Will AMD's Bulldozer plow through Intel's Sandy Bridge?

I would not be remotely dissapointed if it did not defeat Sandy Bridge. That way at least one major market player can crank out a great product in the coming years, like the current Phenom II x3s, in the $70 range.

I just can not understand the logic, whether it be cars, homes, boats, or computers of buying anything that produces a slight gain for many times the cost.

Its amazing how much enthusiast/gaming performance you can get by combining a $70 x3 p2 with a $50 motherboard relative to everything that is available.
 
I read through most of these post, 99% are garbage.

Bulldozer is exactly that, when it comes out you can firmly believe it will best intel's offerings at the time. Will intel do something about it? prolly.

Amd is bragging about bring back the FX line of processors. Now think back a bit, last time Amd marketed FX processors was back in the 939 socket era. Amd was on top with the 64.

FX were performance Cpu built for gaming and were at the top of their class. The fact is if they are going to bring back the FX line they will do just that again. Bulldozer has a tech which puts hyper-threading to shame forget the exact term they use to call it. The information on its architecture is out there just go a few google search.

For those who think the phenom II 6 cores were a fail. You couldn't be more wrong. Intel cannot complete with these chips for the price/performance ratio.

Intel might offer the advantage right now, but Amd has also held the crown as well in the past. They trade blows, and I believe if they are bragging about bring back the FX line of processors, we are in for a real treat.
 
Bulldozer has a tech which puts hyper-threading to shame forget the exact term they use to call it
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The problem with any attack on hyperthreading is most games and applications do not need more than 4 cores right now. As I said in this thread a 4 module 8 threaded Bulldozer of 3.5 to 3.7GHz should easily beat the SB 2600 at stock in applications that need use more than 4 threads. The problem for AMD is there are very few applications that use more than 4 threads.
 
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The problem with any attack on hyperthreading is most games and applications do not need more than 4 cores right now. As I said in this thread a 4 module 8 threaded Bulldozer of 3.5 to 3.7GHz will easily beat the SB 2600 at stock in applications that need use more than 4 threads. The problem for AMD is there are very few applications that use more than 4 threads.
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who cares about single threaded performance? I don't the future is muti-threaded. All new games, and applications right now use some sort of support. In another year all applications and games will use it. Single threaded is quickly going down the drain, and the new era of muti core and muti threaded applications is the future.
 
ebduncan said:
who cares about single threaded performance? I don't the future is muti-threaded. All new games, and applications right now use some sort of support. In another year all applications and games will use it. Single threaded is quickly going down the drain, and the new era of muti core and muti threaded applications is the future.
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Single threaded applications may be reducing however as a programmer I know It will be years before a majority of applications will be optimized for 5+ threads.
 
ebduncan said:
I read through most of these post, 99% are garbage.

Bulldozer is exactly that, when it comes out you can firmly believe it will best intel's offerings at the time. Will intel do something about it? prolly.

Amd is bragging about bring back the FX line of processors. Now think back a bit, last time Amd marketed FX processors was back in the 939 socket era. Amd was on top with the 64.

FX were performance Cpu built for gaming and were at the top of their class. The fact is if they are going to bring back the FX line they will do just that again. Bulldozer has a tech which puts hyper-threading to shame forget the exact term they use to call it. The information on its architecture is out there just go a few google search.

For those who think the phenom II 6 cores were a fail. You couldn't be more wrong. Intel cannot complete with these chips for the price/performance ratio.

Intel might offer the advantage right now, but Amd has also held the crown as well in the past. They trade blows, and I believe if they are bragging about bring back the FX line of processors, we are in for a real treat.
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1. LOL at the Phenmom II x6s being better than Intel for the price.

Whenever you want to, Remove your head out from your ass and youll find that they were both 1090t/i7 930, were 300$ and the i7 750/ 1055t were both 200$.

So they are the same price. And the AMD chips were NOT faster. SO remind me how they were a better value?
 
Mike_Dee said:
A lot of AMD haters in here. :rolleyes:
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Not at all. I don't hate AMD, far from it. Back when AMD had the fastest processors I ran some of the fastest available. A pair of Opteron 254's on a Tyan K8WE. I'm all about absolute performance, whoever provides that. It makes no difference to me. I'd like to see Bulldozer a more competitive alternative to Intel's offerings than Phenom I & II have been.

No doubt AMD competes well at certain price points and in certain markets. I'm seriously considering an AMD build to upgrade my aging HTPC system. That's not something I'd do if I hated AMD's products or the company.
 
The almost no information is AMD's fault. They have kept a very tight hold on any real performance numbers other than the comparison to Magny Cours which I do not find at all impressive for a desktop processor.

Edit: And again the question is "Will AMD's Bulldozer plow through Intel's Sandy Bridge?"

To me that means will the Bulldozer clock at least to 3.4 GHz and have a 50% (or better) IPC improvement over Phenom II. To me this sounds unlikely at best.
 
All i see you do is spamming a bunch of shit and half the time your wrong but least you admit it props for that. And there is nothing to say because like other people have said there is no info about it really.
 
pxc said:
OK, that's pretty soon. Dates, plox?

No dates? Hmmm, strange.
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I don't get it. You say Intel says "Q1 2012" (quarterly granularity) and wonder why AMD hasn't given dates. I give you the same info (quarter granularity) and that is strange? Is this a double standard? I am not aware of many companies giving launch dates beyond the quarter.

silent-circuit said:
Who is this mysterious "JF-AMD" who supposedly "knows Bulldozer"? Curiouser and curiouser.
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Read my blogs, you'll know who I am.

pxc said:
He's an AMD employee, a PR dude. So all you'll get is sunshine.
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Nope, not in PR. And as for sunshine, I think I am pretty conservative. You don't see me saying anything about performance relative to the competition. Basically all I do is answer questions and clarify misinformation. I am pretty far from being the sunshine boy.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
thankfully am3+ boards will be backwards compatible with am3 processors so if AMD does over price the bulldozers ill just snag a dirt cheap x6 and wait out the price war.
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Definitely... this is great. I will just swap out mobo's and wait for the Bulldozer shit to drop in price. AMD = budget winner, as usual
 
What I honestly expect at this point is that Bulldozer on the desktop will not unseat SB parts from the performance crown. The fact is the Bulldozer architecture is designed for heavily threaded apps, so it will be the server and hpc markets where AMD needs to shine. AMD's bulldozer on the desktop won't need to be the best as long as they can crank it out cheap enough and in high enough quantities so that the OEM's eat them up. They are taking that same route with Fusion and the laptop space now, I'm sure it will apply to the desktop side as well.

Basically, as long as AMD continues getting large OEM contracts and their server grade chips perform on par or better than Intel, they will be just fine.
 
Definitely... this is great. I will just swap out mobo's and wait for the Bulldozer shit to drop in price. AMD = budget winner, as usual
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this is what i like most about AMD, they don't force you to buy a new mobo with every new cpu release. If they do require a new mobo its almost always backwards compatible with the generation before it.

I have a am2 board, rockin a x6. Am3+ boards will come out, I can slap my current x6 in it. Then upgrade to the bulldozer when the time is right.

Truthly, i have only owned one intel based system and it was a labtop. Call me a AMD Fan boy, sure. Loyalty to me means more than a a bit of extra computing performance. Intel hasn't made it easy to jump ships anyways. I'm not exactly, going to shell out 400-500$ to go to a intel based system for similar performance.

As always, it doesn't really matter which is the faster. What matters is what you can afford to buy. You can flame toward either side, but i don't care. I will buy what i buy, and will be happy with the increased performance over my current system.

Information side of things
Two tightly coupled, "conventional" x86 out-of-order processing engines which AMD internally named module
(Single-Module ==> Dual-Core, Dual-Module ==> Quad-Core, Quad-Module ==> Octa-Core etc...) Bulldozer family will lay emphasis on multithreading and multiple cores too
Up to 8MB of L3 cache shared among all Modules on the same silicon die (16MB for dual die MCM), divided into four subcaches of 2MB each, capable of operating at 2.4GHz or more at 1.1V [7]
Native DDR3-1866 Memory Support [8]
Dual Channel DDR3 Integrated Memory Controller (Support for PC3-15000 (DDR3-1866)) for Desktop, Quad Channel DDR3 Integrated Memory Controller (support for PC-12800 (DDR3-1600) and Registered DDR3)[9] for Server/Workstation (New Opteron Valencia and Interlagos)
Cluster Multi-threading (CMT) Technology [10]
Bulldozer module [11] [12] consists of the following:
up to 2048kB L2 cache inside each module (shared between the cores in a module)
16kB 4-way L1 data cache (way-predicted) per core and 2-way 64kB L1 instruction cache per module, one way for each of the two cores[13][14][15]
Two dedicated integer cores
- each consist of 2 ALU and 2 AGU which are capable for total of 4 independent arithmetic or memory operations per clock per core
- duplicating integer schedulers and execution pipelines offers dedicated hardware to each of two threads which significantly increase performance in multithreaded integer applications
- second integer core increases Bulldozer module die by around 12%, which at chip level adds about 5% of total die space[16]
Two symmetrical 128-bit FMAC (fused multiply-add (FMA) capability) Floating Point Pipelines per module that can be unified into one large 256-bit wide unit if one of integer cores dispatch AVX instruction and two symmetrical x87/MMX/SSE capable FPPs for backward compatibility with SSE2 non-optimized software
each module has 213 million transistors in an area of 30.9mm² (including 2MB L2 cache) on an Orochi die [7]
modules are operating at 0.8 to 1.3V, achieving clock frequencies of 3.5GHz or more [7]
11-metal layer 32nm SOI process with implemented first generation GF's High-K Metal Gate (HKMG)
Turbo Core performance boost to increase clock frequency by 500MHz with all cores active (for most workloads) and further, as TDP headroom permits [17]
Support for Intel's future Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instruction set, which supports 256-Bit floating point operations, and SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, CLMUL, as well as future 128-bit instruction sets proposed by AMD (XOP, FMA4 and CVT16) [18], which have the same functionality as the SSE5 instruction set formerly proposed by AMD, but with compatibility to the AVX coding scheme.
Hyper Transport Technology rev. 3.1 (3.20 GHz, 6.4 GT/s, 25.6 GB/s, 16-bit uplink/16-bit downlink) [first implemented into HY-D1 revision "Magny-Cours" on the socket G34 Opteron platform in March 2010 and "Lisbon" on the socket C32 Opteron platform in June 2010]
Socket AM3+ (AM3r2)
- 938pin(?), DDR3 support
- will not retain backward compatiblity with Socket AM3 motherboards but AM3+ motherboards will be backward compatibile with AM3 processors[19]. For the server segment Socket G34 (LGA1974) and Socket C32 (LGA1207) will be used.
Min-Max Power Usage - 10-125 watts
According to AMD, Bulldozer-based CPUs will be based on GlobalFoundries' advanced 32nm SOI process technology and utilize a new approach to multithreaded computer performance that, according to press notes, "balances dedicated and shared computer resources to provide a highly compact, high core count design that is easily replicated on a chip for performance scaling." In other words, by eliminating some of the redundancies that naturally creep into multicore designs, AMD hopes to take better advantage of its hardware capabilities, while utilizing less power.
As of November 2009, Bulldozer-based implementations built on 32nm SOI with HKMG are scheduled to arrive in 2011 for both servers and desktops. The servers will be aimed by the dual chip 16-core Opteron processor codenamed Interlagos (for Socket G34) and single chip 4-8 core Valencia (for Socket C32) while the 4- or 8-core processor codenamed Zambezi will target desktops on AM3+ socket.[4][5]

Bulldozer is the next-generation micro-architecture and processor design developed from the ground up by AMD. Bulldozer will be the first major redesign of AMD’s processor architecture since 2003, when the firm launched its Athlon 64/ Opteron (K8) processors. Bulldozer will feature two 128-bit FMA-capable FPUs which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU. This design is accompanied with 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,[6] but the operating system will see each module as two physical cores.
The module, sold as two cores, is similar to a single SMT (simultaneous multi threading) core, but enhanced with a dedicated integer core and scheduler for each thread. Because the shared floating point core is significantly enhanced, performance could get beyond that of two equivalent Bobcat cores while one of the running threads is integer-only. By comparison, Intel sells SMT cores as a single core, but the threads share more resources in current designs.
 
We will just have to wait and see what the score is closer to release. There is little more we can do at this point.
 
pxc said:
Sure. You just relate information to the public. Got it.
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He only tells us this stuff because he wants to. It's not in his job description, which is technical marketing for servers, embedded, and FireStream products. That's why you won't see him post any kind of real information on the client release, since it's not his department.
 
How about Price to performance and compatibility with the new AM3+ Socket

I dislike Intel for releasing a LGA 1156 socket and now it's being replaced with 1155 within ONE year

One year socket life to me is way to short.
 
pclov3r said:
How about Price to performance and compatibility with the new AM3+ Socket

I dislike Intel for releasing a LGA 1156 socket and now it's being replaced with 1155 within ONE year

One year socket life to me is way to short.
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Intel made significant changes to the way the power circuitry operates on Sandy Bridge with the addition of the Serial VID interface for processor PWM communication to the motherboard. For this reason, the boards can't be electrically compatible. When the same socket is retained, as with 775 for example, we see electrical compatibility issues crop up between processor generations that require new boards anyway. Because of this, I would just as soon have the new socket to make things clear.

AMD did a very similar transition from 939 to the AM sockets which have 938 pins and have since then extended the same tech over and over. This is great for backwards compatibility, but you have to wonder if perhaps they could be pushing the performance envelop further if not for carrying the burden of compliance with legacy specs.

Personally, I think that if you are upgrading the processor on a motherboard within a sockets lifetime you are either a computer enthusiast or didn't do your due diligence before buying components. In either case, we have only ourselves to blame for the added cost. ;)
 
Yea I've had 775 CPU's not work in certain 775 boards, so having the same socket isn't really doing anyone any good. That, and I can't think of a time where I upgraded a CPU with the same motherboard, the performance boost for how much it costs was usually never worth it. I just do a complete new build. Motherboard, CPU, maybe re-use memory if I can...

I'm wondering if I should wait for Bulldozer before my new build or just go with a Sandy Bridge... =/
 
Dan_D said:
We will just have to wait and see what the score is closer to release. There is little more we can do at this point.
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Maybe hijack the thread into: AMD please send us some Bulldozer goodness ;) .
 
I like how all the AMD fanboys are like : "omfg amd is so b3wk3rds com5656pliteisslies1111111"

How soon we forget about socket 939. ANd LGA 775 lasted for 5 years, Unlike Socket 939......
 
:):) said:
And LGA 775 lasted for 5 years, Unlike Socket 939......
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With four different series of chipsets no less for each different generation of LGA775 processor, each with its own incompatibilites. Close, no cigar.
 
:):) said:
I like how all the AMD fanboys are like : "omfg amd is so b3wk3rds com5656pliteisslies1111111"

How soon we forget about socket 939. ANd LGA 775 lasted for 5 years, Unlike Socket 939......
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lol that guy who spams everything got banned lol
 
I realize that this is a brand new architecture, but if you think that AMD is suddenly going to make up a 20-40% IPC deficit overnight, I think you are being overly optimistic.

I'd love to see it happen, though. I used nothing but AMD CPUs for the better part of a decade, and I'd love to see more competition in the high end.
 
MyThLoSt said:
lol that guy who spams everything got banned lol
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But he was right. Only cases where AMD was consumer friendly with socket was socket 939 when x2 cpus worked and later Phenom II cpus working in am2+ mobos.

Socket 754 was abandomed in the same way intel does 1156 today. IIRC there even were mobile x2 754 cpus but desktop version was never released.

Socket A was similar to socket 775 on intel side where you had to update chipsets in mobo at some point of time (I had to get new mobo because my KT266 wasn't supporting Barton).
 
This is supposedly the first all new AMD processor since the Athlons. It is possible they will be competitive which would be awesome if they are cheaper than Intel's and have comparable performance. I mean if AMD's top CPU is $400+ less than Intel's top end but maybe ~ 10% less powerful which would you buy? (Unless your going for all out performance)
 
DarkStarr said:
This is supposedly the first all new AMD processor since the Athlons. It is possible they will be competitive which would be awesome if they are cheaper than Intel's and have comparable performance. I mean if AMD's top CPU is $400+ less than Intel's top end but maybe ~ 10% less powerful which would you buy? (Unless your going for all out performance)
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If they are competitive they won't be cheaper as shown by A64 pricing :D Big corporations get customer friendly only after competitor shows them their place ;)

Just compare number of moddable radeon 5830 when AMD was top dog to number of modable 6950 of today ;)
 
DarkStarr said:
This is supposedly the first all new AMD processor since the Athlons. It is possible they will be competitive which would be awesome if they are cheaper than Intel's and have comparable performance. I mean if AMD's top CPU is $400+ less than Intel's top end but maybe ~ 10% less powerful which would you buy? (Unless your going for all out performance)
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Is it possible? Yes.

But if they had some secrets to unlocking IPC performance I would have suspected that some of those improvements would have made their way into the Phenom line. The Bulldozer core has been in development for years.

I'd love to be wrong. I just don't see them coming out of the gate and blowing Intel away. Nehalem is a good 15-20% faster clock for clock than AMD's current offerings, and Sandy Bridge is supposed to have a 20% improvement on top of that.

But as has been repeated throughout this thread, all of this is just speculation until people have retail products in their rigs.
 
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