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Official Bulldozer Reviews

I am surprised intel have not raised the prices slightly. The amount of people who are switching to intel atm due to the bulldozer disappointment they could be make an even bigger killing.
 
Well, BD is very similar to Prescott in many ways, it is very very sensitive to the code quality, due to the fact that each thread of a core only have 2 large decoder, the front end is very limited, and you have to wait for more decode steps to feed your out of order more parallelism opportunity.

This is the major difference with hyper threading, where each thread can get up to 5 large decoding. This cause heavy dependancy on the code scheduling for BD, this is fairly hard to overcome without adding more hardware on each side of the BD decoder ... I am sure that for the last 2 years, AMD has been trying to overcome this .... The problem is that it will cost even more transistors and dice space ==> $$$

This is without counting with the register files of the FP units that need to be dispatch too to each side of the int pipelines. Many opportunity for locking issues there too.

BD will stay very sensitive to code quality as long as the front end is not 4 large on each side of the threads, this is the bottom line.

Hope it is ok to share my point of view and personal analysis of the performance issues.

It is ok to disagree ;-)

Francois Piednoel
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http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...nally-tested&p=4972103&viewfull=1#post4972103

This guy works for Intel i think but my memory is sketchy of him.

Yep: Senior Performance Analyst / System Architect. at Intel Corp

But still he had some kind words.

Noticed that I am quiet too ;-)

I think everybody needs to cool down a little. JF-AMD is like me, passionate about what he does, if you don't believe into it, you can't put so much energy into making those Processors.
Green or Blue, we are all Geeks excited and just never forget, those Processors are the most complex machines build by human kind, at the smallest scale.

Not one man can claim to make any of this by himself, those are massive undertaking, the size of those transistors are mind blowing.

so, yes, there is competition, and yes, this architecture is not the happiest , but at least show some respect to the men who dedicated their life to build such complex machines.
It is ok to make a little fun of it, but please respect the men behind it, and get some perceptive, see how large is the achievement of putting something like Bulldozer together.

So, I am respectfully asking all of you to stay gentlemen ... No personal attack is ever acceptable.

Thanks all , stay on the high road!

Francois Piednoel
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http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...nally-tested&p=4971235&viewfull=1#post4971235
 
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One: Go for worse BD and your money will be a waste
Two: Go for sandybridge instead and your money is every worth it
Three: Wait for Ivybridge coming soon and start saving up

The choice is your!
 
Have anyone seen reviews testing BD for hosting VMs yet? It seems to be a server chip at heart so should be up to it and if it does well compared to the SB line up it could be a reason for me to get one.
 
wolvers said:
I can't think of anything except for games, that don't use more up to date engines that can take advantage of multi-threading properly, and even then they tend to be games that will run at high fps easily anyway. Anything else that is properly CPU intensive that I am likely to do with my cpu will be properly multi-threaded so will surely benefit from BD's design.
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The thing is, whether games are using 'up to date engines' or not is a bit of a moot point when it comes to buying a CPU for gaming; you want good performance regardless of the reason for it. Bashing game engines is pretty common on forums.... "you can't count GTA4, that is just badly coded" or whatever, but as a gamer all that matters to me is what hardware is giving the best results regardless of how 'fair' the game may be on given hardware.

Also looking at the benchmarks it seems that not all games are running at high FPS, for example Anand's SC2 bench clocks the 8150 at under 50fps average (meaning min fps probably significantly lower). Likewise DoW2, average 51.5fps compared to SandyBridge series averaging over 30fps more. The worry is that it seems to be the more traditionally CPU-intensive games/genre (RTS) where BD is suffering the most, whereas obviously for the more GPU intensive games everything tends to bunch together at 'proper' resolutions.

I understand where you are coming from in terms of the suggestion that BD's biggest deficiencies arise in scenarioes that shouldn't be that common, but sadly it just doesn't have the redeeming features to make up for it. If BD had 12 cores and/or was churning out truly stellar multithreaded performance we might forgive lacklustre performance in lightly threaded applications, assuming the power consumption wasn't any higher than it is already. But it simply isn't there, aside from maybe the odd scenario it certainly isn't crushing the 2600k even on its 'home turf'.
 
i cant understand why everyone is so shocked and still trying to defend amd

everyone should relise by now if amd had somthing massivly good and were having no prolems with it then it would have been out when it was suppose to be

every time they delay things its not for a good reason
 
wrote this elsewhere but was wondering if any test sites had done this or something equivalent


for gaming, I would like to see if the CPU helps. Ie use 1920x1080, give us a 6970, then cf, then 6990, and with the nvidia side, 580, 580 sli, 590.

this way the gpu can be seen if its limiting or not, and with the more taxing systems if the CPU comes into play.


so, for example:

2500k vs fx8150

6970, 55fps vs 55fps
6970cf 100 fps vs 70
6990 90 fps vs 70 fps.

this would show real world gaming, and that if down the line you upgrade your gpu or add another if there is a bottle neck.
 
Waited 6 months for this, even went AM3+ socket proof. Not a massive surprise, signes were there, still a shame. 1090T isnt even worth upgrading now. Why didnt i go 2005k when i had a chance
 
mike712 said:
I registered to make this post, I would like to ask opinions on this review: http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...sor-vs-core-i7-2600k-review-introduction.html

Are people perhaps just overeating to bad testing method and misleading test data elsewhere, since the gaming tests they ran shows that the FX 8150 compares quite favorably to an I7 chip in real world gaming scenarios in some of the newest games?
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They've taken an approach that involves testing the cpu as part of the system in scenarios where most people would use it rightly or wrongly.

Whilst all the rest have focused on just testing the cpu in isolation rightly or wrongly.

What you find important is up to you.

Basically the review you posted says if you game at high detail with a res of >1080p and the latest gpu you can expect slightly better performance than a 2600K in the latest highly multithreaded games,albeit with a power draw penalty. Some multi threaded apps are good too.
 
kitch9 said:
Basically the review you posted says if you game at high detail with a res of >1080p and the latest gpu you can expect slightly better performance than a 2600K in the latest highly multithreaded games,albeit with a power draw penalty. Some multi threaded apps are good too.
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The other penalty though could be gimped performance from future GPUs because there are some benches knocking around with multi-gpu set ups that have the BD well behind at similar game settings. DX11 should definitely help it because it's multi-threaded use is good so BF3 it should perform OK in.

I still can't come up with a good reason, apart from possibly with older games, to be that bothered about the single threaded performance?
 
wolvers said:
I still can't come up with a good reason, apart from possibly with older games, to be that bothered about the single threaded performance?
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Because many games still only use 2 'main' threads, no good having 8 average cores that are amazing with 8 threads when only 2 are really being used.

In that situation it's more down to per core efficiency, which BD lacks.
 
Read the Anandtech review this morning, doesn't look good at all, especially being the high end chip tested.
 
Crying shame, I've got a Phenom 2 BE in my home server but i7 in my main desktop.

I can remember having my AMD Athlon XP-M barton 2500+ cpu running on an Abit NF7S mobo, what a cracking combination! Massive amounts of bang for the buck and overclcoked to a silly level!

Their roadmap for the future also looks worrying, if they are only looking at a 15-20% increase in performance every 12 months then I dare say Intel are going to continue kicking their backside for the forseeable future which will only hurt us the consumer. How could they have got it soooooo wrong.
 
Meh, the only really disappointing thing is the power consumption.

The performance is pretty what I expected. If you really thought AMD was going to release an 8 core with IPC anywhere near Sandybridge, and then price it at ~£200, then it's your own fault for having unrealistic expectations.

The early Bulldozer slides showed that a module would have 80% of the power of two cores, as well. It was supposed to make up for the loss of IPC in its very high clock speeds and efficiency (but that didn't quite happen).

IMO, the Bulldozer architecture is great, and in future revisions and die shrinks, I expect it to do well.

Edit: You can also expect to see atleast a 5-10% performance increase as well when the Windows scheduler is updated/patched.
 
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