AMD - Bulldozer Chitchat

[watercooled]

But I have my Bobcat and don't want a Llano, so I they have my permission to start making me a BD

Mind you the Zacate is a TSMC 40nm fabbed part so thats a poor excuse.

Llano is GloFo though, same as BD.

[scaryjim]

Look at the gaming results

You want me to judge a CPU on its ability to push frame rates @ 720p? Seriously?

if you're buying a 980X for gaming then you're not the target market for 99% of CPUs shifted. SCII and BO are obviously lightly threaded clock speed monster, so the transistors on the Phenoms are sitting there untapped, while the aggresive turbo of sandy bridge makes them look silly. But if you think you'll notice the difference between 94fps and 106fps in Block Ops...

EDIT: And I should say: SCII is quite clearly some bizarrely anomalous system monster to have that wide a variety of results at 16x10. It's certainly not typical of the spread of results you'd get from most game engines. But personally, I'm not going to spend £1000 on a CPU just to play a £40 game...

[Biscuit]

It was explained a while ago, it's due to there being a higher demand for Bobcat/Llano so Bulldozer production got pushed back. All the fabs were/are essentially maxed out.

I think you misunderstood my point, i was saying if they could get a suggested 10% improvement from current architecture and this was all they got over bulldozer so they decided to release an improved PII instead, they would be in the poo a little bit because they have already announced a bulldozer release. I think the hype will force AMD to release the BD chip regardless of actual performance.

[watercooled]

Oh I see what you mean. But I doubt they would have even announced it if performance is so poor, they try the chip in software and programmable logic before it even reaches a fab so they'd know well in advance if there wee architectural problems. If anything it would be fab problems IMO e.g. low yield. They wouldn't want to do a Larrabee.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I think you misunderstood my point, i was saying if they could get a suggested 10% improvement from current architecture and this was all they got over bulldozer so they decided to release an improved PII instead, they would be in the poo a little bit because they have already announced a bulldozer release. I think the hype will force AMD to release the BD chip regardless of actual performance.

Look at the BSN article. Nvidia and VIA also left BAPCo. It looks more like conjecture on the part of BSN when they saying AMD left due to poor Bulldozer performance.

They also act like companies don't want to twist benchmarks to their favour?? Right, because Intel would NEVER do that?? They would NEVER ever do anything underhanded,EVER??

On top of this they say "per core".What has that got to do with the price of eggs?? What clockspeeds are they talking about for the cores??

As DanceswithUnix(and myself before IIRC) has mentioned in lightly threaded applications you are running a single thread through each module. This means single threads run better over one module than two.

It has been even stated that two threads will run with lower effiency over a module when compared to two separate cores. As opposed to upto 30% improvement with HT you are seeing upto 70% to 80% improvement with the module design.

Intel does the same thing with HT. A Core i7 2600 has lower performance per thread than a Core i5 2500. Does it mean the Core i7 2600 is slower in lightly threaded applications??

Even,a Phenom II X6 with a boost in clockspeed can be quite competitive in highly multi-threaded applications with a Core i7 2600. So a six core Bulldozer CPU would be comparable with a Core i7 in multi-threaded applications and probably much faster in lightly threaded applications than a Phenom II X6. However,whether it will be able to beat a Core i5 in such applications is another question.

Those so called sources at BSN seem to be themselves confused about Bulldozer.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems AMD has changed their retail packaging even for Llano:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post4887865

Llano is launching around 30th of June or the 1st of July:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post4888376

[melon]

It seems AMD has changed their retail packaging even for Llano:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post4887865

Llano is launching around 30th of June or the 1st of July:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post4888376

Are you preordering , or waiting to see the final price ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Are you preordering , or waiting to see the final price ?

I am just interested ATM but my i3 2100 and Q6600 will have to do for a time longer.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Despite the locked multiplier it seems Llano can be overclocked a decent amount:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...lection-thread

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/10985/

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-an...nology-834387/

[watercooled]

Not read it myself yet but Anandtech has a Llano review up: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4476/amd-a83850-review

[scaryjim]

As do Hexus...

it's what we expected really - CPU performs like an Athlon II X4, GPU performs in the region of a 5550, great for gaming if you keep your resolution and image quality sensible. There's an AT motherboard review which suggests that if you overclock the power management kicks and and actually reduces the graphics performance, although that may be dependant on the motherboard implementation of overclocking. The Tom's Hardware review suggests that overclocking could be problematic as the clock generators are all internal and pushing the base clock up also pushes the PCIe clock up and causes system instability. I have a feeling that may be *very* motherboard dependant though.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD is going to sell a Black Edition Llano:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd-a8...w-32222-7.html

[rob4001]

So are they perfectly good for HTPC or is 13 going to better in the long run?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So are they perfectly good for HTPC or is 13 going to better in the long run?

Llano will be better at media decoding and if you intend to use the HTPC for gaming a 65W A8 quad core will be a better choice.

I am surprised that the 65W A8-3800 can run some modern games at medium settings at 1680X1050!!

[scaryjim]

Wait for the 65W versions to hit retail. Get one of them

Frankly, I currently use a Sempron 140 + HD4200 integrated as an HTPC. As long as you've got hardware video decoding if it's *just* for HTPC usage not a lot else matters. It might even be worth waiting for the dual core A4 and E2 series to come out, tbh...