AMD - Bulldozer Chitchat

[Terbinator]

Are the FM1 Athlons not faster than the traditional AM3 ones?

[Golden Dragoon]

Interesting news about the IB Core i3 CPUs:

http://www.donanimhaber.com/islemci/...e-ediliyor.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christm...holiday_season

It seems that Trinity will be competing against the SB Core i3 CPUs for the timebeing.

Did you mean to put a wiki link to the christmas season?

[Terbinator]

Did you mean to put a wiki link to the christmas season?

Probably due to the i3's 'holiday' release.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Did you mean to put a wiki link to the christmas season?

Yep. It indicates what is meant by "Holiday season" in the US and gives a clue to the releases date of the IB Core i3 CPUs.

[Sputnik]

how many FM1 chipsets are available? A55, A75 ? any others?

[scaryjim]

Are the FM1 Athlons not faster than the traditional AM3 ones?

They should be slightly faster than an equivalently clocked Athlon II X4 due to larger L2 caches and slight architecture tweaks. Ebuyer currently have the 3GHz 651 for just a shade over £70... not bad IMNSHO.

In terms of comparison processors, the £97 Phenom II 960T is also a 3GHz quad, with half the L2 cache per core but obviously a heap of L3 cache and Turbo-core to boot (something the 651 does without), and the £105 3870K is a 3GHz Llano quad core but with unlocked multis and a 400 shader IGP.

To be honest, I'd have difficulty picking the best buy out of that lot. The 651 certainly looks a decent buy, but without turbo core it's going to have AMDs typical problem - lacklustre single threaded performance. The 3870K is identical from a CPU point of view, and £35 for the Llano IGP is pretty reasonable given the relative potency when combined with fast memory - it's as fast if not faster than any discreet card at that price. The Phenom will have better single threaded performance as it has Turbo-core (up to 3.4GHz) and the larger amount of overall cache may give it an IPC edge anyway. Plus being Thuban-derived it also has the possibility of unlocking to a hex-core. Whichever you like the look of though, AMD gives you a lot of value in the ~ £100 space (after all, the 3850 is a smidge under £100 for a 2.9GHz quad with IGP, and the 3670k is £90 for a 2.7Ghz quad with a slightly less potent IGP).

[badass]

*shrug* I'll happily give you that it's not as good as the Xeon. But, since you've accepted that they're not incredibly slow, to also call then "rubbish" at virtualisation seems unfair too. They're actually perfectly acceptable at virtualisation. The thing is the Xeon's are better than acceptable, at about the same price. That makes the Opterons poor value, but it doesn't make them "rubbish".

I think we've all accepted that Bulldozer failed to acheive it's target of making AMD properly competitive again, but branding it "rubbish" and "useless" seems unnecessarily harsh. An FX4100 has more than enough power to meet the computing needs of 99% of computer users. It's not necessarily the best choice, but that makes it neither "rubbish" nor "useless".

If we were talking about cars I'd agree completely with you. Sometimes the car that doesn't handle as well, isn't as good on fuel and isn't as fast can still be a great car - just look at a lot of Alfa Romeos for evidence of that for example, however a Microprocessor doesn't have looks or character to fall back on, so the only meaningful comparisons are price, performance and power usage.
From the manufacturers point of view, there is the cost to manufacture as well.
Bulldozer CPU's trail their Intel equivalents on all 4 of those points in all cases apart from the niche desktop user with more than 6 heavy threads, where they only just beat the Intel chips on performance. I'd say that makes it an extremely poor choice of CPU for all but a very small number of users.
The other niche use I can think of is adding a new server to a Virtual cluster (in the VMware sense) where you want to migrate VM's from one host to another with no downtime. Adding an Intel server in that situation is impossible as live migration/vmotion is not possible between Intel and AMD CPU's.

As you say, it looks like Trinity might be a decent improvement, and if it is that bodes well for the future Piledriver-based server CPUs. It's rare for a new architecture to be a massive improvement over the incumbent (think Netburst P4!) and all the signs are that AMD can address the deficits in bulldozer and make it competitive in the future. How effectively they do that only time will tell, but they have a decent track record of architecture tweaks in the recent past (i.e. Phenom I/II) and given that bulldozer already excels in a (very!) small number of workloads (something Phenom I didn't) they may yet produce something special.

I don't intend to be contrary but the Barcelona excelled over the Conroe based processors in a lot of server based workloads. Conroe was castrated by the FSB type design making it useless for supercomputers, virtualisation, large databases, running Microsoft exchange and pretty much any workload that used more than the on chip cache regularly. On the desktop, there were very few cases where barcelona (and its successor) was better but in the server world I believe it was competitive.
Unfortunately for AMD, Intel have eroded away almost all of AMD's advantages and in many cases, the older AMD CPU's are faster than the bulldozer based ones.
I'll not call Bulldozer rubbish but I will say it's simply nowhere near good enough. Even for users of AM3+ motherboards as the Phenom II CPU's when they were available were faster in all but the most heavily threaded workloads.
As you say, they may well see a substantial improvement in Piledriver and it looks like will use less power, run at higher clocks and get more done per clock than bulldozer. Throw in some Windows 8 Scheduler improvements for a further performance boost and we may well see 30+% performance improvements in CPU bound tests and that will make it competitive.

[DanceswithUnix]

The car analogy is an amusing one, and I say that as an AMD owner and Alfa driver

If I was building a machine right now I honestly don't know what I would use. Choice of stuff that is too expensive for my budget (i7 2600K), and stuff that is no faster than the 955BE I have been using for years now (anything from AMD).

The X4 960T is in my price range, and it would amuse me to unlock it to 5 cores if only to mess up the statistics when programs like Steam scan my machine to see what I am running

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Intel seems very annoyed with Sea Micro:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...l-took-a-pass/

It is now basically calling them useless!! Bahahahaha! Considering that Intel rarely comments on these sorts of things it does sound out of character.

What a load of BS,Intel was very interested in working with the very same company due to its use of Intel Atom CPUs:

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2011/09/12/5768899.htm

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/02/...ew-intel-chip/

So,if they are so useless why did they ask them to participate in IDF and give them first access to certain CPUs??

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401344,00.asp

[watercooled]

The X4 960T is in my price range, and it would amuse me to unlock it to 5 cores if only to mess up the statistics when programs like Steam scan my machine to see what I am running

Made me laugh, that's exactly the sort of thing I'd do!

[DanceswithUnix]

Made me laugh, that's exactly the sort of thing I'd do!

Seriously, every time they turn up on offer I have to stop myself from buying one. Don't need one, can't afford one. I would call it "Audi" because I never saw the point in 5 cyl engines either

[kalniel]

Seriously, every time they turn up on offer I have to stop myself from buying one. Don't need one, can't afford one. I would call it "Audi" because I never saw the point in 5 cyl engines either

Not volvo?

[DanceswithUnix]

Not volvo?

Weren't Audi first with 5 cylinders though? Must admit I was not bothered enough to check

[badass]

Seriously, every time they turn up on offer I have to stop myself from buying one. Don't need one, can't afford one. I would call it "Audi" because I never saw the point in 5 cyl engines either

Apart from the fact they are smoother in general than 4 cylinder engines, sound way better and allow larger capacities whilst maintaining the ability to rev without having the extra pumping losses and packaging constraints of a 6 cylinder

5 Cylinder lover here BTW. Never owned a car with a 5 cylinder though Only 4's and 6's. And thankfully, never a diesel.

[Golden Dragoon]

Most 5 cylinder cars sound much the same as 4's, and they are smoother, but not by much, as there is still part of a crank revolution where no power is being delivered, though it is much smaller than a 4 cylinder though all 5 pots I know of lack a balance shaft so they can still exhibit as much vibration as a 4 pot. You are right about the main advantages though.
V12 man here and have owned or driven 3,4,5,6,8 and 12 cylinder cars, and plenty of diesels

[watercooled]

With anything above 4 cylinder, the power strokes overlap so you don't get the same pulsating delivery of power you get with 4's (or less) so should be significantly smoother. They're not inherently balanced like a 6 but vibrate less than a comparable 4, especially at low-medium revs. But if you're flooring an engine, vibration wouldn't be top of my list.

Big fan of flat-4 myself.