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SPEC CPU2006
Benchmark
x3455 Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 2347 Processor
(1.9GHz, 512KB L2 Cache per Core)
SPECint2006 11.3
SPECfp2006 11.2
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/eserver/b...cpu_091007.pdf
For example the best results of Xeon 1.86GHz - 14.2/12.5 for SpecInt/SpecFP
What would a similarly clocked K8 do on this?
2.2-2.4 GHz OpteronQuote:
Originally Posted by awdrifter
rate is not bad
@kl0012: A similar clocked K8 would do 2,2-2,4GHz? What do u mean?
No. I mean 2.2-2.4 GHz Opteron can match these scores. Ther are no published results for 1.9 GHz Opteron (K8).Quote:
Originally Posted by w0mbat
SPECint2006 11.3
....
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...802-01605.html
10.7 specint 2ghz k8 (cores don't matter for single threaded nonrate benches)
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...820-01837.html
11.5 specint 2.2ghz k8
SPECfp2006 11.2
...
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...802-01603.html
2ghz k8 scores 10.9
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...814-01803.html
2.2 scores 11.6
===
SPECint_rate_base2006 score of 72.8 is in between a pair of 4 socket 2,2.2ghz chips 8 cores http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...806-01678.html and http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...806-01674.html
or almost double 4 2ghz k8 cores http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...802-01602.html
----
2 socket 8 k10 1.9ghz are comparable to 4 socket 8 k8 2ghz in SPECfp_rate_base2006 http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...806-01680.html
or 70% better than 2 socket 4 k8 2ghz (but recent result, optimized) or almost 100% than 2 socket 4 1.9ghz k8 http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...416-00875.html
I don't see much improvement per core...
If that new is true....Quote:
Originally Posted by red
Or we will see tomorrow :)
Wow, that's pretty small improvement from the K8 (2.7-5.6%). They can probably get those results from the K8 if they increased the L2 cache to 2-4mb per core.
So Dell is wrong and now IBM their close "partner" is wrong and cooaler is wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by v_rr
Only one that is right is a dude at a forum so far (cuz he had something good to say) ?
It does not sound to good about K10 and i fear thats a fact tomorrow.
I guess some people in here will abandon XS for a while tomorrow =)
yah, but clock for clock performance/improvement is irrelevant. 4 1.9ghz quads is likely cooler than 2 3ghz k8 and at least in server, cheap. speccpu does not test for realistic desktop usage (or any specific one for that matter) so we need workstation apps to test SSE improvements (non broken runs of Cinebench, 3dsmax etc)
SPECint_rate_base2006 score of 72.8 beats 4 3.2ghz k8 by 30% http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...723-01515.html and SPECfp_rate_base2006 of 68.5 beats 4 3ghz k8 by 38% http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...703-01354.htmlExcept for rate, you must be using exorbitant amounts of bandwidth which is not likely.
And in single thread INT, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...604-01202.html k8 is 42% faster (3ghz k8 vs 1.9ghz k10, btw 3/1.9 does not mean 57% more performance, shown above similarly clocked k8s)
Quote:
Originally Posted by awdrifter
Cache has a totally different effect on Intels cpus than it does on AMD ones. There is virtually no noticable difference in performance between 256, 512 and 1mb per core cache on A64s. where the difference between 2mb and 4mb is quite noticeable on C2D.
Im interested in seeing how the power functions of the new processors does. Im selling my laptop off since alot of the features look very nice for notebooks.
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cf...WT060407195417
next mobile amd chip is k8 with k10 northbridge or something like that...
they should have skipped the l3 cache and released it at the start of the year with decent clockspeeds :rolleyes:
if i ever meet hector ruiz i'm going to stab him in the eye with a pen
Good luck but i think hector has twice the amount of bodyguards tommorow.
You need a spear..
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ubermann
and a good spartan warrior. :ROTF:
dammit amd, why did you do this to yourself? They knew what intel was capable of doing once they saw conroe, and even though they were losing millions of dollars and even a few billion now, they still haven't gotten their act together and only pretty much tweaked k8's performance, k10 seems more like a core update than an entirely new marchitecture on it's own
FYI, the design for K10 was pretty much set in stone before C2D was released. There was little AMD could do to tweak the design so late in the game. I re-design would have taken about 18 months (longer), not counting debugging.Quote:
Originally Posted by AliG
one thing I'm wondering about is if a lot of this could deal with the cache? Amd hasn't messed with l3 caches in a while, and their ln2 caches are way smaller than intels (and I also believe slower too). I really wonder how much of a performance impact could that have? Because in 2008 k10.5 comes out with a bigger l3 cache, and in 2009 the individual cores get bigger caches too, not to mention full sse4 and sse5 at that point. Assuming amd stays alive, and they learn from their mistakes and tweak their ipc to have more instructions for single threaded tasks, k10.5 and k11 could possibly be serious nehalem competitors
If that's the case, then why only make such a small upgrade from the start? Common, your competition is bound to wow you at some point and time, and since they can't afford to keep designing new architectures at the rate intel can, k10 should have been a huge upgrade that at least doubled k8's performance as it was planned to last for multiple years. We can now see that amd plans to do a k10.5 and k11 very rapidly after k10's launch and hopefully they can improve their ipc and give the cpus more cache+higher clockspeeds, but still, that should have been done from the start, same way 65nm should have been down over a year ago for them, not try to fix it at the last moment, and that's why they got caught with their pants downQuote:
Originally Posted by mstp2009
i'm eager to see what excuse will amd use tomorrow if this holds true.
All x86 cpus have predecessor, on which they are based on (e. g. core 2 is a revamped core). Every company has to start to desgin their chip from a certain base, there is no processor "designed from scratch".. there are no revolutionary, new designs. All x86 cpus have a LOT in common.Quote:
Originally Posted by AliG
It's all about tweaking old designs.
You can only revamp a core that much, otherwise if you choose a design that is too ambitious and new you risk even more severe problems (implementation of new features is really hard).
The Barcelona project was already VERY ambitious. Thus it's quite late.. and it probably was only designed to take on core 2 duo but not penryn (that's why it seems kinda "slow").
It seems that AMD concentrated on throughput, multi-core scaling and HPC. I don't know if they intended to do it from the start or it was the best they could do with their transistor budget.
However the Barc. arch falls short of Conroe in single threaded applications that is OBVIOUS. Intels huge cache and agressive prefetch is great for single threaded aps..
Intel and AMD engineers are DAMN smart, and all their cores are heavily tweaked, and they have to keep to a transistor budget on a certain node - the chip can't be to big and to hot for the node it is produced on - and every chip is unbelievably complex. To extract even more performance out of such a complex design is quite a task (the individual barcelona cores can't be much bigger than 65nm K8, because then the die would be simply too big for 65nm... so they had to use some clever tricks to get more single threaded AND mutli threaded performance out of the design)
That's why there are no 5-issue, 128 bit, octa cores with 16mb cache. It's simply not feasible when you have to keep to a certain die size.
Tweaking anything is an extremely difficult task (because almost everything is already heavily optimised!) - that's why I always said that barcelona SIMPLY CANT BE 100% faster in common real world tasks (excluding IMC advantage in throughput) than conroe (e.g. when there were those stupid theinq lies about 30k 3dmark...).
If everything was more or less equal (architecture) than Intel would have to be better, because they have a much more advanced process.. however the architectures are very different in some aspects, but the point is, it's much easier for Intel to win, because of their sophisticated 45nm process.
Imho barcelona is a very specialised core, too specialised, which will be unmatched in throughput.. but that won't sell, they'll have to price their processor according to overall performance and the weak int performance.
K10 is a major upgrade, and very similar to core 2 but with 3 complex decoders instead of Core 2's 3 simple + 1 complex, has slightly weaker OOO and smaller L2+L3, but retains a larger L1 cache, better instruction fetch bandwidth and the IMC advantage. What K10 needs is clockspeed, there's nothing remotely mediocre about the architecture. The Spec numbers don't tell much at all, as K8 performance is similar in spec to core 2, but in real world heavy SSE2 use core 2 blows away K8 and typically outperforms it in other typical applications. Tomorrow we'll know how K10 performs (hopefully) but I expect very good performance (clock for clock) particularly in video encoding/decoding, games and pure number crunch applications. Too bad the launch clock speeds will be low. Looks like reliable motherboard availability will be low as well for some time too. So for now, Intel remains in the lead till early Q1 2008.Quote:
Originally Posted by AliG
IF manufacturers bring bios updates with the phenom launch there will be more than enough motherboards ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by JVguest
Quote:
Originally Posted by JVguest
Yep... on throughput, and large working set workloads, this is a great core... well suited for high data rate FPU and HPC applications, this is the excess bandwidth AMD put emphasis on during design. Even the 2.0 Ghz will be shining in a few places over Intel's top CPU I suspect.
The IBM non-rate data is a glimpse into the actual core (BW not a factor) performance relative to core microarch. It catches up but does not surpass if this data is indeed accurate. This would mean on desktop, C2 will likely retain the performance crown, and AMD's shot at moving up will depend on how quickly they can ramp clockspeeds.
with penryn coming out, being a few percent faster than c2 clock for clock (in general) as well as higher clockspeeds and even better overclocking (if that's possible), there's no way AMD will be in the lead in q1 2008.Quote:
Originally Posted by JVguest
Friday i was lmao with all the FUD that was going around in this forum about K10 when we were at only 3 FRIGGING DAYS from solid numbers... now it's not days it's hours and the FUD remains.
This Red character is making an amazing job, with the watershed of SPEC scores, some of them where SPECint base is higher then peak.
SPEC scores ARE NOT SET IN STONE, did you missed the "miraculous" score improvements Xeon's got in just a few weeks?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/images/2p-...amd-server.png
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/images/2p-...-september.png
What? do you think K10 scores won't go up either? Do you seriously think with the amount of K10 systems that are going to be submitted to SPEC, K10 scores aren't going to rise? How do you know that those IBM scores aren't going to be among the worst that are going to be submitted to SPEC?
Do you want to be fair and look smart? Compare the first Clovertown scores in SPEC to the first K10 scores:
Clovertown -> SPECint2006 12.0 SPECfp2006 10.9
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...202-00322.html
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/...212-00416.html
K10 -> SPECint2006 11.6 SPECfp2006 11.2
That Clovertown is the best score when it came out, the K10 score we don't know if the best or the worst.
Now some math... comparing the amd leaked slides to the IBM pdf we got this:
K10 1.9ghz -> SPECint_rate2006 83.2 SPECfp_rate2006 73.0
K10 2.0ghz -> SPECint_rate2006 88 SPECfp_rate2006 77.2
K10 performance raises around 5,5% with only 100mhz.
Base in the latest SPEC scores submitted by Intel, c2d only gets a 9,5% jump in performance with 333mhz, where K10 with 300mhz will get something like 16,5 % boost, so or K10 IPC is higher or those IBM scores are low.
People say this but theres quite the difference in games with 512K and 1024K L2 cache & K8'sQuote:
Originally Posted by Jimmer411
2.0/1.9= 1.0526.....Quote:
Originally Posted by DoubleZero
so a 5.3% increase in core clock results in an equivilent increase in performance, colour me suprised :rofl:
When core clocks are so low of course the percentage gain is going to be great for small increases in clock, as core speeds increase each 100mhz results in a lower percentage improvement.
100 to 200mhz results in 100% improvement
1900 to 2000 just over 5%
2900 to 3000 just under 3.5%
Its only when I/O is a bottleneck that you'll see less than ideal scaling, and at low speeds theres certainly not going to be a bottleneck. If we were talking about the highest end parts then the fsb would probably provides some problems with scaling, but going from 1.33 to 2.66 to 3ghz sees a similar increase, so IO doesn't seem to be a bottleneck.
Barcelona is Native quad-core.
Teoricaly it will scale lot better with higher clocks then C2D.
Remember cooaler Cinebench?
AMD scaled more 10% then C2D at 2.0Ghz passing from single to multi-tread.
Also there are the articles that speak that Barcelona will show it´s power only with 2.5Ghz.
Tomorrow I wan´t to see a 2.5 to 2.8Ghz K10 overclocked to see the true K10 power.
guys, again, there are significant performance deltas between the release stepping of the core and the B0/B1 steppings.
without much more information than that, you just need to keep your panties in check.
dave
so ibm also uses b0/b1 stepping ?Quote:
Originally Posted by dave_graham
I guess i got caught by the dumb rumours that K10 scaling wouldn't be linear... :slapass:Quote:
Originally Posted by onewingedangel
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:Quote:
Originally Posted by onewingedangel
What was the starting clock where you calculated that 9.5%?? % improvements without a common base will throw you into the wrong conclusion.... for example.Quote:
Originally Posted by DoubleZero
1.9 to 2.0 GHz improvement gives 5% roughly, but 2.5 to 2.6 Ghz is 4%...
if you are calculating from 2.66 to 3.00 gigherzt this is roughly a 12% so 9.5% is not horrid scaling but does demonstrate some BW limiting performance effects.
Does 2.00 to 2.33 make it worse?Quote:
Originally Posted by JumpingJack
depends on when the benches were run.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hornet331
dave
4 years since the k8 - and all theyv doen is put 4 cores on a chip.
all those new designers + design centres and the ipc increases 3% on the core. what have they been designing?
they must have known internally that the ipc sucked - hence no leaks. otherwise they would have leaked like crazy like intel with the core.
hope im wrong - cause if im right the amd is going down.
Dave. you have been pretty optimistic about k10 as of late, you have certainly been one of the more vocal members in defending any sign of weakness from k10 blaming it on steeping etc and pretty much hinting that k10 is going to wipe the floor with intel and I have been believing you but I must admit that it is a stretch not to think IBM has it right, No?Quote:
Originally Posted by dave_graham
I suppose it is only a few hours till we find out if you are on the level:)
It has begun....
Quote:
Originally Posted by gallag
of course i've been vocal.
here's what i've been vocal about:
a.) people assuming that Cinebench 10 and SuperPi results as tested by coolater on a B0/B1 stepping processor are the presumptive indicator of performance for an entire range of processors.
b.) people making snap-assumptions that benchmarks that are published by Tier One vendors are the gospel even when, as we've seen with Dell and IBM, there are SIGNIFICANT VARIANCES IN PERFORMANCE.
c.) people using B0/B1 stepping performance claims to downplay AMD's ability to produce silicon that falls in line with the performance claims they've made in the past.
do I have a lot of experience on this platform? yes.
do I have a lot of background information covered under NDA from AMD and Tyan? yes
i don't drink the Kool-aid. I simply look for the people that do and try to correct it.
seriously. anything i've posted as of late has been to correct significantly incorrect perceptions on Barcelona and it's process to market.
if Intel would actually give me the time of day, I might be inclined to do the same there, but, i don't have the time, money, or anti-AMD attitude that they desire.
*shrug*
clear as mud to me.
in questioning these IBM results, i'm simply providing input that if IBM used B1 stepping processors (versus the BA/B2 stepping processors that will be present at launch), there's going to be significant notable impact on "scores" unless the proper workarounds are implemented.
waiting until tomorrow is somewhat laughable since outside of a very few talented individuals, i'm expecting a :banana::banana::banana::banana:load of poorly done "thanks for the free chips, AMD...you rock!" reviews that have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the capabilities of the platform.
EDIT: at least i'm intelligent in my responses versus some of these asshat Intel/AMD fanboi's who believe without reason. again, knowledge is power.
dave
I take it you'll be using the newer steppings for your review?Quote:
Originally Posted by dave_graham
Just out of interest, is the final silicon significantly faster or are the boards hindering its performance?
From the scant data we currently have, oodles more tomorrow --- my opinion is that AMD looked at the K8 core from a heavy FPU perspective, along with increasing the FPU/SSE to 128 bit, and where they thought they would bottleneck put significant efforts into improving BW.... about 1/2 of the core features were targeted to BW improvements.Quote:
Originally Posted by pawl
As such I would call K10 a success because we are seeing huge improvements in FPU multithreaded performance. Also, AMD designs to the server space first then works that into desktop. As such, a server design for desktop works to an extent.... but DT is not as dependent on BW as is server workloads.
What I think we will ultimately see is great improvements over K8 in the server space, and a competitive product against the competition... on DT there will be case of isolated gains, but on average the improvement IPC wise on CPU bound workloads may be less than expected as a result of the focus on server/throughput.
Don´t worry, here in Europe just 2 minutes to Sept.10th
I want to see some real numbers, good or bad. All this speculation sucks.
it'll be around 1-2 in the afternoon till the NDA is lifted in Europe.Quote:
Originally Posted by STaRGaZeR
And some time before all the reviews are done and published. So don´t worry anymore.
:para: confused :confused:
:eek: excited :yepp: ...but also :para: confused :confused:
Can't wait though, got to go start another pot ..... :coffee:
IBM says the results are current as of Sep 10, 2007. Sounds like they would be using the production stepping, if they bothered to put out a whitepaper on it, and why would IBM submit pre-prod stepping results to SPEC??? That just doesn't seem at all likely.Quote:
Originally Posted by dave_graham
Notice the lame system availability date as well.
Barc is a paper launch from the big OEMs.
From the pdf:
Results are current as of September 10, 2007. The scores have been submitted to SPEC for review and will be posted on their Web site upon successful completion of the review. View all
published results at www.spec.org.
(1) Planned availability for the x3455 model using the AMD Opteron Model 2347 processor
(1.9GHz, 512KB L2 cache per core) is November 16, 2007.
More IBM benchs (LS-DYNA benchmark) with Barcelona 1.9ghz
What's this bench?
"LS-DYNA, developed by the Livermore Software Technology Corporation, is a general-purpose transient dynamic finite element program capable of simulating complex real world problems. It is optimized for shared and distributed memory Unix®, Linux®, and Microsoft® Windows® platforms. LS-DYNA is being used by automobile, aerospace, manufacturing and bioengineering companies. LS-DYNA is heavily used in automobile crash simulation."
Result:
The x3455 server achieved an elapsed time of 31,526 seconds, which is better than the 32,578 seconds of elapsed time achieved by a single-node 8-core blade system using the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® X5355 processor at 2.66GHz.
So, two Barcelona (8 cores) at 1.9ghz, about 3% faster than two Clovertown (8 cores) at 2.66ghz (with 40% less clock than Clover).
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/eserver/b...yna_091007.pdf
Hmm. Maybe the first decent indicator of whether Barcelona will run DC projects well compared with Xeon? That's impressive if true.Quote:
Originally Posted by PetNorth
Wouldn't that mean Barcelona @ 2.4Ghz would be faster than Xeon@3.33? (on such apps, of course)
It seems it would be........
LS-DYNA and their special Fluent Beta are AMD's cherry-picked benchmarks. The one niche where it looks good.Quote:
Originally Posted by hawkeyefan
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6299
hmm that benchmarks sure seems to behave strange...
8 singlecores are faster than 2 quads....
seems, it all boils down how much nodes you use... :shrug:
http://img475.imageshack.us/img475/1160/benchxk8.th.jpg
yeah... superpi is much more important for human life.... who cares HPC (High Perfomance Computing), eh?Quote:
Originally Posted by terrace215
I imagine it depends OS, prog version, etc, so you will have to compare similar configs, I guess...Quote:
Originally Posted by Hornet331
Superpi?Quote:
Originally Posted by PetNorth
How about specINT, specFP, specINT_rate? Intel wins all of these, even CLOCK for CLOCK!
Add in the clock speed advantage, the manufacturing advantage, the Q4-arriving 45nm and improved platform (Seaburg) boost, and it's hard to see how AMD digs itself out of the current hole with the K10.
There are plenty of other important server benchmarks, but it clearly looks like Barcelona will only look good on HPC ones.Quote:
Originally Posted by PetNorth
yeah yeah... or whateverQuote:
Originally Posted by terrace215
how about specFP_rate?
ah wait thats irrelevant, it is AMD cherry picked... not valid...
No it is valid as a measure of floating point performance but it just is not representative of the entire pool of applications. AMD did not cherry pick, they simply choose to show their product in the best light... just as Intel shows SpecINT preferably because that is where they shine....Quote:
Originally Posted by PetNorth
Focusing your attention on SpecFP and extrapolating something great across the board is simply setting yourself up for disappointment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by terrace215
Yes.... Fluent/LS-DYNA if you notice are FP heavy... Barcey is gonna kick butt there.
I don't focuse anything. We have others to do it here.
what funny!
now rest in peace, after the effort.
Intel +1
AMD 0
My bad... I thought your message implied something else.Quote:
Originally Posted by PetNorth
What are your thoughts on the non-rate SpecFP and Int?
Heck, what is the difference between rate and non-rate Spec benches?
the only thing i have heard of is Spec benches. There are other things to determine performance in apps.
Lets see a FULL REVIEW before any conclusions. Come on guys, only hours away, then the fanboys can play.
No wonder Cray and others want access to these processors.... they will eat up FPUs.
September 10th where are the benchmarks, lol.
Can't wait this long.
9:30 tonight we get to see the webcast of launch
London is already 10th September 01:16, hopefully it will be transmitted via internet. I'm still up to see if something comes up. So 3 hours more :(Quote:
Originally Posted by EvlUndrWareNome
It is better go to sleep and see tomorrow.
Man this is killing us.
Don't they mean Sept 10 US?
Official date/time is Sept. 10, 6:45PM
So we're talking monday evening in the US.
If it's anything like the R600, which we had to wait till the end of the launch day, then I guess we'll be waiting till the end of monday :(
LS-DYNA, being a simulation program, will naturally be floating point heavy, like most simulations (eg molecular dynamics on supercomputers).
does anyone know if game physics engines use a lot of floating point? it'd seem logical, given that computer games, especially first person shooters, do a lot of simulating of real world environments & physics, and that's only becoming more common, eg ragdoll physics for dead bodies in the source engine vs icons in doom and duke nukem 3d, and lots of fun object collisions in half life 2 (gravity gun)
some manufacturers have been known to toss results into the ring early...won't name names, but...this is an OEM pissing match, remember. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by terrace215
dave
In 24 hours we'll know what's going on for sure. I just hope the Phenom products launch at higher clockspeeds (regardless of the performance). My Opteron 165 is itching to be replaced, and I'd much rather see AMD in my rig than Intel. :) Now if we could just get nVidia to release the 9 series...
Have you ever known a Tier 1 OEM to submit pre-production scores to SPEC???Quote:
Originally Posted by dave_graham
They have to say when the hardware will be available to customers... and pre-prod never would be.
:clap: IBM submitted scores from a defective CPU!:rofl: :ROTF:
I just can't believe it.
*cough* it happens. i've known several companies to publish "machines" that suddenly have config changes (significant) at time of release.Quote:
Originally Posted by terrace215
cheers,
dave
didn't say that...was just questioning results.Quote:
Originally Posted by lapdog
dave
I guess I misunderstood; you certainly seem to suggest IBM used B0/B1 that had problems and have been fixed (were defective.) :confused:Quote:
Originally Posted by dave_graham
IF the identified CPUs were B1s, yes. don't know as that's not typically revealed.Quote:
Originally Posted by lapdog
dave
[QUOTE=hollo;2421465]LS-DYNA, being a simulation program, will naturally be floating point heavy, like most simulations (eg molecular dynamics on supercomputers).
[QUOTE]
LS-DYNA is a heavy bandwidth benchmark and quad cores not the best solutions for this benchmark.
Here is the list of 8-core scores:
http://www.topcrunch.org/benchmark_r...count=8&type=5
Which is more important in stanford's folding@home?
SPECint/SPECfp????
-tam2-
Neither really give you a good hint:Quote:
Originally Posted by tam2
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13176/7
You have lost all credibility in my book.Quote:
Originally Posted by dave_graham
You seem to give and take said credibility quite easily :)Quote:
Originally Posted by lapdog
Dave's input, whether here or on 2cpu or any other forum, is valued. People may disagree with it, hold it highly, or merely lump it in with other voices, but he's one of the people giving actual input (ie. not regurgitating FUD's tabloid articles). That, in itself, gives him "cred" in my book.
Personally, I'm waiting at least a month or two after the release to form an opinion. Launch day presents too small a sample most likely tainted by brown-nosing. The industry itself will let us know whether they're a good product or not.