AMD Zen 2 processors rumoured to offer a 10-15% IPC boost and up to 16 cores on AM4

[WYP]

16 cores on AMD, 32 cores on TR4 and 64 cores for EPYC 2! Really?



Read more about AMD's Zen 2 processor's and the rumoured 10-15% IPC boost.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

I don't see 8-core designs being used in the CCX. I don't even know if they'll move to 6-cores—but that's certainly possible. Even then, if moving to 6-cores mean reducing clock speeds, I'd rather they stuck with 4-core CCXs and increased the clock speed. That way we'd still have 8-core CPUs for AM4 and up to 32-core for TR4, but at much higher clock speeds. Ryzen with further refinements to the interconnects, 15% IPC bump, 8-core CPUs, 4.6Ghz overclocks/boosts, 95W TDP, all for the same price as what we pay now, that would be astonishingly good.

 

[Dicehunter]

While that's great and all unless their single core performance can match Intel for gaming then more cores aren't going to help with anything other than rendering programs.

 

[Bartacus]

But that Intel single core advantage is only a factor at low resolutions like 1080p, no? It's never held me back at 4K or 1440p, even with my Ryzen 1700 running at completely stock. That IPC performance thing is WAY overblown IMO.

 

[Dicehunter]

But that Intel single core advantage is only a factor at low resolutions like 1080p, no? It's never held me back at 4K or 1440p, even with my Ryzen 1700 running at completely stock. That IPC performance thing is WAY overblown IMO.

The main part that I find odd is that I can at 1440P see only up to around 80% GPU usage even with my 2700X and only now and then spiking to 95% where as with my 8700K it stays constantly at 99% GPU usage.

 

[Bartacus]

But do you see a difference gaming though? That's the key question.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

But that Intel single core advantage is only a factor at low resolutions like 1080p, no? It's never held me back at 4K or 1440p, even with my Ryzen 1700 running at completely stock. That IPC performance thing is WAY overblown IMO.

A lot of people are gaming at 1080p/144hz though. They might only have a GTX 970 or 1060 now, but within a year a lot will have upgraded. At 1080p with a GTX 1080, Intel wins almost all the time. It's not by a large margin until you start pushing clocks up to 4.9Ghz (and even then it's not unreasonable), but it's enough for consumers to choose Intel.

And clock speed and IPC also helps tremendously with things like music production and general productivity. That's a big draw for business-minded gamers who work with spreadsheets a lot. A lot of musicians also happen to be gamers as well (it's a hobby that crosses over regularly) and I would recommend a 8700K over a 2700X for music production.

 

[Dicehunter]

But do you see a difference gaming though? That's the key question.

Yep, General average FPS is up on the 8700K over the 2700X, In Destiny 2 I'd routinely get drops down to 50, Now it's pretty much stable at 80-100FPS.

 

[Bartacus]

Yep, General average FPS is up on the 8700K over the 2700X, In Destiny 2 I'd routinely get drops down to 50, Now it's pretty much stable at 80-100FPS.

Hmm, that surprises me. Interesting though. But I will still never support Intel again unless I'm forced to.

 

[Dicehunter]

Hmm, that surprises me. Interesting though. But I will still never support Intel again unless I'm forced to.

Well when 20% of my £1000 GPU isn't being used because of a CPU I have no problem swapping out the CPU to fully utilize it ^_^

 

[Bartacus]

Well when 20% of my £1000 GPU isn't being used because of a CPU I have no problem swapping out the CPU to fully utilize it ^_^

I hear ya. We still have to buy Nvidia anyway, so what's one more evil company to buy from. I'm just thankful my Ryzen / 1080TIs seem quite happy together with the little gaming I do these days.

 

[Gothmoth]

While that's great and all unless their single core performance can match Intel for gaming then more cores aren't going to help with anything other than rendering programs.

exactly what i am interested in.

i am a heavy multitasker and even when a program can only make use of 2-4 cores.... i often have 4-5 programs running.


lightroom for RAW editing and photoshop for fine tuning the images.
then often i use autopano for stitching panoramas at the same time.


while lightroom is rendering previews of new imported images i can already start editing images.

and while i do that i have AE or another program rendering in the background, a browser open and musicbee running.

 

[MacLeod]

But do you see a difference gaming though? That's the key question.

Yeah that is my concern as well. My rig is for gaming only and I was disappointed to see Ryzen not do as well in gaming as it did in all the other benchmarks. I'm hoping Ryzen 2 really closes the gap.

 

[refillable]

There's no point of hoping that AMD (alone) will magically improve their gaming performance with Zen 2. The point of Zen in the first place was to abolish Intel's fast but (industrially) inefficient intercore topology. It has to rely on the developers to improve performance. In fact, Zen+'s IPC is at least as good as Skylake already, in apps where AMD's intercore topology is utilized properly. Also recall how Skylake X is much worse than Intel's mainstream parts. I'm certain that IPC and core clock is going to get better with Zen 2 (I estimate 15-25% cumulatively). But even if their 6 core Zen 2 part will have the same IPC as Coffee Lake and runs at 5.0 GHz, they will not achieve gaming performance parity.

I see that AMD will tweak their next gen CPU depending on how good this 7nm process is. If power consumption per transistor is around about 1.3-1.7x better, I think they should opt for 6 core per CCX. Anything less than that I probably will expect them to keep the core count. Anything more than that then the 8 core per CCX option will be likely. The thing is we are not sure on that yet.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

There's no point of hoping that AMD (alone) will magically improve their gaming performance with Zen 2. The point of Zen in the first place was to abolish Intel's fast but (industrially) inefficient intercore topology. It has to rely on the developers to improve performance. In fact, Zen+'s IPC is at least as good as Skylake already, in apps where AMD's intercore topology is utilized properly. Also recall how Skylake X is much worse than Intel's mainstream parts. I'm certain that IPC and core clock is going to get better with Zen 2 (I estimate 15-25% cumulatively). But even if their 6 core Zen 2 part will have the same IPC as Coffee Lake and runs at 5.0 GHz, they will not achieve gaming performance parity.

I see that AMD will tweak their next gen CPU depending on how good this 7nm process is. If power consumption per transistor is around about 1.3-1.7x better, I think they should opt for 6 core per CCX. Anything less than that I probably will expect them to keep the core count. Anything more than that then the 8 core per CCX option will be likely. The thing is we are not sure on that yet.

I disagree. For starters, 15-25% IPC improvement and 5Ghz clock speeds would absolutely close the gap irrelevant of Intel's core ring bus architecture being more suited to current games.

Secondly, what you're saying is akin to telling an engineer not to work on the flywheel or the brakes or the turbo of the car because the core engine is not as suited to the terrain as the competition. You want to improve the entire vehicle, not just one part of it. Why limit yourself to one element just because that element is (arguably) the most critical? You can still make massive gains by improving IPC and clock speed without game developers ever touching their engines (game engines, that is).

 

[Kei]

There are other aspects that affect the performance regardless of the raw performance that the chip technically possesses. There is the intel compilers for the software that will optimise for intel cpus and anything that does not identify as Genuineintel will end up on an outdated code path like i386, SSE or MMX.

You also have the obvious zen AVX inefficiency too. Intel have a definite advantage here in software that can leverage AVX256 and AVX512.

 

[AlienALX]

Try not to have "core phobia" here. The more cores there are, the more that (eventually) will be used. It's only a matter of time, albeit maybe a quite long one lol.

 

[demonking]

Try not to have "core phobia" here. The more cores there are, the more that (eventually) will be used. It's only a matter of time, albeit maybe a quite long one lol.

This has never been more relevant on a gaming perspective due to console evolution.

 

[AlienALX]

This has never been more relevant on a gaming perspective due to console evolution.

Yup. I think the thing that blew me away on the Xbone X is how well it can multi task. I was hopelessly stuck on Fallout 4 the other night (four hours going around the same building) so I hit the home button, went off to Youtube, watched a vid and then returned to the game. It was so smooth and effortless.

More cores mean better multi tasking etc. Well, so long as the OS knows how to share them out I am sure future versions of Windows will have this in mind, which can only be a good thing.

 

[BigDaddyKong]

Until we get off the x86 architecture, we are never going to get a huge performance jump again.