Author Topic: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer  (Read 8505 times)

Offline kitamesume

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #80 on: October 13, 2011, 06:33:07 AM »
^ performs like it actually XD

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Offline kureshii

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #81 on: October 13, 2011, 11:27:06 AM »
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20111012151052_AMD_Aims_to_Improve_Bulldozer_Performance_per_Watt_by_Up_to_50_by_2014.html

And we worry more and more about their future ... Remember what we saw from Bulldozer at its best?




They're currently about 50% behind i7-2600K in PPW for heavily multithreaded applications. a 50% improvement in that might help Bulldozer catch up with it ... in 2014. Are we going to see AMD in their Pentium 4 doldrums?
« Last Edit: October 13, 2011, 11:53:43 AM by kureshii »

Offline kitamesume

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #82 on: October 13, 2011, 11:49:28 AM »
we already know bulldozer is failing in PPW <,< and it wont be even viable in the server segment, yea sure it "could" perform great as servers but the PPW would be devastating, whats costy about running servers isnt the initial costs alone but the operation costs as well >.<

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Offline Lupin

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #83 on: October 13, 2011, 12:31:16 PM »
and it wont be even viable in the server segment, yea sure it "could" perform great as servers but the PPW would be devastating, whats costy about running servers isnt the initial costs alone but the operation costs as well >.<
Citation needed. The server SKUs have configurable TDP which OEMs can use to reduce power consumption. AMD is banking on more cores/price to sell these. Workloads are vastly different as well so mediocre desktop performance doesn't immediately translate to mediocre server performance.

Offline TMRNetShark

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #84 on: October 13, 2011, 12:36:33 PM »
Maybe it uses more power because it uses more cores! /sarcasm

They are releasing a water cooled bundle of the FX chip in Japan. I wonder how people will like the CPU over an Intel chip. As of right now, only AM3+ boards will fit it, I guess, right?

Offline kureshii

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #85 on: October 13, 2011, 12:43:46 PM »
They are releasing a water cooled bundle of the FX chip in Japan. I wonder how people will like the CPU over an Intel chip. As of right now, only AM3+ boards will fit it, I guess, right?

Intel's right on that too:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1707/1/

Although it'll only come with SB-E. Seems they went with the same OEM, unsurprisingly.

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/11637/

Offline kitamesume

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #86 on: October 13, 2011, 01:01:28 PM »
even if they could reduce the TDP it would cause them to lower in performance as well(if it doesnt then tell me how they do their wicked magic XD ), lowering the performance would make it even less viable as theres other options.

not only that, alot servers are placed on rackmounts which are known to be compact, putting in a full blown reactor in their would cause it to overheat which would further reduce the performance.

so theres alot of problems to tackle right now, the 8core BD are already running at around 200watts, pressing it another 2cores would further increase it by 50watts? reducing the clock speed would just set back the advantage of adding another set of cores...
« Last Edit: October 13, 2011, 01:08:56 PM by kitamesume »

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Offline TMRNetShark

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #87 on: October 13, 2011, 01:52:16 PM »
even if they could reduce the TDP it would cause them to lower in performance as well(if it doesnt then tell me how they do their wicked magic XD ), lowering the performance would make it even less viable as theres other options.

not only that, alot servers are placed on rackmounts which are known to be compact, putting in a full blown reactor in their would cause it to overheat which would further reduce the performance.

so theres alot of problems to tackle right now, the 8core BD are already running at around 200watts, pressing it another 2cores would further increase it by 50watts? reducing the clock speed would just set back the advantage of adding another set of cores...

So the Bulldozers will be in the 2.0 GHz-3.0 GHz bracket. XD Hey, remember kids... Pentium 4's had their limits. Thanks to multi-cores, we got crazy CPUs that take all this POWER and not do much with it.

Offline Lupin

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #88 on: October 13, 2011, 02:44:10 PM »
even if they could reduce the TDP it would cause them to lower in performance as well(if it doesnt then tell me how they do their wicked magic XD ), lowering the performance would make it even less viable as theres other options.

not only that, alot servers are placed on rackmounts which are known to be compact, putting in a full blown reactor in their would cause it to overheat which would further reduce the performance.

so theres alot of problems to tackle right now, the 8core BD are already running at around 200watts, pressing it another 2cores would further increase it by 50watts? reducing the clock speed would just set back the advantage of adding another set of cores...
I already mentioned it:
Workloads are vastly different as well so mediocre desktop performance doesn't immediately translate to mediocre server performance.
There are workloads were core count matters more than frequency. For example, in a virtualization workload, you can cram in more services into one server as there are more cores to operate on them. Different services have different utilization; they do not tax all the cores everytime and may fit into the thermal budget. HPC workloads tend to use custom code, compiled and optimized for the processor used. Throughput matters more on server/HPC workloads

(click to show/hide)
Anand's benchmark tool version is ancient (1342). The new version is of that benchmark is also old (1913). The current version of x264 is 2085 (from x264.nl) released about 3 weeks ago. I'm interested in how BD performs in the latest version.

Offline kitamesume

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #89 on: October 13, 2011, 04:53:54 PM »
good point, then again if that would've been the case, i wonder why'd they even released it in the desktop segment, it runs awkwardly horrible on usual apps, and compared with the older models it looks more "meh".


if what you'd say that the newer benches are more efficient that would mean the competition's score would increase as well, or are you saying the newer version is more bulldozer biased? or theres simply a hidden trick on running bulldozer that the older version lacks thats hindering bulldozer's performance?
« Last Edit: October 13, 2011, 04:55:33 PM by kitamesume »

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Offline Lupin

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #90 on: October 13, 2011, 06:19:25 PM »
good point, then again if that would've been the case, i wonder why'd they even released it in the desktop segment, it runs awkwardly horrible on usual apps, and compared with the older models it looks more "meh".
BD is an architecture designed for future workloads as well as current and future capabilities of the foundri(es) (GF) they're using to manufacture the design. The problem is they forgot present/past workloads. The drawbacks of the compromises/decisions they have to make in the design were too much.

Why they even released it at that state? It's simple. Delaying it more to improve it will only incur more costs. They can release it later, improved but costs them more R&D money and no income from it for now. Or they can release it now, steadily improve the design (more R&D money), get some money from selling it but suffer from less desirable performance. Which do you think will a cash-strapped company like AMD will choose? Which option is economically more feasible? They do not have the money to put out a new architecture like Intel every couple of years. The last "real" new architecture from AMD was used for 12 years.

Then there's the question: why not just shrink stars architecture to 32nm and add more cores? After all, BD seems to perform similar or worse than the older, mature arch. Doing that will incur some costs, and would be harder to integrate to AMD's general plan on heterogenous computing. Stars probably already reached it's full potential.

if what you'd say that the newer benches are more efficient that would mean the competition's score would increase as well, or are you saying the newer version is more bulldozer biased? or theres simply a hidden trick on running bulldozer that the older version lacks thats hindering bulldozer's performance?
Will newer benches improve intel's scores? Yes. But BD has some new instruction sets (AVX, FMA4, CV16, XOP). I have already posted earlier in this thread how some of these instructions can impact performance (which you probably just ignored because you're already on the bandwagon of immediately bashing AMD). There are also instructions that AMD doesn't optimize anymore. Take superpi for example. It uses x87 that's no longer supported (improved) by AMD. x87 has been superseded by newer instructions. Can you claim that the benchmark results represents its performance accurately?

In this thread, I'm probably the only fanboi left whose somewhat fine with BD's performance. Then again I have had lower expectations from it, especially in the last couple of months. I do not blame people for having high expectations though. I blame AMD's PR department for that.

You people seem to forget that AMD is a company trying to compete against a giant. Intel's marketing budget is around the same as AMD's market capitalization. R&D in this business costs a lot (and it's rising all the time) that simply getting close to the Intel's performance despite being tight in money on intended workloads is a nice thing. Give them the same R&D budget as intel does and you'll probably get something amazing from them.

Offline AceHigh

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #91 on: October 13, 2011, 06:32:39 PM »
Didn't stop AMD from being at Intel's throat back when their Athlon trashed Intel's shitty Pentium 4s. Hell, their tight budget didn't even stop them from buying ATi, a far more successful company in graphics market than AMD is in CPU market. Hell, being a former ATI fanboy I almost want AMD to fail for the way they removed ATI brand because they thought AMD brand is stronger (read: idiots).
For one thing, Tiff is not on any level what I would call a typical American.  She's not what I would consider a typical person.  I don't know any other genius geneticist anime-fan martial artist marksman model-level beauties, do you?

Offline Lupin

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #92 on: October 13, 2011, 06:41:52 PM »
Didn't stop AMD from being at Intel's throat back when their Athlon trashed Intel's shitty Pentium 4s. Hell, their tight budget didn't even stop them from buying ATi, a far more successful company in graphics market than AMD is in CPU market. Hell, being a former ATI fanboy I almost want AMD to fail for the way they removed ATI brand because they thought AMD brand is stronger (read: idiots).
The teams that made both k7 and k8 are long gone from the company. Those teams used to hand optimize the designs. They control the foundries back then as well. Now, AMD no longer does that but uses synthesizeable logic units. No foundries either. Chances of them pulling another one in a reasonable timeline, while not impossible is very slim.

Offline kitamesume

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #93 on: October 13, 2011, 06:49:53 PM »
i think i've read it, final thoughts is about a badly optimized XOP codes being 4x faster or something like that.

i'm not saying BD has poor overall performance, i'm saying BD has poor PPW, i cant put something that eats tons of power just running 24/7 >,> unless they optimize it, it would be just a "meh" release.

well still, until they release the proper mobo for the BD(dude, 90$ for a board is ridiculous if you're aiming for the lower end) and a review for the 4cores i still have my hopes... maybe.

i wonder if the stock HSF could handle the 8core fine <,< the reviews clearly skipped temps.
Edit: oh wait, guru3d had temps, stocks at 51c under stress, 4.6ghz 62c under stress but they were using the liquid cooling kit.
« Last Edit: October 13, 2011, 07:05:31 PM by kitamesume »

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Offline AceHigh

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #94 on: October 13, 2011, 06:55:47 PM »
The teams that made both k7 and k8 are long gone from the company. Those teams used to hand optimize the designs. They control the foundries back then as well. Now, AMD no longer does that but uses synthesizeable logic units. No foundries either. Chances of them pulling another one in a reasonable timeline, while not impossible is very slim.

Interesting info, haven't heard that before.
For one thing, Tiff is not on any level what I would call a typical American.  She's not what I would consider a typical person.  I don't know any other genius geneticist anime-fan martial artist marksman model-level beauties, do you?

Offline xShadow

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #95 on: October 13, 2011, 07:07:51 PM »
The teams that made both k7 and k8 are long gone from the company. Those teams used to hand optimize the designs.
Fucking serious?! On what level of abstraction are you talking about?

If you mean that they seriously sat there and (for instance) stared at transistor-level implementations and said "oh, if we rearrange this we can avoid a break in the p/n diffusion here... YEAH!".. then that's amazing.

If you meant they looked at a gate-level implementation and optimized it via truth tables and k maps and whatnot... still insane.

Quote
They control the foundries back then as well. Now, AMD no longer does that but uses synthesizeable logic units. No foundries either. Chances of them pulling another one in a reasonable timeline, while not impossible is very slim.

You talking about VHDL or something like that?



Just wondering.


Anyway, here's the Bulldozer.

Anyone wanna do some builds to see who comes out on top in price/performance?

Cute, huh?

Offline kitamesume

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #96 on: October 13, 2011, 07:10:12 PM »
Anyway, here's the Bulldozer.

Anyone wanna do some builds to see who comes out on top in price/performance?

i`m looking at the reviews...
edit: WTF is this!? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313123 meh, its been 2months since i last looked at the cheapest 2x4gb kits...

[$219.99]AMD FX-8120 Zambezi - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103961
[$144.99]GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128514
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[$229.99]ZOTAC ZT-50301-10M GeForce GTX 560 Ti - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500197
[$72.99]Noctua NH-U12P SE2 120mm SSO CPU Cooler - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=35-608-014
[$49.99]G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231416
[$149.99]WD Caviar Black 2TB 7200 RPM 32MB - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136830
[$99.99]OCZ ZS Series 750W - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341049
[$89.99]LIAN LI Lancool PC-K7B - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112154
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[$109.99]Patriot Pyro 2.5" 60GB SATA III - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220602
[$58.99]ASUS Blu-ray Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135247
===============================================================================================
[$1226.90] TOTAL

[$219.99]Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115072
[$154.99]ASRock P67 EXTREME4 GEN3 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=13-157-265
[$1236.90] TOTAL

[$314.99]Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115070
[$154.99]ASRock P67 EXTREME4 GEN3 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=13-157-265
[$1432.90] TOTAL
« Last Edit: October 13, 2011, 08:21:52 PM by kitamesume »

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Offline Lupin

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #97 on: October 13, 2011, 08:14:20 PM »

Fucking serious?! On what level of abstraction are you talking about?

If you mean that they seriously sat there and (for instance) stared at transistor-level implementations and said "oh, if we rearrange this we can avoid a break in the p/n diffusion here... YEAH!".. then that's amazing.

If you meant they looked at a gate-level implementation and optimized it via truth tables and k maps and whatnot... still insane.

they controlled the foundries. since they don't share their designs to anyone, they can configure/implement it the way they want that works best for them provided they have the tech to do them. Intel does the same for their implementations. Amazing isn't it?

You talking about VHDL or something like that?
it's more feasible for AMD to use synthesizeable blocks now. they're fabless now. they have to use what each foundry can provide. creating custom implementation for an architecture for each foundry isn't cheap.

Anyone wanna do some builds to see who comes out on top in price/performance?
A 2500K would beat any of the BD in price/performance. If it's just between the BD SKUs, 8120 would probably be the best one.
« Last Edit: October 13, 2011, 08:16:25 PM by Lupin »

Offline xShadow

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #98 on: October 14, 2011, 01:10:44 AM »
they controlled the foundries. since they don't share their designs to anyone, they can configure/implement it the way they want that works best for them provided they have the tech to do them. Intel does the same for their implementations. Amazing isn't it?

No, I kind know what you mean there. I'm just saying that the complexity of a CPU probably gets monstrous at some point. Granted, I guess they had thousands (if not more) people working on it... I guess that's why the R&D phase takes so long and is so damn expensive. I wish I could go get some experience in the actual industry... but I guess that'll have to wait till later.

Quote
it's more feasible for AMD to use synthesizeable blocks now. they're fabless now. they have to use what each foundry can provide. creating custom implementation for an architecture for each foundry isn't cheap.
You're talking about this right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure-play_semiconductor_foundry

From looking at that, all I can gather is that it has to follow design rules. Doesn't seem like it would be a huge limitation (design rules are a bitch though, don't get me wrong). But I guess you're saying that there's some level of customization that they lose by not manufacturing it themselves.

Quote
A 2500K would beat any of the BD in price/performance. If it's just between the BD SKUs, 8120 would probably be the best one.

Kinda sucks that I still have one of my old i5's now, which is more expensive than that one is and probably does way worse.

Well, I'm still satisfied with it though.

I was considering the Bulldozer, but it looks like they didn't do too good a job with it.

Cute, huh?

Offline TMRNetShark

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Re: Your view on AMD's Bulldozer
« Reply #99 on: October 14, 2011, 01:26:32 AM »
I've been looking at some of the reviews/benchmarks... it seems the only way to really get the most out of the Bulldozer is to overclock it. I guess AMD needs to put it at a "safe" power level as for it to work with most mobo/PSU combos.