The comparison is hardly disingenuous: the i5 may not be given Intel's highest branding designation, but it is an enthusiast processor and only a slight step down from the top-of-the-line i7-4770k, lacking only hyperthreading.
And this is completely irrelevant, since the i5-4670k ships with Intel's highest integrated graphics option for desktop chips, which is what is being compared to the A10-7850k.
At the moment AMD's processors can't compete with Intel at the high end. It makes no sense to berate a company for not doing what it can't.
Also, AMD has chosen to fab Kaveri in a bulk process that trades off clock frequency for density (-> more chips/wafer -> cheaper).
The HSA stuff could really be something exciting if they can get the software and OS support. Winning both latest gen consoles is bound to get some clever people spend cycles on it.
Enthusiasts aren't generally using the onboard HD 4600 graphics -- the power profile of CPUs yield a reality that they remain seriously underpowered compared to standalone, 100s of W dedicated GPUs. But for those who do want to maximize the integrated graphics with Intel, the highest option for desktop chips is the Iris Pro 5200 (on the i7-4770R, for instance), which is some 60%+ faster than the 4600.
Nonetheless, these are usually targeted at business PCs and the like (hence the "9 out of 10". Businesses consume the overwhelming majority of PCs).
This article reads like a really bad press release. For instance-
"The new chips show that AMD is moving in a very different direction from Intel"
I just did this. Unless you're targeting something really high end with a lot of 4K and gaming, 4600 is more than enough to handle typical HTPC duties.
I'd certainly look at Kaveri today instead of Haswell for HTPC if I was doing it all over again though.
I've gone integrated on my last two HTPC builds.. my current one is going on 5 years old now.. and have been considering a jump... ironically it's by far the slowest computer in my apartment, and the one I use the most.
Something like this really appeals to me.. I'd been keeping an eye on the F2 line, and will probably go that way, or maybe NUC for my next HTPC, it just feels like the NUC options are just a little under powered.
The Gigabyte BRIX has an Iris Pro-equipped model if that's something you want.
In my case I wanted in-box optical and tv tuner, which eliminates the NUC stuff. There are a handful of right-sized 'htpc' mini-itx cases that enable this and a whole bunch of nice mini-itx boards now.
fair point. Here's a more interesting benchmark [1]
Thus we’ve discovered and confirmed Kaveri’s biggest advantage over Richland, performance per watt. At the high-end Kaveri doesn’t have a lot to offer non-gamers but once you bring TDPs down into standard small form factor or laptop ranges the performance profile of AMD’s newest chip is a lot more competitive. At the present time Kaveri’s performance appears to be a little behind, but still near what we’ve seen from Intel’s ~45 Watt Iris Pro or GT3e graphics solution.
or [2]
It is interesting to note that at the lower resolutions the Iris Pro wins on most benchmarks, but when the resolution and complexity is turned up, especially in Sleeping Dogs, the Kaveri APUs are in the lead.
Seems that Kaveri might not beat intel on the desktop, but might do so on the laptop.
The 45 Watt version of kaveri isn't even out yet and is nothing more than a paper launch. The 15 Watt laptop version hasn't even paper launched yet. I really don't think that this is going to provide any advantage in the laptop space.
You're forgetting about portable (notebook, tablet, etc.), where most personal computers are sold.
One reason I even consider buying a desktop anymore is that discrete-GPU notebooks tend to be enormous and/or awful. If AMD can produce an APU with reasonable graphics performance, I'll gladly buy a notebook with that in it rather than a new desktop rig.
One nitpick: it is not possible to really get Iris Pro on the desktop. The 4770R (all the R chips, actually) are FCBGA and not sold retail.
Maybe the big brand guys sell some desktops with Iris Pro, and I know Gigabyte has it in one of their NUC alternatives, but otherwise 'enthusiasts' can't get their hands on one
it is not possible to really get Iris Pro on the desktop
Current iMacs come with Iris Pro, and of course as you mentioned there are integrated products with it: While you can't buy it as a discrete chip at retail, you can certainly get Intel-equipped desktops with it, which was the point I was discussing.
Which is certainly by design by Intel, based upon an understanding their market: They put higher performance graphics in their mobile and FCBGA chips because those markets are where it is actually likely to be demanded -- from companies like Apple, or on a mobile where it is the primary graphics. When they sell a chip retail, it is overwhelmingly likely the buyer is going to be coupling it with a stand-along graphics card, so there really isn't much of a point.
Which is going to be the issue that AMD is going to come up against. They are selling something as an enthusiast chip while providing graphics capabilities that lie in that no-man's land of being overpowered for a standard business desktop, but underpowered for the market that is likely paying attention.
I'm sorry that I completely ignored Apple. Although I am not sure I would consider someone buying an iMac (or any brand name prebuilt desktop system) to be an 'enthusiast.'
* It does give pretty decent performance (notably, it outperforms the new Mac Pro on some workloads)
* It looks attractive
* A prebuilt OS-X system means less futzing around with drivers etc
I don't play games (beyond the occasional Minecraft session with my son) and I'm not particularly price sensitive. I've built (many!) of my own computers, going back to a 386DX40, and I'm happy to do it again if I see a good reason. But at the moment I don't.
Desktop computers that seem attractive to me at the moment:
This came off as much more judgmental than I intended, especially towards Apple which I respect as a company and whose products I admire from a design and integration perspective. I was also not trying to belittle Apple fans or customers of any of the other big name manufacturers.
I also really like OS X. As a FreeBSD user for many years, seeing OS X be successful is even a little gratifying because I know there's a lot of cross-pollination going on behind the scenes. I'm not a mobile/laptop kind of guy, but did use a MBP for a couple of years and it was without question the nicest laptop I've ever used. If I were to buy a laptop today it would probably be a Macbook Pro.
I've been building computers from parts for 30 years. I enjoy the research, part selection and construction aspect of the process. I like that I can go into the process with a specific set of criteria and come out with something that satisfies them exactly or, barring that, that I'm in control of the compromises. I like that if these criteria change or I find I made a mistake (more likely), I can just swap out a part and continue on. This is possible with most of the name-brand PC desktops, less so with the Apple products, but I like building it all myself the most.
Also, as a FOSS user, it's typical for hardware support to be an issue. Sometimes it feels like various industries either do not care about me as a user or actively want me to suffer; constructing a modern PC that doesn't have support issues is a challenge that brings a small amount of satisfaction when overcome. I understand if people think this is silly.
So, I consider myself an enthusiast. Given this explanation, hopefully my original comment makes more sense.
About 10 hours of crawling through forums, VMWare documentation and a couple of conversations with people about ESXi. So all of it pretty unreliable ;)
I'm actually of the thought that k-series CPUs are just regular CPUs with a non-working IOMMU, so instead of throwing it out they unlock the multiplier and sell it as an unlocked CPU.
If you're looking to do an small gaming rig for under $600, this is probably the chip to get... the APUs from AMD have been really good options price wise.. and the new 45W parts are really compelling for the parents/grandparents. Also thinking this would be a good option for my next HTPC, current one is about 5yo now.
The major difference between an Amiga and a PC (which was essentially "cpu only") was that the Amiga had a chipset with some units that were somewhat programmable.
I know that you're joking but as someone working in software in the semiconductor industry, building system on chips, I can't help but seeing parallels in modern SoCs and the Commodore Amiga with the "Original Chip Set".
In Amiga, you had the choice between using the CPU, the Copper or the Blitter for certain tasks, e.g. a memset or a memcpy might have been faster to do using the facilities of the chip set, which had direct access to memory.
Similarly, at work we are often making a choice which unit of the SoC (cpu, gpu, copy engine) should be used for a particular task, e.g. a big memset, an image blit or perhaps an alpha blend. Like the OCS chip set in the Amiga, all these various units on modern SoCs have direct access to physical memory.
My educated guess is that most computers will be based on some kind of SoC architectures very soon. There are some experiments being done in putting the DRAM silicon in the same package as the SoC and it may be that in the future, 99% of your computer is just a single silicon chip and the motherboard is there only to connect to peripheral devices.
No. From how I understand hsa works, you would be able to throw raw memory at the gpu, but you'd still need to write the code to tell what memory the gpu needs to look at. I'm not certain how much work is involved in redesigning your app for this -- the dev tools AMD has available are from november, and I don't think they'll have all the Kaveri stuff in them yet.
There is no OS level support, and there is nothing that rewrites existing libraries but I am hoping that programming languages themselves (Ruby, Python) get optimizations built in. An example would be hash lookups in Ruby: Why couldn't the GPU do this for us in certain use cases? You could see large performance increases for all apps written for the language with no code changes needed for thousands of developers.
You mean for a hash table? I don't think you'll be seeing that any time soon. Hash computation will almost certainly be faster on the primary cpu then just the scheduling and waiting overhead. And then the GPU isn't particularly good at any pointer chasing required for the rest of the lookup.
I assumed that in most cases when you deal with a hash table you want some data returned. That's perhaps not true in the case of adding to the hash table, but if you don't need the result you can just add it to a queue, and do it in any old thread, since it's clearly not performance sensitive.
"AMD says Kaveri has 2.4 billion transistors, or basic building blocks of electronics, and 47 percent of them are aimed at better, high-end graphics."
This sentence would have been so much better off if they'd just punted on the weak explanation of "transistor" and left it to anyone unsure to look it up.
Old ATI chips were named Rage. Kaveri seems to be a river in India.... but it would've been much more cooler if it was named Kolaveri, which according to my poor translation skills must mean Rage in Indian (or one of it's dialects - possibly tamil).
The words may be etymologically related. The word kaveri has two suggested etymologies; the first is that it's originally a variation of toveri (which is more formal; also means "friend", but has a leftist connotation, like "comrade"). The latter is fairly straightforward loan from the Russian товарищ (tovarištš), which is probably closely related to the Bulgarian aver. Interestingly, the ka- in kaveri may originate from the Swedish kamrat, quite clearly related to the English "comrade".
The other hypothesis is that kaveri is from the Yiddish חבֿר (khaver), which is a direct loan from Hebrew.
You are right! Kaveri is a river in India and Kolaveri does mean something synonymous with Rage or 'intense passion/anger' in colloquial tamil. Only tamil is not a dialect of Indian. An interesting tidbit. There are hundreds of languages spoken in different parts of India.
From wikipedia,
Individual mother tongues in India number several hundreds;[9] the 1961 census recognized 1,652[10] (SIL Ethnologue lists 415). According to Census of India of 2001, 30 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000
All that aside, I'm curious to know about the origin of this name.
Yes. Kaveri is indeed a river in southern India. AMD has used more river names like Kabini (another river in southern India), Temash, Llano, Desna etc. for their APU chipsets.
It is intended that the GPU will be used transparently by Java code employing Java 8's streams (bulk collection operations, akin to .Net's LINQ), in addition to more explicit usage (compile Java bytecode to GPU kernels).
This is one of the things that makes java 8 really exiting.
I think it is going to show where JIT languages are going to shine in comparison to AOT compiled ones.
Multi architecture code in one program without the developer needing to jump through hoops.
Graal/JVM (like pypy) is a really nice way to bring many languages to advanced VM's. See for example node.jar/nashorn/"fast js on the jvm" or Topaz and Truffle
(Ruby on pypy and graal/jvm)
Not only that, replacing Hotspot by Graal will also reduce the amount of C++ code in the standard JVM towards the goal of having a production quality meta VM.
Totally agree, I never wanted to get involved in C++ hotspot. But graal development (even to the point of generating assembly) looks much more welcoming.
It is part of the wishlist for post Java 8 as presented on Java One 2013, but the wishlist was presented without any guarantee of what will be the exact focus.
I was thinking about looking into Go, but this changed my plans. Aparapi + HSA chip looks far more fun and interesting. Combined with Java 8, and easy GPU programming is finally here.
Thank you for your references. I remember that a lot of people complained about Java is too slow since it's an interpret language, as apposed to compilation language like C/C++ which executes the machine code fast. So a hardware JVM interpreter makes a lot more sense.
Somehow, Sun aborted that plan, but the JIT became farter now. But I still don't get it why it has anything to do the AMD's new APU?
Depends on how good the open source drivers for GCN are. At last check they weren't great performance but worked well enough for day-to-day tasks, while r600 worked almost perfectly.
Is that documentation sufficient for a full-featured open-source driver on par with their proprietary ones?
I ask so because, for the past decade or so, I've been using Intel CPUs and GPUs exclusively for their excellent Linux support. If AMD can provide the same or better level of support, I'd consider switching.
These new chips aren't supported in their Mesa driver, no. They probably will be in a few months, albeit in a buggy state where some display outs may not work and the HSA isn't in use at all.
And since its radeonSI based, you don't have opengl past 3.1 or opencl, and you won't likely ever see the bulleted features like Mantle or TrueAudio.
Though, on the other side of the isle, Intel just got support for opengl 3.3 in their driver, and they don't support opencl at all on their IGP parts.
The only real toss between them when comparing gpu freedom is that Intel uses wholly foss drivers while AMD ships proprietary boot firmware that they have staunchly opposed getting rid of.
Then again, AMD supports coreboot on all their chipsets and don't use proprietary signed microcode payloads on their cpus. And even in the driver space, Intel ships firmware blobs for their wireless NICs, so they aren't saints there either.
And Intel pushed uefi, which is such a colossal PITA that makes me angry on any board I've dealt with it on. And even when Google pressures them into coreboot support on some boards only for Chromebooks, they still use firmware blobs so obfuscate the chipset anyway.
Though Intel is pushing Wayland forward, mostly for Tizen, but still they are paying a lot of Wayland devs, which is a good thing. AMD participates in kernel development, but not nearly as much as Intel. Then again, Intel is a magnitude larger company and has wiggle room on their budgeting since they are dominate the industry so much with their ISA stranglehold, so I have to give AMD some credence there.
In the end neither company is "great' for open source while the other is bad. They both do good and evil in the ecosystem (unlike Nvidia, where publishing 2d documentation is supposed to be good enough). I try to support amd when I can, if I have just an "A or B without preference" choice, since they are the underdog. Also, they produce a lot more open standards - they pushed opencl, they are supporting edp for variable refresh screens, etc - whereas Intel keeps making proprietary technologies only for their stuff like smartconnect or rapid storage.
Though some recent AMD technologies like TrueAudio and Mantle haven't been open at all, so once again, it is a toss.
As someone totally unfamiliar with hardware. Can someone explain what exactly I'm looking at here? What do the holes and different colored sections mean?
You are looking at a picture of the surface of the silicon chip with the circuits etched on it. I'm not sure what the holes are, there are too many of them to be wire pads, perhaps this design uses holes to aid in heat transfer. The colors are post-processing added to the image to highlight different functional units of the chip - I'm not sure what they all mean in this case, but on CPUs, the largest/most uniform areas are always the L2/L3 cache.
If you pick up a packaged CPU, you can't see this surface unless you rip the package apart. In a package, this surface is mounted face down on a tiny PCB which connects the wires to pads or pins for the socket that the CPU is inserted into, and also, a metal lid is slapped on top of the silicon chip (with thermal paste in between). Then a heatsink is slapped on top of the metal lid.
Just had an idea. Put holes in the die for gas flow, if there is a keep out region around the hole the flow will remain laminar at the edges provided the pressure balance is correct and not interfere with the chip. Cooling gas could flow directly through the chip.
You're looking at a very high level picture of the CPU. The different coloured sections represent the different logical segments of the CPU. I can't tell you specifically what each section is and maybe someone more informed could clear that up but among there will be: registers (memory), alu (math), CU (control, brain), buses (transport), the GPU, and some other miscellaneous sections (IR,PC,etc..). For the holes, I don't know what they mean I have never seen those on a cpu die.
Will the APU and graphic card cooperate to form a multi-GPU with single output? It sounds as it could create a more effective gaming platform than a CPU and GPU combo.
Any initial insights as to whether this new CPU/GPU combo will play any nicer with linux than previous AMD GPUs?
Setting up Catalyst and getting my ATI Radeon cards to work properly in a linux setup is probably my least favorite step in setting up a linux computer.
Probably not. It doesn't seem very high on their priority list, and as long as they ignore Linux, Nvidia (and their CUDA) will continue to dominate them. With the big push by Steam, as well as GPU computing and Linux's dominance in supercomputing, you'd think AMD would be a little more motivated...
They updated the binary driver today [1], but it looks like open-source support is not working properly [2]:
"However, when the X.Org Server started, the screen remained black and nothing appeared ever on the display nor was anything outputted to the X.Org Server log after reporting it was using RadeonSI and initializing GLAMOR. This was with the Mesa 10.0.1 driver packages in Ubuntu 14.04. Lastly, I tried adding in Mesa from Git master (Mesa 10.1-devel) but here when launching the X.Org Server and going with GLAMOR for 2D acceleration, there was a segmentation fault."
Personally, I find installing the AMD driver on common Linux distros pretty easy. 1 command to build itself into a package for your distro, then 1 command to install. Reboot and you're good.
Sure, you probably can't fix the screen tearing. And their VDPAU equivalent isn't the greatest. But getting up and running? It's always been really easy.
In my personal experience (I have a thinkpad x120e with a E-350) it used to be the case that I needed the proprietary drivers to get anything respectable. However, things have changed recently (in the last year or so) and I've been getting good performance out of the opensource drivers.
This could be an interesting solution for a compact steambox, essentially very similar to the hardware in the ps4 & xbox one, though I wonder if the lack of memory bandwidth would hurt performance noticeably.
I wish Nvidia would join Mesa already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality.
I wish Nvidia would drop Cuda and focus on openCL already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality.
I wish Nvidia would use Miracast already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality. (with regards to their proprietary game streaming)
I wish Nvidia would push edp (/ displayport 1.4 variable refresh) instead of their in-house proprietary gsync already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality.
I wish Nvidia would standardize unencumbered physx, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality.
"I wish 3dfx would drop Glide and focus on OpenGL already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality" - Nvidia in the end of 90's.
I still remember their rhetoric about open standards and how they are good for consumer and that's why we should purchase their GPU's and that's why game developers shouldn't use just Glide.
Somehow I feel like I was tricked by them. As I was in my early teens back then I was somewhat naïve and thought they were serious. Oh how wrong I was.
This is interesting, but my experience is that Intel's CPU's are so monumentally superior that it will take a lot more than GPU improvements to make me start buying AMD again.
Specifically I'm dealing with compile workloads here: compiling the Linux kernel on my Haswell desktop CPU is almost a 4x speedup over an AMD Bulldozer CPU I used to have. I used to think people exaggerated the difference, but they don't: Intel is really that much better. And the Haswells have really closed the price gulf.
I'm actually expecting Nvidia and Apple to catch-up to Intel on CPU performance before AMD does, and I think it will happen within a year or two, after they switch to 16nm FinFET. This can happen among other reasons because Intel has stopped focusing on increasing performance too much since Sandy Bridge. They mainly focus on power consumption and increasing GPU performance these days, which obviously leads to a compromise on CPU performance.
If they don't shift that focus in 5-7 years they'll find themselves kicking ass at the top of the scale in a market no one can afford. Buying 20 of their competitors chips would be cheaper, just as fast and save a boatload of cash in power, cooling and equipment design compromise.
No one will beat Intel at their own game competitors need to keep them going sideways.
You need to appreciate the economics to realize why it won't happen: a new chip foundry for these types of processors costs something like $5 billion, and that price has only gone up over the years (since we keep wanting to put more and more mass-produced nanotechnology into these things).
Every single time you change a process in anyway, millions of dollars of equipment - minimum - is being ripped out, retooled and replaced. And that's fine, because this industry is all about economies-of-scale, but it means Intel has a huge advantage: they can build more chips. As in, they can convert several fabrication lines to build chips, and simply have more out the door and on the market then their competitors, which means they can afford a price drop which other people can't - because they need to pay for the upkeep, running and loans to build those fab plants in the first place.
Intel is focusing on power and GPU because that's where the gains are to be had and what the market needed, and because they have to - current gen high-end CPUs have more thermal output density then a stove hotplate. Power use had to drop to have any hope of running higher performance into the future, and anyone hoping to compete has the exact same problems to contend with. And since new battery technology isn't happening, mobile has to find power savings on the demand side.
You probably won't see anything on their 16nm node until some time in mid to late 2015 and it should be pointed out that it is not a real node shrink but instead a fake one where they use the same 20nm node but have introduced FinFET. While this gets them increased energy efficiency it does not give them the other benefit of a node shrink (increased transistor density) and so that means that means there will be less chips made per wafer driving up the cost.
The speedup was similar but slightly less when $number_of_cores included hyperthreads (or whatever AMD calls them), as I recall. I don't have the Bulldozer machine to play with anymore ,unfortunately.
Bulldozer's cores are closer to full cores than hyperthreads, especially in workloads that don't use floating point operations, like the compilations you mentioned.
Here's something that confuses me, and maybe someone with better know-how can explain this:
1: The one demo of Mantle I have seen so far[1] says they are GPU bound in their demo, even after underclocking the CPU processor.
2: Kaveri supports Mantle, but claims to be about 24% faster than Intel HD processors, which are decent, but hardly in the ballpark of the type of powerful graphics cards used in the demo.
So combining those two, aren't these two technologies trying to pull in different directions?
I think that is probably the case yes, if you are not using a dedicated graphics card more than likely you are gpu bound already. If you are going to use a dedicated graphics card then I would go with an Intel chip as they have a much better CPU and you could still get an AMD graphics card and use Mantle.
I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of Mantle and that demo. Or he may have explained it poorly in the video.
Saying We are GPU bound even when we underclock the processor is attempting to illustrate how cheap Mantle makes issuing tons of instructions to the GPU. Mantle doesn't make the GPU faster, it makes submitting tasks to the GPU faster in terms of CPU-time.
I'm pretty sure his point was that an integrated gpu has no need for this because it is the limiting factor and not the CPU. This will probably not be true in the future has CPU are not getting much faster and instead more cores are being used which is one of the problems Mantle is intended to help with.
Even if the integrated GPU is the limiting factor, it still saves you CPU cycles to spend on other things, and has the additional bonus of simply being compatible with code that you would run on discrete GPU's. T'would be awful if games built with Mantle just couldn't run on APUs.
In particular, Mantle on an APU will give you much better control of memory allocation, usage, transfer, and caching. Which is something that having the GPU on die will excel at. Mantle is also good at decreasing the overhead of issuing new items on the command queue.
I mean, so close to release announcement. I swear sometimes I hear, "Such and such a product has been released!" and then you can't buy it for 6 months.
Among other things, this has lots of applications for molecular dynamics (computational chemistry simulations) [1]. Before you had to transfer data over to the GPU, which if you're dealing with small data sets and only computationally limited is no big deal. But when you get bigger data sets that becomes a problem. Integrating the GPU and the CPU means they both have access to the same memory, which makes parallelization a lot easier. If, as someone else here said, AMD is partnering with Oracle to abstract the HSA architecture with something more high-level like java [2], then you don't need to go learn CUDA or Mantle or whatever GPU language gets cooked up just for using that hardware.
I'm personally hoping that not only will we get to see more effective medicines in less time, maybe some chemistry research professors will get to go home sooner to spend time with their kids.
Can you give examples of medicines developed thanks to computational chemistry simulations?
I'm rather ignorant about this area of research, but it always seemed to me kinda fruitless? Sorta like high throughput screening - a ton of resources and computation is dedicated because it sounds like a good idea... but ultimately there is very little to show for it all.
I'm not giving you what you want, but here's a visual example of using a computational microscope to understand how drug actually works and finds its binding site:
I would be interested in seeing publications on this - the last time I checked, I think the algorithms and software were being treated as in-house intellectual property by pfizer, novartis, and co
Actually, the "algorithms" are usually fairly straight-forward and well documented integrators for Newtonian dynamics, usually some form of Verlet Integration. The most popular and efficient Molecular Dynamics packages are open source, some GPL (e.g., NAMD, Gromacs). The technology is nowhere near in silico drug design, but we're converging on useful tools to measure important quantities like free energies of binding. Pharmaceutical companies have some interest in this technology, but at this point, don't direct too much effort into atomistic simulations.
ah thanks. My only experience with this was going to a lecture back in school when they brought in someone from Pfizer's in-house modeling team, but the presentation was a bit light on references/citations...
There are lots, and a quick Google search would have cured your unnecessary scepticism. It would be more surprising if this method didn't work than that it does.
Imatinib[1] is a good, and pretty old example:
Imatinib was developed by rational drug design. After the Philadelphia chromosome mutation and hyperactive bcr-abl protein were discovered, the investigators screened chemical libraries to find a drug that would inhibit that protein. With high-throughput screening, they identified 2-phenylaminopyrimidine. This lead compound was then tested and modified by the introduction of methyl and benzamide groups to give it enhanced binding properties, resulting in imatinib
I've worked with CUDA before (and hit issues with large datasets, like you've mentioned). While HSA is presumably going to make things a lot easier, I'm curious about AMD's partnership with Oracle - how much of a performance hit do you reckon we'll see if Java is implemented? And wouldn't it have been easier to go with something like Python that also supports multithreading and (to the best of my limited knowledge) has better scientific libraries?
Yeah perhaps I could have worded my comment better. I meant Python (just like Java) supports parallelization as well, plus it seems to have better scientific libraries.
This is an interesting development indeed. In light of http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7677/04%20-%20Heterogeneous... I wonder if we'll soon see a rise in cheap, low-power consumption dedicated servers meant for GPU-accelerated tasks (e.g., for an image host to run accelerated ImageMagick on to resize photographs). Do you think this would be viable in terms of price/performance?
i think there's a good chance that board would melt. the current R9 is 275W TDP? even with a process shrink, this wont be enough to cut it down sufficiently.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadI don't see why not if they have similar prices, and Intel's Core i7, while more powerful, is also more expensive.
And this is completely irrelevant, since the i5-4670k ships with Intel's highest integrated graphics option for desktop chips, which is what is being compared to the A10-7850k.
At the moment AMD's processors can't compete with Intel at the high end. It makes no sense to berate a company for not doing what it can't.
The HSA stuff could really be something exciting if they can get the software and OS support. Winning both latest gen consoles is bound to get some clever people spend cycles on it.
Nonetheless, these are usually targeted at business PCs and the like (hence the "9 out of 10". Businesses consume the overwhelming majority of PCs).
This article reads like a really bad press release. For instance-
"The new chips show that AMD is moving in a very different direction from Intel"
How so? Intel is fully embracing compute, is increasingly improving the onboard integrated graphics, and already has the beginnings of unified memory (http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/03/27/cpu-texture...). Where is the big divide?
I'd certainly look at Kaveri today instead of Haswell for HTPC if I was doing it all over again though.
Something like this really appeals to me.. I'd been keeping an eye on the F2 line, and will probably go that way, or maybe NUC for my next HTPC, it just feels like the NUC options are just a little under powered.
In my case I wanted in-box optical and tv tuner, which eliminates the NUC stuff. There are a handful of right-sized 'htpc' mini-itx cases that enable this and a whole bunch of nice mini-itx boards now.
Thus we’ve discovered and confirmed Kaveri’s biggest advantage over Richland, performance per watt. At the high-end Kaveri doesn’t have a lot to offer non-gamers but once you bring TDPs down into standard small form factor or laptop ranges the performance profile of AMD’s newest chip is a lot more competitive. At the present time Kaveri’s performance appears to be a little behind, but still near what we’ve seen from Intel’s ~45 Watt Iris Pro or GT3e graphics solution.
or [2]
It is interesting to note that at the lower resolutions the Iris Pro wins on most benchmarks, but when the resolution and complexity is turned up, especially in Sleeping Dogs, the Kaveri APUs are in the lead.
Seems that Kaveri might not beat intel on the desktop, but might do so on the laptop.
[1] http://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/14/difference-50-watts-make-... [2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600...
One reason I even consider buying a desktop anymore is that discrete-GPU notebooks tend to be enormous and/or awful. If AMD can produce an APU with reasonable graphics performance, I'll gladly buy a notebook with that in it rather than a new desktop rig.
Maybe the big brand guys sell some desktops with Iris Pro, and I know Gigabyte has it in one of their NUC alternatives, but otherwise 'enthusiasts' can't get their hands on one
Current iMacs come with Iris Pro, and of course as you mentioned there are integrated products with it: While you can't buy it as a discrete chip at retail, you can certainly get Intel-equipped desktops with it, which was the point I was discussing.
Which is certainly by design by Intel, based upon an understanding their market: They put higher performance graphics in their mobile and FCBGA chips because those markets are where it is actually likely to be demanded -- from companies like Apple, or on a mobile where it is the primary graphics. When they sell a chip retail, it is overwhelmingly likely the buyer is going to be coupling it with a stand-along graphics card, so there really isn't much of a point.
Which is going to be the issue that AMD is going to come up against. They are selling something as an enthusiast chip while providing graphics capabilities that lie in that no-man's land of being overpowered for a standard business desktop, but underpowered for the market that is likely paying attention.
Downsides:
* It isn't a great gaming computer
* It isn't great value for money
Upsides
* It does give pretty decent performance (notably, it outperforms the new Mac Pro on some workloads)
* It looks attractive
* A prebuilt OS-X system means less futzing around with drivers etc
I don't play games (beyond the occasional Minecraft session with my son) and I'm not particularly price sensitive. I've built (many!) of my own computers, going back to a 386DX40, and I'm happy to do it again if I see a good reason. But at the moment I don't.
Desktop computers that seem attractive to me at the moment:
* Intel NUC
* iMac
What am I missing?
I also really like OS X. As a FreeBSD user for many years, seeing OS X be successful is even a little gratifying because I know there's a lot of cross-pollination going on behind the scenes. I'm not a mobile/laptop kind of guy, but did use a MBP for a couple of years and it was without question the nicest laptop I've ever used. If I were to buy a laptop today it would probably be a Macbook Pro.
I've been building computers from parts for 30 years. I enjoy the research, part selection and construction aspect of the process. I like that I can go into the process with a specific set of criteria and come out with something that satisfies them exactly or, barring that, that I'm in control of the compromises. I like that if these criteria change or I find I made a mistake (more likely), I can just swap out a part and continue on. This is possible with most of the name-brand PC desktops, less so with the Apple products, but I like building it all myself the most.
Also, as a FOSS user, it's typical for hardware support to be an issue. Sometimes it feels like various industries either do not care about me as a user or actively want me to suffer; constructing a modern PC that doesn't have support issues is a challenge that brings a small amount of satisfaction when overcome. I understand if people think this is silly.
So, I consider myself an enthusiast. Given this explanation, hopefully my original comment makes more sense.
I'd love to see sources/evidence to the contrary.
Binning is a hell of a thing.
The major difference between an Amiga and a PC (which was essentially "cpu only") was that the Amiga had a chipset with some units that were somewhat programmable.
In Amiga, you had the choice between using the CPU, the Copper or the Blitter for certain tasks, e.g. a memset or a memcpy might have been faster to do using the facilities of the chip set, which had direct access to memory.
Similarly, at work we are often making a choice which unit of the SoC (cpu, gpu, copy engine) should be used for a particular task, e.g. a big memset, an image blit or perhaps an alpha blend. Like the OCS chip set in the Amiga, all these various units on modern SoCs have direct access to physical memory.
My educated guess is that most computers will be based on some kind of SoC architectures very soon. There are some experiments being done in putting the DRAM silicon in the same package as the SoC and it may be that in the future, 99% of your computer is just a single silicon chip and the motherboard is there only to connect to peripheral devices.
You mean for a hash table? I don't think you'll be seeing that any time soon. Hash computation will almost certainly be faster on the primary cpu then just the scheduling and waiting overhead. And then the GPU isn't particularly good at any pointer chasing required for the rest of the lookup.
This sentence would have been so much better off if they'd just punted on the weak explanation of "transistor" and left it to anyone unsure to look it up.
And then there is the song... :)
The other hypothesis is that kaveri is from the Yiddish חבֿר (khaver), which is a direct loan from Hebrew.
From wikipedia, Individual mother tongues in India number several hundreds;[9] the 1961 census recognized 1,652[10] (SIL Ethnologue lists 415). According to Census of India of 2001, 30 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000
All that aside, I'm curious to know about the origin of this name.
* http://semiaccurate.com/2013/11/11/amd-charts-path-java-gpu/
* http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2013caspole-2013...
* http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2011/09/14/i-dont-al...
* http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/
It is intended that the GPU will be used transparently by Java code employing Java 8's streams (bulk collection operations, akin to .Net's LINQ), in addition to more explicit usage (compile Java bytecode to GPU kernels).
Graal/JVM (like pypy) is a really nice way to bring many languages to advanced VM's. See for example node.jar/nashorn/"fast js on the jvm" or Topaz and Truffle (Ruby on pypy and graal/jvm)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoJava
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-237302.html
http://www.javaworld.com/article/2077295/sun-s-picojava-i-co...
Somehow, Sun aborted that plan, but the JIT became farter now. But I still don't get it why it has anything to do the AMD's new APU?
[1] http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2013/10/18/amd-gpu-3...
I ask so because, for the past decade or so, I've been using Intel CPUs and GPUs exclusively for their excellent Linux support. If AMD can provide the same or better level of support, I'd consider switching.
And since its radeonSI based, you don't have opengl past 3.1 or opencl, and you won't likely ever see the bulleted features like Mantle or TrueAudio.
Though, on the other side of the isle, Intel just got support for opengl 3.3 in their driver, and they don't support opencl at all on their IGP parts.
The only real toss between them when comparing gpu freedom is that Intel uses wholly foss drivers while AMD ships proprietary boot firmware that they have staunchly opposed getting rid of.
Then again, AMD supports coreboot on all their chipsets and don't use proprietary signed microcode payloads on their cpus. And even in the driver space, Intel ships firmware blobs for their wireless NICs, so they aren't saints there either.
And Intel pushed uefi, which is such a colossal PITA that makes me angry on any board I've dealt with it on. And even when Google pressures them into coreboot support on some boards only for Chromebooks, they still use firmware blobs so obfuscate the chipset anyway.
Though Intel is pushing Wayland forward, mostly for Tizen, but still they are paying a lot of Wayland devs, which is a good thing. AMD participates in kernel development, but not nearly as much as Intel. Then again, Intel is a magnitude larger company and has wiggle room on their budgeting since they are dominate the industry so much with their ISA stranglehold, so I have to give AMD some credence there.
In the end neither company is "great' for open source while the other is bad. They both do good and evil in the ecosystem (unlike Nvidia, where publishing 2d documentation is supposed to be good enough). I try to support amd when I can, if I have just an "A or B without preference" choice, since they are the underdog. Also, they produce a lot more open standards - they pushed opencl, they are supporting edp for variable refresh screens, etc - whereas Intel keeps making proprietary technologies only for their stuff like smartconnect or rapid storage.
Though some recent AMD technologies like TrueAudio and Mantle haven't been open at all, so once again, it is a toss.
If you pick up a packaged CPU, you can't see this surface unless you rip the package apart. In a package, this surface is mounted face down on a tiny PCB which connects the wires to pads or pins for the socket that the CPU is inserted into, and also, a metal lid is slapped on top of the silicon chip (with thermal paste in between). Then a heatsink is slapped on top of the metal lid.
Teal rectangles on right (in between squares): L2
Orange mass on left: GPU
Blueish rectangle on bottom: DDR interface (?) Possibly L3, I forget if these actually have L3.
Are these not the same sort of AMD APU chips used in the PS4, i.e. the PS4 chips already have HSA?
According to the following article, The PS4 has some form of Jaguar-based APU: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/171375-reverse-engineered...
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/dual-graphics/pa...
Of course it has all the issues of multi-GPU setup, so ymmv
Setting up Catalyst and getting my ATI Radeon cards to work properly in a linux setup is probably my least favorite step in setting up a linux computer.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU2NjQ
"However, when the X.Org Server started, the screen remained black and nothing appeared ever on the display nor was anything outputted to the X.Org Server log after reporting it was using RadeonSI and initializing GLAMOR. This was with the Mesa 10.0.1 driver packages in Ubuntu 14.04. Lastly, I tried adding in Mesa from Git master (Mesa 10.1-devel) but here when launching the X.Org Server and going with GLAMOR for 2D acceleration, there was a segmentation fault."
[1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU3MTE
[2]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_kaver...
Sure, you probably can't fix the screen tearing. And their VDPAU equivalent isn't the greatest. But getting up and running? It's always been really easy.
pacman -S xf86-video-ati
...but it doesn't actually work. The card doesn't get used to it's full potential. Which two commands are you talking about?
Also, you can change your power profiles and specify a few custom configs.
But typically open source drivers are still not as good as proprietary regarding 3d support.
I wish Nvidia would drop Cuda and focus on openCL already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality.
I wish Nvidia would use Miracast already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality. (with regards to their proprietary game streaming)
I wish Nvidia would push edp (/ displayport 1.4 variable refresh) instead of their in-house proprietary gsync already, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality.
I wish Nvidia would standardize unencumbered physx, and stop having such a Not Invented Here mentality.
I still remember their rhetoric about open standards and how they are good for consumer and that's why we should purchase their GPU's and that's why game developers shouldn't use just Glide.
Somehow I feel like I was tricked by them. As I was in my early teens back then I was somewhat naïve and thought they were serious. Oh how wrong I was.
Specifically I'm dealing with compile workloads here: compiling the Linux kernel on my Haswell desktop CPU is almost a 4x speedup over an AMD Bulldozer CPU I used to have. I used to think people exaggerated the difference, but they don't: Intel is really that much better. And the Haswells have really closed the price gulf.
No one will beat Intel at their own game competitors need to keep them going sideways.
Every single time you change a process in anyway, millions of dollars of equipment - minimum - is being ripped out, retooled and replaced. And that's fine, because this industry is all about economies-of-scale, but it means Intel has a huge advantage: they can build more chips. As in, they can convert several fabrication lines to build chips, and simply have more out the door and on the market then their competitors, which means they can afford a price drop which other people can't - because they need to pay for the upkeep, running and loans to build those fab plants in the first place.
Intel is focusing on power and GPU because that's where the gains are to be had and what the market needed, and because they have to - current gen high-end CPUs have more thermal output density then a stove hotplate. Power use had to drop to have any hope of running higher performance into the future, and anyone hoping to compete has the exact same problems to contend with. And since new battery technology isn't happening, mobile has to find power savings on the demand side.
The speedup was similar but slightly less when $number_of_cores included hyperthreads (or whatever AMD calls them), as I recall. I don't have the Bulldozer machine to play with anymore ,unfortunately.
1: The one demo of Mantle I have seen so far[1] says they are GPU bound in their demo, even after underclocking the CPU processor.
2: Kaveri supports Mantle, but claims to be about 24% faster than Intel HD processors, which are decent, but hardly in the ballpark of the type of powerful graphics cards used in the demo.
So combining those two, aren't these two technologies trying to pull in different directions?
[1] Somewhere around the 26 minute mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIWyf8Hyjbg
Saying We are GPU bound even when we underclock the processor is attempting to illustrate how cheap Mantle makes issuing tons of instructions to the GPU. Mantle doesn't make the GPU faster, it makes submitting tasks to the GPU faster in terms of CPU-time.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/amd-temash-kabini-richlan...
I'm personally hoping that not only will we get to see more effective medicines in less time, maybe some chemistry research professors will get to go home sooner to spend time with their kids.
[1] http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/gpu/
[2] http://semiaccurate.com/2013/11/11/amd-charts-path-java-gpu/
Which is to say that when you're seeing progress more quickly, you'll spend more hours working on the problem, not less.
Determining whether this is good or bad is left as an exercise to the reader :)
I'm rather ignorant about this area of research, but it always seemed to me kinda fruitless? Sorta like high throughput screening - a ton of resources and computation is dedicated because it sounds like a good idea... but ultimately there is very little to show for it all.
Way too little signal and way too much noise.
Scroll down to Examples.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGqCeSjNuTY&t=50m27s
If you can't see a difference between that and say, X-Ray crystallography then well..
Imatinib[1] is a good, and pretty old example:
Imatinib was developed by rational drug design. After the Philadelphia chromosome mutation and hyperactive bcr-abl protein were discovered, the investigators screened chemical libraries to find a drug that would inhibit that protein. With high-throughput screening, they identified 2-phenylaminopyrimidine. This lead compound was then tested and modified by the introduction of methyl and benzamide groups to give it enhanced binding properties, resulting in imatinib
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib#History
And in case you were, like me, wondering about how much the new AMD CPUs improve on improve on their predecessors' single-thread performance you can find some benchmarks at http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600....
It's nice to read a tech article about a new tech that is available now, and not in an unknown point in the future.
They'd make a fortune.
Then they need to change quantum mechanics so they could cool 4 300w 300mm die packages on one pcb without liquid nitrogen or liquid epeen.
Sounds pretty expensive.
Vendors are pretty tight-lipped about yield, though, and your other points stand as well, obviously.