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AMD talks about many future products
AMD dropped a ton of news at their financial analyst day. Let's break it down.
http://techreport.com/review/28228/amd-zen-chips-headed-to-desktops-servers-in-2016
First off, Zen CPUs are officially coming, and due next year. AMD is promising IPC improvements of 40% over Excavator. That would be a huge jump. I'm not expecting it to mean AMD beats Sky Lake or whatever the contemporary Intel chip is. But there's a decent chance that AMD Zen will be more competitive with Intel in desktop CPUs than at any point since the Core 2 Duo hit in 2006. Something like 2009-2010, where Intel clearly had superior desktop CPUs, but AMD wasn't that far behind, is a likely outcome.
AMD is promising both FX-series CPUs and A-series APUs based on Zen. It will also be on a FinFET process node, so 14 or 16 nm. That's pretty much expected for 2016.
AMD's ARM "K12" chip has been delayed until 2017. But that's not a gaming chip, so let's move on.
Meanwhile, the next series of AMD desktop discrete video cards is, as expected, going to be the Radeon R 300 series. And as rumored, it's going to be mostly rebrands:
http://techreport.com/news/28231/official-specs-confirm-300-series-radeon-rebrands
If you look closely, you'll see Tonga, Pitcairn, Bonaire, and Oland. No Tahiti or Cape Verde, though; it's about time those chips were retired. And no Hawaii on that list, either; it's a big, expensive chip as it is, and will presumably be supplanted by Fiji. I'd think AMD would want something between Fiji and Tonga, though, unless Fiji is going to offer rather less performance than we expect.
AMD also officially confirmed that they're launching a GPU with high-bandwidth memory this quarter. I didn't see them officially call it Fiji, but that's what everyone seems to be calling it, so I will, too. I'm expecting it to be faster than Hawaii (Radeon R9 290X), though that won't automatically make it competitive with a Titan X.
AMD also talked about a "high-performance server APU". The article I linked above said that there will be a consumer version of it, too. I'm not sure how much sense a consumer version makes; if it's a huge die, then for the price tag, you might as well just get a discrete video card for gaming. Scale it down to fit into a laptop and you have your typical A-series APU.
Where it could be a great part is situations where the bottleneck is the PCI Express bus rather than the CPU or GPU. That's not games, however, and I'm not sure if such a part will offer any real advantages over a separate CPU and GPU(s) in other situations. (Power consumption? Form factor?)
Comments
I think the performance increase is probably going to be true simply because they are going to a smaller process node.
I would like a many cored CPU to replace my current vishera based 8 core since I do a lot of CPU based rendering. It looks like AMD is not planning to release a new chipset for FX processors and the upcoming ones will either be APUs with the FX brand, or compatible with the 990FX chipset. MSI just released refreshes to their AM3+ mobos.
AMD's Zen CPUs will be Socket AM4. It's very highly probable that they'll use a new chipset for PCI Express 3.0 support, among other things. It's also very highly probable that they'll use DDR4 memory, which necessitates a new socket.
Die shrinks on CPUs don't automatically give you higher per core performance anymore. They certainly give you the ability to add more cores and larger caches. They also give you the option to get the same performance as before with lower power consumption. But the problem with AMD's FX chips is not one of too few cores or too small caches, and power consumption isn't very important in a desktop.
I'm expecting the top Zen-based FX chip to be roughly competitive with a Core i7-5960X, but with lower power consumption. That's Intel's current top of the line, of course, but note the max turbo only up to 3.5 GHz. And I'm not expecting Zen to catch Intel's top of the line available when Zen launches.
Price Titan X 1299 euro's(followed many forums well i can tell you not many buy Titan X it's same FAILOR as Titan Z) 295 700 euros i'll bet 390x will be around 600 price tag and will prolly performe closely to Titan X if not faster.
But thats my gues also, i can't confirm it neather.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
I'm not claiming that the Radeon R9 390X will or won't be competitive with a Titan X.
I do think that the comparison to a Titan Z is way off, though. The problem with the Titan Z was the Radeon R9 295X2, which gave essentially the same performance for half the price tag, launched earlier, and had a massively superior cooling system. Even if the Radeon R9 390X hits most of those points as compared to a GeForce GTX Titan X (which I'd regard as unlikely; if it's competitive with a Titan X on performance, AMD will charge more than half the price of a Titan X for it), it certainly didn't launch sooner.
Unlike the Titan Z, the Titan X doesn't have serious cooling problems. However small the market for $1000 gaming cards is, it's a whole lot bigger than the market for $3000 gaming cards. The Titan X doesn't have the problems intrinsic to SLI/CrossFire, as it's a single GPU card. And it's very unlikely that the Radeon R9 390X will be able to match 12 GB of memory, however questionable the benefit of so much memory may be.