AMD Gives Early Hint at Bulldozer Performance

[Guest]

"Man its never a good time to build a new system. "

1st -system - Still using 775 socket with Q9550 (from E6400) - system is almost 4 years old and still almost on pair with today's cpus
2nd system - i7 920 / socket 1366 - a year and a half old and still very fresh.

You just have to catch the right time.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]niksimpson[/nom]AMD codenames like Magny Cours are named after Formula 1 racing circuits, with Magny Cours being the site of the French GP, Barcelona being the site of the Spanish GP etc.[/citation]
Wasn't the track famous for its copycat turns, with a lack of exceptionalism that eventually made it unattractive to event holders? That doesn't sound like an inspiring name to me...

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]Sihastru[/nom]It is possible that the first desktop Bulldozer variants will be AM3+, with dual channel DDR3, but that won't stick, they will need the quad channel memory to get that 13% performance increase per core. So for a few months you'll be able to get a "new" CPU but not really any sizable performance increase... It should be more efficient and maybe have more cores, but they will be starved by the puny dual channel memory controller.[/citation]Really. I'd like to know how you came up with that expert analysis. Intel's triple-channel controller is running nearly double the data rate of AMD's dual-channel, so there's obviously room for architectural improvement. Perhaps those architectural improvements are responsible for the higher IPC.

 

[Crashman]

[[citation][nom]AlexTheBlue[/nom]There's more to it than just number of pins, you know. Just because you have a "socket 775" board doesn't mean you can run all socket 775 chips. That's fine, but they didn't label things with an "AM2, AM2+, AM3, etc" naming scheme to make it easy to understand. At least with AMD's naming patterns, I know what my upgrade path is. Of course, with both AMD and Intel, a lot of what you can actually use properly is dependent on the board manufacturer releasing decent BIOS updates.[/citation]

Not true. Back when I was FIXING computers, a customer's heatsink fell off and the processor burned. Turns out the clip hook had broke in transit and the cooler stuck to the CPU until it was warm. Anyway, I couldn't find a replacement processor for it because it had the WRONG VRM VERSION and had to MODIFY THE BOARD to make it work with a newer model CPU.

 

[hundredislandsboy]

I hope the rename it the Crusher because its performance should make Intel's same price chips cry.

 

[jf-amd]

Regarding the "12%" performance numbers that get thrown around. You can't do the math that way.

You are comparing a 12-core fully utilized processor with a 16-core fully utilized processor with a server workload and then trying to correlate a single threaded workload (presumably for gaming) from that.

That is like trying to figure out how long it will take you to get home at 3:00 in the morning based on driving the same route in rush hour traffic.

As for the "single threaded performance increase", it will be significantly above those 12% guesses that are bouncing around the internet.

Also keep in mind when Intel went from Nehalem to Westmere, they added 50% more cores and got ~33% more performance (24% int, 42% FP, avg 33.8%). We are adding 33% more cores and getting ~50%, so obviously our scaling is much better.

 

[nt300]

It seems to me AMD is thowing us a bone in terms of performance, they don't want to reveal Bulldozer's real performance numbers right now, there's no point in doing so. I have a feeling apps & games based on single core performance will be better than Phenom II but apps and games based on Multi-Core sound like it's going to kill anything in the market including INtel's Hyper Threading. I think Bulldozer is gonig to be a multi-core monster.

 

[hundredislandsboy]

Intel will have to come way down from current prices of its 8cre CPUs to compete with AMD's bulldozer. If it doesn't, how fast can you "lose market share"?

 

[mactronix]

As far as i am aware you will need a new Motherboard to run Bullbozer but AM3 CPU's will run in the motherboard.
As said the naming revolves around race track names.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]alextheblue[/nom]Well to be fair they don't ALL use the proprietary connector. Sometimes you get lucky. If you aren't lucky, you can either cut the connectors off the old power supply and solder yourself some connections (don't screw it up!), OR you can just buy a freaking adapter. Something like this one.http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/ [...] lconverter[/citation]BTW, just caught this and you're referring to the wrong type of adapter The one you show is for Pentium/Pentium II-era Dells, his probably has two big connectors (18-pin?) that were used on Dell's high-end stuff after it went "standard" on its mainstream.