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AMD Bulldozer Finally!

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Bulldozer is actually smaller than Thuban and IIRC they are only buying usable chips from Global Foundries,meaning the latter is probably taking the hit.

The FX4100 uses the same die as the FX6100 and FX8100 series and is around £90 to £95. The FX8120 is around £160 to £170. I suspect they could make a profit even selling the FX8150 at £140.
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Bulldozer FX 8150 is two billion transistors...

SB 2500k is less than half of that.
The Phenom II 1100T is over 900 million transistors.

gareth170 said:
http://www.kitguru.net/components/c...on-8-core-review-with-gigabyte-990fxa-ud7/25/

hmmm this review shows the 8150 is in between a 2500k/2600k in some things and on per with a 2500k clock for clock in Cinebench R11.5
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I think you're getting confused.
The FX8150 @ 3.6GHZ with 8 cores, manages to outmuscle the 2500k @ 3.3GHZ.
That's not impressive in the slightest. The 1100T outmuscles the 2500k in cinebench, it's interesting how pathetic the 8150 score is, in relation to the 1100T.
 
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mmj_uk said:
I agree £150 would be a more sensible price but like you say this CPU is still flawed due to the comparatively poor IPC.

Can AMD even afford to sell it for £150 though? given that it's 2billion transistor monster are they even making any profit at £200?
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Smaller manufacturing process, so more chips per wafer, and as others have mentioned they're only paying per working chip. And remember, they only released a few thousand desktop chips, just for the diehard fans - there's about 10x more being shipped as server chips, which cost a lot more, so they could even afford to GIVE away the desktop chips if they wanted to.
 
manveruppd said:
Smaller manufacturing process, so more chips per wafer, and as others have mentioned they're only paying per working chip. And remember, they only released a few thousand desktop chips, just for the diehard fans - there's about 10x more being shipped as server chips, which cost a lot more, so they could even afford to GIVE away the desktop chips if they wanted to.
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Except the yields are horrendous, they're not making enough to ship to retailers.
 
kitch9 said:
No, but you can choose to use the programs that do make the best use of the cores and avoid the single threaded stuff. The single threaded stuff will be mostly older programs that even the crappest of CPU's shouldn't have a problem with anyway.

Cpu reviews are good for an idea but most don't really give an indication of real world use, I mean nobody would only use a single thread to encode videos unless they were mental for instance.

There's plenty of choice out there, games are becoming more multi threaded, drivers are becoming multi threaded, DX11 is now multi threaded, and there's plenty of multi threaded apps for most jobs.

BD would be a decent chip if it had less power draw, 10% more IPC and 10% more clocks, and sorting 2 out of those 3 as a minimum that should be fairly attainable over the next few months I would imagine.
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Single threaded performance inherently increases multithreaded performance.
BD has pathetic single threaded performance, and can barely outmatch the 1100T in multithreaded app's.

8 threaded app's aren't the norm, the 8150's a niche product.

Most app's aren't singled threaded, but that's irrelevant, multithreaded means more than 1, if they don't utilise the 8 threads of the 8150, it's frugal, the 2500k will trounce it.

Put it this way, if the 2500k beats the 8150 in single threaded app's, it's sure as hell going to kill it in app's upto 4 cores (At least), then comes into play BD's scaling etc for 5-8 threaded app's, which the 2500k still puts up a good fight.
 
Martini1991 said:
Single threaded performance inherently increases multithreaded performance.
BD has pathetic single threaded performance, and can barely outmatch the 1100T in multithreaded app's.

8 threaded app's aren't the norm, the 8150's a niche product.

Most app's aren't singled threaded, but that's irrelevant, multithreaded means more than 1, if they don't utilise the 8 threads of the 8150, it's frugal, the 2500k will trounce it.

Put it this way, if the 2500k beats the 8150 in single threaded app's, it's sure as hell going to kill it in app's upto 4 cores (At least), then comes into play BD's scaling etc for 5-8 threaded app's, which the 2500k still puts up a good fight.
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Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't touch the current chip with a barge pole, but I do find your posts a touch hyperbolic.

With some reasonably minor improvement the chip could be decent. I hope the next one is, I'm bored to tears with intel. I'll make the decision around Ivybridge time.
 
gareth170 said:
nope..

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/10/12/amd-fx-8150-review/6

2500k slightly faster than a 1100t clock for clock, this review shows 2500k and 1100t @ 3.3ghz (stock)
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Clock for clock,. the 2500k obliterates the 1100T.
When 6 cores are involved, that doesn't make the 2500k any worse clock for clock, rather that the 1100T gains in the few situations it's utilised.

That was just an explanation of you saying "clock for clock slightly faster than a 2500k"

And I was going off the results you showed in the other review, if anything it just shows you how messy the results are for the kit guru review, compare the score in the two reviews you've linked to.
 
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Martini1991 said:
Single threaded performance inherently increases multithreaded performance.
BD has pathetic single threaded performance, and can barely outmatch the 1100T in multithreaded app's.

8 threaded app's aren't the norm, the 8150's a niche product.
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Could you give me a list ST apps that you run which aren't benchmarks, aren't games, and that require a bit of CPU grunt? By the way, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely interested.
 
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aln said:
Could you give me a list ST apps that you run which aren't benchmarks, aren't games, and that require a bit of CPU grunt? By the way, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely interested.
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I honestly couldn't tell you, because I don't run ST app's that require grunt.
But higher IPC inherently improves multi-threaded app's. Bulldozer lacks this, more so than the Phenom II's before it.

A 4 threaded app is a multi-threaded app, but an 8150 isn't going to stand a chance against a 2500k in it.

The 8150 is a niche product for those who need the 8 threads, or for epeen or whatever.
 
Problem is that apps that need that sort of threading will often need FP precision to match and BD lacks in that department, so other than web serving I can't see what good it is even in highly 6+ threaded apps.
 
There is one program which I find infuriating: MS Outlook.
I have about 10 different email accounts, which I do an automatic send and receive for, every 5-10 minutes. During the send/receive, the entire program locks up. This is a single threaded program. My dual core cpu goes to 50% during the send/receive, while the other 50% is untouched.

I'm developing a major program right now and before I started coding it with multiple threads, the GUI would lock up regularly, while some cpu intensive operations were being processed. Multi-threading is definitely the way to go. I can't understand why other developers dont make use of heavy multi-threading. I'm stunned that many games don't use more than 2-4 threads. By now, I would've thought that most games would be using 100+ threads.
 
Martini1991 said:
I honestly couldn't tell you, because I don't run ST app's that require grunt.
But higher IPC inherently improves multi-threaded app's. Bulldozer lacks this, more so than the Phenom II's before it.

A 4 threaded app is a multi-threaded app, but an 8150 isn't going to stand a chance against a 2500k in it.

The 8150 is a niche product for those who need the 8 threads, or for epeen or whatever.
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I believe a 4 threaded app is probably quite uncommon out with games, though I won't say for certain.

Generally an app will have nThreads, and will just thread each and every piece of work it can. Sure this may be less than ideal efficiency wise, but realistically a programmer is unlikely to specifically write an app particularly for your number of threads when you are able to buy greater numbers in the commercial market.

Further, most programmers, even good ones, will likely consider the CPU itself would be better balancing multiple threads, rather than fewer and ending up bottled necked. Doesn't Apache run 200 threads by default on servers with way many less cores for example? Sure there are reasons other than performance for this, but you think they'd do it if it was extremely detrimental?

I think it's more likely, negating games, that your applications will be single threaded, or the application will be multithreaded beyond the point of 8 threads.

sunama said:
There is one program which I find infuriating: MS Outlook.
I have about 10 different email accounts, which I do an automatic send and receive for, every 5-10 minutes. During the send/receive, the entire program locks up. This is a single threaded program. My dual core cpu goes to 50% during the send/receive, while the other 50% is untouched.

I'm developing a major program right now and before I started coding it with multiple threads, the GUI would lock up regularly, while some cpu intensive operations were being processed. Multi-threading is definitely the way to go. I can't understand why other developers dont make use of heavy multi-threading. I'm stunned that many games don't use more than 2-4 threads. By now, I would've thought that most games would be using 100+ threads.
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Thats a problem with the way they've coded the application at the end of the day. From my knowledge, one of the biggest complaints about vista is it's slow, whilst windows 7 is fast. Realistically they're the same speed, but the engineers threaded the GUI side of things so that the user didn't need to wait whilst things were happening, thus giving the appearance of superior usability.

You see the problem with most any application halting isn't that the CPU isn't fast enough, its that it's almost definitely waiting on a lock and most probably this has something to do with contention on disk access somewhere. Personally I run Thunderbird on Debian and it was a completely dog at first. I had a pretty poor experience due to the fact my CPU was pinned in a generally high wait %, which was reflecting the fact the application would rather be indexing my IMAP box than be usable. I gather the windows task manager wouldn't report this as anything other than a thread being maxed out though.

On top of that, sending e-mail isn't actually a CPU heavy task. If your CPU is pinned at 50% (ie whoring a full core), and you aren't experiencing something akin to disk thrashing, then I'd be worried that there’s something wrong with the situation when a fairly light weight task can floor a full core on a c2d. See the funny thing is, if you upgraded for this reason you'd actually probably just be throwing money away when an SSD would probably resolve all problems and cost quite a bit less.

biffa said:
Problem is that apps that need that sort of threading will often need FP precision to match and BD lacks in that department, so other than web serving I can't see what good it is even in highly 6+ threaded apps.
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It depends what you're comparing it to, but if it's a 2500k there are quite a few instances which can be considered normal usage where you'll get a resonable advantage from using BD. The problem is, it should have been a slam dunk, it's not and that’s why it's underwhelming. That doesn't make it a worse buy though, it just means that it's underwhelming, like I said. Personally the power/performance ratio is a bit weak for me, but that me be less of a consideration if they fix core parking.
 
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Multithreading is "niche"? Are you guys still running MS-DOS or something? I can't be bothered to post a screenshot but I just took a peek in the process tab of my task manager. You know how many threads Chrome alone is running?

54!
 
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