Your view on AMD's Bulldozer

[nstgc]

Holy fucking spirits batman... iindigo is alive!

I thought he got ***** by those tentacle monsters in Nihon.

Tentacle monsters don't rape men (well 98% of the time they don't).

[ColdFission]

Found an interesting post from HardOCP with the point of view of former AMD engineers:

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1037482638&postcount=88

And some interesting write-ups from Charlie of S|A:

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/why-did-bulldozer-underwhelm/

Much of the first half the article explain why AMD needed to hurt more in 2010 to hurt a little less in 2011 by pulling the plug on 45-nm Bulldozer as it was sucking up too many resources to do further designs on 32-nm. The part I quotes was quite interesting to me.

If you look at some of the details, a few things stand out. First, the cache latencies as measured by Michael Schuette in the Lost Circuits article, are in a word, horrific. L1D caches are 1 cycle slower than Phenom/Stars, and the L2 cache is 25-27 cycles, 10-12 slower than it’s predecessor. It may be twice as large, but it is shared by two cores, and is almost twice as slow. Sharing of resources may have some very nice benefits, but in this case, the downsides are, well, crippling.
It is hard to fathom how such high latencies were tolerated, much less put in to production. While it is unlikely to be possible given the shared front end, a few more transistors burned to split this 2MB L2 cache in to 2 1MB L2 caches would have halved latency. This alone would have a marked increase on performance, and not a trivial one, even a single shared 1MB cache with a 15 cycle latency would likely be an improvement over what we ended up with.
During the press briefing in late August, the question of cache latencies came up, and AMD didn’t give an answer, but said they would get back to us. Given the number of people in the room with business cards that read architect, that lack of an answer did send up serious red flags. The official numbers never came for some reason, and now you know why. Cache latencies are such a massive screw up that it is hard to put in to words. Consider the cache latencies a handful of cuts, not just one.

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/bulldozer-doesnt-have-just-a-single-problem/

[Lupin]

Found an interesting post from HardOCP with the point of view of former AMD engineers:

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1037482638&postcount=88

Those macforum posts have been used to death. Response from someone still in AMD: http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=123260&threadid=123240&roomid=2#CURRENT

Much of the first half the article explain why AMD needed to hurt more in 2010 to hurt a little less in 2011 by pulling the plug on 45-nm Bulldozer as it was sucking up too many resources to do further designs on 32-nm. The part I quotes was quite interesting to me.

If you look at some of the details, a few things stand out. First, the cache latencies as measured by Michael Schuette in the Lost Circuits article, are in a word, horrific. L1D caches are 1 cycle slower than Phenom/Stars, and the L2 cache is 25-27 cycles, 10-12 slower than it’s predecessor. It may be twice as large, but it is shared by two cores, and is almost twice as slow. Sharing of resources may have some very nice benefits, but in this case, the downsides are, well, crippling.
It is hard to fathom how such high latencies were tolerated, much less put in to production. While it is unlikely to be possible given the shared front end, a few more transistors burned to split this 2MB L2 cache in to 2 1MB L2 caches would have halved latency. This alone would have a marked increase on performance, and not a trivial one, even a single shared 1MB cache with a 15 cycle latency would likely be an improvement over what we ended up with.
During the press briefing in late August, the question of cache latencies came up, and AMD didn’t give an answer, but said they would get back to us. Given the number of people in the room with business cards that read architect, that lack of an answer did send up serious red flags. The official numbers never came for some reason, and now you know why. Cache latencies are such a massive screw up that it is hard to put in to words. Consider the cache latencies a handful of cuts, not just one.

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/bulldozer-doesnt-have-just-a-single-problem/

Follow the thread for that article in S|A's forums.

[kitamesume]

what i`m guessing is they'll gonna gamble on the 22nm die shrink with a few more touches to further reduce the power consumption and further increase the clock speed.

i think i got my guess right, right?

[kamuixtv99]

You get what you pay with AMD, They have poor benchmarks but with its price, it's still the 'king' for massive buyers like for schools and internet cafes. These days what you see inside internet cafes are facebook and its lousy games and WoW

Unfortunately bulldozer is priced higher or the same as the competing intel parts. And the Intel parts use about a third of the power, which saves you a surprising amount of power over the years.

What I am most irritated about is that their server CPU section has been promising us lower power and more performance, the the truth is actually that their old server CPU:s are more efficient, and faster!

However, those are still not competitive with the Xeon CPU:s.

You get what you pay with AMD. Yes, that was before Bulldozer. From Athlon/Sempron to X2 I guess. Like those days if you want to do something (video editing, video conversion) other than games then get an Intel by spending $50 to $100 more (In my place $50? hmmm you need to work for 42 hours to earn that.). I only know a little about Bulldozer I'm just getting info from you guys. This is about to see when it reaches to our shores.

Yes, another one who thinks anyone that doesn't care about computers must be a mindless drone. You are not above "them" just because you care about a few pieces of silicon, kamuixtv99, maybe you will understand that when you find out that you're an "average joe" by shampoo enthusiast standard.

Sorry. "average joe" was a wrong term. It's the people who rely on brand name, not sure with the term. Knows a little or none at all on the performance.

Anyways, like what you guys said. AMD is no longer the same as before. A lot of people resigned, change of management and etc.
Good thing I have no plans to upgrade my rig not until something will replace Blu-ray. Yes, Bulldozer may not be the right choice for now.

[kureshii]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5050/amd-implements-cost-cutting-workforce-reduction-carrell-killebrew-is-out

And with that, the guys who brought us the Evergreens and Eyefinity are gone. Best of luck to AMD henceforth; they’ll need it.

[vuzedome]

Job cuts, looks like they're on a downward spiral.

[krumm]

Ya, that news is bad and I see no light in that tunnel.  Looks like amd is going to take out ati with them.

[kitamesume]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5050/amd-implements-cost-cutting-workforce-reduction-carrell-killebrew-is-out

And with that, the guys who brought us the Evergreens and Eyefinity are gone. Best of luck to AMD henceforth; they’ll need it.

[!] nvidia all the way? more and more apps seems to prefer cuda, best of example is decoding packs like lav filters and such...

[ColdFission]

Not surprised at all with the announcement. However, over the past 5 days according to marketwatch, their stock actually went up overall.

Although this is certainly bad news for AMD, even more so for those who got cut, I don't see it to be the end of AMD. They have cut jobs in the past and AMD is still around. This should get them a little more lean and hopefully have more spare cash to go into R&D.

But I really wanted the Board at AMD to get a change up too. Apparently, they haven't done a good job with decision making either which added to AMD's fall from grace. There are rumours going around that the next gen Trinity APU's should be coming in very early next year.


Furthermore, their next-gen HD 7000s would be receiving a performance boost of up to two times. And, AMD has also recently won a design win with Penguin to build the world's HPC Super Computer with AMD's Fusion APUs.

Despite the dark news of layoffs, there are bright spots around for the company but they are few and hard to find. AMD will have to try really hard not to screw up their releases of their next-gen products because AMD's relations with various OEMs like Cray have been severely strained. Cray's financial reports won't be looking good because of the delays of Interlagos, a 16-core Opteron variant based on the Bulldozer architecture.

I do hope that they do pull out of the mess they are in and rake in some money in the next financial quarters next year because they need it.

[Sosseres]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5050/amd-implements-cost-cutting-workforce-reduction-carrell-killebrew-is-out

And with that, the guys who brought us the Evergreens and Eyefinity are gone. Best of luck to AMD henceforth; they’ll need it.

[!] nvidia all the way? more and more apps seems to prefer cuda, best of example is decoding packs like lav filters and such...

Isn't the difference in how they choose to go about using the resources? Nvidia having stronger cores, ati more of them. Meaning they are suited for different things?

[Lupin]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5050/amd-implements-cost-cutting-workforce-reduction-carrell-killebrew-is-out

And with that, the guys who brought us the Evergreens and Eyefinity are gone. Best of luck to AMD henceforth; they’ll need it.

Rory Read's announcements on November 9 should be interesting.

[per]

Isn't the difference in how they choose to go about using the resources? Nvidia having stronger cores, ati more of them. Meaning they are suited for different things?

Well. In a way. Nvidia have more generic cores. That is, they are better at "normal" computations (things that are not strictly speaking standard computer graphics).

nvidia also goes for things like ECC support and a more "normal" memory architecture, which makes them even more suited to computation tasks.

[AnimeJanai]

To improve things for AMD's prosperity, the governments of the world should give Intel more taxcuts but keep on taxing AMD.  That is good for the economy and thus society.  Intel will trickle down the wealth such that people will be able to buy stuff and therefore improve AMD's economic problem and aid in a faster recovery.  AMD's problem is that it doesn't have enough incentive to join the ranks of Intel.  This is yet another reason why the world must give the wealthy more taxcuts so that they can invest their wealth.  Then the economic effects will trickle down to AMD and improve AMD's situation.   It's a win-win strategy and makes solid economic sense to tax Intel even less and tax AMD more in proportion.

[nstgc]

To improve things for AMD's prosperity, the governments of the world should give Intel more taxcuts but keep on taxing AMD.  That is good for the economy and thus society.  Intel will trickle down the wealth such that people will be able to buy stuff and therefore improve AMD's economic problem and aid in a faster recovery.  AMD's problem is that it doesn't have enough incentive to join the ranks of Intel.  This is yet another reason why the world must give the wealthy more taxcuts so that they can invest their wealth.  Then the economic effects will trickle down to AMD and improve AMD's situation.   It's a win-win strategy and makes solid economic sense to tax Intel even less and tax AMD more in proportion.

May I assume you are joking?

[Sosseres]

May I assume you are joking?

He is, he has long posts about economy and politics all over the forum. That is a parody of the trickle down economy, while also being a true parallel.

[nstgc]

I thought so, but I'm a novice when it comes to sarcasm.

[kureshii]

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230565/AMD-s-Interlagos-and-Valencia-finally-emerge

About time too. And Intel arrives just in time to take a dump on AMD’s party: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5091/intel-core-i7-3960x-sandy-bridge-e-review-keeping-the-high-end-alive

And with numbers to make AMD shit their pants too.

Threading:





Power consumption:


(Keep in mind that i7-3960X is 435mm^2 compared to FX-8150 at 315mm^2.)

Overclocked:



Yes, I’m being selective with what I’m showing, because single-threaded stuff is pretty boring to look at. And yes, the i7-3960X is ridiculously priced and not within most people’s budgets. But the i7-3930K at $555 MSRP seems to be an interesting option, if only those damn X79 board prices weren’t ridiculous enough to make Sony prices look reasonable.

[AnimeJanai]

BULLDOZER PC CASE



BULLDOZER PC CASE


The front actually moves in order to allow you access to the optical media drive.  The case is roomy enough to fit a full-sized ATX motherboard and full-size graphics cards.  Digital displays are on the front and side so that you can see the operating temperatures if the case is positioned where you cannot see any one specific facing.

[nstgc]

I just saw the next Intels on Newegg today. Haven't seen any benchmarks until now. AMD just got bum-fucked...again. Well on the plus side, the new Intels are super expensive.