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[DeaviL]

More cores doesn't necessarily mean each one is small here. AMD has gone for really big dies that eat at their margins before...And since this is a server part, more cores ahoy is kind of par for the course.

Indeed, i didn't immediately notice this was a server CPU...

 

[Photolysis]

As someone who encodes a crapton of videos AND plays games (and makes said videos of games), this sounds awesome...I wonder if Handbrake/Vegas/etc can actually handle 16+ threads though...never had more than 8 for obvious reasons. If this is real it could be very interesting. Doesn't sound like a desktop chip but whatever it is is interesting.

People have already been throwing 16 threads at Handbrake using a 5960X w/ HT. Video encoding using H264 is pretty much embarrassingly parallel. Certainly with Handbrake, all it needs to do is spin off a new thread. Video editing should scale well, but one imagines that this might be harder to achieve given the far greater complexity of the software.

 

[TheLegendOfMart]

32 threads won't do much if games can't use more than 4 effectively.

PS4 has 8 cores, games wont take advantage of the cores until a cpu comes out with more cores.

 

[Yudoken]

RELEASE THE COREKEN!

 

[-SD-]

Oh, yes.

 

[Dictator93]

Oh, yes.

AMD is finally getting it.

Pisswater + Pisswater = beer?

 

[agiantenemycrab]

Consumer space don't need these kinds of core numbers. This is most likely from upcoming server CPU line.



That was in DX9/11 days which was singlecore friendly with poor scaling for other threads. Mantle/Vuklan/DX12 are fully multithreaded.

Games, by and large, are difficult to parallelize effectively due the complexity of the interdependencies between the subsystems in a typical engine. Adding more threads will not immediately increase performance and in some (admittedly pathological) cases can hurt performance dramatically.

For this reason, games usually pick a relatively low limit on the number of threads they will attempt to use. Unreal Engine 4, for example, currently uses a maximum of 8 threads.

 

[garbagejuicer]

Nah. The FX chips do too. My 6300 has 6 logical cores, 3 physical.

Nah. There are 6 physical cores on a FX6300. Each module (pair) shares resources, not hyperthreading.

 

[LordOfChaos]

Nah. There are 6 physical cores on a FX6300. Each module (pair) shares resources, not hyperthreading.

To be exact, each two core module has two proper integer units, but one shared FP unit.

Anywho, on topic:

 

[LeleSocho]

Yeah that's not a consumer product, one can dream though...

 

[onQ123]

This is clearly the Nintendo NX APU get hyped!

 

[GeoNeo]

I'd love to see a AMD x86 CPU that could go toe to toe with Intel's chip per core performance wise.

But, I don't see it happening.

 

[stan423321]

As an emulator enthusiast, I find them going for straight multi-core bad news.

 

[AmyS]

This is clearly the Nintendo NX APU get hyped!

Nintendo NX - Now You're Playing With ZEN.

Haha.

I'd be happy if PS5 and the next Xbox had even half of this chip for the CPU side of things (8 decent sized cores, 16 threads) with enough room for a 15-20 TFLOP GPU. Plenty of HBM2 / HMB3 on a 10nm FinFET process for 2018/2019.

 

[Chucke1992]

They will be able to achieve i5 level now lol

 

[stan423321]

PS4 has 8 cores, games wont take advantage of the cores until a cpu comes out with more cores.

That's not how it should work, though. At the point when you skip the border of, say, four threads of execution, you would imagine devs would stop focusing on splits like "thread for graphics" and "thread for logic" since you cannot manage something like this with 128 different threads. But this keeps happening. Coding is hard, I guess.

 

[jeff_rigby]

If you dig enough some interesting details:

Next generation dGPU = ARTIC is a new 2017 14nm Finfet dGPU with HBM Artic Islands GPU family (Cold reference)

Next Generation CPU = Zen is built with packages of 8 CPUs each that speculation has KGD (known good die) assembled on an Interposer or MCM with the top configuration having 4 CPU packages = 32 CPUs. Notice again 8 CPUs = what the PS4 and XB1 have. Zen can be 28nm? AMD's K12 (ARM) version of Zen references K12 the second highest mountain peak so I expect Zen is more powerful. Using VISC for increased single thread IPC

Next generation APU/SoC = Summit Ridge Family

AMD Zen To Be Featured Inside Summit Ridge Family of 14nm Processors – Rumored To Feature FM3 Socket Support and DDR4 Memory Compatiblity. Can still be 28nm 2.5D assembled on interposer with 14nm GPU and 20nm HBM.

Greenland (cold reference largest Artic Island) stream processor is the GPU in Summit Ridge and it uses up to 16 GB of HBM on interposer.

We can expect a next generation Game Console will be a scaled down version of the above. Guess 8 Zen CPUs, scaled down version of Greenland with 8 GB HBM and 32 MB L3 similar to the XB1. This puts a next generation game console at 2017 or later, likely later but before 2020 when the CE industry and FCC moves to ATSC 3 and 4K becomes mainline. 2017+ a move to all IPTV becomes mainline.

Hinted at but not referenced by anyone is Cryptographic co-processor and trusted boot on an ARM bus using Cadence IP where the Northbridge, HBM controller and more will be ARM IP and again using Xtensa stream processors.