AMD Bulldozer Finally!

[the_director]

The 990fx motherboards are looking good. The CPUs just need to be around the Intel mark for it to be a great choice for gamers - after all, Intel save x16 crossfire for Extreme setups which cost a lot more than any of the AMD chipsets that offer dual x16 slots running at full bandwidth.

 

[the1gooner]

Oh jesus, you clearly no nothing about CPUs...

Your so right, that was a totally clueless statement.

The Athlon XP (Barton especially) was competing with the Pentium 4 whilst being clocked lower and then when the Athlon 64 came out it totally blew the Pentium 4 out the water with regards to performance, features and power requirements.

 

[Gashman]

infact, Intel have only came back at AMD using the same technique that AMD use, with maximising IPC, maximising efficiency, interestingly enough their Core processors were based off the Pentium IV Mobile 'Dothan' chips I believe which were very very similar to AMD Athlon 64s, heck a bit faster in terms of IPC! so AMD could very well come back at Intel if Bulldozer does the following three things, 1) raises AMD's bar in terms of IPC, 2) very efficient in multi-threaded applications (which is what Bulldozer is designed for!) and 3) undercut them on price, so steal the efficiency crown.

 

[arknor]

AMD cannot, will not beat intel in performance. This is from a guy who has had an AMD and intel CPU's since AMD brought our their duron CPU's. Intel CPU's are far faster than AMD. We all know this from looking at benchmarks on the net. I know that AMD cpu's have to be clocked a lot more, just to atlease compete with lower clocked intel cpu's. Saying all of this though, i'm looking forward to AMD's apu's. I guess intel may bring something out in thel future to compete with this.

yea and i remember when people said that about ati numerous times in the last 10 years only to be proved wrong

 

[hux]

I remember the first athlon which really shook up intel, really showed them up for performance and was still cheaper to boot.

They were also tricky to get hold of initially, anyway amd can do it sure it's been a while but it can happen.

 

[MichaelM]

AMD can beat Intel, just they are very unlikely to.
If they are going to it will be with a completely new design...like Bulldozer.

So it could go either way, lets wait and see.

 

[AgedIdiot]

I agree with the sentiment but can we not go down the road of dividing ourselves into "camps", "teams" and "fanboys". If AMD come up with the goods then fine, great for everyone.
Hopefully we're going to see a new era of innovation of the type that spawned the Core 2 architecture

+1


Am very happy with the i2500k set up I bought & I do not believe that it can be beaten on the (purchase 'new') bang for buck scale at the moment BUT I hope that Bulldozer is better!
Competition and innovation are ,nearly, always good things.

 

[SeeKified]

Next Gen AMD/Nvidia gpu's are they going to be PCI-Ex 3?

Possibly, but PCI-E 3.0 is backwards compatible with all the previous versions anyway. And I highly doubt we'll see anything that saturates the bandwidth in a PCI-E x16 2.0 bus anytime soon.

I really hope someone throws up a proper review of the chips soon, if HardOCP gets one that'd be amazing. I just want something that's not scribbled out SuperPI testing.

 

[opethdisciple]

My only concern, is buying a PCI-Ex 2 mobo at this stage, even if the pci-e 2 slot has plenty of bandwidth left, when the first pci -e 3 gpus come out (next ATI and Nvidia cards??) we will be in a position where we are not getting the most out of new gpus putting pci-e3 gpus in pci-e2 slots...

It cant be that long untill reviews and concrete benchmarks start appearing....

 

[daveash]

It's unlikely to happen anytime soon, I'm pretty sure it's only with the last gen (480s etc) that we saw any actual difference in FPS with 1.0 vs 2.0. It'll be several generations of 3.0 cards before we see any difference, IMO.

 

[JF-AMD]

AMD cannot, will not beat intel in performance. This is from a guy who has had an AMD and intel CPU's since AMD brought our their duron CPU's. Intel CPU's are far faster than AMD. We all know this from looking at benchmarks on the net. I know that AMD cpu's have to be clocked a lot more, just to atlease compete with lower clocked intel cpu's. Saying all of this though, i'm looking forward to AMD's apu's. I guess intel may bring something out in thel future to compete with this.

So, ask yourself, is it important to beat the competition in a part of the market that sells less than 1% or is it important to beat the compeition in the area where 99% of the processors are sold?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The thing is for software like HandBrake a Phenom II X6 still does very well considering how much it costs:

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/Intel_i7_2600K_i5_2500K/7.html

It takes a more expensive Core i5 2500k overclocked to 4.7GHZ to beat a 3.3GHZ Phenom II X6 1100T.

 

[Tweaker]

So, ask yourself, is it important to beat the competition in a part of the market that sells less than 1% or is it important to beat the compeition in the area where 99% of the processors are sold?

That is a little short sighted, brand transfer is important for Intel, people know Intel have the fastest chips, therefor they associate Intel with fast and good performance. AMD do a lot of talk about value for money, but when people are in the store picking a laptop, they see the Intel logo and expect good performance, even if it isnt as good by 5% compared to AMD, the branding is too strong for people to buy AMD.

 

[Gashman]

thing is though, performance makes no difference to speak of, people will always favour Intel over AMD, even though the AMD might offer superior performance. similar to the sort of way that people will always prefer an Audi over a Ford for example, even though a lot of the time Fords are just as good, maybe have some better attributes in some areas. even though K8 was fair whack faster than Netburst still didn't stop Intel selling millions and millions more of them, just because of their advertising power. so even if hypothetically Bulldozer is faster than Sandy Bridge, don't see it really hurting Intel that badly unless AMD actually commit to some advertising, cannot remember seeing a single AMD advertisement to this date.

 

[qbazdz]

That is a little short sighted, brand transfer is important for Intel, people know Intel have the fastest chips, therefor they associate Intel with fast and good performance. AMD do a lot of talk about value for money, but when people are in the store picking a laptop, they see the Intel logo and expect good performance, even if it isnt as good by 5% compared to AMD, the branding is too strong for people to buy AMD.

+1

On the other hand.. quite a few years ago AMD had much better performance per clock than intel CPU's... and these were days were each MHz (yes! MHz not GHz like nowadays ) made a difference...

I hope Bulldozer can do just that, especially while still being a bit more price competitive.

Hate this itchy feeling and having to wait so long to find out

 

[Cooper]

The thing is for software like HandBrake a Phenom II X6 still does very well considering how much it costs:

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/Intel_i7_2600K_i5_2500K/7.html

It takes a more expensive Core i5 2500k overclocked to 4.7GHZ to beat a 3.3GHZ Phenom II X6 1100T.

For specific apps like that, then the more cores the better, but for someone like me who only really stresses CPU cores out running emulators (PCSX2,Dolphin,MAME)which only really use a maximum of 2 cores...single threaded performance is king...

And the impression im getting is that BD will simply not be able to match SB in this area, the gap between a SB running at 4Ghz and a Phenom II running at 4Ghz is vast in emulators, getting on for 50-60% faster, clock for clock, and i havent seen anything to suggest that BD will be 50-60% faster per core, than the Phenom II CPU's.

Dont get me wrong, i will still wait for proper reviews, but come September/October im pretty certain, for the specific need i have, BD is going to be a massive dissapointment, and will almost certainly mean me swapping to Intel.

 

[DragonQ]

Single-threaded performance is important to me (computational stuff that doesn't scale with cores well) but I also do x264 encoding sometimes (maybe once or twice a month, mainly shrinking BDs to BD25 size). So if Bulldozer ends up being 10% worse than Intel per-clock at single threaded applications but 50% faster per-clock at full load (8 cores vs 4 cores + HT) I'll probably prefer it to an i7-2600K. This is all assuming both reach the same kind of clock speeds, which Llano suggests could be the case (different architecture of course but the same 32 nm process).

We'll see (one hopes).

 

[qbazdz]

How many average users have the emulators running? Multi-threaded apps are the way forward, so I don't think we need to be so focused on something that is only important to a very small number of people.

I so hope AMD can get bigger market share, and no, I am neither a fanboy or I work for them
I simply think that when intel has more less a monopoly for performance and mainstream market then they can dictate the prices and the actual pace of the market.
A proper intel vs AMD price & performance war would only benefit us

 

[Cooper]

How many average users have the emulators running? so I don't think we need to be so focused on something that is only important to a very small number of people.

...true, but i was just pointing out why it looks like AMD will be losing a customer in a few months, that would otherwise have been happy to stick with them.

 

[clocka]

@JF-AMD: Can you get AMD to work with the x264 developers to add silicon to AMD's chips specifically for x264 encoding, intel's quicksync is extremely fast but uses their own h.264 codec with poor settings. The guys at x264 have contacted AMD before to get amd to create silicon to allow x264 to be encoded with dedicated silicon. a lot of people encode with x264 these days, google, facebook are just 2 examples, its the best h.264 implementation. This would be a huge selling point for a lot of people as people edit videos and put them on youtube a lot, being able to do this far faster would certainly make me want to buy an AMD cpu!

Intel have already been in discussions about x264 with the head developer, if intel gave them the low level api's x264 would fly. they have apparently been telling him some info of how it works but its NDA he said in a post yesterday on doom9 forums. If Intel adds support for x264 that would be a massive blow to AMD as your cpu's would be multiple times slower.