Speculation: AMD's 50-year anniversary

[Vattila]

Next year it will be 50 years since AMD was founded in 1969 by Jerry Sanders and seven co-founders. 2019 also marks the 20-year anniversary of the release of Athlon. Athlon was a smash hit and went on to beat Intel to the 1 GHz milestone in 2000.

So what will AMD do to commemorate these events? What remarkable things will they do in 2019?

Please vote and provide your thoughts.

PS. By the way, here is AMD's press release for their 40-year anniversary back in 2009 when Dirk Meyer was the CEO and "Fusion" was their business philosophy:

AMD Marks its 40th Year as Technology Innovator

"As part of the year-long anniversary celebration, the company is holding a series of contests in the U.S. and Canada as a gesture of thanks to the dedicated customers who have been, and continue to be, key to AMD’s critical presence in the processor industry."

https://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd_marks_its_40th-2009apr30.aspx

Similar marketing is probably to be expected for the 50-year anniversary as well.

 

[Markfw]

I say they will gain some on Intel in the server market.

 

[Vattila]

I say they will gain some on Intel in the server market.

That's a very cautious claim, albeit probably the most financially important event likely to occur.

The poll is multi-choice, so feel free to go wild. I'm sure at least one of the options I listed should be a pretty safe bet.

 

[Panino Manino]

A party.
Bake a cake.
That's about it.
Need they do more, really?

 

[whm1974]

Can dual channel DDR4 handle the demands of a 12c/24t CPU?

 

[Vattila]

Can dual channel DDR4 handle the demands of a 12c/24t CPU?

Well, dual-channel has proven to be able to feed decent 1080p gaming for the APUs, so I guess it will do, even if it may start to affect scaling to some degree in certain memory-hungry applications.

 

[maddie]

Can dual channel DDR4 handle the demands of a 12c/24t CPU?

I think not, unless much higher speeds are easily achievable. 2400 > 3600 is same ratio as 8C > 12C.

 

[whm1974]

I think not, unless much higher speeds are easily achievable. 2400 > 3600 is same ratio as 8C > 12C.

Personally I think an 8c/16t Ryzen CPU with a 4Ghz clockspeed at 65w TDP will be more suitable for mainstream. Do think that with 7nm AMD could do this?

 

[Markfw]

That's a very cautious claim, albeit probably the most financially important event likely to occur.

The poll is multi-choice, so feel free to go wild. I'm sure at least one of the options I listed should be a pretty safe bet.

Yes, for a reason. When I first started my second IT career, the company was very large (one of 10 data centers had over one square MILE of floor space). This was in 2002, when the Opteron used less power, was cheaper, and performed better then its Intel counterpart. But when I asked why we did not buy them, upper management at the data center said "we only use REAL CPU's, Intel". That kind of stupidity is still around. The EPYC processor is less expensive than its Intel counterpart, performance across different situations is about even, and I think they use less power. And thats before 7nm which is sampling now. But will they gain market share ?

 

[Vattila]

Personally I think an 8c/16t Ryzen CPU with a 4Ghz clockspeed at 65w TDP will be more suitable for mainstream. Do think that with 7nm AMD could do this?

I think they might do.

See https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-and-derivatives.2511914/page-2#post-39313608

 

[dark zero]

An APU with GDDR6 inside to basic gaming or 4GB HBM3 for it.

 

[whm1974]

An APU with GDDR6 inside to basic gaming or 4GB HBM3 for it.

I wonder if that would boost the Vega 11 to GTX 1050Ti perfomance?

 

[sandorski]

They should release a 50 Core Epyc. The numbers don't work, but it would be cool.

 

[Vattila]

They should release a 50 Core Epyc. The numbers don't work, but it would be cool.

Slap a small GPU on the die with 2 CUs and call it 50 "compute cores", like they did for a while.

 

[whm1974]

Slap a small GPU on the die with 2 CUs and call it 50 "compute cores", like they did for a while.

With 50 cores I doubt that even a small iGPU will fit.

 

[maddie]

Personally I think an 8c/16t Ryzen CPU with a 4Ghz clockspeed at 65w TDP will be more suitable for mainstream. Do think that with 7nm AMD could do this?

The claims are roughly a 35% performance increase at similar clocks. The 3.2 GHz Ryzen 2700 only needs a 25% increase to get to 4 GHz. This should easily be achievable. If they can't, then something is very wrong.

Edit:
Should be
"The claims are roughly a 35% performance increase at similar power."

 

[darkswordsman17]

I speculated that we'll see a 6 channel 36 core Threadripper and a quad channel 12core Ryzen, and then at Computex they show off 8core/16thread APUs (with quad channel, this way you've got bandwidth for CPU intensive stuff but also boost for graphics bandwidth; maybe they'll only do that for desktops and all-in-ones, with mobile chips maybe topping out with 6 cores 3 memory channels).

I believe I saw somewhere that people have said that AMD isn't even going to bring out a real new APU using Zen 2 next year, but I think that would be crazy, as that is absolutely going to be the most popular chip for laptops, so it will full on stall their progress to not take the opportunity to try to really take it to Intel. I could see them not overhauling the graphics side since just boosting memory bandwidth and clock speeds, and adding CPU cores should still let them equal or even best Intel's iGPU. They could probably fit a bit more CUs too if that'd help. Now, I could see them still making the APUs that will be out this year for cheap systems. Or maybe I got confused and that's what will happen this year (instead of spending the money to move to the "12nm", they just stick with 14nm, and then go to 7nm next year).

As far as commemorating their 50th, maybe they'll do a demo of a 50 core/100thread (50 years, and here's to 50 more!) dual socket enthusiast system, with coolers like Intel used on their 28 core/56 thread chip, and if they can clock it to 5.0GHz all the better. Toss in some 7nm Vega GPUs, 50TB of SSD (using those big Samsung ones), 256GB of RAM (maybe do where 200GB, with 56GB as a RAMdisk), Make a point of it being a showcase and not an actual product (taking a dig at Intel). Send it around to review sites and let them play with it. They could do something weird and use a single 48core/96 thread with a special board where they integrate a 2core/4thread APU to get to the 50 cores, signifying the diversity in chips they have, but I don't think the APU would be impressive.

 

[whm1974]

The claims are roughly a 35% performance increase at similar clocks. The 3.2 GHz Ryzen 2700 only needs a 25% increase to get to 4 GHz. This should easily be achievable. If they can't, then something is very wrong.

Yeah looking at the 12c/14t Threadripper it has what an 180w TDP? I doubt it will be possible even with 7nm for AMD to release a mainstream desktop 12c/12t CPU at 95w TDP without lowering the clockspeed so low it would be almost useless for most users .

Which is why I propose AMD releasing a 8c/16t CPU at 4Ghz with an 65W instead.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Slap a small GPU on the die with 2 CUs and call it 50 "compute cores", like they did for a while.

Maybe the PS5 will be an 8 core 42CU part?

 

[darkswordsman17]

Yeah looking at the 12c/14t Threadripper it has what an 180w TDP? I doubt it will be possible even with 7nm for AMD to release a mainstream desktop 12c/12t CPU at 95w TDP without lowering the clockspeed so low it would be almost useless for most users .

Which is why I propose AMD releasing a 8c/16t CPU at 4Ghz with an 65W instead.

I'm not sure why you say that. The 16c/32t Threadripper was also 180W. Plus, you'd lose a die (and a lot of pins on the socket) which will save you a fair amount, and you'll have less I/O, and possibly less memory channels (plus I believe they're going to be doing a lot of work on the memory controller on Zen 2, I think they were using a lot of 3rd party design in the 1st gen Ryzen controller and are going to do more of it themselves this time? Might be wrong on that, but I recall people talking about that potentially being one of the reasons why Ryzen was a bit wonky with memory and that AMD said they would do more of the work themselves or maybe integrate it better or something), so you should have more benefits than just the ~33% power reduction at same clock speeds (which that alone would put you at 120W).

They should be able to do 12c/24t Ryzen at 105W TDP at the clock speeds they are now. I have a hunch we'll see higher clock speeds too (nothing too drastic, I'm not expecting 5.0GHz at same TDP or anything, but maybe an extra 100-200MHz; and it'll be TDP constrained, so maybe 4.5GHz on 2-4 cores, 4.3 on 6, 4.1 on 8, and then 3.9 on 12; and how long you can sustain that would be dependent on your cooling and motherboard). Which, maybe they'd change InfinityFabric so that it is tied to the core clocks and not the memory, if that provides a good boost in performance (which would also enable it to be less memory dependent, in theory at least). Or even just move it to have a 4:3 ratio with the memory (so 3000MHz memory would work well for 4.0GHz, 3400 for 4.5GHz, and 2400 for 3.6GHz, which that should tie well with the core clockspeeds). So that might consume more power with the same core clocks or something.

 

[ao_ika_red]

Do like Intel did with 8086 and Pentium.
But this time, AMD will have specially binned Athlon that capable of reaching higher turbo than other Ryzen APU.

 

[Rudy Toody]

I think the next innovation will be to incorporate the memory into the chip, which will free up the mobo real estate for other uses. And overclocking speeds up everything. Five GHz 64GB anyone?

 

[ericlp]

Should do a APU quadruple the size of Thread Ripper socket that has 32 Gigs of RAM, a 1070 GPU speed with 16G's of Video Memory and a 16 Core 4Ghz CPU all in one. Is that too much to ask? Hmmm, oh, and let it run wild for 500 bucks! Oh, and will OC at 5Ghz on air with temps below 55C.

 

[ao_ika_red]

Should do a APU quadruple the size of Thread Ripper socket that has 32 Gigs of RAM, a 1070 GPU speed with 16G's of Video Memory and a 16 Core 4Ghz CPU all in one. Is that too much to ask? Hmmm, oh, and let it run wild for 500 bucks! Oh, and will OC at 5Ghz on air with temps below 55C.

That would be a hell of DC machine.

 

[whm1974]

I think the next innovation will be to incorporate the memory into the chip, which will free up the mobo real estate for other uses. And overclocking speeds up everything. Five GHz 64GB anyone?

I kind of doubt anyone will in the near future will be capable of putting that memory on a CPU package much less the die. That is a lot of memory.