AMD - Bulldozer Chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nothing like a bit of bias from tech review sites

The problem is that they rely on companies for parts to review and interviews. They also need advertising(basically more page hits) to give them income.

Very few review sites will be entirely objective as a result as they need to think of their own jobs.

There is another problem is down to testing methodology too - what are you trying to test for when you run a benchmark?? Some reviewers have a more technical background too and it shows in the reviews they perform.

Assuming the reviewer has no bias you can see the issues this causes.

Add reviewer bias,ie,fanboism to it and you can see where this leads.

TBH,if I won a large pile of money,ie,something like the EuroMillions(would need to play it first) I would probably set up my own review site and buy the hardware with money out of my pocket.

[Biscuit]

Hence why even if a product gets stated as extremely average it will still get 4 Xs in Hexus

Have to say i still think BD is generally a POS.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The easiest way forward is to look at:
1.)What are the review conditions
2.)What is being tested and why is it being tested.
3.)How is the test performed
4.)What data set is used to generate the test results
5.)What are the results produced
6.)What conclusions do YOU gauge from what has been tested and how is it relevant for YOUR usage patterns.
7.)Look at other reviews using conditions similar to 1.) to 5.) and see if they are consistent
8.)Be prepared to update viewpoint based on newer data down the line

Too many reviews do not devulge enough of 3.) and 4.) which is a shame.Why?? It would enable independent verification of results by third parties.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have just seen this review of the FX4100 and FX6100:

http://ht4u.net/reviews/2011/amd_fx_...iew/index8.php

Its not perfect,but I like how they test many different times of applications for each application type. They also test multiple data sets for the same application.

[Repressor]

The FX-8120 is on TodayOnly for £155 and you should still be able to get the £20 rebate...

8 cores for £135? Not bad...

[dfour]

The FX-8120 is on TodayOnly for £155 and you should still be able to get the £20 rebate...

8 cores for £135? Not bad...

Almost tempted but its just not of enough of an upgrade to my 965 quad

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

According to this article Trinity is meant to have an IGP which is half way between an HD6000 and HD7000 series graphics card in technology:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=23777

I suspect this means the IGP will probably be either DX11.1 VLIW4 or even VLIW5 based.

[watercooled]

I'd be surprised it it wasn't, but I hope it has that transcoding engine!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'd be surprised it it wasn't, but I hope it has that transcoding engine!

It is meant to have it though. Perhaps the shader dependent part is not included??

[watercooled]

Yeah maybe, I can't see them developing it to run on VLIW for probably 1 release.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems Trinity is using VLIW4 shaders:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5426/a...7000m-strategy

[scaryjim]

Hmmmmm. Speculating a little, the comparison between 5870 and 6970 should be relatively valid, assuming that 384 core figure I read somewhere is accurate (if it isn't all bets are off ). 6970 certainly didn't beat 5870 by ~ 50% across the board. In fact, it didn't beat it by that in any circumstance, AFAIK. That would have to mean that AMD have either tweaked the memory controller even further, to give Trinity a lot more bandwidth on tap than Llano had; have managed to bump the graphics clock up higher within the same TDP envelopes to push the performance up; or they've mixed some new special sauce into the shaders or set up which dramatically increases performance.

Of course, if that the 384 figure is incorrect, and we see more like 480 VLIW4 cores in Trinity, that would explain the 50% increase - and make Trinity a bit of a graphical monster, tbh...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Looking at the HardwareCanucks review of the HD6550D it pretty much seems around HD5550 GDDR5 level performance:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...esktop-21.html

That is already HD4670 DDR3/GDDR3 level performance. So,I suspect the top end Trinity IGP will be at least HD5570 level performance, and might even get upto HD5670 level performance in certain instances.

[kalniel]

Of course, if that the 384 figure is incorrect, and we see more like 480 VLIW4 cores in Trinity, that would explain the 50% increase - and make Trinity a bit of a graphical monster, tbh...

But the package as a whole will still be very weak at FP compute. Bulldozer architecture needs to work in synergy with something like GCN - that will be something to behold.

[scaryjim]

But the package as a whole will still be very weak at FP compute.

I guess that depends on how many kinks they've ironed out of the FPU. My reading at Bulldozer launch was that theoretically the FPU could handle 2 simultaneous 128bit flops, but that it was only actually doing that with 128bit AVX instructions. If they can tweak that in piledriver so it can handle 2 128bit flops - regardless of specific instruction - then we'd be cooking on gas.

Bulldozer architecture needs to work in synergy with something like GCN - that will be something to behold.

I guess that's the crock of gold - let's hope they can find the end of the rainbow I don't know how simple it would be to take flops that were programmed and coompiled for running on an x86 (well, x87 technically?) CPU and translate them to a vector compute unit. Still, if a math co-processor was good enough for us in 1980...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I guess that depends on how many kinks they've ironed out of the FPU. My reading at Bulldozer launch was that theoretically the FPU could handle 2 simultaneous 128bit flops, but that it was only actually doing that with 128bit AVX instructions. If they can tweak that in piledriver so it can handle 2 128bit flops - regardless of specific instruction - then we'd be cooking on gas.

I didn't know that the FPU could only do two 128 bit AVX instructions! That would explain a lot.