Why I bought a Bulldozer inside

[jonnyrb]

Somebody on these forums pointed out that Toms and a few other sites used the same benchmarking kit with an nVidia 580 gpu and the same mobo ASUS Crosshair V. This these tests are using a different benchmarking kit and an AMD gpu... *cough* as intended

Nobody can argue with pictures

 

[yannifb]

Look at this, again AMD reiterates that perf should be inline with i5/i7 SB:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/processors/amdfx/Pages/amdfx-competitive-comparison.aspx

Something has to be wrong with the benches.

 

[ern88]

but WTF is the point of an 8 core CPU to any consumer that is not running a server?????? and when a 4 core cpu can do the same work........while using less power......i mean, if intel wanted to waste silicon on an 8 core consumer model CPU, im sure they could. but they arent that silly.

Look, dont get me wrong everyone, i am an AMD fan from way back. From the k5/k6/k6-2/athlon/duron/athlonxp/athlon64 days. I loved AMD. the core 2 duo is the first Intel CPU i have purchased EVER, and it was well worth it. and since the core 2 duo, AMD has failed to impress, and this 8 core disaster that is slower than Phenom (and the core 2 architecture) is a joke. so it has more cores, so what. you could make a "Core 2 8 core" and it would be faster. that many cores is useless for the average consumer or gamer

I agree with you about power consumption. For 32 nm chip. It loves the power. It's like driving an old 1970 Caddy for your daily driver with a 500 Cubic inch motor. It can do the speed limit of a 4 cyc 2011 Ford focus. But you get 5 mpg instead of 40 mpg with the Focus

 

[ern88]

Look at this, again AMD reiterates that perf should be inline with i5/i7 SB:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/processors/amdfx/Pages/amdfx-competitive-comparison.aspx

Something has to be wrong with the benches.

Ya, they are only showing you what the want you to see. Clock speeds don't mean anything!!!!

 

[Katsushiro]

Look at this, again AMD reiterates that perf should be inline with i5/i7 SB:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/processors/amdfx/Pages/amdfx-competitive-comparison.aspx

Something has to be wrong with the benches.

Their marketing department is doing everything they can because the chip won't sell itself based on the benches.

 

[wolfram23]

You guys should read this, it explains why Bulldozer is a bit of a flop:

"Ex-AMD Engineer Explains Bulldozer Fiasco: Lack of Fine Tuning."
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20111013232215_Ex_AMD_Engineer_Explains_Bulldozer_Fiasco.html

 

[phatbuddha79]

They keep shooting themselves in the foot.

 

[megamanx00]

^ In this case it's more like blown off.

 

[BaronMatrix]

Bulldozer was over-hyped... it was intended to complete with Sandy Bridge and for the most part it does. However, I think all these benchmarks only prove we hit a wall with CPU's. I can't help but notice on MOST benches even the PII is keeping up with Sandy-bridge and Bulldozer.

Why would someone want to upgrade from a PII or a first gen i7?? You would get nearly zero noticeable gain unless you happen to be a media junkie, and if that's the case you'll want Bulldozer for the eight cores.

AMD never hyped BD. They described their goals and made ONE announcement 50% for 33%. As the Linux benches come out you'll see what suckers you all are for bowing to a criminal.

Crap. And I finally left all of that. Thanks.

 

[BaronMatrix]

What good is potential that could be 1-2 years away now? Especially when in 1-2 years Intel will push out 2-3 new archs.

AMD priced it wrong. AMD hid the performance while hyping it.

Meh. BD is not worth it over a 2500K.

Find ONE article where they made any perf announcements. Just one. I've seen ZERO. You all did that.

 

[BaronMatrix]

Their marketing department is doing everything they can because the chip won't sell itself based on the benches.

You mean like Netburst? Why are you all such suckers? Intel doesn't care about you. They just want more money than they deserve.

 

[Outlander_04]

Its not about actually playing at those resolutions. Its about ensuring that you are not CPU limited in your frames per second.

The benchmarks show that the FX hits a performance wall quite a bit before the i5 or i7 will. And without a big pricing advantage no gamer would be right to consider the FX.

Im a gamer [ some days ] and I can tell you now IT IS ALL ABOUT PLAYING AT HIGH RESOLUTION , and has nothing to do with pointless comparisons showing one cpu or another can produce uselessly high fps at lower resolutions .

Its not a performance wall at all . Its a decent understanding of how digital technology actually works

 

[iam2thecrowe]

^ so lets all get athlon x2's because CPU power has nothing to do with performance at high resolution.

 

[Katsushiro]

Im a gamer [ some days ] and I can tell you now IT IS ALL ABOUT PLAYING AT HIGH RESOLUTION , and has nothing to do with pointless comparisons showing one cpu or another can produce uselessly high fps at lower resolutions .

Its not a performance wall at all . Its a decent understanding of how digital technology actually works

I'll agree that at today's games, the FX-8150 is not a performance wall (at least to the degree that causes all the uproar on these forums). However, how about tomorrow's games? We test today's games at lower resolutions to speculate how these chips will perform on tomorrow's games which will be more CPU dependent and more likely to be CPU limited. The results indicate that Sandy Bridge will last longer in a gaming system before being the component that limits GPUs.

How about I quote myself from another thread:

quote:

... in the big scheme of things I will concede that it seems the FX-8150 can handle today's games at very playable settings. I highly doubt that anyone who buys this processor will be disappointed any time soon. Yet as games progress and when Phenom IIs become inadequate, I feel that the FX-8150 will be too. This is one of my complaints: there is little future-proofing value vs high end Phenom IIs (for gaming).

One more thing, they more than doubled the transistor count vs Phenom IIs and the FX is only marginally faster (Anand states FX is ~2 billion transistors, PII 6 cores are 904 million, PII 4 cores are 758 million). I mean, come on man. This is exactly like if nVidia's Fermi (GTX 580, 3 billion transistors) only beat the GTX 285 (1.4 billion transistors) by like 5-10%. Could you imagine the disappointment if that were the case?

:endquote

 

[Outlander_04]

Im not going to argue that AMD will be completely happy with BD . We already know the design is going to last less than a year before enhanced versions appear .
It may only be a matter of 2 months before enhanced BD cores appear in Fusion APU's

I doubt games will switch to being more cpu intensive . The BF3 beta is an example of the next generation of games . It likes quads , definitely , but cpu hardware is still less an issue than gpu hardware .

 

[megamanx00]

Well I think the above case was kind of valid if you compared the 465 and the GTX 285 ^_^. Anyway yes, that is my fustration with the FX. AMD would have been better off with a Phenom II X8 that has 4 instruction decoders per core and lower cache latency.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

^+1

 

[ern88]

Well I think the above case was kind of valid if you compared the 465 and the GTX 285 ^_^. Anyway yes, that is my fustration with the FX. AMD would have been better off with a Phenom II X8 that has 4 instruction decoders per core and lower cache latency.

+2

 

[phatbuddha79]

So any thread that casts BD in a positive light gets to keep going?

 

[noob2222]

Their marketing department is doing everything they can because the chip won't sell itself based on the benches.

very few people actually check benchmarks, the majority of people look at numbers. AMD calls it an 8-core cpu, and that will sell.

How many people here are arguing about benchmarks vs how many BD have already been sold?

 

[Chad Boga]

Look at this, again AMD reiterates that perf should be inline with i5/i7 SB:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/processors/amdfx/Pages/amdfx-competitive-comparison.aspx

Something has to be wrong with the benches.

Maybe there is something wrong with the people who made the claims that BD will be inline with a i7.

Find ONE article where they made any perf announcements. Just one. I've seen ZERO. You all did that.

You are being much too modest here. How can you have forgotten that YOU made the claim of 30 to 50% IPC improvement for BD over Deneb/Thuban?

You mean like Netburst? Why are you all such suckers? Intel doesn't care about you. They just want more money than they deserve.

This holds true for all for profit corporations, why do you think AMD is any different to Intel?

Im a gamer [ some days ] and I can tell you now IT IS ALL ABOUT PLAYING AT HIGH RESOLUTION , and has nothing to do with pointless comparisons showing one cpu or another can produce uselessly high fps at lower resolutions .

Its not a performance wall at all . Its a decent understanding of how digital technology actually works

By all means show High Resolution, but showing Low Resolution gives you a better idea of which CPU is likely to serve you longer as a gaming CPU, where you only need to update your GPU every couple of years or so.

You seem to think that people only care about having a CPU good enough for at least the next 12 months, but many people have a far longer horizon that they want their CPU to be useful for.

 

[earl45]

So any thread that casts BD in a positive light gets to keep going?

YES, plain and simple.

 

[intel4eva]

This holds true for all for profit corporations, why do you think AMD is any different to Intel?

It's his party and he'll cry if he wants to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYJyVEUaC4

 

[earl45]

AMD never hyped BD. They described their goals and made ONE announcement 50% for 33%. As the Linux benches come out you'll see what suckers you all are for bowing to a criminal.

Crap. And I finally left all of that. Thanks.

Baron speaking for myself it really don't matter how good Bulldozer is on Linux systems, I only run Windows
based systems and that's where the performance matters to me.

I have a second system that's in need of a upgade it's sporting a E6600 with a 3870 and 4gb of ram.
that's what i wanted the Bulldozer to replace, but with the numbers in windows i'll be better off with
another 2600k for encoding or wait for SB-E or IB.

 

[intel4eva]

AMD never hyped BD. They described their goals and made ONE announcement 50% for 33%.

 

[statikregimen]

Just upgraded yesterday from my 1100t to an 8120. To me, it was money well spent. Here's why:

Everybody keeps making this bogus claim that today's software/OSes aren't geared as much for multithreading. Those people probably have never looked at their task manager. I have a Logitech G15 keyboard, so I can see per-core usage, at a glance. Windows (and Linux, of course) does an _outstanding_ job of spreading its workload across multiple cores. It means I have a lot more headroom for multi-tasking/threading both now and in the future.

As for games not using more than 2-4 cores? Again: you clearly haven't monitored your per-core usage when playing modern games. I cannot think of one single game that I own which doesn't get all 8 of my cores rumbling. Maybe not all with heavy loads, but working, nonetheless. It has unleashed my crossfire performance...I was very disappointed before.

Now, with all of that said, Sandy Bridge is easily a superior product, overall. I would not recommend BD, in good conscience to most system builders for the foreseeable future - only on a few niches that BD fills well. In that case, overclock an 8120 to get bang for buck. For anybody wanting a solid, future-looking upgrade for their old Phenom IIs w/o changing platforms, the OCed 8120 is definitely the way to go. It will make your computer run smoother in day-to-day workloads, as well as gaming. Just overclock it to or past a stock 8150 - mine is at 4.5ghz @ 1.47v stable. Unless you're doing something like Photoshop that doesn't scale well across cores. Definitely look at the benchmarks to make sure it will fit your needs, but for the gamers, I see no area where it slouches.

Note: these are the only benches I can easily link to right now...Not trying to cherry pick, or even prove anything...Just showing.

8120 @ 4.5ghz:
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/2008319
http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3562222

8120 @ 4.2ghz:
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/2002726
http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3559643

1100t @ 4.125ghz:
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/1902139?show_ads=true&page=%2F3dm11%2F1902139%3Fkey%3DnLK8K6YWbcudhRP3yQS5QK2qHhW38U (This was my system - I just didn't have a futuremark account when I did the bench...Also can't find my vantage score, but it was around 19k for CPU)