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flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:22 pm

Cool. Then you should have no problem at all with the statement that the masses don't need more than 4 cores! :roll: :wink:
 
Deanjo
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:25 pm

flip-mode wrote:
Cool. Then you should have no problem at all with the statement that the masses don't need more than 4 cores! :roll: :wink:


Nope, nor 3 nor 2 nor 6 nor 8.
 
flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:50 pm

You do remember the context of the discussion is desktop computers? You're saying you'd suggest someone build a single-core general purpose desktop? I'd never recommend less than two, but whatev.
 
ronch
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sat Feb 23, 2013 10:04 pm

@Deanjo: Just curious, what's your current CPU? Is it an Athlon XP?
NEC V20 > AMD Am386DX-40 > AMD Am486DX2-66 > Intel Pentium-200 > Cyrix 6x86MX-PR233 > AMD K6-2/450 > AMD Athlon 800 > Intel Pentium 4 2.8C > AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 > AMD Phenom II X3 720 > AMD FX-8350 > RYZEN?
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sat Feb 23, 2013 10:34 pm

Deanjo wrote:
Considering how the masses are making do with tablets and smartphones now for their computing needs I stand by my statement.
Tablets and smartphones that mostly have dual- and quad-core processors! Hooray! ψ(`∇´)ψ
 
sschaem
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:52 am

And it as already began...

As times goes on people that bought AMD processor/GPU will see software efficiency go up in gaming dramatically.

Crysis 3 is a taste of whats to come, where a 32nm 180$ AMD CPU beats Intel desktop 22nm 340$ flagship CPU.
An AMD 8 core 28nm steamroller could easily crush the best haswell APU for gaming.

The same thing will happen with GPU, where shader code will highly favor AMD GNC.

Also as the web gets more GPU accelerated, even old APU like llano will deliver a better user experience then sandy bridge based APU.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 3:03 am

sschaem wrote:
And it as already began...

As times goes on people that bought AMD processor/GPU will see software efficiency go up in gaming dramatically.

Crysis 3 is a taste of whats to come, where a 32nm 180$ AMD CPU beats Intel desktop 22nm 340$ flagship CPU.
An AMD 8 core 28nm steamroller could easily crush the best haswell APU for gaming.

The same thing will happen with GPU, where shader code will highly favor AMD GNC.

Also as the web gets more GPU accelerated, even old APU like llano will deliver a better user experience then sandy bridge based APU.


Good news for AMD although there was a reason for me switching from AMD to Intel.
Funny thing about that last Intel chip I owned was a Pentium MMX 233 MHz.
Piledriver was a nice step from Bulldozer but since I was looking to replace my AMD Phenom II x6 there was no place to go.
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:35 am

@schaem:

I hope this is really the start of much better things to come for AMD. It's just too bad the industry clobbered them for mainly one reason: low single thread performance. It's a little silly, looking back, how many folks at AMD were fired and how far their stock price has fallen due to this, a reason that is turning out to be not so serious after all once the industry leans more toward highly threaded applications.
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sschaem
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 5:22 am

ronch wrote:
@schaem:

I hope this is really the start of much better things to come for AMD. It's just too bad the industry clobbered them for mainly one reason: low single thread performance. It's a little silly, looking back, how many folks at AMD were fired and how far their stock price has fallen due to this, a reason that is turning out to be not so serious after all once the industry leans more toward highly threaded applications.


I hope so to, AMD withering away doesn't benefit 'anyone' in any ways.

Whats is inevitable is that Game developers are going to tweak their pixel, vertex & compute shader to death for AMD GNC in the next 5+years.
Its now practical to optimize for 'one' console platform. One CPU architecture, one GPU architecture.
And for the first time, all those optimizations are directly going to run native on AMD desktop gaming rigs.
(Steam adopting AMD makes allot of sense)

AMD APU and SoC, specially Jaguar/GNC will have a clear advantage because of this. For a long, long time.

But I'm not sure if this will translate into big $ for AMD, but all sign point to AMD totally owning gaming in 2014.
On console obviously, but this will also translate to desktop, as we see with engines like Cryengine3

People that decided to pay more to get an Intel CPU for gaming might have the benefit short lived....
 
flip-mode
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 9:39 am

ronch wrote:
@schaem:

I hope this is really the start of much better things to come for AMD. It's just too bad the industry clobbered them for mainly one reason: low single thread performance. It's a little silly, looking back, how many folks at AMD were fired and how far their stock price has fallen due to this, a reason that is turning out to be not so serious after all once the industry leans more toward highly threaded applications.


I must be the only one around here that needs high single threaded performance and high multi threaded performance - BOTH. AMD got "penalized" for very good reasons, but not for Piledriver. Piledriver was the beginning of the cleanup of the Bulldozer mess. And even still, Bulldozer and Piledriver both might weather very well as time goes on, and AMD fans have used that refrain for years now, but purchases are most often based on getting the best solution for the current need; that, and the future is never certain.

I'm an "AMD fan" myself, having had only their CPUs in my home machine for 13 years now (yikes, middle age approaching), but I'm not going to sugar coat anything. If I had to buy a CPU right now, it would be a toss-up between the i7 3770K and the Xeon 1230 V2, and I'd probably stretch to get the i7. And don't kid yourselves, just a small amount of overclocking is necessary for the 3770K to eclipse the FX 8350, and when it comes to overclocking both, the i7 3770K will go a good deal farther than the FX 8350.

Piledriver is showing strength and that's great news. If it had the single threaded performance I needed I'd buy one, no questions asked. But I still want to see better from AMD, something that doesn't involve a bunch of compromises and rationalizations on my part to purchase one.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 2:37 pm

What Flip said. Outside of gaming and tight performance per watt requirements, AMD's cores are right there with Intel's, and they do present a number of real and potential advantages.

Just keep in mind why single-threaded performance is important in gaming, at least for the moment. While game workloads can obviously be threaded out as a large amount of the work is homogeneous and not innately serial, the overall picture is like Flip said: we need both good single-thread performance and good multi-threading support. Single-threaded performance is going to limit your minimum frame-rates and directly affect the 'smoothness' of a game, while good multi-threading is necessary to keep up with the load, especially when paired with a decent GPU.

One wonders if a pair of STARS cores sufficiently shrunk and optimized for the latest process alongside two or three Piledriver modules might make an effective hybrid solution? Just a crazy random thought...
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 2:55 pm

Airmantharp wrote:
One wonders if a pair of STARS cores sufficiently shrunk and optimized for the latest process alongside two or three Piledriver modules might make an effective hybrid solution? Just a crazy random thought...
They're "Stars", not "STARS" -- this isn't Resident Evil. (*≧艸≦) Also, Stars isn't really the best choice, honestly; its floating-point performance is better than that of Bulldozer and Piledriver, but still not "good". I'm more curious to see what AMD does with Steamroller.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 3:09 pm

auxy wrote:
Airmantharp wrote:
One wonders if a pair of STARS cores sufficiently shrunk and optimized for the latest process alongside two or three Piledriver modules might make an effective hybrid solution? Just a crazy random thought...
They're "Stars", not "STARS" -- this isn't Resident Evil. (*≧艸≦) Also, Stars isn't really the best choice, honestly; its floating-point performance is better than that of Bulldozer and Piledriver, but still not "good". I'm more curious to see what AMD does with Steamroller.


My mistake- it's been quite a while since I've dug into AMD's technology. I was just thinking of it as an analog to the PS3's Cell CPU, in that it would allow for stronger cores to handle the varying needs of 'control' logic backed up with focused logic. It's just a dream though, as I'm aware that the Piledriver units would be better at branching code, not the heavy FP code that games would require.

In reality, AMD is best off pushing what they've got. With continued optimization and focused developer support they may yet tweak their CPU business back into the forefront.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 3:31 pm

Minium frame rate show the fx-8350 stomping on the i5-3570k, and beating an i7-3770k.

If the fx-8350 and i7-3770k where the same price I would get the i7-3770k, no question.
But we are talking about 180$ vs 340$ difference.

I think CryEngine3 paint the picture pretty well of whats to come, Intel will need to dramatically lower their prices to appeal to gamers.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 3:46 pm

From the FX-8350 review on TR: "In many games, a single, branchy control thread tends to be the performance limiter," in reference to the Intel CPUs absolutely stomping the AMD CPUs in Skyrim.

Thankfully the data we have on Crysis 3 is a good counter-thesis to this, and shows that there's still quite a bit of low-level multi-threading work to done in common game engines. We should also be thankful that both high-end consoles due in the next year or so are pushing for highly threaded, low-clocked CPUs, which means that prevailing game engine design will likely move toward threading out everything that can be threaded to reduce the effect that lower clockspeeds can have on 'single, branchy control threads'.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:01 pm

I like how nobody is considering the hypothesis that the game might simply be poorly optimized for Intel processors. (」゚ペ)」Isn't it an AMD "Gaming Evolved" title?
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:16 pm

The fact that SB-E stomps face in the game weakens the viewpoint that it is an optimization issue and lends more credence to a threading difference. These result also potentially imply that Crysis 3 is leveraging more integer math than FPU math. Bulldozer and its kin have two integer units per module as I recall.
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:19 pm

auxy wrote:
I like how nobody is considering the hypothesis that the game might simply be poorly optimized for Intel processors. (」゚ペ)」Isn't it an AMD "Gaming Evolved" title?


Considered it? Well, we can, but it's more likely that Crytek has focused on optimizing for AMD's modules with an eye towards a four module/eight core CPU, taking advantage of the greater number of real execution resources. If they were also trying to deal with the reported lower clockspeeds in future consoles, the relatively high clockspeed of the FX-8350 only helps.

And if you optimize for real cores, then Intel's 'fake' extra cores are at a real disadvantage.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:21 pm

Ryu Connor wrote:
The fact that SB-E stomps face in the game weakens the viewpoint that it is an optimization issue and lends more credence to a threading difference. These result also potentially imply that Crysis 3 is leveraging more integer math than FPU math. Bulldozer and its kin have two integer units per module as I recall.


Except in the usage chart that sandy bridge e is only being half utilized. So you only have an average of 51 percent utilization. That's 3 of 6 cores (without hyperthreading). I'd like to see some more test's before coming to any real conclusions.
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:22 pm

Ryu Connor wrote:
The fact that SB-E stomps face in the game weakens the viewpoint that it is an optimization issue and lends more credence to a threading difference. These result also potentially imply that Crysis 3 is leveraging more integer math than FPU math. Bulldozer and its kin have two integer units per module as I recall.
SB-E has more threads than the 8350, though -- certainly the number of threads and/or cores helps a lot, and I also agree with your assessment wrt integer vs. FP math; still, I wonder if they aren't doing some kind of brute-force integer math algorithm (which the Bulldozer et al. arch would obviously be very good at) and avoiding a more elegant solution that would shine on the Intel CPUs. (。ヘ°)

I'm not trying to suggest some kind of vast anti-Intel conspiracy; merely that they happened to build it in a way that is very advantageous to Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture. These results are contrary to almost everything else, especially in the case of games; even GTA4 -- which is also very happy to fill up an SB-E -- has no love for Bulldozer derivatives. So why does Crysis 3? 「(°ヘ°)
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:23 pm

Ryu Connor wrote:
The fact that SB-E stomps face in the game weakens the viewpoint that it is an optimization issue and lends more credence to a threading difference. These result also potentially imply that Crysis 3 is leveraging more integer math than FPU math. Bulldozer and its kin have two integer units per module as I recall.


Without knowing beforehand, it could potentially be extremely FP heavy or extremely Int heavy; either way, if the load is largely homogenous outside of the 'branchy control thread', HT becomes less of an advantage. It still helps more than it hurts according to the benchmarks above, but not nearly as much as having actual cores.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:24 pm

thecoldanddarkone wrote:
Except in the usage chart that sandy bridge e is only being half utilized. So you only have an average of 51 percent utilization. That's 3 of 6 cores (without hyperthreading). I'd like to see some more test's before coming to any real conclusions.
Technically, if the SB-E is showing 51% utilization, then it's showing 6 of 12 logical cores being loaded, which means Crytek is avoiding the logical cores.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:25 pm

auxy wrote:
thecoldanddarkone wrote:
Except in the usage chart that sandy bridge e is only being half utilized. So you only have an average of 51 percent utilization. That's 3 of 6 cores (without hyperthreading). I'd like to see some more test's before coming to any real conclusions.
Technically, if the SB-E is showing 51% utilization, then it's showing 6 of 12 logical cores being loaded, which means Crytek is avoiding the logical cores.


I forgot to say this, I meant out of the 6 cores, removing hyperthreading.
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:26 pm

thecoldanddarkone wrote:
No 51 percent core usage, I'm not even including hyperthreading.
Do you have a source for that?
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:27 pm

auxy wrote:
thecoldanddarkone wrote:
No 51 percent core usage, I'm not even including hyperthreading.
Do you have a source for that?


Umm, it's like on the 6th post? :D
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:29 pm

thecoldanddarkone wrote:
auxy wrote:
thecoldanddarkone wrote:
No 51 percent core usage, I'm not even including hyperthreading.
Do you have a source for that?


Umm, it's like on the 6th post? :D

Ohh, I didn't see it. Hehe. Sorry for that.

That's pretty interesting! And it does indeed show they are avoiding the logical cores. It definitely seems like an optimization issue to me then. Where's Bensam123 to scream about core parking? (*≧▽≦)
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:35 pm

I have to wonder if they're avoiding the virtual cores, or if the threads that are broken out for them just don't get anywhere on them. While it doesn't seem to be the case here, Hyper-threading has been known to cause a performance decrease, and works best with heterogeneous workloads that allow a mix of instruction types to be available for schedule.
 
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:36 pm

auxy wrote:
I like how nobody is considering the hypothesis that the game might simply be poorly optimized for Intel processors. (」゚ペ)」Isn't it an AMD "Gaming Evolved" title?

Yea, it is... AMD worked very closely with Crytek on this game, it is a public info :wink:
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:44 pm

Link

Looks like 8 of the 12 cores are in use. Six of physical at roughly half and two of the logical as quarter or less.

The listed 2600 has 6 of 8 cores in use. All four physical and again very little of the logical.

That it more or less ignores HT doesn't strike me as particularly odd. HT can only show great benefits in niche scenarios: for example during a branch prediction failure and the subsequent pipeline flush, HT can run another waiting thread through the pipeline. The module design of Bulldozer is not a clever use of left over/available resources of the CPU, it actually references an available pipeline. If there are more threads to be processed than there are execution units for, then this is a bottleneck, not an optimization issue.

IPC and clockspeed differences make reading into the % utilization a shot in the dark.

Hopefully someone will get Crytek to explain more fully, but I'd bet on plenty of threads and integer math.
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Re: Crysis 3 CPU scaling, hyperthreading vs AMD cores

Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:48 pm

Ryu Connor wrote:
Looks like 8 of the 12 cores are in use. Six of physical at roughly half and two of the logical as quarter or less. The listed 2600 has 6 of 8 cores in use. All four physical and again very little of the logical.
Isn't it still strange that the physical cores are only being loaded halfway?「(°ヘ°)
Ryu Connor wrote:
Hopefully someone will get Crytek to explain more fully, but I'd bet on plenty of threads and integer math.
I think you're probably right, but I still don't see why the Intel cores only get loaded partway. Seems strange... 「(°ヘ°)

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