The PC hardware thread(s)=(now with SMT support)

[vlad01]

Ok, I thought its about time we had a thread dedicated to this sort of stuff as a lot of us are interested in the subject and then there are others here that struggle a bit and we can help out with any general computer related questions here.


I thought I'd start by saying this year in the PC scene has been a big one as we have not seen any innovation or progress like this in 10 years starting with massive leaps in GPU performance. Like jumps of 30-40% from gen to gen in the last 3 gens, pretty much all nvidia lately though, radeon is a bit slow the last 5 years but did make some good ones with interesting tech.

The biggest chance we have seen is the massive upset in the CPU market AMD have caused this year with their great line up of consumer and pro-sumer CPUs which have totally caught Intel by surprise and they screwed for a good while I reckon. from 4c/4t ultra low end to the casual high end platform of 16c/32t at what will be a very good price.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nynBEGCtg90[/youtube]

We are also seeing some shit like this now days.

I'm getting because it cheaper that what my custom made design trying to achieve a similar goal.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LauL5JxYis[/youtube]


nooice!

http://fanlessfan.com/


I am also majorly impressed with these NVMe drives, about time we had hard drives that go as fast as the hardware they are attached to. some of the best NVMe drives get well over 3GB a sec of transfer and they aren't much bigger than half a ram stick with about half a dozen chips on them and 100s of GB of storage. You can get a few TB on them if you pay up.

[The1]

I just spent $600 and built a new 6 core AMD Ryzen and slapped it straight upto 4ghz prime stable on stock cooling, compaired to me paying $600 for 1meg of ram back in the late 80's it's crazy.

Though it's all starting to slow down now, hence multi cores is becoming more norm.

[vlad01]

Well multi core is only becoming the norm with mobile SOC and AMD for the normal CPU market. Intel always played catch up in that department, they have always been single core and speed orientated. We were stuck with 4 core crap for almost a decade when AMD fell behind due to poor financial situation. Also that was the reason for progress slowing down, most of it anyway as they had no competition and were drip feeding customers with inferior products (to what we should of had by now) with minimal steps in performance. Thats what a monopoly will do to the industry.

Now that AMD have come in with a vengeance with their amazing line up Intel have do their usual catch up and overtake strategy once again.

Interesting with the speed slow down and what not, there has been a lot of issues at Intel with node shrinks. They were suppose to be on 14nm way back in 13 but they are still on it now. They are saying they will get to 10nm next year, meanwhile AMD have 7nm samples coming out about September so there is something going wrong at Intel it seems where all the 3rd party fabs are now overtaking. Even the GPUs are soon overtaking Intel in shrinking transistors.

So I welcome this boost in progress as it was stagnant for so many years.

Those Ryzens are great CPUs, heaps of performance, cheap and more performance per w than what Intel offer. And performance on average is pretty on par with their high end parts. Very nice indeed!

[The1]

yeh perhaps intel is trying to get to the 5ghz range and with die shrinks and there structure maybe it's proving very hard. Its quite interesting how different makeups on the die show very different results and at different clock speeds. Gone are the days where clock speeds matter, efficiency is now a big area to tweak, pretty crazy that 6 or 8 cores can be under 100 watt TDP.

Ive never had a system like this one, more than double overclock, Celeron 533 that was stable at 1147mhz with peltier.

[vlad01]

lol at the logo.

well there has been cpus that are clocked pretty close to 5Ghz out of the box. The FX9590 which has a base of 4.7 and turbo of 5.0. They have a TDP of 220W lol.

Also a number of intel cpus with similar figures.

[antus]

The interesting thing though, from a programming perspective is how to use a highly parallel system. A typical desktop app will have few threads run pretty fast. A badly written multi-thread app will have many threads and be knobbled in performance because of the way the threads have dependancies on each other. In the scientific field this is a big challenge because those who know the maths might not be the best programmers. Typically they will work with programmers and often historically used fortran which is made for those types of problems but these days languages like julia are rapidly makeing inroads and decreasing development time while in many cases improving performance.

[vlad01]

Programmers are getting better and better at it as there more cores available. Actually since launch of the new AMD chips several games and programs, drivers etc... have got updates to better work with their architecture and have seen some pretty good improvements.

A lot of that scientific research/data crunching stuff is done on GPUs these days due to their massive parallel core count. Now CPUs having much more cores they are going to leg up on the more complex maths that can be paralleled that works so well on x86.

[antus]

Yeah thats right. Im talking hpc stuff but now cpus are getting 32c/64t at low cost it has to be getting practicle soon to use them for some workloads. But yeah most newer software (games) can use more threads better but i just wanted to make the point as a lot of people take a single thread app and put it on a many core machine and wonder why they dont get a linear speed increase by number of cores.

[vlad01]

Yeah I agree. To really make it work it needs to be coded for multi core from the beginning and for best results an understanding of the CPU architecture and instruction sets is key to proper code optimisation.

[Tazzi]

I think alot programmers have just don't bother reviewing and optimizing their work anymore. The old saying 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' fits that nicely.