AMD cuts to the core with 'Bulldozer' Opterons

[-Boris-]

No,I believe the difference won't be big or impact gameplay that much.Not to mention there won't be 4.8Ghz Deneb chip to actually compare this(unless you do the dry ice session and test it yourself ).But I figure many will be looking to replace their SB or Bulldozer desktop chips with something new in 2014 so testing a Deneb on Dry Ice with the latest GPUs wouldn't be on anyone's priority list .

Well I say that we don't nedd a 4.8GHz phenom II for that expermient, I say that a chip much faster than Phenom II 940 3GHz will perform much better in games in 2014. And I say that Core i7 is such a chip, and I say Zambezi better be such a chip. Furthermore, it's my opinion that this benchmark is a very bad indicator of real world performance.

I think you are a hypocrite that claims amount of cores and L3 will be important, but at the same time neglect the importance of the architectures properties like IPC and frequency. I say that an i7 that beats a Phenom II with a wide margin in todays games will do so on the games of 2014. And not suddenly become equal just because a GPU limited bench from today showed them to be equal.

OK let me help you to understand.
DB module consists of two quasy-cores, not full cores. They have some shared hardware. You can consider them as hiperthreading. In other words, when one core performance is 100%, 2 cores have only 180%, not 200%.
Same for 8 modules: 800% when used single core within each module, and 1440% using 16 threads with 8 modules and taking ideal case 100% scaling of modules.

It is just very good hiperthreading compared to intel's one.

I know very well about the information that is released on Bulldozer so far. And if we should consider it to be like a good hyperthreading we should call Zambezi a quad core.

Regarding scaling of MC and BD you wrote above:
Scaling itself means performance increase when adding same cores. Say, Phenom II 8 cores to 12 cores while having same frequency/IPC per core.. So, again, forget your 12.5. That number is only for 16-threaded Interlagos compared to 12-core MC.
4 module BD will have significantly higher clock speed. Particularly in desktop processors having 125 watt TDP.
And you correctly figured out that single-threaded performance is going to be significantly higher that Phenom II. Actually I see it within 20%-25% considering what we already know.

I don't think you really understood what I said.
Thuban is a higher clocked singlechip piece for AM3 just as Zambezi is a higher clocked singlechip piece for AM3.

Thuban has more in common with Istanbul than with Magny Cours. Magny Cours is an improved new micro architecture which was only to be released for server market, as AMD was hoping that both Fusion and Bulldozer (specifically for desktop) would materialize sooner than this. However, in the server market, it was getting rather too close for comfort with improved Intel server chippery. AMD addressed this situation in the server market with Magny Cours. There is no Magny Cours derived desktop part in the market, but only ones based on Shanghai (Agena) and Istanbul (Thuban).

Which is why i personally have an opinion that we would see a nice jump when it comes to new desktop architecture. However original Phenom was supposed to do so too... So unless things go really that bad for AMD in desktop arena, it is all rosy going forward. Sandy Bridge should have some competition and not just on cost front.

The differences between Istanbul and Magny Cours is none except that Magny Cours has a new socket. You can see Magny Cours like two Istanbuls in the same package, the new socket makes sure the communicate quickly and each have dual channel DDR3, effectively making it quad channel. The solution with Interlagos will be the same, two Zambezi-like opterons on the same package.

So an Istanbul and a Magny Cours will have the same relationship as a single die bulldozer compared to a dual die bulldozer.


If you still claim that Magny Cours have some improvements over istanbul other than the socket related ones (the same as dual die BD also haves compared to single die BD) please provide a source for you claim.

Then again, you have mentioned in another post, Intel still continue with their BS compiler frauds... who knows how much of a negative impact that has on AMD's processor in real world scenario. In one study they found that there is 15-20 odd percent increase in performance, when you change the vendor id from "AMD" to "Genuine Intel". Which is funny, given there's only so much difference between Phenom II and i7's. :P

Honestly I don't think changing vendor ID is enough. I think the differences in compiling go deeper. Better tailored for intels way of making caches or executing software for instance.