Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, morphine
ronch wrote:One can only guess what AMD is planning by slashing prices. OK, it's very unlikely they'll introduce new SKUs -- it's more like begging people to pick up those unsold 220w CPUs. Honestly, I consider the FX-8350 to be their top-model CPU. Those FX-9xxx chips can't fool us and they're just trying to trick us out of ~$700 when those crazy things came out. I pity the poor souls who went out and actually paid almost a grand for the FX-9590. They probably kicked themselves when prices plummeted, then banged their heads on the wall when Haswell 2.0 came out,
ronch wrote:For the record I'm using an FX-8350 and I couldn't be happier even if you gave me a 4790K (OK, I might take that statement back). The only thing I don't like about it is the power consumption so I avoid loading all the cores when I could. Talk about buying a gas-guzzling chip then being afraid to put the pedal to the metal.
loophole wrote:But 220W... that's on par with big iron chips like IBM's POWER8. Admittedly there's a fair bit more harware muscle on that die though.
the wrote:loophole wrote:But 220W... that's on par with big iron chips like IBM's POWER8. Admittedly there's a fair bit more harware muscle on that die though.
Actually, the FX 9950 at 220W consumes more power than the POWER8 which is a 190W part.
the wrote:loophole wrote:But 220W... that's on par with big iron chips like IBM's POWER8. Admittedly there's a fair bit more harware muscle on that die though.
Actually, the FX 9950 at 220W consumes more power than the POWER8 which is a 190W part.
just brew it! wrote:Piledriver is pretty much at single-thread performance parity with the Phenom II when you take the higher clock speeds into account.
just brew it! wrote:I don't know if Steamroller ever managed to reach IPC parity though.
loophole wrote:the wrote:loophole wrote:But 220W... that's on par with big iron chips like IBM's POWER8. Admittedly there's a fair bit more harware muscle on that die though.
Actually, the FX 9950 at 220W consumes more power than the POWER8 which is a 190W part.
Right you are. I assumed POWER8 would be ~250W. But 190W, that's actually pretty impressive for 12 cores (and braniac cores too). I guess there is something to using SOI. Pity we never saw AMD move to (or GloFo offer) a 22nm SOI process...
loophole wrote:We probably won't see POWER8 chips for £175 though
hakron wrote:I wonder if they will release a more modern chipset to go along with this CPU price slashing.
Nation wrote:http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20140820105340_AMD_to_Cut_Prices_on_FX_9000_Other_FX_Processors_New_Prices_Revealed.html
the wrote:POWER8 is the only architecture that I know of that exceeds Intel's Haswell design in terms of IPC. IBM's design runs about twice as fast as comparable Xeon's but a good chunk of that speed boost is in radically higher clock speeds.
the wrote:Not for that price but we will actually know the price of just the chip. Companies like Tyan are building commercial POWER8 motherboards and they'll need processors for them. Traditionally IBM has hidden the price of the POWER chips as part of a system build price which was further abstracted (often discounted) due to these systems being sold as part of a service contract.
ronch wrote:Creating a new chipset for AM3+ shouldn't be too hard for AMD, although yeah, there would be little incentive for them to do so since they seem to have admitted that Bulldozer was a failure and it would be better to pour resources into their upcoming big ARM and x86 cores. They have all the building blocks to put a chipset together that can match Intel feature for feature, and I reckon it's just a matter of putting the building blocks together just like putting an SoC together. They've pretty much validated these blocks too, so I imagine it wouldn't need too much validation work. The tricky part is convincing board makers to make boards based on this new chipset, and they can do that only if they can make FX CPUs that are dramatically better in terms of performance and efficiency so that people would actually line up to buy it. At this point even with a new chipset I imagine board makers would be uneasy investing resources to support it.
loophole wrote:I wonder how accurate that article is... Why would the E version of a SKU be the same price as a non-E? Surely fewer dies are capable of running within a 95W TDP vs 125W, right? What incentive would a user (or a system builder) have for choosing the higher TDP variant?
just brew it! wrote:
Or maybe GloFo's process has improved enough that nearly all of them (including the non-E ones) are hitting the 95W power envelope now, and the non-E version is only going to stick around until existing stock is exhausted. If it is effectively the exact same CPU, I could maybe see them continuing to charge the same price.
Geonerd wrote:I always thought that AMD was left sitting on great piles of the things, all of which were manufactured some time ago...
loophole wrote:
I wonder how accurate that article is... Why would the E version of a SKU be the same price as a non-E? Surely fewer dies are capable of running within a 95W TDP vs 125W, right? What incentive would a user (or a system builder) have for choosing the higher TDP variant?
Geonerd wrote:Wouldn't be surprised if many of the 125W chips are running lower than rated TDP. If you've got a 100w part, and 125 is the next standard bin, well... in in it goes! The difference between the 'E' and 'standard' chips may not be anywhere near the implied 30W.
just brew it! wrote:loophole wrote:I wonder how accurate that article is... Why would the E version of a SKU be the same price as a non-E? Surely fewer dies are capable of running within a 95W TDP vs 125W, right? What incentive would a user (or a system builder) have for choosing the higher TDP variant?
Almost gotta be a typo.
Or maybe GloFo's process has improved enough that nearly all of them (including the non-E ones) are hitting the 95W power envelope now, and the non-E version is only going to stick around until existing stock is exhausted. If it is effectively the exact same CPU, I could maybe see them continuing to charge the same price.