AMD FX Series and A Series First Performance Projections Surface

[Freddie1980]

I don't know what graph some of you are looking at the one I see shows the fx chip keeping up with the expensive 2600k which is impressive in my book. I don't know what you expected to see but this is pretty much what I was expecting and I'm impressed.

 

[Cooper]

I don't know what graph some of you are looking at the one I see shows the fx chip keeping up with the expensive 2600k which is impressive in my book. I don't know what you expected to see but this is pretty much what I was expecting and I'm impressed.

I see an 8 core BD keeping up with a hyper threaded 4 core SB......which isn't an overwhelming result TBH...

And do you really think the top of the range 8 core BD will be that much cheaper than the 2600k?...because i dont.

Just looks like BD is using the 'brute force' approach of more cores to keep up with SB, which is fine if your running a well threaded game/app, but it doesnt really say much good about per core performance.

And if those graphs are accurate, its taken 2yrs and billions spent on research and design, to only gain a 20% or so performace gain over Phenom II CPUS....which is pretty dissapointing.

 

[Owenb]

I see an 8 core BD keeping up with a hyper threaded 4 core SB......which isn't an overwhelming result TBH...

And do you really think the top of the range 8 core BD will be that much cheaper than the 2600k?...because i dont.

Looking at the graph it would suggest that PCMARK doesn't make great use of threads- the 2600 is only ~33% faster than the i3 2100 although it has twice the cores and has a faster base clock speed.

IMO if those numbers are then BD should be fairly competitive at work loads with 2-4 threads, thanks to an aggressive turbo mode, and probably very competitive on highly thread apps.

 

[bru]

Well as far as I can see the APU 8 core (4th one down) looking at the green bar only is about 30% slower than the currant 6 core phenom II 1100t, with the APU 6 core and APU 4 core progressively slower still. All of which would appear to be slower than an Intel i3 2100 and thats a £90 CPU.

now of course that is only one benchmark with no real details at all, but i would say its not looking too good for AMD performance wise.

 

[Culinia]

And if those graphs are accurate, its taken 2yrs and billions spent on research and design, to only gain a 20% or so performace gain over Phenom II CPUS....which is pretty dissapointing.

It's not exactly 'bulldozing' the competition now is it? They should have saved that code name for something more worthy of note.

I was hoping for a real processor from AMD back in the Pentium 4 - Athlon days

But I guess I will be happy if what some of you guys are saying -- a viable and perhaps cheaper alternative to Intel could only mean a good thing right?

 

[Gtiracer]

I see an 8 core BD keeping up with a hyper threaded 4 core SB......which isn't an overwhelming result TBH...

And do you really think the top of the range 8 core BD will be that much cheaper than the 2600k?...because i dont.

Just looks like BD is using the 'brute force' approach of more cores to keep up with SB, which is fine if your running a well threaded game/app, but it doesnt really say much good about per core performance.

And if those graphs are accurate, its taken 2yrs and billions spent on research and design, to only gain a 20% or so performace gain over Phenom II CPUS....which is pretty dissapointing.

This is exactly what i think

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well as far as I can see the APU 8 core (4th one down) looking at the green bar only is about 30% slower than the currant 6 core phenom II 1100t, with the APU 6 core and APU 4 core progressively slower still. All of which would appear to be slower than an Intel i3 2100 and thats a £90 CPU.

now of course that is only one benchmark with no real details at all, but i would say its not looking too good for AMD performance wise.

The Llano processors have 4 cores(A8),3 cores(A6) and 2 cores(A4) respectively.

On top of this the IGP in a Core i3 2100 is not that great(I have one myself). Llano has an IGP which is going to be between the speed of an HD4670 and an HD6570(probably closer to an HD6570 as the IGP is called an HD6550) which is good for casual gaming. On top of this near HD6570 level graphics performance in a lower end laptop is going to be great. You barely see anything faster than a Mobility HD5650M(or the Nvidia equivalent) in even most £500 to £600 laptops and in most cases it is worse than this.

A Core i3 2100 and an HD4670 will set you back £135 to £140.

It's not exactly 'bulldozing' the competition now is it? They should have saved that code name for something more worthy of note.

I was hoping for a real processor from AMD back in the Pentium 4 - Athlon days

But I guess I will be happy if what some of you guys are saying -- a viable and perhaps cheaper alternative to Intel could only mean a good thing right?

If each of the cores is similar in speed to those in a Core i7 2600K,then even with the resource sharing in multi-threaded applications like video encoding and rendering it will be much faster. The main point of getting a quad core with HT,a six core or an 8 core processor is for these sorts of applications IMHO.

Remember,that there are four core and six core versions of Bulldozer too. The six core is probably going to have higher IPC as it has access to all of the L3 cache.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This is exactly what i think

You do realise that a Core i7 990X scores less than a Core i7 2600K in PCMark Vantage??

 

[bru]

Wrong. The Llano processors have 4 cores,3 cores and 2 cores respectively.

On top of this the IGP in a Core i3 2100 is not that great(I have one myself). Llano has an IGP which is only going to be between the speed of an HD4670 and an HD6570(probably closer to an HD6570) which is good for casual gaming. On top of this HD6570 level graphics performance in a lower end laptop is going to be great. You barely see anything faster than a Mobility HD5650M(or the Nvidia equivalent) in most £500 to £600 laptops and in most cases it is worse than this.

A Core i3 2100 and an HD4670 will set you back £135 to £140.

ok so if the APU 8, APU 6 and APU 4 doesn't correspond to the number of cores each CPU has the performance is still not particularly good in comparison to the i3 2100.

As for video performance (which i didn't even mention before) the AMD A series APU are listed with discrete graphics and the slide mentions dual graphics so its anyones guess as to what that means. the red portion of the bar certainly seems to be bigger than the Intel IGP light blue section.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

ok so if the APU 8, APU 6 and APU 4 doesn't correspond to the number of cores each CPU has the performance is still not particularly good in comparison to the i3 2100.

It has been known for nearly 18 months that Llano would be based on a tweaked 32NM Athlon II core with a bit more L2 cache and Turbo Core.

Still like I said before the Core i3 2100 has very poor graphics performance(as I said before I have one myself) so AMD is obviously trying to leverage a much faster IGP here.

For some people the faster IGP will be of little use and for some others it maybe a more important consideration.

As for video performance (which i didn't even mention before) the AMD A series APU are listed with discrete graphics and the slide mentions dual graphics so its anyones guess as to what that means. the red portion of the bar certainly seems to be bigger than the Intel IGP light blue section.

Only the Bulldozer and Phenom II CPUs had an HD6670 graphics card as they lack an IGP. Supposedly some news sites have suggested that a top end Bulldozer and an HD6670 will be around the same price as a Phenom II X6 1100T and the same GPU.

The other CPUs are using their IGP. Llano has 160 shader(dual core) and 320 and 400 shader IGPs(triple and quad cores). The HD5670 has 400 shaders for example. The dual graphics means that the you can add another card for Crossfire. IIRC,supposedly you can Crossfire an HD6570 or HD6670 with the A6 and A8 IGP. The IGPs also have Turbo too(like what Intel does).

 

[Freddie1980]

I was hoping for a real processor from AMD back in the Pentium 4 - Athlon days

But I guess I will be happy if what some of you guys are saying -- a viable and perhaps cheaper alternative to Intel could only mean a good thing right?

With all due respect but that's a pretty naieve to think Bulldozer was going to do the same to Sandy Bridge as the original Ahtlon did to the P4. The one of the reasons why the Athlon done so well was because the P4 was a terrible design so you had a good chip going up against a crap chip. Bulldozer vs Sandy brdige will be (hopefully) a good chip vs a good chip.