News 
Market Data 
Discover
Replies to post #147967 on Intel Corp (INTC)
03/03/17 7:19 PM
Where I only see Rizen making an immediate impact is in hpc orientated sites but that is not a huge market.
Good for Servers But Not HPC
The exact range for Zen-based PC processors will depend on the frequency. Intel’s PC processors clock the CPU cores at 2–4GHz. Because Zen has a slight IPC deficit, it will need a higher frequency, all other things being equal, to match a Skylake core. The CPU is just one of several components in a PC processor, however—it’s clearly the most important, but graphics, media, image processing, and display interfaces are all critical for a well-rounded product. Any of these factors (along with lower prices) can sway OEM and end-user buying decisions.
To maximize multicore throughput, most Intel server processors operate at 2–3GHz, which is quite feasible for Zen. But servers require more than just low-power cores (e.g., 22 cores in 135W): they need a high-bandwidth low-latency L3 cache and fabric, coherent links, memory and I/O controllers, power management, and excellent overall integration. The new Zen core is a necessary but insufficient condition for server success. AMD has experience with many of these components and certainly understands what is necessary, but its disappearance from the mainstream server market means it must do more work to refresh its server products. The company is declining to discuss these other platform factors.
The Zen core does have some limitations that make it less suitable for scientific computing, which accounts for 15–20% of the server market. It sacrifices floating-point and SIMD throughput to reduce area and power—important metrics for this segment. As Table 1 illustrates, Zen offers more FP flexibility than Sandy Bridge and will deliver much better performance on SSE code. Haswell and Skylake, however, provide twice the flops per clock using AVX FMA instructions and, more importantly, twice the cache bandwidth to feed the FP and SIMD execution units.
The forthcoming server version of Skylake will further double the computational throughput using AVX512 and also increase the cache bandwidth. Practically, Zen will therefore struggle to offer competitive HPC performance both for classic scientific computing and for workloads such as machine learning that require dense computations. Fortunately for AMD, the bulk of the server market is running databases, web servers, and other tasks that fall outside scientific computing.
03/04/17 6:32 PM
AMD stock will fall further as all those big institutional boys who bought shares/notes at 7 will want to take profit while they can
