End Of The Line for AMD FX CPUs
techpowerup.com
Now Intel has no competition for high end CPUs, which means price increases for us.
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This will make the average CPU a better processor for more users.
My first real build had an Athlon 64 X2, and back then I foolishly assumed that the closeness of the competition was going to last (this was just before Conroe/Core 2 launched). I decided to upgrade to a Core 2 Quad a few years later, and an Ivy Bridge chip about a year ago. None of these upgrades, however, feel quite as potent as that first time when I switched from a Prescott Celeron to that Athlon 64 X2.
Sure, synthetic CPU benchmarks show that Moore's law isn't quite dead yet, but singlethreaded performance just is not the battleground it was a decade ago. I feel that somewhere along the line, people stopped pushing the envelope. Have we gotten to the point where people have run out of ideas to push their hardware with? Perhaps it's because physical limitations are being reached. Still, I can't help but fantasize about what the world would be like if the x86 market were as competitive as it were a decade ago.
Moore's law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. Which is still very much the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_law_graph.svg
Now if only we had really good GPGPU frameworks to compile generic code to OpenCL and make use of those extra cores for non-graphics, non-numerical applications.
A GPU can switch threads on a cache miss, something few CPUs can do. Even the CPUs that do this switch between 2-8 threads (it's called SMT architecture, for example, popular Intel Pentium/Core CPUs have at most 2 hardware threads per core, Xenon Phi has 4). GPUs have dozens of threads per core and, often, more cores than CPUs. Combined with the fact that a GPU thread is much wider than a CPU this allows a GPU to saturate memory bandwidth even on a pointer chasing code. The same code causes the CPU to stall and underutilize its memory bus (as soon as the few threads hit cache miss there is nothing to do, software multithreading cannot switch between threads that are waiting for data).
Of course, as I said, it's still not efficient even on GPU (most of the bandwidth is used to move unneeded data as you only need one word from the whole cache line) and you still need to write massively parallel code.
Yes, but if you actually try to do it, you'll find that "massively parallel" code can be written only for certain problems that lend themselves to being, well, "massively parallel".
I've seen people struggling with GPGPUs ever since they appeared (at a certain point in my career I was involved in heavy number-crunching research). Six years later, there are still a lot of real-life problems that can't be put in a GPGPU-useful framework; in fact, coming up with good models so that you can reason if a given problem would ever lend itself to being solve like that is one of the more important progresses of the scientific community.
Look, GPGPUs are cool and all, and useful for certain classes of problems, but let's not do the whole Itanium thing all over again, please.
A whole lot of real-life stuff is either parallel or does not need heavy computing. This is why people started building massively parallel computers well before the last 6 years[0].
Exactly. A lot of the GPGPU pitch is easily refuted with some hindsight.
I said that APUs are the future of computing not because I'm favoring parallel applications, but because boring old manufacturing constraints are making greater single-threaded performance more difficult to achieve. What we have now is about as good as it's going to get, at least until we see 3D chips or molecular nanotechnology.
But that gap is rapidly diminishing - the phones are catching up.
And as for user experience, you need to be able to get a "proper" desktop OS, and you need to not have to plug in lots of cables. And it needs to be able to drive a sufficiently high resolution display at good speed. It's slowly getting there, but it's got a bit to go still (but consider that today, mid-range Chinese unknown brands churn out quad core Android tablets with 2560x1600, and even low end phones come with 1920x1080 screens; and many of these devices can handle 3840x2160 output to external screens...)
Eventually low-power portable-class computing hardware will be as powerful as typical desktop systems today. Though there will likely always be a niche for even higher performance machines.
Price will come down with volume and greater competition as the market matures, as it always does.
And the OSes will get better as people spend more time on these devices and developers spend more time targetting them and working out the appropriate UI optimizations for mobile vs. desktop modes.
Already we have tablets running x86 with good enough battery life, better power than the ARM counterparts, and a full OS, with external hardware support.
Sure, it's not completely there yet, but considering it's $399 today for something that is pretty damned close (and close enough that my girlfriend just ordered one, to use for most of her primary computing, but coupled with the active digitizer for sketching; basically, a netbook), it's only a matter of time before this is completely doable!
Without a large base to spread costs over, it will become a more and more specialised field.
Both Intel & AMD are moving towards not selling individual CPUs and instead having them built into the main board, and I imagine that after that RAM will become built in as well.
GPUs are disappearing from the low end (onboard is getting pretty good) and if Intel succeed with Xeon Phi cards, thats going to start splitting the HPC market away from GPUs. Without the low end to get rid of older stock and increase the yield, I could very well come that Nvidia and AMD aren't able to keep the R&D dollars in GPUs.
Component manufacturers will start exclusively targeting consumer electronic companies, and the Off the shelf market may find that it is forced to pay premium prices, further reducing the number of people who are participating.
Unfortunately consolidation is a sign of a maturing market, with most people being happy with an off the shelf system (i.e. most people even on HN are happy with a macbook pro / air and its limited upgradability). A quad core laptop, 8gb of ram and 256gb SSD is suitable for most people, especially if they have a way of storing another 1tb of rarely used content (external hdd, NAS, online storage). They have been available for the past 3 years, and we are starting to get to the stage where they will likely be suitable for the next 3 as well. It will be a shame as the days of building cheap consumer grade servers for home use will be behind us, as will High performance workstations for 1/3rd of cost of Dell / HP / whoever.
For me it was 2002. Since then I have only bought laptops.
With no competition for high end desktop CPUs we can expect price increases.
Intel is effectively competing with itself. I have three Intel CPUs in my home and Intel needs to beat them by a significant performance margin, and at an acceptable price, before I will buy another.
So they still have plenty of incentive to outdo themselves.
Just to comment on your specific purchase, it would seem that your 8320 would be relatively closely matching the corresponding Intel CPU (3470) in performance, as you note AMD having slight lead on multi-threaded benchmarks and Intel on single-threaded ones. But the major difference between the two is that the Intel CPU does this while consuming 50ish watts less power (77W vs 125W TDP). Of course that doesn't matter for all people and TDPs are not really comparable directly, but still it is something to note.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ultra high end desktop cpu market isn't that large so they are assuming people who want that sort of power can just buy server processors.
Are they not going to make any server processors?
Can APU's not be used for high-end gaming? Can the GPU portion of the processor not be looked at the same way FPU's used to be seen?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni...
excerpt: * The Accelerated Processing Unit, formerly known as Fusion, is a marketing name for a type of microprocessor from AMD designed to act as a CPU and graphics accelerator (GPU) solution on a single chip *.
So I'd personally say not a very big surprise.
I heard it was coming out in 2014.
This is good, I can't wait for HSA programming model.
Of course, the best of that series also comes with a 220W TDP.
There was while when people would choose AMD because they could get enough more cores for the price that the performance would make up for it, and you could get more memory in a system than a similarly priced Intel. But those workloads weren't as command as AMD would have liked.