News Leaked Z270 Motherboards

Guru3d has released a bunch of photos for the Z270 motherboards I assume will be released at CES in two weeks' time. There's only one mITX offering on the list which looks okay. Looks like more RGB LED all around, which isn't a surprise. Also looks like a few companies are trying out SLIGHTLY varied color schemes which is nice.

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/in...hotos-from-asrockgigabyte-and-msi-leaked.html

 

[jeshikat]

My one fear is that Intel's R&D is so far that they'll drop a 20% performance gain in 18 months and AMD will have nothing to respond with.

I seriously doubt they just have technology they're sitting on that could give a 20% improvement in performance.

Intel is competing against themselves as much as they are with AMD so the minor performance increases from generation to generation means people are holding onto their previous-gen Intel chips longer so that's less sales for Intel.

 

[Phuncz]

The thing I'm sure of is that they'll not so much focus on keeping the lead on the desktop CPU, but much more on mobile/ultramobile and server CPUs. And I believe they are already trying to derail the server part cold-war-style: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...ical-security-flaws-in-amds-upcoming-zen-cpu/

Someone on [H] pointed out that Intel sponsors security courses on that same university the two people attend who made the previous article. They're also basing their findings on the documentation AMD has released, negating any platform security features it might have. This looks an awful lot like stirring the pot, to put doubt on AMD before it hits the ground running, so that the server industry will just not trust AMD CPUs, even though they might be as stable or as fast as Intel for a much lower price.

And on mobile, I'm pretty sure AMD has way too much work to do to get anything competitive. Intel is already in full "manifested monopoly snooze mode", looking at their 7th gen series for laptop with the i3-7100U, i5-7200U and i7-7500U. They are all dual-core with HyperThreading limited to 15W TDP, ranging between roughly $300 and $400. Their clocks range from 2.4 GHz without Turbo to 2.7 GHz with 3.4 GHz Turbo. All have the HD Graphics 620 with performance ranging between 1.00 GHz and 1.05 GHz. Cache between 3MB and 4MB.

To me this seems like the same effing processor with binning, only now it's the entire notebook lineup. I'm amazed this hasn't happened on desktop yet, I was expecting it to with Sky Lake.

 

[EdZ]

To me this seems like the same effing processor with binning, only now it's the entire notebook lineup. I'm amazed this hasn't happened on desktop yet, I was expecting it to with Sky Lake.

Uh, this HAS been the case for several generations, at least since Sandy Bridge. The entire desktop LGA 115x socketed lineup is generally 2 (or in some cases 3) dies with different binning (one for 2-core chips, and one for 4-core), and those 'extra' dies are often only encountered in the 'why would you buy that?' OEM lines (e.g. the i5-6402P). Same on the AMD side.

I wouldn't count Intel out just yet. If AMD can pull the move of essentially cutting all R&D on their current CPUs for several years and releasing only minor changes, and instead focussing on a new architecture, then Intel can do exactly the same (as they did with Core replacing Netburst). Remember the rumours from years back (when Cannon Lake was still called Skymont) of a new post-Core architecture? It will be interesting to see if the 'fused core' concept (having multiple cores that can work on a single thread) worked out given the many extra years they've now had to work on it. Then there's EUV and newer transistor geometries, which can be taken into account with architecture design. Like with the hit AMD took on their GPU lines when 20nm Planar was cancelled across the board, going fabless and cutting out massive process development costs has drawbacks.

While the handful benchmarks so far show the top-end Zen chip as being competitive in multi-threaded workloads by behind in single-threaded, hopefully that is sufficient to get Intel to move up their timescales post Cannon Lake, and successful enough that AMD have the funding to invest in future R&D rather than just scarping by on Zen refinements.

 

[Phuncz]

Binning at this degree has indeed been happening for a while on desktop, but since mobile is such a large market and Intel was apparently at a point they wanted to move to soldered BGA for desktops (in the past around Haswell), I would have expected this to happen on desktop first.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

The new desktop Xeon E3-1500 series are Skylake-H E3-1300 with Iris PRO iGPU and BGA.....

ASRock Rack C236WSI4 Key Specs

• Mini-ITX form factor (6.7″ x 6.7″)
• Intel Xeon E3-1500 V5 Processor 4 core/ 8 thread
• 4x DDR4 SODIMM supporting up to 64GB (4x 16GB) ECC RAM
• 6x SATA III 6.0gbps ports with one supporting SATA DOM power
• 4x 1GbE with 3x Intel i210 and 1x Intel i219
• PCIe 3.0 x16 slot
• m.2 storage slot
• USB 3.0 Type-A header

 

[Phuncz]

Good point, it seems they are testing the waters with soldered CPUs for workstation and entry-level servers. I don't see anything wrong with the concept but it does limit possibilities. Especially on desktop where there are so many brands, so many different boards and so many different builds.

 

[jtd871]

Has anybody announced/leaked any H270 mitx mobos?

 

[Kmpkt]

There is an MSI in the link I put in the first post. There is also a picture of the new AsRock Fatal1ty in a promo pic somewhere in this thread.

 

[jtd871]

Nope. It's Z270 I'm afraid. I'll keep looking.

 

[Phuncz]

Really now, PCI slots? On boards with enthusiast-level chipsets? In 2017? There must be something I'm missing here, because I cannot see how that in any way makes sense.

Apparently we all missed the PCI revival, because these seem to pop up on the entry-level AM4 boards too: https://www.techpowerup.com/229103/amd-a12-9800-bristol-ridge-am4-apu-with-asus-a320m-c-tested
(cheap entry-level mATX by the way, the future of mATX it seems )

I sure missed those 133MB/s slots, you know, for ATA-133 drives. Or USB 2.0 ports.

 

[jtd871]

I can't imagine that drivers for PCI cards are available for modern operating systems...