Hello there! Just want to get this out of the way first, been a member of BakaBT for more than two years now but never posted here but I have lurked around a couple of times. Anyway, I just wanted to start a topic on this as there is a lot of talk surrounding AMD's next-generation architecture code-named Bulldozer that is set to replace their current K10h (AMD Phenom IIs such as the 1090T or the Phenom I 9600) architecture. I also thought this would be an interesting discussion to have since there should be some techies around these forums.
Just a really quick run-down on why there is a lot of talk around the desktop iteration of Bulldozer code-named Zambezi. Around 2006-2007, AMD released Barcelona (server parts in the Opteron lineup, was also the codename of the architecture that covers both servers and desktops, aka K10) and later with Agena, Agena FX (client parts to be called the first generation Phenom processors) and from what I can remember, AMD was really hyping this new architecture, saying it will be faster, more efficient etc. Expectations were high for this new architecture (I believe it was called K8 at the time) to do very well since the CPUs from that K8 architecture were released during the Athlon 64 days (like the fabled Athlon 64 FX CPUs such as the FX-51) were pounding what Intel had during those times (remember the Pentium 4 Extreme Editions?) in various benchmarks and people were hoping that AMD would do the same with their Agena and Barcelona CPUs.
Also around the 2006-2007, Intel came back with a bang to replace its Netburst architecture with their Core architecture (Nehalem and Sandy Bridge also have ties to the Core architecture) and when the first Intel Core 2 Duos came out, they absolutely hammered AMD's offerings. Things got a lot worse for AMD when the TLB bug hit which can basically lead to a system lockups and the news was made worse with some publications exaggerating the issue as it lockups would most likely occur in server environment and not in desktops. AMD tries to scramble to fix the issue but the damage was already done and people started to avoid AMD processors not only because of the TLB but also poorer performance against Intel's Core 2 Duo CPUs. AMD tried to get some enthusiasts back to their camp, so they created the Quad-FX platform where you could put two FX class CPUs in a motherboard in an attempt to compete with the Core 2 Quads from Intel. But the platform performed horribly and was much too expensive to even consider (its pretty much a server motherboard your paying for at the time). AMD pretty much loses billions of dollars after Barcelona in the coming financial quarters into 2008.
Soon after, there were some serious management issues in AMD with Hector Ruiz stepping down as CEO and when AMD acquired graphics company ATi, there were rumblings around in the stock markets about the acquisition and AMD stocks pretty much hit the ground form 40 dollars a share (during the time when AMD controlled around 30% of the server market, a very important market where you make the most money out of if you are an OEM or a major semiconductor maker/designer) to around 2.30 dollars a share. During these hard times, Dirk Meter took over as CEO (Dirk was recently knifed by the Board of Directors at AMD for not being aggressive enough in the mobile markets) and did some major restructuring of AMD such spinning off its fabrication plants for a new venture with ATIC to form GlobalFoundries. After a lot of work, there were new stirrings of a new architecture code-named Bulldozer around 2008-2009 and there was new hope for the recovering company.
By this time, Intel pretty much commanded the x86 market. They currently have more than 80% (or was it 90%?) of the server market, again, this is the bread and butter for both AMD and Intel; thanks to AMD screwing up their release of K10, Intel's great engineering, as well as their illegal tactics of strong-arming OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) like HP and Dell to only sell Intel CPUs (AMD did sue Intel for antitrust violations in 2005 and Intel later payed off AMD in 2009 for over a billion dollars) and lockout AMD CPUs.
I tried to give as much background information (much of which is based on memory) about AMD as I could in a condensed format for those who really have no clue what I am talking about xD so I will leave relevant links at the bottom of this post.
So, this is where AMD is today. Their Fusion APUs (Accelerated Processing Unit) with graphic shaders (like what cores are to CPUs, shaders for GPUs) on the same piece of silicon with the CPU cores have been doing very well in the client segments, especially in the mobile segments. They take the form of products such as the A8-3550 based on Llano architecture that are released for both desktops and laptops. Their current Phenom IIs (with all the bugs removed from the first generation Phenom Is) are quite popular for budget builds and for people are waiting to upgrade to Bulldozer for those who have AM3+ socket based boards. And their server parts, such as their 12-core Magny-cours have been very popular with supercomputer makers such as Cray (who were also the first ones to receive the first shipments of AMD's 16-core Interlagos CPUs which are simply drop-in upgrade to Magny-cours, both of which use the G34 server socket). And their HD 4000, HD 5000, and more recently, their HD 6000 series GPUs have been received very positively (I am still running on a HD 4870, need to upgrade soon or just get a whole new system for BF3 lol) by reviewers and customers.
So what is Bulldozer? To quote from a wiki article:
Bulldozer will be the first major redesign of AMD’s processor architecture since 2003, when the firm launched its Athlon 64/Opteron (K8) processors, and will feature two 128-bit FMA-capable FPUs which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU. This design is accompanied by two integer cores each with 4 pipelines (the fetch/decode stage is shared). Bulldozer will also introduce shared L2 cache in the new architecture. AMD calls this design a "Bulldozer module". A 16-core processor design would feature eight of these modules,[8] but the operating system will recognize each module as two physical cores.
The module, described as two cores, can be contrasted with a single Intel core with HyperThreading. The difference between the two approaches is that Bulldozer provides dedicated schedulers and integer units for each thread, whereas in Intel's core all threads must compete for available resources, except for the individual thread state information.
Keep in mind the Bulldozer has server loads in mind where these CPUs are designed to run hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines, applications, remote terminal sessions, used in supercomputing, etc. Expectations for the desktop versions is that they will do very well on heavily-threaded applications and may trounce some Intel chips in that department, but will do sub-par or equal to some Intel parts in less threaded applications, where Intel does very well at. As for actual performance data, NO ONE in the public arena really know for sure. Even if they do know, they are currently under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with AMD until it lifts at launch day. There have been leaks of performance numbers but most of them are from engineering samples that aren't supposed to be used for benchmarking but for validation, compatibility, and stability with various testing platforms. Furthermore, many of leaks are photoshopped, made-up, April fools jokes (there was one back in 2009-2010 that someone on the AMDzone boards created a multi-page review on Bulldozer that looked totally legit but had to be taken down at the request of John Fruehe, who is a director of product marketing for server parts at AMD because too many people were taking it seriously), or just outright trolling material (OBR, some blogger who passed on faked benchmarks to a well known site to release various AMD leaks called donanimhaber thought that they were real and ran the story. They later pulled that article and posted an apology after OBR posted on his blog about them being fake).
Bulldozer is going to be very important to AMD as its going to be their ticket to get back some server market share (IIRC, the share is around 7% but I can't be too sure about it) as well as regain the trust of many enthusiasts (although a very small segment, it is important to AMD for marketing purposes. Especially when enthusiasts hailed the old FX CPUs, AMD was seen in a very positive spotlight) and to gain more ground in the desktop markets. AMD also needs this to be very successful in order to survive and evolve as a company, especially when AMD currently hold less than 30% of total x86 market while Intel commands over 70%. Recently, a key executive at AMD Rick Bergman recently left for "new opportunities" in the shadows of a new hiring of a new CEO, Rory Reed. Rick was a key figure with the AMD/ATi acquisition and responsible for the successes of the Radeon lineup. I personally saw this as a major loss for AMD for a really smart engineer just to leave like that, same feeling I had when Dirk Meyer left he cleaned up the mess Hector Ruiz left.
The latest release is a slide deck from donanimhaber suggests that the FX-8150 does go toe-to-toe with the i7 2600K but there were some inconsistencies with the slides that made them suspect.
http://www.donanimhaber.com/islemci/galerileri/AMD-Bulldozer-FX-resmi-test-sonuclari.htmAnd a "spirited" debate on the legitimacy on the slides:
http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5217&page=174I consider these slides to not be legit as they appeared before the official launch (launch date of Bulldozer is supposedly October 12 but no one knows for sure, AMD has kept very tight-lipped on the release date as well as exact performance figures), whenever that is. John has put a very nice FAQ about Bulldozer pre-launch questions on this thread:
http://www.overclock.net/amd-cpus/1107646-bulldozer-pre-launch-faq.htmlWell, as for my personal view on how it will perform for the desktop side of things, I think it will just do fine competing with Intel's current offerings. Is it going to be like the old FX in the Athlon 64 days? No, I don't really think so. I mean, this was supposed to be released back in late summer but was delayed and delayed. Previous rumours suggested a September 19 launch but that has come and gone. There have been issues with the brand new 32nm process from GlobalFoundries (where the Bulldozer chips are made, AMD is a fabless company in which they just send their designs to them, a point I forgot to mention earlier on) so it may impact performance expectations. But I think AMD's real winner is the upcoming Trinity, an APU due in 2012 that combines an enhances iteration of Bulldozer called Piledriver and combines with some next-generation shaders that will be used in the upcoming HD 7000s series.
Enough of my banter and I apologize for for this uber long post but I thought the background info was needed for those who want to know about Bulldozer and why its important for AMD to be successful as well as those who are just simply curious about the whole thing. Looking forward to some other views from the members here.
Anyway, here are some relevant links for further reading:
Some historical info on AMD (interesting to note that Intel and AMD are more tied to hip than you know):
http://www.amd.com/us/aboutamd/corporate-information/Pages/timeline.aspxhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVHctiKV-Bghttp://www.build-your-own-computer.net/amd-history.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Deviceshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation In-depth overviews of the Barcelona architecture aka K10:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT051607033728&p=1 *highly recommend this guy if you want to know more about the innards of various CPU architectures*
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2183General wiki overview of K10:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_10hPhenom 1 Reviews:
http://goo.gl/hwPJy Phenom X4 9500
http://goo.gl/kfjzm Phenom X4 9600
http://goo.gl/68psN Phenom X4 9850
Quad FX reviews:
http://goo.gl/fZj3MBad news AMD from the K10 days:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-hector-ruiz-ceo,5926.htmlhttp://www.geek.com/articles/chips/mounting-evidence-suggests-amd-sinking-fast-in-quagmire-of-own-making-20080425/http://www.legitreviews.com/article/588/1/http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Sinking-Intel-Rising-60014.shtmlhttp://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/amd-loses-177-billion-in-december-quarter/7634?tag=content;siu-containerList of AMD architectures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_CPU_microarchitecturesList of AMD processors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_microprocessorsBulldozer links:
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/08/02/what-is-bulldozer/http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082610181333 *again, highly recommended reads from RWT*
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT033011040021http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(processor)
http://semiaccurate.com/assets/uploads/2011/08/Bulldozer_Die_size.pnghttp://www.computerbase.de/bildstrecke/35954/ *leaked slides that reveals more technical details*
http://www.donanimhaber.com/islemci/galerileri/AMD-Bulldozer-FX-resmi-test-sonuclari.htm *supposed slides that shows how it performs*
AMD roadmaps and slides from 2010 Financial Analyst Day (some of the slides are in PDF format):
http://goo.gl/pn8LB *more server orientated but it does a useful quick overview on how threads would work in a module*
http://goo.gl/4C4nl *desktop orientated, lots of GPU related content*
http://goo.gl/5P6wT *product and technology roadmap*
http://blogs.amd.com/work/fadcodenames/Llano Fusion architecture overview and reviews:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT062711124854http://semiaccurate.com/2011/06/20/a-llook-at-the-llano-architecture/http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-A8-3850-Llano-Desktop-Processor-Review-Can-AMD-compete-Sandy-Bridgehttp://www.anandtech.com/show/2871/1http://techreport.com/articles.x/21099http://goo.gl/ChDDNTrinity APU links:
http://goo.gl/Lb4qxhttp://goo.gl/gVYTahttp://goo.gl/ZSNOnIntel Core Architecture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_(microarchitecture)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1998 (bit of a vs of the Intel Core vs AMD K8 architectures)
x86 Market Shares:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/02/amds-market-share-tiptoes-higher-intel-still-ruler-of-the-roos/http://hothardware.com/News/IDC-Claims-AMDs-Server-Market-Share-Fell-33-Percent-Last-Quarter/http://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.htmlStock pricing history:
http://www.google.ca/finance?q=NYSE%3AAMD *change zoom to 5 years to see how far AMD dropped since K10, pretty astonishing really*
Some recent rumblings with AMD:
http://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=8935242&postcount=162http://semiaccurate.com/2011/09/23/analysis-rick-bergman-leaving-amd-has-no-up-side/http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/238851/new_amd_ceo_faces_challenges_in_mobile.htmlhttp://goo.gl/pD4W9http://goo.gl/yvcZb
