AMD's forthcoming/new PC architecture

[djsb]

I cant wait until I can buy a new AMD AM4 socket based motherboard and install a new Zen based summit ridge cpu into it. I really don't want to start a flame war or get into a big argument about AMD vs Intel. I just feel eager to try out AMD's new technology in my new PC build. It's been 9 years since my last PC was built and I hope it's worth the wait. What are your thoughts?




PS My current PC uses an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and the PC before that used an AMD 486DX CPU. So ANYTHING will probably be a vast improvement on what I'm using now.

[RGB255_0_0]

I wouldn't wait to build/buy a PC now with the assumption that AMD will come out with something better than what Intel have out. Most of the guesses are that Zen won't even be as fast as Ivy Bridge but at least it won't be as shit as what they have now.

AMD's marketing is some of the worst in the industry, especially for GPUs.

If you have something like Bloomfield circa 2009 then it's probably not going to be a huge change except SATA 3 (native not some third party crap) and PCIe 3.0/NVMe support.

[zapta]

What is that you are after? Brand? Performance? Power eficency? Just change? Value?

[raptor1956]

Hard to avoid the partisan flame war thing but AMD is pretty much dead as far as I'm concerned.  They had a good run until the multi core processors and since then Intel has owned and dominated AMD.  But, worse, AMD is no longer a manufacturer of anything as they farm out production to whomever so they are a shrinking entity and the trend line for that invariably leads to extinction. 

It's sad to because AMD provided a worthwhile competitor to Intel and kept them honest -- that's no longer the case.  Of course, Intel is no longer the juggernaut they once were as they have never managed to carve out a profitable slice of the smaller/cheaper ARM range market.  Part of that problem is Intel was and is used to high margins on the core uP products for desktop, workstations, and laptops but that market has been in decline for a decade and continues to decline.

I once worked for IBM in there micro-electronics division and up to the early 80's they were a major player in semiconductors -- since then they began a slow decline and have pretty much sold off there production capacity and are in talks to complete that work.

So, AMD is not alone in there slide towards oblivion!


Brian

[whitevamp]

AMD's CPU's  have gone down hill and i doubt anything that they come out with will be as good as a Intel.
I have all ways used AMD CPU's but the next one i build will be Intel.
there bulldozer platform was a joke, it was not any better then there Phenom II X6 platform.( well very marginally, not worth the cost of upgrading. )
no flame war intended just saying, my IMHO

[RGB255_0_0]

AMD's CPU's  have gone down hill and i doubt anything that they come out with will be as good as a Intel.
I have all ways used AMD CPU's but the next one i build will be Intel.
there bulldozer platform was a joke, it was not any better then there Phenom II X6 platform.( well very marginally, not worth the cost of upgrading. )
no flame war intended just saying, my IMHO

Bulldozer was so bad Microsoft had to make a patch so Windows could properly use it. 

[wraper]

But, worse, AMD is no longer a manufacturer of anything as they farm out production to whomever so they are a shrinking entity and the trend line for that invariably leads to extinction.

As well as pretty much everyone in GPU and ARM CPU (except cortex M) market, only Samsung comes to mind when thinking about who have own manufacturing capabilities.

[wraper]

Considering that first Zen CPUs should appear at the end of this year, I don't see why one couldn't wait a couple of months if not in hurry for replacing an old PC.

[nctnico]

AMD's CPU's  have gone down hill and i doubt anything that they come out with will be as good as a Intel.

AMD was never on a hill. I tried AMD CPUs several times in the past decades to save cost but I have never seen a PC with an AMD CPU survive as a workstation in a work environment. At some point I had a bunch of AMD fanboy co-workers which all wanted to have AMD machines when the boss went through a PC upgrade cycle. A couple of months later the PCs got replaced by Dells because the AMDs machines just had too many issues. Some of my co-workers still wheren't convinced AMD was a poor choice because their PCs at home worked OK. Then I asked: how long is your PC at home on per day? Maybe 2 or 3 hours playing a game, reading e-mail and browse some websites? The PC at the office has to work for at least 9 hours and open & close many files and run several demanding applications. Huge difference.

[RGB255_0_0]

AMD's Opterons were amazing and forced Intel to go back to the Pentium 3 architecture and develop the Core line. Opterons were gaining huge traction in the server market and were more efficient to Intel's CPUs at the time, which were very hot and power hungry under the various Pentium 4 lines.

It wasn't until Intel developed the Core line that AMD couldn't scale: they sold their Dresden fab and other assets to IBM or Global Foundries, can't remember exactly.

But AMD had a great time until they bought ATi and I think they thought APUs would dominate as mobiles (laptops) were beginning to outsell desktops. That worked somewhat as HP and some others were big buyers of AMD CPUs but Intel had the money and AMD rarely had profitable quarters.

[wraper]

AMD's CPU's  have gone down hill and i doubt anything that they come out with will be as good as a Intel.

AMD was never on a hill. I tried AMD CPUs several times in the past decades to save cost but I have never seen a PC with an AMD CPU survive as a workstation in a work environment. At some point I had a bunch of AMD fanboy co-workers which all wanted to have AMD machines when the boss went through a PC upgrade cycle. A couple of months later the PCs got replaced by Dells because the AMDs machines just had too many issues. Some of my co-workers still wheren't convinced AMD was a poor choice because their PCs at home worked OK. Then I asked: how long is your PC at home on per day? Maybe 2 or 3 hours playing a game, reading e-mail and browse some websites? The PC at the office has to work for at least 9 hours and open & close many files and run several demanding applications. Huge difference.

Bulid PCs from some shitty components, then blame AMD, common story. In my experience I had issues with both. And the single CPU which had ever died, was intel i7-3820.
Edit: so reading that again. That company bought/built some shitty PCs, then replaced with DELL. They could just buy AMD based Dell or another good brand PCs as well  .

[whitevamp]

AMD's CPU's  have gone down hill and i doubt anything that they come out with will be as good as a Intel.

AMD was never on a hill. I tried AMD CPUs several times in the past decades to save cost but I have never seen a PC with an AMD CPU survive as a workstation in a work environment. At some point I had a bunch of AMD fanboy co-workers which all wanted to have AMD machines when the boss went through a PC upgrade cycle. A couple of months later the PCs got replaced by Dells because the AMDs machines just had too many issues. Some of my co-workers still wheren't convinced AMD was a poor choice because their PCs at home worked OK. Then I asked: how long is your PC at home on per day? Maybe 2 or 3 hours playing a game, reading e-mail and browse some websites? The PC at the office has to work for at least 9 hours and open & close many files and run several demanding applications. Huge difference.

i have a K62 500, and a 5600 and i use them for my webserver and a streaming media server, the 5600 i run 10 VM's on it and they both run 24X7X365, and dont have any issues.
my main comp im on right now maby gets rebooted once a month, and its my gamming rig. AMD Phenom II X6 1090T ( yes its a couply yrs old, now and not much of a gamming rig now.)

[nctnico]

AMD's CPU's  have gone down hill and i doubt anything that they come out with will be as good as a Intel.

AMD was never on a hill. I tried AMD CPUs several times in the past decades to save cost but I have never seen a PC with an AMD CPU survive as a workstation in a work environment. At some point I had a bunch of AMD fanboy co-workers which all wanted to have AMD machines when the boss went through a PC upgrade cycle. A couple of months later the PCs got replaced by Dells because the AMDs machines just had too many issues. Some of my co-workers still wheren't convinced AMD was a poor choice because their PCs at home worked OK. Then I asked: how long is your PC at home on per day? Maybe 2 or 3 hours playing a game, reading e-mail and browse some websites? The PC at the office has to work for at least 9 hours and open & close many files and run several demanding applications. Huge difference.

Bulid PCs from some shitty components, then blame AMD, common story. In my experience I had issues with both. And the single CPU which had ever died, was intel i7-3820.
Edit: so reading that again. That company bought/built some shitty PCs, then replaced with DELL. They could just buy AMD based Dell or another good brand PCs as well  .

Well my co-workers had a say in the choice of components so I guess they didn't go for the cheapest crap. BTW in my experience AMD based Dell machines also sucked and AFAIK Dell currently doesn't even have AMD based machines. Dell is pretty good at designing reliable workstations but if even Dell can't get it right then what else is out there? Sure you are right that many AMD systems are build from bottom-of-the-barrel components / chipsets and AMD is not to blame 100% but still the problem remains. IMHO the problems are also partly due to the much lower quantities sold so the design effort that goes into the CPU and various components (chipset) has to be less to be profitable (a downward spiral). For starters AMD should have made their own chipsets like Intel does and test them thourougly so they didn't had to rely on third parties.

[wraper]

and AFAIK Dell currently doesn't even have AMD based machines.

And AFAIK yes they do.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/desktops#!facets=135390~0~22697643,135390~0~21800234,135390~0~21800235,135390~0~24262736,135390~0~21800233&p=1&sort=-price

[nctnico]

@evb149:
Early last year I bought a Dell Tower 5810 with a Xeon E5 CPU. It is insanely quiet (I had to get used to the absence of noise from a PC) and there isn't even a fan on the CPU itself. I'll admit this isn't a cheap PC though.

[RGB255_0_0]

AMD's CPU's  have gone down hill and i doubt anything that they come out with will be as good as a Intel.

AMD was never on a hill. I tried AMD CPUs several times in the past decades to save cost but I have never seen a PC with an AMD CPU survive as a workstation in a work environment. At some point I had a bunch of AMD fanboy co-workers which all wanted to have AMD machines when the boss went through a PC upgrade cycle. A couple of months later the PCs got replaced by Dells because the AMDs machines just had too many issues. Some of my co-workers still wheren't convinced AMD was a poor choice because their PCs at home worked OK. Then I asked: how long is your PC at home on per day? Maybe 2 or 3 hours playing a game, reading e-mail and browse some websites? The PC at the office has to work for at least 9 hours and open & close many files and run several demanding applications. Huge difference.

Bulid PCs from some shitty components, then blame AMD, common story. In my experience I had issues with both. And the single CPU which had ever died, was intel i7-3820.
Edit: so reading that again. That company bought/built some shitty PCs, then replaced with DELL. They could just buy AMD based Dell or another good brand PCs as well  .

Well my co-workers had a say in the choice of components so I guess they didn't go for the cheapest crap. BTW in my experience AMD based Dell machines also sucked and AFAIK Dell currently doesn't even have AMD based machines. Dell is pretty good at designing reliable workstations but if even Dell can't get it right then what else is out there? Sure you are right that many AMD systems are build from bottom-of-the-barrel components / chipsets and AMD is not to blame 100% but still the problem remains. IMHO the problems are also partly due to the much lower quantities sold so the design effort that goes into the CPU and various components (chipset) has to be less to be profitable (a downward spiral). For starters AMD should have made their own chipsets like Intel does and test them thourougly so they didn't had to rely on third parties.

Meh. Nforce 2 chipset was the best chipset I've ever used. Maybe I have different viewpoint to you, but as an enthusiast the different options provide faster innovation.

Intel not allowing Nvidia to continue making chipsets stifles innovation and forces people to be compliant to Intel's schedules.

[wraper]

Well my co-workers had a say in the choice of components so I guess they didn't go for the cheapest crap.

Most of the intermittent problems that appear right away usually are related to RAM incompatibility. Changing RAM model, motherboard model or CPU model, likely will solve it. The difference between branded PC and custom built PC is that combination of components in branded PC were tested to work. If you build by yourself, it's up to your luck. RAM issues are very annoying and hard to trace. You may have BSOD once in a week or two and RAM tests won't show any issue. At the same time none of the components are faulty, they just don't work together.
BTW AMD makes their own chipsets since bought ATI and there are no 3rd party chipsets for many years.
EDIT: for accuracy of the facts, some new motherboards on nforce 630a chipset are still available but why the hell it is still sold  , it's 9 years old chipset. The last Nvidia chipset for AMD was released in 2009
EDIT2: Likely Asrock got worldwide stock of nforce 630a, it's in their blood to make some weirdo products with obsolete chipsets. On the other hand, I had much less problems if any with Asrock products unlike with Gigabyte which can be incompatible with just about everything, including PSU and have some weird issues.

[Kuro]

I am also looking to update my old Sandy Bridge i7. Was planning on an 8-core Intel, but prices are a bit stiff, and not budging. I almost resigned to a 6-core when I learned about Zen.

So now I am trying to be patient  . I am looking for single thread performance in Intel's ballpark, but with over 4 cores, at much lower prices than Intel's 'enthusiast' range. I never knew 'enthusiast' was synonymous to 'rich' 

[RGB255_0_0]

I still have nightmares using VIA chipsets 

[raptor1956]

But, worse, AMD is no longer a manufacturer of anything as they farm out production to whomever so they are a shrinking entity and the trend line for that invariably leads to extinction.

As well as pretty much everyone in GPU and ARM CPU (except cortex M) market, only Samsung comes to mind when thinking about who have own manufacturing capabilities.

Most of the others that farm out production have done so all along -- AMD used to be a manufacturer and the history of these things is that companies that first begin to farm out production with the plan that they will continue to develop and just contract for production almost always go out of business and often not long after they close there production facilities.  It's the history of how these things go.

IBM is still in business and making billions but they are no longer the principal driver of the industry.  In the late 80's, during the period where IBM and Microsoft were embroiled in the OS/2 thing, a reporter asked Bill Gates about his relationship with IBM and Bill said "IBM is irrelevant!"  As an IBMer at the time that quote really stung and more so because I knew Gates was right!


Brian

[wraper]

Most of the others that farm out production have done so all along -- AMD used to be a manufacturer and the history of these things is that companies that first begin to farm out production with the plan that they will continue to develop and just contract for production almost always go out of business and often not long after they close there production facilities.  It's the history of how these things go.

Nowadays it's financially nonviable to have own production facilities unless you can load them to 100%, also it is very financially demanding and you need to keep them at the edge of technology otherwise your products won't be competitive. Developing smaller fabrication nodes becomes more expensive with each generation. The only reason why Intel can keep their own production is because they are very big.

the history of these things is that companies that first begin to farm out production with the plan that they will continue to develop and just contract for production almost always go out of business and often not long after they close there production facilities.  It's the history of how these things go.

The history is that who haven't done so, is out of business a long time ago. Even Texas instruments couldn't keep up with fabless companies in mobile ARM market and is completely out of that business. IBM even paid $1.5 billion to Globalfoundries, just so they take away their failing fabs. They are source of losses, not income. It's a bloodbath.

[raptor1956]

It's all about cost and cost is more than labor.  ARM chips in particular are driven by cost and while Intel can demand and get more than $100USD for a single uP what's the cost of a typical ARM processor?  Intel can't compete there either.

The major FAB's that produce them are running 24/7, but so are almost all FAB's -- the only way to cover the multi-billion in capital cost is to utilize the equipment 24/7 and almost all FAB's do this.  But, like many things in production, the 1st world is at a disadvantage to the developing world because the pay scale is higher and the workplace safety and pollution controls add cost that companies in other parts of the world don't have to deal with.

This is all part of a bigger picture and although it makes sense to the bean counter types to close domestic production and move where it's cheaper, but we've seen that model before and the end result is the disappearance of the domestic companies that outsource.  In the mid 60's the USA produced about 95% of the worlds TV sets but by the mid 60's the big TV makers, wanting to cut cost on products that were very labor intensive as TV's of the day were owing to the discrete components that they were made of, and they began to outsource to Japan.  Within a decade Japan owned the market and by the early 80's there were almost no TV's being made in the USA and the companies that moved production to Japan were also history -- replaced by Sony etc.  The US makers of TV's had bad timing with this move as the move towards integration, pioneered by Ti and a few others in the semiconductor business dramatically lowered the cost of TV set production independent of labor costs.  The Japanese benefited from those advances and the US companies were, by then, on to something else.

So, it's a more complicated picture than simply continuing or discontinuing domestic production but the end result has been demonstrated before and will/is happening again!


Brian

[StillTrying]

its my gamming rig

I hate to be the spelling officer, but do you always spell gaming that way. 
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gamming

[wraper]

It's all about cost and cost is more than labor.  ARM chips in particular are driven by cost and while Intel can demand and get more than $100USD for a single uP what's the cost of a typical ARM processor?  Intel can't compete there either.

The major FAB's that produce them are running 24/7, but so are almost all FAB's -- the only way to cover the multi-billion in capital cost is to utilize the equipment 24/7 and almost all FAB's do this.  But, like many things in production, the 1st world is at a disadvantage to the developing world because the pay scale is higher and the workplace safety and pollution controls add cost that companies in other parts of the world don't have to deal with.

This is all part of a bigger picture and although it makes sense to the bean counter types to close domestic production and move where it's cheaper, but we've seen that model before and the end result is the disappearance of the domestic companies that outsource.  In the mid 60's the USA produced about 95% of the worlds TV sets but by the mid 60's the big TV makers, wanting to cut cost on products that were very labor intensive as TV's of the day were owing to the discrete components that they were made of, and they began to outsource to Japan.  Within a decade Japan owned the market and by the early 80's there were almost no TV's being made in the USA and the companies that moved production to Japan were also history -- replaced by Sony etc.  The US makers of TV's had bad timing with this move as the move towards integration, pioneered by Ti and a few others in the semiconductor business dramatically lowered the cost of TV set production independent of labor costs.  The Japanese benefited from those advances and the US companies were, by then, on to something else.

So, it's a more complicated picture than simply continuing or discontinuing domestic production but the end result has been demonstrated before and will/is happening again!


Brian

This is not about first and third world or domestic production. Silicon manufacturing in not about workforce cost at all, unlike things like PCB assembly. Not a single globalfoundries fab is located in China, and the only Asian fabs are located in Singapore which have a very expensive workforce BTW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries
The issue is, be you small, big or super big manufacturer, you will need to pay the same amount of money to develop new technologies. And if you are not as big as intel, it becomes so large part of your revenue that you just cannot keep up with the newest technology. And if you cannot keep up with newest technology, then fabless competitor products will outperform you (as they can use the newest technology available) and your business will go down to the drain.

[whitevamp]

its my gamming rig

I hate to be the spelling officer, but do you always spell gaming that way. 
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gamming

no it was a double tap