News - Third stepping’s a charm for AMD Bulldozer?

[HEXUS]

AMD leaks evidence that a B3 stepping for Bulldozer is in the works.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

Given recent benchmarks, we’d like to think that the Bulldozer is suffering from an equally devastating ailment that can be fixed with a simple stepping update; in reality this is very much likely not to be the case, a small increment from 2 to 3 as opposed to 'B' to 'C' indicates only minor changes, though it may be possible to hope for slight improvements in areas such as power consumption, memory-timing efficiency or the typical overclocking threshold.

Pretty much sums it up for me. I think hoping for anything more than a slight increase in power usage is likely to lead to disappointment.
If the increase in power usage isn't substantial i think AMD will be in for another bought of serious geek rage.

[crossy]

Pretty much sums it up for me. I think hoping for anything more than a slight increase in power usage is likely to lead to disappointment.
If the increase in power usage isn't substantial i think AMD will be in for another bought of serious geek rage.

Erm - I'm confused - didn't you mean "decrease" rather than "increase"? Although, I suppose winter is coming, so having a BD-powered "space heater" for the room might be good.

Still not sure whether BD is a disappointment or not. Think the most sensible approach is to wait until prices stabilise a bit more and then decide whether the price premium for a top-end SB is worth it.

[Biscuit]

Erm - I'm confused - didn't you mean "decrease" rather than "increase"? Although, I suppose winter is coming, so having a BD-powered "space heater" for the room might be good.

Still not sure whether BD is a disappointment or not. Think the most sensible approach is to wait until prices stabilise a bit more and then decide whether the price premium for a top-end SB is worth it.

Sorry i meant increase in power efficiency, was early

Even at the right price point bulldozer i still think its a disappointment really, in a lot of cases its slower than Phenom II and only in fairly obscure tests it shows any discernible improvement over SB. This should have been AMDs chance to jack the prices up a bit and gain some lost market share but instead its just another mid range pile of yawn which will struggle to sell in the enthusiast market and force AMD to pull the prices down to be competitive.

If anything its proven a good source of release for ranting so thanks to AMD for that!

[MSIC]

An interesting architecture which depends on 'fingers crossed' future abilities of the chip? It's AMD's equivalent of the P4 Netburst architecture all over again....
I feel really bad for AMD, having no strong affiliation for any one chip company be it CPU or GPU, but i think if AMD fail it is bad news for us all.

[shaithis]

Likening it to netburst isn't particularly fair. Netburst brought nothing to the table really. At least BD has brought a new design approach to processors.

Once they iron out the kinks and windows gets an update, people will change their tunes....unlike anyone did with netburst!

I would even like to see them take the BD design further.....pull more and more instructions out into highly-specific units to make a more RISC-like modular CPU.

[Brewster0101]

Bulldozer is too important to AMD to sit back and leave all the highlighted issues.

They will quickly address all the issues - they can't afford no too.

[Steve]

All modern CPUs are RISC - they just pretend to be CISC on the frontend. Everything gets translated into RISC-like micro-ops at frontend decode.

That said, heterogeneity is the way forward, so it seems. So yes, lots of units, doing different things, but not always on, would be nice.

[badass]

I saw that the FX-8170 had a base clock on 3.9 GHz and thought "cor blimey that's fast" then I remembered the FX-8150 had a 3.6 GHz base clock and was, to quote a poster above "a pile of mid range yawn"

[pstlouis]

we have to wait to see what the stepping will do and also wait for the windows 7 patch announced by tiger direct tech on the web. The new instruction are not implemented wet to compiler and i will like to see some benchmark with the use of those new instructions.I think that AMD did well for that new architecture but need some adjustment or tweak to give some sense to that FX series processor. I am waiting for the FX-8170 and think that will be my processor that will succeed to my phenom II 1100t.

[Biscuit]

we have to wait to see what the stepping will do and also wait for the windows 7 patch announced by tiger direct tech on the web. The new instruction are not implemented wet to compiler and i will like to see some benchmark with the use of those new instructions.I think that AMD did well for that new architecture but need some adjustment or tweak to give some sense to that FX series processor. I am waiting for the FX-8170 and think that will be my processor that will succeed to my phenom II 1100t.

I have tried tracing the source of this 'patch' to fix these so called problems and it doesnt exist. I find forum posts saying:

The boys over at Kubuntu has been working on a AMD Bulldozer fix that sort-of applies across several platforms. The idea came from ArchLinux that run ARM multiple processors. AMD FX-Bulldozer is neither 4 core or 8 core… that’s the problem. The ARM Cortex-A9 8 core processor had a similar problem that was overcome with a software patch. The problem right now is that the patch has to be re-registered with each Windows start. Look for a 40% performance boost if this works…. more to come.

There is most definitely a Windows 7 AMD FX – software patch in the works. By most estimates the AMD Bulldozer FX is underperforming by 40-70% in most Windows 7 benchmarks. By forcing Windows 7 to recognize 8 cpu cores a huge performance hit has happened. The Bulldozer FX-8xxx design… really isn’t 8 cores, it’s a 4 core CPU with an extra integer pipeline on each core. If the FX-8xxx series scale according to the 4 and 6 core Bulldozer design than there is a serious bug in Windows 7 that is crippling the FX-8150 performance.

but then the source link goes back to here. Until there is an official announcement i don't buy any of it, especially the claims of 40%-70%.

[pstlouis]

The technician on tiger direct said that there is a windows update for bulldozer and it is not related to registry or Kunbutu.Verified on the tiger direct site where is the video that review the fx-8120.

[Biscuit]

I appreciate you are a new member so you cant post any links but i have had a browse and i cant find them myself, perhaps you could find the info and link it in this format:
"www[dot]tigerdirect[dot]com/other address stuff"
so we can put the proper dots in and have a look?
Im curious to knowh what is his source of information, why haven't other sources been given this information and/or allowed to release it?
Im struggle to see some technician on tiger direct as enough evidence to make the information plausible, especially given its his interest to sell the processors

[Matt94]

For me, Bulldozer was a success in that it just about managed to keep Intel from raising its prices. However, we are dangerously close to a monopoly, especially at the high end, which would lead to Intel charging whatever they want for the sandy bridge E processors.

[Brewster0101]

we are dangerously close to a monopoly, especially at the high end, which would lead to Intel charging whatever they want for the sandy bridge E processors.

Intel can only charge what they want if people pay them. Consumers have themselves to blame if they pay over the odds for a product and wonder why prices keep going up.

[MSIC]

Intel can only charge what they want if people pay them. Consumers have themselves to blame if they pay over the odds for a product and wonder why prices keep going up.

Unfortunately treating "consumers" as a single entity body rarely works - we are a collection of individuals rather than a unit with collective thought (gosh - am sounding like the borg!!).
As such, individiuals will act individually, and selfishly, with negative consequences to the wider whole.

One example being house prices in London - if we all agreed here and now not to now pay any higher a price for a previously sold house, suddenly there would be zero price rises and people could better calculate their current and future lives - however if just one person offers a slightly higher amount to a seller on a house I want to buy, i lose out.

Intel will pitch their CPUs at a price it thinks it can get away with since, as the man said, AMD are offering no competition.
Just MHO.