FEATURED AMD ZEN Discussion (Previous Rumor Thread)

Woomack said:

Good comparing to 5 year old series ... it just supposed to be good
As I said, I just hope it won't be released too late and that overclocking potential is good as current 2.8GHz clock isn't telling much except it's still not enough against new Intels regardless of number of cores.

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I mean, considering that the fx is quite literally almost at twice the clock speed and is still losing, I'd say everything is lining up to what they are telling us (40% IPC improvement).

rescuetoaster said:

I mean, considering that the fx is quite literally almost at twice the clock speed and is still losing, I'd say everything is lining up to what they are telling us (40% IPC improvement).

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Yes but the question remains, how well does it clock, and as an addendum to that... How well does it overclock? Yes the performance is decent at 2.8, but how fast can AMD push those chips, and how well does the 2.8ghz model take to pushing it a bit further.

I think a lot of people are missing the boat on what zen is. It's a great processor that looks to brings exactly what a lot of people are wanting to the PC market. Very good performance, 4K capable gaming pc, for a great comparative price.

Zen will also be the BASELINE for the future Vega /CPU APU which will be the next wave of Xbox and PS processors. Anyone that thinks AMD isn't going to dominate the PC market and this sink isn't looking at the big picture. AMD is building technology that isn't just great for PCs. Very good move on their part.

FlyingTexan said:

I think a lot of people are missing the boat on what zen is. It's a great processor that looks to brings exactly what a lot of people are wanting to the PC market. Very good performance, 4K capable gaming pc, for a great comparative price.

Zen will also be the BASELINE for the future Vega /CPU APU which will be the next wave of Xbox and PS processors. Anyone that thinks AMD isn't going to dominate the PC market and this sink isn't looking at the big picture. AMD is building technology that isn't just great for PCs. Very good move on their part.

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I will follow up your post with "we'll see".

AMD talks a lot of game, but rarely back up their claims when it comes time to launch their product. If they can't significantly beat Intel on price/performance then they are, for lack of a better term, screwed. Why would anyone pick second-best when the overall costs aren't that significant to have the better option available to them. AMD will either need to have their many-core CPUs be super cheap and have at least the same performance of Ivy/Haswell, or it will be another wasted time period for a product. If they can't get OEMs to buy-in, then they will be used for the occasional bargain computers and system builders, both relatively niche markets compared to a standard business-line Optiplex/Precision computer from Dell, for example.

This is coming from me, an AMD shareholder, where I had very high hopes for them multiple years ago when I bought in for ~$8/share, to watch them crash to under $2/share (they are now sitting just under $7).

Janus67 said:

I will follow up your post with "we'll see".

AMD talks a lot of game, but rarely back up their claims when it comes time to launch their product. If they can't significantly beat Intel on price/performance then they are, for lack of a better term, screwed. Why would anyone pick second-best when the overall costs aren't that significant to have the better option available to them. AMD will either need to have their many-core CPUs be super cheap and have at least the same performance of Ivy/Haswell, or it will be another wasted time period for a product. If they can't get OEMs to buy-in, then they will be used for the occasional bargain computers and system builders, both relatively niche markets compared to a standard business-line Optiplex/Precision computer from Dell, for example.

This is coming from me, an AMD shareholder, where I had very high hopes for them multiple years ago when I bought in for ~$8/share, to watch them crash to under $2/share (they are now sitting just under $7).

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I have to agree. I'm a long time AMD user but just started switching to Intel for my next build. The problem for me is the cost vs performance was too much to over look. In the past I have over looked the small boost in performance in Intel because I ultimately saved a good chunk by going AMD. Now it seems Intel has grown in both efficiency and performance while AMD has just grown In price.

Too many times has AMD hyped up a new cpu or gpu before release, then at release various issues cause it not to live up to that hype for me to wait for a new generation. AMD needs to have a truely good generation or go back to lower cost to build confidence then people will come back.

Janus67 said:

If they can't get OEMs to buy-in, then they will be used for the occasional bargain computers and system builders, both relatively niche markets compared to a standard business-line Optiplex/Precision computer from Dell, for example.

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I can honestly say that Dell made a AMD server once just to pee in Intel's water bowl. Its a business thing as to why servers are designed with Intel rather than AMD. It mostly has to do with the history of Intel over AMD and it has little to do with the performance of the chips.

Coming from someone that bought at $4.97 a share and still sitting on it.


What do you look at when you buy your stock? What a company has done or what they are going to do? AMD is not the same company it was. It might have he same buildings but it's not the same company. The products they focus on, the markets they cater to, the R&D, marketing, etc is part of the leadership. Look and the new CEO and look at what has been done. Most game consules in the world use their products. They've by rock bottom and are producing technology that can be used across various platforms. The company isn't the same. The products aren't the same, the outlooks isn't the same, might as well call the company something else. Just read about the sever market they are aiming for. Servers need CPUs and gpu. Google is very heavily gpu dependent and there's not a single cpu/gpu combo out there. For the first time ever there will be and it will exist on a platform, ZEN, than can be used across all markets. It can be a server, a desktop, anything and still have a build in GPU. This will greatly increase the efficiency of the company by not requiring multiple product lines and create an extremely efficient server cpu compared to current options.

Dolk said:

I can honestly say that Dell made a AMD server once just to pee in Intel's water bowl. Its a business thing as to why servers are designed with Intel rather than AMD. It mostly has to do with the history of Intel over AMD and it has little to do with the performance of the chips.

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I would think driver reliability has to play a part in that as well. I can't remember a time when my motherboard driver reliability went smoothly on my AMD setups...Maybe my Barton? The server/business world can't be dealing with bad drivers and poor stability.

FlyingTexan said:

Coming from someone that bought at $4.97 a share and still sitting on it.


What do you look at when you buy your stock? What a company has done or what they are going to do? AMD is not the same company it was. It might have he same buildings but it's not the same company. The products they focus on, the markets they cater to, the R&D, marketing, etc is part of the leadership. Look and the new CEO and look at what has been done. Most game consules in the world use their products. They've by rock bottom and are producing technology that can be used across various platforms. The company isn't the same. The products aren't the same, the outlooks isn't the same, might as well call the company something else. Just read about the sever market they are aiming for. Servers need CPUs and gpu. Google is very heavily gpu dependent and there's not a single cpu/gpu combo out there. For the first time ever there will be and it will exist on a platform, ZEN, than can be used across all markets. It can be a server, a desktop, anything and still have a build in GPU. This will greatly increase the efficiency of the company by not requiring multiple product lines and create an extremely efficient server cpu compared to current options.

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I don't understand why (some of) your unbridled optimism is about an integrated GPU and how it can be used in a server or a desktop. The relevance to the Data Center crowd (me) couldn't be much lower on the list, honestly. Servers do not need a GPU... well, they need one to put a picture on a screen, but, there is on board which is MORE than sufficient. I assure you DC Managers/Technicians/Sys Admins could care less if there is an iGPU or if its integrated in the board, or a discrete card.

I don't recall the Zen architecture dropping the Operton line (Naples core...is based off Zen IIRC). Assuming that is true, wouldn't it still have multiple product lines? I am not entirely sure what you are getting at or why that would create an 'extremely efficient server CPU compared to current options'. In other words, what in a single product line, is going to have more efficiency in a server CPU? Perhaps I am tired, but its like asking a math question like 1+1 and saying "G" is the answer. If I am understanding things, it feels completely unrelated... but, I'm also whooped!

There used to be shed loads of opteron based servers back in the day.

FlyingTexan said:

ZEN, than can be used across all markets. It can be a server, a desktop, anything and still have a build in GPU. This will greatly increase the efficiency of the company by not requiring multiple product lines and create an extremely efficient server cpu compared to current options.

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I can see racks and racks of new AMD ZEN chips with tons of wasted iGPU power.

The non upgrade-able consoles using APUs.... that are just not as powerful as the Average Gaming PC.

Who needs iGPU for real gaming? They make GTX 1080's for that. Lemme have a ZEN chip without iGPU please.

Oh wait, that's how it really is. They are not making a singular chip for all platforms.

Perhaps you mean the X86 core design will be similar across all platforms. Some with L3 cache, some with none. Some with iGPU and mad power house servers with 128 threads per cpu..... who's to know.

Funny you mention AMD isn't the same company it used to be. But I find it funny they called Mr. Keller for a fresh design.... like back in the day when he had designed for AMD before.

Sorry to tell you, but AMD is going to have multiple product lines. Including x86 and ARM too.

I don't know if some of the optimists here saw but AMD plans for the future are mainly fully integrated chips like APU in various versions. Desktop enthusiast/gamer and server CPUs will probably end on one-two chips with more or less cores ( knowing AMD will be about 20 chips at various frequencies and different amount of cores ). AMD has much more profits from graphics cards and APUs than from CPUs that are now only FX series which are let's say not the best. AMD is trying to move to ARMs for couple of years what includes mobile and server markets ( so far they're failing on both markets ). Also big part of the production goes on gaming consoles where are low performance APUs. It's not hard to notice that desktop CPUs are not really what AMD is aiming for. However a lot of customers make opinions of whole company based on history and desktop hardware which is great for marketing purposes. It's always like top series "are selling" low/mass series and on that is counting AMD. They want to make a lot of noise with ZEN and later will make profits on everything else. ZEN has no place anywhere except enthusiast/gamer computers while it's not the biggest market. We hear mainly about new high end graphics premieres and desktop CPUs while what AMD is selling are mainly APUs and cheaper graphics for lower series desktops and laptops.

I see ZEN as good option but we hear about it for a long time. Leaks are for couple of months so chips are in tests. At the same time AMD is telling us that their new series will be as good as ... Haswell ? but when, in December ? Performance can be good but in next year Intel will release new CPU and what then, AMD will be couple of generations back with new products ? ( again )
In the latest tests ( link from 2 days ago in this thread ) 8 core ZEN is a bit better than 4 core Haswell ... is it really a success ? It simply has to be better. Comparing performance of Intel chips, 4 core 5GHz is about as fast as 8 core 2.5GHz in multithreaded tests ( personally tested on i7 vs Xeon, 4/6/8/12 cores ). So there is still something wrong with ZEN performance core to core vs already old Intel.

Other thing is price. I don't know why all think that new AMD will be for sure so much cheaper than Intel. We don't know prices and I won't be surprised if we see similar prices to Intel counting chip performance. The same as AMD is doing on graphics cards market vs Nvidia ( where is also losing because of delayed premieres ).
Next thing is reliability of whole platform. You can get good CPU but it's useless without good motherboard. Most 990FX boards were really bad or just average even though chipset was quite good and personally I liked to work on ASUS CHV.
Motherboard manufacturers are adding only required updates to their AMD based motherboards. Some don't even care to fix all issues and some like Gigabyte were releasing multiple PCB revisions instead of fixing issues with old one or simply let users to make RMA on faulty boards. Instead of that they were saying that their boards are perfectly fine ( whole 990FX UD series ).

I'm going to disagree here - our supercomputers that we use finally started adding gpu compute a few years ago, which MASSIVELY sped up the processing time on our data. I can't really speak for general data center servers, but for research purposes GPU compute is an immensely useful ability.

rescuetoaster said:

I'm going to disagree here - our supercomputers that we use finally started adding gpu compute a few years ago, which MASSIVELY sped up the processing time on our data. I can't really speak for general data center servers, but for research purposes GPU compute is an immensely useful ability.

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That's absolutely true, when considering research/computer. The issue is that I'd argue in most datacenters 95%+ of those servers have no need for a GPU, especially as they are just moving towards virtualization anyway. Then you have the niche circumstances of utilizing VDI with a vGPU (dedicated GPU core to a VM) like we do for a few CAD classes at my college.

Janus67 said:

That's absolutely true, when considering research/computer. The issue is that I'd argue in most datacenters 95%+ of those servers have no need for a GPU, especially as they are just moving towards virtualization anyway. Then you have the niche circumstances of utilizing VDI with a vGPU (dedicated GPU core to a VM) like we do for a few CAD classes at my college.

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exactly. We aren't talking supercomputers...we are talking a server throwing up an image on some screen. But that assessment is correct rescue.

EarthDog said:

Janus67 said:

rescuetoaster said:

I'm going to disagree here - our supercomputers that we use finally started adding gpu compute a few years ago, which MASSIVELY sped up the processing time on our data. I can't really speak for general data center servers, but for research purposes GPU compute is an immensely useful ability.

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That's absolutely true, when considering research/computer. The issue is that I'd argue in most datacenters 95%+ of those servers have no need for a GPU, especially as they are just moving towards virtualization anyway. Then you have the niche circumstances of utilizing VDI with a vGPU (dedicated GPU core to a VM) like we do for a few CAD classes at my college.

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exactly. We aren't talking supercomputers...we are talking a server throwing up an image on some screen. But that assessment is correct rescue.

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I'm not sure how Zen has any bearing there regardless. Your GPU supercomputer isn't going to be very super without discrete GPUs.

It doesnt... ask the guy that originally posted that up.

I've had quite a few AMD Opterons in the past. single socket and multiple socket platforms. Not one opteron had iGPU. However the core design was the same as the desktop in most aspects.

I see mention of performance compared to Haswell. That's not a bad thing. But it's not really a good selling point, but gives a little insite of the IPC jump.

ZEN will have it's ups and downs. We'll see some really decent numbers with multi-tasking benchmarks and everyday use. And that's where most Hardware is going. We can compare Intel to AMD on a single core and multi core level, and with zen Hyper threading as well.

In a nut shell, I believe ZEN will bring a good amount of interest to the table. Hence this thread.

My opinion of this, well 8 cores and 16 threads will feel pretty ZEN. lol. I've not had that thread count without a multiple socket platform for starters. single core IPC is actually at the back of the mind atm. I know it'll game. Current AMD processors game..... so the new ones will just game better. From FX to Haswell type performance, I think 90% of people would be more than satisfied!!

Yes ZEN please. It will Trump the current AMD offerings nough said!

It looks like M$ is sticking to their W10 guns with regard to hardware. Want Zen? You'll need Windows 10. They are extending support to 2020 for 7/8/8.1 on Skylake and FX but new processors will have no support for older OS' from M$. Zen is Ten or nothing. There is still Linux, maybe Steam OS will get some traction, but for the vast majority W10 is it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyl...7-and-8-1-intel-skylake-support/#72f3be407781

Alaric said:

It looks like M$ is sticking to their W10 guns with regard to hardware. Want Zen? You'll need Windows 10. They are extending support to 2020 for 7/8/8.1 on Skylake and FX but new processors will have no support for older OS' from M$. Zen is Ten or nothing. There is still Linux, maybe Steam OS will get some traction, but for the vast majority W10 is it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyl...7-and-8-1-intel-skylake-support/#72f3be407781

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You've got to be kidding me.

WTF Microsoft. I don't want 10

WTF Microsoft. I don't want 10

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You aren't alone there. I'm looking in to a dual boot on my current rig, using 10 just for gaming. I want to make sure 10 keeps its snooping out of other OS' in a dual boot configuration first. But if you want Zen they have you over the proverbial barrel. I suppose M$ may change their mind again but I'm not counting on it. They haven't shown much inclination to be less pushy about W10 so far. With Kaby Lake I don't see any performance gain I can't match with a little OC magic, but the Zen issue is big. That's more than a little tune up on a Bulldozer. This decision isn't likely to bring me back in to the AMD fold anytime soon.