AMD Bulldozer Finally!

Martini1991 · 27 Oct 2011 at 18:57

Lol, that's depressing.

MAXIBOY · 27 Oct 2011 at 19:33

Just read this weeks micro mart. 20-26 oct 2011.

Mark Pickavance built himself a high performance system costing £1,656.00. I think the outcome might be worth a read next week.

His question is will amd bulldozer push the current crop of Intel sandy bridge processors over the performance cliff, or will it simply level the playing field?

Results next month. Have a feeling he might be gutted with that outlay..

LeJosh · 27 Oct 2011 at 19:35

It is interesting watching how CPUs pan out. I've got some choice to go from my E5300.

But I really don't think 1st Gen BD will be any of my choices.

I wonder if Piledriver will be any good, they need to make sure that all cores can share 8MB of L3 cache instead of 2MB each. That was a stupid design decision.

Martini1991 · 27 Oct 2011 at 19:38

Piledriver won't be a miracle.
What ground they made up on Phenom II from Phenom, they threw away, and I can't say Intel were ever this behind were they back in the day? I wouldn't know as I wasn't into PC's then.

LeJosh · 27 Oct 2011 at 19:41

No it won't be a miracle but it's just reminds of the GTX480s, very hot, big TDP and performance didn't reflect those, imo. But the 580s were refined and brought those down which I think will happen with Piledriver.

Nonetheless, they've still got many die shrinks to go, so it could end up fantastic. *pours salt everywhere*

mmj_uk · 27 Oct 2011 at 20:01

I just hope for competitions sake that in 5-10yrs AMD aren't competing with Cyrix.

Martini1991 · 27 Oct 2011 at 20:04

LeJosh said:
No it won't be a miracle but it's just reminds of the GTX480s, very hot, big TDP and performance didn't reflect those, imo. But the 580s were refined and brought those down which I think will happen with Piledriver.

Nonetheless, they've still got many die shrinks to go, so it could end up fantastic. *pours salt everywhere*

How does it remind you of the GTX480? The 480 was the best single GPU out at the time.

LeJosh · 27 Oct 2011 at 20:11

It may have been the fastest by around 10% but the temps were insane and the TDP was also. If you don't care about those then yeah it was the "best."

mmj_uk · 27 Oct 2011 at 20:14

It's more like the first P4... higher clockspeed but slower, higher TDP, hotter, basically a backwards step in most departments.

Can see now why AMD released 990FX so soon, lots of people bought them thinking Bulloldozer would be decent.

lay-z-boy · 27 Oct 2011 at 20:14

LeJosh said:
No it won't be a miracle but it's just reminds of the GTX480s, very hot, big TDP and performance didn't reflect those, imo. But the 580s were refined and brought those down which I think will happen with Piledriver.

Nonetheless, they've still got many die shrinks to go, so it could end up fantastic. *pours salt everywhere*

What? The 480's walked over the 5870's and perform far better in sli and with less problems than 5870 crossfire. Yes they are a bit noisy and hot while they are doing their job however.

Merlin5 said:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?276114-8120-after-1-week

I must have missed this somehow but; Haha, loving how my laptop cpu is not too far off those results.

chaotic_uk · 27 Oct 2011 at 20:17

LeJosh said:
It may have been the fastest by around 10% but the temps were insane and the TDP was also. If you don't care about those then yeah it was the "best."

where do you get this from about the temps ?

Martini1991 · 27 Oct 2011 at 20:37

chaotic_uk said:
where do you get this from about the temps ?

Well temps and power usage were pretty stupid tbh.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/294?vs=309

chaotic_uk · 27 Oct 2011 at 22:55

Martini1991 said:
Well temps and power usage were pretty stupid tbh.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/294?vs=309

well mine must be a later version of the gtx480 and it runs cooler than my 6970

, back on topic lols so the fx cpu's are not worth it then if you have the 1100T ?

Martini1991 · 27 Oct 2011 at 23:20

What GTX480 do you have?
If it's an aftermarket cooler then I can understand.
And no, Bulldozer isn't worth it over an 1100T.

chaotic_uk · 28 Oct 2011 at 00:11

Martini1991 said:
What GTX480 do you have?
If it's an aftermarket cooler then I can understand.
And no, Bulldozer isn't worth it over an 1100T.

stock cooled asus gtx480 when they were £199.99 , from the compair charts at AnandTech they are about the same in most things (fx8150 vs 1100T)

Martini1991 · 28 Oct 2011 at 00:44

chaotic_uk said:
stock cooled asus gtx480 when they were £199.99 , from the compair charts at AnandTech they are about the same in most things (fx8150 vs 1100T)

Which is bad

chaotic_uk · 28 Oct 2011 at 01:08

Martini1991 said:
Which is bad

that maybe but most reviews state it does not perform as good as the phenom II , but from what i have read this is not the case . i will admit it does not perform like AMD said it does

, what does it perform like in games (not benchmarks)

littlepuppy · 28 Oct 2011 at 01:39

You simply cannot compare 480 and bulldozer. 480 had some failings, but the part did not fail to deliver on performance, it had side issues - heat, yield (480 not 512 cores to start with) but it did bang out the performance, didnt crash systems, was faster than the previous gen (without a doubt)

Bulldozer is a very sorry state of affairs.

Martini1991 · 28 Oct 2011 at 01:48

chaotic_uk said:
that maybe but most reviews state it does not perform as good as the phenom II , but from what i have read this is not the case . i will admit it does not perform like AMD said it does , what does it perform like in games (not benchmarks)

It doesn't perform as well as Phenom II though?
Clock for clock it's well lower, hence why the 1100T is beating the 8150 in games.

The FX4 would get crushed by the Phenom II 970 for example.

PCZ · 28 Oct 2011 at 09:12

It is has been said that BD is only good for multi threaded tasks such as encoding video.
Well i have to disagree with that.
It sucks at encoding as well.

As a test i encoded a dvd to mkv using handbrake.
I left the settings at default apart from the quality level which i set to rf15

My 2600K running at 4.6Ghz finished the encode in 12 minutes
The BD 8150 also running at 4.6Ghz finish the encode in 22 minutes.
I then ran the same job on a 1090t at 4.0Ghz and it finished in 15 minutes.

Now reducing the quality level down to the default of rf20 helped the BD somewhat.
It finished in 12 minutes and the 2600K in 10 minutes.
I guess at the defaulty quality level the amount of CPU time required is a lot less and a greater proportion of the encode time is spent reading/writing files.

A massive performance gulf opened up between the 2600K and the BD 8150 as the quality level/complexity of the encode was increased.