The AMD Execution Thread [2007 - 2017]
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I still wonder why Stars wasn't further developed. Say a 12 core Stars without IGP and a less useless Turbo. I suppose it's been discussed.
Probably inertia. By the time people started realizing that Bulldozer sucked, the company was too invested in it and it was too late to go back to Stars without incurring enormous expenses and wasting a lot of time. Plus it was likely felt that some of Bulldozer's biggest issues were fixable, and I think Excavator shows that to be at least partially true.
D
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Or maybe a stubborn person or group of people wanted to somehow prove a point.
And failed.
And failed.
I won't go as far as digging old reviews but what I remember for what it is worth is that Bulldozer sucked compared to Phenom in most metrics and the only saving grace was support of new instructions that allowed big wins in specific workloads.
It is pretty terrible when you consider that it was indeed using a newer process.
May be some issues with bulldozers were fixable but one may say that fixing issues is what AMD have been doing for now 4 years with the results we know about. It tooks lots of efforts and time to get from bulldozer to excavators, in the meantime Jaguar which looked like to me like a "simple" but sound and solid basis to build upon (different market segment than BD) ended up canned. By killing Jaguar line AMD gave up on the really low power segment (tablet, cheap notebook and what could be a growing market mini desktop/STB if not HDMI keys) by sticking to a big core only they are sure to not be in a situation on perf (and perf par watts) with Intel higher end offering and it will be as tough to fight with Intel lower end line of product (Atom, Quark). I know Intel wants to get rid of Atom but looking at the slowing down of progress on the lithography front it would not surprise me if they keep it going for longer than they want, pragmatism is always a good choice especially when it is the only one the table
I agree with an answer 3Dilettante made to one of my post a good while ago, Amd may not have other choice as bad decisions are unwinding and time travel ain't an option
Other than that I don't see the departure of Keller as a good thing, foremost from a managerial pov it is never really good to have so much changes at the top, AMD might be perceived as a freaking roller coaster by the engineers /employees.
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http://www.mystatesman.com/news/business/amid-challenges-chipmnaker-amd-sees-a-way-forward/nngdf/
interesting time line for AMD
interesting time line for AMD
Well you should have looked at old reviews, as it was for the most part faster, though not nearly enough considering the process jump and sheer size of itI won't go as far as digging old reviews but what I remember for what it is worth is that Bulldozer sucked compared to Phenom in most metrics and the only saving grace was support of new instructions that allowed big wins in specific workloads.
It is pretty terrible when you consider that it was indeed using a newer process.
May be some issues with bulldozers were fixable but one may say that fixing issues is what AMD have been doing for now 4 years with the results we know about. It tooks lots of efforts and time to get from bulldozer to excavators, in the meantime Jaguar which looked like to me like a "simple" but sound and solid basis to build upon (different market segment than BD) ended up canned. By killing Jaguar line AMD gave up on the really low power segment (tablet, cheap notebook and what could be a growing market mini desktop/STB if not HDMI keys) by sticking to a big core only they are sure to not be in a situation on perf (and perf par watts) with Intel higher end offering and it will be as tough to fight with Intel lower end line of product (Atom, Quark). I know Intel wants to get rid of Atom but looking at the slowing down of progress on the lithography front it would not surprise me if they keep it going for longer than they want, pragmatism is always a good choice especially when it is the only one the table
I agree with an answer 3Dilettante made to one of my post a good while ago, Amd may not have other choice as bad decisions are unwinding and time travel ain't an option
Other than that I don't see the departure of Keller as a good thing, foremost from a managerial pov it is never really good to have so much changes at the top, AMD might be perceived as a freaking roller coaster by the engineers /employees.
Well the FX8150 outdid the Phenom II X6 thought it is in no way a fair comparison, more cores, more silicon, more power.
That is a fairer comparison, new instructions support and increased simd capabilities helped the processor to age better (you would expect that much of a newer processor). If the fx6300 is anything alike the FX8150 then power efficient has to be worse than that of the phenom.
Anyway it is an old story, lets hope Zen cores come out right hence...
Not sure what you mean by fair since I didn't specify any specific review, I just remembered that it was usually faster than the Phenom II X6 and checked a Techreport review to be sure. I still think it's a shit CPU design from that the company who made Intel look foolish wrt the Netburst architecture, you would think at least someone there would recall what happened to Intel when they pursued a similar route.
I still wonder why Stars wasn't further developed. Say a 12 core Stars without IGP and a less useless Turbo. I suppose it's been discussed.
Whether Bulldozer was a successful replacement is separate from whether Stars was running out of steam.
Llano was what resulted from Stars going to 32nm.
Architecturally, Stars was behind in terms of memory speculation, cache hierarchy (it's another question if BD was a step forward, and some of the poor elements are holdouts from Stars), and an integer pipeline with reservation stations instead of a physical register file, which everything that succeeded it has moved to.
Stars also didn't have SMT. If Bulldozer is criticized for only making it halfway to supporting SMT like its ostensibly superior successor Zen, then Stars can be knocked for stopping short of that.
The architecture targeted a certain set of nodes, since manufacturing and physical constraints changed so much over time, and it was dragged past even those by the time 32nm came around.
This is why I made the point that the first sentence is a different issue than the second.
The need to replace something does not make the success of its replacement's design effort more likely.
It's not like Stars didn't have generations of lukewarm performance scaling. That 90nm FXs maintained their clock leadership for so long is a data point in favor of the idea that the base pipeline was conceived with the constraints of that era's process and physical needs.
AMD failed repeatedly to replace Stars (at least 2 BD attempts, there were rumors of a speed racer and brainiac besides those), but the reality is that it kept trying all the way to Bulldozer and lost ground to Intel the more it failed.
Llano had various headwinds against it since it was an APU, which makes the comparisons imperfect, but it had some of the most serious problems on the process it moved to compared to Bulldozer.
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Looks like Silver Lake is having second thoughts about investing in AMD.
D
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Chipmaker AMD to cut about 500 global jobs
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015...20151001?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews
It means that the total cost of the restructuring is expected to be $42M and that $41M of that cost will be put in the books for the September quarter.
So expect a $41M line item in the upcoming 10K report and another $1M in the one of January.
Even more concrete: the Oktober quarterly loss will be $41M larger than without this restructuring, and there will be at least a $41M difference between GAAP and non-GAAP profit/loss.
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AMD veteran, HSA president Phil Rogers leaves company for Nvidia
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...esident-phil-rogers-leaves-company-for-nvidia
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...esident-phil-rogers-leaves-company-for-nvidia
I don't know about looking at version 1.0 of anything and feeling like there's not enough to look forward to. He was an old hand at AMD, so it must have been quite a draw to take him out of AMD and the HSA foundation, if not a push.
An AMD that was more secure along those lines would be one where a critical element of HSA--the GPU--was more integrated with the direction of the company (like having part of its direction covered by the CTO), was expanding its software development, and whose other critical element--the next-gen CPU--was coming in the form of an APU sooner rather than later.
An AMD that was more secure along those lines would be one where a critical element of HSA--the GPU--was more integrated with the direction of the company (like having part of its direction covered by the CTO), was expanding its software development, and whose other critical element--the next-gen CPU--was coming in the form of an APU sooner rather than later.
Like ARM ones ? Im sorry but i dont really see how AMD will fight Intel IGP ( who become more and more powerfull each time ) with a imagineon or Adreno gpu's inside. let alone it will contradict completely the strategy of the company on the computing side. How will they include support of DirectX ( 12 etc ) and other computing stuff needed in their strategy of APU for server / computing / gaming.
The ARM based SOC IGP start to be interessant on a mobile gaming point of view, but they are at some thousands of miles behind what can offer them the actual AMD GPUs for APU's.. for computing or for gaming.
And when i speak about strategy for their APU, the first thing who come in my mind, his the Exascale race: http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/07/29/amds-exascale-strategy-hinges-on-heterogeneity/
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