AMD’s 10 core Piledriver chips revealed!


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AMD’s 10 core Piledriver chips revealed

amd-roadmap.jpg



The net is alive today with news that AMD is planning a 10 core CPU sometime next year, based on a revision to their Bulldozer design codenamed Piledriver.


The new processor was revealed in a deck of presentation slides leaked by the Chinese news site Zol.com.nc, and shows that these new processors won’t have on board graphics and will require a new motherboard socket, called FM2, which supercedes the current AM3+ board. Just behind these ‘up to 10 core’ CPUs is confirmation of the Trinity CPU/GPU hybrid that was announced at Computex, which will also use the Piledriver architecture and FM2 socket.


While we’re still waiting to see samples of the delayed Bulldozer CPUs – which will have up to eight cores and be known as the AMD FX when they launch – this isn’t surprising news. AMD had already said that they plan to launch 10 core server chips codenamed Sepang next year, so it makes sense that the desktop line will follow suit.


Not surprising, but still quite exciting. A decacore processor gives games developers an interesting target to work towards for elements of the game engine that can be heavily multithreaded.


(via The Inquirer)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/26/amds-10-core-piledriver-chips-revealed/


Why the need for this? At the moment, it's bit overkill, imo.
 
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Well, what's gonna render the graphics that we'll eventually need to immerse ourselves in a virtual world like people predict we will be in the future?
 
How much power and cooling would a set up like that need?

Well, I got a machine with two QuadCore Xeons here (Z600 workstation).


Cooling is no issue, the harddrive is even louder than the fans.


Power Consumption with a FireGL card is about 600 - 800 Watt in full load.
 
AMD’s 10 core Piledriver chips revealed

Not surprising, but still quite exciting. A decacore processor gives games developers an interesting target to work towards for elements of the game engine that can be heavily multithreaded.


(via The Inquirer)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/26/amds-10-core-piledriver-chips-revealed/


Why the need for this? At the moment, it's bit overkill, imo.

not really, I could really benefit from two 10-core CPUs to compile my engine, it takes quite a long time to do a full rebuild which happens more often than not when working on optimising base templates and inline functions.


a 7 minutes edit-compile-test cycle is 5+ minutes of compile at -O3 on a quad core.


to me it'd be a definite gain in productivity worth every pennies
 
The proposed Bulldozer FX series shrunk to 28nm leads to 10 cores/5 modules, hence if accurate this would correspond would indicate AMD is aiming to get 28nm online for both GPUs and the FX line instead of the previous roadmaps indicating they'd use 32nm with Komodo. Possibly due to Intel having issues and delays of their own taking some of the pressure off in getting a product out.


Note these FX series parts are designed to have modules not in use power gated off and the remaining power draw used by the modules in use up to the conservative design stability limits, not to mention shared L3 allotments, so as to make the best use of the die to handle varying loads. So you'll see some gains even if you're not using loads that can be streamed through all modules, or there aren't improvements in OS/die for pipelining the die.


The bigger news, in my book, is abandoning AM3+ for a merge on FM2 between Trinity and Komodo thus shifting back towards AMDs tendency towards giving freedom in mixing between boards and processors, that is part of their well established advantage over the stratified Intel products. That and it looks like they're trying to make the effort keep the advantage in features over Intel products.
 
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a 7 minutes edit-compile-test cycle is 5+ minutes of compile at -O3 on a quad core.


to me it'd be a definite gain in productivity worth every pennies

depends if your compiler will use the additional core, I'm maybe getting old, but I'm warry of multicore and single threaded apps
 
depends if your compiler will use the additional core, I'm maybe getting old, but I'm warry of multicore and single threaded apps

make will split out as many jobs as you want. But at some point I'm sure they'll all be fighting over the same external bandwidth and HDD access. 10 cores won't reach the same clock speed as 8 cores (TDP limits), so your work is going to have to be pretty parallel and compute intensive to see big gains. My gut feeling is that it'd still be a win for compilation, though, but of course only when you're actually compiling 10+ new modules.


As for 20 cores I'm skeptically that it'll even be available in a desktop configuration instead of a workstation or server one.


I don't see any indication that Komodo will be 28nm. I find it unlikely that AMD would use GF's 28nm at all for BD, especially for non-APU parts, since it's not SOI. Just the same, there are these rumors:


http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.mydrivers.com%2F1%2F200%2F200891.htm&act=url


But that's for 2013 (at which point it'd make a lot more sense to focus on the move to 20nm as much as possible)


Zambezi is estimated to be around 292mm^2 with 4 modules. A 5 module part, with the same L3 allotment, would be around 365mm^2, which isn't really too large for a high-end part (it's not that much different from Thuban at 45nm). Of course, they could also just shrink the L3 slightly.


Socket consolidation is great, but Komodo using FM2 sounds pretty weird IMO, since it isn't an APU. It'd be connected to motherboards with monitor connections that go nowhere. I'm guessing OEMs would have the connector removed to avoid confusion.


Soon Intel will have its own 8-core/16-thread Sandy Bridge-EP chips out, although those are only for the server market, ie no Sandy Bridge-EX. Next year they might accelerate Ivy Bridge-EX to fill this gap, which would be awfully fierce competition for anything AMD could bring in the enthusiast desktop space (although probably a lot more expensive)
 
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