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AMD AMA - Starts at 12PM EST on Wednesday May 9

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jsimenhoff

jsimenhoff

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AMD AMA with Senior Enthusiast Team Manager James Prior

AnandTech is proud to announce the upcoming guest in our featured Community series -- ASK ME ANYTHING.

On Wednesday, May 9th through Thursday, May 10th we’ll be hosting James Prior, Senior Manager for the AMD Enthusiast Team, in a live AMA on the AnandTech CPU and Overclocking Forums. Have a question about Ryzen? Now’s your chance to speak with AMD directly. Log into the forums to join the discussion and learn about the latest news on the future of AMD and the Ryzen Desktop platform.

This thread will be unlocked, open and live for 24 hours starting at 12:00pm (noon) ET on Wednesday, May 9th. Questions will be moderated and supervised by AnandTech Assistant Community Manager, Joshua Simenhoff, as well as a full team of moderators.

Ask Me Anything Rules

• No tech support questions, as these require in-depth personal follow-up and diagnostics.

• All Rules of Conduct apply.

• Keep questions direct and to the point.

• Avoid opinion bias, as in, "Why are all your products awesome/horrible?"

• Be respectful of our guests--no insults, no leading questions.

• Do not post duplicate questions or repost your question multiple times.

• Not all questions may be answered. Questions may not be answered in the order in which they are received or posted.

To reiterate: No opinion bias, insults, leading questions, or breaking the Rules of Conduct. Breaking these rules may result in a one-day ban.

Only registered users will be able to ask questions, so if you haven’t yet, be sure to register now for your chance to participate!

The official representatives will reply periodically, using a recognized and verified account.

Please join us on this date to throw your questions into the mix and ask AMD what you've always wanted to ask!

What: Ask Me Anything – AMD

When: Wednesday, May 9th, 12pm EST

Where: The AnandTech Forums!

Who: James Prior – Senior Manager, AMD Enthusiast Team
 
Hello there!

1) Threadripper Gen 1 had the unfortunate issue of having a fairly large latency penalty for crossing dies. I'm wondering, would there be anything with Threadripper Gen 2 like say an interposer to reduce latencies involved? I understand if this cannot be answered 🙂

2) Anandtech's review claims Pinnacle Ridge's L2 latency further dropped from 12 cycles in Threadripper/EPYC/Raven to 11 cycles. Is that correct, or did they misunderstand company messaging?

3) Are OEM's embracing Raven Ridge in prebuilt desktops? It was claimed that Ryzen Gen 1 was held back there because OEM's prefer to not having to deal with a dGPU. Raven Ridge seems like a perfect package for OEM's!

4) Can a single memory controller support both DDR4 and DDR5? I know Intel's Skylake does both DDR3 and 4 depending on motherboard, but I'm not sure if they have a single controller or multiple ones.

5) This is more of a suggestion than a question. How about an ultra binned part for overclockers? If you remember the old TWKR processors, basically that. Those things were awesome, and I'd love seeing them make a return!

6) Is AMD not worried about the confusion with naming their chipsets so similarly to Intel's? It became kind of a mess with B250, B350, B360, and soon B450.
 
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Hello, James! Two questions, please!

1) In the context of the AM4 socket, what are your views on PCIe 4.0 now that the final specification has been released? Is there any chance of current PCIe 3.0 motherboards being *forward* compatible with PCIe 4.0 after a BIOS update when paired with an hypothetical CPU that supported PCIe 4.0, just as some Intel Z68 motherboards that had only PCIe 2.0 at launch eventually became PCIe 3.0 compatible when paired with an Ivy Bridge CPU?

2) The first and second gen Ryzen chips are known to have lower gaming performance in some scenarios due to high inter CCX latency, which needs special software optimizations to be partially mitigated. Does the Zen core team see this as something that eventually ought to be better addressed in hardware with further optimizations to Infinity Fabric?
 
I do some tech support for the elderly living in the area to help them out. But last year was a nightmare when it came to "firmware/sub zero ring/out of OS control"
updates or insecure devices that work functionally 100% but from a security standpoint are bricks.

So my question is :
Why do CPU makers in general feel like putting so much extra functionality in end users products that out of OS control. Or is that me asking for a car without wheels?

Follow up question :
Will we see in the future a trend off better firmware upgrade paths in CPU design or better OS control over CPU's?

PS I know a certain company had a lot more issues than AMD 😛
 
Hi James,

I have a couple of questions, feel free to answer all or any of them.

1. Do you guys at AMD actually spend any money, time or research to understand what gamers want or are looking for out of their hardware?

2. Does AMD anticipate DDR5 will have a massive impact on the improvement of infinity fabric products?

3. Is AMD looking to increase single-threaded performance out of Zen2 or will it be geared more towards SMT improvements?

4. Does AMD consider Ryzen a success over Bulldozer or previous AMD CPUs?

5. Is power efficiency considered important to RTG products? Or is performance the main focus? Or is it a combination in the form of performance per watt?

Thanks again James!
 
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Hello Will there be any improvements to the first gen Ryzen CPU's. I.e. improved precision boost , any 1st gen features. Will we get further improvements to ryzen master for 1st gen cpus so that we also can tinker just like the new 2nd gen cpus?
 
Hi James,
I'm in need of a new computer and have been wanting to upgrade to a Raven Ridge APU/SFF PC. I would rather not go to the trouble of building from scratch this time, but I can't seem to find any company that sells pre-built Raven Ridge computers. Is this something that AMD is going to do in the near future? Is this segment of the market a struggle for AMD to find big name manufacturers (HP/Dell/Lenovo) to jump into? With Raven Ridge being out for a few months now, i'd figure someone would be selling something by now, but it's been pretty quiet, so i'm wondering if this is something AMD is just avoiding.
 
Hi James,

Has AMD finished any testing about Ryzen 3rd Gen CPUs ? If so, what could we get out of it compared to Ryzen 2nd Gen ?

Will you push more cores into Ryzen 3rd Gen and after or will you push or more single/multi-core performance ?

Thank you for this AMA.
 
Another question: some engineers from motherboard makers have talked about a major pain point related to the way AMD handles AGESA updates, because it seems AMD usually changes some settings' default values between AGESA revisions without fully specifying the changes in any documentation that is disclosed to its partners. This causes a lot of trouble for end-users because every new AGESA has to be tested by pure trial and error, which contributes to platform instability. Does AMD have any plans to improve the AGESA documentation that is disclosed to motherboard makers?
 
Hi James,

1. 3rd Generation Ryzen 2 7nm, will we see operating frequency ~5GHz?
2. Are there going to be more improvements to Latency?
3. When, roughly, will these products be launched?

Thank you!
 
Could it be possible to enable Instruction Based Sampling through Ryzen master?

My motherboard doesn't have the option in BIOS, and I would like to play around with uProf.
 
*obligatory greetings and such happiness*

At the moment (and historically) a large advantage of AMD "mainstream" CPUs has been the number of cores. I was wondering is the number of CPU cores something which AMD intends to continue to advance? Is this a major consideration with your marketing and engineering goals?
 
Another question: according to recent comments made by AMD to media outlets, it seems Precision Boost Overdrive is a feature whose official implementation is still being worked on by AMD. Is there any ETA on when it might be ready?
 
On the topic of the newly released AMD Combat crates. Will we see more variety among them? I'd like to see some with second gen Ryzen chips, an Asrock motherboard, and either an RX 580 or Vega 56 graphics card included.
 
Q1: Are there any plans to improve driver vs software / games as part of support for APUs ?
Q2: Any lessons learned from Ryzen 2xxx for new APUs?
Q3: For second generation of Zen APUs, is it going to be just process refresh or any chance to see increase in CU count ?
Q4: Is AMD addressing the lack of small form and very small form boards for Zen+ and beyond ?
 
Another question: do you have any info on how many software companies are already using uProf, especially game studios? Is AMD actively promoting uProf to game studios?
 
Could the chipset driver branding be changed? Right now it's confusing as it looks like you're installing Radeon drivers. I've had a lot of friends message me after they got Ryzen about why I'm telling them to install Radeon drivers when they have NVIDIA.
 
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