Friday, December 2nd 2011
AMD Realizes That Bulldozer Has 800 Million LESS Transistors Than It Thought!
AMD's new flagship Bulldozer "FX" series of processors have turned out to be mediocre performers in almost every review and benchmark going, sometimes even getting bested by the existing Phenom II and certainly no match for their Intel competition. To add to this tale of fail, it now turns out that AMD didn't even know how many transistors they have! Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech received an email from AMD's PR department and this is the revelation he had to share with us:
Yes, something as basic as how many transistors are in their flagship product wasn't known about until months after the launch! This kind of info would be common knowledge within the company by the time the first tape-out is ready during the design and testing phase, so surely this cannot be and there must be some other explanation? If this is an attempt to make the processor look better by showing it "doing more with less", then this PR stunt has backfired spectacularly and it would have been better to have left the "error" as it was. Paradoxically, FX processors are a sales success and are flying off the shelves as we just reported, here.
Source:
AnandTech
This is a bit unusual. I got an email from AMD PR this week asking me to correct the Bulldozer transistor count in our Sandy Bridge E review. The incorrect number, provided to me (and other reviewers) by AMD PR around 3 months ago was 2 billion transistors. The actual transistor count for Bulldozer is apparently 1.2 billion transistors. I don't have an explanation as to why the original number was wrong, just that the new number has been triple checked by my contact and is indeed right. The total die area for a 4-module/8-core Bulldozer remains correct at 315 mm².
142 Comments on AMD Realizes That Bulldozer Has 800 Million LESS Transistors Than It Thought!
AMD has been using Intel designs since after K6(and before but that isn't really important is it)
K7, K8, K10 -> Intel Alpha CPUs
K15 -> Intel Architect, Andy Glew
Pretty much everything AMD makes has an Intel stamp on it...if it is a CPU based architecture
P.S. NWM, just looked up "Sherman Antitrust Act".
Gotta admit, AMD is getting a lot of PR for all this. Good or bad, their name is still getting out there. Perhaps there was more brilliance with removing the ATI name. Without Radeon I'm sure AMD's name would be even more mucked up right now. General consumers aren't smart enough to tell the difference. Course it can work the other way too, but the Radeon branding is likely the deciding factor which prevents that.
Anyway if someone worked at an another company and now he/she works at amd, it doesn't mean the company's new design will be that man's former company's design.
I hope you understand what i'm trying to say.
This was a nasty underhand tactic, if ever I saw one and Intel rightly deserved to get nailed for this. I believe this may have been part of the now settled antitrust lawsuit that AMD filed against Intel.
I'll stick to buying what performs best for the price I'm looking to pay.
Whatever you want, the thing is that the end customer is being beneficted with this struggle beacause if you note the prices was going down from some years ago, so we are winning at the end, because we can take good technologies at lower cost, that is the point, or you didnt note this on gamming video cards also, i think that the AMD is not working in order to make a big deal like INTEL, i would like to think that the AMD is working in order that all of us can approach technology to our self benefict, and say which is good or not good is not important, the main conclusion is what is what you want because if you note at the end both does the homework one some seconds before but that is not the thing is that both works well.
PS: People discuss abour which is better disregarding price i would discuss about cost/benefict because at the end every one of us has to work in order to pay for every chip maker.
That being said, AMD runs their public relations and marketing teams in-house. This is a terrible error on their side, but not the only one that's happened in the world, and certainly not one as huge as others that have happened. Read up on Wal-Marting Across America, that's a real fun case study.
So I was not agreeing with the notion that this is "just another mistake by their useless marketing team", it is a major corporate blunder, along with much of the bulldozer launch.
I hope they get past this, because we all need to see good competition in the higher end CPU bracket.
Like David (CP) says intel beats AMD in the numbers, but amd is way snappy. I agree. I played on an Intel monster as the local guy called it and to be honest I thought it was a tad on the slower side. But like I said its just numbers... Im sure code is and or written in software to favor one brand over another. Anyways just take what I said with a grain of salt :cool:
And I'll continue having fun being SLOW as you say hahahahah :rockout: