AMD Zen Reportedly Delayed Until Early Next Year

[juno]

This is my favorite part about internet forums... nothing actually changed in the schedule AFAIK (at least not for Zen, no idea about the Intel part), but between Phoronix and other sites there will probably be 300 pages of discussion about "why".

Yeah and it's not only forums, the guy over at seekingalpha for example or the recent article by Kyle Bennett obviously have some nice time talking about how doomed AMD is...

btw: about the new APUs. I don't see something about Bristol Ridge, only the smaller Stoney. Are changes for BR necessary or will it be supported from launch by the Carrizo parts in the amdgpu stack?
Maybe there will finally be some interesting and small notebooks with "CZ"/BR, DDR4 and without additional GPU.

[bridgman]

So those slides bearing AMD's logo are not from AMD?

Which slides are you talking about ? There are certainly a lot of faked slides around (with logo) but I don't remember even seeing fakes talking about launching early.

Also, although I don't follow your posts on Phoronix religiously, I don't recall you ever stepping in before when people posted they expect Zen this year. There are several articles stating "a first full period of revenue to be reported in 2017" and none of them was ever disputed, afaik. Not sure how you'd achieve that w/o day 1 availability. Then again, maybe AMD is happy to embrace Apple grapevine marketing tactics...

If it was discussed here (which I don't remember seeing) I might simply have missed it.

Not sure what you mean by "grapevine marketing" although I assume you mean some kind of gossip-based thing (pretty much what I try to prevent). Google search kept pointing me to specific companies with that name.

[lovenemesis]

I have been following up Zen news for quite a while. Cannot remember seeing anywhere saying that it would be seen at retailers or OEM in end 2016.

The only thing I wait for them now is the AIB RX480 with customized cooling solution.

[bug77]

Which slides are you talking about ? There are certainly a lot of faked slides around (with logo) but I don't remember even seeing fakes talking about launching early.

For example, the first two slides here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9231/a...dmap-zen-is-in
Anyway, whatever the original plan was, it's irrelevant now. Intel get another year to milk Skylake. I hope you guys are at least making some profit on you CPUs as well, otherwise it will a painful wait till Zen.

[bridgman]

Maybe I'm missing something, but those slides just say "availability in 2016". AFAIK the plan has always been to sample in 2016 and aim to start selling at the end of 2016, with real volume in 2017. I forget the exact wording our execs used but that was the gist of it.

AFAICS the rumor mill confused sampling with selling and started saying that we would be selling in Q3, which was never the plan, then realised that we would not be selling in Q3 and started writing "OMG the schedule has slipped" articles because they get more clicks than "OMG we were wrong" articles.

EDIT - ahh, here we go.... "and we remain on track for ‘Zen‘ availability in 2016 with first full year of revenue in 2017″

That was in Sep 2015.

[juno]

This is from the financial analyst day. "Availability in 2016" doesn't necessarily mean you can buy it in 2016. They stuck to that and Lisa Su said at computex that SR samples will be available for few selected partners in the coming weeks and announced wider availability of samples in Q3.

@bridgman: could you tell something about my question above? Will Bristol Ridge be usable with amdgpu/carrizo drivers immediately or would it need changes first? What about BR's new features over CZ, are they coming to Linux as well?

[bridgman]

@bridgman: could you tell something about my question above? Will Bristol Ridge be usable with amdgpu/carrizo drivers immediately or would it need changes first? What about BR's new features over CZ, are they coming to Linux as well?

I'm not sure yet, but my understanding is that the current CZ code will support BR as well. The main changes seem to be (a) fab process changes for higher frequency operation and (b) qualification of additional HW features like DDR4 support.

I didn't see much mention of other new HW features in BR except in articles that were comparing "desktop BR" to "desktop KV" - what features were you thinking about ?

[bug77]

Maybe I'm missing something, but those slides just say "availability in 2016". AFAIK the plan has always been to sample in 2016 and aim to start selling at the end of 2016, with real volume in 2017. I forget the exact wording our execs used but that was the gist of it.

AFAICS the rumor mill confused sampling with selling and started saying that we would be selling in Q3, which was never the plan, then realised that we would not be selling in Q3 and started writing "OMG the schedule has slipped" articles because they get more clicks than "OMG we were wrong" articles.

EDIT - ahh, here we go.... "and we remain on track for ‘Zen‘ availability in 2016 with first full year of revenue in 2017″

That was in Sep 2015.

Ok, so availability means "not available". I'll give you that, English isn't my native language so nuances escape me from time to time.
But how do you get a "full year of revenue" if you product isn't available since the beginning of the year?

I'm going to stop here, because I feel I'm starting to become annoying. And my CPU isn't scheduled for an upgrade too soon so it's not like I was lined up to buy Zen.

[bridgman]

Ok, so availability means "not available". I'll give you that, English isn't my native language so nuances escape me from time to time.
But how do you get a "full year of revenue" if you product isn't available since the beginning of the year?

Yeah, I think we are talking about two different things - one is when we start shipping for revenue, and the other is the actual launch announcement. Typically we start shipping parts before the actual launch so that they can be built into systems/boards/whatever by the time the launch happens.

[juno]

I'm not sure yet, but my understanding is that the current CZ code will support BR as well. The main changes seem to be (a) fab process changes for higher frequency operation and (b) qualification of additional HW features like DDR4 support.

I didn't see much mention of other new HW features in BR except in articles that were comparing "desktop BR" to "desktop KV" - what features were you thinking about ?

IIRC, BR was introduced as some kind of evolution, yes, better fab process is one thing, leading to higher clocks, but also improved power management with PStates and thermal/voltage regulations. I believed this would be done in software.



Also, there have been some infos about video decoding, but I don't remember all. Pure software advancements, VP9, HEVC UHD only in Stoney?