News AMD details Steamroller design changes

So it's an incremental improvement... so how far behind Intel will this place AMD when it finally hits the market?

And are we ever going to see AMD being a realistic alternative to a high spec Intel?

 

Maybe they'll at least create a value alternative to Intel.

 

I love my quad-core FM1 chip. It allowed me to build a cheap, low power, decent HTPC with the capability to play Skyrim at decent settings at 720p. No graphics card required. No Intel chip could have offered me that for the price I got my 3670k for ($80). The thing is perfect fast enough for everything I use it for as well. (though I bet the SSD has something to do with that )

Now when Intel really gets rolling with their IGP technology AMD might end up in the back the line again.

 

I'm interested in Steamroller, but I do think AMD need to be asking some long hard questions about how their designers are working: why is it that they seem to need two goes at everything to get it 'right' recently?

Then again, they did kick Intel where it hurt with the Athlon64 and that woke the sleeping giant...

...

That said, if Bulldozer wasn't so power-hungry, at the prices they currently are I'd probably buy one just to have a play with. Bit like the FM1 A8 chips; very interested in them...

 

For your first, no idea, but compared to Ivy, it might actually be pretty comeptive. Compared to what Haswell seems to be promising...not even close. Haswell supposedly is bring transactional instruction sets which might well promise HUGE gains in multithreaded efficiency as well as a bunch of other fun stuff. Combine that with a supposed increase in GPU ability of 2.5x...and AMD might be significantly lagging in both CPU AND GPU ability in their APUs (and CPU onlys) pretty soon.

For your later question...not likely, but it could happen eventually if Intel falls asleep or AMD stumbles upon some radical new innovation.

 

I'm pretty sure there was an article about a month ago saying they're not focusing on high-end anymore, unless I was mistaken and Piledriver is the last.


I personally wonder if these recent changes were made by the Athlon 64 guy who they recently re-hired. If so, maybe they have further changes planned before the release date and then there can be even more performance improvements. Just high hopes though.

 

It seems AMD is also looking at transactional memory too:

http://blogs.amd.com/developer/2009/11/17/the-velox-research-project/

That article was nearly 2 years ago.

TBH,until the CPUs which have them hit retail and there is adequate software support,I am going to reserve judgement. It took years for the 64 bit extensions in the Athlon 64 to be properly supported by software.

 

I really hope this is a success for AMD, Intel are too dominant atm, not good for us buyers!!

 

All I get from this is that it is going to have yet more cores than Piledriver and minor other improvements. Still no decent IPC increases to be seen. Maybe if they can get the power draw down low enough this thing will have a market but I don't know, competition is pretty tough in that area.

 

Where AMD falls short is rendering, video-encoding and productivity-stuff like that and the reason why I'm using intel CPUs for the last few years. If you're not using your PC for productivity-stuff like that tho, then AMD has a better value due to it's lower pricetag.

 

Transactional memory will need software support. Without it you'll see no benefits. On the desktop this effectively means you won't see any uses for it for years after Haswell is released. Not to mention gaming, that'll take years and years and years to use transactional memory.

There's no way he would have been involved with the changes, these things take 12 months+ to push through and then add on validation and prototyping on top of that, so that's another 12 months. Latest I heard was Piledriver had completed the 'design phase' so working out how to turn a snazzy diagram into a physical product and validating and testing the whole ensemble is what comes between now and the 2013 launch date.

 

Good Lord. Please whoever posted this newsnip; actually try and understand the briefing. Power gating secondary cache the biggest change?!! WTF! Everyone, I refer you to Anandtech or Techreport for actual infomation. Dear dear.

 

I read somewhere that the "floating point rebalance" was to re-jig the FPU a bit to let MMX and SSE instructions use the same multipliers rather than sending the data along slightly separate paths for different instructions. I think this mainly saves area rather than performance or power though.

 

Dear Mr Halfacree, Are you aware that your newsnip did not mention a 30% improvement in performance?
"reduced branch prediction errors by 20 per cent and cache misses by 30 per cent" no mention of performance. You seem to have difficulty reading your own copy, never mind anyone else's .

But hey!; thanks for selective out-of-context editing! Let's hope no one else reads decent coverage of this topic - they'll never know the difference!

 

Ha! nah. You might check vr-zone though, that's quite intreasting. 45%? ipc?

 

Hooray. Yet another AMD fanboy eager to show their red cape off.

Still; I'd quite like this, Bulldozer isn't that slow, it's just not that fast in relation to Intel.