AMD - Bulldozer Chitchat

[Kumagoro]

Will the FM1 take bulldozers without gpu though?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nobody knows ATM.

[Biscuit]

i hope they stick with PGA, given intels problems with their LGA sockets i dont see the point in changing

[scaryjim]

Will the FM1 take bulldozers without gpu though?

certainly not the first gen as they are AM3+. It will depend whether they choose to integrate the PCIe lanes into an on-chip "northbridge" for non-APU bulldozer (which could then share a socket with APUs), or whether they keep it simple with an integrated memory controller and separate northbridge (which would require a different socket).

Also, this assumes that AMD will continue to produce CPU only dies rather than just APUs! We know they will in the short term, but in the long term...?

[Golden Dragoon]

My feeling is we will see BD+ without the gpu in the future, though I think it will be the same die as the full BD+ but with faulty or simply disabled graphics.

[Biscuit]

I guess a lot of it depends on if more software allows the workload to be shifted onto the GPU. At the moment servers are all about having lots of cores/threads for visualization so that would help drive the market of GPU-less CPUs. The commercial market has a lot less requirement for this kind of thing.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07..._2011_numbers/

[Biscuit]

yayyyyy although it will b the end of next month blates.

[Terbinator]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRYvf...layer_embedded

Bottom left corner, 15 seconds in. September 19th launch date?

[scaryjim]

Looks more like 29th to me. That's pretty late if it's true...

[Golden Dragoon]

It's the 19th, watch the trailer in HD and it is clearer.

[Doherz]

Another source is quoting the 19th as well.

http://www.hkepc.com/6810/page/1#view

Look at the charts on the first page of this article for supposed clock speeds as well.

I'm not personally sure of the quality of this source but on another forum I've been on the guys reckon they are usually quite credible, certainly much more so than OBR anyways.

Sorry for no images am very short on time.

[watercooled]

Yeah definitely looks like 19th to me.

[EvanJackPenn]

So... do you think Bulldozer will win on the gaming front versus Sandy and Ivy? I'm curious to see if AMD can control the gamers sector of the market, where (I believe) they have been slipping behind recently.

[kalniel]

So... do you think Bulldozer will win on the gaming front versus Sandy and Ivy? I'm curious to see if AMD can control the gamers sector of the market, where (I believe) they have been slipping behind recently.

If the games are highly multi-threaded and relying on integer speeds then yes - bulldozer looks like it's going to be a bit of a parallel int monster. But games typically aren't - they only take advantage of limited numbers of cores and tend to be more reliant on floating point speed. The clock speeds look good, though nothing Intel couldn't achieve if it wanted to, so it's just going to be a case of how well they perform clock for clock vs Intel's chips. We've no way of knowing at the moment. If I had to take a guess I'd say they'll perform worse clock for clock, but the out of the box clock speeds are slightly higher to make up for it, so it's probably going to be quite close.

[shaithis]

I've been thinking about this a lot recently....I would guess certain games will see a giant boost, yet others will not fair so well against the intels.

You would like to think that the most floating point intensive code was being run on the GPU......the main problems I see are (bad) console ports and games with physics that are being run on the CPU.

More and more games are scaling better with additional cores and if OpenCL starts to get used for game physics I can see the BD design being quite a gaming beast in the future.