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AMD Bulldozer Finally!

ots3go said:
With regards to be saying it's for servers, data centres are really being pushed to be more 'green', I doubt they'll want servers powered by these.
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Power per watt, heat dissipation, air condition design/costing etc etc has been high on the priority lists for high density server installations for quite some time now. This would not fly even years ago, nevermind now! :eek:

Seems there are server orientated chips which have this in focus but if the power hungry desktop variants are lacklustre in performance I'm not sure why would you take this over the already well established server chips.
 
Jokester said:
They really should just die shrink Thuban onto 32nm and see how it goes tbh.

I'm appalled at the die size and transistor count, surely that can't be right?
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They could have done a 32nm Phenom II X8 or even a Phenom X12 with less transistors than BD, either would have outperformed BD across the board and given Intel a real headache.
 
I don't see it as that much of a disappointment tbh. At multithreaded things (which is what it's designed to do really tbh) it's on par if not better with the similarly-priced 2500K.

What IS disappointing is its performance relative to the Phenoms - if the established AM3+ userbase dont' have a good reason to upgrade, then they're counting on people building new rigs to choose it over the i5, and that's a hard sell. Not because it's not as good, for 99% of everyday tasks there'll be no discernible difference, but simply because to erode an established competitor's dominance they needed it to be BETTER at the same price, not "as good". Unless you're an aware consumer like me who's uncomfortable with Intel's anti-competitive behaviour and murder of innocent Palestinian children of course. :p (I exaggerate with the Palestinian children. Not about the monopolistic behaviour though.)

That Anandtech reviewer reckons the low IPC is all down to the longer pipeline. If that's the case I don't understand why they went down that route. Hasn't this been tried before with Netburst?

Maybe it's like that reviewer says, and they were originally counting on being able to hit much higher frequencies. Browsing the stock vs overclocked benchmarks on Hard[OCP] (which I think was the better review of the two tbh), it seems that BD's performance scales somewhat better than SB's as you raise the clockspeed (in a couple of tests it was almost a 1:1 scaling!), so there might be something to that theory: maybe we'll only see it coming into its own next year when they shrink the die, letting them clock it higher (assuming GF's flakey manufacturing lines can pull it off). Maybe in the long haul BD will continue to scale well with increased clockspeeds long after Intel's current architecture starts seeing depreciating returns as its shorter pipeline gets saturated, though I find that concept slightly dubious as surely Intel can compensate by increasing the L3 cache to some extent?

What I think is more likely is that AMD are simply doubling down on the server market with this architecture, and even there that they're competing not so much on raw computing power as in efficiency (eg. FLOPS/W). I'd be very curious to see some benchmarks comparing Interlagos (the server-bound Bulldozer part) against old-gen Opterons and against Xeons. Not that this matters to me, I'm just curious to see if BD's performance in that arena justifies what seem like some questionable design choices from the desktop consumer perspective.
 
Martini1991 said:
EDIT : People, bear in mind the RRP for the 8150 is 220 quid, that's 2600k money.
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SRP is largely irrelevant though. I can't find the i7-2600K for less than £239 right now, yet the FX-8150 can be pre-ordered for £195 and the FX-8120 is £165. So far, there's no evidence that the FX-8150 is any better at overclocking than the FX-8120 either.

For heavy multi-threaded users, the FX-8120 is easily the best buy (in terms of performance per £). These users are probably few and far between though, certainly on this forum at least.
 
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DragonQ said:
SRP is largely irrelevant though. I can't find the i7-2600K for less than £239 right now, yet the FX-8150 can be pre-ordered for £195 and the FX-8120 is £165. So far, there's no evidence that the FX-8150 is any better at overclocking than the FX-8120 either.

For heavy multi-threaded users, the FX-8120 is easily the best buy (in terms of performance per £). These users are probably few and far between though, certainly on this forum at least.
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I can find the 2600k at 227 delivered and the 2500k at 155 delivered.

Anyways, you're right, the FX price has been lowered and there seems to be a fair amount of price gauging on the SB parts.
 
^ gouging

I can't make my mind up about what route I should go. It seems clear that the FX 8000s aren't worth it, the power consumption is a deal break especially because overclocked they're not *that* bad, but the power consumption is stupid.

So I'm not sure where to go, 2600K Seems like a ridiculous price just for Hyper Threading. 2500K seems to be where it's at with Intel, and 1090T for AMD, but I can't really decide between them. 1090T would overall be cheaper because of the cheaper motherboard too.
 
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