Thursday, October 13th 2011
Bulldozer Aims For 50% Improvement By 2014: Is This Really Enough To Counter Intel?
The reviews are now out for AMD's brand new Bulldozer architecture, in the form of the Zambezi FX 8120 & FX 8150 processors and they don't paint a pretty picture of these flagship products. The chips use lots of power, run hot and significantly underperform compared to their Intel competition. On top of that, they are being marketed as 8 core processors, when they are actually 4 core with an advanced form of multi-threading, due to the siamesed nature of each dual processor module. Perhaps to counter this negative publicity and try to restore some faith in the AMD brand, they have released a roadmap for the planned improvements to the architecture, all the way to 2014 - an ambitious timeline, given how much and how unexpectedly things can change at the cutting edge of the technology world.
Looking at the chart, one can see that the various architectures Piledriver, Steamroller and Excavator all add up to between 30-50% projected improvement by 2014 (subject to change without notice, of course). These are all names designed to impart a tough-guy image to their products to give one the impression that they must perform very well, beating the competition into submission. Therefore, if they fail to perform competitively against Intel, those names will continue to be branding embarrassments like Bulldozer is, currently. As Intel is already 20-50% faster right now depending on the benchmark, how are these modest improvements possibly going to compete with Intel's future products? AMD has already had a change of management at the top recently, so we can only hope that the right CEO comes along and turns them around, otherwise they may end up not manufacturing x86 processors at all in future, possibly becoming a GPU company only.
The main problem with the current Bulldozer architecture is that it's very, very late to market. AMD started working on it four years ago in 2007, which is a very long time in the world of desktop processors, so AMD have effectively released a new "old" product. The two important things that it has going for it, are that it scales well with core count and clock speed - those 8GHz overclock marketing demos weren't completely without merit. What we need to see is AMD improving performance much more than the prediction slide they've released, more like 100% or more perhaps, which is not really such an unrealistic target to achieve in three years of design and process improvements. Perhaps discarding this whole architecture and starting afresh with fully discreet cores like on the Phenom might be the way forward? AMD has recently let go some of its top-level management, so perhaps their replacements can turn the company around?
So, even if AMD achieves this projected performance improvement and more, will it really be enough to counter Intel, or will Intel steamroller AMD's Bulldozer back into submission?Source:X-bit labs and Bulldozer block diagram courtesy of Hexus' FX 8150 review.
The main problem with the current Bulldozer architecture is that it's very, very late to market. AMD started working on it four years ago in 2007, which is a very long time in the world of desktop processors, so AMD have effectively released a new "old" product. The two important things that it has going for it, are that it scales well with core count and clock speed - those 8GHz overclock marketing demos weren't completely without merit. What we need to see is AMD improving performance much more than the prediction slide they've released, more like 100% or more perhaps, which is not really such an unrealistic target to achieve in three years of design and process improvements. Perhaps discarding this whole architecture and starting afresh with fully discreet cores like on the Phenom might be the way forward? AMD has recently let go some of its top-level management, so perhaps their replacements can turn the company around?
So, even if AMD achieves this projected performance improvement and more, will it really be enough to counter Intel, or will Intel steamroller AMD's Bulldozer back into submission?Source:X-bit labs and Bulldozer block diagram courtesy of Hexus' FX 8150 review.
132 Comments on Bulldozer Aims For 50% Improvement By 2014: Is This Really Enough To Counter Intel?
As for the Patch, it's already been confirmed, Windows 7 does a bad job with Bulldozer style of design. If people think this patch business is BS, then why does Bulldozer perform much better in Windows 8 :confused: :D
As mentioned, why does it perform better in Windows 8? Looking around on the internet, some people are seeing some minor boosts in performance running windows 8. Others are showing it almost even though.
Assuming the latter then 10% is what you should expect a patch to be capable of with a windows 7 patch.
If threading is the issue though, has anyone tried enabling Thread ordering service on BD in 7?
Back OT: If they release a 12 core CPU at same clocks and same power usage by 2014, they have met their goal (50% performance improvement). Since that is what they are striving for, multi threaded designs only, it is a completely believable roadmap.
Most everyone is saying this is a Fab and windows 7 issue (although windows 7 has been out so long, how they could not have known and created a patch for it at launch is beyond me).
Anyhow, they've been quite LAZY for the past several years.
But it is changing, BF3 leading the way, Skyrim I expect to make use of multiple cores as well... It definitely is the way forward.
I wouldn't design a highway that needed 4 lanes with 2 lanes. Bottom line. People would crash and burn....amirite?
And speak of this patch.....I heard Ryan shroudt and Patrick Norton talking about it ...they expect 4-6 percent. And I trust them.
We can hope that Piledriver will be a nail in Intel's coffin :D
instead of dropping cash on a problem child. I haven't had any problem with
my CPU and have it running cool and quiet at 3.7 on a Micro ATX.
If it has 6 or 8 cores available UNDER $1000 I will be surprised
If you followed JF-AMD's posts on web, he started not to talk about IPC at some point. In addition, AMD CEO and other top staff left; that should have been enough signals that BD wasn't going as good as they hoped.
Well, I shouldn't have sold my semi-rare 95w 1065T part, dang it. But I've found i3-2100T (35w) to be a very good cpu for very small builds. AMD has nothing (not even close) that can compete with i3-2100T at the moment.
So, I guess it's Intel for me for a while.
I for one am going to pick one up when the bloody thing becomes available.
My 3000+ clocks better though lol Ive hit as far as 2.7 or 2.8Ghz on it
PII X4 980 is $180
FX 8150 is $282
and the FX is only faster by about %10 some of the time. The extra $100 doesn't buy you much.