. Let's see Intel copy AMD and offer a 8c/16t chip at mainstream prices.akamateau - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Hmmm...AMD was first with 1Ghz and faster processors.
AMD was first with multi-core processor.
AMD was first with CPU + GPU = APU. Intel has the laughably poor performing Intel IGP LOL. And to get it Intle had to poach technology from NVidia and then NVidia sued them!!!! LOL
AMD owns X86-64.
SO your point?????
AMD has a license to copy Intel and if like Frank Sinatra chooses to do it their way, it can only be good for the consumer.
So smarten up. Without AMD Intel would have killed the PC 10 years ago with $2000 CPU's!!!
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I don't live in the past from a decade ago. When AMD finally release their first decent CPU in 10 years wake me up.Even with negligible competition from AMD Intel has chosen to keep the prices of chips for the mainstream socket at low levels for 10 years. It was 2009 with Lynnfield that they last had a $1,000 Extreme chip for consumers and there were plenty of good chips in that range starting at under $300 so the Extreme chips were for rich fools really.
The_Countess - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
intel created a entire artificial market segment with the i5's because of lack of competition. they still sell dual cores for christ sake, and havent offered anything above 4 cores on the main stream market, which AMD's had for over 6 years already.On 22nm, let alone 14, there is no way they couldn't have made a affordable 6 core. but all we get are ridiculously priced -E variants on a ridiculously overpriced platform.
FMinus - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
that is still at most ~20 years back, AMD is on the face of the earth for 47 years and more as half of that they spend innovating nothing, but being contractors and priates of technology.tamalero - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
whats with hardcore intel fanboys just getting out of their caves now that AMD might have a decent cpu to compete with Intel?The_Countess - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
and they went from that to creating the athlon64 and royally kicking intel's ass with superior innovations in just 14 years (counting from the first k5).to bad intel's monopoly abuse has already done its damage leaving AMD wofully short on production capacity meaning 80% of people still had to buy intel's crummy shit for too much money. and with AMD not making nearly as much money as it should have from the athlon64, intel could one again copy everything AMD did and then brute force outspend them.
MonkeyPaw - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Heck, people are forgetting some significant firsts for AMD--the first to bring the IMC and hypertransport to x86. Both were big for the server world, too.smilingcrow - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Innovation is good and AMD have had many moments in the sun but let's not forget that Core 2 duo lacked an IMC and still trounced the AMD competition.Good products matter more than innovation and the trick is to turn innovation into good products.
The_Countess - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
and lets not forget the first with a on-die memory controller for a x86 CPU. a huge improvement on both the desktop and the server space. it basically is what made more then 2 socket motherboards viable at all.Kevin G - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Intel had a 386 chip with an integrated memory controller back in 90's so AMD wasn't the first to do it even in the x86 segment.looncraz - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Pretty sure they did not, they had memory management techs built-in, but not memory controllers. The 286 had memory management capabilities as well, and so did all of AMD's comparable CPUs, naturally.The_Countess - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
that would be the first time i heard about that so: source?Kevin G - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
80386EX for the embedded market. Came out in 1994. By this time, it was two generations behind the Pentium so it generated very little fan fair.http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Wants-The-Emb...
Here is a book that includes some details about the 80386EX, though you'll have to do a bit of digging in it:
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~squire/intel_book.pdf
Gigaplex - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"AMD was first with CPU + GPU = APU."Llano came out June 2011. Intel had Westmere (January 2010) and Sandy Bridge (January 2011) before Llano. Even if you discount Westmere since they were separate dies on the same package, Sandy Bridge still got there before Llano.
Mahigan - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/00011...Intel and AMD have a cross-licensing agreement which covers patents and technologies from both firms allowing both firms to use a rather generous amount of patents from their competitor.
Nobody copied nobody. The two companies are quite intertwined tbh.
Mahigan - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"Advanced Micro Devices has clarified terms of the cross-license agreement with Intel Corp. on Thursday. As it appears, if either AMD or Intel change their control (i.e., gets acquired), the cross-license agreement between the two companies is automatically terminated for both parties.AMD and Intel have a cross-licensing agreement, which guarantees that the companies will not pursue litigation for any potential patent infringements. The agreement covers entire patent portfolio for both companies, which includes general-purpose processors, graphics adapters and other intellectual property. For example, AMD can design and sell microprocessors compatible with Intel’s x86 instruction set architecture and featuring a variety of extensions, whereas Intel can develop and ship central processing units that utilize IP and extensions initially created by AMD . The cross-licensing agreement has a number of terms and limitations. For example, the chip designers are not allowed to build processors that are compatible with competitor’s infrastructure (e.g., sockets, mainboards, etc.). Besides, if AMD and Intel change their ownership , the agreement terminated."
http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov...
looncraz - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Really, this design is like nothing Intel has.Intel uses a unified scheduler, and it looks from the diagram that AMD is using seven schedulers... which is just insane. Beyond both using SMT schemes and executing x86, they are very different designs.
e36Jeff - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Just a quick FYI, Intel is licencing the SMT technology from Sun, as they hold the US patents for it. So Intel, just like AMD, is copying Sun.svan1971 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Wow that was a hell of a burn on AMD zingy....Nothing better than routing for Goliath huh.farmergann - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Zen is actually an enlarged evolution of the Jag Cores with doubled up pipelines and SMT. Don't take my word for it either, study the link below and pay attention to what we learn about Zen. Jag/Puma+ are actually better Cores than their intel competitors despite a huge node disadvantage. AMD is back.http://www.realworldtech.com/jaguar/
msx68k - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
AMD did not copy anything from Intel, because Intel did not invent the SMT technique. The SMT was developed by IBM in '60, while CMT was by DEC in '90, and both are processor design techniques, something like Risc or CISC.The_Countess - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
like intel copied the short pipeline of the athlon64, the on die memory controller, and the larger l1 and l2 caches, in addition to the already mentioned AMD64.medi03 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
That's one silly statement.That's the way progress works. When there is a good idea to (re-)use, you do it. Nothing wrong with it.
stimudent - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Think or research about what you're about to say before posting.SanX - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Doubt about that. Somebody is just pumping AMD stock. Typical bluff, none of these 200 journos have a clue about all these cache speed exchange etc, they understand only cash speed exchange. The 40% increase in processor performance they claim will actually be 20% or even 10%. And compared to Intel in 2017 - 0%. You can not jump factor of 2 anymore, the Moore's law is dead. And 10-20% difference in computing means EQUAL, and all that Zen noise means NOTHING.looncraz - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
In order for the feat they demonstrated to be real, they had to have exceeded 40% IPC over Excavator, unless their SMT is scaling unusually well.FX-8350 at 3Ghz would take well more than twice as long. Even the FX-8350 at 4GHz would probably take twice as long.
pikunsia - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Yeah, but let's recall also Intel used AMD64 architecture (since the Opterons).atomsymbol - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
It is true there's no significant difference between ZEN and Skylake.bobhumplick - Thursday, August 30, 2018 - link
of course they copied intel. its just a dual socket system shrunk to fit on a single die. and thats exactlyw hat they should have done. its exactly what intel should have done when they made the p4. they should have copied themselves. you dont try to push a new arch like p4 or fx when another desing is so dominate. you have to make the cpu fit the software not the other way around. also intel learned that lesson again with epyc (well i guess at the same time as the p4 thing). you have to have something that will run todays software, if you can add functionality to become the new standard in the future then great but it must fit todays software first and if the compeitions cpu fits todays software better then they will set the trends not youMichael Bay - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
WHENCygni - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
READMichael Bay - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
I WANT DATESTheinsanegamerN - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
BETTER LOSE WEIGHTMichael Bay - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
YOU GOT MEKaboose - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"It’s worth nothing that AMD said"3rd to last paragraph on the final page, should probably read
"it's worth NOTING that AMD said".
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Ha! That's 2am brain drain for you. Fixed :)BrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Hmm...interesting news to say the least, but I'm reluctant to make any assumptions until after Zen is out there being tested. A lot of us were interested in AMD's construction equipment series processors and were disappointed by the final product.Chaser - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Good on AMD! I am hopeful for them with Zen as many others are.ikjadoon - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Hmm....nice timing with IDF. Besides the fantasy of getting XPoint in a consumer drive in 5 years, I agree: most people are more interested in AMD. Cautiously (remember the RX 480 presentation?) optimistic.At the very least, we'll have some competition around the $300 CPU range. Fairly sure the i7-6700K is priced a little too much higher than the i5-6600K.
melgross - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Most people are more interested in AMD? In what way?nandnandnand - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
AMD's Zen 4/6/8 cores will be a better value than Intel's i7 quad cores. That's what way.Cygni - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"Will be" sounds pretty definitive considering they aren't even on the market yet and we have no idea how Intel will react with prices or products.You would think people would learn not to over hype products that haven't even come out (see: No Man's Sky) but here we are again...
StrangerGuy - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Yeah, and projected products never gets delayed or meets the hype either.Flunk - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
In the competition lowers prices way.ikjadoon - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
In the most basic way possible: reading the news, hehe. I think most people (who aren't interested in X-Point) even realize IDF2016 is happening right now, where Intel showed off Kaby Lake silicon inside a Dell laptop running Overwatch.smilingcrow - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"The fantasy of getting XPoint in a consumer drive in 5 years."Firstly, as a replacement purely for NAND in storage most consumers might find it irrelevant.
Secondly, it will be available for consumers but at prices that only prosumers might be interested in.
I think the bigger shift for consumers will be with later products that remove the distinction between memory and storage.
wumpus - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I want this chip (or a semi-low priced i7 with the graphics removed and 4 more cores in its place) with HBM[2-3] memory (and presumably all the DRAM that fits. Hopefully in 5 years that doesn't imply a transition die) and xpoint as "main memory - SSD buffer/cache/'SSD dram'"So yes, five years at least.
ikjadoon - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
No, I think it theoretically is very relevant. If those QD1 numbers are to be believed, we should see noticeable performance increases in day-to-day usage, right?Exactly: it's a fantasy at the price points that are palatable to *consumers*, hehe. Prosumers are also buying $1000+ GPUs, hehe...not the same market.
Right....and that transition is still many years away.
So, what I meant....IDF16 is not very interesting for consumers. AMD timed this presentation quite well.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I am not sure that the QD1 numbers will really make a noticeable difference for general consumer usage patterns. Have to wait for real world benchmarks.azazel1024 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I was very meh about Zen, but now I am actually kind of anticipating it. Even with some of the early engineering sample leaks and rumors that it will be improved IPC, possibly even right up on Skylake, but with much lower clocks. meaning it'll still be lower single threaded performance doesn't bother me too much. BD and it's kin are generally extremely poor single thread compared to Intel's latest Core processors. If Zen comes a fair amount closer...but does it while having 8 cores and 16 threads...that to me says it might actually have a good shot at being in between Skylake/Broadwell and Broadwell-E. If it can do that at a lower price point and being in spitting distance of single thread performance AND manage vaguely reasonable power consumption figures, you could count me as a buyer (if AM4 socketed boards have decent bus support).Give me a Zen with 80-90% of the single thread of Broadwell-E and 80-90% of the mutlthreaded performance of an Octocore Broadwell-E at the price of an entry level Broadwell-E Hexacore, or even a little less ($250-350) and you could count me as a buyer, so long as it isn't some 150TDP monster.
jjj - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Intel rates Broadwell-E at 140W while Zen 8 cores is supposed to be 95W.We'll see about base clocks and Turbo clocks but power might end up being very interesting.
Ofc die size will be interesting too and they should have 4 cores 65W with no GPU.
smilingcrow - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Keep in mind that the TDP for the E range tends to be the same for the whole range so in practice the chips below the top of the stack may in reality be capable of using a lower TDP.patel21 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
For me, a performance comparable to i3 skylake, with power requirements at max over 20% of i3, with a good gpu integrated and at around 70% of i3's price. And My boat will sail AMD....Ho yaanandnandnand - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Weren't "8-core" Bulldozer/Excavator chips sold around $200-250? Maybe it's not so crazy to say that AMD will sell Zen real 8-cores in that price range.80% single threaded of Broadwell-E, 80% multithreaded performance, $225. How does that sound?
Gigaplex - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
If Zen is much faster than Bulldozer, expect it to cost quite a bit more. Bulldozer sold for peanuts because nobody wanted it.StrangerGuy - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Didn't you already know AMD fanboys have the right to be self-entitled cheapskates?"I want AMD to be competitive but without the competitive price tag along with it because evil Intel/NV."
breweyez - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
You sure sound like an intel fanboysmilingcrow - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Recognising and acknowledging that AMD's CPUs were in the doldrums for 10 long years doesn't make you an Intel fanboy but a realist. Ignoring that inconvenient truth does though make you an AMD fanboy.Come on Zen although the amount of crap that the fanboys on both sides will spout when it is released will be immense. I will keep off the forums.
jjj - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
There are no volumes above 350$, anything above that might as well not exist. Zen more or less needs to compete with Skylake while offering 2x the cores. If they have some higher clocks SKU above 350$, that could work but people need to be able to afford Zen,otherwise what's the point. Zen shouldn't be a huge die so AMD should be able to offer reasonable prices. Ofc there is no need to offer 8 cores high clocks at 200$ ,that's too far.BMNify - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
if AMD cant get far better throughput than skylake with twice the zen cores , then they have no right to stay in business after all these missteps and the clammer of Jim Keller PR a DEC engineer who helped design the Alpha 21164 and 21264 processors then how can you ever expect to get a UHD1 rec.2020 capable CPU/GPU by even 2020.smilingcrow - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
A lot of people are hoping that will be their strategy but it depends also on yields and final clock speeds.If they have low yields for the high clock speed parts they might well push that as an FX part and price it at $500 or more. It would still be a good halo product.
Also if they have a really good 8 core at $350 or under it will impact how much they can ask for the higher volume quad core parts.
If they sell too cheap they might have trouble matching the demand.
It's quite a juggling act to balance all that.
azazel1024 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
It sounds very good in fact. My biggest thing is overall system cost. Next is performance and finally noise and power consumption. Sure, I've love what a 10 core Core processor can level, but I don't really need it. I can get by with my Ivy Bridge i5-3570, but if I am going to upgrade, I'd like it to be for a nice boost in performance. Compared to my Ivy Bridge, I could be okay with a very small loss in single threaded performance, but I'd like a big gain in multithreaded performance. That to me says that Zen needs to bring, compared to my i5-3570, at least 90% single thread performance and at least 70-80% of the per core performance under multithreaded workloads. Then deliver it with roughly a $400 overall platform cost (between an "entry" mid-grade board and the CPU, ignoring RAM costs). Do that and they have a buyer from me. Don't and I'll probably look at the lowest level Hexacore Skylake-E processor once they come out next year.Basically I need 8 core Zen to be at least a little faster, averaged out, than current 6 core Broadwell-E, yet come in somewhat under the price of 6 core Broadwell-E. That would be enough extra performance to justify an upgrade from my current system early next year.
AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I am disappointed that they are only releasing Zen in 2017 as I really am looking to upgrade my PC towards the end of the year. But hey, what's another few months, I guess? *siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Aaargh! Where's the edit button please guys????Just to be clear, I'm not waiting /to buy Zen/, I'm waiting for it to come out so that proper, independent tests can show what CPU would be better suited to my pocket and my needs.
melgross - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
As always, I've hopes that this will be what AMD says it will, but little confidence that it will.silverblue - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
The micro ops cache is a bit of a surprise; I believe the Steamroller preview mentioned that particular design was getting such a cache. Perhaps it didn't in the end.willis936 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I thought the zen hype was all noise but if they're actually doing what they're claiming they may make up a lot of ground here.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I'd be cautious about that. If AMD was expecting to be extremely competitive, I think the company would be keeping a closer hold on architectural details so as to catch Intel more by surprise. Instead, they're leaning more toward full disclosure which means they're looking to build hype with consumers. One could read into that openness as a harbinger of a mediocre product launch for which Intel might already be well-prepared to meet.And if that's true, I'd be disappointed. We need a more competitive market to kick things along a little even if it won't last for very long thanks to the ever-increasing difficulty in developing smaller transistors.
nandnandnand - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Zen is getting a one time massive boost in IPC due to correcting the failed architecture.The scientists and engineers working at AMD aren't high school dropouts. It's not crazy to think that they can put out something 75-90% as good as Intel, and undercut them on price. Namely because Moore's law is almost dead and Intel has stalled out, delaying 10nm by a year. Let's see 14nm vs. 14nm. The ever-increasing difficulty in developing smaller transistors works to AMD's benefit.
wumpus - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
One thing to remember is that GoFlo can't supply more than 10% of the marketshare. Even during AMD's glory days when Intel was floundering with Pentium4 and the Itanic disaster, there simply was no way to take over the market due to the simply inability to supply enough chips (which Intel was able to exploit with exclusive deals to the likes of Dell).Now with no chance of meeting, let alone exceeding the power of Intel (who has vastly more smart guys who have been literally refining this overall architecture for more than 10 years (the current uarch might not be the same as core2, but it is vastly more similar than Zen is to Bulldozer). AMD's only real chance is to find some niche they can beat Intel at, and convince the customers that want it to buy AMD (and yes, the latter is often harder than the former).
Obviously, it looks like AMD is going for the full-thread power. The catch is that *everybody* looks at full-thread power (IBM Power and any competition popping up from the ARM world), so Intel has probably spent more R&D researching how to combat that than AMD spent making the Zen. Intel already wastes enough transistors in the more expensive chips on built-in graphics (chips that will *never* use it considering the relative cost of a GPU to the CPU itself), so they can easily add more cores (which will improve benchmarks and presumably decrease AMD sales, even if they do almost nothing else in the real world than those unused graphics).
Of course, Intel seems to have hit a 10 year plateau (possibly through AMD's, IBM's and ARM's complete inability to compete*). They should certainly not be as surprised by any Intel counters as they may have been with the 1060.
* It must be said that Intel finally admitted that while ARM can't eat Intel's lunch, they can't eat ARM's lunch either. If only this was true for AMD.
mdriftmeyer - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Samsung and GloFo share the same 14nm process, so yes they can provide > 10% of the market.Nagorak - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
There are diminishing returns on everything. Having ten times as many "smart people" maybe gives you a 10-20% advantage. AMD can see what worked for Intel and basically reverse engineer it too. The process disadvantage has been pretty much narrowed. It would not surprise me if Zen was competitive with Intel at this point.I'm not sure that I agree with Intel's decision to give up on mobile. Sure they haven't made much headway, but it made sense they were going after it, and I don't think just throwing in the towel was necessarily the right thing to do.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Reverse engineering Intel products and then incorporating those technologies into new AMD products would cause AMD to ALWAYS remain behind Intel because of the latency between reverse engineering and production. To get into that sort of a situation means AMD would never achieve a technological parity or be in a position to rise above the competition. In a competitive market, that's a path to bankruptcy and nothing else. In order to survive, AMD must be innovative, nimble, and aggressive.Kevin G - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
If AMD becomes popular again, they can port the design to TSMC for additional volume. They do have a minimum order agreement with GloFo but it isn't truly exclusive.FMinus - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
When we get to now the details of an architecture, the competition already knows about it two years ago. There's no point being quiet.jardows2 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
I'm not so sure about that. It's not like the GPU market where there is lots of fluidity in the technology. Intel is pretty much locked in for features/improvements for the next few years. A few details about their competitor, coming this close to release, isn't going to change anything Intel does. It's not like Intel is in the position to radically redesign Kaby Lake or Cannon Lake, and after that is so far out that it is irrelevant to Zen's launch.I think AMD is doing a smart move by releasing more details. Perhaps they feel the sting of hyping up Bulldozer so much, but releasing few details, and getting trashed in real-world performance. For Zen, release more details so the hype doesn't dwarf the reality, and give people the desire to purchase the product.
Ro_Ja - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I just want Zen and hope people who are waiting for it won't be disappointed.MrSpadge - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"Unlike Bulldozer, where having a shared FP unit between two threads was an issue for floating point performance, Zen’s design is more akin to Intel’s in that each thread will appear as an independent core and there is not that resource limitation that BD had. With sufficient resources, SMT will allow the core instructions per clock to improve"Ian, this section makes no sense! The reason Bulldozer and kids were slow was not the module design, but simply the cores being too weak. What helps Zen is not SMT but rather the fatter cores and the power optimization. If Zen had only 2 FP execution units, the maximum FP throughput per clock would be the same as for Bulldozer, independent of whether 1 or 2 threads run on a core / module. Or similarly if a Bulldozer module would have gotten 4 FPUs.
Nagorak - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
As I understand it the issue was that for many purposes Bulldozer cores were really only dual core, not four true cores.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
bulldozer had one FPU (a weaksauce FPU at that) for two cores, zen will have one FPU per core, the way intel does it.jjj - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
You list Broadwell-E L3$ at 1.5MB per core but they got 2.5.AMD with less cache and likely 2 mem chans might get away with substantially lower power and smaller die as well as lower BOM for system builders and only a minor perf penalty in consumer.
SunnyNW - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Seems they wanted some press since this week and since they have a Zen presentation at Hot Chips next week anyway the timing doesnt hurt.SunnyNW - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Wow that got sent ALL wrong lol....With them presenting at Hot Chips next week anyway grabbing some press this week doesnt hurt.
extide - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
OMG, SO excited for this. Gotta say that the FinFet GPU's and Zen are some of the most anticipated releases in a long time! I remember when I used to get excited about Intel releasing new arch's but these days that's so boring!SunnyNW - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"We’ve got another couple of pieces detailing some of the AMD internal/live benchmark numbers during the presentation, as well as the dual socket server platform, the 32-core Naples server CPU, and what we saw at the event in terms of motherboard design. "Please hurry up and publish these benchmark numbers!! :)
SunnyNW - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
NICE!!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQS8s7TOXsE
SunnyNW - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Looks like the early leak (AOTS) is more/less correct at least for the ES...at the presentation they had the 8c/16t part running at 3ghz.StormyParis - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"Firstly,"I object bigly to that word.
psurge - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Ian - I think there's a mistake on the first page. As far as I know, AGUs do not perform loads and stores, they calculate load/store addresses. It strikes me as interesting that Zen can perform memory operations more quickly (3 per cycle) than it can generate addresses for them (2 per cycle, per the diagram).KaarlisK - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
"some put it as a major stepping stone for Conroe"Err, wasn't it Sandy Bridge?
MrSpadge - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Good catch, I think you're right.silverblue - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I thought Conroe's ace was its four-issue front end; AMD didn't have that ability until Bulldozer.farmergann - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Did anyone else notice AMD's Zen has 2x GCN CUs? LOL, this is how they managed to trump broadwell-e in Blender. Slightly dishonest since they didn't mention that, but I'm proud of them for showing some competitive fire!Ian Cutress - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Source?patel21 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
For me, a performance comparable to i3 skylake, with power requirements at max over 20% of i3, with a good gpu integrated and at around 70% of i3's price. And My boat will sail AMD....Ho yaaiwod - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Assuming no major bugs, or I/O ( AMD has ALWAYS HAD problem with I/O controller ), Zen should do very well in Server market.Yes there is Pref/ Watt, but when you compound it in the Server power usage from other component, I think Zen should be favourable to many. ( Assuming Intel dont massively drop price )
pogostick - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
What's all this bickering about AMD and Intel. Open your eyes people. There is only one master x86 cpu company and it is VIA. Soaring on their successful acquisition of the Cyrix remains, they've forged ahead to make blisteringly fast products like their 64 bit QuadCore E-Series. It beats everything but my wife. Geez. You guys are CLUELESS.AndrewJacksonZA - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Hahahahaha!belph - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Competition is back (?)patel21 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Yes sir, it sure is.Rickkins1 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Without the competition that AMD provides, Intel cpu's would be priced out of range for most people.Michael Bay - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
And then you remember that AMD didn`t provide any competition worth of note for the past eight years.just4U - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Ofcourse they did.. just not on the highest end of the scale. The PII was a great chip. The FX line is decent but hasn't really seen much love.. and their APU is an excellent product.Meteor2 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Quite. Intel have only been competing against themselves these last years.Makaveli - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
If that is true then why haven't Intel prices increase substantially in the last 10 year where AMD has not been competitive?Maybe because Intel competes with their own previous gen chips. AMD being the reason for Intel's keeping prices in check only works when they have a product that competes and forces them to.
BMNify - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
so, what did AMD do to improve generic x264/x265 data throughput on 10bit 1080P and especially UHD1 rec.2020 software encoding throughput ?what did AMD do to improve ffmpeg and related downstream hardware UHD1 encoding/streaming etc.
patel21 - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Actually whom are you asking these questions ?Peichen - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Lets hope this isn't another one of AMD's empty claim that we've all seen like 8 times over the last 10 years on both CPU, GPU and the nonsense APU.The stock tripled over the last 12 months but that's only if Zen can deliver. If Zen is another <fill in AMD product for the last 10 years>, AMD will be a dollar stock again.
mxnerd - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Wow. AMD stock climbs 12.5% after the news.jihe - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
I pray to god this is a worthwhile processorjust4U - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
All it really needs to be is competitive on the performance front. It doesn't need to beat Intel but hey if it can well shoot.. that would be interesting. Not expecting that or even hoping for it since I think that would be unrealistic.cocochanel - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
If Zen is good enough, it'll take some market share away from Intel, but not much since Intel CPU's are pretty much state of the art. However, the real advantages will come with their APU's (Zen + Polaris). The upcoming PlayStation Neo and Xbox Scorpio will use them. AMD will also go after mobile since they have no completion there with their APU's. Intel has some powerful iGPU's but they are nowhere near AMD APU's in performance. With the node disadvantage gone away, performance and power consumption should be up there. I know the desktop diehards will disagree, but desktops sales have been falling for years. Likely causes are a move by many to mobile devices and cheap, powerful gaming consoles. I don't see that trend changing. The ARM ecosystem is also rolling along and now it's beginning to creep into so far, exclusive x86 server markets. VR will also force ARM designers to come up with more powerful hardware. The next 5-10 years should be interesting.Michael Bay - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Problem is, mobile itself has reached saturation and isn`t so attractive anymore. Plus, what AMD is to go there with, x86? Intel tried already.Node disadvantage will come back at some point, simply because it`s a matter of survival for intel.
Where things should get interesting is the server side. ARM is hardly a threat, but AMD might have a good product here with GPU+CPU compute, likely at lower price.
cocochanel - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
My mistake. By mobile, I meant laptops and not tablets. It's still a big market.Intel regaining node advantage ? Mmm, from I have seen in tech reports ( and I am not a big expert ), both 10nm and 7nm will be a tough nut to crack and will cost huge amounts. Compared to years past, Intel is now up against big giants ( Samsung and TSMC ) who are making billions every year selling tons of ARM SoC and have the deep pockets needed for new nodes. The South Koreans and the Chinese are a smart bunch. I mean, look at the SSD market. Intel had a lock on that until Samsung decided that one was too many. Remember Thunderbold ? Nice tech, but now the market is moving away from it. Sadly, even for mighty Intel, the landscape has changed.
I hope you're right about the server market. AMD can use any sales they can get, but then again, Intel has a lock on that and they will get aggressive and mean if necessary ( it's big bucks, you know).
ARM not a threat ? Architecturally speaking, they have advantages, after all, x86 is a dinosaur and ARM business model is one of their biggest strengths. But you're right, the installed base for x86 is huge and it will take time. There are some big names, however ( Qualcomm and others ) pouring some serious money in it.
Should be interesting.
Michael Bay - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
x86 is a very functional dinosaur with A LOT of companies standing behind it. ARM can license all they want, to actually break in and make those huge server monies, you need a full sw/hw/oem stack.I`d look at IBM`s last hooray POWER thing as the real competitor for intel right now, with AMD hopefully coming in soon as well.
BillBear - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Google has announced their intention to open up competition in the server space by fully adopting IBM's POWER chips over their entire server software/hardware stack and is working with AMD and others to make sure they can do the same thing with the ARM based server chips in development.Competition is a good thing.
Kevin G - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Google is porting their internal software but they're not moving production system unless there is a clear reason. (And for some specific applications, there are some clear reasons.)Google doesn't want to be married to any particular architecture.
BillBear - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
As of April, they seem to have already ported their software stack to POWER and to be in the process of designing server hardware with Rackspace with the intention of making those designs public under the Open Compute Project.http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053092/ibms-power-...
BillBear - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
I should be clear that I'm not saying Google intends to abandon x86. They are simply talking about POWER based servers becoming a first class citizen in their infrastructure.TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Crossing fingers for a great 35 watt APU. The iGPU space in laptops has been stagnant since trinity. and it is abundantly clear that intel cant supply iris pro parts in any meaningful capacity.Now that AMD supports linux properly with polaris, all we need is a polaris+zen APU for laptops, and I can finally move off of windows altogether.
Michael Bay - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
Why would you even need a gpu in a laptop running specialized OS in the first place? Games aren`t being ported outside of token cases and rendering/drawing/general office applications are a sad joke.Networking is where it`s good at, and you don`t need anything over perfunctory graphics there.
Gigaplex - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
Linux is quite the opposite of a specialized OS. It's probably the most versatile platform out there.Michael Bay - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
I see it being said a lot, but what`s the point if software is so bad with no hope of improvement? You can`t reasonably compete with Adobe if there are three people on your team doing this in their spare time, same goes for Zbrush and any other professional content creation tool. Much better to focus where you actually can lead.asoltesz - Sunday, August 28, 2016 - link
"with no hope of improvement" is nonsense for one tracking the Linux world even if only casually.First of all the open source applications have matured a lot. E.g. I could do everything I wanted with Kdenlive as good as the built in movie editor of OSX. (Consumer level, bit still)
For certain niches, oss is now as good as the commercial competition (eg Krita for digital painting)
A lot of newer applications now have proper Linux support (E.g. Slack) because they were created with platform independent toolkits.
As for the base OS and desktop, I find desktop Linux way more powerful and sophisticated than either Windows or OSX. My ws runs KDE Plasma 5 on an Ubuntu base and it is better looking , faster and more stable than my OSX ElCap laptop.
BrokenCrayons - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
Check Steam. The last time I looked, about 2,700 games of the 11,000 were supported under Linux. Then there's quite a few that play nicely under WINE + PlayOnLinux. Native gaming on Linux has dramatically improved in the last 4 years. It seems as though momentum is building still rather than declining. Office applications have come a long way as well thanks to the folks behind LibreOffice. I've been using it as a personal office suite since the fork from OpenOffice and it's made impressive progress. Formatting MS Office documents is still a minor sticking point, but the number of differences I see when moving files between office suites now are very small with most cases being oddball outliers that require obscure capabilities of Microsoft's suites. Rendering has never been a problem on Linux platforms. Drawing though, in my opinion is still a shortcoming. GIMP is a miserable piece of software to work with and remains one of the only image editing options for Linux users.However, I doubt my comment will change your mind. Much like the people who use a $ when they talk about Microsoft, you insist on using the word "loonix" in many of your posts. It shows a very strong bias supported by a framework of childish emotional investment in something as meaningless as software on a computer someone else owns.
Michael Bay - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
>2700 indie nongamesUh-uh. Wake me up when AAA comes in any significant number.
>WINE
Are you joking.
>Libre
Okay, now I know you are.
>GIMP
At least here we can agree.
Reww - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Neither AMD or Intel invented the microprocessor, so they're both copying from someone. Now that we cleared that up, everyone can stfu about copying.BillBear - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
I will be thrilled to see AMD be competitive on more than price. If AMD is also competitive on performance it's a huge win for consumers.SlyNine - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
I almost expected Anand himself to come back and review this one.FireSnake - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
Where did he go, anyway? Does anybody know?patel21 - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
Some commenters say he is working for Apple nowJohan Steyn - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
So many people here are defending Intel. Yes AMD has floundered. They have been poor competition to Intel. They are are struggling and maybe even a dying company. It will be a miracle if this chip will be successful, yet I do believe in miracles. I just hate having an Intel CPU in my notebook.Why is this so? Intel is the bully in town and they bullied AMD to death (almost). I have been in this business at that time. Companies were basically forced not to sell AMD. Intel was found guilty of it and got a slap on the wrist for it. $1B is nothing for them. For this I would welcome the day Intel dies a slow (make it rather quicker) and painful death. But this will probably not happen.
People say it it is just business, well it is in my books not ethical business even though it might be legal. It was even found to be illegal, yet with it they killed their opponent. These days many contractors do the same. When they build a building, the law requires a certain amount of parking space (in our country). If they do not do this, they are fined. Parking brings in little compensation and therefore they rather pay the fines, even if the fine are relatively high. This is what Intel did. They new they did wrong, but also new that the repercussions will be minimal. It was worth it for them to kill the competition by breaking the law and be fined. Intel might be your hero, not mine.
This is sickening. Intel makes me sick. I really hope AMD has some success with Zen, even though I think Intel will find another devious way to curb AMD's success. I even hope ARM will eventually dethrone Intel.
Outlander_04 - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
AMD have surpassed intel in the past . Some of us are old enough to remember 1800 Mhz Athlon 64's smashing intel P4's running at 3000+ MHz .We also remember intels response that saw them bribe oems to continue using their crappy processors by sending back bags of cash to people still buying from them .
We also remember the fines and penalties intel eventually paid for their price fixing. Price fixing that cost their fanboys because it kept the prricee of theeir processors aartificiaally high eveen though they were junk .
A strong AMD is in everyones benefit . We will get more powerful processors and we will get them at a reasonable price . Lets hope ZEN is even better than it seems
sharath.naik - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
The Problem with AMD is that being a technical company, they should have realized lying repeatedly in the name of marketing about the performance of their products, is akin to crying wolf. For now, it does not matter if they actually have a good product or not. The General assumption is that this is going to be another falsehood, and likely their chip can match intel at 3 ghz only when one core is running (That too when turbo is disabled on intel). And will fall far behind both in single and multithread when there is no trubo restriction on the intel chipslyronit - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
I agree with you, but if there's something that can kill Intel at this point, it would be ARM based chips, not AMD.atomsymbol - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
Bulldozer and Piledriver have a write-through L1D cache. Pentium4 has a write-through L1D cache. Zen has a write-back L1D cache. Skylake has a write-back L1D cache.jamyryals - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
Excited to see if they execute, I'm rooting for AMD. After two straight Intel chips, I'd love to spend money with AMD again.slyronit - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
I would be happy to see AMD succeed and be relevant in the desktop/tablet/laptop space again. I have stuck with AMD over the years because of the low price to performance ratio and good multithread performance (I use photo editing apps which multithread well) and because Intel is a mis-leading, monopolistic company.soulLover - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
no avx2 ? After excluding the Micro-OP cache, the four instruction per cycle are to feed 2 x 128 bit, right ? i.e. 4 x 64 bits / cycle. If I'm not wrong AMD is lacking serious parallelism in SIMD than Intel AVX2.unimatrix725 - Sunday, August 28, 2016 - link
I have read both In depth Zen reviews, however something huge is missing! No one or any tech site that I'm aware of has went in depth about Global Memory Interface. The best I got out of it was a variant of a PPC on Wikipedia? There needs to be coverage of this. I believe it critical to Zen & AM4 in general. Since there is no more NB&ORSB. Shocked not even Wikipedia has an article. A double edge sword more or less...patrickjchase - Sunday, August 28, 2016 - link
The comment that "some put [a micro-op cache] as a major stepping stone for Conroe" is wrong on a couple levels:First, Conroe didn't have a uop cache. Like many other micro-architectures before and since it could use its uop queue to buffer small loops, but had no uop cache as such.
Second, Intel cores had uop caches long before Conroe. The first Intel x86 microarchitecture with a first-level I-cache that stored decoded uops was Pentium-4. The oft-maligned trace cache was in fact a uop cache. The fact that it went a step beyond and stored superblocks of decoded uops doesn't change the fact that it was a uop cache.
The uop caches first appeared in the "non-Pentium-4" Intel x86 line in Sandy Bridge, two full tocks after Conroe.
Hixbot - Friday, September 2, 2016 - link
Any chance Zen competition will push Intel to release an 8-core mainstream CPU for about $300?