With AMD closing the gap with Intel competition in the CPU market is back after a ten year abscense.
What I'm waiting for is an AMD GPU that can compete with a top-tier NVidia offering. Vega is nice, but not really a contender on the mid to top end. The G series cpus with vega inside are great, but where is the 2080ti, or even 1080ti, killer? Even something a bit slower, but close, would be great.
Is it too much to ask of AMD to handle both? I am unsure, but I would love to see NVidia in a price and performance war at the same time Intel is. Competition makes the resulting products better. Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen?
Yeah, despite owning 2080Ti and some Teslas, I'd strongly prefer AMD to be competitive in Deep Learning space.
I've heard that recently tensorflow-rocm can be installed using simple:
`pip install tensorflow-rocm`
Anyone did some Vega64/56/RX580 benchmarks with this? How fast is it in comparison to 1080Ti/2080Ti/Titan V? Can it do latest state-of-art models? Thanks!
> MIOpen[1] is a step in this direction but still causes the VEGA 64 + MIOpen to be 60% of the performance of a 1080 Ti + CuDNN based on benchmarks we've conducted internally at Lambda. Let that soak in for a second: the VEGA 64 (15TFLOPS theoretical peak) is 0.6x of a 1080 Ti (11.3TFLOPS theoretical peak). MIOpen is very far behind CuDNN.
It would be great to do Deep Learning with AMD GPUs. Might do wonders for prices too as new nVidia are really expensive nowadays.
Of course, crypto might have something to do with this. I see miners offloading GTX 1060-s and 1070-s so perhaps the second hand market might become more approachable?
I wouldn't say AMD is closing the gap in CPUs. They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead.
For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has. Nvidia has continued rapid progress in GPUs even though they have a dominant position (and a near monopoly in the datacenter).
Perhaps because they don't have as much of a lead as Intel used to? Intel was a monopoly, plain and simple, but AMD has always been a contender when it comes to GPUs.
The market made it pretty clear that as long as Nvidia was increasing performance substantially with each release, they could collect a healthy margin of profit. There was no incentive to artificially slow down their progress. (Additionally, the benefits of GPU power were clear to gamers, and new benefits from parallel processing units became apparent in the areas of cryptocurrency and machine learning.)
Intel, however, ran into engineering issues with their process improvement, while having limited market-driven incentive to spend and innovate improvements to their efficiency (IPC) beyond a certain level (or to increase core count.) So their "tick-tock" cycle was broken.
Nvidia came to my place of work to do a presentation on the stuff they were working on around AI and Deep learning. More than anything, I took away the message that regardless of how large your budget is, they've got a way for you to spend all it on GPU compute.
AMD is still behind per core in both clocks and per clock performance. Intel has demonstrated the ability to just keep pushing cores to match AMDs largest offerings by just jacking up architectures they have been milking cheap for high margins for years.
TSMCs 7nm node will be the first legitimate tech advantage over Intel and if Intel does get their act in gear and manages to deploy their 10nm next year they will at least keep parity.
I am a huge AMD fan and will almost certainly be considering a Zen 2 build next year (though the fact I can disable Intel ME and can't remove AMD PSP will temper my interest) but thats more to support the underdog and get better value for money than getting the absolute best possible performance.
Intel has been the undisputed champion of process since the 80486 days so it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, let alone 7nm.
I would never have bet money that the tiny little CPU designed by Acorn Computers that ended up powering the Newton would be the first CPU to jump two nodes ahead of Intel in terms of process, but here we are.
ARM's doing great work and I hope they continue to push core counts to even more ridiculous levels.
it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, little lone 7nm
The feature size there is a bit misleading – "Intel 10nm" and "TSMC 7nm" are roughly equivalent, with IIRC the Intel 10nm process actually having a higher transistor density. The TSMC chips aren't really "two nodes ahead" – but it is likely that Intel will lose its process lead for maybe a year or so.
I get the impression that Intel overextended on their 10nm process, in that they were perhaps a bit more ambitious that other manufacturers and it came back to bite them when there were scaling problems. On the other hand, last I heard was that the scaling problems experienced with the 10nm node haven't held up Intel's 7nm node, which could well see them re-establish their process lead.
At the end of the day, it's great that the market is seeing some more competition, so hopefully we will all be able to enjoy the benefits from a variety of manufacturers soon!
> I get the impression that Intel overextended on their 10nm process, in that they were perhaps a bit more ambitious that other manufacturers and it came back to bite them when there were scaling problems.
I’m no micro-electronic expert but I wonder if we are hitting limits in clock speed scaling with regards to feature size - i.e. shrinking pass a certain feature size clock speeds actually have to drop for the chip to be stable.
Intel’s priority is clock speed first and foremost due to what they produce - desktop and server CPUs. A new process is pointless for them if they can’t get at least equal clock speeds out of it as their old process.
TSMC caters to mobile CPU and GPU production - those will never boost to 5Ghz like CPUs; the former for power efficiency reasons (and heat) and the later tends to go for more “cores” as it focuses on parallizable workloads.
As I understand it, it's not chip speed. It's chip voltage. Everything is a conductor if the voltage is high enough, and the closer the traces get, the less resistance the insulation provides. The problem is that at the temperatures we run computers at, the conductor traces need a fair bit of voltage to push the current through the entire chip.
The ratio of conductivities of insulators and conductors stays the same.
It's more that making many very long conductors with very short insulators between them becomes problematic. But that was the case at any process size, but now we are pushing the limits as far as possible to try to make bigger chips.
I don't doubt that Intel will get it together and remain competitive but right now they're really in a bad place. They're usually a step or two ahead, even when pushing ridiculous designs with no merit at all like the Pentium 4 or Itanium. To see them scrambling now to catch up is pretty much unprecedented.
I'm talking about how ARM got their first on the process and now AMD has a chance to fab using that as well. AMD got out of the fabrication game, they couldn't keep up, which means they can use specialists like TSMC which are killing it now.
Intel's largely "secret sauce" process has been their greatest asset. Now it looks like a huge liability.
> AMD is still behind per core in both clocks and per clock performance.
Yes, that's true but the per clock performance is close. They are only 5-10% behind in single threaded tasks without AVX (depending on the workload). The IPC increase is expected to be 10-15% (will of course depend on the workload). And their achilles heel, the AVX performance, will also improve with Zen 2 (256 bit instead of 128 bit etc.)
Due to 7nm the clocks (for consumer hardware like Ryzen and Threadripper) will probably also increase (not 5 to 5.2 ghz after overclocking like Intel, but up to 4.7 ghz overclocks could be possible seeing that 4.3 ghz is possible on the current node which is mobile optimized).
Depending on how much the clocks increase I believe they can close the gap. Maybe even pass Intel. The future certainly looks promising for AMD.
I wonder if they will revive their X APUs for the Server. In the past they had Opteron X APUs to increase the compute density of servers. Now with Zen and Vega this could be a nice combo in addition to discrete GPUs.
Imagine replacing these two 32 core Epyc CPUs made in 14nm with two 32 core Epyc APUs (Zen 2) made in 7nm, which would use the saved space due to 7nm for Compute Units, and you might get an additional 10-16 TFlops per System. Which is basically one additional GPU.
People keep thinking AMD's 7nm is this amazing thing, like everyone is talking about the same thing when it comes to CPU's and nm. When in reality nm has just been marketing fluff for a decade now, just like response times in monitors.
AMD's 7nm might get them close to on par with Intel's current 14++ nm chips, but it's not like AMD has really figured out how to make the entire CPU half the size.
People who follow the tech press talk about the same thing when talking about nm, and they know TSMC 7nm competes with Intel 10nm not Intel 14nm.
It's been all over the town for months that TSMCs 7nm is estimated to be worse than Intels ambitious failure that is 10nm [0][1][2][3] but quite a bit better than Intel 14nm (with the exception of clocks), and that 7nm+ with EUV for cost savings (which TSCM already taped out last month) is estimated to be equal or even slightly better.
So I'm not really sure what to make of your comment?
> AMD's 7nm might get them close to on par with Intel's current 14++ nm chips, but it's not like AMD has really figured out how to make the entire CPU half the size.
No they didn't, but they don't claim that, do they? From what they say they decided on the IO die exactly because IO doesn't scale as much, and that decision allowed them to double the number of cores. Since 7nm is expected to be much more expensive than previous nodes this seems really clever from a money standpoint as well. The core only Zen 2 chiplets are expected to be around 70 mm² which is mobile SoC territory.
AMD is already close in IPC to Intel even though AMD uses a worse node (GloFos mobile optimized 14nm is more like Intel 22 then Intel 14nm) and wins in multithreaded workloads because their SMT implementation seems to scale better than Intels. They also seem to have better performance/watt when under load. I have not seen numbers for idle wattage for Xeons but Intels desktop CPUs are slightly (5 - 10 watt) better when idle.
So I'm looking forward to them having the better node for the first time ever.
> TSMCs 7nm node will be the first legitimate tech advantage over Intel
AMD's Zen architecture is leaps and bounds above Intel's offering, not only performance-wise but also where it matters the most: product design and production costs.
>For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has.
Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead.
People underestimate just how huge a deal Intel's traditional lead in fabrication tech was. I've long argued that the real casualty of Intel's anticompetitive tactics in the early 2000s was AMD being forced to spin off GloFo. Far more than AMD's near term marketshare at the time, it lead to a situation where AMD couldn't really even fall back to their traditional position of competing on price at the low end of the market and played a direct hand in Intel's decade-plus domination of the market.
>Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead.
I would argue that is nothing to do with Intel stagnation. Look at Intel's leadership and management. Look at Jensen Wong. The last time Intel had any energy at management level were Pat Gelsinger, and they pushed him out.
When I built my PC it seemed like Intel had a pretty small single core edge but amd had twice the cores per dollar. Easy choice if you do anything but gaming imo. I really hope they catch up the GPU space soon.
Interesting enough, a lot of productivity PCs still go for Intel in the form of the 18-core i9-7980XE. AMD isn’t necessarily a shoe-in in productivity either.
“A lot of productivity PC” builds are going for $1700 Intel CPUs... really? Even if the $1700-CPU PC market was really popular, tell me: why would they choose the slower of the $1700 CPUs, other than corrupt or beurocrafic business practices?
And don’t try to argue how Intel’s $1700 18-core CPU is faster than AMD’s similarly priced 32-core CPU because Intel’s has slightly faster per-core performance. Such an argument would be absolutely absurd: the point of an 18-32 core CPU is NOT the single threaded performance :)
Don’t know about you but his builders actually benchmark the CPUs.
Dansgaming uses the 18 core i9 for his streaming box.
Not every application a person uses scales to high core counts, in such situations a CPU with good single thread performance (in addition to high core counts) would be beneficial.
Cache performance matter too. AMD’s CPUs have a split L3 cache. Some applications might not like that.
> Intel is still king in high-end gaming performance
Not really if you consider the price per core. Normally designed games utilize all cores, and something like Ryzen 7 2700X provides a major benefit. Comparable Intel CPUs are a lot more expensive. Their only advantage is higher overclock frequency. But if you need to overclock your CPU to play something, that game is already poorly designed and is probably not using all cores properly.
> Normally designed games utilize all cores, and something like Ryzen 7 2700X provides a major benefit.
No they don’t. Most games barely scale to use 4 cores - some struggle to use even 2.
Even games with tons of threads tend to have a one thread that is ultra heavy which become the limiting factor - i.e. you need single thread performance.
It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too.
It means they are poorly designed which is exactly my point. It's not really a measure of CPU quality, but rather the measure of those games quality. Normal games today use something like Vulkan to saturate the GPU and should not be CPU bound.
So if you need a single thread performance that requires overclocking, it's a poor engine design.
> It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too
And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Unfortunately, time is at a premium in game development - the amount of crunch is already absurded.
Multithreading hasn’t gotten any easier.
Even when games are forced to multithread like on consoles. Said games run on PCs with half the cores (admittedly at nearly twice the clock speed and higher IPC) outpace consoles with 2x the frame rates.
> And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Of course, it’s the best on the market. Intel would be stupid not to charge a premium. It’s how such things are priced.
My point is, for gaming there is no need to spend so much money just to get higher single core frequency. There are some games that are very poorly optimized, but I see them as edge cases which you can skip if it becomes an issue. Most games don't require overclocking really.
That’s correct. I never buy the top of the line because I know it doesn’t have a good cost:benefit ratio.
BUT there are people that want the absolute best available and have the money to afford it ... /shrug
> There are some games that are very poorly optimized, but I see them as edge cases which you can skip if it becomes an issue.
There are a lot of games that aren’t well threaded.
Well multithreaded games are primarily by rich AAA developers - and not even all of them do it; some just don’t have the programming talent for it and some have games that have ran for decades that are too old to multithread without rewriting the whole game.
PS: Sorry for late reply. Apparently people disagreed with me and I had negative Karma for a while. Which slows down posting?
Most game source code I've seen has exhibited this "poorly designed" trait. Some because it was originally written in a single-threaded context and continued to provide shareholder value, and others because it didn't have high enough performance needs to utilize parallelism.
I think that will slowly change over time though, especially for big-budget titles that want to scale with performance better. Architectures like Unity's Job System and the specs package in Rust[1] with a stronger emphasis on staged data processing can help with utilizing cores and cache.
> They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead.
For awhile in the early 2000's, AMD's CPUs were supposedly better than Intel's CPUs. There was a lot of doom and gloom predicted.
I briefly worked for Intel during this period. At an internal quarterly meeting, they shared some confidential information. It was very simple, and very damning to AMD. (In short, Intel very quickly came back on top for reasons that were very obvious to anyone paying attention.)
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Intel right now. I wonder if they really are falling behind, or if they know some things that we don't?
I'm sorry, that's deeply revisionist history. Intel kept their dominance through illegal market practices [0], despite AMD's tech advantage at the time. Intel eventually paid out >$1B, but by then the damage was done and it would take AMD almost 10 years to come back.
> I'm sorry, that's deeply revisionist history. Intel kept their dominance through illegal market practices [0], despite AMD's tech advantage at the time.
While that may be true at the time, it doesn't negate the point that Intel knew internally, long before others, that technically superior solutions where coming.
But illegal business practices only have impact on economics. They don't change the fact that Intel had a technologically superior solution in the pipeline that would eventually trump AMD's offerings.
That would have resulted in Intel taking the economic crown anyway, irrespective of their illegal business practices.
> But illegal business practices only have impact on economics.
That's patently false. As OP stated, the biggest impact of Intel's illegal business practices was getting rid of any competition for over a decade in spite of having a technically inferior and underperforming product line.
I'd rather not repeat confidential information in a public forum, but the advantage had very little to do with a specific feature, technology, or performance.
Was that information "We have finally accepted that NetBurst is a failure and our next chip will be a more conventional design that should outperform AMD's chips"?
I can't find the other news articles. But a number of Radeon group employees have moved to Intel.
A lot of the tension I read was that the Vega team was ransacked. For console engagement chips i.e. Playstation 5 and the new Xbox. There was also speculation of disagreement between Raja and Lisa.
I'm also waiting for a higher end AMD gpu, but will probably grab a 5xx series in the future to tide me over.
The basic principle of GPU, performance scales linearly with transistor count and die size. Since GPU is nothing more than a massively parallel beast, the more you throw in the better.
You can't really expect a 400mm2 GPU to compete with 800mm2 square GPU. So unless AMD made a monster size GPU they will never be able to compete directly with Nvidia.
So why doesn't AMD make one? Economies of scale. Nvidia could afford the huge price of design, testing and (relatively) low yield of an 800mm2 chip, as long as they have customers buying bulk of it. Nvidia is basically enjoying all the Deep Learning / Machine Learning Money buying to their CUDA ecosystem, they could afford to make such bet and they are selling it as fast as they could make them.
AMD doesn't have this luxury, and Lisa Su knew that well, that is why they could only compete in segment that makes sense. Until the day ROCm can compete directly with CUDA, and its demand are high enough before AMD could afford doing a monster die size chip. But AMD already has plan to use the same Chiplet strategy for GPU, and hopefully everything learned with EPYC will fully be used for these GPU.
AMD's resources is limited and they selected a proper priority
1. CPU first, GPU next. as a break through in CPU side is easier than GPU side - just go with more cores with chiplet, since intel basically stopped innovation, while GPU side will be much tougher.
2. data center first, consumer/gamer second. Vega is not meant to compete with best Nvidia card, but it was designed to handle both data center/ML needs and gaming need, maybe the gaming version is just a space holder. The data center version will bring more profit and buy time for AMD to develop the software ecosystem -- CUDA is the moat of Nvidia, and AMD need time to overcome that.
So 7nm is used on data center version instead of a gaming card, which make perfectly sense for AMD.
Isn’t AMD well positioned to make a hybrid unit which works well as a CPU and GPU?
> Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen?
Recently got a new work laptop, a 12” with a 4C/8T i5. I definitely wouldn’t have expected that without Ryzen on the market, which also is available in business laptops from Dell in a 4C/8T config.
But is Ryzen really on the laptop market? There are just few low-end models, nothing that I would consider buying, so for laptops I'm kind of stuck with Intel.
Well, not really, only low end and a bit of midrange. No chance to buy a trivial retina display with any Ryzen U. Like they just dump excess inventories of TN and HD IPS panels at whatever AMD has to offer, even if Ryzen U is far more suitable to 2.5k/3k/4k screens than any Intel UHD.
AMD, please consider making your own premium notebook brand to teach your 3rd party manufacturers what your APUs are capable of!
Specifically retina-style display. I have a perfect vision, can't go back to 1080p and use all-retina/HiDPI screens exclusively for 5 years already. Even got the very latest LG 5k2k ultrawide display yesterday.
Wow ok.. complete opposite, I intentionally chose a lower res display because I find it easier to read, obviates endless resolution problems and uses less battery.
Even without actual Ryzen chips in laptops, we get the benifits. The Thinkpads and XPS series having Intel, low-power, quad cores is a direct result of the desktop chips going to six and eight core.
I think it's impossible, because the whole concept of Zen architecture is to produce 4-core dies, and then glue them together to create a gigantic 8-core or 16-core processor. There isn't 6-core (or 8-core) Ryzen mobile processor, because it wouldn't physically fit inside the laptop.
But Rome architecture, unveiled yesterday uses 8-core dies, so there's hope.
I was looking into getting an A485 Thinkpad which has a Ryzen in it. Sadly, from reviews it sounded like AMD's platform isn't as good at getting into really low power states as Intel is and that shows up in battery life.
I saw some pretty slick business models come out from HP. Actually held one that somebody showed me, it seemed well built.
It'll obviously take time for high quality AMD-based laptops to become a normal thing, but with the CPU being en par and the GPU clearly being better than Intel's offering, it should really only be a matter of time.
Yo! I just bought an E485 from Lenovo, and it's definitely not "low". 4C/8T 2.5 GHz, Vega 10 graphics, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD and 1080p 14" matte display.
The A485 is better spec'ed with docking capability, ports, and an external battery.
Linux works on it with some tweaks, and in 4.20 full support is added.
Granted, it's harder to find, but I am hopeful that with Ryzen performing well, and their Vega GPU beating the crap out of Intel integrated and competing with Nvidia MX150, that we'll see more respect from laptop makers.
This wouldn't be the first time AMD has ceded the top tier to NVidia but still been pretty competitive in the mid range and down. This was what they were doing in the HD 4000 series era.
What I'm waiting for is an AMD GPU that can compete with a top-tier NVidia offering. Vega is nice, but not really a contender on the mid to top end. The G series cpus with vega inside are great, but where is the 2080ti, or even 1080ti, killer? Even something a bit slower, but close, would be great.
Is it too much to ask of AMD to handle both? I am unsure, but I would love to see NVidia in a price and performance war at the same time Intel is. Competition makes the resulting products better. Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen?