AMD Piledriver, finally coming soon!

[Stone22uk]

You'd have to say Ivy Bridge will be the death of Piledriver, barring small miracles from AMD

 

[mmj_uk]

AMD really need to stop with these embarrassingly aggressive naming schemes, Bulldozer & Piledriver getting absolutely clobbered by Sandy and Ivy.

 

[eddiew]

Once bitten...

No, as interested as I will be by PD's launch, I can't imagine it will thump Ivy around! Also I shall be stroking an i7 long before it comes out

AMD really need to stop with these embarrassingly aggressive naming schemes, Bulldozer & Piledriver getting absolutely clobbered by Sandy and Ivy.

At least it's not Julian and Sandy ...

 

[DragonQ]

Yeah maybe they should call it Drain Pipe. Far less expectations there.

 

[eddiew]

Perhaps just "Pile"?

The tag line could be "well polished!"

 

[d_brennen]

Gotta be in it to win it I suppose

My prediction is PB will be awesome and a complete turn around for AMD. It will have an IPC in excess of SB-E and clock like a demon*















*Don't actually believe this, but would make an awesome "quote myself" in a year +

 

[Ringiho]

I hope that it is good for AMD. Bulldozer isn't exactly awesome.

Its been too long since I had an AMD machine that was awesome

 

[Surveyor]

*Don't actually believe this, but would make an awesome "quote myself" in a year +

Or everyone else can quote you and point out how wrong you were

 

[kitch9]

You'd have to say Ivy Bridge will be the death of Piledriver, barring small miracles from AMD

There's nothing to say 22nm won't have leakage and power draw issues and won't be delayed. Its a decent jump from 32nm and there's a lot can go wrong.

AMD's biggest problem at the minute is their 32nm appears to be leaking like hell, which is the last thing you need when there's a few billion transistors to turn on and off.

They must have had higher performing early prototypes for Bulldozer or they simply would not have continued with this design. I'm guess they've hit their issues when trying to mass manufacture and thats when they've had to make compromises.

I'm amazed they went the big hot chip route after what they learned from the whole Fermi debacle though.

 

[Strife212]

WHY DO PEOPLE COMPARE THIS SACK OF FAIL TO A FERMI?

IT IS NOTHING LIKE THE FERMI FFS.

Quite. Fermi is actually good.

 

[nshire]

Ok when I said about fermi I mean't how the original spec was and what it came out as.
Geforce 480 was a cut back of what the original Fermi was mean't to be but needed massive power (hence overpowered) and underwhelmed since it wasn't what it was originally going to be spec wise, I do hope that clears that up.
Geforce 580 is more like what the Fermi was mean't to be about.

But yes the Fermi is very nice performance. Even after cutting back what the original spec was going to be. If I didn't have a 6870 I would be very happy with a 460/560.

Bit like AMD was with BD performance going to be amazing and then quieter and quieter and seems more cutback than what it is capable of.

 

[edscdk]

They're only predicting a 10-12% improvement aren't they?

Isn't Ivy Bridge aiming for 20%? And that's only a die shrink... Haswell's going to murder Piledriver... possibly Steamroller too (Both aimed at 2013) since that's also aimed at a 10-12% improvement over Piledriver (~25% over Bulldozer): http://media.bestofmicro.com/bulldozer,L-N-310523-3.jpg

performance is not important (to a large degree)

as long as they can knock out like for like cpu's at the lower end of the market it does not matter....

 

[numatic.nathan]

Hehe.
I actually hope one day AMD will beat intel, they're good on the Graphics front, but when it comes to CPUs, they fail

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I am actually more interested in the Trinity CPU. It will be interesting to see how good the GPU in that will be.

I am not so sure about Piledriver though. Its hard to say how fast and how efficient a modified Bulldozer CPU will be.

There is a cryptic comment from Phoronix about a Trinity sample they tested under Linux:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_trinity_early&num=1

"The current quad-core Llano offerings are clocked at 2.6GHz (A6-3650) and 2.9GHz (A8-3850), while this Trinity part is clocked slower, it's numbers are nice compared to my A8-3850 Linux system."

 

[ReekiTiki]

lets do this thing!

 

[malfunkshun]

hmm leaks suggested a 2012 release for Piledriver, I would wager that we wont see it until at or after windows 8 lands on shelves.

 

[nikeair94]

hmm leaks suggested a 2012 release for Piledriver, I would wager that we wont see it until at or after windows 8 lands on shelves.

So in the next year we could see fail hardware in a fail OS. (Assuming AMD fails again and Windows 8 fails like the beta)

 

[SheepBeast]

intel will be raking in the cash from all the people who were waiting for BD to upgrade, and from the BF3 upgrader crows. this is bad for everyone (except intel obv).

if piledriver achieves the ~10% increase in IPC as well as a slight (~5%) bump in clock speed, then the performance will be good enough to compete. AMD/GF should be able to sort out power consumption by then too, so i'm gonna be cautiously optimistic and say piledriver will be pretty decent. (i'm not saying it'll demolish ivy, just that it'll be a competetive alternative)

 

[welsh_andy]

You'd have to say Ivy Bridge will be the death of Piledriver, barring small miracles from AMD

that would be a shame as you will all suffer, i remember the days of intel monopoly, massively inflated cpu prices, SB at £150, more like £500 if intel crush AMD, cpu prices are low because of one thing alone and thats the competition from AMD

aeotd, you guys will soon be moaning when intel bang up their prices, so for everyones sake lets hope AMD catch up sooner rather than later

 

[nitram100]

Piledriver is going to be awesome, can't wait! Intel cannot have the monopoly on the CPU market because we will lose that way.