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AMD Bulldozer analysed

Code names are a bit silly.

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Good write-up tbh.

It's a shame the desktop chips fared so badly, Llano was/is superb. Dual gpu laptop with a good 40-60% over-clocking head room on the cpu for under £500 wasn't even conceivable 2 years ago. When you consider how many laptops are sold now, and how rapidly the mobile space is still growing, it sort of make sense for amd to get the mobile chips right i.e. if they had to drop the ball on one side the desktop was the logical choice.

With opencl/gl finally arriving and amd heterogeneous computing experiments (20% performance boost via software, using the gpu for the number crunching and cpu largely for organisational cache) it makes bd even less relevant. Interesting times.
 
i got to say i have a BD FX-8150 @4ghz and it runs fantastic i think the CPUs are underestemated, for gaming they are great i can get everything maxed out on all games at 1080p and have had no problems so far
 
trickynickyuk said:
i got to say i have a BD FX-8150 @4ghz and it runs fantastic i think the CPUs are underestemated, for gaming they are great i can get everything maxed out on all games at 1080p and have had no problems so far
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And a similarly priced 2500k would give you much better gaming performance (When it comes to actually measuring the performance)
 
I was just having another look at this.

Im wondering if simply looking at fps is an indication of a smoother experience?

For instance if a game uses all 8 cores of a BD cpu, but the fps are lower compared to a SB or IB cpu, COULD it still deliver a smoother experience, or feel smoother considering its usung 8 cores?
 
opethdisciple said:
I was just having another look at this.

Im wondering if simply looking at fps is an indication of a smoother experience?

For instance if a game uses all 8 cores of a BD cpu, but the fps are lower compared to a SB or IB cpu, COULD it still deliver a smoother experience, or feel smoother considering its usung 8 cores?
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I suppose you'd have to add in tech reports frametime latency things to give a better indepth go into it.
But since they use Intel CPU's in their GPU tests and you can see frame times of GPU's and their perfectly low and fine, I think there'd be a pretty much lack of differing results.
 
Good report, I like this nitty-gritty stuff (even if I don't get all of it).

The conclusion says it all really - the architecture is too deeply pipelined and the L2 cache too slow for games, but...

It will be interesting to see if AMD will adopt a µop cache in the near future, as it would lower the branch prediction penalty, save power, and lower the pressure on the decoding part. It looks like a perfect match for this architecture.
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Could be a huge improvement.
 
Martini1991 said:
And a similarly priced 2500k would give you much better gaming performance (When it comes to actually measuring the performance)
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And this is the fundamental issue most people face.

If a cpu can produce a higher fps rate than is needed e.g 70/80 fps then the user get no benefit from one capable of producing 90/100. Intel makes fantastic chip - no question, however they also focus on high artificial benchmarks. The truth is most users never see that extra performance they're capable of. They just end up spending more money because sadly, higher numbers = better stuff is the driving mentality for 95% of consumers. The sad truth is were really in the minority here.

It's worse in the mobile workspace, where people will spend more than double on an intel branded chip with dedicated nvidia (rebranded so many times icr what is was originally) over and amd llano system - which does exactly the same thing at half the price. The 6 core phenoms were in the same position. They dragged behind intel in benches for everything except encoding. The single most intensive thing most people do is encoding. Amd built a chip specifically to handle well the toughest task because the rest of the numbers were superfluous once they exceeded suer perception.

Bulldozer is just in the same position every AMD chip ends up in. It's sure got it's issues, but so did the phenom IIs which I could fry becon on - yet owners were still happy with them.

Intel is not only good at producing chips, it's also good at commercial bullying, price-fixing and overcharging. When intel locked their chips they forced us to buy the most expensive chips and boards :mad:
 
I'm not sure I agree with anything of your points Azuse05.

The extra performance may not be evident with current games but in future the Intel chip will perform adequately when the AMD chip lags behind.

The AMD 6 core was only any good to the small minority of people who do any encoding, gaming on the other hand is much more common CPU intensive task and Intel walked all over the Phenom II, making it a niche product at best.

AMD is just as guilty at locking it's CPUs and selling it's FX range at insane prices. I think the intel K range is a steal in comparison.
 
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Azuse05 said:
Intel is not only good at producing chips, it's also good at commercial bullying, price-fixing and overcharging. When intel locked their chips they forced us to buy the most expensive chips and boards :mad:
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Steady.

The value for money of the 'new' intel chips (sandy/ivy) is well known. These are chips that can (and more than likey will) stand the test of time. Where as the Bulldozer chips are sold cheap as they perform decently with 'today's' requirements but will potentially struggle with the future application.

If anything AMD are providing a flase economy.

That is how i see it anyway.
 
Azuse05 said:
Good write-up tbh.

It's a shame the desktop chips fared so badly, Llano was/is superb.
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I'm surprised more people havent picked up on this point!

Llano is a bit of a dark horse, it may not be a power house when it comes to raw cpu power but what it does do is absolutely shame its competitors in a comparable market!

HD4000 is a step forward but still a generation behind the Llano and the comparable nvidia's are reserved for high end gaming laptops.

There is a massive emerging market where the cpu cycle is becoming redundant and Intel may find themselves a behemoths to a market that no longer exists outside of a niche.
 
I have not read the article yet...

The only thing they needed to sort out from what I remember, is the problem where, just like the ATI 5870/6870 GPU's it would reach a 'limit' (cache size?).. and that's it.. it can't do a particular operation any faster. If they fix that, it should be a very competitive chip, on par with things like the i5 etc. It just seems to have a fundamental flaw in performance at present.

Off to read the link now :)
 
sonicology said:
This is why Intel are working so hard to improve the performance of their integrated GPU hardware; expect Haswell to make even bigger advances in this area than Ivy Bridge did this generation.
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The thing is, Intel have always bigged up there igpu unit releases, then they get released and quite frankly there a joke beyond desktop usage.
I dont doubt they will ever let themselves fall behind but its hard to imagine them doing anything other than the basic tasks.

Its an interesting future that's for sure!
 
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