AMD Bulldozer Finally!

MichaelM · 24 Jul 2011 at 18:03

8170 is just a better binning of the 8150's?

If you get a decent 8150 there is not need to wait for next year?

Destination · 24 Jul 2011 at 19:21

Out of interest, given these chips have eight cores, and some rendering uses as many as it can get, what other applications do people expect to get good real use results from using these chips?

ng93 · 24 Jul 2011 at 19:41

MrBlobby said:
Looks like I'm doing quite well in my competition

Im guessing september 20th, whoever is closest gets a free internet cookie

gareth170 · 24 Jul 2011 at 19:44

depending on price, i think i'll get a 8150 then clock it.....

a 8170 would be nice but i guess it'll be £70-90 more than the 8150..

tbh the first few batchs of these chips such clock to the 8170 speed and over.

i just hope the 8150 is about £250-260

Tute · 24 Jul 2011 at 20:30

If I go for one it'll be a standard 8100 for me I think. It'll be plenty fast enough.

opethdisciple · 24 Jul 2011 at 20:38

I remember reading recently that AMD have 10+ core consumer chips planned for next year!

Destination · 24 Jul 2011 at 20:49

opethdisciple said:
I remember reading recently that AMD have 10+ core consumer chips planned for next year!

Great but for what purpose? Consumers have minimal applications which will make use of this many cores.
Is there a reason?

Just wondering if amd think the best way to compete in future times is to slap in many many cores and hope cunsumers are thick enough to think the bigger number is always better.
Will we see a massive change in programming to incorporate megamulticore apps? Doubt it, as producers won't wish to alienate 80% of their potential market.

Guess we shall see, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, next gen consoles and nmber of cores they have could be a major factor.

opethdisciple · 24 Jul 2011 at 20:54

Hikari Kisugi said:
Great but for what purpose? Consumers have minimal applications which will make use of this many cores.
Is there a reason?

Just wondering if amd think the best way to compete in future times is to slap in many many cores and hope cunsumers are thick enough to think the bigger number is always better.
Will we see a massive change in programming to incorporate megamulticore apps? Doubt it, as producers won't wish to alienate 80% of their potential market.

Guess we shall see, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, next gen consoles and nmber of cores they have could be a major factor.

The future is multicore however...

As of now 4 cores is the good minimum/maximum value apps can make use if... but increasing games and applications are utilising more than 4 cores....

Maybe AMD think this is the direction that the market will go.

So rather than compete against intel on a per core basis they want to make sure that they have the multi core architure in place inorder to 'be at the right place/ right time' when the market goes in that direction.

Its a bit like what they have done by putting 2Gb vram on their gpu's.

Another good example of a foresight to see this was the direction the market was going. I regard it as a mistake that the 500 series from Nvidia didnt come with 2Gb of ram... expecially the 570 and or the 580.

MichaelM · 24 Jul 2011 at 21:18

Hikari Kisugi said:
Great but for what purpose? Consumers have minimal applications which will make use of this many cores.
Is there a reason?

Just wondering if amd think the best way to compete in future times is to slap in many many cores and hope cunsumers are thick enough to think the bigger number is always better.
Will we see a massive change in programming to incorporate megamulticore apps? Doubt it, as producers won't wish to alienate 80% of their potential market.

Guess we shall see, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, next gen consoles and nmber of cores they have could be a major factor.

With the Samsung Galaxy 2 phone sporting a two core processor I think that is a sign of the future.
My 5 year old laptop has an Intel Core Duo so average Joe going to buy a laptop or PC now will be choosing between spec's all with multi core processors I think.

Soon I don't think they have any other choice than to add more cores with the current processes they use and still achieve decent performance increases.

Kobi · 24 Jul 2011 at 21:54

Might also be a good idea not to jump stright onto the dozer though. Obviously most people will ignore this, but im prtty sure when the first phenoms came out people had problems(i didnt, but im sure there was something wrong with them) and didnt the first SB cpu's have overheating issues? ...or am i making this up? haha. usually best to give it a month or 2 till they sort out the kinks.

Final8y · 24 Jul 2011 at 22:37

Hikari Kisugi said:
Great but for what purpose? Consumers have minimal applications which will make use of this many cores.
Is there a reason?

Just wondering if amd think the best way to compete in future times is to slap in many many cores and hope cunsumers are thick enough to think the bigger number is always better.
Will we see a massive change in programming to incorporate megamulticore apps? Doubt it, as producers won't wish to alienate 80% of their potential market.

Guess we shall see, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, next gen consoles and nmber of cores they have could be a major factor.

It wont alienate anyone, being able to make use of more cores does not stop programs from working on less cores.

BFBC2 scales to 8 cores but it still works on single core CPUs.
There are programs that scale to 16 cores but still work on single core.

DragonQ · 24 Jul 2011 at 23:02

Kobi said:
Might also be a good idea not to jump stright onto the dozer though. Obviously most people will ignore this, but im prtty sure when the first phenoms came out people had problems(i didnt, but im sure there was something wrong with them) and didnt the first SB cpu's have overheating issues? ...or am i making this up? haha. usually best to give it a month or 2 till they sort out the kinks.

This is from memory but I think it's right. The original Phenom CPUs had a bug that caused a crash in rare circumstances. It was fixed with a change in BIOS setting I believe - unfortunately this "fix" also reduced performance by something like 10%. The bug was to do with individual core power saving features.

The original Sandy Bridge motherboards have a design flaw that means the SATA ports could stop working after a couple of years. There was no problem with the CPUs.

Kobi · 24 Jul 2011 at 23:59

DragonQ said:
This is from memory but I think it's right. The original Phenom CPUs had a bug that caused a crash in rare circumstances. It was fixed with a change in BIOS setting I believe - unfortunately this "fix" also reduced performance by something like 10%. The bug was to do with individual core power saving features.

The original Sandy Bridge motherboards have a design flaw that means the SATA ports could stop working after a couple of years. There was no problem with the CPUs.

Ah right, so really, i was just making it all up. I knew something was wrong, just couldnt quite remember. should have kept my mouth shut haha

ntg · 26 Jul 2011 at 12:27

The future is multicore indeed IMO. Having plenty of cores and intelligent mobos/bios's with the ability to utilise only as many cores as you need at any given time while turning the others "off", is the future. It would be great to have an X-core cpu where I can use all its cores when I'm working on the pc and have only 1 core on during the night when it's downloading stuff or doing something menial that doesn't require horsepower - thus reducing the electricity bills as well.

phil128 · 26 Jul 2011 at 12:50

kgi said:
The future is multicore indeed IMO. Having plenty of cores and intelligent mobos/bios's with the ability to utilise only as many cores as you need at any given time while turning the others "off", is the future. It would be great to have an X-core cpu where I can use all its cores when I'm working on the pc and have only 1 core on during the night when it's downloading stuff or doing something menial that doesn't require horsepower - thus reducing the electricity bills as well.

Until operating systems incorporate such a feature, were stuck with what we've got :-(

. Its not a easy as switching of a core and hope for the best (I wish things were that simple). Until then mommy and daddy are having to pay for my computer running :-D

(plus my house keeping, I do work :-\).

pmc25 · 26 Jul 2011 at 15:43

phil128 said:
Until operating systems incorporate such a feature, were stuck with what we've got . Its not a easy as switching of a core and hope for the best (I wish things were that simple). Until then mommy and daddy are having to pay for my computer running (plus my house keeping, I do work :-\).

The advanced clock gating in Bulldozer is designed to do exactly this.

phil128 · 26 Jul 2011 at 17:06

pmc25 said:
The advanced clock gating in Bulldozer is designed to do exactly this.

I can kinda see now how this would bloody awesome!!! I hope they bring out a new FX series of chips. I've still got the first FX51 chip that cost me just over 700 quid (about 7 years ago) which was excellent on power consumption. Shame about the performance of that chip though. I hope AMD will bring somehting new to the table. I dunno what Intel have got lined up.

pspcpog · 26 Jul 2011 at 17:11

I wish they incorporate a technology that turns redundant cores off and mega-turbo clock
one core for single threaded apps.

I just happend to use lots of applications which use just one or two cores.

ng93 · 26 Jul 2011 at 17:14

pspcpog said:
I wish they incorporate a technology that turns redundant cores off and mega-turbo clock
one core for single threaded apps. I just happend to use lots of applications which use just one or two cores.

They have, Turbo CORE (or Turbo Boost if your on Intel).

pspcpog · 26 Jul 2011 at 17:33

I mean mega turbo core/boost like, [email protected] and 10ghz@turbo
yes it's a wishful thinking i know