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AMD Bulldozer Finally!

I am not trying to defend BD but nearly all gamers are GPU limited so there is merit to running at standard settings. Outside of dual card setup's most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a BD and 2500k- other than the massive increase in room temperature!

Single GPU set ups, I'd agree the difference in gaming isn't all that. Once you start to increase the amount of cards, or go to some of the bigger cards coming out, you're going to get a CPU bottleneck sooner on the current AMD crop of CPU's, if this wasn't true, you wouldn't see frame rate differences between the set ups now (Although, both set ups could be achieving over 60 FPS, if one is lower by say 10-20 frames, out of the margin of error, then it's still a bottleneck)
 
yeah I am somewhat notorious for long posts :D they did indeed claim early on that their intention was to hold the line with IPC with regards to Phenom II, but JF-AMD has been saying toward the later part of the development process that IPC haven't only stayed the same, but improved over the Phenom II series.

don't think this individual would have spent too much time looking at gaming benchmarks, just theoretical ones more than likely. there is no way with such an increase to ALU performance and FPU performance the instructions per clock should have went down, something just doesn't add up in that respect.

how a processor posts such good ALU/FPU scores then does so badly in arithmetic operations like HiperPi/SuperPi and wPrime makes no sense at all, like someone who is a mathematical genius getting stuck on something as simple as the eleven times table. so rather than arguing about how it has clearly went wrong, which I won't deny it has! how about we discuss theories on why it has went wrong since on paper the architecture is still a strong one? ;)

Edit: who thinks that AMD are as baffled as all of us are to why this has occured? even Piledriver won't be that competitive unless they figure out what is stumbling Bulldozer, what is a spanner in the tracks so to speak, it is so essential that they figure that out and fast.
+1

Yet you keep bringing up JF's comments which in every thread I've ever seen he always says "these comments are about server performance".

Also you seem to not know what IPC is, separate the words, instructions per clock, NOT performance per clock, NOR performance per CORE.

Even then that's open to interpretation, because it can decode less instructions per clock but the core itself, despite one less integer pipeline, can actually run through more per clock. In terms of server throughput, theoretical instructions per clock and ACTUAL instructions per clock are VERY different, you can reduce the former AND raise the latter, realistically you'd end up with a better performing chip if you lowered peak but raised the average performance.

But again, you have said JF/lies/AMD/marketing multiple times on this page alone, and you use JF's statements which are specific to server chips, then ask everyone to ignore server performance because only desktop matters.

Then we can bring up things like, cache being broken(if it is, or poorly implemented) can drop effective IPC while the core is no different. Its highly likely the SAME cores with the SAME clock speed with different cache could be significantly faster, it seems obvious to everyone but you that IPC can be dramatically improved with proper scheduling. Nothing so far has disproved that IPC on Bulldozer is higher than Phenom, but a factor of MANY things outside of the core itself can lead to lower performance, there are situations in which it is faster. If they bought out a fixed bulldozer with fixed cache but identical actual modules, and performance was up 30% the effective IPC of the modules/cores will not have changed, just the overall package will perform differently.


You change your argument to suit, I'll use JF's server performance claims about desktop and bemoan anyone else mentioning server performance as its not relevant.

You can't prove IPC is lower, you can't find JF say he talks about anything other than server performance, server performance is relevant just not to you.



This is not an accurate statement, at all, what you I assume meant to say was, performance per core improvements inherantly increases performance across the board........... IF you make no sacrifices in the architecture to raise per core performance.

In reality AMD could not fit 8 "wider" cores on a Bulldozer die, its that simple. Unlike you I have from day one said, per core performance IS irrelevant. There isn't a single thing I'd do on a 2500k, 2600k or Bulldozer, or Phenom x4/x6 where single threaded performance matters any more. There isn't a single game I own, going back 15 years that is single threaded that won't run great on a Bulldozer, new games are all multithreaded, some of them are heavily multithreaded, performance in all of them is more than ample, and going into the future more games will be more heavily multithreaded thereby using the bulldozer more effectively.

Anyway I went a little off track there, to raise IPC as you see it, performance per core on a single thread, you WOULD need a more robust front end AND another integer pipe, maybe a little more FPU aswell, this would all have made it impossible to have 8 cores on a die. So you'd end up with 4 "fat" cores, faster in single thread, same speed or even maybe slower in heavily multithreaded applications. Heavy multithreading IS the future, bringing a new architecture out now, which will carry over for the next 4-5 years at least, and focusing on single threaded performance WOULD end AMD, its that simple. Basing an architecture that needs to be competitive in 5 years, on single threaded performance, would be beyond stupid.

In your magical world of make believe where you can make the cores wider with no die size penalty and increase the single threaded performance, sure, that would be great, but we don't live in the land of Martini makes up the rules of physics.



I really have no idea what you are getting at with this, it seems to be not the first time where you suggest a 10-25% performance bump in single threaded performance is laughable as it won't improve 8 threaded performance.........

Yet in any other post all you complain about is single threaded performance, and randomly ignore the fact that with 8 threads Bulldozer beats the 2600k multiple times and the 2500k almost every time. So the one area it would bump performance is the one area you complain about but this is somehow.... laughable.

More importantly, with a 15-25% bump in single threaded performance in 4 or less threaded performance, Bulldozer would likely beat the x6/x4 in almost every single situation with mostly similar clock speeds.

Lets be honest, you talked crap about Bulldozer when you didn't understand it, you talked crap and literally lied about what other people had supposedly said about it ( You have indeed accused me of saying Bulldozer would be awesome and be faster than Sandybridge, when I was infact one of the few to point out exactly why it would not), you're still talking crap about Bulldozer even ignoring all facts now known. You consistantly call it slower than an X6/x4/previous gen, despite multiple situations in which it trashes the x6/x4, which are, as it happens, area's where software will be going more frequently in the coming years and, meh, not much else needs to be said.

You've been trolling this thread since the start, posting more ill informed crap than anyone else, doing a bit of a "raven" by trying to hype expectation about what you think it should do, then coming in after and saying how crap it is and you seem to have a fundamental lack of knowledge about errm, everything in which you talk about.

+10.
 
insane thing is, if they just accept Bulldozer wasn't really what they had hoped for and invest all their time and effort into rectifying the problems in Piledriver, it'll be a hell of a processor when you consider that Bulldozer has 'real' performance hidden underneath some 'troubles', its ALU and FPU scores are really encouraging, its memory bandwidth scores are impressive, still slower than Intel but miles faster than previous generation.

wonder if the 'stumbling' performance could also be front-end related, not being able to feed the pipelines (which based on the more basic tests are obviously fairly potent (even more so than 'stars' even though they have 33% less resources, not sure how they've managed that?!), since the front-end has four x86 decoders, Phenom II had three decoders per core, where Bulldozer has four for two integer cores, so essentially 33% less decoders expected to do 33% more work, am I missing something? :confused:
 
@Gashman they are putting time and effort into Piledriver, admitting that Bulldozer wan't as good for consumers as they're marketing department said it would be won't change anything.
 
@Gashman they are putting time and effort into Piledriver, admitting that Bulldozer wan't as good for consumers as they're marketing department said it would be won't change anything.

in that case then, would expect Piledriver to be way way more than 10 - 15% increase in performance, since that was based on the 'hypothetical' Bulldozer, Piledriver could be the 'Bulldozer' architectures crowning glory in theory, for the sake of competition lets hope they hit the nail on the head and could be looking at competitive benchmarks again rather than just 'how much do Intel win by?...' crack that it is at the moment, even though Bulldozer has done well to eat into some of Intel's leads in certain aspects. ;)
 
their architecture is genuinely good at various tasks, some tests it beats the 2500K, sometimes by a good margin? in most gaming situations the 2500K beats the 8150, sick of debating the differences to be honest. run Super PI on two systems, a 2500K and a 1100T, the 2500K will destroy the 1100T, like do 32M calculation in half the time, does that mean the 2500K is twice as fast as the 1100T, course it bloody doesn't it just means that the coding of Super PI runs well on the Sandy Bridge architecture. look at 7-zip as an example of a situation where Bulldozer outright destroys the 2500K, its ~40% faster, again what does this mean? simply that that certain application runs well on Bulldozers architecture! Photoshop CS1 as well, it beats the 2500K, 2600K and the 1100T by a reasonable margin, is it the best processor ever?! likely not! same thing applies to a comparison between 'Stars' and Bulldozer, sometimes Bulldozer walks all over the 'Stars' processors and others it does badly, what does this all mean? 9 times out of 10 Intel users bring gaming into the debate, Dawn of War, Crysis, Starcraft II are all very Intel favourable gaming benchmarks, Intel always do well in those games compared to AMD. don't understand why this is a surprise to anyone?

to confuse matters even more in applications that don't make use of the eight-threaded nature of Bulldozer you can get yourself a decent 10 - 20% boost in performance by simply telling the OS to send single thread to each module rather than two threads to each module, so for optimum performance in a lighter threaded workload this should be the way its done, essentially shut down one integer core and have the other with the full FPU working on a single thread. 20% is a decent improvement and puts it more on the level of the 'Stars' processors in this fabled 'instruction per clock'. also in that situation it always brings a benefit to schedule that way, there never seems to be a negative impact unless the load of heavily multi-threaded and therefore actually benefits from the eight integer cores. so is Bulldozer a bad processor, is it balls, its just different from most of the other stuff out there and when tasks are schedules efficiently its no worse than the current Phenom II processors in IPC, but performs better in multi-threaded workloads plus has lots of room to improve with upcoming revisions! ;)
 
think AMD have commented on scheduler problems, not sure about Microsoft though. though you can get improvements through manual settings, by disabling one core per module, therefore giving that integer core access to the full resources. the thing is though that sort of thing should be done automatically through the OS depending on the type of workload being ran.

Bulldozer is more a proof of concept thing, think AMD intention is to get the best performance out of the APU version of Bulldozer since it has really really strong integer performance but not so great floating point performance, think the intention is to somehow utilise the onboard GPU for that sort of workload since they are good at that sort of thing. time will tell, B3 is due before the year is out so we'll see how that goes, lower power consumption and temperatures combined with some minor tweaks should be something to look at. :p
 
no but in the video below he does mention the patch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOho_YpVF9I

I see. But he is just a reviewer. Until we hear something from MS, it's not worth getting excited about a patch.

It's not impossible that there may be a patch released, but I'm struggling to see why MS would do this.

My understanding is that Intel and MS have a close relationship (WIntel) and as such it wouldn't make any sense for MS to release a patch which specifically helps users who have bought a BD CPU. Surely, it would be upto AMD to release the patch themselves, in the form of a driver of some sort. This would make more sense.
 
I see. But he is just a reviewer. Until we hear something from MS, it's not worth getting excited about a patch.

It's not impossible that there may be a patch released, but I'm struggling to see why MS would do this.

My understanding is that Intel and MS have a close relationship (WIntel) and as such it wouldn't make any sense for MS to release a patch which specifically helps users who have bought a BD CPU. Surely, it would be upto AMD to release the patch themselves, in the form of a driver of some sort. This would make more sense.

they did have a very close relationship in the past (too close) but hear things have soured recently, which is fantastic. now all we need is to get rid of all the pro-Intel benchmark tools and the fair world is back in business...remember that lawsuit because of Intel 'anti-AMD' compiler tricks, I for one don't think that has completely gone yet either! Microsoft have had lawsuits like that in the past as well so nothing would be a surprise!

Edit: also its apparently hard due to the fact nobody outside of Microsoft has access to their code, so it would be best for them to do it directly!
 
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I wouldn't say marketing has lost credibility. The fact is that it works. If it had lost credibility, then it wouldn't work as very few people would buy into it. Apple are living proof of this. ;)
 
I'm sure the piledriver has a 10% increase of performance over the bulldozer?

10 - 15% quoted by AMD originally, but and this is a huge but, whatever is the problem with Bulldozer never figured into their plans, since it quite clearly has some internal problems whatever they may be. so chances are (could be being optimistic mind!) Piledriver core will do more than improve 10 - 15% on the current Bulldozer processor, if B3 comes out and they have fixed any cache or front-end problems and we get a nice boost across the board in performance as well as lower power usage, then perhaps Piledriver will only be 10 - 15% faster than that, but don't think at the current state.

also we haven't even seen Bulldozer working at its peak efficiency yet, not even close! the fact you can get some 15 - 20% boost in light threaded workloads by simply telling the OS to send one thread to each module rather than core, effectively shutting down one integer core per module suggests it has a lot more to give even at its current state, also works for mixed workloads in theory.

two single 'heavy' threads are sent to modules 1 and 2, and four lighter threads are sent to modules 3 and 4, making it in that situation six threaded processor, but you would get the benefits of having all your resources for the first two modules so your 15 - 20% instruction per clock increase and the benefit of cache sharing and such with the more related, lighter workload with the other modules, think this is the sort of dynamic scheduling Bulldozer needs to be a success. since nobody on here has really given the chip a chance its going to be hard to see if that sort of dynamic workload works for Bulldozer, and whether it shines in those circumstances, games tend to be less threaded than encoding applications for example, right now it gets scheduled inefficiently to individual cores rather than using the maximum resources i.e. ever module, you'll still use power gating to save power since your effectively in that situation only using 2/3 of each module, so one whole integer core will be idle and should be put in a lower power state.

Edit: also think there should be a BIOS option for what state to use the chip in, like a maximum performance state where it schedules threads as aggressively as possible, taking no consideration for power saving. then a balanced state where it tries to balance performance with power saving and finally a more power conscious state where the chip tries to work most efficiently for times when you don't really need the extra 'oomph' from aggressive scheduling and such, like web browsing and watching movies, where as the maximum performance state would be more effective for gamers and such.
 
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