Bulldozer Aims For 50% Improvement By 2014: Is This Really Enough To Counter Intel?

[Jstn7477]

I don't know who to believe anymore. :shadedshu

I think I'll be going to Intel for a while. 1155 sounds like it has an upgrade path (Ivy) and it simply does its job. I played Brink multiplayer tonight and it was annoyingly choppy most of the time, even with a 4GHz PII X4 and an overclocked HD 5770. Crappy console port or not, it's still pretty lame that BD has trouble competing against PII X6 processors, so I don't feel it would be much of an upgrade.

 

[nothappy]

Worth of the device

I am an enthusiast with low income, I bought my 5770 a year after its launch. And now with HD7000 at the horizon, I worked my butt off to get me a new rig. But alas the HMS AMD hit an iceberg, does the hull made of scrap? is there a breach in the hull? is there an intelligent being left onboard?

My ATHLON 64 X2 5200+ has been with me for 3 good long years, and now I am thinking of buying ether a VGA card or SSD. To have a HD6850 or above and then much later when I see a processor worth buying I'll add another HD7000 and called the machine "Zeroshift : Generations". I just hope its an AMD, but if it's an INTEL? then I call it "Zeroshift : Lost Generation".

Just a Vent, sorry about taking space

 

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

I don't know who to believe anymore. :shadedshu

I think I'll be going to Intel for a while. 1155 sounds like it has an upgrade path (Ivy) and it simply does its job. I played Brink multiplayer tonight and it was annoyingly choppy most of the time, even with a 4GHz PII X4 and an overclocked HD 5770. Crappy console port or not, it's still pretty lame that BD has trouble competing against PII X6 processors, so I don't feel it would be much of an upgrade.

Your a fool to believe AMD anymore as they have yet to miss a chance to fail.

 

[15th Warlock]

WTF? AMD is in full retard mode, who handles their PR? I would fire their collective asses; is hyping all that's left to them? AMD better get down to earth and get their $hit together, or they risk become another Cyrix or Via, with no influence in the x86 market at all...

At least they've got Ati to fall back to... What a shame, as others said, we can only wait and watch as Intel processor prices go sky high, so much promise wasted...:shadedshu

 

[Super XP]

I would estimate only 1% (Us PC builders) know what's really going on with Bulldozer. This is why AMD's PR people will make Bulldozer look great with all the colourful pictures. Companies like HP, DELL, ASUS, ACER and so on are going to make killer sales with AMD FX CPU's.

 

[zx679]

SuperXP is right. AMD needs IBM and they need them NOW. They need some serious technical leadership. People are desperately looking for 'silver linings' in Bulldozer's middling performance but the reality is this: Bulldozer puts AMD in a position where AMD competes only with its existing product line. Without more performance soon AMD will have to continue slashing prices in order to create 'value'.

I guess AMD learned nothing from ATi's mistakes. When ATi released released chips with architectures that were too forward thinking performance suffered. We don't need chips that will supposedly handle highly threaded applications very well five years from now. We need chips that run today's moderately threaded applications well.

 

[Batou1986]

By 2014 intel will have chips 50% faster then there current offerings which will put AMD 100% behind them, this claim only makes AMD look worse.
Now if they would have said a 30% faster on windows 8 new threading capabilities then it would be worth putting out there.

 

[sunil]

Unfortunately I see nothing wrong with BD We have more powerful CPU in 2012 and next year is going to be an incredible year.

 

[ViperXTR]

I am an enthusiast with low income, I bought my 5770 a year after its launch. And now with HD7000 at the horizon, I worked my butt off to get me a new rig. But alas the HMS AMD hit an iceberg, does the hull made of scrap? is there a breach in the hull? is there an intelligent being left onboard?

My ATHLON 64 X2 5200+ has been with me for 3 good long years, and now I am thinking of buying ether a VGA card or SSD. To have a HD6850 or above and then much later when I see a processor worth buying I'll add another HD7000 and called the machine "Zeroshift : Generations". I just hope its an AMD, but if it's an INTEL? then I call it "Zeroshift : Lost Generation".

Just a Vent, sorry about taking space

Former X2 5200+ user here (~OC'd to ~3.1Ghz+) good times
VGA upgrade? going from 9600GT to GTX 460SE oc'd for me didn't offer much difference, changing the processor however, is a different story.

 

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

Unfortunately I see nothing wrong with BD We have more powerful CPU in 2012 and next year is going to be an incredible year.

http://i263.photobucket.com/albums/ii144/dinarek/10-13-20117-38-20PM.jpg

I lol'd


That's what everyone said about bulldozer .. .. :shadedshu

 

[semantics]

is it going to take 50% more watts to oc it, cuz i don't think the planet can take it.

 

[MikeMurphy]

They took 4 years to actually get worse IPC while handily doubling the transistor count.

I don't expect SB IPC at all, but getting WORSE single-threaded IPC over the ancient K10.5???? I have no faith in what they'll do in the next few years.

Honestly, they shouldn't have even released BD for desktop CPUs. They should have done an entire K10.6 update as they did on Llano and then work hard on a BD fix for the major issues it has.

 

[TRWOV]

I don't know who to believe anymore. :shadedshu

I think I'll be going to Intel for a while. 1155 sounds like it has an upgrade path (Ivy) and it simply does its job. I played Brink multiplayer tonight and it was annoyingly choppy most of the time, even with a 4GHz PII X4 and an overclocked HD 5770. Crappy console port or not, it's still pretty lame that BD has trouble competing against PII X6 processors, so I don't feel it would be much of an upgrade.

Don't be mistaken. That the PII X6 beats the FX-8150 in some benchmarks doesn't mean that it will beat it in all of them.

In your case it seems an issue with memory bandwidth, which PII lacks (Sandy Bridge has almost twice). The FX falls right in the middle in that regard.

They took 4 years to actually get worse IPC while handily doubling the transistor count.

I don't expect SB IPC at all, but getting WORSE single-threaded IPC over the ancient K10.5???? I have no faith in what they'll do in the next few years.

Honestly, they shouldn't have even released BD for desktop CPUs. They should have done an entire K10.6 update as they did on Llano and then work hard on a BD fix for the major issues it has.

With the fact that Piledriver is being released so soon I believe that AMD knew about the design's problems (branch prediction, pipeline flushing, cache trashing, decode unit not wide enough) but instead counted on higher frequencies to make up until Piledriver could be released. Anandtech's review also shows that cache latency is worse than Phenom II. Both problems can be blamed on Global Foundries' poor 32nm process. Cache latency can be increased and clockspeeds lowered to get higher yields.

I think that AMD saw the problems that needed reworking but decided that clockspeed would be enough to counter them for the time being but then a few months later they find that yields were too poor and had no choice but to launch as is.

 

[MilkyWay]

I reckon they need to go more than 50% to keep up with intel. Imagine how much better intel processors will be at that time.

Ive always had AMDs since Duron but im really considering going Sandybridge because i dont think AMD have anything going for them anymore.

 

[RejZoR]

Where is the design team that brought us AMD Athlon (K7, Thunderbird) and AMD Athlon XP chips!? Those were really the golden days for AMD. I remember owning both of them, the AMD Thunderbird 1GHz (the first CPU that reached 1GHz clock at the time) and later AMD AthlonXP 2400+. Athlon64 era wasn't bad but then it all just went straight down. Only good thing coming from AMD these days are the low end and mid end parts where GPU bytes competition in the ass. C-50, C-60 and E-350 and E-450 are great combos. Same for A3 and A5 chips. But as far as CPU only goes, a bit disappointed...

 

[Thefumigator]

at this moment shrinking K6-III could be a nice thing to try...

 

[HXL492]

The fermi was really messed up when it came out and look where where it is now. I see great potential in bulldozer and i hope amd gets it fixed by the time i purchase a new pc

 

[Undead46]

You guys don't know what you're talking about, I can't wait to see AMD whoop Intel's beehind in 2014!!

 

[Syborfical]

2014 in AMD's timeline.

so that would be 2020 + in the real world?


AMD needs fix there mistakes in 3 months and actually release it on time.
Other wise they will lose more and more people.

 

[Completely Bonkers]

3 years to gain 50% performance improvement? Hmm, If Moore's law states 100% improvement every 18-24 months, then at 36 months they should be at 100%*(36/24)^2=225% improvement.

Therefore AMD is aiming at 50%/225% of the performance envelope, which is only 20% of what Moore's law would predict as being theoretically possible.

Now, is Moore's law completely wrong, or is AMD complete FAIL?

++++++

Someone made a very valid observation in a previous post, that AMD made a strategic mistake by killing the CPU design team and replacing them with a cpu-by-software construction kit playgroup. It's like replacing machine code/assembly programmers with people who can only write stuff in BASIC. No matter how good the compiler, a compiled BASIC program will never get anywhere near the performance of hand coded machine code. And it will also miss many conceptual tricks for performance along the way.

AMD is so far behind they have to admit they are now in a different race. They need to target the value segment and third world segments. I think they could do well developing PC SoC concepts... everything but the RAM on one chip. Great, cheap, small middle- and low-end stuff. Perhaps they should also try their hand at consoles.

 

[naoan]

Déjà vu

 

[the54thvoid]

The fermi was really messed up when it came out and look where where it is now. I see great potential in bulldozer and i hope amd gets it fixed by the time i purchase a new pc

Well, to be honest, you must be referring to the GF100 (GTX 480 - very hot and loud) but which was still the most powerful gpu. BD is not the most powerful cpu. The GF110 (GTX 580) addressed some of the problems but still had a high power consumption. Nvidia has had overly hot and power hungry chips since GF 100. ATI (AMD) in that time produced marginally lesser gpu's but with far higher power efficiency - i.e. if you scaled up a ATI card to match Fermi power levels, you'd get a faster card (hypothetically speaking).

BD is more power hungry than SB AND performs worse. But i don't disagree, BD (in PD guise) has more potential but then Ivybridge should release on a smaller fab with better power efficiency than SB and better performance.

AMD will lag behind whichever way you look at it. It needs to stop shouting about how great it is and deliver a cost/performance winning chip - which BD isn't compared to it's own Phenom 1100.

 

[laszlo]

people don't forget that amd barely managed to survive so R&D is not what should be; i don't even compare to Intel $7.3 billion R&D for 2011 when Amd total revenue is $6.49 billion in 2010 so we get what they afford nothing more or less .

 

[Crap Daddy]

They have to give out signals to the shareholders, investors whatever that they are working on something magical. They can't say now, look we'll have 3% increase in IPC over the next year. So this makes sense in a way, as it was the case when they presented Bulldozer long time ago as a big step forward. On the other hand things aren't looking to bright for them. Luckily Ivy will be a just a die-shrink of the current Sandy and if AMD will manage to improve a bit the FX series - like Nvidia did very quickly and in a spectacular way with Fermi - then there's hope for them.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

I am an enthusiast with low income, I bought my 5770 a year after its launch. And now with HD7000 at the horizon, I worked my butt off to get me a new rig. But alas the HMS AMD hit an iceberg, does the hull made of scrap? is there a breach in the hull? is there an intelligent being left onboard?

My ATHLON 64 X2 5200+ has been with me for 3 good long years, and now I am thinking of buying ether a VGA card or SSD. To have a HD6850 or above and then much later when I see a processor worth buying I'll add another HD7000 and called the machine "Zeroshift : Generations". I just hope its an AMD, but if it's an INTEL? then I call it "Zeroshift : Lost Generation".

Just a Vent, sorry about taking space

maybe you should change the name of your current PC to 'Zeroshift: LAST Generation'

haha, Im only kidding

Unfortunately I see nothing wrong with BD We have more powerful CPU in 2012 and next year is going to be an incredible year.

http://i263.photobucket.com/albums/ii144/dinarek/10-13-20117-38-20PM.jpg

Yes!!! It will be an INCREDIBLE year for intel. AMD will be pushed to the back of the queue again mulling over dated fabs & silicon while Intel will already be 2 or 3 generations ahead.

It wasnt too long ago where AMD just released a good enough CPU to run toe to toe with a Core 2 Quad, Unfortunately the Core 2 era has long since been in the process of being phased out.

I have no idea if piledriver will be any good but Intel sure has a lot of work to do and they wont stop

And in 2014 when AMD can finally drop the sad puppy dog eyes "I-made-a-good-CPU-I-did-I-really-did!" look for their BD CPUs, they will be already obselete and nobody will care.

and since their design is already in the open. who says that intel wont try to create an architecture that uses the same or similar feature or something thats BETTER then it.

ask yourself....who are you fooling but yourself?


Trololol

 

[BarbaricSoul]

Luckily Intel has no plans for improvements until 2015.

With the performance of BD compared to SB, Intel needs to give AMD time to catch up(again).