K10 Scores starting to surface

[adamsleath]

ahuk !

[terrace215]

You don't think he was forced out???

Obviously not. When you force your Chief SALES and Marketing officer out, you have a replacement ready to announce at the same time as you announce the departure of the old guy.

When someone quits with short notice, a la Henri, you have to say that his functions (head of sales AND marketing) are "reporting in to the office of the CEO" while you scramble to find the replacement.

[Mad_Man]

The BIOS argument is a decent one, but typically BIOS code does not interact to produce a computational result... it provides very low level IO code, most of which OSes simply ignore today. Though it could be that there are initializations for various functions that are not occuring correcty and such, but I have never really experienced a BIOS update, even a buggy one, to affect performance that much.

Nonetheless, there is way way too much contradictory information or conjecture. Theo seems to think it is a monster, Hector Ruiz is downplaying the significance, Raul is certain of great performance, AMD has conceded single thread perfomance to Intel in various press statements.... so it is hard to know what to make of this.

we do not really know much about that rig that was benched. only speculations.
but the bad bios argument seems it could be true.

i tell you, once i flashed my mobo with new bios, everything looks good, no errors etc. yet, with exactly the same settings, mem bandwith was whole 2GB less than with older one. sPi went up 5sec. everything was slow. i reflashed the bios twice, same doggy result.
went back to older bios and it was how it should be.

sometimes, especily if you dont have good background, or "base score", you cant tell whether the bios is good or bad one....

[SOLDNER-MOFO64]

we do not really know much about that rig that was benched. only speculations.
but the bad bios argument seems it could be true.

i tell you, once i flashed my mobo with new bios, everything looks good, no errors etc. yet, with exactly the same settings, mem bandwith was whole 2GB less than with older one. sPi went up 5sec. everything was slow. i reflashed the bios twice, same doggy result.
went back to older bios and it was how it should be.

sometimes, especily if you dont have good background, or "base score", you cant tell whether the bios is good or bad one....

Agreed....these fools who insist a BIOS has nothing to do with it need brain transplant. A BIOS can make ALL the difference to a machines performance....and we ALL know this. You'd need to be a complete forehead biter to think otherwise.

Besides....it would be kinda silly to pick PHENOM as a name for a line of cpu's which perform really badly against even older architecture and fail miserably against your direct competitors.

some time ago in an AMD lab
......"Ehhhh hold on guys...this cpu ain't looking too hot now we're approaching completion. I just ran it in CINEBENCH and INTEL's Q6700 scores double!!!! What we gonna do guys?".
"Well (say's one of the other guys in the lab)...we could always just release it anyway insisting it's actually better than INTEL's quads".
"Yeah," says another lab hand, ".........and we can call it PHENOM as in PHENOMINAL since it's soooooo CRAP!"

[Hornet331]

god... 10 more days till this crap battle is over...

[Movieman]

Lets see a concrete review. A review with pictures and an author. I do not trust pics from a foreign nation across the world.

The only hype or benches I will believe is when it is a true posted review, written up by an author, with pics of the packaging and cpu. I want to know what chipset it is running on as well as memory.

I dont trust a few screen shots from across the globe as a reliable performance benchmark.
Also note these are early opteron K10's not the Phenoms that willl be out later this year, nor the chipset we will run them on, and most likely different ram speeds/timings.

Xs is an international forum with trusted members from all over.
Would you use this logic to dismiss Victor Wang's findings or Pedro Rocha's or Kinc's?
All people from a "foreign country" as you describe it and all people of impeccable credentials.
I'll be very polite and say that this was a very badly worded statement on your part. Where someone is from isn't a factor to their credibility.

[Thesavage]

More here,
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=42052

[Movieman]

not trying to fuel a fire here, but calling stupid people stupid isn't flaming, it's just calling them exactly what they are.

[ >> continue ]

Puts mod hat back on:
Yes it is. The intent is to insult and there is the issue.
Rational adults should be able to get together, discuss a subject from all viewpoints without insulting one another.
Someone can come here and post a brilliant thought but if that person calls another a moron,etc in his first sentence then his message is lost.
He's simply lost his credibility in my eyes as he's shown that he doesn't have the ability to disect anothers argument with facts and logic.
At that point it just turns you off to listening to anything that guy has to say.

[Theli]

god... 10 more days till this crap battle is over...

In 10 days, a new shipment of ammunition arrives.

[Movieman]

In 10 days, a new shipment of ammunition arrives.

And I will be writing AMD a personal note of thanks so that my poor two typing fingers can have a break!

[Hornet331]

And I will be writing AMD a personal note of thanks so that my poor two typing fingers can have a break!

2?

[Movieman]

2?

Just 2..My 2 forefingers, thats it..remember, when I went to school the only people that took typing were of the female persuasion and I was in my 40's before PC's were out.

[Hornet331]

i see, but it never to late to learn something new.

[Movieman]

i see, but it never to late to learn something new.

To be honest I don't have the motivation or the need. I can do app 40 words a minute with 2 fingers and that covers my needs..

[rozzyroz]

To be honest I don't have the motivation or the need. I can do app 40 words a minute with 2 fingers and that covers my needs..

two finger guy here too, but for different reasons. i have an injury in my right hand that made me lose any dexterity in my middle and ring finger.

i still do ok on my typing though.

edit: but i still misspell words a lot heh

[Movieman]

two finger guy here too, but for different reasons. i have an injury in my right hand that made me lose any dexterity in my middle and ring finger.

i still do ok on my typing though.

edit: but i still misspell words a lot heh

Use the built in spell check,"Ispell"..Not perfect but pretty good..
Where you see the ""ABC with a checkmark at top right whewn your posting above the smileys

[uOpt]

Other than breaking NDA,Sood simply said Phenom @ 3ghz is "stone cold killer" and that it is and will be considerably faster than any intel or AMD chip when it is out.

If he means in 3Dmark, that doesn't contradict Coolaner's site's numbers. We have seen that K10 improves over K8 by about 7%. Per Core and Clockspeed.

So how does that compare to a 3.0 GHz Core2 if you consider two eight-cores? We have seen (in cinebench) that Barcelona's disadvatage per clock is less the more processors you count, which is hardly surprising given Hypertransport, integrated memory controller and NUMA. It has been the same way with K8 in both multiplprocessor sockets.

But the Intel Core2 eight-core is a socket 771 system, so no SLI.

So even if the per-core per-clock performance of Barcelona is still lower (which it is, face it), a benchmark involving both multi-processor code and graphics code, with Barcelona using SLI, will easily see K10 beat Core2.

[cpuz]

i was talking about this:
cpuz 1.41 should be barcelona compatible, if i can call it that.
so cpu-z should show bus speed as 200mhz, and HT link 1000mhz for stock system??

You're right.
The dump I got reveals several problems with the HT link of the CPU. According to the config regs, the CPU HT link width is set to "Link physically not connected".
I don't exactly know if this is possible that the system works in such conditions, however, there's definitely something odd.

Capabilities
	HyperTransport Capability
		Offset			A0h
		Revision		3.00
		Interface type		Host/Secondary
		Device number		0
		Link 0 frequency	200MHz
	HyperTransport Capability
		Offset			C0h
		Revision		3.00
		Interface type		Host/Secondary
		Device number		0
		Link 0 frequency	200MHz
	HyperTransport Capability
		Offset			E0h
		Revision		3.00
		Interface type		Host/Secondary
		Device number		0
		Link 0 frequency	200MHz

[Yoxxy]

Hi: For what it's worth I also saw 1.40.8 and 1.41 showing wrong cpu voltages on the clovers..3.3+volts..
1.38 was fine..

On topic please everyone. Let's get back to more information on K10.

[w0mbat]

@cpuz: Has this any impact on the performance of the k10?

[JumpingJack]

Obviously not. When you force your Chief SALES and Marketing officer out, you have a replacement ready to announce at the same time as you announce the departure of the old guy.

When someone quits with short notice, a la Henri, you have to say that his functions (head of sales AND marketing) are "reporting in to the office of the CEO" while you scramble to find the replacement.

As much as I despise quoting fudzilla, he posted a rumor that another VP will leave AMD:
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?op...=2774&Itemid=1

[JumpingJack]

we do not really know much about that rig that was benched. only speculations.
but the bad bios argument seems it could be true.

i tell you, once i flashed my mobo with new bios, everything looks good, no errors etc. yet, with exactly the same settings, mem bandwith was whole 2GB less than with older one. sPi went up 5sec. everything was slow. i reflashed the bios twice, same doggy result.
went back to older bios and it was how it should be.

sometimes, especily if you dont have good background, or "base score", you cant tell whether the bios is good or bad one....

Yeah, I have seen small improvements here or there, but let's assume the Coolaler data is correct, it appears AMD is somewhere between 15-20% short on IPC relative to Core at least in rendering, CPUmark is general but not a great indicator .... BIOS, even an early beta that gets this rig running, would be a stretch to make up that gap. Which is why I say the BIOS argument is a decent one, but not a good one.

What you see argued in this thread, and an argument that needs to be had in light of all the speculation, is that these results indicate that Barcey is fairing poorer than expected -- based upon AMD claims and known architectural work.... therefore, the skepticism is rational and the idea is to explain the data in light of the lower than expected performance... BIOS is one argument, not a good one but it is one... disabled features are another good argument, which is why knowing the stepping is so critical.

[Lightman]

You're right.
The dump I got reveals several problems with the HT link of the CPU. According to the config regs, the CPU HT link width is set to "Link physically not connected".
I don't exactly know if this is possible that the system works in such conditions, however, there's definitely something odd.

Capabilities
	HyperTransport Capability
		Offset			A0h
		Revision		3.00
		Interface type		Host/Secondary
		Device number		0
		Link 0 frequency	200MHz
	HyperTransport Capability
		Offset			C0h
		Revision		3.00
		Interface type		Host/Secondary
		Device number		0
		Link 0 frequency	200MHz
	HyperTransport Capability
		Offset			E0h
		Revision		3.00
		Interface type		Host/Secondary
		Device number		0
		Link 0 frequency	200MHz

That somehow fits to what Gary Key from Anandtech (thanks informal) said about early benches.

Interesting at least...

[Morais]

Well, two more Monday's and we will see the real truth ...I cant stand more speculation

[HopJokey]

Hey guys here is even more information from Gary Key. I just thought there wasn't enough speculation so I will add some more

I asked him if the part scales better than linear since he was saying Barcelona needed at least 2.4Ghz to show it's "true colors". Here is his response:

Not exactly, I cannot go into the details yet, just imagine the cache/memory pipeline as being a supercharger on a car, you have an engine (same compression ratio/cubic inches for NA versus SC) that performs the same until you hit a certain RPM/air-fuel mixture where the SC comes online and the power curve changes dramatically compared to the NA engine. The same basis is occurring here, all of the changes/enhancements made to the core / HT/ cache / memory controller are basically "idle" in some cases (SC is flowing more air than than the engine can take advantage of at low RPM plus you have parasitic drag from powering the SC), if not a hindrance (low compression and mismatched gearing). An engine (CPU) is most efficient at its torque peak (wherever that happens to be based on gearing, displacement, compression, efficiency, etc) and in this case, it starts nearing it (torque peak) around 2.4GHz from all indications.

This is a very crude and simple example but about the only way I can state information at this time. The simple fact is, this core needs clock speed and until 2.4GHz or so, it is not that impressive in my opinion on the desktop. Certain transactions/operations will be noticeable/improved over some of the Core 2 family processors on a performance/wattage aspect from an enterprise overview, but this chip design is going to require clock speed before you start seeing some numbers that make sense in the consumer/workstation market. That is why Phenom will launch at higher clock speeds, different core configurations, and with chipsets designed to take full advantage of the core changes with consumer applications. That is my guesstimate based on performance up to this point, several of the larger OEMs received their final silicon chips this past week, most noticed another improvement in performance, how much, we will find out shortly but do not expect a leap frog over the Blue Bunnies yet.

I would not be surprised to even see supply shortages until early next year and still think BullDozer is the AMD CPU that will make or break the company. Barcelona and Shanghai, plus their desktop counterparts, are evolutionary designs (core basis) based off the K7/K8. This is why I have never really understood the hype around this launch, yes, performance improvements will come and we get some interesting new technologies like HT 3.0 /native quad core layout, but without clock speed improvements to match, you end up with A64 X4+ for a lack of simpler words.

Also here is his take on the recent benchmarks on the Coolaler forums:

Actually, based on the last chip we had, those numbers are in alignment with some of the results we noticed and others as well. I think they will be better than that at release and especially on a consumer board with Vista 64-bit. Until we have final silicon and boards, anything is a guesstimate at this time. I just think people are going to be disappointed in some ways, as were we, until the clock speeds come up.