AMD's Bobcat and Bulldozer

[savantu]

I'm pretty sure that when you have the position JF has in a company you get pretty accurate numbers from engineering and so on. There is no need for him to sit down and bench engineering samples personally. Would be quite stupid if engineering lied about the performance in internal reviews and documents.
You know this isn't Dilbertland right?

Let's say their past history isn't as imaculate as you portray it. There is an alternate discussion on BD details on Aces and Paul Demone directly answers JFs claims :

wrote:
JF's comment about "lower IPC" in BD
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... tcount=589

Quote:
See, that statement is what gets people in trouble. Someone reads that statement and assumes 10% lower performance.

IPC will be higher than previous generation
Single threaded performance will be higher than previous generation

I hope this is clear enough for Paul and his crystal ball.

ROFL. A Niagara has higher "aggregate" (across all threads) IPC than a US-IV
but far lower single thread performance. Listen for what a salesman doesn't
say! Higher single thread performance than K10? Probably, but at far higher
clock rates enabled by a deeper pipeline, simpler cores, and a process shrink.

I remember another AMD "great white hope" chip called Barcelona.

I remember another rash and brash AMD marketing guy called Henri Richard.

That guy said a lot of things about that chip, made a lot of fantastic claims
of how it would make Intel cry. AMD fans worshipped the ground he walked on.

The funny thing is that once Barcelona silicon was characterized, SKUs defined,
and the first pre-release internal benchmark data compiled that guy left AMD so
fast it made the air crackle. Once Barcelona was released it was obvious why. :-D

Good ole JF has said a lot of things about BD. My guess is he still has at least
18 months to spin BD before having a third party reality check. I hope unlike
Henri he sticks it out post BD release just to see his fancy footwork trying to
match these claims up to reality.

Until then I'll believe a gram of disclosure from AMD's current and recent design
engineers over a ton of claims from a marketing guy. My advice to AMD fans
hanging on to JF's every last word is to remember back on what Henri Richard
said in private vs what he said in public.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10433953-64.html

an excerpt of a 2004 internal AMD communication from former AMD Executive Vice
President Henri Richard, the company's then-highest-ranking sales executive: "If you
look at it with an objective set of eyes, you would never buy AMD. I certainly would
never buy AMD for a personal system, if I wasn't working here."

BD taped out a month or two ago. If they were lucky silicon is mostly functional. If not, they are working overtime to fix it and get working samples. Silicon is being characterized and in pre-validation stage.
In other words, benchmarks and performance are second place at this time, most important is getting a functional chip.

What this all means, every claim about BD performance is based on estimates done without having actual silicon in hand.
SUN Rock was meant to be the greatest chip done in the past decade with with innovative features like transactional memory and scout threads. I still remember Jonathan Schwartz, how ecstatic he was over Rock.
Rock turned out a complete dud, burning 300w and abisymal performance.