Official Bulldozer Reviews

Sin_Chase · 14 Oct 2011 at 12:44

Unrealistic? AMD themselves said there would be an IPC increase over previous gen chips.....it gets beat by older chips. You expected older chips to be able to do better than in?

wolvers · 14 Oct 2011 at 13:03

HeX said:
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.

I get all that, I just fail to see what I am doing on my PC that is only single threaded where I would really be missing out. Anything that I'm likely to do that is heavily CPU intensive, BD (and the X6 chips to some degree) does well at because they tend to be proper multi-threaded apps. Everything else is not going to show any tangible difference because they're just not that CPU intensive, if they were they would be supporting multi-threading by now.

There's only 2 areas I can see BD has really fallen down on;

One is gaming performance, but only if I choose to run my games at 1024x768 :rolleyes:

or have 3 gpus and and aren't happy with 100+ fps otherwise I will actually gain some performance at the settings that I do actually play at (which I still don't full understand tbh) and in future DX11 titles that should be multi-threaded.

Two is power usage which is clearly poor compared to SB, except for idle which is good enough to say is of a negligible difference. But then it is about the same my 920 so is it really that bad? I know it's a generation behind but it was OK then and still is now.

Just trying to get some perspective really amongst all the drama that spouts forth from the internet.

Sin_Chase · 14 Oct 2011 at 13:06

Christ......

Low resolution testing is not for real world application. ITS TO DISCOVER THE HEADROOM OF THE CPU, IN A CPU TEST, TO GO FURTHER WHEN THE GPU IS NOT LIMITING IT.

Assuming equal pricing why would you not want the CPU which will have more space to let more powerful GPUs shine?

If all you want is an adequate CPU to play games why are you interested in BD _at all_? Just stick with an old CPU.

wolvers · 14 Oct 2011 at 13:16

Err, sounds like you're getting your knickers in a twist. It's just a discussion.

Sin_Chase said:
Assuming equal pricing why would you not want the CPU which will have more space to let more powerful GPUs shine?

Absolutely, if that is the case then no you wouldn't. I'd quite like to see, out of interest, that hardocp gaming review done with a second 6970 to see how BF3 scales with BD and more GPU power.

Sin_Chase said:
If all you want is an adequate CPU to play games why are you interested in BD _at all_? Just stick with an old CPU.

Because more threads is better for proper CPU intensive applications, so it may well suit the user. No?

stulid · 14 Oct 2011 at 13:30

MSI and ASrock have BIOS updates for some boards.

http://event.msi.com/mb/am3+/
http://www.asrock.com/news/index.asp?cat=News&ID=254

But some of the boards are still limited to 95W etc meaning the FX 8150 is out of reach.

ATIorNvidia · 14 Oct 2011 at 14:46

Sin_Chase said:
Unrealistic? AMD themselves said there would be an IPC increase over previous gen chips.....it gets beat by older chips. You expected older chips to be able to do better than in?

I personally expected clock for clock performance to be lower than Phenom II, but pull ahead slightly because of the much bigger clock speed headroom (and I admit, I am SLIGHTLY disappointed, but not a whole lot). It does this in *some* cases, but not quite consistently enough (and if you check, most reviews are incredibly inconsistent), which is probably the OS's/software's fault.

Also, hardware comes first, and software comes after. Bulldozer is new, and very different.

And yes, I do think it's unrealistic expectations. If Bulldozer had the clock for clock/single threaded performance of Phenom II, coupled with the fact that it has 8 cores, a far superior instruction set, and can clock to ~4.8Ghz, then the flagship chip would not be £200.

Nightglow · 14 Oct 2011 at 14:55

I had been waiting for it, & was expecting so much. :mad:

Due to having both my pc's dying within days of each other, I settled for a 2500K, glad I did now.

Evil-I · 14 Oct 2011 at 14:56

wolvers said:
I get all that, I just fail to see what I am doing on my PC that is only single threaded where I would really be missing out. Anything that I'm likely to do that is heavily CPU intensive, BD (and the X6 chips to some degree) does well at because they tend to be proper multi-threaded apps.

Yet the 8 core BD is performing about the same or worse than the x6 core Phenom IIs in cinema 4d, which is about as multithread efficient as anything out there......

If it was showing massive multithreaded performance gains over thier own past generation CPUs whilst sacrificing on the single thread gain at least there would be some sense, but they aren't.

Its not like the issue is the performance against intel, it BDs performance against their own previous generation thats the really big issue....

LeJosh · 14 Oct 2011 at 15:34

I'm sure I read they opted for longer pipeline for higher clocks. Why? No idea.

wolvers · 14 Oct 2011 at 15:35

Evil-I said:
Yet the 8 core BD is performing about the same or worse than the x6 core Phenom IIs in cinema 4d, which is about as multithread efficient as anything out there......

Is that the Cinebench tests in the Anandtech review? The 2500k is only 10%-20% slower than the 2600k in those yet has only 50% of the number of threads available and at a lower clock speed. Not very multi-thread efficient then really.

DragonQ · 14 Oct 2011 at 16:07

A core with HyperThreading is not two real cores. With two real cores, if you run two identical threads it should get a 100% speed boost compared to running just one thread at a time. However, the benefit of running two identical threads (or even different threads) on a core with HyperThreading completely depends on what the thread(s) is doing. For example, some things barely benefit at all from HyperThreading (e.g. most games), whereas x264 gets a ~35% speed boost and some scientific number crunchers that I use get a ~50% speed boost.

wolvers · 14 Oct 2011 at 16:16

A 'module' isn't 2 real cores either is it?

Final8y · 14 Oct 2011 at 16:24

wolvers said:
A 'module' isn't 2 real cores either is it?

That's why i would like to see a 6 module 12 core Bull.

StriderX · 14 Oct 2011 at 16:25

Final8y said:
That's why i would like to see a 12 core Bull.

That would melt the motherboard... :rolleyes:

dave_beast · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:20

Make the 8150 £99 and it's an ok buy, but £200, no, just no.

mmj_uk · 14 Oct 2011 at 17:43

dave_beast said:
Make the 8150 £99 and it's an ok buy, but £200, no, just no.

£150 would be reasonable but I'd still struggle to justify buying one over an X6 or 2500K.

If X6 is phased out and Bulldozer prices don't come down AMD are going to help boost 2500K/2600K sales immensely.

Sin_Chase · 14 Oct 2011 at 18:06

wolvers said:
Because more threads is better for proper CPU intensive applications, so it may well suit the user. No?

Not at the cost of gaming head room and single thread performance.

Get the all round better chip that loses out marginally in some areas but smashes the competition everywhere else.

I.E. 2500/2600k

Phatzy · 14 Oct 2011 at 18:31

Looks as thou AMD share price has dropped all the way from to $9 to $4.90 since the rumours of the poor performance started floating around the web. Not looking good.

Daniel Berenbaum

“It’s difficult to recommend aggressively shorting AMD with the stock already at $5, but we maintain our view that AMD is being structurally squeezed by poor competitive positioning and longstanding operational struggles,” he writes. “AMD is on the verge of sinking into irrelevancy as ARM-based competitors gain share in low-end computing and Intel extends its advantages in performance and manufacturing.

“It’s difficult to remember the last product AMD launched on time, and it is now evident that, even aside from manufacturing challenges with partner GlobalFoundries, AMD’s technology roadmap is severely lagging,” he writes. “Third-party reviews indicate that the performance of new products based on the Bulldozer architecture is disappointing – this means that AMD will likely remain a bystander in the ongoing data center build cycle (which has accrued significant benefit to Intel), and will now also miss a window to compete in consumer PCs.”

Source

Final8y · 14 Oct 2011 at 18:39

Phatzy said:
Looks as thou AMD share price has dropped all the way from to $9 to $4.90 since the rumours of the poor performance started floating around the web. Not looking good.

Source

I can't see where it says when it was at $9 because doubt that it lost that in that time and was going down before hand.

Phatzy · 14 Oct 2011 at 18:44

Final8y said:
I can't see where it says when it was at $9 because doubt that it lost that in that time and was going down before hand.

I stand corrected $7.5 ish sorry