AMD Bristol/Stoney Ridge Thread

[AtenRa]

Can I ask why you think this?

Because OEMs dont think like we do, that is why im sooooo against Laptops. We are in the OEMs mercy, we cannot choose and build what WE need like in Desktops but we always have to buy what OEMs want.

OEMs dont make Laptops for our (consumer) needs, they think how to make a profit. Because a 35W TDP iGPU only with 2400MHz dual Channel memory Carrizo/BristolRidge will be much better (both in performance in games and higher battery life) than an Intel 15W TDP with NVIDIA 64bit DDR-3 memory dGPU, they will never release a Laptop like that because it will cannibalize their Intel products.

That means less Intel products, less rebates, less profit.

 

[cbn]

Ideally, AMD should design a reference ultrabook and make it available for sale to enthusiasts and business customers, but this may not be financially feasible.

We are in the OEMs mercy, we cannot choose and build what WE need like in Desktops but we always have to buy what OEMs want.

Maybe a community supported 35W Bristol Ridge laptop is not such a bad idea then?

 

[cbn]

Because OEMs dont think like we do, that is why im sooooo against Laptops. We are in the OEMs mercy, we cannot choose and build what WE need like in Desktops but we always have to buy what OEMs want.

OEMs dont make Laptops for our (consumer) needs, they think how to make a profit. Because a 35W TDP iGPU only with 2400MHz dual Channel memory Carrizo/BristolRidge will be much better (both in performance in games and higher battery life) than an Intel 15W TDP with NVIDIA 64bit DDR-3 memory dGPU, they will never release a Laptop like that because it will cannibalize their Intel products.

That means less Intel products, less rebates, less profit.

Regarding the conditions mentioned in the Anandtech Carrizo review article:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10000/who-controls-user-experience-amd-carrizo-thoroughly-tested/20

What the OEMs have done with Carrizo is pre-define it as a low end part, and worked with AMD to reduce their overheads by creating a pin-compatible platform between Carrizo and Carrizo-L. Because of the Carrizo-L limitations, any hardware that is built to support both but ends up with Carrizo is unnecessarily cut off at the legs before it leaves the gate. We see this with single channel memory designs, chassis built to cost, 13x7 TN panels for Carrizo-L systems and trackpads that need to be blown up in controlled explosions. A side note is the memory – Carrizo is defined up to DDR3-2133, but this only works in 35W scenarios. But if the device is designed for Carrizo-L as well, then it is limited to DDR3L-1600 at single channel by design, such as in the case of the Lenovo Y700. That’s restricting performance before you start.

AMD needs to define their market. I would argue that the split between the low Puma+ core platform and the Excavator module design, as with previous generations, should have been kept in place. OEMs design motherboards for laptops day-in and day-out, so designing two different ones for Carrizo and Carrizo-L isn’t that much of a hit in the R&D department. By combining the two AMD is ultimately defining a near-union Venn diagram which shouldn’t even exist. As a result, there are very few people (technical users or OEMs) willing to take a risk with a high end Carrizo platform, in case it might be restricted, or for fear of all the low quality systems currently in the market (if you can even find one) with bad panels or poor configurations.

There's also the fact that the performance per watt metrics lie purely in Intel's camp, and OEMs seem to believe that the highest specification CPU solves all issues, as in the Toshiba Satellite in our roundup that had the FX-8800P and not a lot else. When compared to the i5-5200U or i6-5300U, very few metrics went in AMD's favor, partly because of the memory issue but also due to Intel's architecture mapping better to common software.

The price/performance ratio is harder to clarify - as we saw in the Lenovo Y700 Carrizo vs Core comparison that for the same price the Intel version had a true quad core and dual channel memory but a smaller HDD compared to the Carrizo. But when we compare the Y700 Carrizo to the Zenbook UX305, also at a similar price, you exchange that 35W Carrizo for a 15W Core but in a smaller, lighter device, with the SoC performace being much closer in exchange for the size and weight of the laptop. The performance gap at 15W vs 15W is hard to compete against when the default designs are being stung with single channel memory (for integrated graphics and elements like compression) for what is arguably another $10-$25, especially with AMD's other business units that are focusing on gaming. There's also the design aspect, and why there are fewer thin/light platforms for Carrizo - part of this might be around z-height of the platform, which was the big push for Broadwell.

I did mention in the other thread the following comment:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=38017344&postcount=236

Maybe AMD can assist the process of creating 35W Bristol Ridge laptops by having Stoney Ridge at 35W as well?

Then with enough Bristol Ridge 35W processors available the OEM can set-up the motherboard for dual channel.

A dual channel motherboard can be used by single channel processor right? (I would assume the cost is a bit more, but with enough 35W Bristol Ridge available it should be worth it).

However, with Kaveri no longer being produced AMD should have more wafers being available to dedicate to Bristol Ridge compared to what it had for Carrizo.

The net effect (hopefully) would be to design a dedicated 35W dual channel laptop Bristol Ridge motherboard with enough volume to spread around without needing to share design with Stoney Ridge.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Who says Kaveri is no longer in production? Remember, Kaveri is 28SHP, while Carrizo/Bristol Ridge is not . . . I would not be surprised that the Kaveri dice come from completely different fabs, or perhaps different lines at the same fabs. Regardless, as AMD demonstrated with their recent FM2+ update and the release of the 7860k, they're still producing Kaveri chips, as well as motherboards to support them.

 

[USER8000]

AMD should configure Bristol Ridge APUs so that they won't boot unless both RAM channels are populated. That may be the only thing that stops OEMs from sabotaging this release the same way they did with Carrizo. Unfortunately, even that won't stop the OEMs from using 1366x768 TN panels, terrible trackpads, and all the other things that make a laptop into a craptop. Ideally, AMD should design a reference ultrabook and make it available for sale to enthusiasts and business customers, but this may not be financially feasible.

I agree that AMD's marketing is utterly terrible. I can't believe that they mismanaged the Anandtech Carrizo review so badly - this is complete amateur hour. Hopefully, Zen and Polaris will be good enough that the marketing department won't be able to screw them up...

OEMs in general cut corners wherever they can. Even my Dell 7559 comes with 1x8GB DDR3L-1600, when the 6700HQ/HM170 in it is dual channel... talk about crippling the performance! Day 1 upgrade is another 8GB stick.

I get what you are both saying bu some of the Carrizo laptops have HD and IPS screens which were a rarity for AMD laptops.

But that's the thing a lot of those Intel laptops will run dual channel memory and going by the review its basically giving the impression that the laptops are permanently single channel which is not correct.

AMD is selling their laptops on the basis of graphics performance first and Intel its more CPU performance, battery life and then graphics so it makes Carrizo look a backward step compared to the Kaveri laptop used.

I really hope the other poster who said it might be a ploy to upsell Bristol Ridge is correct otherwise its very worrying indeed!

 

[dark zero]

Reviving the thread...

Soney Ridge info is here!
AMD’s Stoney Ridge Performance And Market Positioning

Stoney Ridge is AMD’s new low power, low cost, mobile computing line. It succeeds Carrizo-L and is supposed to share the socket with AMD’s higher end Bristol Ridge much like Carrizo-L shared the same socket with Carrizo.

Unlike Carrizo-L which is based on the low power cat cores (4 Puma+ cores) Stoney Ridge is using the bigger architecture and employs the construction cores instead. It uses the latest iteration of the construction cores (Excavator) which was first used in the Carrizo line. Though it is rumored that Stoney Ridge is using a slightly improved version of the core (Excavator+).
What we know about Stoney Ridge is that it uses a single Excavator module, which means two cores. It also has three Radeon clusters (192 stream processors) and a single 64bit DDR3/4 memory controller.
From a CPU performance point of view, Stoney Ridge presents a departure from the typical AMD low end APU designs. Where due to the characteristics of the cat cores the x86 performance was heavily weighed towards multi-threaded performance at the expense of single threaded. In Stoney Ridge, however, the use of XV cores allows the APU to scale its single threaded performance much higher than any previous low end APU from AMD. Though due to the fact that there is only a single XV module, multi-threaded performance is expected to regress, specially in FP workloads.
It is also worth mentioning that it is due to the multitude of power saving features that went into the XV design AMD was finally able to scale its more powerful cores down to the low power low value segment. With APUs expected to have as low as 6 watts of TDP.
The GeekBench3 database now has multiple entries for three Stoney Ridge samples. These samples have the following identification strings:
S1 => ZM2401AFY23AC_35/29/11/06_98E4
S2 => ZM2401AVY23AC_28/24/11/05_98E4
S3 => ZM2401AVY23AC_22/20/10/04_98E4
These can be found here:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5129061
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5141631
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5140915

Source:
http://wccftech.com/amds-stoney-ridge-performance-market-positioning-detailed/

----

Thanks Khalid Moammer for the information...
Also this is found too:

Sample - Cores - Clock (idle/base/turbo) - GPU Cores - GPU Clock - TDP
S1 - 2 - 1.1/2.9/3.5GHZ - 192 - 600MHZ -15W?
S2 - 2 - 1.1/2.4/2.8GHZ - 192 - 500MHZ - ???
S3 - 2 - 1.0/2.0/2.2GHZ - 192 - 400MHZ - 6W?

Seems that SR are all of them Dual Core who goes from 6 Watts to 15 watts, so, that means that SR is made with 28nm High Dense Libraries tech.
My guess is this:

S1 - A6 9XXX chip (8XXX chip might get ditched)
S2 - A4 9XXX chip
S3 - E2 9XXX chip

So, maybe the infamous E1 chip is gone forever and for good.

Comparing to the competition on 15 Watts

Ok, seems that Stoney Ridge has a good performance against all Dual Core on Integer and on Floating they managed to catch up.

BTW, the E2 was supposed to compete against Celeron and the A8 against the i3...

Now with the supposed to be sucessor of the E2 or even E1....

If that ends true, it would be wonderful for AMD to manage to tie against Intel in the low tier...

BTW, that E1-7010 sucks hard and is compared against the VIA C3....

 

[superstition]

I thought DDR4-2133 was slow with Skylake.

It is. Hruska put up a Dirt 3 chart from Anandtech that shows 2133 tanking the performance of Skylake while anything above that is fine.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...g-ddr4-to-3200mhz-improve-overall-performance

Can't imagine what DDR4-1866 would be like.

Horrible, I'd expect, especially with the latencies the OEMs would use.

Are these still limited to 2400 max?

2400 should be fast enough, unlike 2133 and below, if that Skylake result is any indication.

 

[superstition]

Single channel 1866 CAS 19 FTW.

"Revolutionary DDR4 memory to make your work and play go at astronaut speeds!"

 

[The Stilt]

ZM2901 / ZM2902 = A9-9410
ZM2401 = A6-9210
ZM2001 = E2-9010

The naming policy is getting better and better D:

 

[NTMBK]

Wonder if we'll see Stoney Ridge show up in any interesting devices. That 6W one could potentially be better than Cherry Trail for portable gaming devices, depending on what the real world power draw is like.

 

[Sweepr]

Wonder if we'll see Stoney Ridge show up in any interesting devices. That 6W one could potentially be better than Cherry Trail for portable gaming devices, depending on what the real world power draw is like.

I don't think this competes with Cherry Trail. Looks more like a lower-cost alternative to Core M for bigger devices. Also Atom 'Broxton' should hit the market in Q3.

 

[monstercameron]

Wonder if we'll see Stoney Ridge show up in any interesting devices. That 6W one could potentially be better than Cherry Trail for portable gaming devices, depending on what the real world power draw is like.

maybe this is why the smach z guys retreated a bit, maybe it was to secure these chips vs micro mullins.

 

[NTMBK]

I don't think this competes with Cherry Trail. Looks more like a lower-cost alternative to Core M for bigger devices. Also Atom 'Broxton' should hit the market in Q3.

I'm mostly comparing to Tegra K1- two "big" cores, 192 shaders, 64 bit memory interface, ~6W power consumption. Slap that in a gaming tablet with integrated controls, put SteamOS on it, and I'll buy it!

 

[The Stilt]

All the models I listed have TDP of 15W. They support cTDP between 10-15W or 10-25W, depending on model.

 

[Dresdenboy]

Thanks Khalid Moammer for the information...

This article has been written by a guest author.

 

[Flash831]

It seems AMD might finally have found a place where the construction cores actually shines, the <15 TDP market!

Having (more) shared resources compared to traditional cores might be the more energy efficient approach, which leaves room to increase the frequency of the chip.

Besides, using the 28nm instead of 14nm might actually be a good thing:
1. AMD must know this node very well by now and can probably cram the most out of it with a very high yield.
2. As larger designs gets moved to the 14-/16-nm node the utilization of the 28nm nodes might go down, and the foundries might decide to drop the prices on the 28nm as a result, as they have done before.

 

[dark zero]

Reviving the Thread!


AMD E2 9010 is now the bottom processor of Stoney Ridge! And new benchmarks appeared!

https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5875455
Single Thread: 1441
Multi Thread: 2342

Comapred to E2-7110
https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5489053
Single Thread: 1004
Multi Thread: 3226

---
Comparing the E2 Stoney Ridge against the E2 Carrizo-L
Single Thread difference (%): 43% more (!)
Multi Thread difference : -27.4% (meaning that the E2 Stoney Ridge has the performance of 3 E2 Carrizo-L cores)
Similar ammout of cores difference (2 Core): 45% (!)

 

[The Stilt]

E2-9110 is also clocked > 22% higher (2.2GHz vs. 1.8GHz) than E2-7110 Carrizo-L (Mullins) in ST.

 

[dark zero]

BTW... comparing against the best bench of the competitor of that E2: Celeron N3060
https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5378645
Single Thread: 991
Multi Thread: 1882

And comparing against the N2840
Single Thread: 1088
Multi Thread: 1919

Seems that AMD finally managed to defeat Intel's lowest offering BIG TIME.

Now comparing to the near nemesis: The Celeron 3955U at 15 watts
https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5487664
Single Thread: 1887
Multi Thread: 3217

The E2 supossedly to use only 6 watts is defeated... but at least gets neat the ST performance against the Intel solution.... seems that AMD finally did it right with Stoney Ridge.

However we need to take it as a grain of salt since is only Geekbench, we need more benchmarks to confirm that.

But for now the E2 needs a LOT of design wins and why not? put it on a Phablet to make it interesting...

 

[The Stilt]

E2-9110 is a 15W TDP part. It support 10W configuration through cTDP.

 

[ElFenix]

do we really need 3 carrizo threads?

 

[Azuma Hazuki]

Actually, couldn't the "Carrizo Pre-Release Thread" be closed and this one left over? Strictly speaking this thing is as much Carrizo as Ivybridge was Gescher...

And this looks good. My concern is that Intel is going to pull more shady s*** and keep these out of where they'd do well, much like whatever happened with Mullins vs. Silvermont. If these numbers are real AMD has the superior product this time.

 

[cbn]

Ideally, AMD should design a reference ultrabook and make it available for sale to enthusiasts and business customers, but this may not be financially feasible.

We are in the OEMs mercy, we cannot choose and build what WE need like in Desktops but we always have to buy what OEMs want.

I made the following thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2468562

Please add your ideas and suggestions if interested.

 

[dark zero]

So is confirmed...
http://wccftech.com/amd-bristol-ridge-processor-launch/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10362/amd-7th-generation-apu-bristol-ridge-stoney-ridge-for-notebooks
Bristol and Stoney Ridge released on mobile!

Lets check:

Bristol Ridge: Sorry AMD, but your naming is getting more and more ridiculous
- All of them Quad Cores
- FX and A12 have Radeon R7 with 512 SPs. A10 are R5 with 384 SPs.

Chips available
- FX - Flasgships with improved Base Ghz and finally 2 chips to each tier. They should renamed as FX-P for portable and FX-U as for Ultra Low voltage. Just my opinion. Also they are competing against the Core i3 U.

35-45 Watts: AMD FX-9830P - 3.7 Ghz Max - 3.0 Ghz Base -- 900 Mhz GPU Speed
12-15 Watts: AMD FX-9800P - 3.6 Ghz Max - 2.6 Ghz Base -- 758 Mhz GPU Speed

- A12 - The "New" A10 - Aparently direct competition against the Core i3 U in everything, which in practice are tieing against Pentium U.

35-45 Watts: AMD A12-9730P - 3.5 Ghz Max - 2.8 Ghz Base -- 900 Mhz GPU Speed
15-25 Watts: AMD A12-9700P - 3.4 Ghz Max - 2.5 Ghz Base -- 758 Mhz GPU Speed

- A10 - The "New" A8 - This is the real competitor of the Pentium U.

35-45 Watts: AMD A10-9630P - 3.2 Ghz Max - 2.6 Ghz Base -- 800 Mhz GPU Speed
15-25 Watts: AMD A10-9600P - 3.2 Ghz Max - 2.3 Ghz Base -- 686 Mhz GPU Speed


"Stoney" Ridge: Well, this is supposed to be Stoney Ridge, however is part of Bristol Ridge.
- All of them Dual Cores
- A9 uses Radeon R4, A6 uses Radeon R3 with 192 SPs and E2 uses Radeon R2 with 128 SPs

Chips available
- A9 - Ok, this is the real deal for the budget. Celeron U will have BIG problems here if AMD manages to get some design wins on there. Also Apollo Lake could have problems too here.

10-25 Watts: AMD A9-9410P - 3.5 Ghz Max - 2.9 Ghz Base -- 800 Mhz GPU Speed

- A6 - They are competing against Apollo Pentium Quads. They will win on ST, but on MT they will have problems. If they have Dual channel, they have chances on iGPU.

10-15 Watts: AMD A6-9210P - 2.8 Ghz Max - 2.4 Ghz Base -- 600 Mhz GPU Speed


- E2 - They are competing against Apollo Pentium Duals. Oh boy... Intel will face against a BIG Core here and to make it worse this chip is FAR better than the monocore E1.

10-15 Watts: AMD E2-9010P - 2.2 Ghz Max - 2.0 Ghz Base -- 600 Mhz GPU Speed

 

[The Stilt]

Stoney Ridge is a ~125mm² die, but I'm not certain if there will be harvested Carrizo / Bristol Ridges used for some of "Stoney" models.