Zen better support PCI-e 3.0!
it will. in fact it HAS TO. because back during Bulldozer and Vishera, all the chipsets had native PCI-E 2.0 support. none of them had 3.0 except the APUs.
I remember the time of AM3. There were AMD dual and quad cores. And then they started selling triple core CPUs... They was quad cores with one defective core. So my uneducated guess is, nonX cards are basically X cards with some defective stream processors that have been locked. That way amd have an option to manufacture 1 chip and sell even the defect ones and not throw away any. That is my uneducated guess.
As for Zen :
That is exactly what I am expecting. 40% increase sais amd, I do expect less, about 25-30%, that will be around 20-25% slower per core performance than Haswell... That will be awesome. If they can deliver 8 core on the price of i5 will be great. We don't need 300$ chip that performs as 200$... If we have 200$ chip that performs as 300, that will be serious win for AMD CPU division.
100% correct. It's called die/core harvesting. Throwing away defective dies is exceptionally expensive, so they laser cut a few key components off and sell the now cut down die as a lower tier part. Since all the defective parts of the die have been removed, the product is stable. During the days of AM3 they were locking bad cores rather than cutting them, this is just a cheaper way to remove the faulty chunk of silicon; by not removing it at all.
AMD is a mixed bunch when it comes to laser cutting, sometimes they do sometimes they don't.
Tons of 2xx series cards can be unlocked to their X counterparts without issues, Fiji pro cards can also be unlocked with bios fiddling.
Free performance is always nice.
We shouldn't hype up Zen too much. We basically know it's not going to beat Intel in gaming anytime soon (40% IPC increase should place it around a 2500k in terms of single-core performance and draw-calling). It should closer to a $1K Intel Extreme part in terms of raw performance, but as long as games still use single-core/high overhead draw-calling (which is basically every game in existence) AMD is going to end up on bottom of the gaming review graphs. People won't be very happy then if it's hyped to be better than Skylake or Kaby lake. Don't get me wrong, it's going to beat Intel's $650 i7s in multi-threaded applications (probably most all of them, even ones that the FX8s didn't do so well in), but it's not going to beat an Intel chip in FPS any time soon.
TL;DR? (Assuming the rumors are true)
- Zen < Intel in FPS benchmarks
- Zen > Intel in most compute tasks
- AMD charges an unreasonable amount for flag-ship (like $499 for an 8-core, 16-thread, with GCN cores) if you are a gamer.
- People are going to be unhappy. More unhappy than Intel's 5% each generation shenanigans.
I'm personally more interested in Zen's chipset, because the CPU performance will blow Bulldozer out of the water, and will be a complicated story against Intel.
First off, that's waaaay cheaper than the intel's 5960X without gpu...
Then again, we don't know... In gaming, DX12 may actually use the extra cores and boost the AMD 8 cores above the Intel's quad cores. Or it may not. That's the thing. We don't know yet.
I really wish the best to Zen, otherwise, my only option for Quadcore CPU would be to go on the highway and shave my legs...
Oh god, yes... The chipsets need so much improvement. They currently support nothing natively. No M.2, no USB3,1, no nothing. AMD need to put those PCI-E lanes to work and use them properly. Otherwise... I choose motherboard for the features it gives me. If there are non, well...
actually MSI is one of the only vendor who has kept the AM3+ socket alive. they've released about i believe 2 motherboards in the last year giving the 970 chipset USB 3.1.
Like this motherboard for example.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130849
And there is an Asrock one... Or i believe it was 2 asrock mobos...
No, i mean native, as it supports USB 3,0... I believe the 3,1 was done with ASMedia or whatever controller, just like on the new Z170 boards...