Speculation: Zen 4 (EPYC 4 "Genoa", Ryzen 7000, etc.)

[maddie]

Belief doesn't come into play. What I know is that Intel is currently losing ground in the server room. The only thing saving Intel from Zen4 is that currently no one can replace Intel's 14nm volume. Not even Intel!

Key point here. At best, not for a long time.

 

[carrotmania]

🤷‍♀️ If you want to believe that Intel is hopelessly behind and will never catch up, ok. The psychological bias in seeing current realities as immutable exists, it affects us all, I feel it too, but probably worth defending against with reason. What makes you certain that this is the time that AMD becomes immune to competition, and Intel unable to adapt?

Calm down, remember you're in an AMD thread, there's no point getting your knickers twisted every time someone disses your mighty Intel.
Saying that, he said "Sapphire Rapids", and yes, Intel is HOPELESSLY BEHIND with that technology. Their chipletish design does not scale nicely AT ALL. 60cores @ 350W vs 96 (or 128) @ 320W from Epyc4.

And while Genoa is currently shipping to a few customers, wide release is expected to be on track, whereas SR is nowhere to be seen. Intel even just announced another release delay till NEXT YEAR.

AMD delivered Frontier, 1.1ExaFlops @ 21MW. Pat (Himself on the back) Gelsinger had to do the same PR limitation that Intel has always done, and quickly announced that Aurora, their 2Exa machine is out... er... soon. Lets gloss over that its 4 years late already. Turns out that 2Exa will use 60MW! 37% more watts per flipflop than AMD.
Now we have more details of El Capitan, which will do a similar 2Exa, but at 40MW. Intel will be at 50% more watts per flopflip than AMD.

I'll take AMDs release performance of the last 5 years over Intels of the last 10, any day. Intel have way more to prove than AMD currently, and I don't see them proving anything, yet.

 

[moinmoin]

I think his point is that people are over-estimating how behind Intel is.

🤷‍♀️ If you want to believe that Intel is hopelessly behind and will never catch up, ok.

Look, there's a way to go about it without getting personally invested, without making it a personal discussion about, and without having to estimate anything or creating new belief in any direction:

Companies plan roadmaps to stay competitive well into the future and estimate the competitive environment in said future. They announce those roadmaps, announce launch dates, keep them or delay them. Based on that behavior one can conclude how confident a company is about the future, and how on time the execution of those plans is.

Intel keeps being publicly bullish about its long term future. But just looking at SPR (but also Arc, Aurora and other products) Intel appears to be slacking in execution of what they previously publicly promised.

This has nothing to do with being "hopelessly behind" or "never" being able to "catch up". Plans obviously change yet more accordingly to achieve competitiveness again despite setbacks. Nothing wrong with that. And the competition as well reacts accordingly to changes in the estimated competitive environment in the future.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Things wouldn't look so bad for Intel if AMD weren't firing on all cylinders. It's not Intel that's behind so much as it is AMD that's way too ahead.

Imagine if AMD were still stuck with their Bulldozer architecture. In that scenario, Intel missing their targets wouldn't be big news. Intel would still have older stuff performing much better than AMD's newer stuff.

Intel's main issue has been lack of proper leadership and inability to fill the leadership roles with the right people. When Lisa Su was appointed AMD CEO, I had no idea about her abilities. I assumed she would be someone like HP's Carly Fiorina. I was wrong. She's proved herself to be one of the best female CEOs in the tech sector. Reading about Intel's culture, I doubt she would have made that far inside Intel.

 

[Timmah!]

Not many people use a 2nd GPU. Those that will, they will get something more expensive and probably E-ATX. Then there's also PCIe extenders or riser cables. Most people are likely to leave the 2nd slot alone or at most, use it with an M.2 NVMe adapter.

I understand that most people wont use the second slot anyway, as most dont have 2 GPUs. But i presume they are aware of that and since they put it in there anyway, they likely do it for those people, who would use it. In that case, why half-a** it like this? The problem here is the distance between the slots, even if someone wanted to put something else into the bottom slot, like M2 adapter as you mention, it would be too close to the GPU above it. They just should have moved upper slot one position up, there is clearly space, its simple as that.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Things wouldn't look so bad for Intel if AMD weren't firing on all cylinders.

AMD is not perfect. They had an excellent product in Zen, and they've iterated upon it successfully. But there have been some hiccups. Let's not ignore those. Also they continue to suffer from volume shortages. They're targeting specific, lucrative markets for many reasons, one of them being that it's the best use for their limited wafer supply. AMD can't become the Intel of 2006-2016 for that reason alone.

Still, it's best not to be narrow-minded in assuming that Intel might be "catching up" with some product like Raptor Lake or Meteor Lake when one of Intel's biggest cash cows from the past two decades is now in complete disarray. That is where AMD's decidedly competent execution stands in contrast with . . . uh . . . whatever it is that Intel is doing.

 

[Asterox]

🤷‍♀️ If you want to believe that Intel is hopelessly behind and will never catch up, ok. The psychological bias in seeing current realities as immutable exists, it affects us all, I feel it too, but probably worth defending against with reason. What makes you certain that this is the time that AMD becomes immune to competition, and Intel unable to adapt?

You should check Top500 list, and especially TopGreen500 list.

TOP500 List - June 2022 | TOP500

www.top500.org

Green500 List - June 2022 | TOP500

www.top500.org

Discussion - RDNA4 + CDNA3 Architectures Thread

With the GFX940 patches in full swing since first week of March, it is looking like MI300 is not far in the distant future! Usually AMD takes around 3Qs to get the support in LLVM and amdgpu. Lately, since RDNA2 the window they push to add support for new devices is much reduced to prevent...

forums.anandtech.com

Well it is, Intel servers/HPC market share is sinking no doubt.This is where you can see who is the leader.If you look further into the future, i don't see any detail how Intel can turn the situation to its advantage.

Get back to reality, Intel will never have same situation or advantage as from 2007-2016.World or market has changed, the situation today or in the future will be quite different.World is in big crisis, energy is expensive and so will be even more expensive in the future.

CPU Power consumption=performance, this is and will be the most important details on the scales.

This is old Intel slide, yes it is real slide of future advances in nm technology.

 

[maddie]

You should check Top500 list, and especially TopGreen500 list.

TOP500 List - June 2022 | TOP500

www.top500.org

Green500 List - June 2022 | TOP500

www.top500.org

Discussion - RDNA4 + CDNA3 Architectures Thread

With the GFX940 patches in full swing since first week of March, it is looking like MI300 is not far in the distant future! Usually AMD takes around 3Qs to get the support in LLVM and amdgpu. Lately, since RDNA2 the window they push to add support for new devices is much reduced to prevent...

forums.anandtech.com

Well it is, Intel servers/HPC market share is sinking no doubt.This is where you can see who is the leader.If you look further into the future, i don't see any detail how Intel can turn the situation to its advantage.

Get back to reality, Intel will never have same situation or advantage as from 2007-2016.World or market has changed, the situation today or in the future will be quite different.World is in big crisis, energy is expensive and so will be even more expensive in the future.

CPU Power consumption=performance, this is and will be the most important details on the scales.

This is old Intel slide, yes it is real slide of future advances in nm technology.

View attachment 63600

The arguments being made distill to the simple meaning that Intel has a righteous God given place at the top of the table and soon, soon, they will regain it. A sort of manifest destiny thinking applied to CPUs.

 

[Mopetar]

The L1 needs to be left out because it's inclusive, but there is an argument to be made that the correct way to measure Ryzen caches are L3+L2. Because that represents the maximum amount of data that can actually be cached. For an 8c Zen 4 X3D, that would be 104 MB (96+8*1).

The L3 cache is shared between all cores, but the L2 is per core. Does Zen let cores access the caches that belong to other cores? That alone would make a difference for any single core programs which now only have access to 97 MB of cache.

The access times are also vastly different. The L2 cache access times are around a third of the L3 times. If an additional 32 MB of that Rita cache were L2 instead of L3 the performance difference would be staggering, but the reported number would still be the same.

There's a reason that the various caches are all listed separately. Mixing them together like that is the kind of reporting you'd only do for people who don't even understand how a CPU works.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

The L3 cache is shared between all cores, but the L2 is per core. Does Zen let cores access the caches that belong to other cores?

You can load from other L2 caches, but no data ends up there in the first place unless the core in question accesses it.

The access times are also vastly different. The L2 cache access times are around a third of the L3 times.

L2 is faster mostly because it's closer. The other L2s are obviously not as close as your own (or even as close as the L3).

 

[Ajay]

You can load from other L2 caches, but no data ends up there in the first place unless the core in question accesses it.

And the memory system needs to run cache coherency checks, but that's done against tags, IIRC, where a cache line may be 'poisoned' by a shared pointer that was altered on another core. So, no writes, just mark the that line as dirty (which must mean it can be written over). Geez, it's be around 25 years since I studied this stuff!

 

[eek2121]

Oh dear. Let's hope nobody asks OpenAI about holocaust cloaks.

The stories I could tell you about OpenAI…

Stay away from that company. Far far away. As an example of how messed up they are, they did not filter the data coming into their model. User generated stories corrupted the model with, erm, “inappropriate” (read: illegal in any sane country) content. Rather than fixing the core issue (allowing any content to be injested), they (“alledgedly”, though nothing else explains the events before and after) threatened AI dungeon, causing mass censorship. The backlash was large enough to found a startup that has seriously put the hurt on AI Dungeon, and therefore OpenAI. The startup is not only profitable, they actually now have an arguably superior AI model. I am not naming the startup and I am being vague intentionally. I wasn’t attempting to derailed the thread.

EDIT: Disclaimer: was long time paying user of
AI Dungeon. Witnessed quite a bit. Surprised a lawsuit was not filed. Not biased, supported AID and OpenAI longer than most, but if you saw what I saw…