The AMD Execution Thread [2007 - 2017]

[rcf]

In the x86 market AMD may be small compared to Intel, but maybe AMD's history in the x86 market, their CPU design experience and brand recognition are still enough to make them a reference in the ARM market?

The ecosystem in the ARM world is still fragmented and mostly mobile-oriented (iOS and Android), so what about AMD begging Microsoft to release full-blown Windows Server and Windows 11 for ARM while making AMD's K12 platform the reference for everybody else (like they did with AMD64)?

And the fact that Zen and K12 can be pin-compatible and interchangeable on the same motherboard is also interesting.

 

[eastmen]

Please. Either "a hundred bucks" OR simply "$100". Not both at the same time! Otherwise you effectively write "a hundred bucks dollars", which is just...well, you attended school, didn't you, or are you a third-grade dropout?


Frankly I think they're fucked regardless what they do. They just don't have the money to spend sufficiently on R&D, or hire (enough) cutting edge engineers.

how do you think I got the $100 bucks , green backs , bones , wad , (insert other slang). I killed a hundred bucks and traded them for a $100 and then bought stock. Its all koser !

 

[eastmen]

If he used an online discount broker the purchase can be done in any amount.

Even so assuming he spent only $100 and the minimum brokerage fee for purchase is $10 then with only $90 left and AMD at $2.50 a share he would have purchased 36 shares.

In order to break even when selling his 36 shares of AMD it would have to rise to $3.06 or a 22.4% gain.

36 x $3.06 = $110.16 - $10 brokerage fee = $100.16

Seems rather pointless.

I got an introductory offer when I signed up for the e trader so I paid nothing for the first $1k I put in. I bought shares of Disney also.

We will see what happens. Perhaps the new graphics cards will raise the stock price !

 

[Deleted member 2197]

AMD’s ARM servers delayed a full year ....

This is something we alluded to last week, but it deserves its own mention. During the conference call, when CEO Lisa Su was asked when investors could expect to see Seattle ramp for volume shipments, Su responded: “Seattle we continued to sample, and customers are continuing to develop both systems and software. Relative to the production ramp for volume shipments, I think we’ll see that in the second half of this year.”

This is a significant delay compared to what the company had previously stated. Back in 2013, AMD announced it would sample Seattle in early 2014, with volume shipments beginning later that year. In January 2014, AMD announced it was targeted a March sample date (this actually happened in July) with a Q4 2014 server announce date (this hasn’t happened yet). Now, Lisa Su has said that the chips start ramping for production by the second half of the year.

Why the delays? There are several possibilities. While the IP blocks and data from ARM for the basic design should be straightforward, this is still AMD’s first non-x86 CPU in a very, very long time. It’s also a product aimed at the server market, which means the amount of validation that has to occur is going to be higher than it would be for a consumer product. 28nm, however, is a proven node and the Cortex-A57 is a proven CPU design — which means AMD really ought to have had a product out by now.

AMD’s upcoming Analyst Day should answer some questions on whether the company intends to seriously push ARM as a server architecture. AMD still owns the Freedom Fabric IP, even if it closed SeaMicro, but the one advantage of owning the server retailer was that it gave AMD its own showcase for future products — including ARM processors and the x86/ARM hybrid platform known as Project Skybridge. Shutting the vendor down altogether could be seen as evidence Lisa Su disagreed with Rory Read’s oft-repeated assertion that dense servers represented a huge growth opportunity for AMD.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...-be-32nm-amds-arm-servers-delayed-a-full-year

 

[aaronspink]

They have 3 lines of processors(A, R, M). They have GPU IP. They have system IP (interconnect, MMU etc.)
I assume that the A line is by far the most resource intensive though.

R/M is primarily repackaging of older R/M/A lines. Interconnect/MMU etc are normally part of a processor design.

 

[Deleted member 2197]

AMD's Fiji XT-based Radeon R9 390X will have extremely limited numbers at launch, according to our sources (NYSE:AMD, NASDAQ:NVDA)

We're getting closer and closer to the release of the Radeon R9 390X, but we've been hearing some rumblings from within the industry. Our sources have said that AMD will have two Radeon R9 390X cards to launch: one of them will be the Radeon R9 395X2 (a dual-GPU version) with 8GB of VRAM. The second card will be a 4GB version that won't beat the GeForce GTX Titan X.

The dual-GPU will beat the GeForce GTX Titan X, but the normal 4GB won't be capable of beating NVIDIA's GM200-based beast. Our industry sources also tell us that there are some hurdles with yields on HBM, which will see a very limited supply of Radeon R9 390X and Radeon R9 395X2 cards right through to the end of the year.

We're expecting AMD to launch their Radeon R9 390X and R9 395X2 at Computex 2015, which kicks off in the first week of June. With NVIDIA having some 74% of the discrete GPU market, AMD needs to sell as many cards as they can, and these yield issues are something we don't need to hear about right now.

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/44684/amd-radeon-r9-390x-rumored-very-short-supply-launch/index.html

 

[eastmen]

well that's not good considering in a lot of cases a r295x beats the titan or comes close

 

[HKS]

AMD's Fiji XT-based Radeon R9 390X will have extremely limited numbers at launch, according to our sources (NYSE:AMD, NASDAQ:NVDA)

This is also what SK Hynix told me at GTC. HBM1 would be limited to 4GB per GPU.

 

[silent_guy]

This is also what SK Hynix told me at GTC. HBM1 would be limited to 4GB per GPU.

That's what we all thought until there were this somewhat legit looking slides popped up a month ago where they talked about some voodoo tricks to allow 8GB after all.

We'll see.

In any case, Fiji being plagued by yield issues sounds reasonable for a packaging technology that, AFAIK, hasn't seen mass production in consumer products. (Has it?) Becoming king of the memory BW hill seems to come at a very high price, and the window to profit from it is closing fast. By the time Pascal comes around, the issues may have been solved...

 

[Alexko]

I don't think HBM has seen volume production in anything.

 

[3dilettante]

The products I am aware of for 2.5D integration are Xilinx FPGAs, which aren't exactly cheap. Enthusiast cards aren't cheap either, but a high-end card using an interposer is closer to the rest of the graphics market than has been done so far.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

well that's not good considering in a lot of cases a r295x beats the titan or comes close

And so does a SLI of GTX 970, which also comes cheaper than a Titan X, so point being..?

Fiji is the equivalent of two Tahitis glued together, plus a lot more memory bandwidth and ROPs to keep up. Naturally, two Hawaiis would be faster.

 

[eastmen]

And so does a SLI of GTX 970, which also comes cheaper than a Titan X, so point being..?

Fiji is the equivalent of two Tahitis glued together, plus a lot more memory bandwidth and ROPs to keep up. Naturally, two Hawaiis would be faster.

I was speaking of this part

The dual-GPU will beat the GeForce GTX Titan X, but the normal 4GB won't be capable of beating NVIDIA's GM200-based beast.

AMD already has a part out capable of doing it the r295x . This isn't good news if the dual chip is only capable of beating it.

 

[silent_guy]

I don't think HBM has seen volume production in anything.

No question about HBM. But using the kind of interposers that they do. I'm only aware of FPGAs as well.

 

[Alexko]

I'm currently watching AMD's Analyst Day. First tidbits (I guess I'll update this post as it goes on):

— AMD expects to be profitable in H2'2015;
— Skybridge (socket-compatible x86 and ARM chips) is dead: customers supposedly don't care about socket compatibility;
— AMD promises a 40% IPC improvement for Zen over Excavator;
— GCN on 14nm is claimed to be twice as energy efficient (compared to what version of GCN exactly is not clear);
— HBM is said to be over three times as power-efficient as GDDR5;
— in H2'2015, AMD will release open-source software for machine learning (deep neural nets) in OpenCL, presumably with some HSA sprinkled on top;
— some vague comments about AMD having a high-performance interconnect for which all of their IP is designed, and that can extend off-chip;
— Papermaster's talk is already over, and was way lighter on details than I was hoping for;
— Refreshed discrete mobile graphics lineup—but rebrands, or new silicon?
— HBM enables smaller form factors (as expected);
— Carrizo systems will be available for the back to school season;
— There will be desktop CPUs with Zen cores, but apparently APUs are still based on Excavator; at least AMD doesn't mention Zen for them—pretty disappointing!

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Then this slide is already wrong?

Technically, being BGA makes it a non-socket..

 

[3dilettante]

— Skybridge (socket-compatible x86 and ARM chips) is dead: customers supposedly don't care about socket compatibility;

Aside from possibly a SeaMicro-type system, whose overall appeal appears to have been decisively measured, was there a client type that was primed to swap between chips? I don't recall.
The lines seem stark these days where going ARM means aiming a system one way, and going x86 means going another, either in terms of workload or the platforms.

 

[silent_guy]

When I hear socket compatibility, my mind wanders to the times of the Commodore 128, which had 3 compatibility modes (C64, C128, CP/M), or Amiga DOS extenders, or more recently Android tablets that can also do Windows.
It's not quite the same thing, of course, but there seems to be very little value in chameleons. Better simply do one thing very well.

 

[Alexko]

Then this slide is already wrong?

Technically, being BGA makes it a non-socket..

Definitely. The real roadmap contains almost no information at all, apart from sockets (AM4 on desktop) and the fact that desktop CPUs have Zen cores. Updated list:

— AMD expects to be profitable in H2'2015;
— Skybridge (socket-compatible x86 and ARM chips) is dead: customers supposedly don't care about socket compatibility;
— AMD promises a 40% IPC improvement for Zen over Excavator;
— GCN on 14nm is claimed to be twice as energy efficient (compared to what version of GCN exactly is not clear);
— HBM is said to be over three times as power-efficient as GDDR5;
— in H2'2015, AMD will release open-source software for machine learning (deep neural nets) in OpenCL, presumably with some HSA sprinkled on top;
— some vague comments about AMD having a high-performance interconnect for which all of their IP is designed, and that can extend off-chip;
— Papermaster's talk is already over, and was way lighter on details than I was hoping for;
— Refreshed discrete mobile graphics lineup—but rebrands, or new silicon?
— HBM enables smaller form factors (as expected);
— Carrizo systems will be available for the back to school season;
— There will be desktop CPUs with Zen cores, but apparently APUs are still based on Excavator; at least AMD doesn't mention Zen for them—pretty disappointing! Desktop chips will be on AM4, while everything else will be on FP4;

 

[Deleted member 13524]

— There will be desktop CPUs with Zen cores, but apparently APUs are still based on Excavator; at least AMD doesn't mention Zen for them—pretty disappointing! Desktop chips will be on AM4, while everything else will be on FP4;

And let me guess: no HBM for APUs either?
So AMD will be putting their brand new, supposedly more power-efficient cores into a dying design for the consumer market (GPU-less CPUs), and leave the APUs with the old and bad cores, together with an ancient memory controller.
And they gut their APU line's competitiveness after they've been spending money on developing HBM and preaching about the advantages of HSA everywhere.

I give up...