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Another bulldozer thread :cool:

CmdrTobs

CmdrTobs

CmdrTobs

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16 Jan 2011
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51
Looking at the aggressive Intel roadmap that see's LGA2011 in Q4 with quad channel memory and PCI-E 3.0 and the seeming ability to pull 22nm Ivy Bridge chips back to Q2! if Bulldozer is any good. I can't help but think the true happy times of neck and neck competition are over.

It seems AMD have slipped back into their pre-Athlon roll of selling good chips that are a generation behind Intel. (remember those 100Mhz+ AMD 486s?) AMD are yet to sell a high K 32mn chip while Intel is deliberately keeping the covers on a probable retail ready 22nm sandy(Ivy) process!

From a business side it's tragic how the OEM world and workstation certification side helped lock people into Intels massive market share during Intels arguably crap P6/Netburst days. The amount of schools, collages etc I saw with overpriced celerons and PIII's instead of Thunderbird's:( One of the biggest freemarket fails of the decade.

I can't help but think AMD should just make socket compatible parts with Intel as they used to. Bulldozer will be success but not the AMD of ~2004 more like the AMD of ~1994.

- A probable bulldozer buyer.

Q. Do reckon you will buy bulldozer? (AM3+, C32, G34?)
If so, is this because you think it will be 'the best' (am I too pessimistic?)or are you simply counting on AMD to price it right and thus deliver a price point king?

Argue/rant/discuss. (JF-AMD come out wherever you are)
 
If it's a good bang for buck then maybe but tbh with all the console ports my 965 at 3.9ghz is more than enough.

So I probably will see sense and not upgrade to anything for another 2 years.
 
I'll upgrade to it when i can afford it :D

Need a new motherboard anyway, so might for it, or perhaps get a cheap Phenom X4 on the bay :P
 
I need a new Mobo so i may purchase the new AM3+ socket motherboard and get a nice new processor to play with :) depending on how good the benchmarks look, got a 1055T at the moment overclocked to 3.9ghz so my processor isnt in need of an upgrade that badly, but we will see :D
 
Well considering Ivy bridge will STILL only be quad core on 22nm(remember they went quad core, mainstream WELL under £200 with the Q6600 at 65nm, what, 4 years ago?). Yes they'll be decent chips but AMD, from in a few months will have octo cores available in the likely £150-300 price bracket. Intel won't offer the same till the end of next year or maybe Q1 2013.

Intel are aggressive, but largely in keeping their margins high, not providing great price/performance.

AMD chips are comparitively much much bigger than Intel's and yes have to compete on price/performance, however, Intel has no reason to just beat AMD because they'll just be eating their own profits.

Cores are becoming a strange thing, and there is a rapid move towards APU's from both companies, remember that no matter what Intel does for at least a couple years AMD will simply wipe the floor with Intel's APU's, though quicksync is a great way to "counter" that to some degree.

The issue will be, in say 18 months the top end AMD and Intel cpu's will have gpu's on die, and AMD will almost automatically spank Intel in every benchmark in every review that focuses on gpu performance, and Intel will likely beat AMD in most of the cpu based benchmarks. The big issue is one of the most gpu accelerated most widely used features in video decoding/encoding and Intel has thrown a big spanner in the works by adding more transistors for hardware decoding rather than mostly software.

I can't see AMD not following suit there though.

Fact until it would seem Haswell in Q4 2012 at the earliest AMD will have £100 top end mobo's with a £200 chip that can quite easily beat Intel's Sandybridge quad core offerings, with £180 top end mobo's with a £200 chip.

8 cores for the same price as 4, should beat it in a heck of a lot of benchmarks and be seen as the clear winner?

Yes, come the end of this year Intel will have hex/octo core chips, but they'll be on quad channel mobo's that cost £150+ likely for a midrange board, £250 for a similar "high end" board, starting at maybe £350 for a hexcore chip and maybe £600+ for octo cores?

The question is do AMD need to win THAT fight, the answer is quite simply, no.

When we hit Haswell and Intel actually bringing out octo cores to midrange, it will still be upper midrange pricing and we could well have 16 core AMD chips by then. The only thing in question is just how fast is a Bulldozer two issue single core, vs an Intel 4 issue core, slower, almost certainly, how much slower, dunno. Superpi is likely to be very bad for AMD, Intel can fill its width here better than really anywhere else, real world performance, yet to see.
 
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@Druken, I think you are massively playing down the importance of performance per thread, which for the desktop user is king. Although it will be a fine desktop product AMD has made no secret that Bulldozers core raison d'etre is the 'Opteron' and to take the cloud server market.

Your price analysis is borked in that it overstates the value of cores, in that most people won't pay for more but slower cores. Look at I5 vs X6. Intel will offer 22nm chips by summer to compete with BullDozer (If Intel deems bulldozer too good) and not many people I know will make the calculation that they MUST have an expensive 8-core 2011LGA to get better performance. They will be more than satisfied to pay ~£250 for a 4core 22nm that has blistering IPC and overclocks like sin and dominates everything but Cinebench.

In summary, Intel don't need the bend-over-and-pay LGA2011 platform to beat AMD in performance. I envision Intel still having the fastest desktop app benching £600 mobo+cpu+mem+GFX combo with LGA1155 on a desktop. Sure the equiv AMD system could beat that by using $$$ saved to go crossfire perhaps - then we get hampered by Nvida folks being turned off.

Your analysis speaks to penny pinching thread lovers like me who are dreaming of a C32 with crossfire. Though most people aren't willing to give up Cryisis timedeomo or 3D mark bragging rights.

P.S I think one test AMD can possibly stamp on intel in is Folding@home, it perplexes me how big that is and how much 'kudos' that gives, AMD could make that there 'Crysis timdemo' this is such a faceted topic with so many *IF's* and *Buts*
 
Drunken said: "remember they went quad core, mainstream WELL under £200 with the Q6600 at 65nm, what, 4 years ago?"

Which is the focus of my OP. AMD has ceased being high performance competition (no matter how silly the cost) so we move on the only market leaders timetable. Remember how good it was when AMD stuffed 64bit down intels throat early and MS then dropped a AMD64 XP? That's the industry I want.
 
CmdrTobs said:
Drunken said: "remember they went quad core, mainstream WELL under £200 with the Q6600 at 65nm, what, 4 years ago?"

Which is the focus of my OP. AMD has ceased being high performance competition (no matter how silly the cost) so we move on the only market leaders timetable. Remember how good it was when AMD stuffed 64bit down intels throat early and MS then dropped a AMD64 XP? That's the industry I want.
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I agree that AMD has become more of a 'value for money' rather than top end stuff. So no matter what cpu they release intel will always stay one step ahead unless AMD comeup with something radically different. Granted that bulldozer is a new architecture after such a long time but I get the feeling that 2011 SB or Ivy Bridge will still beat bulldozer:(.
 
I think bulldozer will mop the floor with sandy bridge, i base that conclusion on a good feeling i have that bulldozer will mop the floor with sandy bridge :)

Seriously though i hope its at least competitive with the old i7's, dont want another phenom 1 repeat, that CPU was horrible.
 
CmdrTobs said:
@Druken, I think you are massively playing down the importance of performance per thread, which for the desktop user is king.
Click to expand...

I will argue that performance per thread is not the biggest driver. Intel's product that drives the biggest performance per thread costs $1000 and holds ~.01% of the total desktop market.

This means 99.99% of the desktop customers do not see performance per thread as the most important variable. As a matter of fact, the fact that the share is so small would lead me to believe that it might actually be the *least* important variable.

Price/performance is what is going to drive the market.

To prove this, please answer the following question. If you had an opportunity to buy two processors, processor A that scores 100 in a benchmark and costs $300 and processor B that scores 110 in a benchmark but costs $900, which one would you buy?

If performance per thread is the #1 criteria, dig deep, you're spending 300% more for 10% more performance. If performance per thread is not the #1 criteria then congratulations, you are joining the rest of the real world.
 
I don't get all this obsession with the number of cores a CPU has, give me one core for a I care so long as it's the fastest product at what ever price I'm paying.
 
JF-AMD said:
I will argue that performance per thread is not the biggest driver. Intel's product that drives the biggest performance per thread costs $1000 and holds ~.01% of the total desktop market.

This means 99.99% of the desktop customers do not see performance per thread as the most important variable. As a matter of fact, the fact that the share is so small would lead me to believe that it might actually be the *least* important variable.

Price/performance is what is going to drive the market.

To prove this, please answer the following question. If you had an opportunity to buy two processors, processor A that scores 100 in a benchmark and costs $300 and processor B that scores 110 in a benchmark but costs $900, which one would you buy?

If performance per thread is the #1 criteria, dig deep, you're spending 300% more for 10% more performance. If performance per thread is not the #1 criteria then congratulations, you are joining the rest of the real world.
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+1

Even though most of us here don't represent the real world & do pay more in % for only a tiny % more in performance but as you can see some people forget that most of the world don't think like that or do what we do..
 
It's simply going to come down to performance for me. I'm eyeing up an Intel DH67CF board with an i7-2600S so the bar has been set.

Hopefully we'll find out this/next month what to expect and I can either get on with buying SB or waiting for Bulldozer.
 
I don't plan to upgrade until next summer, so no I won't be replacing my 965 + 5870


Bulldozer is a winner for AMD.

This entire forum is focusing on such meaningless parameters such as price/performance, performance per thread, die size etc... All important to people such as me or you.

However, we are certainly not the mainstream. When someone goes into the purple place and sees an intel machine and an AMD machine, where the AMD machine has double the core count. They will buy the AMD machine.

Most people don't understand how computers work, and will go by the principle that more is better. Quite often, it is.
 
All those thinking bulldozer will be better, better start praying because AMD are now a best performance for the price type operation and it wont touch 2011 or highly ramped 1155 systems. As for the 'octo' core, who cares, I mean most desktop users will see no real benefit from that, hell we are still waiting for quad cores to be properly utilised and how long have they been about now. Even the 6-core AMD cpu's are only worth it because of their cost. The last time for me that AMD were on it so to speak was when they launched their socket 939 Athlon 64 line which was superb. Ever since then sadly they seem to be stagnating R&D wise. When Core 2 landed they were screwed and what did they come back with............the Phenom........yay
 
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Liquid said:
All those thinking bulldozer will be better, better start praying because AMD are now a best performance for the price type operation and it wont touch 2011 or highly ramped 1155 systems. As for the 'octo' core, who cares, I mean most desktop users will see no real benefit from that, hell we are still waiting for quad cores to be properly utilised and how long have they been about now. Even the 6-core AMD cpu's are only worth it because of their cost. The last time for me that AMD were on it so to speak was when they launched their socket 939 Athlon 64 line which was superb. Ever since then sadly they seem to be stagnating R&D wise. When Core 2 landed they were screwed and what did they come back with............the Phenom........yay
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Cut them a bit of slack... they make nowhere near the money intel do, the fact they even managed to beat intel from time to time is pretty outstanding.
 
MaxP779 said:
Cut them a bit of slack... they make nowhere near the money intel do, the fact they even managed to beat intel from time to time is pretty outstanding.
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Don't get me wrong i'm no fanboy, Ive had amd before and I am sure I will again at some point in the future.
 
sorry to hijack the thread, Neallnufc you have the exact same system as I'm planning on getting could you give a brief mini guide on the asrock. what have you managed to clock the 2600k to wit it 24/7 use
 
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