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AMD Says Bulldozer Is 50% Faster than Core i7

HangTime said:
On a forum like this you have to add in

3. Overclocking potential

What has kept Intel competitive in the enthusiast market in spite of #1 is that Intel chips typically overclock very well (40%+). A midrange Intel cpu when overclocked will usually perform as well as a moderately high-end overclocked AMD (bit of a generalisation but the point is that you don't need to buy the best Intel chips to keep up with AMD, which eats away at the price difference).
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Intel has now essentially canned overclocking for its sub £140 processors now.

Unless you spend £170+ you cannot even overclock the CPU that much.
 
Well, a lot of us are still using core 2 chips because they clocked so well they still keep up with current programs today. That's bad for a company that is constructed around forcing customers to buy a new chip-set (mobo) along with a new cpu. Basically they don't want people buying a £60 chip and running it at the same speed as a £160 chip like we've been doing the past few years so you now have to buy a new cpu (the most expenisve one of course), a new motherboard (just because they can) and you loose the onboard gpu doing so. If it takes up 1/4 of the die then that means you're paying an extra 25% for something that you're then pay to disable and will likely be replaced by a new socket next year anyway :-/ 1156 has already been replaced, 1 year lifespane isn't exactly great.

Cpus are designed 5 years before they hit the market and we've had 4 sockets in 3 years. More importantly intel deliberately designs so that chipsets are not backwards compatible (i.e. you can put a 1156 chip into a 1155 mobo) and they chose to release the sockets in such a way so as to guarantee this.

True, you won't be able to put an am3+ cpu in an am3 motherboard, but you will be able to put an am3 cpu in an am3+ motherboard giving you the ability to stagger you're upgrade, gain sata 6/usb 3 ports for little outlay then buy an am3+ cpu when the price is right.

Usually I'd say it comes down to price. However, with intels recent changes (not only forcing you to buy a new motherboard but the more expensive cpu also) they're actually handing people a reason to consider amd. It's been 8 years since amd release a totally new design, where as intels on it's second gen of i series cpu giving amd the real possibility of claiming the performance crown (unless you count some £900 cpu made just to send to reviews for media epeen).

Intels been done for anticompetitive behaviour (read forcing businesses to by it's stuff) recently, amds got some nice tech that it much easier to update than intels (cheaper too) and mobile produce sales have rocketed while desktops have fallen and microsofts announced windows will be running on arm chips in the next 2 years (something intel have nothing competitive to counter with). Odd coincidence then, that a socket was made redundant and cheap overclockable cpu at exactly this time, no? :)
 
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The P67 chipset works fine with socket 1156 CPUs:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/p67-transformer-lga-1155-intel-lynnfield,review-32092.html

On top of this Sandy Bridge needs to work with 1.5V DDR3 whereas the JEDEC specification for DDR3 is a maximum of 1.575V.

However,the 32NM Core i3 and Core i7 processors could work fine with 1.65V RAM.

It just shows you how many artificial limitations Intel has placed on Sandy Bridge so they can make more money.
 
8igdave said:
You also clearly arn't understanding how these percentages are working. An i7 will max out any game currently quite happily so say its running at 100fps. A 50% increase means that some how another cpu has to be good enough to run it at 150fps. On a game that is already being maxed out by an i7. This just isn't possible. You'd have to jump several generations to be able to get even close to a 50fps improvement.
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How the hell do you know that?

For all you know they could have an integrated graphics chip into the processor and it could work simultaneously with your graphics card.
 
I think its amusing that people have been so stubborn in their defence of Intel, claiming there is no way AMD can surpass them with Bulldozer. always had a bit of a thing for AMD, the whole David vs. Goliath thing is quite humbling in a way, but they have surpassed Intel in the past (K8 vs. Netburst for example, who can deny that K8 was superior?) and the fact that nobody here takes part in the design process of CPUs at either company, we can't really comment on the potential of Bulldozer until we get some working ES to put through their paces. the rumours floating around are that its either as fast or faster than i7 chips, so that at least gives us the conclusion that they are going to be competative, plus the rumours around the return of the FX brand, since FX are high-end parts they have to be competative to really have a point. they are 32nm as well, so I would expect some decent overclocking headroom so I doubt Intel will have any real advantage in that respect either.

Well aware that Intel have Ivy-Bridge coming in the not to distant future, since if these new AMDs are as fast as claimed, can't see Ivy-Bridge destroying them by any stretch of the imagination, don't know what sort of updates the second generation Bulldozers will bring to the table either. so clearly this is Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge for the time being, whatever happens Intel will remain market leaders, they control virtually everything in the market but I can see AMD gaining a stronger market position overall, especially considering they are taking the fight to NVIDIA in the GPU market. :D is there a concrete release date and preliminary figures, clock speeds, etc.?
 
Interesting to see them compare a chip that is coming out in 2011 to a 4-core chip that came out in May 2009.

Not really that amazing then that it's 50% faster then is it...
 
madindehead said:
Interesting to see them compare a chip that is coming out in 2011 to a 4-core chip that came out in May 2009.

Not really that amazing then that it's 50% faster then is it...
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The Core i7 950 is a quad core with HT which you should know.

BTW, the Core i7 2600K is not 50% faster than a Core i7 950 but at best around 30% even though it is clocked 10% higher and is the fastest Intel CPU under £500.

It must be a bit of a fail for you then as the latest Intel chip is not that much faster than one which came out in May 2009.
 
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CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The Core i7 950 is a quad core with HT which you should know.

BTW, the Core i7 2600K is not 50% faster than a Core i7 950 but at best around 30% even though it is clocked 10% higher and is the fastest Intel CPU under £500.

It must be a bit of a fail then for you then as the latest Intel chip is not that much faster than one which came out in May 2009.
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Since Core 2 series which gave massive performance increase over Pentium 4 (Q9650 vs Pentium 4 lol), we haven't seen anything significant with later generations. It has mainly been incremental increase in performance of about 25-30% which is still pretty good but not something extraodinary.
 
The thing is, if AMD doesn't cripple overclocking like Intel have then they can pretty much win at every price point up to the i5-2500 (at least for overclockers), even if they can't surpass that.
 
WingZero30 said:
Since Core 2 series which gave massive performance increase over Pentium 4 (Q9650 vs Pentium 4 lol), we haven't seen anything significant with later generations. It has mainly been incremental increase in performance of about 25-30% which is still pretty good but not something extraodinary.
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I know but I was only responding to the statement that a 50% improvement in performance was rubbish when compared to a Core i7 950, and yet the same could be said of the current Sandy Bridge processors.
 
DragonQ said:
The thing is, if AMD doesn't cripple overclocking like Intel have then they can pretty much win at every price point up to the i5-2500 (at least for overclockers), even if they can't surpass that.
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AFAIK they don't have any intention of doing so, think about it Intel are slamming the door in the faces of the enthusiast community with the whole crippling overclocking business, because they have no competition. Bulldozer will likely no have any such overclocking restrictions, simply because that doesn't affect them in the slightest in the OEM market, but gives them the upper hand in the enthusiast market, hearts and minds, hearts and minds!

been doing a fair bit of reading on these processors over the past day or two, and all in all the preliminaries sound really promising, think this could truely be AMDs return to form. AMD are going down a better route than before, and their processors are now based on a modular architecture, with two interger cores in each module, while not using the silicon required to make a true dual-core, therefore increasing potential yields and availability. don't see how they can't be at least even with the current Intels, and substancially faster than the Phenom IIs. also worth noting Bulldozer is apparently a 'balanced' design, trying to find the best balance between frequency and IPC so I would expect them to overclock well, Im by no means a fanboy for either team but I can't believe so many are dismissing these before they ever see the light of day, could appear and demolish Intel for all we know, the architecture is too different from K10.5 to really comment. :)
 
The thing is for all the talk about intel crippling overclocking on low-end cpus, a lot of enthusiasts on here don't go for low-end cpus anyway. I see a helluva lot of people clocking cpus costing over £100.

OK so the current 2500k isn't cheap at present, but you have to remember that Intel have cheaper cpus on older architecture that are still very competitive with AMD when overclocked (S1156). By the time AMD gets something new out to dominate them, 2500k price will likely have fallen.
 
looks cool but as the writer of the article points out comparing an 8 core to a 6 core is obviously a bit daft. that said, the speed increase in rendering is what i would expect from 2 extra cores, therefore it now looks like AMD appears to be on a par with Intel mhz-for-mhz, unless I'm mistaken.

good news for all of us if true!
 
It's compared to a quad core i7. Double the cores yet only 50% faster. Probably expecting too much but that seems a bit naff to me, especially that new generation i7's are now available.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The tests were run against BOTH the Phenom II X6 1100T and the Core i7 950.

A 50% increase in gaming performance over a Phenom II X6 1100T would place Bulldozer at around the same performance as a Sandy Bridge Core i5 or Core i7.
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50% increase in gaming performance over a 1100T. Now thats funny
 
good point! didn't spot that....

in that case it's pretty rubbish. as with everything AMD it'll be great value for money but if you want speed there's still only one choice. meh..... what a shame.
 
If anything, this should brind SB prices down.... hopefully.

Although in my case, all though my pc isnt exactly a BEAST, I should be ok playing any game and wait to upgrade in 2013 when Windows 8 is released.

And yea, from what I read a few days ago, release date for Windows 8 is tentativley set for early January 2013.
 
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