So, fella's. *Bulldozer*

[Orcvader]

I must say, on paper BD sounds very promising. Thanks for the long explanation Drunken .

From the sound of things I don't think BD will perform well in single threaded apps compared to SB, but for multithreaded, if the rumours of it's die size are true then we can will be seeing some nicely priced 4 module/8 core BDs. Sounds like 8 module/16 core is possible too !

 

[marms]

I'm waiting for BD, hopefully it'll live up to the hype, i badly need an upgrade to my X2 5600 lol

 

[milkinc13]

BD looks promsing. esp the new CPU design where it's split into modules.

Hopfully this is a turn around for AMD as it's first major chip redesign since the Athlon64 which in it's self changed computing.

 

[zoomee]

I really do wish AMD all the best - but I won't be upgrading to the first generation Bulldozer- probably the 2nd gen one as is usually the case with AMD chips (Athlon v's Athlon II, Phenom v's Phenom II).

The reason why allot of us current AM3 users are ****ed is quite simple - Why did AMD bother releasing the 890 chipset, if it wasn't bulldozer compatible. back q2 last year AM3 users were going nuts over 890 being bulldozer compatible (and it probably was with the 45nm release which they were working on) and it wasn't until Q4 that they announced they're requirement for a new socket (AFTER most AMD fan's had bought 890 with thuban chips) - If I would have known I would have just gone intel to bide me over till q3 next year!)

Looking at the one AM3+ board out there (an MSI 990FX) - Pin layout isn't that much different from AM3 - no support for quad-channel (due for 2nd gen and will defo be a different socket type - aimed more at the server market) - AMD has gone completely against they're current motherboard framework. Fair enough if BD shows like 50%+ improvement a motherboard change will be worth it - but I doubt it will be.

All this talk about more cores pees me off - Software (i.e. games) hardly take advantage of more than 3 cores (poorly coded console ports) - so what use is 8 cores over 4? not much except in specialist scenarios - i,e, coding vm's etc.

 

[Nocky24]

All this talk about more cores pees me off - Software (i.e. games) hardly take advantage of more than 3 cores (poorly coded console ports) - so what use is 8 cores over 4? not much except in specialist scenarios - i,e, coding vm's etc.

I strongly believe it's all about efficiency in execution cycles, turbo multis etc with cpus at the moment in gaming as opposed to how many cores it has (and yes I've seen the pcgameshardware article on 6 core utilization ). We're seeing it now with the 980x/970/1090t/1100t vs. sandy bridge's four cores. However when it comes to production software, the more cores the merrier.

 

[ATIorNvidia]

Thing is if AMD had bulldozer arriving this summer and it was really good, you would half expect AMD to be bragging or leaking some benchies/early photos of it.... simply to stop everyone moving over to intels Sandybridge...

but nadda.....

Got a bad feeling AMD arent gonna arrive this Summer and it will be a fall product and will barely catch up with Sandybridge, but heres hoping am wrong completly

Desktop = Q2.
Server = Q3.

 

[Gashman]

doesn't Bulldozer use loads of fancy new instructions and what not, to further improve its performance? also heard it has something like an AGLU rather than the traditional ALU and AGU. though that could be entirely speculation to be honest. I think IPC it'll be faster than Phenom II and predicting they will clock well also, for something like crysis for example, where you can tell certain parts of the game engine to use certain cores, could be interesting!

 

[DragonQ]

The most important new instruction set supported by Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge is AVX:

Suitable for floating point-intensive calculations in multimedia, scientific and financial applications (integer operations are expected in later extensions). Increases parallelism and throughput in floating point SIMD calculations. Reduces register load due to the non-destructive instructions.

It boosts GFLOPS by 70-80% in things like Linpack. Not sure about real-world applications. Apparently x264 won't be using it any time soon (since it's largely integer based anyway, like most codecs).

You need Windows 7 SP1 to use AVX though.

 

[Gashman]

is their any actual specifications for Bulldozer, from AMD themselves going deeper than just 'Pipeline', FPU, etc. since some of the diagrams show two AGU and two ALU for each interger core, others show four AGU and four ALU in each core and there is one roaming about somewhere with four 'AGLU' in each core, know which one is accurate!?

 

[buttkinz]

I kinda get the impression that bulldozer was designed as a server chip so I'm not very confident it's going to do well on desktop and games. Shame as I don't use servers lol

 

[AceTK]

Yes, Bulldozer will be marketed as 2 cores = 1 module and their official statement is that 1 module is effectively 80% as powerful as 2 cores. I'm sure by the time Intel release their 8-core Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPUs, AMD will have 16-cores ready so no worries.

Price and overclockability are going to be the major factors that determine whether AMD can compete with Intel at the high end. I imagine their initial 8-core CPUs will be similar to the i7-2600K performance-wise but if they only overclock to 3.8 GHz then they're not exactly going to be worth it. They'd have to match the i5-2500K's price point if that was the case in order to be popular.

Agreed and I did read just today that they are using a gate first process on the first generation bulldozer so its possible they wont overclock much until the second gen at 22/28nm when they start using the gate last process.

Intel use gate last....

 

[kitch9]

I kinda get the impression that bulldozer was designed as a server chip so I'm not very confident it's going to do well on desktop and games. Shame as I don't use servers lol

The platform will probably offer circa 80% of intels finest performance for <50% of the cost if history is anything to go by.

 

[EvilOne]

Not sure where this 80% thing came from.

1 Module running 1 core = 100% efficency
1 Module running 2 cores = 180% efficency (due to shared resources.), so 90% each compared to 1 core running on a Module, not compared to other cpu's.

Note that the *cost* for this extra core per Module is aprox 5% die space.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Here is a slide from AMD which hints at the performance of Bulldozer:

http://www.techpowerup.com/139053/Bulldozer-Shines-in-3D-Gaming-and-Rendering-AMD.html

 

[zoomee]

noice find cat