Post-CES Keynote Interview With AMD CEO Lisa Su

Subject: General Tech | January 18, 2019 - 02:50 PM | Jim Tanous
Tagged: Ryzen 3000, radeon vii, lisa su, interview, EPYC, amd

German site PC Games Hardware today posted an interview with AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su. The interview was conducted as part of a roundtable discussion following her CES keynote last week.

Dr. Su addresses questions about the current and future role for Vega for both professionals and consumers, the outlook for Ryzen 3000 and EPYC, ray tracing and FreeSync, AMD’s 2019 product roadmap, and the future of chip design.

Check out the interview over at YouTube or via the player embedded above.

Radeon rumourmongering

Subject: General Tech | January 17, 2019 - 12:32 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: amd, rumour, Vega VII

There are several rumours bouncing around the internet about the new GPU from AMD, from overall shortages, to selling short through to the non-existence of custom cards from AIB partners.  As usual AMD is fairly tight lipped about unreleased product but did refute the post from Tweaktown stating there will be a mere 5000 cards available at launch, stating that they expected to be able to meet initial demand; a nice change from the issues that plagued the entire industry in 2018.

There are also allegations that the cost of the 16GB of HBM2 will mean AMD will take a loss on every single card sold at the $700 MSRP, which is honestly ludicrous on the face of it.  However there is one rumour that The Inquirer noticed AMD would not comment on, we still do not have confirmation of third party cards.  That would be an odd move on AMD's part, but as this year we will see Intel auction off a high end chip instead of selling them on the open market perhaps we are in for a strange year.

"AMD, however, has dismissed that these supply issues exist, and said in a statement that it has enough supply of the 7nm GPU to meet demand."

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Let us see how you handle my Threadripper's new NUMA Dissociater attack!

Subject: General Tech | January 15, 2019 - 02:57 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: amd, NUMA, Threadripper, numa dissociator, coreprio

With Threadripper, AMD introduced something new and different to the market, a HEDT architecture with nonuniform memory access.  This has met with mixed results, as is reasonable to expect from such a different chip design.  There has not been much out of Redmond to adapt Windows to handle this new design compared to the amount of work coming out of the enthusiast community, especially those using Linux.

Phoronix has recently benchmarked a piece of software from CorePrio called NUMA Dissociater on both Windows and Linux.  It was designed to better address some performance issues on the Threadripper 2990WX and 2970WX than AMD's Dynamic Local Mode which can be enabled if you run their Ryzen Master software.  As you can see in the full review the results are not earth shattering, nor do they always increase performance, but the foundation for improvement is fairly solid. 

"Here are some benchmarks of Windows 10 against Linux while trying out CorePrio's NUMA Dissociater mode to see how much it helps the performance compared to Ubuntu Linux. Additionally, tests are included of Windows Server 2019 to see if that server edition of Windows is able to offer better performance on this AMD HEDT NUMA platform."

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G.SKILL Announces Trident Z RGB DDR4-3466 32GB for X399

Subject: Memory | January 14, 2019 - 02:51 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: G.Skill, ddr4-3466, X399, Threadripper, amd, RGB, TZRX

Threadripper's architecture loves high frequency RAM, though it can be a bit picky at times and you will have a far better experience sticking with vaildated RAM ... though you certainly don't have to.

G.Skill have just announced a 32GB kit of four DDR4-3466 modules, with timings of 18-22-22-42 and plenty of RGBs.  On the Threadripper 2950X system they used as an example, the DIMMs were perfectly happy running at the default of 1.3V.   They will be available relatively soon and you will be able to spot them thanks to the TZRX branding they will sport.

AMD's Scott Herkelman on CES, Radeon VII and NVIDIA

Subject: General Tech | January 14, 2019 - 01:04 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: Scott Herkelman, radeon vii, amd

[H]ard|OCP had a chance to talk with Scott Herkelman, the man with a plan from AMD, about the new generation of GPUs which were teased at CES.  Among other things, they confirmed that the card shown at CES with the triple fan design will match the card AMD will be selling directly as well as the requirement for a pair of 8pin PCIe power connectors.  The cards will natively support HDMI 2.0, with 2.1 possible in the future with an active adapter. 

You can read more in the entire interview, including his reaction to Jen-Hsun's comments about the new card and NVIDIA's reluctant compatibility with Adaptive Sync.

"We had the opportunity to talk to Scott Herkelman at AMD about the new Radeon VII GPU at CES 2019, and he was kind enough to answer questions that we had. We get his thoughts on the new Radeon VII, its full specifications and die size, FreeSync, multi-GPU, 16GB of HBM2, AMD getting back into direct retail sales of video cards, and more."

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AMD Supplies First Radeon VII Benchmarks

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 12, 2019 - 08:17 AM | Jim Tanous
Tagged: vega 64, Vega, RX VEGA 64, radeon vii, gpu, benchmarks, amd, 7nm

After announcing the Radeon VII this week at CES, AMD has quietly released its own internal benchmarks showing how the upcoming card potentially compares to the Radeon RX Vega 64, AMD's current flagship desktop GPU released in August 2017.

The internal benchmarks, compiled by AMD Performance Labs earlier this month, were released as a footnote in AMD's official Radeon VII press release and first noticed by HardOCP. AMD tested 25 games and 4 media creation applications, with the Radeon VII averaging around a 29 percent improvement in games and 36 percent improvement in professional apps.

AMD's test platform for its gaming Radeon VII benchmarks was an Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4 memory clocked at 3000MHz running Windows 10 with AMD Driver version 18.50. CPU frequencies and exact Windows 10 version were not disclosed. AMD states that all games were run at "4K max settings" with reported frame rate results based on the average of three separate runs each.

For games, the Radeon VII benchmarks show a wide performance delta compared to RX Vega 64, from as little as 7.5 percent in Hitman 2 to as much as 68.4 percent for Fallout 76. Below is a chart created by PC Perspective from AMD's data of the frame rate results from all 25 games.

In terms of media creation applications, AMD changed its testing platform to the Ryzen 7 2700X, also paired with 16GB of DDR4 at 3000MHz. Again, exact processor frequencies and other details were not disclosed. The results reveal between a 27% and 62% improvement:

It is important to reiterate that the data presented in the above charts is from AMD's own internal testing, and should therefore be viewed skeptically until third party Radeon VII benchmarks are available. However, these benchmarks do provide an interesting first look at potential Radeon VII performance compared to its predecessor.

Radeon VII is scheduled to launch February 7, 2019 with an MSRP of $699. In addition to the reference design showcased at CES, AMD has confirmed that third party Radeon VII boards will be available from the company's GPU partners.

AMD Promises Full Radeon GPU Lineup Refresh in 2019

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 11, 2019 - 04:35 PM | Sebastian Peak
Tagged: video cards, Vega VII, Vega, Refresh, radeon, Mark Papermaster, graphics, gpus, cto, amd, 7nm

AMD CTO Mark Papermaster spoke with The Street in a video interview published yesterday, where he made it clear that we can indeed expect a new Radeon lineup this year. “It’s like what we do every year,” he said, “we’ll round out the whole roadmap”.

Part of this refresh has already been announced, of course, as Papermaster noted, “we’re really excited to start on the high end” (speaking about the Radeon VII) and he concluded with the promise that “you’ll see the announcements over the course of the year as we refresh across our Radeon roadmap”. It was not mentioned if the refreshed lineup will include 7 nm parts derived from the Vega VII shown at CES, but it seems reasonable to assume that we haven’t seen the last of Vega 2 in 2019.

These three foundries aren't scared of a wee 7nm

Subject: General Tech | January 11, 2019 - 01:14 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: amd, 7nm, CoWoS, TSMC, SPIL, TFME

DigiTimes today is sharing some information about just where AMD's 7nm chips will be processed and there seems to be a name missing.  TSMC, SPIL and TFME will all be producing specific products but there is no mention of GLOBALFOUNDRIES in the news post.

TSMC will handle the bulk of the EPYC and HPC versions of Vega production with their chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, as one might expect; SPIL and TFME will handle desktop Ryzen and GPUs.  One hopes that by diversifying their production sources we can avoid shortages from one line effecting the entire market as we have seen in the past. 

"TSMC is also among the backend partners of AMD for its new 7nm computing and graphics products, according to industry sources. Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) under Taiwan's ASE Technology Holding, and China-based Tongfu Microelectronics (TFME) are other backend service providers for the chips, the sources continued."

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