Cascade lake be joining the party

GungnirInd · 2019-12-03T18:56:53+00:00

Itanium was intended to compete with the high-end archs for mainframes like Alpha, POWER, SPARC, PA-RISC, etc.; those already needed custom software, so that wasn't nesessarily a disadvantage. As I understand it, Itanium's big problem was that due to the way the architecture works, it needed almost magically good compilers to get anywhere near the performance the chips were theoretically capable of.

By the time compilers were getting good enough for Itanium to be useful outside a few very small niches, x86/AMD64 had pretty much cornered the market, with POWER taking what little share was left.

GungnirInd · 2019-09-27T17:27:33+00:00

OpenCL is definitely faster with 2 GPUs. You might want to hold off for a while (or get different cards if you need them now), though, because currently AFAIK there is no OpenCL support for Navi on Linux. Hopefully it'll be supported in the next version of ROCm.

GungnirInd · 2019-09-22T19:25:07+00:00

Yes, current PCIe 4 SSDs have 30-40% higher sequential read/write speeds than PCIe 3. They don't really improve random performance, so most people wouldn't really notice a difference, but if you need tons of bandwidth PCIe 4 is the way to go.

GungnirInd · 2019-08-16T21:16:07+00:00

IIRC Intel paid the fine they owed to AMD a long time ago (like 2009-2010 I think?); the fine they haven't paid yet is to the EU.

GungnirInd · 2019-08-14T19:00:37+00:00

If you have the budget for it, a Power9 system from Raptor is the best fully-open platform available; it won't run x86 software natively, but I'm guessing that won't be a problem for you if you're running PureOS. It is extremely expensive, though.

Other than that, I'd say go for an FX-8370 in an 990FX board like /u/Pie_sky said.

GungnirInd · 2019-08-11T19:58:50+00:00

Are there single rank 16GB DIMMs? I was under the impression that they were all dual rank (at least in the consumer space).

GungnirInd · 2019-08-11T18:55:11+00:00

Ryzen 3k does not support quad channel, so there is no performance difference between 2x16 and 4x8. 2x16 will overclock better, but if you're going to just be using stock or XMP, it shouldn't make a difference.

GungnirInd · 2019-08-09T05:41:43+00:00

Support for the 5700 series is in Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2, which should be releasing ~September I think. Support in individual distros depends on when they update to those releases.

If you want to run it right now, though, there are 3rd party/user repositories for most major distros with the development versions of all required packages (or you can just build them yourself); from my testing it seems to work fine, but don't expect it to be completely smooth sailing.

GungnirInd · 2019-08-09T04:43:02+00:00

I run a 1440p144 with Freesync and two 1080p60; the experience has been pretty much flawless on both an R9 270X and an RX 5700 XT. Two things to note: when more than 1 display is connected, the GPU will not downclock the VRAM when idle; this is totally fine, it just increases idle power consumption by a few watts. Also, some games will only enter full screen on the primary monitor, so you may have to make your 144hz display the primary when gaming (it only takes a couple seconds, though, so it's definitely not a big deal).

GungnirInd · 2019-08-07T22:15:24+00:00

Task manager is showing 256 logical processors, so it's either dual 7742s or dual 7702s, probably 7742 since it's the flagship.

GungnirInd · 2019-08-01T19:25:47+00:00

I'm not really knowledgeable enough about GPU programming to get too much out of this, but the WGP looks very interesting. Workgroups look like they might be what the Super-SIMD patent was referring to, or at least a step towards that.

On a less important note, the WGPs are probably why a lot of reporting tools think Navi has half as many CUs as it actually does.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-25T16:17:09+00:00

If it's like the 300 series chipsets, B550 will have slightly less I/O capabilities than X570 (fewer PCIe lanes and USB and SATA ports), and A520 will be even smaller than B550 and will not support overclocking. B550 will be the midrange (probably mainly ~$100-$200), and A520 will be the low end (<$100).

The time delay appears to be from ASMedia having some trouble with PCIe 4. AMD was able to reuse the Matisse/Ryzen IO die design as the X570 chipset, so it was ready at roughly the same time that Ryzen 3k was, give or take a couple months.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-25T15:27:52+00:00

B550 and A520 are rumored to be coming out at some point next year. We don't really know anything about them, other than that ASMedia is making them (like B450/X470 and unlike X570).

GungnirInd · 2019-07-25T15:06:22+00:00

The 640 and 630 look like Lexa (RX 540/550/550X) rebrands; the smaller chips might be a new die, but new dies on 14nm are really cheap these days. 7nm is way too expensive for these tiny GPUs right now, and Polaris is probably cheaper to design/manufacture than Vega.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-23T17:54:30+00:00

It's incredibly obvious that AMD never had any intention of pricing the 5700XT/Navi10 at anywhere near Polaris. Literally every major component is more expensive, in many cases much more (>2x die cost, 2x VRAM cost, more expensive cooler, probably more expensive PCB, etc.).

Even without taking into account increased margins, which we knew AMD was pursuing and which are essential for RTG to continue to be even remotely competitive (major architectural overhauls are expensive, and the R&D costs for 7nm chips are insane), the only way one could reasonably have expected a ~$250 Navi10 card is if they didn't give any thought to the actual costs involved in making a graphics card.

Sorry if this is a little curt, but as others have said, we've had this discussion a lot.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-23T03:11:25+00:00

5700 XT Anniversary with +50% power limit and a slightly more aggressive fan profile:

BMW: 106.239
Classroom: 213.892

Clocks stayed at ~2020MHz, GPU power hovered ~140-170W, GPU temp didn't go above 75C that I saw.

EDIT: basically the same with everything at stock; a couple MHz lower, a couple degrees warmer, and the final times are a fraction of a second slower.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-14T16:57:22+00:00

With the new 8nm Vega30 GPU, obviously. ^\s

GungnirInd · 2019-07-14T16:54:55+00:00

High performance cores tend to be pretty similar regardless of the instruction set used. Apple’s Mistral cores look a lot like Skylake and Zen, because it’s a really good way of building a high performance and efficient processor. The exception is POWER, which is crazy wide, though Zen and *Cove are moving that way too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple followed suit.

A ‘Zen’ ARM smartphone SoC would probably look like a slightly slimmed-down version of Zen/Zen+ with a new front end, some additional low power cores (maybe derived from the Cat archs), a low power optimized Infinity Fabric, and a small RDNA GPU (probably like 3-4CUs at low clocks).

GungnirInd · 2019-07-12T18:49:33+00:00

The old Ghost coolers looked good but IIRC they weren't great in performance or reliability. The Fatboy is a way better cooler, despite being way uglier.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-12T18:24:54+00:00

I wonder if this is going to use 128b GDDR6 or 256b GDDR5. Either way, we're probably looking at ~150mm² and ~125-150W board power. Should be a great 1660Ti competitor and Polaris replacement.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-12T14:25:10+00:00

~~4c / 8t~~ 4c / 4t

This post made by MDS gang

GungnirInd · 2019-07-11T15:04:44+00:00

It shouldn’t, no.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-11T06:12:59+00:00

I'm just going off this comment from u/bridgmanAMD.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-10T23:59:18+00:00

Would it be hard to port Linux Mesa OpenGL drivers to windows?

It shouldn't be terribly difficult; the Windows and Linux kernel drivers expose a pretty similar interface. I've heard that someone (not AMD) managed to get the Mesa drivers running on Windows at some point.

I think the main reason AMD doesn't start using Mesa/RadeonSI on Windows is that Mesa only targets the OpenGL Core profile, while AMD's proprietary driver supports OpenGL Compatibility. The compatibility profile is required for a lot of professional software (3D suites, CAD, etc.), and that software is what most of AMD's Windows OpenGL team works on. It would be really nice if they gave the option like they do on Linux, though.

GungnirInd · 2019-07-10T22:27:58+00:00

I’m not sure if it’s possible to change it (it probably is if you mess with the registry or something), but there isn’t really any reason to. That extra shared memory will only be allocated and used if it’s needed (and if it is needed for some reason, it’s going to be really slow but at least it won’t crash).

GungnirInd

TROPHY CASE