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Star War Sex Parrot posted:So as a 7970 owner, I'm still stuck using 11.12-based Catalysts. I thought for sure 12.1 would unify the card-specific releases again, but apparently not. Catalyst 12.1 and 12.2 Preview both do not support the 7900 series. I can't wait for the 7950 to land and watch AMD fork it again.
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Jan 28, 2012 02:30
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Nice quote from Tom's Hardware today. The bold is theirs.Toms Hardware posted:With the sub-$100 Pentiums performing so well, Intel's $125 Core i3-2100 easily beats more expensive Phenom II and FX models. And the $190 Core i5-2400 dominates the sub-$200 landscape without challenge, really. As such, we're almost-shockingly left without an AMD CPU to recommend at any price point.
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Jan 30, 2012 21:41
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Bob Morales posted:Nice quote from Tom's Hardware today. The bold is theirs. As a long time AMD fan, it breaks my heart. Maybe someday AMD will be relevant for CPUs again. I don't think their graphics division can really save them either, based on their 2011 earnings report: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-2011-earnings-report-169b-revenue-for-q4-657b-revenue-for-2011
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Jan 31, 2012 03:49
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syzygy86 posted:As a long time AMD fan, it breaks my heart. Maybe someday AMD will be relevant for CPUs again. I don't think their graphics division can really save them either, based on their 2011 earnings report: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-2011-earnings-report-169b-revenue-for-q4-657b-revenue-for-2011 Yea I read the Toms article too and it was quite depressing. I really hope they manage fix things up by the time piledriver comes out
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Jan 31, 2012 04:15
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Anand's 7950 review.
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Jan 31, 2012 06:46
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I've been telling my coworker to get an Athlon X4 for his home server, because he's running a handful of intensive single core programs (sabnzbd, minecraft server), is AMD still a good idea for this use case, or have the i3s so surpassed them that even at a dual core it still kicks rear end?
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Jan 31, 2012 08:09
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FISHMANPET posted:I've been telling my coworker to get an Athlon X4 for his home server, because he's running a handful of intensive single core programs (sabnzbd, minecraft server), is AMD still a good idea for this use case, or have the i3s so surpassed them that even at a dual core it still kicks rear end? Toms Hardware posted:With the sub-$100 Pentiums performing so well, Intel's $125 Core i3-2100 easily beats more expensive Phenom II and FX models. And the $190 Core i5-2400 dominates the sub-$200 landscape without challenge, really. As such, we're almost-shockingly left without an AMD CPU to recommend at any price point. If he's looking at an extreme-budget build an AMD quad will do it, but beyond that, a dual-core i3-2100 would probably be a better option at this point.
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Jan 31, 2012 08:13
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To be fair that article is only for gaming, which is extremely limited in its ability to consistently use more than two cores and gives a significant advantage to processors with Turbo. I would consider an A6-3670K, potentially even overclocked. The big advantage is with the onboard graphics, if he doesn't care at all about graphics and definitely wouldn't want to overclock at all, then an older platform with an Athlon II X4 may be better. That said, I would strongly recommend he consider just springing for the i5 2400+ if he cares about CPU performance, especially with Turbo it's a really fast platform.
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Jan 31, 2012 08:29
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FISHMANPET posted:I've been telling my coworker to get an Athlon X4 for his home server, because he's running a handful of intensive single core programs (sabnzbd, minecraft server), is AMD still a good idea for this use case, or have the i3s so surpassed them that even at a dual core it still kicks rear end? Per-core performance for Intel is vastly better than AMD's selling. If you need single-threaded performance, Intel is what you want. If you want multithreaded performance, Intel is what you want. In short, no, he probably wants a i3/i5.
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Jan 31, 2012 16:28
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Alereon posted:To be fair that article is only for gaming, which is extremely limited in its ability to consistently use more than two cores and gives a significant advantage to processors with Turbo. I would consider an A6-3670K, potentially even overclocked. The big advantage is with the onboard graphics, if he doesn't care at all about graphics and definitely wouldn't want to overclock at all, then an older platform with an Athlon II X4 may be better. That said, I would strongly recommend he consider just springing for the i5 2400+ if he cares about CPU performance, especially with Turbo it's a really fast platform. Hey, you have a star now! FWIW, I think the Intel platforms make better server boards/platforms for the home anyways. Stable, clean drivers across all platforms (Windows, Linux and Solaris!) I hadn't realized that i3 performance had caught up to this point though, I may have to start considering that for any super-budget builds.
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Jan 31, 2012 18:44
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movax posted:Hey, you have a star now! I reluctantly started arguing that about two thirds of the way through last year, and while it was contentious at the time (Zambizi hand't yet dropped like the turd it is, for one thing, and Llano's desktop performance hadn't yet been established as somewhere between "gently caress" and "that"), people seem to be coming around to it now. I don't think anyone's especially happy about it, honestly, no one wants to see AMD fail to provide good competition for Intel, but if the performance isn't there, why should the recommendation be?
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Jan 31, 2012 18:56
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FISHMANPET posted:I've been telling my coworker to get an Athlon X4 for his home server, because he's running a handful of intensive single core programs (sabnzbd, minecraft server), is AMD still a good idea for this use case, or have the i3s so surpassed them that even at a dual core it still kicks rear end? If he's already got an AM2+ or AM3 set up, an Athlon II X4 may be a very cheap performance boost for under $100. If he wants to go for new mb/ram/cpu then there's really no question, the Intel offering is better right now.
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Jan 31, 2012 20:01
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Anand's 7950 review. The value proposition at a glance: (BTW the faster 6870 can be found at ~$150, too) 
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Feb 1, 2012 12:48
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You could increase that price point marker higher though, because it can be overclocked like a goddamn demon. Also, it has almost always been this way - the closer you get to the high end of the market, the prices spiral up. ATI hasn't done it for a while, which is why it seems unusual, but NVIDIA has done it for a long time. Also, hold on, where are you finding a Radeon 5850 for $150? You can't even buy them new... I can find a 6870 at $160 though, so your point does have merit. It's not as fast as a 5870 though. I'd still recommend the 6950 2GB for price/performance though, day in, day out, have done for a long time. Especially if it's one known for unlocking. HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Feb 1, 2012 |
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Feb 1, 2012 13:12
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It'll be interesting to see how the 7700-series holds up, they should be out before the end of February. Also BF3 is the 7000-series' weakest app right now, something like Metro 2033 looks a good bit more favorable:
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Feb 1, 2012 13:20
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HalloKitty posted:You could increase that price point marker higher though, because it can be overclocked like a goddamn demon. I don't see a 6850 or 6870 listed its probably a typo. But I'm pretty sure I remember preference being better on the 6k series and the price being less which is why I bought a 6850 to replace my 4850 last year. That also looks to be about exactly what I get in BF3 if I set it to that, so I normally just play on high with no AA stuff because I can't really tell the difference at 1920x1200.
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Feb 1, 2012 17:59
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That's because neither the 6850 nor the 6870 are high-end cards, whereas the 5850 is faster than both of them and was a $300 card at launch.
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Feb 1, 2012 18:10
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The 5850 is faster than the 6850, but not the 6870. 6870 > 5850
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Feb 1, 2012 18:24
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pienipple posted:If he's already got an AM2+ or AM3 set up, an Athlon II X4 may be a very cheap performance boost for under $100. With per core performance the Intel is kicking rear end on the low end, but until a single i3-2100 core is twice as fast as an Athlon x4 645 core, I'm not sure why you're all saying it's such a clear winner. For gaming and general computer use I'd agree the i3 is better, but when the overhead of the operating system (Linux with no Xserver) is so low, and the use case of the server fits so well with more cores, I just don't see it. E: I know synthetic benchmarks aren't the best, but here's a comparison I found between the two chips: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/188?vs=289
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Feb 1, 2012 18:31
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FISHMANPET posted:With per core performance the Intel is kicking rear end on the low end, but until a single i3-2100 core is twice as fast as an Athlon x4 645 core, I'm not sure why you're all saying it's such a clear winner. Not all of those benchmarks are synthetic. The Cinebench ones, for example, measure rendering a real-world scene, and the i3's single-threaded performance is about 54% higher than the Athlon. Combined with Hyperthreading, the dual-core is only about 6% behind the full quad-core Athlon at equal clocks in the multithreaded performance. The i3 will have a fully-loaded performance lower than the Athlon, that's true. But its moderate-loaded performance will be competitive for 25% less power consumption, and, if single-thread performance ever becomes paramount (like, say, the Minecraft server gets heavily loaded), the i3 will have a major advantage over the Athlon. So the two options are pretty close, with trade-offs for going either way.
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Feb 1, 2012 19:16
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Alereon posted:It'll be interesting to see how the 7700-series holds up, they should be out before the end of February. Also BF3 is the 7000-series' weakest app right now, something like Metro 2033 looks a good bit more favorable:  
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Feb 1, 2012 19:20
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That's a good point, and a reason I wish more sites would include minimum frames on their reviews. Anand did that at some point, but I think it was hit or miss based on whatever card they were doing/how much time they had with it. No one really cares about how high FPS gets, it's when performance dies down to the minimum that your brain picks up and remembers "poo poo why is that hitching/running so slowly?"
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Feb 1, 2012 19:31
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Factory Factory posted:Not all of those benchmarks are synthetic. The Cinebench ones, for example, measure rendering a real-world scene, and the i3's single-threaded performance is about 54% higher than the Athlon. Combined with Hyperthreading, the dual-core is only about 6% behind the full quad-core Athlon at equal clocks in the multithreaded performance. Oh poo poo, did not realize the i3 had hyperthreading. That kind of changes the whole game.
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Feb 1, 2012 19:41
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FISHMANPET posted:Oh poo poo, did not realize the i3 had hyperthreading. That kind of changes the whole game. Not really? I mean, it improves the efficiency of execution and reduces branch prediction miss penalty, but presenting two logical cores per physical core does not change that what you've got is a dual core processor keeping up with a quad-core processor that costs the same in multi-threaded applications, and dominating it for single-threaded and per-core performance.
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Feb 1, 2012 20:33
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FISHMANPET posted:Oh poo poo, did not realize the i3 had hyperthreading. That kind of changes the whole game. My i3 laptop has comparable or better performance for cpu intensive tasks than my athlon X4 3GHz. The exception is when I'm rendering video files. That's where the four cores, rather than two hyperthreaded cores, do a significantly better job. I tend to agree that for gaming an i3 would be better unless you are an edge case where you need a lot of cpus.
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Feb 1, 2012 21:54
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Gwaihir posted:That's a good point, and a reason I wish more sites would include minimum frames on their reviews. Anand did that at some point, but I think it was hit or miss based on whatever card they were doing/how much time they had with it. No one really cares about how high FPS gets, it's when performance dies down to the minimum that your brain picks up and remembers "poo poo why is that hitching/running so slowly?" The thing about min frame rates is that it could be just a time thing where a game has low fps, but all other times it is pretty high. The best way to show it is like [H] where they have a graph showing the frame rate at all times.
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Feb 2, 2012 02:07
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Hopefully this is a temporary situation for AMD as they get their poo poo together with CPU/GPU hybrid chips. Cross your fingers that subsequent generations can deliver CPU performance that is acceptable for people that want to run discrete graphics now that they have gotten the development of their first Fusion products finished. But probably not. They will be forever behind Intel in manufacturing tech.
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Feb 2, 2012 05:01
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L-O-N posted:The thing about min frame rates is that it could be just a time thing where a game has low fps, but all other times it is pretty high. The best way to show it is like [H] where they have a graph showing the frame rate at all times. To be fair, The Tech Report has a similar thing, where they graph the time taken to render each frame, and then follow up with average frame time, 99th percentile frame time, and time spent beyond 50ms. Those roughly correlate to overall frame rate, typical frame rate, and time with dips in frame rate.
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Feb 2, 2012 05:54
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unpronounceable posted:To be fair, The Tech Report has a similar thing, where they graph the time taken to render each frame, and then follow up with average frame time, 99th percentile frame time, and time spent beyond 50ms. Those roughly correlate to overall frame rate, typical frame rate, and time with dips in frame rate. Actually, 99th percentile frame time would more closely be related to minimum frame rate rather than typical. Using the 99th percentile throws out the very worst frames, though, which might not be GPU related. I think that is a very useful second # to the average frame rate.
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Feb 2, 2012 14:12
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The AMD Financial Analyst Day is happening, we're seeing a pretty major shift in strategy for AMD to recover from the near-suicidal Bulldozer debacle. The big (and probably not unexpected) news came as part of CEO Rory Read's talk on strategy: AMD will be exiting the high-end x86 CPU market to focus on APUs in mobile and emerging markets, game consoles, and cloud computing. They're not doing smartphones, but this means a focus on Ultrabook-style thin notebooks and tablets. They're also going to stop aggressively ramping on new process shrinks, instead focusing on using proven, mature processes to reduce costs. AMD is also opening up to using IP blocks from third-party vendors, which is necessary to make any headway in the SoC market. This could apply to both Brazos-based SoCs as well as future ARM products that AMD keeps hinting at. AMD will also be focusing on shorter design cycles. Instead of spending years designing, building, and selling huge CPUs to go along with fancy new processes, AMD will be making simpler products made out of IP building blocks, including those from other companies. The idea is that they can iterate products more rapidly by licensing updated building blocks rather than having to wait for a die-shrink or the next major revision of the product to be designed. This also means the end of AMD's emphasis on core counts. AMD is also adopting a flexible ISA strategy, meaning they won't just be sticking with x86-64. They're not saying what other ISAs they might use, but this pretty much confirms they'll build ARM-based SoCs if they see market demand. Given their desire to court China, MIPS may also be a possibility. Here's the latest version of AMD's 2012-2013 CPU/APU/GPU roadmap. And here's the 2012-2013 server roadmap, no real surprises here. Since Bulldozer already does pretty well here, they'll continue to iterate with performance/power efficiency improvements every year. The only thing that's really new here is that AMD had talked about a new server platform in 2012 to support 10-20 core processors, but they'll instead keep making processors for their current platforms. AMD's upcoming Hondo platform will target tablets with a 4.5W TDP. AMD hopes to scale their future SoCs to below 2W. Alereon fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Feb 2, 2012 |
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Feb 2, 2012 20:18
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Well, it's the end of an era. My first ever build was a 1.4GHz Thunderbird when I was in high school. Made my repugnant nerd friend who got me into this stuff so jealous because all he had was a 1 GHz which he hamfistedly overclocked to 1.2. Gonna drink to AMD tonight. Here's hoping they do well in their future endeavours. Also, gently caress you, Spell Check, that's how the space shuttle is spelled.
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Feb 2, 2012 20:24
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I guess most of us saw it going in this direction, especially when desktop/high end Llano ate poo poo, but gently caress me if it isn't pretty scary. Now who competes with Intel in the x86/64 market sectors? There's always IBM (and friends) doing cool stuff with their own angle but what about desktops? poo poo, this sucks.
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Feb 2, 2012 20:29
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Well, I guess after 10 years of using them, this is my last AMD based desktop.
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Feb 2, 2012 21:45
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Are they not clever enough to keep up with intel, then? Do they not have enough money? Perhaps they're predicting ARM will overtake x86 in the desktop market? I have yet to decide if it's brave, stupid, wise or cowardly. I guess time will tell. I love intel and their latest processors, but this just seems really bad for future generations.
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Feb 2, 2012 21:49
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At this point AMD is stuck with a lovely desktop architecture (Bulldozer) for quite some time. Even if they pulled off a miracle and the next iteration was Jesus in silicon form, Intel has about a 2 year lead in process technologies. It looks like Intel's 22nm 3D process is going to be a game-changer, trying to keep up with them here was bankrupting AMD (hence why they became fabless), and Global Foundries doesn't seem to be doing much better. It's important to keep in mind that AMD will still be producing APUs for desktops, even while they refocus on mobile. The promise of Sandy Bridge's graphics was never really fulfiled, because Intel can't write a graphics driver to save its life. Until that changes AMD has a compelling opportunity to knock out Intel in the low-end and mid-range markets, they just can't offer anything competitive the i5/i7 series on the desktop. Trinity looks like it will be a good successor to Llano, and with effective Turbo will hopefully close the CPU performance gap.
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Feb 2, 2012 22:08
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Fruit Smoothies posted:Are they not clever enough to keep up with intel, then? Do they not have enough money? Perhaps they're predicting ARM will overtake x86 in the desktop market? Intel's profit for 2011 exceeded AMD's revenue. Their mainstream desktop lineup has been excellent for some 5 years running now. Given the enormous cost of designing and manufacturing it's surprising that AMD has held up as long as they have. But the disappointment of Bulldozer shows that they are not able to compete with Intel's core strength. It's just as well that they don't beat themselves into bankruptcy trying. AMD will pose more of a threat to a lazy Intel if they are alive and well in other parts of the market than they would killing themselves failing to keep up.
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Feb 2, 2012 22:46
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Factory Factory posted:Well, it's the end of an era. My first ever build was a 1.4GHz Thunderbird when I was in high school. Made my repugnant nerd friend who got me into this stuff so jealous because all he had was a 1 GHz which he hamfistedly overclocked to 1.2. My first build was a p100, but my first AMD build was also the 1.4ghz Thunderbird  . It still works fine and I use it sometimes to write images to cf cards or whatever, but the 80mmx38mm Delta screamer on the heavy as hell Alpha heatsink means that while it still works fine, it's still also very loud.Alereon posted:At this point AMD is stuck with a lovely desktop architecture (Bulldozer) for quite some time. Even if they pulled off a miracle and the next iteration was Jesus in silicon form, Intel has about a 2 year lead in process technologies. I'm looking at putting together a new PC later this year since my Phenom 9950 is getting a little long in the tooth, and it'll be the first time in a long time (since my Celeron 300a which overclocked to 450 easily) that I'll be looking at Intel hardware. I do still see promise in AMD stuff for small, mobile, or purpose built PCs. I recently got an HP Proliant Microserver to use as a NAS and it runs great on the AMD Neo CPU, but it's a shame about the desktop line. I can't say I've been exclusively an AMD fanboy, since I've always just gone for the best price/performance based on what was currently available, but I definitely enjoyed being able to get equal or better performance for lower prices from AMD for the last 3 or 4 CPUs I've purchased. I was a DEC fanboy, and Compaq can go to hell.
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Feb 3, 2012 01:17
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Oooh boy. Time to kiss the $200 unlocked Intel Core i5s good bye.
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Feb 3, 2012 02:50
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Wedesdo posted:Oooh boy. Time to kiss the $200 unlocked Intel Core i5s good bye. Is this necessarily true? I didn't think AMD ever had a chip competitive with the Core i5 series at any price point and that was one of their problems.
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Feb 3, 2012 03:00
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What are AMD's future mobile APUs going to be based on, Bulldozer/Piledriver?
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Feb 3, 2012 04:24
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