AMD’s Bulldozer And Bobcat Architectures Pave The Way

[scook9]

[citation][nom]konjiki7[/nom]Tell me about it! That cardboard box launch was tremendous failure...Although that didn't stop folks from buying there molten lava gpu's[/citation]

They may run hot....but they flat out DO outperform the ATI counterparts......

 

[Otus]

Meanwhile, AMD is forced to engineer its six-core CPUs into a 130 W TDP using 45 nm lithography.

They have a 95W six core out...

 

[kamen]

[citation][nom]scook9[/nom]They may run hot....but they flat out DO outperform the ATI counterparts......[/citation]
Your living in a dream world. Ati still has the fastest card plus they have miles of room to drop prices compared to anything Nvidia has right now. The 5xxx series is really giving ATI some breathing room to develope the 6xxx series of gpu's

 

[sublifer]

Great write up Chris! Some good information that I hadn't heard before. I can't wait to see the performance on these chips.

 

[pcfxer]

[citation][nom]randomizer[/nom]Really? Here I was thinking that's exactly what AMD was building.[/citation]

It's more than an i7 920...Hyperthreading isn't die-efficient. There are parts of a CPU that are duplicated but EXCLUSIVE to HT. Thus proving Intel has more money than brains somewhere along the line.

 

[dark_lord69]

Imagine a gaming PC with one of these babies and an HD 6000 series GPU!

 

[utengineer]

Sounds like the Bulldozer will catch up to the 980x Gulftown. Once Intel's Sandy Bridge E rolls out (circa mid-2011), Bulldozer will be another budget level solution for gamers, but not a powerful solution for the extreme, enthusiast PC users.

 

[coldmast]

So can I buy a AM3 board now w/ x2 555 or x4 955 and do a proc drop later?
If so off to the store I go!

 

[rpg123]

Sounds like Bulldozer and Bobcat emphasize small die size and low power usage, lots of small cores with hardware hyperthreading. They have Ipc improvements overall, but the shared parts do cause an Ipc decrease. I'm not expecting AMD to catch Intel in Ipc therefore, unless you count threads instead of cores, which is still a reasonable way of measuring.

 

[Wheat_Thins]

4 years later..... Just wait for Bulldozer..... AMD is coming back! 0.o
8 years later..... Just wait for 'x'........... AMD is coming back! 0.o

I loved myself some AMD back in the Althon XP/64 days but I have moved onto the i7 platform without wincing and it just boggles my mind that people I would imagine to be grown adults still wave fanboy flags all day long and remain loyal to a name. I have also switched between ATI / Nvidia multiple times over. Buy whats best available at the time; you're buying performance, not a brand name when it comes to computing capabilities.

If Bulldozer rocks I will move back, if it don't I wont. Pretty simple. To see people holding their breath in hopes that 'x' company will make a better product because they are emotionally attached to 'x' (LOL emotionally attached to a company) is really downright pathetic.

AMD is offering GREAT value as of late. I bought a 1055T for what I would consider cracker jack toy prices when you consider your getting six cores. But when it comes down to it I respect the fact that Intel (at this moment) has higher performance / clock, runs cooler, uses less energy, over clocks better, and in turn accept the fact you will pay a higher price for these luxuries EXACTLY like when Althon X2 was king of the mountain and AMD raped the willing.

 

[Guest]

i fear AMD is playing a dangerous game, if they dont release a product soon they will lose market presence but if they release a half baked product then the stigma of an inferior product may haunt their fusion line up (look at fermi)

Scorpius is an interesting platform, it would appear to decouple the CPU and GPU aspects of the fusion design, in theory allowing the enthusiast to pick and pair compatible CPU and gfx cards to form their own fusion solution (at the expense of efficiency and maybe performance, i realise performance could easily be compensated for by choosing top of the line gfx and CPU). It would mean though that such a setup may well tax and even fully saturate the existing PCIX 2.1, if that were the case such a product would not fully mature until the adoption of PCIX 3. Scorpius will also allow the continued existence of ATI gfx card

now the question begs which would give you better performance, Scorpius populated with top of the line gfx card and CPU or Lynx with top of the line APU

the fact that there is even a choice makes me smile.....

 

[DjEaZy]

... x64?

 

[gnesterenko]

"AMD plans to use 32 nm manufacturing, and early reports suggest Socket AM3 compatibility (along with DDR3 memory support). Zambezi is not an APU, but rather is meant to be paired with discrete graphics. "

Can we get a hard confirm regarding this, instead of "early reports suggest"? This directly impacts my purchasing decisions and I imagine I'm not the only one...

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

 

[utengineer]

Bulldumpster will collecting garbage while Sandy Bridge takes the title. AMD just cannot keep up with Intel's tick-tock cadence of technology.

 

[jimmysmitty]

The benefit that SMT or HT brings is the added performance boost without much of a power draw or heat addition.

If AMD does plan to add extra parts in order to improve this single core, multi thread approach it might have power draw/heat output as a down side.

Of course we will have to see some performance benchies to see if its will work.

 

[Guest]

Sub 1 Watt is impossible, unless you don't really equip the processor with a graphics processor on chip. Most likely it has a video decoder onboard, but no graphics accelerator for 3D games.

 

[hari_41]

hope bulldozer can get atleast to a i7 960 with a price tag around $300

 

[antilycus]

add a register into the cpu that figures out the thread processing/splitting/managing automatically and doesn't have the retarded limitiations of the CeLL processor. Even today's quad or hexa cores are still only running 1 thread at a time. Until that is done on a hardware level, instead of a software level, you'll get just as much out of a single core 3.5 ghz as a dual core 3.5 ghz.

 

[lashton]

[citation][nom]utengineer[/nom]Bulldumpster will collecting garbage while Sandy Bridge takes the title. AMD just cannot keep up with Intel's tick-tock cadence of technology.[/citation]
says an intel employee, you would have said that in 2003 when AMD spanked intel, bulldozer looks like (llando demo) that it will kill the i7, sorry buy intel you days may be numbered, also THG llano is coming out q4 2010 NOT 2011, this is just a regurgitated article

 

[lashton]

[citation][nom]ProDigit80[/nom]Sub 1 Watt is impossible, unless you don't really equip the processor with a graphics processor on chip. Most likely it has a video decoder onboard, but no graphics accelerator for 3D games.[/citation]
Not really, on idle it can consume less than 1 watt

 

[ezodagrom]

[citation][nom]utengineer[/nom]Bulldumpster will collecting garbage while Sandy Bridge takes the title. AMD just cannot keep up with Intel's tick-tock cadence of technology.[/citation]
Sandy Bridge is looking to be quite unimpressive though, since, according to an Intel leaked powerpoint, the Gulftown based Core i7 are still going to be the best Intel CPUs, with the i7 980X being 25% to 35% better than the Sandy Bridge based Core i7 2600, the best Sandy Bridge until at least Q2/Q3 2011, according to the benchmarks and roadmap in that powerpoint.

 

[utengineer]

[citation][nom]ezodagrom[/nom]Sandy Bridge is looking to be quite unimpressive though, since, according to an Intel leaked powerpoint, the Gulftown based Core i7 are still going to be the best Intel CPUs, with the i7 980X being 25% to 35% better than the Sandy Bridge based Core i7 2600, the best Sandy Bridge until at least Q2/Q3 2011, according to the benchmarks and roadmap in that powerpoint.[/citation]
The first launch of Sandy Bridge(this year) is for business class PCs. I am talking about Bulldumpsters impact on the extreme class, which AMD has been playing 2nd fiddle to for years. Sandy Bridge E, this is slated for this time next year.

 

[Guest]

"Some workloads don’t see any speed-up from Hyper-Threading. Others barely crack double-digit performance gains."

I'm not sure where you get your data to support this statement, but on my i7-920 scales linearly on both Integer and Floating point process through 8 threads. I expected a big knee between 4 and 5 threads, but was surprised to see 8 cores produce greater 7x that of one core!

 

[saint19]

The AMD's future looks promising but the only thing that I can't see is the tri-channel support will be awesome add this feature to have more features against Intel and his 1366 and new sockets that support DDR3 tri-channel.

Other thing that I can see here is that they plan use the 32nm technology for the next CPU generation and that is good for win some costumers that want the best performance for the lowest price 😉

Now we need wait until 2011 to see the AMD's evolution and the Intel response to that

 

[Houndsteeth]

I've been reading up on AVX...someone over at AMD followed the trail of breadcrumbs left by IBM and Freescale when they developed VMX for the POWER architecture. Finally we will see an SIMD instruction set done right on the x86 platform.